The Temporality of Life

The Southern Journal of Philosophy (2007) Vol. XLV

The Temporality of Life: Merleau-Ponty,

Bergson, and the Immemorial Past
Alia Al-Saji
McGill University
Abstract
Borrowing conceptual tools from Bergson, this essay asks after the
shift in the temporality of life from Merleau-Pontys Phnomnologie de
la perception to his later works. Although the Phnomnologie conceives
life in terms of the field of presence of bodily action, later texts point to
a life of invisible and immemorial dimensionality. By reconsidering
Bergson, but also thereby revising his reading of Husserl, MerleauPonty develops a nonserial theory of time in the later works, one that
acknowledges the verticality and irreducibility of the past. Life in the
flesh relies on unconsciousness or forgetting, on an invisibility that
structures its passage.

What concepts of life inform Merleau-Pontys philosophy? In

Phnomnologie de la perception, the study of the lived body (le
corps propre or vcu) implies a particular understanding of life.1
Life is an intentional, yet operative, activity that brings the
body into contact with objects in the world. In Le visible et
linvisible, the concept of the lived body gives way to that of the
flesh (la chair), which brings with it a different sense of life. 2
Life, in the flesh, is not limited to an individual body but radiates
in several directions at once, encompassing the world and
others. This life-force is both visible and invisible; perception
and unconsciousness, activity and passivity, present and past
intertwine therein. But whatever its sense, the concept of life
Alia Al-Saji (PhD Emory University, 2002) is Assistant Professor
of Philosophy at McGill University. Her recent articles address
Merleau-Pontys ethics (in Interrogating Ethics, Duquesne University
Press, 2006) and Bergsons influence on Sartre (in ber Sartre,
Turia+Kant, 2005). She has also written on memory in Bergson and
Deleuze and on sensation in each of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. In
addition to several anthologies, her articles have appeared in Chiasmi
International, Continental Philosophy Review, and Philosophy Today.
Her current work interrogates memory, vision, and ethics through
Bergson and Merleau-Ponty.

177

Alia Al-Saji

remains behind the scenes in these texts. Whether because

Merleau-Ponty is unable to find in the term life the precision
he desires, 3 or because life itself is ambiguous, comprising
several tendencies that cannot be integrated under one
overarching concept, any philosophy of life drawn from
Merleau-Ponty appears heterogeneous, even fragmentary. The
concept of life has several currents in his work that remain
unthematized. I will attempt to make these currents visible by
focusing on the ways in which life deploys time in MerleauPontys texts. Time offers a unique and productive lens through
which to study the life of the lived body and flesh.4 By inquiring
into the temporality of life, my aim is to discover connections
and discontinuities among Merleau-Pontys texts that are not
visible otherwise.
Light can be shed on the relation between temporality and
life by borrowing some conceptual tools from Henri Bergson.
Certain Bergsonian concepts will help frame my reading of
Merleau-Ponty: namely, attention to life [attention la vie]
and the past in general [le pass en gnral] from Matire et
mmoire, 5 and the vital impetus [lan vital] of Lvolution
cratrice. 6 These concepts define different aspects of life for
Bergson, in some ways continuous and in others opposed. Though
I will be drawing upon resonances between Merleau-Pontys
texts and Bergsons, these will rarely be direct references. With
the exception of passages addressing Bergsonian intuition and
the past in Le visible et linvisible or in footnotes to Phnomnologie de la perception, such references are limited.7 Rather, I
will elaborate upon tendencies hinted at, but not explicitly dealt
with, in Merleau-Pontys writingsa certain unthought that is
revealed when Merleau-Ponty is read in conjunction with
Bergson.8
My contention is that the modulation and deployment of
time by the lived body or fleshand thus the temporal sense of
life and the way that past, present, and future relateshift
from Phnomnologie de la perception to Le visible et linvisible.
Though the earlier text presents bodily life mainly in terms of
action and a perceptual field of presence, the later text goes
beyond this to a life of invisible dimensionalities and
immemorial depth. Hence, while the Phnomnologie remains
for the most part in the grips of a philosophy of consciousness
and presence, Le visible et linvisible opens the way to an
original sense of the past and to the irreducible role of
unconsciousness and forgetting.9 In particular, Phnomnologie
de la perception seems to generally agree with Bergsons
concept of attention to life, whereas Le visible et linvisible and
later course notes and essays draw on the Bergsonian concept of
an immemorial past. In parallel with this deepening Bergsonian
influence, I will point to Merleau-Pontys revised approach to
Edmund Husserl in his later works. There, Merleau-Pontys
178

The Temporality of Life

increasingly critical reading of On the Phenomenology of the

Consciousness of Internal Time is accompanied by an intensified
appreciation for later Husserlian texts, in particular The
Origin of Geometry.10 I argue that while Merleau-Pontys early
reading of Bergson is mediated by Husserls lectures on timeconsciousness, his later revised reading of Husserl is part of a
different theory of time that takes seriously, and finds its echo
in, Bergson. 11 This BergsonianHusserlian interplay can be
witnessed in the weight accorded to forgetting and the past and
the disruption of serial time in the later works. Hence, a
guiding question of my essay: Can Merleau-Pontys concept of
life in its various incarnationsas acting body or flesh
accommodate and account for an immemorial dimension of
pastness and thus a structural absence or alterity, irreducible to
presence?

1. The Early Merleau-Ponty and

Bodily Life as Action
My aim is to elucidate the notion of life in Phnomnologie de la
perception by interrogating the temporality of the lived body.
The body represents a current of intentional activity, but it is
also subtended by what Merleau-Ponty calls prepersonal or
natural lifecurrents of biological, habitual, or sensory existence (which I study elsewhere).12 For the purposes of the comparison with the later Merleau-Ponty, I will focus on the
dominant current of life in the Phnomnologie: the body in
action.
In action, my body appears to me as an attitude directed
towards a certain existing or possible task (PhP 100/116). The
perceived world is primarily, though not exclusively, given by
the practical and utilitarian attitude we adopt toward it. It is a
world organize[d] in accordance with the projects of the
present moment (PhP 112/130). The tasks toward which the
body is oriented are not pure possibilities; they are inscribed
within a field delimited by the bodys abilitiesby what
Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl, calls its I can. Although
Merleau-Ponty draws a distinction between actual, present
action and virtual, possible or future action, the second is
extrapolated from the first. To be precise, virtual action is an
extension not simply of the bodys current occupations, but of its
present capacities and sensations (built up through habit).
Virtual action is felt in the body by the presence of a particular
tension (PhP 109/126), through kinaestheses that prefigure
future movements. By means of kinaestheses [t]he normal
person reckons with the possible, which thus, without shifting
from its position as a possibility acquires a sort of actuality
(PhP 109/127). Hence, the field of possible actionthough not
reducible to the actions of the body at the momentis opened
179

Alia Al-Saji

up according to the capacities and projects of the present

moment and draws its efficacy from them (PhP 11112/129).
Bodily action is centered upon the present and circumscribed by
the possibilities of the now, with the result that what MerleauPonty calls virtual action takes the form of deferred presence.
The futurity of the body has neither the sense of the unpredictable nor the merely imagined.13 It is rather projected from,
and mirrors, the present.
The vitality of the body is thus understood in terms of what
it does or is capable of doing. The bodys life is its efficacy, which
finds its reflection in the field of actions available to the body.
That bodily life in the Phnomnologie is implicitly identified
with action has been argued by other commentators. As
Dorothea Olkowski shows, the lived body is not nave contact
with the world but operates according to a hermeneutical
principle of action or utility; although this principle structures
the phenomenal field in the Phnomnologie, its role remains
unacknowledged by the early Merleau-Ponty.14 Significantly, as
I. M. Young has pointed out, bodily efficacy is measured and
illustrated in the Phnomnologie by actions that are generally
goal-oriented.15 [T]o move ones body is to aim at things through
it, says Merleau-Ponty (PhP 139/161). In other words, action
tends to be identified with the object at which it aims (PhP
11011/128). Action is based on an objectivating intentionality
through which objects present themselves to the subject as
poles of action call[ing] for a certain mode of resolution, a
certain kind of work (PhP 106/123). It is this intentional arc
that organizes, animates, and endows experience with its
degree of vitality and fruitfulness (PhP 157/184)so that the
life of the body is woven from things with which it is engaged in
the world. Within this dialogue of subject and object, bodily
unity mirrors the unity of the object-pole or single task to be
performed (PhP 132/154). Bodily unity is thus accomplished in
the teleology of action (PhP 101/117), that is, when [the body]
escapes from dispersion, pulls itself together and tends by all
means in its power towards one single goal of its activity one
single intention (PhP 232/269). The unity of the senses
discussed by Merleau-Ponty in the Sentir chapter serves as an
illustration. Although the senses appear at first to be a
heterogeneity, communicating synaesthetically, the presence of
an object-pole in perception puts a term to this instability and
imposes upon them an objective and external unity. The senses
then appear to be united in translating aspects of the same
thing; [they] intercommunicate by opening onto the structure
of the thing (PhP 229/265). Their synthesis is not lateral and
free-floating, but frontal and intentionally directed.
In La philosophie de lexistence, a talk from 1959 published
in Parcours deux, Merleau-Ponty notes that the definition of the
body as that by which we act is already to be found in Bergson
180

The Temporality of Life

and constitutes a space in which their philosophies meet.

