MERLEAU-PONTY IN CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE

PHAENOMENOLOGICA
COLLECTION FONDEE PAR H.L. VAN BREDA ET PUBLIEE
SOUS LE PATRONAGE DES CENTRES D'ARCHIVES-HUSSERL

129

MERLEAU-PONTY IN
CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE

Edited by
PATRICK BURKE and
JAN VAN DER VEKEN

Comite de redaction de la collection:

President: S. IJsseling (Leuven)
Membres: W. Marx (Freiburg i. Br.), J.N. Mohanty (Philadelphia),
P. Ricreur (Paris), E. Straker (KOln), J. Taminiaux (Louvain-Ia-Neuve),
Secretaire: J. Taminiaux
 MERLEAU-PONTY
IN
CONTEMPORARY
PERSPECTIVES

Edited by
PATRICK BURKE and
lAN VAN DER VEKEN

.....
"
SPRlNGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Merleau-Ponty in contemporary perspective! edited by Patrick Burke

and Jan Van der Veken.
p. cm. -- IPhaenomenologica ; v. 129)
Papers presented at the internatIonal sympasium on Merleau-Ponty.
held in Nov. 1991 by the Institute of Philosophy and the Husserl
Archives at the Kathol ieke Universiteit te Leuven.
rncludes bibl iographical references and index.
ISBN 978·94·010-4768·5 ISBN 978·94·011·1751·7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978·94·011·1751·7
1. Merleau-Ponty. Maurice. 1908-1961--Congresses. r. Burke.
Patrick. II. Veken. Jan van der. III. Series, Phaenomenologica
129.
B2430.M3764M4695 1993
194--dc20 92-38343

ISBN 978-94-010-4768-5

printed an acid-free paper

AII Rights Reserved

© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Oordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1993
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover lst edition 1993
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
To the memory of
Joseph Van de Wiele
and
Louis Van Haecht
 Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCES xi

JAN VAN DER VEKEN / Preface xiii

PATRICK BURKE / Introduction xvii

PART I: INTERROGATION AND THINKING

BERNHARD WALDENFELS / Interrogative Thinking: Reflections 3
on Merleau-Ponty's Later Philosophy

BURKHARD LIEBSCH / Archeological Questioning: Merleau-Ponty 13

and Ricoeur

FRAN<;OISE DASTUR / Merleau-Ponty and Thinking from Within 25

MARC RICHIR / Merleau-Ponty and the Question of Pheno- 37

menological Architectonics

PART II: NATURE, THE UNCONSCIOUS, AND DESIRE

RUDOLF BERNET / The Subject in Nature: Reflections on Merleau- 53
Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception

M. C. DILLON / The Unconscious: Language and World 69

GALEN A. JOHNSON / Desire and Invisibility in "Eye and Mind": 85

Some Remarks on Merleau-Ponty's Spirituality
vii
viii T ABLE OF CONTENTS

PART III:
EXPRESSION, CREATION, AND INTERPRETATION
EDWIN WEIHE / Merleau-Ponty's Doubt: The Wild of Nothing 99

RUDI VISKER / Raw Being and Violent Discourse: Foucault, 109

Merleau-Ponty and the (Dis-)Order of Things

JAMES RISSER / Communication and the Prose of the World: The 131
Question of Language in Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer

PART IV: POLITICS, ETHICS, AND ONTOLOGY

STEPHEN WATSON / Merleau-Ponty, the Ethics of Ambiguity, and 147
the Dialectics of Virtue

LAURA BOELLA / Phenomenology and Ontology: Hannah Arendt 171

and Maurice Merleau-Ponty

PART V: EPILOGUE
G. B. MADISON / Merleau-Ponty in Retrospect 183

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 197

NAME INDEX 201

 Acknowledgements

A significant debt of gratitude is owed to Professor Samuel IJsseling, Director

of the Husserl-Archives at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven for his kind
support and encouragement in bringing forth this volume in the
Phaenomenologica series. Gestures of thanks and deep appreciation are offered
to Ms. Ingrid Lombaerts and Mr. Steven Spileers for their professional assis-
tance in final manuscript preparation. Permission from Professor Marc Richir,
co-editor of Merleau-Ponty, phenomenologie et experiences (Jerome Millon,
1992), to publish the English translations of the essays of Professors Bernet
and Dastur is gratefully acknowledged. Words of gratitude are extended to
the contributing authors and translators whose scholarship and expertise have
made this collection possible, and in particular to Professors Boella, Dastur,
and Richir for permission to publish their essays in English.

ix
 Abbreviations and References

Detailed references (edition, translator, publisher, date of publication, etc.)

to the particular texts of Merleau-Ponty are given in each essay, usually on
first mention of the text; thereafter, a standard form of shorter citation may
be used, depending upon the author. For frequently cited works of Merleau-
Ponty, the following abbreviations are employed volume-wide, wherever an
author has elected to use abbreviations.

English

AD Adventures of the Dialectic

CR "Christianity and Ressentiment"
EM "Eye and Mind"
HT Humanism and Terror
IPP In Praise of Philosophy
PhP Phenomenology of Perception
PNP "Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel"
PriP The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological
Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics
PW The Prose of the World
S Signs
SB The Structure of Behavior
SNS Sense and Non-Sense
TLC Themes from the Lectures at the College de France 1952-1960
UP "An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of
His Work"
VI The Visible and the Invisible

French

EP Eloge de la philosophie
xi
xii ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCES

OE L'Oeil et L'esprit
PP PhenomenoLogie de la perception
PriP Le Primat de la perception et ses consequences philosophiques
PM La Prose du monde
RC Resumes de cours. College de France 1952-1960
S Signes
SNS Sens et non-sens
SO Merleau-Ponty it La Sorbonne - resume de cours 1949-1952
VI Le Visible et l'invisible
 JAN VAN DER VEKEN

Preface

Merleau-Ponty in contemporary perspective: this was the theme of the

conference at the Institute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
(K.U.L.) from 29 November to 1 December 1991. Thirty years after Merleau-
Ponty's untimely death, it seemed appropriate to bring together scholars from
Europe and from the United States of America to reappraise his philosophy.
In fact, a significant body of scholarship has emerged which would seem to
attest to the continuing importance of his thought for a variety of disciplines
within the humanities, the social sciences, and the philosophy of nature.
In the present volume, Gary Brent Madison addresses the issue whether
Merleau-Ponty can be considered to be a classical philosopher. The fact that
his work is one of the highlights of the phenomenological tradition and is of
continuing inspiration for researchers in various domains seems to justify
that claim. Yet, it is the feeling of many of the contributors to this volume
that the so-called "second Merleau-Ponty" is still not really known. The
unfinished state of The Visible and the Invisible and the cryptic condition of
many of the "Working Notes" may be responsible for that. More research
should be done, to uncover "the unsaid" of Merleau-Ponty. lowe to a remark
of Paul Ricoeur in his introduction to the work of G. B. Madison, La
Phenomenologie de Merleau-Ponty. Une recherche des limites de la
conscience (Paris, Klincksieck, 1973, p. 14) the insight that, in order to under-
stand the ontology of the "second" Merleau-Ponty, we should look to (the later)
Schelling. In reading the Themes from the Lectures, one cannot help but to
be impressed by the fact that Merleau-Ponty addresses now, in search for a
new ontology, such unfathomable issues as The Concept of Nature.
Should we talk about a serious shift in Merleau-Ponty's thought? The
majority of the papers in this volume stresses the continuity rather than the
discontinuity. The tone, however, of the way in which Merleau-Ponty addressed
the main themes of philosophy had deepened. In preparing his candidature
for the chair of philosophy at the College de France, Merleau-Ponty expressed
his intention tq reconsider the whole of his philosophical enterprise in a more
fundamental way: "reprendre toute la demarche philosophique en pensee
fondamentale". It is my conviction that this "ontological turn", looking for
xiv PREFACE

