Being a thing that feels: the sub-categorical in Maurice Merleau-Ponty

This essay takes as its subject the theme of feeling, a problematic entity and one leftover from the Cartesian paradigm, irreducible and exemplary in the new paradigm proposed by Merleau-Ponty. The phenomenological analysis of feeling permits a shift fron subjectivity understood as a thing that thinks to bodily consciousness; from the experience of awareness of one's own existence to the experience of the flesh; from the predominance of categorical reasoning to the centrality of the pre-categorical or sub-categorical; from understanding the world to inhabiting the earth. This proposal forms a part of a conception of the subject that is radically anti-reductionistic, incarnate, and relates to the surrounding environment