According to Merleau-Ponty, this view of the body as action
emphasizes the dimension of the present, because Bergson
defined the present as that upon which we act, and we
evidently act through our body.16 Though I will have occasion to
question this reading of Bergson, it is useful to first elaborate
the connection that Merleau-Ponty is trying to make. Indeed,
the first chapter of Matire et mmoire presents the body as a
sensori-motor schema, a center of action and affection. This
body exists in the present and its memory is that of repetition
and habit. The body is understood along organic and functional
lines. It is an organism whose complexity leads to indetermination and hence hesitation and the ability to choose. The bodys
perceptions are the reflection onto things of the bodys possible
actions on them, its possible uses of them. Conscious perception
is discernment in view of utility and action; it is the ability to
detach a figure that interests the body from the background of
indifferent images. The richness of this perception comes from
the intensity of ones attention to life (MM 7). Attention la
vie thus designates a life that is defined by practicality and
interest in the present.
Phnomnologie de la perception resonates with this view of
bodily life centered on the present. The body, from the point of
view of action, is here and now.
Just as it is necessarily here, the body necessarily exists now; it
can never become past, and if we cannot retain in health the
living memory of sickness, or, in adult life that of our body as a
child, these gaps in memory merely express the temporal
structure of our body. (PhP 140/163)

Though this could be taken to mean that the body lives an

instantaneous existence of discontinuous acts, Merleau-Ponty
does not wish to draw this implication. He points simply to the
privilege of the present in the way in which the body lives time.
Notably, the body secretes time project[ing] round the
present a double horizon of past and future (PhP 23940/277).
This projection takes place on the basis of the implications
contained in the present (PhP 181/211) and spreads out from
the present in the form of a network of intentionalities (PhP
417/477). Bodily temporality originates, and takes its energy,
from the presentbeing itself constituted as a field of
presence17 (PhP 416/47576). This rectilinear and formal view
of time owes much to Husserls lectures On the Phenomenology
of the Consciousness of Internal Time.18 But it also presents us
with problems that arise once past and future are conceived in
terms of the presentdifficulties that cause Merleau-Ponty to
revise this picture of time in the working notes to Le visible et
linvisible (as we shall see). Three problems can be noted at this
181

Alia Al-Saji

juncture: (1) The past, however remote, differs from the

immediate past only by its place in the temporal order. Both
remote and immediate past are retrievable and representable in
principle due to the positions they occupy as former presents
(PhP 416/47576). There is no sense of pastness as an original
dimension of being that is not derived from the field of
presence. (2) There is no way to explain the discontinuous
nature of forgetting (VI 194/248). Forgetting may be understood
as an ordered fading-away that occurs on the horizon beyond a
certain arbitrarily designated point in the temporal order. Or
forgetting may be conceived as an intentional act, performed in
bad faith, by which a memory continues to be possessed but is
held at a distance.19 But, in both cases, the latency and unconsciousness of forgetting are elided. Forgetting is sidestepped as
a phenomenon, but also as a structural dimension of time itself.
(3) As a corollary, the status of the present is not questioned. As
the nave presence to self and world, the present is left without
articulation or depth. What at once grounds the present and
makes it pass remains unthought.
This view of time is accompanied in Phnomnologie de la
perception by a largely critical reading of Bergsonian dure.
Since both Renaud Barbaras and Leonard Lawlor have shown
this to be a misreading of Bergson, I will limit my discussion to
what this reveals of the privilege of the present and of the
Husserlian framework that mediates Merleau-Pontys reading
of Bergson in the Phnomnologie. 20 Notably, Merleau-Ponty
tries to fit Bergsonian duration into a flat and linear Husserlian
picture of time (specifically that of the Time-consciousness
Lectures)thus suppressing the dimension of original pastness
that can be found in Matire et mmoire. Viewed serially,
duration becomes a haphazard accumulation of preserved
presents (PhP 415n/475n). The critique is twofold: Bergson fails
to account for the ordered passage, and retention, of the
present. And he misses the genuine consciousness of absence,
the negativity, that constitutes the past, since preserved
perceptions continue to coexist with the present (PhP 413/473).
In Merleau-Pontys reading of Bergson, all of duration is
squeezed into a present with no possibility of transcendence or
passage (PhP 79n/9394n). However, since Bergsonian duration
is not modeled on retention, the attempt to understand it from
within this Husserlian schema results in a misreading. MerleauPonty may note, with disapproval, the fusion and fluidity of
consciousness that he takes to be characteristic of duration
(PhP 276n/319n). But this picture of fusion is not surprising,
given that the organizing dimension of past in general, and
the difference in kind that it installs, are not acknowledged in
Merleau-Pontys reading of duration.
Even when Merleau-Ponty presents a sympathetic account of
Bergson, a similar misreading often takes place. In La philoso182

The Temporality of Life

phie de lexistence, Merleau-Ponty makes the following surprising claim: [T]he analysis that Bergson carried out in
Matire et mmoire, for example, shows that if we consider time,
we must take into account, within time in particular, the
dimension of the present.21 But to read Matire et mmoire as
privileging the present is to limit oneself to the first chapter of
the book. Though it is true that duration is contracted into the
present in the context of actionthe past being only selectively
allowed in and actualized to mold to present intereststhis is
not all there is to duration for Bergson. Here, Merleau-Ponty
again elides the dimension of past in general or pure memory
so central to Matire et mmoire. Without memory, the body can
only be understood as a zero-point in space (a center of action
and affection) (MM 1112), while perception remains
instantaneous and fleeting, the superficial reflection of the
bodys possible actions on objects around it (what Bergson calls
pure perception) (MM 31, 3335). But these presentations of
body and perception are only preliminary; Bergson revises both
and spends much of Matire et mmoire arguing why memory
must in fact already inform any concrete theory of perception.
First, because the body has a more complex relation with the
past. Not only does habit form a kind of bodily memory, but
each body expresses a particular rhythm of duration or hold
on time (MM 24950). Bodies are not external envelops
indifferent to duration, and duration is not exclusive or internal
to consciousness. Second, pure perception is only a hypothetical
construct (MM 31). Not only does concrete perception take time
and thus already contract the immediate past, but memories,
more proximate and more remote, are actualized in every
perception, informing and completing what is perceived (MM
68).
This reading of Bergson tells us more about Merleau-Pontys
own early view of time than it does Bergsons. 22 It shows a
conceptualization of bodily life centered on the present, of
efficacy limited to action, wherein the force of the past remains
a blindspot. For Bergson, however, it is this elided dimension of
originary pastnessirreducible to any representational memoryimage or present perception because different in kind from
themthat makes possible the flow of time and the passage of
the present. In what follows, I will explore productive openings
to such a dimension in Merleau-Pontys later course notes and
texts.23

2. The Later Merleau-Ponty

and the Life of the Flesh
In the immemorial depth of the visible, something moved,
caught fire, and engulfed his body; everything he paints is in
answer to this incitement.24 Thus Merleau-Ponty inscribes the
183

Alia Al-Saji

immemorial past as invisibility in the structure of the flesh. In

this section, my aim is to discover the sense of life at work in
Merleau-Pontys later texts by again broaching the question of
temporality, in this case that of the flesh. 25 The flesh is a
difficult but central concept of Merleau-Pontys later philosophy
one for which no adequate definition is supplied. In this
context, we find that the bodily field of presence has broken up,
revealing the ground upon which it is institutedan immemorial
or invisible abyss. Here, the invisible is alternatively referred to
by Merleau-Ponty as the depth or lining [doublure] of the
visible (EM 187/85). These descriptions point to an immemorial
that is neither lost presence, nor distant past; as both ground
and abyss, the immemorial is a past that accompanies and
makes possible the present. This insinuation of the past into
the present, we shall see, lies at the heart of what MerleauPonty means by describing the flesh as visible and invisible.
Central to Merleau-Pontys project is a reconsideration of both
Bergson and Husserl on time. In conjunction with a critical rereading of Husserlian time-consciousness, Merleau-Ponty draws
on both Bergsons concept of the past in general and Husserls
later notion of institution in order to think the dimension(s) of
invisibility that open up the life of the flesh.
The immemorial is presented in Le visible et linvisible as
originary nonpresence; it is, to echo Husserl, Nichturprsentierbar (VI 239/292). Merleau-Ponty notes that we find in our
experience a movement toward what could not in any event be
present to us in the original and whose irremediable absence
would thus count among our originating experiences (VI 159/
211). But this originating breaks up (VI 124/165), so that the
sense of the immemorial is not an original integrity, a secret
lost and to be rediscovered (VI 122/162). It is neither an
empirical past, once present and now forgotten, nor a layer of
positivity, underlying experience but hidden from view (VI 158/
20910). The immemorial is, Merleau-Ponty says, an impossible
pastone that has never been present and that cannot be
made present in a representation or act of recollection (VI 123/
164). It registers within experience as an original forgetting or
blindspot that does not derive from, and cannot be overcome in,
direct perception (VI 248/301). Merleau-Ponty echoes Bergson
when he insists that only a special kind of vision or memory
can allow us to catch a glimpse of this dimensionnot to hold
[it] as with forceps, or to immobilize [it] as under the objective
of a microscope, but to let [it] be and to witness [its] continued
being (VI 101/138).26 This memory rejoins the past through its
constitutive distance, without seeking to nullify that distance
(VI 124/166).
In Merleau-Pontys invocation of an immemorial depth of
the visible, we can hear the echo of Matire et mmoires past
in general. Although Merleau-Ponty still sometimes regards
184