the "Ineinander" of subject and object, is the real contribution of "Eye and
Mind" and of The Visible and the Invisible. The papers of the conference
and the Panel Discussion between Samuel IJsseling, Jacques Taminiaux and
Jan Van der Veken on "Transcending Phenomenology?" tackled this issue.
Merleau-Ponty was at the same time fully aware of the historicity and finitude
of all philosophizing, and nevertheless he addresses in a new and searching
way "the eternal problems of philosophy".
The symposium was organized under the auspices of the Center of
Metaphysics (K.U.L.), The Husserl-Archives, and the Merleau-Ponty Circle of
North America. It was made possible with generous donations from the Joseph
Van de Wiele Foundation, the National Foundation for Scientific Research
(Belgium), the French Embassy in Belgium, and the Institute of Philosophy.
The planning committee for the conference was comprised of John Patrick
Burke from Seattle University in Washington, Jacques Taminiaux (Universite
Catholique Louvain), Rudolf Bernet and Samuel IJsseling (Husserl-Archives),
Galen Johnson (University of Rhode Island) and Jan Van der Veken (K.U.L.).
The Institute of Philosophy owed this gesture of gratitude "after thirty
years". Merleau-Ponty had a long association with Leuven and, most of all,
with the founder of the Husserl-Archives and of this series, H. L. Van Breda,
and with Alphonse De Waelhens, who wrote the introduction to his La struc-
ture du comportement and devoted an important book to his "philosophy of
ambiguity". Van Breda's article on "Maurice Merleau-Ponty et les Archives-
Husserl a Louvain" (Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 67 (1962), pp.
410-430 has recently been translated into English and has appeared in
Merleau-Ponty Vivant, edited by Martin Dillon (SUNY Press).
Participants at the conference had a chance to examine a number of
historical documents concerning Merleau-Ponty's relation to the Institute of
Philosophy. These included the first editions of several books sent by Merleau-
Ponty to Herman Van Breda. Several letters from the correspondence between
Merleau-Ponty and Van Breda were also on display, together with a number
of important doctoral dissertations on Merleau-Ponty written at the Institute.
Permit me to draw special attention to one of those dissertations, Beyond
Phenomenology. Toward an Ontology of Presence: Self-Critique and
Transfiguration in the Thought of the Later Merleau-Ponty by John Patrick
Burke. He started it under the direction of the late Alden Fisher and finished
it in Leuven, where he defended it successfully in 1978, in the presence of
Charles Hartshorne, who was at that time a guest professor at the Institute.
Without that thesis, which opened the research of 1. P. Burke into the "unsaid"
of the later Merleau-Ponty, the conference bringing together scholars from both
sides of the Atlantic would never have happened. He deserves our gratitude
for bearing the "heat of the day" in inviting all the speakers. This, in turn,
was made possible by a scholarship from the Board of Research of the K.U.
Leuven, and a special grant from the National Foundation for Scientific
Research.
A conference, however, comes from the ground only, because many persons
 PREFACE xv

devote time and care to the daily tasks of organization. They are the obvious
proofs of what Sartre has called "l'indepassabilite de l'organisme pratique".
Ingrid Lombaerts and Daniel Vande Veire shouldered the burdens of the Local
Program Committee. They, as well as the members of the Planning Committee
and the supporting institutions deserve our heartfelt gratitude.
As a result of the Conference, an International Merleau-Ponty Society has
been founded, with Martin Dillon and John Patrick Burke as his "European"
counterpart.
May the new society prosper, and may this volume be the first of a new
international series of studies to keep "Merleau-Ponty vivant"!
 PATRICK BURKE

Introduction

To Laura,
... da lei ti ven l'amoroso pensero ...
Petrarch

That silence still engulfs his name, that his arguments have not factored
significantly in the mainstream philosophical conversations of the last twenty
years, that he has been skirted, ignored, or repressed, is to have been expected,
given the very style which was the thought of this philosopher of ambiguity.
Merleau-Ponty said more by what he did not say and by the way in which
he did not say, almost disappearing even in his own texts as he has in the
texts of others who have learned and taken so much from him. His thought
was naturally generous, poignant, and allusive. The ampersand and the
question, and the maelstrom they create, were his native dwelling. He was
never the disjunctive thinker designing V-2 rockets with all the force and
authority of declarative sentences, not this writer for whom perspective was
a function of the hidden logos of the line, of the competing vortices and vectors
which let a thing appear, and for whom placing his own thought into critical
perspective was an incessant challenge and obligation. This challenge and
obligation are now taken up by the present volume which purports to illumi-
nate the contribution of Merleau-Ponty's thought to various philosophical
problematics, from the culminative point of view of more than thirty years
of continental philosophy since his untimely death.
The occasion for the present volume was the International Symposium on
Merleau-Ponty, hosted in late November 1991 by the Institute of Philosophy
and the Husserl-Archives at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.
The papers presented here under the title, Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary
Perspective, were prepared for the Symposium which bore the same title.
Yet the present volume is not a mere proceedings of a conference, not a
generally loose confederation of essays lacking a pervasive theme or an
over-arching question that would internally bind the various contributions
into a single work. The integrative focus of this volume is achieved by its
underlying issue, that of deciding whether the work of Merleau-Ponty is to
xviii INTRODUCTION

be relegated to the status of a classic of the French phenomenological

tradition, or whether it is still a compellingly genuine contemporary work,
or somehow both. As the various essays gathered under it confirm, the title
of this volume risks a certain irony, that which is involved in trying to place
into contemporary perspective what may well still open and focus our vision
(albeit now in only a too silent and invisible manner), namely an original
thought whose creative unfolding still awaits its future.
In the Epilogue to this volume, Gary Madison argues the case for reading
Merleau-Ponty as a classic. What does this mean? If we follow Merleau-Ponty's
own understanding of the principal characteristics of a classic, this would mean
that his works have a methodological or heuristic value, that on the whole they
constitute a kind of academic laboratory through which our thinking must pass
in order to advance, within which our analyses can be checked or redirected,
affirmed or reinspired, but that their theoretical framework is obsolete, and,
as Merleau-Ponty said of the works of Marx and, perhaps, of his own earlier
work, especially the Phenomenology of Perception, they have the status of a
"secondary truth" and, consequently, are not to be understood literally as a
contemporary work might be. Certainly the papers in the present volume can
be read as meditations on a classic, and the attention they devote to Merleau-
Ponty can be seen as a commemoration, a tribute, a homage, even a kind of
iconography, or a belated requiem, made possible by significant develop-
ments in philosophy subsequent to his death and which provide a relatively
stable vantage point from which his works come definitively into view,
allowing for that scholarly, critical look backward to a classic. But Madison
offers more in his essay, and reveals a tension in his and Merleau-Ponty's
understanding of a classic. The guiding question of Madison's essay is: in
what way does Merleau-Ponty's work anticipate themes developed more
explicitly by Gadamer, Derrida, and Habermas, and in what way does his work
exceed theirs in terms of its significance for our own times? The key word
here is 'exceed'. Merleau-Ponty also used it in his description of the classics:
"they retain an expressive power which exceeds their statements and propo-
sitions.,,1 What is this excess, and does it really succeed in setting-off a classic
from a contemporary work?
Certainly the great work, whether it be a classic or a contemporary, is
characterized by an abundance of meaning, a generosity of expression, a
spaciousness of imagination; the great work is a kind of spiraling axis which
draws into its weave the dense and colorful jumble of threads which it spawns
in its turnings and which can continually sustain new weavings and reweav-
ings. This capacity to sustain the new, this abundance, generosity, and
spaciousness, all mark the excess of a work, that is to say, its overlapping
into, its generating of, its own future. It is precisely this relation to the future
which marks-off a classic from a banal work. Classics are creative, banal works
are not. Classics inaugurate traditions, banal works do not. But great con-
temporary works as well have that surplus of creative power which may
inaugurate new traditions. Should we then speak of a contemporary classic?
 INTRODUCTION xix

Or do classics and contemporary works have a different relation to the future?

Neither Madison nor Merleau-Ponty are helpful here. Madison says that
Merleau-Ponty's work exceeds that of living contemporaries in terms of its
significance for our times. Is this not to say that Merleau-Ponty is more
contemporary than they are, that he is our true contemporary, or is at least
on par with them as contemporaries? What does Merleau-Ponty say to this?
We cite three statements from "Eye and Mind":
1. "the figurations of literature and philosophy are no more settled than
those of painting and are not more capable of being accumulated into a
stable treasure,,,2
2. "if no work is ever absolutely completed or done with, still each creates,
changes, alters, enlightens, deepens, confirms, exalts, re-creates, or creates
in advance all the other,,,3
3. "if creations are not a possession, it is not only that, like all things, they
pass away; it is also that they have almost all their life still before them."4
Here, it would seem, Merleau-Ponty makes the case for assigning to a
classical thinker the quality of being a contemporary. For instance, "Kant,
our contemporary"! It is true that Kant's thought continues to structure the
tensions we find in our questions about the world, our lives, and our history,
questions which inversely make visible the rich and unresolved tensions in
his works which he could only partially see and by virtue of which a distinct
Kantian tradition of meditation was born and is still being worked through.
Embedded and operative in the above citations is Merleau-Ponty's notion of
l'impensee, i.e., the circumscribed but 'unthought of' dimension secretly
polarizing and creatively animating the great work of art, of literature, of
philosophy, its excess, the principle of its future. On this basis, then, the
great artists, writers, and thinkers of the past are our contemporaries. If
Merleau-Ponty belongs among the great, then he too is our contemporary.
But does this sense of 'contemporary' allow us to say at this very moment
that Raphael is lifting his brush, or Merleau-Ponty his pen? Does it allow us
to go further and say that they may be more contemporary than currently living
artists and thinkers?
Certainly it is counter-intuitive to say that Raphael or Merleau-Ponty
are contemporaries in the sense that living persons are. After all, such a
contemporary is one who still speaks, still writes, and one to whom we listen,
and for whom we wait, for her next book, his next essay, always for the new,
and not yet. He or she is one who offers us a new language, or a new way
of looking at language, of appropriating our own language, who thus opens
in a fresh manner the space of discourse, and who is still perhaps searching
for better words, for a more refined style, who is still pursuing the illusion
of coming into possession of his or her own thought, who lives thus toward
the future and delineates and creates the contours and stylistics and metaphors
for our approach to the future, who listens to us and who interrogates us in
provocatively new ways, teaching us how to read, to interpret, to question, and
xx INTRODUCTION

