Intertwinings presents exciting interdisciplinary scholarship on twentieth-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The contributors break new ground by bringing Merleau-Ponty?s work into conversation with literary theory, architecture, cultural studies, critical race studies, and current feminist theory and practice. Spanning Merleau-Ponty?s early and late thought, this volume focuses on the ontological, ethical, and political implications of his unique emphasis on the constitutive intertwinings of inside and outside, self and other, language and gesture, body and world, and identity and difference. Intertwinings affirms Merleau-Ponty?s insight that we should not eradicate, but rather celebrate, the corporeal differences that make our encounters with both human and nonhuman others a source of inexplicable richness and endless fascination.