The Temporality of Life

Bergsonism as a philosophy that locates the secret of Being

in an integrity that is behind us (VI 124/165), in a former
present which has been preserved (VI 122/163), I also find a
positive re-reading of the Bergsonian past in Le visible et
linvisible. In this reading, the pure past is reinscribed as an
invisible.
[I]f in being inscribed within me each present loses its flesh, if the
pure memory into which it is changed is an invisible, then there is
indeed a past, but no coinciding with itI am separated from it by
the whole thickness of my present. (VI 122/163)

This reevaluation of Bergson is accompanied in Merleau-Pontys

later works by a re-reading of Husserl on time. Merleau-Pontys
focus shifts from the lectures on time-consciousnesstoward
which he becomes increasingly criticalto later Husserlian
texts, in particular The Origin of Geometry. Rather than
reading Bergson through Husserlian time-consciousness,
Merleau-Pontys interest in Husserl now seems to have a
Bergsonian inflection. 27 Without overstating this influence, a
mutual re-reading of Bergson and Husserl appears to take place
in the later worksmotivating, in my view, Merleau-Pontys
rethinking of the past and of life.28

2.1 Re-reading Husserl

The immemorial is described by Merleau-Ponty as a vertical
past, which disrupts the serial or linear order of time (VI 244/
297). He says: The wild or brute being is introducedthe
serial time, that of acts and decisions, is overcome (W.N.
January 1959; VI 168/222). This corresponds in Le visible et
linvisible to a reversal of the Phnomnologies dominant
picture of time, seen in the acting body and its field of
presence. This reversal is made apparent in Merleau-Pontys
multiple attempts in the working notes to revise Husserls
theory of time-consciousness. Indeed, as Renaud Barbaras and
Mauro Carbone have shown, this criticism of Husserl is part of
Merleau-Pontys critical rethinking of the Phnomnologies
reliance on a philosophy of consciousness and presence. 29
Significantly for Merleau-Ponty, Husserls error is to have
described the [retentional] interlocking starting from a
Prsensfeld considered without thickness, as immanent
consciousness (W.N. February 1959; VI 173/227). In Husserls
theory, the past exists only as consciousness of the past; its
being is derived from the act of consciousness that constitutes it
(IP 33). Time is reduced to a succession of punctual acts
intentionally tied back to a primordial-impressional consciousness, what Husserl calls the source-point of time-consciousness.
Though Merleau-Ponty attempts to re-read the lectures on time185

Alia Al-Saji

consciousness beyond this picture of life as punctuality (VI 195/

248), it remains a core problem of Husserls account (VI 244/
297). For Husserl, primordial-impressional consciousness
grounds, gives life and meaning to, the present (and hence to
the past and future as modified and dependent dimensions). It
is the absolute self-possession and self-presence of this consciousness that is supposed to guarantee the evidentiary and
vital givenness of perceptual presence.30 But this self-coincidence
not only excludes any original dimension of unconsciousness or
forgetfulness (VI 194/248), it also dictates the punctuality of
primordial-impressional consciousness and makes its passage
inexplicable. Hence, while the present becomes an abstract
idealization, an absolutely positive instant with no influence of
Zeitmaterie on Zeitform (VI 184/238), the past remains a
mystery to such a philosophy of time founded on consciousness
(IP 123).
In place of the rectilinear flow of lived experiences, connected
in succession by retentions and protentions, the immemorial
institutes a different kind of temporality of lifewhat MerleauPonty calls a time before time (W.N. April 1960; VI 243/296).
In his reading of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty leave[s] the
philosophy of Erlebnisse and pass[es] to the philosophy of our
Urstiftung (VI 221/275). The verticality of time was already a
central theme of Merleau-Pontys course on The Origin of
Geometry, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (195960);
and it can be discerned even earlier in the two courses from
195455, LInstitution, La Passivit. Thus, it is through Husserls
unthought on institution (HLP 1415), as it is through
Bergson, that Merleau-Ponty comes to rethink time.31 Opposing
institution and constitution, Merleau-Ponty notes that time is
the very model of institution. 32 In this sense, time cannot be
reduced to constituting consciousness, nor can it simply be
divided along lines of activity and passivity (IP 37). To
understand time as institution is to recognize the verticality of
the pastits originality and alterity, but also its inaccessibility
as it was to present consciousness. This is the surplus of the
past to representation (VI 253/306). In this sense, perception is
borne by the past as massive Being without exhausting it (VI
244/297).
Merleau-Ponty emphasizes in his reading of Husserl that
this past in general is not a positivitythe in-itself conservation of the pastbut a hollow or circumscribed negativity
(HLP 20). This negativity is understood not as lack but
precisely as surplus, as more than Being (HLP 49; IP 168). It
is an absence that Merleau-Ponty describes as fecund (VI 263/
316), that counts in the world (VI 228/281). The past hence
continues to have an effect and to leave a trace, but not through
the efficacy of action; its efficacy or generativity is, as we shall
see, that of an unconscious. By instituting itself as past, each
186

The Temporality of Life

event opens a dimension.33 It makes possible a different kind of

futurein which it is not just a particular action that becomes
possible, but a new style or field of activity is opened up (IP 38,
124). The instituted past sets up a level, a different norm of
meaning, according to which we experience or see differently (IP
41).34 Institution means opening a register, says Merleau-Ponty
echoing Bergsons Lvolution cratrice (EC 16/16; IP 40).
Curiously, although Merleau-Ponty finds the notion of institution
in Husserl, his elaboration brings several Bergsonian concepts
to bear. (I will explore the role of the past in general below,
but the image of time as an open register [registre ouvert] and
Bergsons famous retrograde movement of the true should also
be noted.)
At the same time, the institution of the past means the
ineluctuable passage of the present: Husserl has used the fine
word Stiftungfoundation or establishmentto designate
the unlimited fecundity of each present which, precisely because
it is singular and passes, can never stop having been and thus
being universally (Signs 59/7374). This passage, paradoxically,
both forgets and conserves; it is a noble form of memory
(Signs 59/74). It is neither conservation as the accumulation of
in-itself presents; nor is it forgetting as an indifferent succession of mutually exterior moments, one replacing the other
without trace. Rather, what Husserl calls sedimentation and
Merleau-Ponty terms simultaneity in depth, are attempts to
articulate this difficult temporal structure of life. It is unclear,
however, that Husserl fully thought through the implications of
institution; what is missing is a theorization of forgetting that
acknowledges the unconscious and irrecuperable nature of the
past. Though Merleau-Ponty finds forgetting interspersed in
Husserls texts (e.g., not only in The Origin of Geometry but
also in Ideas II), it is left to Husserls readers to recognize both
its irreducibility and fecundity; forgetfulness remains for
Husserl a lack that could ideally be filled.35 Here the Bergsonian
unconscious, as past in general, comes to inflect MerleauPontys reading of time. To see this, I will turn to MerleauPontys conception of time before time, prior to explicitly
investigating its resonances with Bergson.

2.2 Time as Chiasm

There are several ways of understanding the anteriority
involved in Merleau-Pontys reference to a time before time.
Time before time preexists the linear time of presence, where
past and future are derived from the present moment. Because
this time is not based on presence, its past is not formed after
having been present; rather it comes into existence as always
already past, as preexisting the present in general. Time before
time is therefore a temporality that inscribes a structure of
187

Alia Al-Saji

preexistence or asymmetry; it is organized around a past that

has never been present. But there is another sense to this
anteriority, for the temporality, which Merleau-Ponty is trying
to highlight, undergirds and makes possible the passage of the
present that characterizes linear time. Time before time hence
coexists with phenomenal time as flow, just as depth coexists
with and provides the structural condition for things to be
things, or as a background coexists with the figure that it puts
in relief. In this sense, time before time inscribes a structure
of coexistence, whereby the past that has never been present
forms the ground for the existence and passage of the present.
But these two senses of anteriority, temporal and structural,
must be thought together.
According to Merleau-Ponty, time before time exists by
piling up, by proliferation, by encroachment, by promiscuity (VI
115/155). It is a time structured by virtual envelopment or
coexistence rather than succession. In the working notes to Le
visible et linvisible, Merleau-Ponty refers to this as the
simultaneity of past with present (VI 243/297; also IP 124). He
notes that the present or the visible landscape under my eyes
is not exterior to, and bound synthetically to other moments
of time and the past, but has them really behind itself in
simultaneity, inside itself and not it and they side by side in
time (VI 267/321). This coexistence is not, however, coincidence.
There is a constitutive distance, or difference, that holds past
and present together, but prevents the past from simply
becoming present.36 What is given, says Merleau-Ponty, is not
the past itself such as it was in its own time, but rather the
past such as it was one day plus an inexplicable alteration, a
strange distance (VI 124/166). This distance is one of difference
in kind for Bergson, one of chiasm for Merleau-Ponty. Although
Merleau-Ponty first hesitates to call this a difference in kind
or to use the philosophical categories of the homogeneous and
heterogeneous (IP 19495)by the time of Le visible et
linvisible he recognizes that the true difference in kind is that
of chiasm. 37 Crucially, the chiasm institutes an irreversibility.
The relation of past and present is asymmetrical, since one of
the terms appears to forever preexist the other. But it is also a
reversibility (VI 148/194), since there is preexistence of the past
in general only in connection with the present.38 Moreover, the
present continues to pass, to incorporate itself into and transform the past, as the past continues to coexist with and insinuate
itself into the present. Simultaneity is, then, one with the
irreversible passage that defines time (VI 243/297).
For Merleau-Ponty, the apparent positivity of the present
thus incorporates and relies on a negativity of the pastjust as
the visible spectacle includes an invisibility in principle. It is
useful to explore this analogy between past-present and
invisible-visible a little farther. The invisible plays a crucial role
188