to write, who is thus face to face with us in the living present, in the flesh.
In this light, if a classic is characterized by a certain 'excess', as described
above, should we not say that a contemporary is characterized by a different
kind of excess, that of being pregnant with the future as future, a future never
future enough, with what it has not said yet, but which it is just now in the
process of saying relative to an open and indeterminate horizon, now, in the
flesh? Such a differentiation of the notion of excess appears to settle the
question.
But perhaps we must go further, perhaps we must tum to this notion of being
in the flesh, if we are to appreciate a certain fecundity of sense in the apparent
blur of the distinction between the classic and the contemporary. Is there
some way that Merleau-Ponty's notion of the flesh would allow us to assign
to a writer, now dead for more than thirty years, the qualities of a contem-
porary as delineated in the above paragraph, even if we were to do so by an
analogy marked more by difference than similarity?
Merleau-Ponty describes the flesh as connective tissue, as an interweaving
and overlapping of internal and external horizons, of the invisible and the
visible, the seeing and the seen, subject and world, person and other person,
such that he can say that they are ineinander, in one another. Is there not
also, by extension, an intertwining, an overlapping, between reader and writer
creating a more rarified kind of flesh, a 'texture', such that the reader is
interwoven with the text, that he or she enters the very act of writing itself
by making himself or herself available for the living meaning of the word,
and that this entering is not an act of interpretation, which too often protects
a speculative distance, but an act upon which all interpretation rests, a kind
of surrender, a dispossession, a tenderness? Here the notion of 'excess' is
important; as we have said above, the great work, the great text, is charac-
terized by the magnitude of its generosity, of its abundance, of its excess,
and, might we not add to this description, the excess it creates in the act of
reading which prolongs its being written over and over again afresh, not a mere
repetition and more than a repetition with a difference, but, in a very real sense
of the term, a metamorphosis, a creation.
By this standard, the text of Merleau-Ponty may well be the text of a
contemporary, of Merleau-Ponty vivant. No doubt the argument can be made
that his work can be read as a classic and thus belongs to the order of the
"heuristic", but also, by virtue of its flesh, it may well be read as a contem-
porary text and thus in the order of the "creative" and, consequently, of the
not-yet-said, of the "new". Accordingly, the papers which appear in this volume
entail not only a reading of Merleau-Ponty but, it can be argued, a writing
of Merleau-Ponty; they live at the edge of an interrogation which he left for
us to resume, not only by the fact of his early death, but also because he
could not do it alone, because the question is communal and futuristic by
nature, awakened to be sure in a unique voice which knew itself to be
fundamentally interrogative and, therefore, fundamentally intersubjective and
intergenerational.
 INTRODUCTION xxi

But can this not be said of every great work, that it exists in the flesh, in
the overlapping of reader and writer, producing always a fresh texture? Is there
something about Merleau-Ponty's text that especially invites this description,
this analysis? Is there a quality in his work which permits us to conclude
that, like Nietzsche, he deserves the title of 'posthumous writer', one whose
language is still in the state of becoming language, one whose thought calls
for and comes to fruition in the words of others?
The answer is to be found in Merleau-Ponty's claim that "the world exists
in the interrogative mode," and the function of the philosopher is not to offer
sphincter-tight solutions to its problems but to create the space of interroga-
tion, that hollow around which the vault of language is built and within which
things are free to be born on their own and to question us who would "hold
them as with forceps". 5 In Part I of this volume, "Interrogation and Thinking",
this thematic is taken up. The inaugural essay of Part I and the foundational
essay for the entire volume is offered by Bernhard Waldenfels under the title
"Interrogative Thinking: Reflections on Merleau-Ponty's Later Thought".
Embedded in and motivating Waldenfels' essay is the following 'interrog-
ative ensemble' (a phrase we borrow from him and Merleau-Ponty). In what
way, for Merleau-Ponty, is the primacy of perception already the primacy of
questioning? What is the difference between 'asked' and 'asking' questions,
between 'interrogation interrogated' and 'interrogation interrogating'? What
kind of questioning arises from 'wild Being', that intermediate zone of
questions where the world exists in the interrogative mode? What does the
self-reference of questioning mean? Does interrogation ultimately point only
to itself or does it always maintain a reference to what is other than itself which
is, nonetheless, inherent to questioning itself? In other words, is interroga-
tive thinking fundamentally responsive to questions posed to us and which
arise only in the process of our responding to them? How would this indicate
that questioning is a sort of ontological organ? How does the chiasm between
the questioned and the questioning reveal that we are called into question by
what we experience, and thus what precedes questioning is questioning? In
what way, therefore, is questioning a kind of responding such that interroga-
tive thinking turns into responsive thinking? Finally, in what way does an
ethical impulse arise in the heart of the alternative of question and response?
In response to these questions, Waldenfels reveals the remarkably poignant
changes which Merleau-Ponty's thought is capable of introducing relative to
traditional conceptions of question and response deeply rooted in traditional
views of rationality and subjectivity. With great resourcefulness, Waldenfels
demonstrates how we are caught in the chiasm between questioning and
responding, between responsive interrogation and interrogative responding,
such that our element is the question. The papers in this volume occur in
this interrogative space which Waldenfels thus opens; they are a kind of
question-writing, interrogating Merleau-Ponty's interrogation by being taken
up by it, by responding to it interrogatively and thus prolonging its life as
interrogation interrogating, in contemporary life, in the flesh of texts, an
xxii INTRODUCTION

interrogation not belonging only to Merleau-Ponty or, perhaps, belonging to

no one, seeming as if to emanate from things.
In Waldenfels' essay, the distinct thematics of interrogative thinking making-
up the four parts of this volume are delineated:
1. his concern for the nature of interrogation and thinking leads, in the
remainder of Part I, to asking about archeological questioning, about
thinking from within Being, and about interrogative thinking as architec-
tonic;
2. his concern for interrogation's other is formally examined in Part II within
the problematic of nature and the unconscious;
3. in showing that the event of questioning can be understood through the
event of speaking, Waldenfels invites the thematics of expression and
interpretation taken-up in Part III;
4. in showing that interrogative thinking is primarily responsive thinking,
he opens the space of ethics and politics and an ontology which would
include them, themes which focus the work of Part IV.
In the spirit of Merleau-Ponty, the essays within each of the four major parts
of the volume can be best summarized by the questions which they uniquely
and explicitly address, which will allow us to show how the response of each
author sets forth a new direction for Merleau-Ponty scholarship and, perhaps,
for continental philosophy today.
In the second essay of Part I, Burkhard Liebsch explores 'archeological
questioning' as a specific form of interrogative thinking. As the central focus
of his work, he questions how Ricoeur's archeological-teleological model of
hermeneutics stands-up against Merleau-Ponty's claim that archeological
questioning necessarily casts into doubt the conception of a progressive
constitutive teleology as the inverse counterpart of archeology, that such a
conception suffers from a 'retrospective fallacy' . He argues that, if it is to avoid
the 'retrospective fallacy', what Ricoeur designates as 'narrative order' must
be cognizant of the 'wild contingency' of past futures, that, as Merleau-Ponty
would say, this 'wild contingency' renders every story provisional and never
a matter of 'fate' or of a progressive genesis, that the story can be told in
other ways starting from a different past-future which we may have thought
was excluded but which nonetheless has been at work and has been realized
in perhaps the subtlest manner, requiring within the story drastic revisions.
In the course of his discussion, Liebsch stakes out fertile ground for future
research by reminding us of the following ensemble of questions which
constitute, in part, Merleau-Ponty's response to the archeological methodology.
In what way might archeological questioning invalidate well-proven
phenomenological tools such as the concepts of 'noema', 'noesis', and 'inten-
tionality'? To what extent might an archeological phenomenology undermine
the seemingly self-evident presupposition that the 'original structures' of
experience will present themselves in terms of modalities of being present
to consciousness? To what extent might an archeological phenomenology
 INTRODUCTION xxiii