The Temporality of Life

in Merleau-Pontys later philosophy of life, for it designates the

absence, negativity, or difference that he takes to be constitutive of being or flesh.39 Most importantly, the invisible permits
Merleau-Ponty to conceptualize this difference as an irreducible
part of all experience. The visibility of a spectacle involves
clear zones, clearings, and intervals that are themselves
unperceived but make possible the articulation and formation of
a perceived (VI 148/195). Though intervals between things are
not seen for themselves, they serve to differentiate and define
what is seen (VI 180/234). The invisible is thus not an in-itself,
but rather the lining [doublure] or reverse side of the visible
(EM 187/85). Visible and invisible are inseparable terms for
Merleau-Ponty, without being coincident (VI 152/200). They are
not opposed, but belong to each otherso that we must speak of
an invisible of the visible. (VI 247/300) But the relation of
visible and invisible also involves an asymmetry. For the
invisible is, according to Merleau-Ponty, that which makes
visible. This account of the power and generativity of the
invisible is clearly illustrated by Merleau-Pontys example of
depth in Lil et lEsprit. Depth is not merely an objective and
measurable third dimension, but that which generates dimensions. To see in depth is to see material objects in their place
despite, or rather because of, the fact that they overlap with
each other (EM 180/64). Depth makes possible not only the
coexistence of visible things in space, but lived space itself as a
diacritical and heterogeneous locality in which distinct objects
can appear to, and coexist with, my body. It is from this spatiality that measurable dimensions are abstracted (EM 180/65).
But depth itself cannot be seen; what is visible is the play of
things one behind the other, movements closer and farther, and
shifts within space. What is made visible is thus not a copy of
the invisible, for the invisible is not a thing or idea. The
invisible is a power of differential creation. It opens the dimension of visibility. It creates diacritical differences within the
world and in this way makes the world visiblevision being the
discernment of difference in the perceptual field.40
Just as visible and invisible require one another, just as they
are different but coexistent terms, so are past and present. To
understand the invisible as an invisible of the visible (VI 247/
300) is hence to understand time as chiasm (W.N. November
1960; VI 267/321). However strange it may seem to describe
past and present in these termsto say that the past not only
preexists the present but also coexists with and makes present
this is Merleau-Pontys position in Le visible et linvisible. The
inscription of an immemorial dimension in lifeof a vertical
past of institutionresults in a time where, as Merleau-Ponty
says, [t]he past and the present are Ineinander, each
enveloping-envelopedand that itself is the flesh (VI 268/321).
The immemorial appears as a constitutive dimension of the
189

Alia Al-Saji

present and the flesh, just as the invisible opens for us visibility.
This is because Merleau-Ponty has come to understand time
differently in Le visible et linvisible: not as succession, but as a
structure requiring the negativity of pastness to make possible
the existence and passage of the present. The present is no
longer privileged. Rather, the present appears at the intersection
of lines of force and dimensions that are not themselves present,
but that make present (VI 114/153). (It is rethought beyond
punctuality, as we shall see.) Time before time does not
therefore designate a temporally prior origin, an integral and
in-itself past. It points, rather, to a time that is the structural
condition of all temporalizing movementthe ground of the
passage of time as well as the possibility of remembering. In
this vein, the immemorial should not simply be understood as a
remote past. It is both closer to the present, as the ground that
makes it present and allows its passage, and farther from the
present, since this ground was never itself present. Drawing on
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty describes this ground as an abyss.41
The immemorial past is not a thing or a collection of memories
(VI 236/289); it is the constitutive distance or difference, the
negativity, that structures time itself. Rather than being
comparable to any given object set off in the distance opened up
by depth, the immemorial is akin to depth itself.

2.3 Bergsonian Inflections

Like the invisible that is revealed as that which makes visible,
Merleau-Ponty seeks within time a negativity that will make
possible its organization and its passage. As we saw, MerleauPonty uncovers this verticality in part by interrogating
Husserls unthought in The Origin of Geometry; time as
chiasm is also Stiftung (VI 267/321). But the understanding of
pastness, and even the reading of Husserl, in the later works
shows Merleau-Pontys renewed attention to Bergson. That the
past is not negativity for Bergson, but virtuality, and that he
sometimes speaks of it as though it were in-itself, does not
prevent the later Merleau-Ponty from reading Bergsonism as
the insinuation of negativity into being or life. 42 We find in
Merleau-Ponty the same motives that led Bergson to see
duration as coexistence of the past with the present (in the cone
of pure memory in Matire et mmoire), after he had theorized
it as succession and flow in Les donnes immdiates. 43 What
Gilles Deleuze will later call Bergsons paradoxes of time mean
that the past must already coexist with the present, already be
held within it. 44 In order for the present to pass, there must be
both a past of the present that allows it to be retained and
recalled, but also a dimension of original pastness that
destabilizes the present and ensures its passage. This original or
immemorial past preexists the present in general, just as it
190

The Temporality of Life

coexists with and permits the passage of each present. Without

this dimension, the present would have no internal reason for
passing. The only way for the present to pass, says Bergson, is if
it passes while it is presentif the past is given along with the
present and internally implicated in it.45 (Hence, Merleau-Ponty
will point to the simultaneity of past and present.) But in
order for this coexistent dimension to be past and not merely a
duplicate of the present that is, this dimension cannot itself be
present. It must be instituted along with the present as a past
which has never itself been present, different in kind from the
present. (Hence, Merleau-Ponty will insist on a difference that
internally connects past and present, a chiasm, which is
obstacle and connection.)46 For Bergson, this is not a particular,
dateable and recollected past, but the virtual element of the
past in general.
Merleau-Ponty will add another paradox to this Bergsonian
picture of time. In the working notes to Le visible et linvisible
and in his lectures on La Passivit, we find that both memory
and perception require forgetting. The past should not be understood as a container that preserves all memories intact ready to
be recalled. Nor is the past reducible to a construct of consciousness. Both conservation and construction fail to address what
Merleau-Ponty in La Passivit calls the problem of memory (IP
231). This problem is badly posed if forgetfulness is understood
as an inability to remember, or a difficulty to be overcome.
Merleau-Pontys innovation comes in seeing forgetting as the
solutionas a necessary and original structure of time (IP 256).
As we saw with institution, in order for the past to be conserved,
it must be forgotten; it must be unconscious (HLP 31; IP 257).
Merleau-Ponty notes that it is this inaccessibility of the past
that makes it past (IP 257; VI 122/163), so that the past exists
in the mode of forgetfulness.47 The error is to believe that the
past in general was first consciously present and only then
passed. Rather, the past is an originary forgettingimperception or blindspotthat accompanies every present, an
immemorial 48 (VI 247/300). The past is already insinuated in
every present, as the invisible ground of every perception (VI
194/248). Forgetting is, however, not absolute negationthe
erasure of the past as if it never was (IP 256). Forgetting is
distance, difference, or transcendence of the past, which means
that there is no possibility of coinciding with it in recollection.
Only in this way is memory possible according to MerleauPonty: Forgetfulness that is memory, transcendence of the past
that drives into me its arrow like a wound, that which
separates is also that which unites.49
It is in this sense that Merleau-Ponty, in his reading of
Husserlian institution, calls forgetting a secret or noble
memory (IP 256; Signs 59/74). Sedimentation, notes Husserl,
leaves our capacities and energies free for production (rather
191

Alia Al-Saji

than endlessly engaged in the task of reactivation to secure

self-evidence) (HUA 37374). But Husserls use of intemporal
formulas in The Origin of Geometry leads to reservations on
Merleau-Pontys part (HLP 20, 3032). For the unconditioned
general validity [unbedingte Allgemeingltigkeit] that Husserl
seeks implies the ability to ultimately overcome forgetfulness
(HUA 366, 385). In this regard, the past would be an in-itself
origin that could be recovered, or coincided with, in principle.
The inability to completely reactivate the past would reflect the
limits of our individual capacities and social communication
(HUA 375), rather than a structural or ontological element of
the past itself. Husserls ambivalenceconceding the necessity
of forgetfulness but still desiring coincidence with the entire
instituted pastmeans that the fecundity of forgetting is finally
elided (HLP 20). It is left to Merleau-Ponty to draw the implications of this Husserlian unthought. Though it is unclear
whether he intended to take this route, Merleau-Pontys insistence on the unconscious nature of the past recalls Bergsons
concept of pure memory. One may speculate, then, that the
Bergsonian past helps Merleau-Ponty save institution from the
presence of origins.50
What Bergson calls pure memory [souvenir pur] is not a
passive imprint on the mind. Pure memory has a power
(puissance), which is not that of efficient causality but of
suggestion.51 What it suggests is not a copy of the present from
which it was formed, but a different way of living timea particular rhythm of duration or intensity of life that characterizes
a plane of pure memory. Pure memories are not atomistic or
separable moments, but planes in which the whole past coexists
at different levels of tension (corresponding to sheets in Bergsons
famous image of a cone) (MM 181). Each plane instantiates a
different style or configuration of pastness, a different perspective of the past. Each opens, to use Merleau-Pontys terms, a
dimension or level according to which the present is experienced and has meaning. It is thus artificial to speak of individual, dateable pure memories. 52 Pure memory is not the
empirical or factual content of the past, but its dimensionality
not recollection, but what sets the tone, or style, of our recollections and perceptions. In actualization, the suggestive richness
and complexity of this past is reduced in light of utility and
indexed, as memory-images, relative to the present (MM 156).
What was a fluid and polyphonous networkwhere events
interpenetrated and were over-inscribed with meaningis
decomposed. But as an interconnected, open, and endlessly
detailed whole, the past in general is unconscious; it cannot be
represented as such. Pure memory therefore lies outside
consciousness and the present; it constitutes an original kind of
forgetting. 53 (Deleuze describes it as extra-psychological, an
ontological unconscious.)54
192