open-up dimensions of 'irrevocable absences' intruding even into the seeming

self-givenness of things and which belong thus to the original dimension of
our experience? What are the implications of these possibilities for the
'backward questioning' of psychoanalysis?
Archeological questioning challenges the "God's eye" view of the Being
process, and requires that interrogative thinking be a "thinking from within"
Being, which is the theme developed in the third essay of Part I by Fran~oise
Dastur. She examines afresh Merleau-Ponty's project of an Intra-ontology
by taking up the questions which follow. In what way is "thinking from within"
the interrogative experience of pre-objective Being, of the opening of Being
from the inside according to a difference which is in no way exclusive of an
identity? In what way is it an asubjective thinking of the non-exteriority of
the seer and the visible, and not a thinking of the interiority of the subject?
In what way is it a thinking by virtue of horizon, of a proximity which is
distance, of a durational thickness and depth which is an obstacle only for a
non-promiscuous "thought from the outside"? How does this imply that Being
is pregnant with its own utterance, its own word? In what way does Being
demand creation of us in order for us to experience it?
As her essay unfolds, Dastur reveals new dimensions in Merleau-Ponty's
interrogating of Being which still demand our attention, namely:
(a) that the "thinking from within" of Being, like vision itself, is a metamor-
phosis of Being, that it is part of the creative process of Being by which
Being makes itself consciousness and history, a process which is never
finished but always in the making (here she makes sense of Merleau-Ponty's
proposal of a "cosmology of the visible" and opens up future dialogue with
contemporaries in the tradition of process philosophy);
(b) that the "thinking from within" of Being calls for the rethinking of the
notion of "presence", neither as 'objective presence' nor 'presence of self',
but as an enigma, as the exploded presence of beings, the mystery of their
simultaneity and co-existence in and through distance and difference (here
she stakes out the rudiments of Merleau-Ponty's proposal for a "tran-
scendental geology"); and
(c) that the "thinking from within" of Being calls for a rethinking of "reflec-
tion", not as the presence of the mind to its own self-generated internal
operations, but as a "reflection by Ec-stasy", rooted in the reflexivity of
the flesh, in the reversibility, the metamorphosis of an inside into an outside
and of an outside into an inside, an 'eminent' reflectivity on the model
of which our concept of the work of the mind as reflection should be based.
In the final essay of Part I, Marc Richir discloses the fundamentally
architectonic nature of interrogative thinking by addressing the following
questions. In what manner and to what extent do we find in the Vlth Meditation
of the young Eugen Fink the origins of the thought of the later Merleau-
Ponty regarding the transcendental eidetic of "wild essences"? Why must
this transcendental eidetic of wild essences be understood on the model of
xxiv INTRODUCTION

aesthetic contemplation as delineated by Kant in the third Critique? If,

according to the most fundamental exigencies of Kantian architectonics, we
conceive essences as truly 'wild' and their significations and concepts as
truly 'our own', then why must we admit that between the wild phenomenal
field and the instituted symbolic field no relation of 'derivation', much less
'deduction', is possible? How is the division which ought to be thought
between the phenomenological and the symbolic a division which is archi-
tectonic and nowise ontological?
In the course of a dense but brilliantly subtle analysis, Richir projects
some arenas in which Merleau-Ponty's thinking can still conduct vigorous
interrogation:
(a) he calls for a rewriting of the 'transcendental doctrine of method' that
Fink contemplated in the Vlth Meditation, but now from a different
perspective, that of the problem of the phenomenological encounter
between the symbolic and phenomenological dimensions of experience,
between concepts and the wild essences or 'incarnate existentials' which
are their respondents (not correspondents), an encounter which Merleau-
Ponty had only begun to measure;
(b) he proposes that aesthetic reflection, which proceeds as in Kant 'without
prior concept' and which brings us back to an entirely different con-
ception of the 'disinterested spectator' and which alone is properly
'phenomenological reflection', that this aesthetic reflection be general-
ized into phenomenology, into what is required by phenomena as 'nothing
but phenomena', namely their phenomenological reflection as devoid of
prior concept; Richir asserts that only this can preserve phenomeno-
logical thinking from the transcendental illusion of a simultaneously
intuitive and archetypal understanding.
In Part II, interrogative thinking turns toward its inherent 'other' and the
creative transformations entailed by their reversibility, hence the topical
heading Nature, the Unconscious, and Desire. The inaugural essay is
contributed by Rudolf Bernet who approaches in a new and provocative way
a problem not sufficiently probed by Merleau-Ponty scholars, a theme whose
rich and complex dimensions, discovered surprisingly in a rereading of the
Phenomenology of Perception, foreshadow an arena for future research, namely
the intersubjective relation of the symbolics of nature to the corporeality of
the body and the symbolics of the body to the corporeal life of nature. Bernet's
remarkably incisive analyses proceed along the following interrogative axes.
In what way does the philosophy of nature developed in the Phenomenology
of Perception, a philosophy which surmounts the opposition between nature
and the subject, give birth to a new conception of the subject as well as of
nature? In what way is the structure of the subject encountered exactly where
it was least expected, that is, in the life of things in the world? In other
words, in what way can a subjective capacity be attributed to things and the
world such that they interrogate our gaze and invite the human subject to
 INTRODUCTION xxv

dialogue and, consequently, stand in an intersubjective relation to the human

subject? In what way do the answers to these questions point to a new
form of phenomenological reduction? To what extent is 'nature' in the
Phenomenology of Perception transformed into 'savage spirit' in The Visible
and the Invisible?
In addition to the themes in interrogative thinking mentioned above, Bernet
offers this valuable agenda for subsequent research in the philosophy and
psychoanalysis of nature proposed by Merleau-Ponty in the "Working Notes",
an agenda which augments proposals made by Waldenfels and Dastur:
(a) in what way is nature both a primordial form of transcendence which
supports and permeates the human body and a finely articulated symbolic
system, a diacritical system of differences, an expressive capacity which
animates, traverses, and unites things to each other and to the gaze that
wanders among them, this universal life of meaning that precedes human
constitution and to which it must necessarily return as sedimentation?
(b) in what way is nature an 'unfinished unity', a unity in 'becoming' an
essentially 'temporal unity', to be understood as 'savage spirit' animating
the universal corporeity of the flesh?
(c) how does the turn to Scheler and to Cassirer, rather than to Husserl, offer
the better path for understanding Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of nature?
The body-subject emerges from and is nourished in the depths of nature,
that vast and varied field of pre-reflective life, which sustains and permeates
conscious projects, and allows us to speak meaningfully of the 'unconscious',
the theme which Martin Dillon takes up in the second essay of Part II. This
essay is the respondent to the following interrogative set. How is the 'uncon-
scious' to be conceived, as a blind causal mechanism, or a self-effacing
grammarian which a self-constructing lexicon, or an absolute absence
discernible only in its self-dissembling effects and, in all cases, radically
discontinuous with consciousness? How does Merleau-Ponty's notion of
corporeal reflexivity overcome the trenchant dualism between the conscious
and the unconscious dictated by these notions of the unconscious? How does
it provide a common ground for the thematic reflexivity designated as
consciousness and the horizontal reflexivity designated as the unconscious?
In what way did the thesis of the primacy of perception, maintained in the
corpus of Merleau-Ponty's writings, have clear implications for his under-
standing of the unconscious and the process of symbolization? How is
corporeal reflexivity the manner in which the world presents itself to itself
through that part of itself that we are? How does this show that the logos of
language is grounded in the 'nascent logos of the perceptual world' such that
if the unconscious is structured like a language, this is doubtlessly because
language is structured like the world?
In shaping his essay around these questions, Dillon circumscribes an arena
where Merleau-Ponty's thought can contribute fruitfully, namely toward a
radical renewal of the unconscious, according to the following parameters:
xxvi INTRODUCTION

(a) rather than to Lacan or to Derrida, we must turn to Merleau-Ponty who

offers a radical pluralism which celebrates differences without creating a
pure diacriticality, unbridgeable binary oppositions and discontinuities
between the various levels of experience, between consciousness and its
other;
(b) the radical renewal focuses on what Fran~oise Dastur has already
delineated in her essay, namely an expanded notion of presence, beyond
that of 'presence to' (presence to consciousness, consciousness present
to itself, etc.), a horizontal notion of presence which encompasses both
figure and background, surface and depth, and which entails a primordial
accessibility to and reversibility of self and world, language and things,
matter and meaning, consciousness and the unconscious, designated also
by the term 'corporeal reflexivity' of the flesh inhabited by a nascent logos;
it is only within this expanded notion of presence, according to Dillon,
that the relation of consciousness to its 'unconscious' other can be rendered
intelligible.

In his essay on nature, Bernet points to the 'desire' of the body to always
see more, a desire stirred up by the world, and the ultimate locus of this
desire and the source of its energy, according to Freud, is the 'unconscious'.
But Dillon criticizes Freud for his proto-mechanistic analytic of desire, rebukes
Lacan for having reduced desire to a play of signifiers, and articulates a
different notion of the unconscious through which desire might be better
understood. In the third essay of Part II, Galen Johnson situates his own formal
discussion of desire within Merleau-Ponty's interrogation of the invisible in
Eye and Mind, a work which Johnson considers a metaphysical experiment
in fashioning a new philosophy of nature. The probative focus of Johnson's
essay is manifest in the following imaginative questions he presents to this
text. How does Merleau-Ponty's study of color reveal the 'flesh' as the synergic
intertwining of the depth of the world with the depth of desire? In what way
are visible color and line to be understood as a pregnancy, as a labor of
desire, a longing for the Other which is the birthplace of expression? How
is the visual a metamorphosis of desire? How is desire transubstantiated into
the mystery of invisibility, of the word, of moral command and criticism, of
self-comprehension, of spirit?
Along the path of his meditation, Johnson develops a promising itinerary
for creatively entering, i.e., reading and writing anew, the works of Merleau-
Ponty; he recommends:

(a) that the depth of the there is a function of the incarnate doubling of
difference and desire, which an analysis of Merleau-Ponty's metaphoric use
of fire would reveal;
(b) that the erotic synergy of desire, operative in the depths of the self and
the depths of the world, does not seek 'synthesis' between the seeing and
the seen, the touching and the touched, but a 'metamorphosis' in the
 INTRODUCTION xxvii

strongest sense, that of 'transubstantiation', and that the 'sacramental'

significance of the latter word should be taken seriously;
(c) that 'spirituality' is rooted in a primordial generosity, in a multi-voiced
plurality, a porosity and openness, a wonder, all of which mark the invis-
ible depth of the visible, the inversion of the movement of desire toward
its Source;
(d) that the call of ethical concern is the invisible of the visible of things,
that things have a 'face' that breaks through, that commands our respect
or demands our repair, and to which eye and mind 'ought' to be atten-
tive.
Johnson's essay reveals desire as the germinating ground of expression, and
Bernet locates the most primordial expressive capacity within nature. These
analyses establish the basis for Part III: Expression, Creation, and Inter-
pretation, where interrogative thinking situates itself in the advent of speaking,
in the creative moment of expression where simultaneously flesh becomes word
and word becomes world. The first essay is presented by Edwin Weihe who
exemplifies the gathering function of expression by subtly weaving together
the thematics of the previous essays at those points where the thought of
Merleau-Ponty and of Joseph Conrad cross. Weihe's incisive and lyrical work
cuts this interrogative path into the core of expression. How does Merleau-
Ponty's Cezanne bring us back to the Inner Station depicted by Joseph Conrad
in Heart of Darkness? In what way is the artist's doubt the experience of
uncertainty, of irreducible contingency, at the Inner Station of primordial
perception? How does it originate in and how is it sustained by an inter-
rogative wonder and the 'wild words' which are anticipated but unexpressed,
heard in 'savage silence' at the source of solitary experience where matter
spontaneously takes on form and where the gift of expression is received?
In what way are both writers struggling with the relation between the
invisible idea and the expressiveness of perception, and how does this struggle
constitute their shared doubt?
Within these interrogative contours, Weihe compellingly demonstrates the
fecundity of interaction between the works of Merleau-Ponty and major writers
in the literary tradition, a field well ripe for harvesting. We have long been
aware of the importance of Proust for Merleau-Ponty's articulation of his
own thought, and this century is witness to philosophy in the form of the novel,
the play, the poem, the dialogue, the journal, the diary, even the postcard. What
Weihe sets forth explicitly is the way in which the encounter with Conrad's
theory of expression as explored and realized in Heart of Darkness can reorient
our own reading of Merleau-Ponty by offering new interpretive possibilities.
For instance, Conrad's description of how every expression, including the
process of spontaneous organization by which form emerges from matter, is
irreducibly contingent and, consequently, threatened with the possibility of
chaos suggests to us that what Merleau-Ponty calls 'wild Being' is to be
understood, perhaps, in the most radical sense of the term 'wild', as a sort
xxviii

of mad jumble of trajectories, lacking an internal organizing principle, and that

the 'nascent logos' is a secondary and contingent phenomenon, a thesis the
hints of which are to be found in his last lecture courses at the College de
France. Conrad's Marlowe also anticipates many of the interpretations offered
in this volume, for example his intimation of the 'wild words' which cannot
be expressed, which cannot cross the boundary into the zone of our words,
echoes the architectonic analysis offered by Richir, that there is not a deriva-
tion but rather a 'change of register' in the move from 'wild essences' to
our significations and concepts; or when Marlowe describes the 'wilderness'
as Kurtz's motif, thinking itself, making itself conscious in him, what comes
to mind is Bernet's arguments for the subjectivity of nature. Weihe's Conrad
also anticipates the thesis of the radical creativity of expression which is
explored in depth in the next essay by Rudi Visker.
If Weihe found it useful to go to Conrad to enlarge and deepen Merleau-
Ponty's discussion of expression, Rudi Visker masterfully sets up an intricate
and intensive encounter between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, breaking their
words open at the seams and releasing, thereby, the rich insights which
otherwise would remain trapped, revealing as well the limits of their interro-
gations which can also be found only at this point of rupture. In the style of
a polyphonic composition the respective ideas and methods of Merleau-Ponty
and Foucault are probed and contrapuntally developed in a continuous
interweaving of their successively entering voices and the voice of the analyst,
Rudi Visker, who structures his essay along the following interrogative
parameters. In what way is discourse for Foucault a tertium quid much like
perception for Merleau-Ponty which cannot be accounted for by empiricism
or intellectualism? How does Foucault's genealogical approach to discourse
fail both to convincingly set itself off against empiricism and to correct
archeology's tendency to collapse into discursive idealism? What effect will
the question of the ontological status of copulation and creation have on the
efforts of Foucault and Merleau-Ponty to find a new starting point in philos-
ophy. In what way does what Merleau-Ponty calls 'raw being' demand creation,
and how does this involve a certain kind of violence? What difference does
Merleau-Pontian 'raw being' make to the 'order of things'? What does
Merleau-Ponty mean by an 'archeology'? In what way is 'raw being' a-topic
and hence a dimension instead of a first archeological layer of experience?
In what way does everything that relates to the perceived world have the
structure of expression, and how is it that the expressive medium has a logic
of its own such that expression is a translation that produces its own original?
What is the desire that drives expression beyond itself, and how is it
implicated in the very structure of response which produces an 'excess' or
moment of 'alterity'? How does the analysis of this desire reveal a new concept
of subjectivity? What is the relation of this desire to ethics?
In leading us imaginatively through this interrogative labyrinth, Visker
accomplishes the following:
 INTRODUCTION xxix

(a) he offers a model of reading and writing Merleau-Ponty today, by posing

the questions "that we might have wished Merleau-Ponty to have addressed
to Foucault," questions which provide a kind of "grillwork through which
we can see his texts dislocating themselves and diverging from what we
thought them to be;" in this way, he shows how Merleau-Ponty's texts
can still illuminate those which came later, how they can enter into
contemporary dialogue, and. as in a dialogue, say and hear things that
alter the course of the conversation; for example, Foucault's notion of
the operation of power would benefit from Merleau-Ponty's analysis of
the act of attention as creatively developing and enriching that which
awakened it, as would Merleau-Ponty's notion of 'raw being' benefit from
Foucault's notion of 'discourse';
(b) with the help of Foucault, he is able to focus on the precise question,
perhaps the ultimate question, for Merleau-Ponty scholarship today, the
question of creation and the ontology which could make sense of how
the perceptual field is a matter already pregnant with form and yet still
needing to be put into form; he points us in the right direction when he
suggests that 'raw being' is the creative power to restructure which is found
at all levels of human experience. not merely the archetypal perceptual
level, and that expression is fundamentally creative relative to an irreme-
diable absence, an origin that has broken-up.