The Temporality of Life

This unconsciousness points to the peculiar spontaneity

that belongs to the pastif, as Stphanie Mnas suggests, we
understand spontaneity as a surging forth (surgissement) that
lies outside the control of consciousness and hence is not
opposed to passivity.55 But, as Merleau-Ponty makes clear, such
spontaneity cannot be understood as a cause of consciousness
(IP 181). The weight of the past forms another power [une
autre puissance] of life, one that he tries to articulate in his
later work beyond the dichotomies, not only of subject-object,
but also of activity-passivity (IP 251). 56 The past in general
reveals a deeper current of life, which incarnates the force of
time, not the efficacy of action. As we saw with institution, this
past is theorized by Merleau-Ponty as a fecund absence or
circumscribed negativity (HLP 20, 29). But the full sense of
the fecundity of the past can only be understood by taking
forgetting and unconsciousness seriouslyby reconceptualizing
the invisible as that which makes visible (as seen above).
Merleau-Ponty appeals to Bergson in this context: Bergson:
unconscious, lacuna of consciousness, and lacuna which is not
only non-being, emptiness, but operative emptiness, active.57
It is by opening a dimension, a register, that the instituted
and forgotten past makes a difference for, and in, the present.
The key to the generativity of the unconscious thus lies in its
invisible dimensionality, its making visible. Forgetting leaves a
trace (IP 99; HLP 29) that calls for an indefinite search or
elaboration (IP 124), which depends upon [the forgotten] and
goes farther. 58 In this regard, the unconscious functions as a
pivot (VI 189/243), as hinges of our life (VI 221/274), or
articulations of our field (VI 180/234). In Merleau-Pontys later
works, I find at least two ways in which this dimension is
invisible or unconscious. (i) It is the level according to which
one perceives, and as such cannot itself be perceived. What are
perceived are figures upon levelsperception requiring, for
Merleau-Ponty, the differentiation of a Gestalt structure (VI
189/243). It is in this sense that perception is ignorance of
itself, imperception (VI 213/267), for it forgets the openness or
dimensionality that makes it possible. This may shed light on
Merleau-Pontys description of forgetting as indifferentiation
in the working notes (VI 197/250). Although this indifferentiation seems, at first, to simply be the result of a lack of separation (specifically that of figure-ground)a fusion that destroys
the pastthe notion of dimension suggests another interpretation. The indifferentiation of the past would not be lack of
difference, but the multiplication of differences that connect
laterally and nonoppositionally, without selection. The past
would be a polysemic and overdetermined matrix, a mixed life
that can suggest divergent futures (IP 269) Could this be an
attempt to understand difference, the articulation of our field,
beyond the frontal structure of the Gestaltand to reinterpret
193

Alia Al-Saji

the Gestalt itself (VI 205207/25860)as winding, or lan

vital?
(ii) Every level or dimension is the deformation of an already
established level; it is divergence with respect to a norm of
meaning, difference. 59 The old level is destabilized, redistributed, and reorganized in order to create the new (IP 24950).
Before the new level has been established, it therefore appears
as a disarticulation of the previous order (VI 197/250). It is in
this additional sense that the opening of a new dimension
always involves an initial, structural blindness of consciousness
(VI 225/278); perception begins in imperception and forgetfulness of what was previously given, only to take this up differently (IP 99). While, as instituted, the past will give the new
norm or articulation of the field of experience, as instituting it
represents a change of direction (virage) from the already
given norm (IP 87)a disarticulation that, in the case of
matrix-events [vnements-matrices] (IP 44) or traumatic
events (IP 250), registers as nonsense with respect to that
norm. This open-ended movement is described by MerleauPonty as decentering and recentering, zigzag, ambiguous
passage. 60 It is in this sense that life is a winding [serpentement], he says citing Bergson (VI 194/247). 61 This winding
designatesin language that immediately predates that of the
flesha lateral, dynamic, and diacritical differentiation. It
suggests a transcendence without subject or object, whereby
perception is formed in the things and not imposed upon them
(VI 194/247).62 Merleau-Pontys clearest account of this probably
comes in Lil et lEsprit. Again drawing on Bergson, he understands the latent line in painting as a generating axis, or lan,
that institutes a new index of spatial curvature by means of its
inflectionrendering things visible through its self-differentiation (EM 183/724). Whether as line-become-level or vector,
point-become-center of forces (VI 195/248), or color-becomeneutral lighting (VI 247/301), the winding points to a duration
that grounds the process by which dimensions are opened up.
It is hence through a certain disorder, which creates a new
order, that dimension is installeda process which itself takes
time. In the shift, boug, between instituting and instituted,
the present is opened up to duration and passage (IP 88); its
supposed punctuality and self-presence are shattered. Rethinking
the past demands such a reconceptualization of the present,
according to Merleau-Ponty (IP 252). The dimensional present,
thus understood, is unlocalizable or ungraspable in the
forceps of attention (VI 195/249). Its passage cannot be understood serially, as a succession of instants with defined contours
that replace one another (VI 184/238). To say that the present
passes is to say that it has no locus between the before and the
after (HLP 9). But this does not mean that the present is
nothing; it has thickness or verticality, since the past is
194

The Temporality of Life

simultaneous with the present, as we have seen (VI 24344/

297). The living present is a swelling or bulb of timea cycle
that Merleau-Ponty understands by means of the Husserlian
notion of horizon (VI 184/238): Through the horizon, there is
still a double circulation of the past toward the future and the
future toward the past (HLP 32). It is in this context that
Merleau-Ponty brings together Husserls institution and
Bergsons retrograde movement of the true63 (IP 91, 9394). To
be precise, the present becomes something only as past for a
future; it gets its date only afterward (HLP 31). The futural
horizon promises forgetfulness, and conservation, of the present;
the productivity of the present as dimension is felt in the
future(s) it makes possible. 64 Yet dimension, once instituted,
appears to have always preexisted itself (IP 94). This is the
retrograde movement by which the dimensional, instituted
present is reflected back onto its instituting process, bringing
into focus the present as an event. But since the future is
divergence with respect to the present, this reflection is also a
refraction of sense; the present is not given in-itself. Despite
Bergsons hesitations, this noncoincidence is not an illusion for
Merleau-Ponty but the structure of meaning by which an event
has to become what it is.65

2.4 Life, Flesh, and a Plurality of Invisibles

As a result of this reconceptualization of time, the life of the
flesh is not limited to the here and now, to the field of presence
of the individual body, but radiates beyond itself (EM 186/81).
There is a flesh of time (VI 112/150)a temporalizing movement, without displacement, a movement by vibration or radiation (EM 184/77). Merleau-Ponty notes:
As the formative medium of the object and the subject, [the flesh]
is not the atom of being, the hard in itself that resides in a unique
place and moment: one can indeed say of my body that it is not
elsewhere, but one cannot say that it is here and now in the sense
that objects are. (VI 147/193)

The difficulty in rendering this radiation or dimensionality

appears in Merleau-Pontys repeated attempts to articulate the
flesh: what we are calling flesh, this interiorly worked-over
mass, has no name in any philosophy (VI 147/193). Midway
between the material individual and the universal idea, though
coincident with neither, the flesh comes into contact with
Bergsons lan vital (VI 13940/184). The sense of life as
winding that we find in the flesh recalls Bergsons philosophy of
life in Lvolution cratrice. Like the past in general, life is a
virtual multiplicity of tendencies or rhythms, at times incompossible (EC 258/259). Due to this unstable balance of
195