In the Epilogue to this volume, Gary Madison states that contemporary

hermeneutical literature seldom, if ever, refers to Merleau-Ponty's philos-
ophy of expression. In the last essay of Part III, James Risser makes it his
business to fill this gap by taking up the following questions. Is there a common
thread between a philosophy of ambiguity and a philosophical hermeneutics
in terms of which we can decide just how hermeneutical Merleau-Ponty's
philosophy of language really is? In what way does Merleau-Ponty's tum from
the field of pure signification into the creative vibrancy of speaking indicate
the proper hermeneutical structure of his thought such that the question of
his relation to Gadamer's project arouses our interest? In what way does the
vibrancy of speaking receive its sense from the way in which language is
enveloped in 'excess' which, for Merleau-Ponty, is another word for 'silence'?
In what way does this notion of 'silence' pertain to the notion of 'possi-
bility' as articulated by Gadamer's hermeneutics? How does Merleau-Ponty's
notion of difference in language open into the framework of the ontological
doubling - or better, oppositional weaving - of the visible and the invisible?
In other words, what is the connection between silence and 'ontological
vibration', and how is this connection manifest in the 'responding speaking'
in the interrogative? How does Gadamer's analysis of the 'poetic word' show
his commitment to the 'excess of meaning' in the vibrancy of speaking? How
do both philosophers inaugurate a 'tum toward the voice'?
The comparison with Gadamer, elaborated in reply to these questions, proves
xxx INTRODUCTION

remarkably fruitful, not only by the fact that it establishes three distinct
hermeneutical moves in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of language, but also in
its unfolding of a category important for Merleau-Ponty's ontology as well,
namely the notion of the possible, which has not received due notice in current
Merleau-Ponty research. Risser exposes the creative dimension of speech in
Merleau-Ponty's analysis of how new significations emerge, how the vibrancy
of speaking is enveloped in excess or silence or, to use Gadamer's word,
'possibility'. For Gadamer, the speaking event, in expressing a relation to
the whole of being, brings about an increase in being. As Risser unpacks it,
this is a function of the virtuality of speech (another name for Being), holding
within itself possible being and by which it opens new possibilities of meaning.
What still awaits exploration here is how this notion of the 'possible' as
articulated by Gadamer may give us the interpretive access to what Merleau-
Ponty described as "the new notion of the possible: namely, the possible
conceived not as another eventual occurrence, but as an ingredient of the
existing world itself, as general reality.,,6 Risser suggests a path toward such
an ontological understanding of the possible when, following Bernet's lead,
he attributes voice to things which call for the vibrancy of our responding
speaking in the interrogative, a dialogue which leads to an increase of being,
a creative infolding and unfolding, as part of Being's self-differentiation.
In Part IV, interrogation shifts to the question of ethics and politics and
the ontological framework wherein they might be intelligible. We have already
seen the ethical impulse surface in several of the essays, in Waldenfels'
discussion of interrogative thinking as responsive thinking, in Johnson's
mention of the moral 'face' of things and the earth, and in Visker's
reference to the 'ethos' implied by the creative process within 'raw being'.
In the Epilogue, Madison claims that an ethics is something Merleau-Ponty
never even so much as outlined, but Steve Watson finds embedded in the
"Preface" to Signs and in other essays the principles for an ethics. He draws
them forth from their matrix by focusing on these questions. In what way,
according to Merleau-Ponty, does the ambiguity affecting values neither negate
their validity nor the responsibility required in the art of their interpretation?
In what way does the problem of the contingency of value remain, even if
there is no 'moral sense' or no demonstrable 'natural law'? In what way
is politics a withdrawal from political theory and a vacillation between
the world of reality and that of values, between individual judgment and
common action, between the present and the future? In what way is the
de-substantialized space of the political itself pluralized, and thus a space of
indeterminate identity? In what way does the notion of value undergo the
'reciprocal encroachment' of institutions and intentions, necessity and
contingency - virtu and fortuna, as Machiavelli put it? What prevents the
consequent 'pluralization' of meaning and value from collapsing into a vacuous
relativism or nihilism? How is it that ethics or politics, no more than episte-
mology, can be neither a matter of return to origins nor a reduction to
foundations, but must be based on the recognition that the appeal to the
 INTRODUCTION xxxi

originating goes in several directions, that the originating arises in the 'expres-
sive step beyond' which involves non-coincidence, differentiation, dis-
continuity? How does the space of the oscillation of value and event involve
the incarnate and irreducible difference of a 'transcendental between', of a new
ideal of rationality? What does Merleau-Ponty mean by "virtu sans aucune
resignation"? How does being condemned to meaning entail being condemned
to responsibility?
Watson's essay succeeds in showing that the question of ethics in Merleau-
Ponty is not to be situated in the existentialist ethics of ambiguity which
may seem to characterize his earlier writings, but that we must tum to his
reading of Montaigne, Pascal, and Machiavelli to find the pivotal ethical
category, virtu, the dialectics of which may allow questions of right and
responsibility to be reasonably approached and practically decided. Watson
completes Risser's discussion of expression by showing how the ethical, for
Merleau-Ponty, is rooted in the 'excess' of the signifier over the signified,
that in this 'excess', in this differentiation, this non-coincidence, this discon-
tinuity (which is wild Being), we find that 'good ambiguity' which is the
principle of an ethics, something which was already implied in his 'humanism
in extension' articulated as early as 1947. Because Merleau-Ponty shows
respect for the withdrawal in which virtue would be ventured today, because
he vigilantly acknowledges the complexity and risk of virtue, Watson argues
that Merleau-Ponty's legacy retains prominence.
In the second essay of Part IV, Laura Boella echoes the themes of ethics
and politics in her taking-up of Hannah Arendt's refusal of ontology. Boella
shows how Merleau-Ponty's thinking was inscribed by Arendt who expli-
citly acknowledges her debt to him, and yet offers a critique of the whole
ontological project of his later writings. Boella's essay exhibits the following
interrogative structure. In what way does the phenomenological approach of
Hannah Arendt go clearly in the direction of the later Merleau-Ponty, and
yet why does it stop short of the philosophy of the flesh and the ontological
project of 'brute being'? Why does she refuse the idea of 'chiasm'? Why,
according to Hannah Arendt, is the question of 'meaning' not the same as
the question of man's concrete experience of the world. In what way does
the autonomy of thinking stress the primary ethical significance of self-
awareness and, consequently, open itself to the human condition of plurality
and the political context of discourse? To what extent is Hannah Arendt's
analysis of the tragic dimension of finitude and the culpability of action more
existentialist and more Husserlian than Merleau-Ponty's analysis?
As did Visker and Risser, Boella reveals the remarkable fecundity of the
interface between Merleau-Ponty and contemporary thinkers whose works
postdate his. With great finesse, she reveals how Arendt's focus on appear-
ances and the field of practical action is illuminated intensively by the
philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, the latter of which might also benefit from
Arendt's philosophy, especially her emphasis on the ethical structure of
self-awareness which would significantly augment Merleau-Ponty's theory
xxxii INTRODUCTION

of intersubjectivity. Finally, she points up the fact that Merleau-Ponty's

philosophy of the flesh can support conflicting readings, such as those of
Hannah Arendt and Steve Watson, the latter finding in Merleau-Ponty a
'grounding' of ethics in an ontology of the Abgrund and of discontinuity,
the only ontology which Arendt, who denies Merleau-Ponty's ontology, can
accept.
In contradistinction to Arendt's refusal to adopt Merleau-Ponty's philosophy
of the flesh and the ontology of brute Being as the horizon for an ethics,
Gary Madison, in the Epilogue to this volume, directs future Merleau-Ponty
research towards an ethics of communicative rationality committed to universal
human rights and 'grounded' in the reversibility of the flesh and the primor-
dial intersubjectivity which it entails. In so doing, Madison shows how
Merleau-Ponty's thought compliments and exceeds that of Habermas. Likewise
he shows how Derrida's neologism, dif!erance, is anticipated by Merleau-
Ponty's notion of the flesh which nonetheless exceeds it in its relevance to
contemporary global politics. Although he recommends that we read Merleau-
Ponty as a classic, nonetheless Madison joins the other authors in this volume
in affirming Merleau-Ponty as a contemporary philosopher who offers new
directions for philosophical interrogation, who still frames in a fresh and
provocative voice the issues which remain urgent for our time.
If to place Merleau-Ponty in contemporary perspective is a form of
commemoration, it not only involves our memory of how his works have
inspired our thinking, but also, in a deeper sense, celebrates his own power
of memory exactly as he exercised it in his own self-criticism, always trying
to say again for the first time, to gather in one bouquet all the absent roses,
those impensees that originally gathered and colored his reflective and
unreflective wording, and which impelled him to write that "depth is still
new, and it insists on being sought, not 'once in a lifetime', but all through
life.,,7 We must remember these words as we remember the texts of Merleau-
Ponty. Like Cezanne, he continued to ruminate the mystery of depth, its
puzzles, its secrets. As the papers in this volume intimate, he still opens for
us the path into the depth of the world, which is the depth of the body and
the gesture, of eye and mind, of voice and desire, of right and reason. He leaves
us today as he left us more than thirty years ago with his unfinished works,
and he calls us to resume his vocation, that of the philosopher, of the researcher
who reveals that "the secret and the center of a philosophy does not lie in a
prenatal inspiration but that it develops as the work progresses, that it is a
becoming-meaning, which builds itself in accord with itself and in reaction
against itself, that a philosophy is necessarily a (philosophical) history, an
exchange between problems and solutions in which each partial solution
transforms the initial problem in such wise that the meaning of the whole
does not pre-exist it, except as a style pre-exists its works, and seems, after
the fact, to announce them."g To place Merleau-Ponty in contemporary
perspective as this volume purports to do means, in the last analysis, to grasp
and say the 'becoming-meaning' of his works with respect to the problems
 INTRODUCTION xxxiii

which polarize our thought and menace our world today. To commemorate,
in the case of Merleau-Ponty, is, therefore, not only to offer a critical and
interpretive look backward to his works and the meditation on depth started
therein, but also to move forward to them just as we now move in an
uncertain and explorative way toward the future of philosophy.

NOTES

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern

University Press, 1964), p. 11.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 189.
3. Ibid., p. 190.
4. Ibid., p. 190.
5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), p. 101.
6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures at the College de France, 1952-1960,
trans. John O'Neill (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 98.
7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, op. cit., pp. 179-180.
8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1963), p. 19.

II Querceto
September 1992
 PART I

Interrogation and Thinking

 BERNHARD WALDENFELS

Interrogative Thinking:
Reflections on Merleau-Ponty's Later Philosophy

Thinking which presumes to be a sort of interrogative thinking is not

satisfied with raising questions, rather it keeps questioning all the time. Trying
to plunge us into a maelstrom of questions, Merleau-Ponty quotes from
Claudel's poetics, where we can read:
From time to time, a man lifts his head, sniffs, listens, considers, recognizes
his position: he thinks, he sighs, and, drawing his watch from the pocket
lodged against his chest, looks at the time. Where am I? and What time is
it? - such is the inexhaustible question turning from us to the world . . .1
However, why should this question be inexhaustible? Is it not true that we
make use of clocks and maps to date or to locate what we experience? It should
be noted that Merleau-Ponty picks an example as common as possible. We
can already see that the author refuses to concede to philosophical thinking
the privilege of universality, as if every-day questions or scientific and
professional issues could finally be surpassed by questions concerning world
and mankind as a whole, able to be expressed in high style. It is not high
style which characterizes "fundamental interrogation" (VI, 103; VI, 140), but
different style. Philosophical questioning is a sort of questioning back, going
back behind what is given in every-day life, in scientific research or in
institutional issues, it does not question beyond it.
"Interrogative thought" already starts by perception as a kind of thinking
"which lets the perceived world be rather than posits it, before which the things
form and undo themselves in a sort of gliding, beneath the yes and the
no" (VI, 102; VI, 138). In this way Merleau-Ponty points back to his own
beginnings. More decisively than in earlier times, the primacy of perception
is presented as primacy of questioning, i.e. as primacy of a sort of
questioning which has always already begun. "It is not only philosophy, it is
first the look that questions the things" (VI, 103; VI, 140), and philosophy
which starts from the asking look, "as an approach to the far-off as far-off,
[... ] is also a question put to what does not speak" (VI, 102; VI, 138).
P. Burke and 1. Van der Veken (eds.), Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, 3-12.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
4 BERNHARD WALDENFELS

Similar to the way in which Merleau-Ponty, in his Phenomenology of

Perception, distinguishes between secondary and primary perception or
between spoken and speaking language, we could now differentiate between
asked and asking questions (interrogation interrogee and interrogeante). So
on the one hand we are confronted with a sort of questioning which is rooted
in a pre-existing ground of questioning, integrated in a certain order of
questioning and sustained by a register of questioning, and on the other hand,
with a sort of questioning which not only puts something in question, but rather
puts itself in question, including its own order.
How crucial this issue is for him becomes obvious when one realizes that
the primary part of The Visible and the Invisible, in accordance with the
author's own working plans, is entitled L'interrogation philosophique. The
philosophical kind of questioning is understood as counterpart to several modes
of thinking which in one way or another silence interrogation by giving
answers. It is not so important whether the goal is attained or not, but whether
we aspire to it, even by taking it for unattainable. Merleau-Ponty explicitly
refers to the philosophy of reflection which tries to catch up with its own
pre-reflective beginnings; he further refers to dialectics a la Sartre which
opposes to the positivity of Being the negativity of questioning, tending in
this way to a new kind of positivity; he finally refers to philosophy as
intuition of essences which assumes that all questions of fact could be overcome
by questioning the essence of whatever we experience. Merleau-Ponty's own
thinking revolves around a focus of questions placed between fact and essence,
thus becoming a kind of hyper-phenomenology which is centered on
'surreflection', 'hyperdialectic' and the 'overdetermination' of all phenomena.2
The questionability of Being, articulated in terms of "phenomena-questions"
(VI, 248; VI, 302), depends on the fact that whatever appears deviates from
itself and surpasses itself.
In what follows it should suffice to pick up some central threads from
Merleau-Ponty's texts, especially from The Visible and the Invisible. Doing
so, I will ask "what it means to question and what it means to respond" (VI,
120; VI, 160). Running through three stages, my reflection will focus on
different relations of questioning, first on its relation to things, then on its
relation to itself, and finally on its relation to the other. The questionability
of Being will increase from step to step.

II

On a first level, questioning is characterized by its subject (Sachgehalt).

Questions are restricted to "questions of cognition" (VI, 128; VI, 171) which
means that I do not know something I want to know. The character of
question ability represents nothing more than lacunae within the economy of
knowledge. What is questionable is unknown in the sense of something not
yet known. As Merleau-Ponty writes:
 INTERROGA TIVE THINKING 5

Our ordinary questions - 'Where am I?' 'What time is it?' - are the lack
and the provisional absence of a fact or of a positive statement, holes in a
fabric of things or of indicatives that we are sure is continuous (VI, 105;
VI, 142).
This situation will not change if we merely enlarge the range of questioning,
asking if space, time and world exist and what they are in essence. Such
questions are only a sort of "semi-question" (ibid.) because they remain rooted
in our fundamental belief, aimed at a pre-existing world. We are still within
a pre-established order, and all answers we find or receive do nothing more
than transform a state of void into a state of fullness, a state of indetermi-
nacy into a state of determination, or a state of undecidedness into a state of
decision. It makes no great difference whether we define questioning as
aspiration to knowledge, following the tradition of metaphysics, or define it
as a request for information, following the current trend of linguistic
pragmatics, or whether we presuppose that we are individually or collec-
tively looking for something, or that we mutually exchange our own thoughts
(VI, 119; VI, 159). In both cases, responding is reduced to answering as a
kind of fulfillment or appropriation. We stay within a teleological or a
regulative circle, what is questioned becomes questionable only for us, not
in itself From a state of belief being without question, questioning aims at a
state of knowledge being again without question. Questioning is only a
transitional state, marked in advance by schemes of pre-knowledge and
pre-scriptions. The interrogative mode can be derived from the indicative,
announcing a certain state of knowledge or, we might add, from the optative,
expressing a certain lack of knowledge. MerIeau-Ponty maintains that the
"negativism" of factual doubts and the "positivism" inherent to the intuition
of essence complete each other. The question may remain without answer or
the answer may be immanent to the question; in both cases finally there will
be no question at all. "Either, cut off from Being, we would not even have
enough of the positive to raise a question, or, already caught up in Being,
we would be already beyond every question"; if there is any 'answer' then
it is "higher than the 'facts', lower than the 'essences', in the wild Being where
they were, and - behind or beneath the cleavages of our acquired culture -
continue to be, undivided" (VI, 120; VI, 161). The region of 'wild Being'
presents itself as a region where it is not yet settled once and for all if
something is the case, what something is and what it is good for. This is a
region where the portals of cultural order are not yet closed, where what
something is implies more and other things than what it is. Here "the world
exists in the interrogative mode" (VI, 103; VI, 139) and is "articulated starting
from a zero of being" (VI, 260; VI, 314). We now have to ask ourselves what
kind of questioning arises from this intermediate zone of questions.
6 BERNHARD W ALDENFELS