Alia Al-Saji

tendencies, vital impetus is divided between various directions

(EC 98/99). In actualization, only some rhythms can come into
existence to the detriment of others. Life is in this sense a finite
principleone that is blind, since Bergson does not posit a goal
to life, but that is also creative. The generativity of life means
that it can be conceived under two aspects: as invisible vital
impetus and as visible actualizations or offshoots of that impetus.
Life is at once a continuous vital force and the discontinuous,
material sedimentations of that force. It is at once an instituting lan, or winding, and the instituted dimensions, forgotten
along this winding and sedimented in the form of organisms. It
is both the drive to see and the eyes that see (EC 9194/92
95).66 Like Merleau-Pontys invisible, life is generative of difference in the visible world; the evolution, or actualization, of life
goes toward increased differentiation and divergence according
to Bergson (EC 117/118). Like Bergsons concept of life, the flesh
appears to overflow the bounds of the present and to hold
within its folds the invisible trace of a past which has never
been present and the virtual memories of other lines of differentiation, other rhythms or invisibles (EC 118/11920). But the
concept of life in Lvolution cratrice also pretends to harmonize
these rhythms within the unity of a virtual origin (EC 117/118
19). While the diversity that Bergson describes in the development of lan vital resonates with Merleau-Pontys idea of the
flesh, Merleau-Ponty dismisses any original unity that would
hold together the invisibles of the flesh, be it virtual or otherwise.
We are therefore left, in Merleau-Pontys theory of the flesh,
with a heterogeneous multiplicity of invisible dimensions.
In this essay, I have pursued the parallel between immemorial past and invisible in Merleau-Pontys later works, and
thus avoided relegating the immemorial to the sphere of presence
or positivity, to a remote but once present past or a past initself. The immemorial, then, is a kind of invisible, a dimension
of invisibility of the flesh. But it is not all the invisible. There is
more to the invisible for Merleau-Ponty than the past in
general, and in this he differs from Bergson.67 For [t]he originating is not of one sole type, it is not all behind us (VI 124/
165). And [t]he reversibility that defines the flesh exists in
other fields (VI 144/189). Not only is the present also dimensional for Merleau-Ponty, but the flesh is a spatializing-temporalizing vortex (VI 244/297). It is not possible to give an
exhaustive list of the invisible, since it is not a homogeneous or
univocal dimension.68 The invisible proliferates with the being
of which it is the condition and the reverse side. This is
reflected in the impossibility of coinciding with the invisible, of
holding it with forceps as Merleau-Ponty says, for there is
always a further invisible dimension within what we grasp as
well as behind it. There is heterogeneity of the invisible, as
there is heterogeneity of life and in the flesh for Merleau-Ponty.
196

The Temporality of Life

But there are also ways in which these invisibles intersect, in

which the flesh of the visible and the flesh of time come together.
Significantly, it is by appealing to the heterogeneous nature of
life that the two temporalities of life presented in this essay
acting body and fleshcan meet.

3. Conclusion
We began with a conception of life, framed by the activities and
interests of the body in the present. We have arrived at an
understanding of life, no longer as a field of presence or action,
but as flesh inscribing an invisibility or pastness in principle.
These two senses of life appear at first to be unbridgeable.
Their difference would be insurmountable if it were simply a
shift in concepts, a discontinuity between different periods of a
philosophy. But the shift and the heterogeneity are here within
life itself. This offers us a means of bridging the two concepts
not by reducing one to the other, but by situating them within
the general impetus of life that holds together incompossible
tendencies or directions.
Our access to life in Le visible et linvisible came through the
immemorial, but Merleau-Ponty offers another route to the
concept of life in his later work, a route that proceeds by way of
vision. In Bergson se faisant, Merleau-Ponty reads the
Bergsonian concept of life as a prehuman or total act of
vision (Signs 187/235). Here Merleau-Pontys analysis connects
the lan vital of Lvolution cratrice with the discussion of
perception in Matire et mmoire (Signs 186/23435). MerleauPonty notes that the main illustration of lan vital is to be
found in the example of the formation of the eye in Lvolution
cratricewhich is not an arbitrary example. There is continuity
between individual perception, as it is presented in Matire et
mmoire, and the inner workings of life as a kind of vision.
But behind this continuity lies a deeper sense of life than
Merleau-Pontys account suggests. The analogy between vision
and life is a complex one for Bergson, since they are not only
parallel structures or tendencies, but enjoy a relation of part to
whole. The description of life as a kind of vision owes to the
sense that life has for Bergson in Lvolution cratrice: life is,
more than anything else, a tendency to act on inert matter (EC
96/97). He adds: the rle of life is to insert some indetermination into matter (EC 126/127). Action, for Bergson, is not the
performance of a predetermined behavior; it involves indetermination and a rudiment of choice (EC 96/97). For this to
occur, the possibilities of action of a living body must be marked
out in advance in terms of its environment. This is visual
perception: the things surrounding my body present to me the
outline of my possible actions upon them (EC 96/9798). Vision
is thus not an innate principle, but a drive that is immanent to
197

Alia Al-Saji

life as action. However paradoxical it may be, there is a drive

within lifea tendency to actionthat carries us away from the
virtuality and pastness inscribed in life. Bergson calls this drive
attention to life.
However, once indetermination is inscribed in the flesh, once
a distance or gap is installed between body and world, other
lines of development are opened up. Vision is also hesitation
and discernment. It is the ability to refrain from immediate
action and to take up alternate paths that may no longer obey
the imperatives of utility, in other words, to see differently. In
this sense, vision can also be affective, intuitive or aesthetic.
Most importantly, these paths are opened up because the
hesitation, which constitutes vision, allows the virtuality of the
past to surge into the present. Useful, actualized memories are
then selectively allowed into the present, molding to and deepening our perception of it. But other memories can also
contaminate the present, reverberating as traces of a dimension
of pastness hitherto forgotten (MM 90). The flow of life is thus
sustained by an immemorial depth, which life covers over in its
push toward action, but which is recalled when life turns to
other ways of seeing. Vision is therefore a figure for both senses
of life outlined in this essay: vision is perception in view of
action, but vision can also be an auscultation or palpation in
depth, a special vision or intuition that glimpses the immemorial dimensionality, invisibility, or winding of life without
reducing it to presence (VI 128/170). Indeed, vision is only
perception and action by relying upon and forgetting this depth.
Both senses of life and of vision are present in Merleau-Pontys
texts as they are in Bergsons. 69 It is through this optics that
the two senses of life, presented in this essay, can be seen to
converge.

Notes
I wish to thank Leonard Lawlor for his insightful and detailed
comments on an earlier draft. I gratefully acknowledge the financial
support of Le Fonds qubcois de la recherche sur la socit et la
culture and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada.
1
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C.
Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962); Phnomnologie de
la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). Henceforth cited as PhP, with
English then French pagination.
2
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. C.
Lefort, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1968); Le visible et linvisible, suivi de notes de travail, tabli par C.
Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Henceforth cited as VI, with English
then French pagination.
3
In a discussion with Ortega y Gasset in 1951 concerning
Diltheys use of the term Leben to express historicity, Merleau-Ponty
notes the relative imprecision of the term life. Cf. Lhomme et

198

The Temporality of Life

ladversit, in Parcours deux, 19511961 (Paris: Verdier, 2000), 376.
4
If, as Merleau-Ponty notes, [c]oncepts for a philosopher are only
nets for catching sense, then the workings of time in his texts will tell
us something about the concept(s) of life operative therein. Cf. Husserl
at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. L. Lawlor and B. Bergo (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2002), 53; Notes de cours sur Lorigine
de la gomtrie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1998), 64. Henceforth cited as HLP. (The English version will be
primarily used.)
5
Henri Bergson, Matire et mmoire: Essai sur la relation du corps
lesprit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1896), 7 and 148.
Henceforth cited as MM. Gilles Deleuze calls the past in general a
pure past, borrowing the term from Bergsons concept of souvenir pur.
Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Le bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1966), 54. I will employ both formulations as equivalent in
what follows.
6
Henri Bergson, Lvolution cratrice (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1907), 88; Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell
(Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998 [1911]), 87. Henceforth cited as
EC, with English then French pagination.
7
Here I should add the various texts in which Merleau-Ponty pays
homage to Bergson or revises his early, mainly critical, reading:
Bergson in the Making, in Signs, trans. R. McCleary (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1964); Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960),
henceforth cited as Signs, with English then French pagination. loge
de la philosophie et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1953); La Nature:
Notes, Cours du Collge de France, tabli et annot par D. Sglard
(Paris: Seuil, 1995); and La philosophie de lexistence, in Parcours
deux, 19511961 (Paris: Verdier, 2000).
8
Though I find recent studies of the explicit comparisons and
influences among Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and other authors very
useful, my approach differs in that it seeks to use Bergson to develop
Merleau-Pontys thought (or unthought, HLP 1415) further. Notable
among these recent comparisons are Florence Caeymaex, Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty, Bergson: Les phnomnologies existentialistes et leur
hritage bergsonien (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005), and Mark
Muldoon, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur in Search of Time, Self
and Meaning (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006). I find
inspiration for my own approach in the work of Renaud Barbaras, Ed
Casey, and Elizabeth Grosz, who show how Merleau-Ponty can be
productively read through Bergson. See Renaud Barbaras, Le tournant
de lexprience: Recherches sur la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty (Paris:
Vrin, 1998), 3361; Edward S. Casey, Habitual Body and Memory in
Merleau-Ponty, Man and World 17 (1984): 27997; and Elizabeth
Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2005), 11329.
9
This is one of Merleau-Pontys famous criticisms of Phnomnologie de la perception: the fact that in part I retained the
philosophy of consciousness (W.N. February 1959; VI 183/237). This
criticism has been elaborated by several commentators, notably
Renaud Barbaras, Le tournant de lexprience, 4446.
10
Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of
Internal Time (18931917), trans. J. B. Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1991), and The Origin of Geometry, in The Crisis of European

199

Alia Al-Saji
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to
Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 35378, cited as HUA with German
pagination.
11
Bergson and Husserl are, of course, not the only authors whom
Merleau-Ponty re-reads in his later works. A study of the working
notes to Le visible et linvisible and the course notes from the Collge
de France from 195455 and 195861 shows that Heidegger and Freud
are also important in this regard. My focus on Bergson and Husserl
comes from the complex mirroring that characterizes Merleau-Pontys
re-reading of these authors and their significance with respect to his
understanding of the past.
12
See my manuscript A Past Which Has Never Been Present:
Toward an Alternative Theory of the Prepersonal in Merleau-Pontys
Phenomenology of Perception.
13
Virtual action in the Phnomnologie does not share the
Bergsonian or Deleuzian sense of the virtual (a generative, productive,
always self-differentiating power). It is more in line with what
Bergson calls the possible in La pense et le mouvant (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1938), i.e., it is conceived on the basis of the
real (10912).
14
Dorothea Olkowski, Merleau-Ponty and Bergson: The Character
of the Phenomenal Field, in Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality,
Painting, ed. V. Fti (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996), 2930.
15
Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl: Twenty Years Later,
in Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998), 28889.
16
[Bergson] a dfini le prsent comme ce sur quoi nous agissons,
et nous agissons videmment par notre corps (Merleau-Ponty,
Parcours deux, 252, translation my own).
17
For the relation between this field of presence and the central
problem of the Phnomnologie, that of subjectivity, see John Sallis,
Time, Subjectivity, and the Phenomenology of Perception, The
Modern Schoolman 48 (May 1971): 34357. (Merleau-Ponty famously
criticized this philosophy of subjectivity later in his career (VI 200/
253). But decisive, in my view, is how the Phnomnologies desire for
subjectivity as presence limits its ability to think the originary nature
of the past.)
18
As evidenced by Merleau-Pontys close reading of that text in the
Temporalit chapter of the Phnomnologie.
19
The latter option appears as Merleau-Pontys provisional solution
in Phnomnologie de la perception: Forgetting is therefore an act; I
keep the memory at arms length, as I look past a person whom I do
not wish to see (PhP 162/189).
20
Cf. Barbaras, Le tournant de lexprience, 4142; Leonard Lawlor,
Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 8990.
21
[L]analyse laquelle Bergson sest livr dans Matire et
mmoire, par exemple, montre que si nous considrons le temps, il faut
considrer, dans le temps en particulier, la dimension du prsent
(Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux, 252, translation my own).
22
It also reflects, as Elizabeth Grosz points out, Merleau-Pontys
anxiety with respect to Bergsonian influence (Time Travels, 116).
23
There is a location in Phnomnologie de la perception that offers

200

The Temporality of Life

such an opening: Merleau-Pontys reference to a past which has never
been present at the end of the Sentir chapter (PhP 242/280).
Although it foreshadows discussions of the invisible and unconscious
in later texts, the prepersonal temporality opened up by this reference
remains marginal to the dominant current of bodily lifethe primacy
of perception and actionthat runs through the Phnomnologie. I
analyze this temporality elsewhere (see my paper A Past Which Has
Never Been Present: Toward an Alternative Theory of the Prepersonal
in Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception).
24
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, trans. C. Dallery, in The
Primacy of Perception and Other Essays (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1964), 188; Lil et lEsprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964),
86. Henceforth cited as EM, with English then French pagination.
25
The texts concerned are Le visible et linvisible and Lil et
lEsprit, as well as some of the published notes from Merleau-Pontys
lectures at the Collge de France, in particular Husserl at the Limits
of Phenomenology, La Nature, and LInstitution, La Passivit, Notes de
cours au Collge de France, 19541955 (Paris: Belin, 2003), cited as IP.
26
Also VI 128/170. Merleau-Ponty is drawing here on Bergsons La
pense et le mouvant, 4. The relevant passage is referred to by
Merleau-Ponty in a working note from May 20, 1959 (VI 193/247).
27
More generally, the importance of Husserl for the later MerleauPonty has been demonstrated by Marc Richir, Le sens de la
phnomnologie dans Le visible et linvisible, Esprit 66 (June 1982):
12444. Also see Claude Lefort in an essay written after MerleauPontys death collected in Sur une Colonne Absente: crits autour de
Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 844. For an excellent account
of Bergsons growing influence on Merleau-Ponty (especially on his
later critique of Husserlian eidetic phenomenology), see Barbaras, Le
tournant de lexprience, 3361, 7173.
28
Other important influences for the later works are, of course,
Freud (cf. LInstitution, La Passivit and Working notes to VI, e.g., VI
243/296) and Heidegger (cf. Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology
and Notes des cours au Collge de France, 19581959 et 19601961,
tabi par S. Mnas [Paris: Gallimard, 1996]). The later MerleauPontys reading of Heidegger is a complex question, which I must defer
to others (cf. Richir, Le sens de la phnomnologie, 13738, 14042;
Lawlor, Foreword, HLP). Interestingly, this reading is itself mediated
by his interpretations of Husserl and Bergson (for Bergson, Notes des
cours, 195859, 103 and, for Husserl, HLP 5354).
29
Renaud Barbaras analyzes Merleau-Pontys critical re-reading of
Husserls early theory of time in The Being of the Phenomenon:
Merleau-Pontys Ontology, trans. T. Toadvine and L. Lawlor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 21823, especially 219. Mauro
Carbone presents this re-reading in light of Merleau-Pontys reading of
Proust, see The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Pontys A-Philosophy
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 113.
30
For the importance of self-presence to Husserl, see Rudolf Bernet,
Is the Present Ever Present? Research in Phenomenology 12 (1982):
105106, and, of course, Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phnomne
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 67.
31
For a detailed analysis of Merleau-Pontys course LInstitution,
see Robert Vallier, Institution: The Significance of Merleau-Pontys
1954 Course at the Collge de France, Chiasmi International 7 (2006):

201

Alia Al-Saji
281302; while for Merleau-Pontys reading of The Origin of Geometry,
see Franoise Dastur, Chair et Langage: Essais sur Merleau-Ponty
(Fougres: Encre Marine, 2001), 17790.
32
Le temps est le modle mme de linstitution (IP 36, translation
my own).
33
Whether this applies to every present or only to those presents
we may designate events (vnements-matrices, IP 44, or even
traumatic events, IP 250) is a more complex question.
34
For dimension in the later Merleau-Ponty, see Barbaras, Being of
Phenomenon, 17481, and Carbone, Thinking of the Sensible, 3637.
35
Cf. Signs 173/218. What appears mentioned in passing by
Husserl (Selbstvergessenheit in Ideas II) is read by Merleau-Ponty as a
structure. Marc Richir describes this reading as a fecund infidelity
that draws on Husserls concrete analyses (Le sens de la phnomnologie, 136). (Cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book,
Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. R. Rojcewicz and
A. Schuwer [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989], 55.)
36
Renaud Barbaras elaborates this idea of constitutive distance
in Merleau-Pontys later philosophy in Le tournant de lexprience,
5356.
37
In a working note from May 20, 1959, Merleau-Ponty criticizes
Bergson for being conceptually unable to sustain a genuine difference
in kind: Inadequacy of the Bergsonian representation of a soul that
conserves everything (this makes it impossible that the perceived
imaginary difference be a difference in nature) (VI 194/247). This is a
markedly ungenerous reading of Bergson. But it shows, in reverse,
what Merleau-Ponty is trying to arguethe true difference in kind
being that of chiasm. Moreover, in Notes de cours, 196061, MerleauPonty describes the relation of past and present as [c]ohsion par
lincompossibilit, again criticizing Bergson for not going far enough
(199).
38
For an analysis of the reversibility of time, see Glen Mazis,
Merleau-Ponty and the Backward Flow of Time: The Reversibility of
Temporality and the Temporality of Reversibility in Merleau-Ponty,
Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. T. W. Busch and S. Gallagher
(Albany: SUNY, 1992), 5368. I would add to this, however, that time
as chiasm must be understood not only in terms of reversibility but
also irreversibility.
39
For the invisible in the later works, see Marc Richir, Phnomnes,
Temps et Etres: Ontologie et phnomnologie (Grenoble: J. Millon,
1987), 8285.
40
Although depth appears as first dimension in Merleau-Pontys
account, other differentiationssuch as color, line, Gestalt, and
movementalso contribute to the deflagration of Being that renders
vision and visibility possible (EM 180/65).
41
For Merleau-Pontys appropriation of Heideggers Abgrund, see
HLP 49, 52. In Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty
is reading closely Martin Heideggers Language (Poetry, Language,
Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter [New York: Harper & Row, 1971]). There,
Merleau-Ponty uses Bergsons famous argument about nothingness to
show that the Heideggerian abyss is not a lack of Being, but more
than Being (HLP 49). (For the play between ground and abyss in
Merleau-Pontys thought, see Rudolf Bernet, La vie du sujet:

202

The Temporality of Life

Recherches sur linterprtation de Husserl dans la phnomnologie
[Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994], 169.)
42
Le vrai sens de la philosophie bergsonienne nest pas tant
dliminer lide de nant que de lincorporer lide dtre (MerleauPonty, La Nature, 97).
43
Henri Bergson, Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1889).
44
Deleuze, Le bergsonisme, 5357.
45
Henri Bergson, Lnergie spirituelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1919), 13031.
46
The full text reads: Le temps nest pas enveloppant et pas
envelopp: il y a de moi au pass une paisseur qui nest pas faite
dune srie de perspectives ni de la conscience de leur rapport, qui est
obstacle et liaison (Proust) (IP 36, above translation my own).
47
Le pass existe dans le mode de loubli (IP 272, translation my
own).
48
On originary forgetting, see Bernhard Waldenfels, Time Lag:
Motifs for a Phenomenology of the Experience of Time, Research in
Phenomenology 30 (2000): 115.
49
Oubli qui est mmoire, transcendance du pass qui plante en
moi sa flche comme une blessure, ce qui spare est aussi ce qui unit
(IP 258, translation my own).
50
Merleau-Pontys reference to partial coincidence in the context
of the Bergsonian past in Le visible et linvisible, and his reading of
Husserl and Bergson together there, seem to support this (VI 122/163).
51
Bergson, Lnergie spirituelle, 99, 133.
52
Il na pas de date et ne saurait en avoir; cest du pass en
gnral, ce ne peut tre aucun pass en particulier (Ibid., 137).
53
In this regard, I disagree with Rudolf Bernets characterization
of Bergson as having no genuine sense of forgetting (A Present Folded
Back on the Past (Bergson), Research in Phenomenology 35 [2005]:
5576). Though Bernets phenomenological reading of Bergson offers
substantial insightin particular into the relation of perception and
memory (6668)it remains that by identifying the pure past with the
virtual consciousness of it, Bergson is assimilated to philosophies of
consciousness (63, 7374). (One question would be whether MerleauPontys description of forgetting as imperception is open to the same
criticism.) My reading of pure memory thus comes closer to Leonard
Lawlors analysis in The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology,
Ontology, Ethics (London: Continuum, 2003), 5459. A consequence
(which I do not have the space to develop) would be the following: If
forgetting is also a kind of death, then life for the later Merleau-Ponty
must already be intertwined with death. (For my reading of Bergson,
see The Memory of Another Past: Bergson, Deleuze and a new theory
of time, Continental Philosophy Review 37(2004): 20339.)
54
Le bergsonisme, 50, 69. In his study of memory in La Passivit,
Merleau-Ponty was already concerned with the philosophical, or
ontological, significance of forgetting (IP 167).
55
Stphanie Mnas, Passivit et cration: Merleau-Ponty et lart
moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), 134.
56
For an elaboration of how Merleau-Pontys time before time
contributes to overcoming the dichotomy of activity-passivity, see
Carbone, Thinking of the Sensible, 1213.
57
Bergson: inconscient, lacune de la conscience, et lacune qui nest

203

Alia Al-Saji
pas seulement non-tre, vide, mais vide oprant, actif (IP 222n,
translation my own).
58
To quote the full text: La sdimentation est cela: trace de loubli
et par l mme appel une pense qui table sur lui et va plus loin
(IP 99, above translation my own).
59
[Ce sens interne] est cart par rapport une norme de sens,
diffrence (IP 41, translation my own).
60
[D]centration et recentration, zigzag, passage ambigu (IP
87, translation my own).
61
Bergson, La pense et le mouvant, 264. Elizabeth Grosz sees in
this winding the distinctly Bergsonian inflection of Merleau-Pontys
later ontology (Time Travels, 12627).
62
Mauro Carbone describes this as complying with, from within,
the showing of the sensible itself, or seconder (Thinking of the
Sensible, 37). See also Mauro Carbone, La visibilit de linvisible:
Merleau-Ponty entre Czanne et Proust (Hildesheim: Georg Olms
Verlag, 2001), 177 and 185.
63
Cf. Barbaras, Being of Phenomenon, 99n.
64
It is in this way that the newness of the present is given: as
negativity, experienced in opening up the future, or Vorhabe (HLP 21),
not in the positivity of presence (VI 267/32021).
65
The full note reads: [C]e qui est et demande tre: il a
devenir ce quil est (IP 36, margin, above translation my own).
66
For vision is opened up as a diacritical dimension through the
two eyes (cf. VI 217/270).
67
There are other invisibles in Bergsons texts, e.g., unperceived
spatial objects, but these play a minor role (MM 15861).
68
See Vronique Fti, Visions Invisibles: Philosophical Explorations
(Albany: SUNY, 2003), 74.
69
Bergson theorizes concrete perception, or attentive recognition,
as a form of action and contrasts this to intuition, which detaches from
action and sees life in terms of dynamic tendencies and rhythms of
duration (EC 17677/178). Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between
objectifying, profane vision and the painters vision, which sees the
visible from within and expresses, instead of representing, the work
of invisibility (EM 165/25).

References
Al-Saji, Alia. A Past Which Has Never Been Present: Toward an
Alternative Theory of the Prepersonal in Merleau-Pontys
Phenomenology of Perception. Manuscript.
Barbaras, Renaud. The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Pontys
Ontology, trans. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2004.
. Le tournant de lexprience: Recherches sur la philosophie de
Merleau-Ponty. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1998.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. Mineola,
NY: Dover Publications, 1998 [1911].
. Lnergie spirituelle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1919.
. Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1889.

204

The Temporality of Life

Bergson, Henri. Lvolution cratrice. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1907.
. Matire et mmoire: Essai sur la relation du corps lesprit.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1896.
. La pense et le mouvant. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1938.
Bernet, Rudolf. Is the Present Ever Present? Research in Phenomenology 12 (1982): 85112.
. A Present Folded Back on the Past (Bergson). Research in
Phenomenology 35 (2005): 5576.
. La vie du sujet: Recherches sur linterprtation de Husserl dans
la phnomenologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994.
Caeymaex, Florence. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson: Les phnomnologies existentialistes et leur hritage bergsonien. Hildesheim:
Georg Olms Verlag, 2005.
Carbone, Mauro. The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Pontys APhilosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004.
. La visibilit de linvisible: Merleau-Ponty entre Czanne et
Proust. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2001.
Casey, Edward S. Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty. Man
and World 17 (1984): 27997.
Dastur, Franoise. Chair et Langage: Essais sur Merleau-Ponty.
Fougres: Encre Marine, 2001.
Deleuze, Gilles. Le bergsonisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1966.
Derrida, Jacques. La voix et le phnomne: Introduction au problme
du signe dans la phnomnologie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967.
Fti, Vronique. Visions Invisibles: Philosophical Explorations. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2003.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2005.
Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter.
New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989.
. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time
(18931917), trans. J. B. Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1991.
. The Origin of Geometry in The Crisis of European Sciences
and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1970, 35378.
Lawlor, Leonard. Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of
the Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.
. The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics.
London: Continuum, 2003.
Lefort, Claude. Sur une Colonne Absente: crits autour de MerleauPonty. Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1978.
Mazis, Glen. Merleau-Ponty and the Backward Flow of Time: The
Reversibility of Temporality and the Temporality of Reversibility
in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. Thomas

205

Alia Al-Saji
W. Busch and Shaun Gallagher. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1992, 5368.
Mnas, Stphanie. Passivit et cration: Merleau-Ponty et lart moderne.
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. loge de la philosophie et autres essais. Paris:
ditions Gallimard, 1953.
. Eye and Mind, trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of
Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the
Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1964, 15990.
. Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, Including Texts by
Edmund Husserl, ed. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2002.
. LInstitution, La Passivit, Notes de cours au Collge de France,
19541955. Paris: ditions Belin, 2003.
. La Nature: Notes, Cours du Collge de France, tabli et annot
par D. Sglard. Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1995.
. Notes de cours sur Lorigine de la gomtrie de Husserl, suivi de
Recherches sur la phnomnologie de Merleau-Ponty, sous la
direction de Renaud Barbaras. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1998.
. Notes des cours au Collge de France, 19581959 et 19601961,
tabi par Stphanie Mnas. Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1996.
. Lil et lEsprit. Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1964.
. Parcours deux, 19511961. Paris: Editions Verdier, 2000.
. Phnomnologie de la perception. Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1945.
. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1962.
. Signes. Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1960.
. Signs, trans. R. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1964.
. Le visible et linvisible, suivi de notes de travail, tabli par C.
Lefort. Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1964.
. The Visible and the Invisible, ed. C. Lefort, trans. A. Lingis.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Muldoon, Mark. Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur in Search of Time,
Self and Meaning. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006.
Olkowski, Dorothea. Merleau-Ponty and Bergson: The Character of
the Phenomenal Field. In Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality,
Painting, ed. Vronique Fti. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996.
Richir, Marc. Le sens de la phnomnologie dans Le visible et
linvisible. Esprit 66 (June 1982): 12444.
. Phnomnes, Temps et tres: Ontologie et phnomnologie.
Grenoble: Jrme Millon, 1987.
Sallis, John. Time, Subjectivity, and the Phenomenology of Perception. The Modern Schoolman 48 (May 1971): 34357.
Vallier, Robert. Institution: The Significance of Merleau-Pontys 1954
Course at the Collge de France. Chiasmi International 7 (2006):
281302.
Waldenfels, Bernhard. Time Lag: Motifs for a Phenomenology of the
Experience of Time. Research in Phenomenology 30 (2000): 10719.
Young, Iris Marion. Throwing Like a Girl: Twenty Years Later. In
Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1998, 28690.

206