III

In Merleau-Ponty's view, philosophical questioning in its strict sense only

arises from a second order questioning, i.e. from a kind of questioning which
returns to itself in terms of self-questioning, instead of being restricted to
the questioning of things finding its end in certain answers. But such a kind
of questioning has to be dealt with cautiously. Doubling the process of ques-
tioning does not mean that somebody putting the question and something
put into question coincide in the form of a self-reflective consciousness, a
reditio in se ipsum, completing the range of questioning and still being kept
within the circle of knowledge. On the other hand, the self-reference of
questioning does not mean that questioning is distributed on two levels of
questioning, because in this way the order of questioning would only be
multiplied, and the final answer would only be postponed. Self-questioning
is only capable of revealing the very structure of questioning insofar as
questioning pari passu interrogates something else and itself. Merleau-Ponty
compares such a doubling of questioning, which surpasses pure duality without
realizing a complete union, to the phenomenon of diplopia: a double look
which, as in the case of binocular sight, fuses two monocular pictures into
one vision (VI, 166; VI, 220). Such questions are philosophical, in that, "at
the same time that they aim at the signification 'being', they aim at the being
of signification within Being" (VI, 119; VI, 160). In contrast to the above
mentioned "questions of cognition", Merleau-Ponty calls this sort of question
"question-knowing" (question-savoir, VI, 129; VI, 171), i.e. a sort of question
concerning the state of knowledge as such. Such questions cannot be overtaken
by statement or answer because there is no frame of know ledge merely waiting
to be filled up. What is put in question is questionable (jraglich) in itself.
This becomes clear when we return once more to Claudel's chain of ques-
tions, evoked and discussed several times by Merleau-Ponty: "Where am I?
What time is it?" These simple questions of every-day life become philo-
sophical questions as soon as Montaigne's "Que sais-je?" accompanies them
in a way similar to Kant's "I think", which is said to be able to accompany
all of our representations. Such an accompanying question directs our
attention from what can be known to the very mode of knowing, without
stopping at a certain state of knowledge, as the mere test of knowledge does.
What strikes us while considering the examples mentioned is the fact that
we are confronted with what Husserl would call occasional questioning, which
explicitly refers to the situation of the person who puts the question. However,
in a certain sense all questions are occasional. It belongs to the presupposi-
tion of every act of questioning that the person who puts the question suggests
by his question more or less explicitly that he does not know what he asks,
but wants to know it. Otherwise asking would not be a serious speech-act.
But this is not only a problem of the pragmatics of the question - interroga-
tive logic as well does not work without making epistemic presuppositions,
referring to the state of knowledge of those who put questions and give
 INTERROGA TIVE THINKING 7

answers. In this sense all questions are occasional, in contrast to statements

and prescriptions, whose claims of validity may extend beyond all contex-
tual restrictions. Surely, we may ask if this emancipation from contexts can
really be achieved without forgetting the interrogative background of whatever
is stated or prescribed. In any case, there is no unconditional question
(unbedingte Frage).
However, there are other remedies invented for getting rid of the occa-
sionality of questioning. One may purify the content of the question of all
occasional or indexical features by substituting proper names, by transfer-
ring the 'here' and 'now' into general data of space and time, and finally by
replacing proper names and individual descriptions with general names. So
we become more and more able to pose the general question about man's place
in time, world and history. The person who poses these general questions is
no longer you or me. We take the role of somebody, taking part in a specific
discourse, and finally we take the role of everybody, belonging to a universal
discourse. Everything becomes good for anybody. The person who questions
something and himself only survives to the extent that he abstracts from the
real situations and conditions of questioning. This purification of questioning
leads us to the so-called questions of mankind, which set-up house in the
shadow of divine knowledge. Self-questioning is reduced to an initial event
which is increasingly absorbed in the process of becoming familiar with myself,
in the dialectics of Being and Nothingness or in the survey of the kosmothe-
oros, just as the spark gets lost in the fire it has inflamed. The 'here' and 'now'
is, after all, nothing but a space or time datum among others, just as the
asking subject is one subject among others. Where -, when -, and who -
questions are no longer puzzling questions. Self-questioning becomes inte-
grated into the questioning of a whole which - the more we approximate it
- loses the shadows of questionability.
Now what puts a stop to this process of absorption, changing the whole
into an "interrogative ensemble" (VI, 187; VI, 241), is a pervasive feature of
duplicity, not only in the sense of a double look, but also in the sense of a
double speech. How wrong we are to take questions like "where am I?" as
trivial becomes evident by an impressive example we find in Eugene
Minkowski's book on Lived Space. 3 Two patients were confronted with the
simple question "Where are you?" The one patient, a paralytic, answered by
simply pointing to the place where he was standing, whereas the other, a
schizophrenic, answered: "I know where I am but do not feel like I am there".
Perhaps Merleau-Ponty has such cases in mind4 when he swells Claudel's
simple questions up to a cascade of questions:

... but where is the world itself? And why am I myself? How old am I
really? Am I really alone to be me? Have I not somewhere a double, a twin?
These questions, which the sick man puts to himself in a moment of respite
- or simply that glance at his watch, as if it were of great importance that
the torment take place at a given inclination of the sun, at such or such
8 BERNHARD WALDENFELS

hour in the life of the world - expose, at the moment that life is
threatened, the underlying movement through which we have installed
ourselves in the world and whiCh recommences yet a little more time for
itself (VI, 104; VI, 141).
The double disturbance of space experience shown by Minkowski's patients
can be interpreted on the one hand, as a fixation on the 'here' making the
horizons of experience shrink, and on the other hand, as a levelling
of the 'here' by uprooting knowledge from its spatial anchoring. The
splitting of space knowledge and space feeling, typical of the answer of
the schizophrenic, points to a process of duplication we find in every kind
of first-person speech, even in that of the normal person. Putting it in linguistic
terms, we could say that '1', 'Thou', 'Here' and 'Now', represented in the
enonce or in the propositional content of speech acts, are neither identical with
nor completely separated from the corresponding items which belong to the
enonciation or to the elocutionary act. There is a certain 'Here' and 'Now'
belonging to what is said, and another one belonging to saying itself. A
simple sentence like "I promise you that I will meet you there tomorrow"
clearly shows this double register of language. The very event of speaking,
which Merleau-Ponty calls 'operative', 'vivid' or 'speaking language', appears
within what is said, i.e. the choses dites (see VI, 125f., 129; VI, 167, 171),
without being absorbed in it. On the other hand, what is said outlasts the speech
event by being repeatable. The case of schizophrenia mentioned above may
be interpreted as severing the connection between saying and what is said,
whereas the case of paralysis demonstrates the possibility that what is said
is merged in the pure linguistic gesture. Using the famous distinction made
by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus (4.1212), we can say: in the former case we
approach the situation where something is said while saying itself is not shown,
whereas in the latter case saying shows itself, but nothing is said. The extremes
of something being said without reference to saying and of saying without
reference to what is said indicate a duplication of language which can only
be eliminated at the price of the loss of language.
Coming back to the problem of self-questioning, we must assume that we
will never be able to say definitively where, at what time and who we are.
If questions like "Where am I? What time is it? Who am I?" cannot be
answered definitively, this is not so because I do not know all this, but because
the event of questioning, including the different instances of discourse, first
and foremost determines what is put in question and what not, whether
something is put in question or not and whether we are "ourselves in question"
(VI, 103; VI, 140). Questioning and what is questioned are no more one and
the same than are saying and what is said. This is the reason why experi-
ence, speech, action and thought are questionable in themselves. Interrogative
thinking is a kind of thinking which will never be absorbed in what is thought,
and so we will never be able to say what it is and to whom it belongs.
In a noteworthy working note entitled '''Eyoo and 000.<;" (VI, 246; VI,
299f.), Merleau-Ponty confronts the named "I" with its own anonymity. As
 INTERROGATIVE THINKING 9

operative ego I am nobody. Husserl has already made a similar assumption

while presupposing in the Crisis, within the pure sphere of transcendental
reflection,
... a residuum which remains unthematic - remains, so to speak, anony-
mous - namely, the reflections which are functioning in connection with
this theme. (Buss. VI, 111; Engl. 103).
But Merleau-Ponty goes even further because he no longer starts from a
reflective-prereflective self-consciousness but, on the contrary, in the same
context he defines reflexivity as the "self-relation of the body, of the speech".
What I am I am through the speech, by "duplication" of myself, my body
and my speech: ''the body, language, as alter ego - the 'among ourselves' (entre
nous) (Michaux) of my body and me - my duplication . . . ". The non-
coincidence of touching and what is touched, of seeing and what is seen, no
longer results from a process of failing self-objectification, it appears as a kind
of double phenomenon, similar to the gap between saying and what is said. s
Faced with an ego which permanently escapes itself while seeing and
expressing itself, every kind of return to oneself seems to be a pure chimera.
There is nobody to whom I could return. Self-questioning, which includes
this no man's land in its own questioning, excludes the possibility of finding
oneself in the other: self-reference, reference to the other, reference to other
things as well as to other persons, will never coincide. What is questioned
or interrogated shows certain aspects of depth and distance which will never
be transformed into absolute proximity (VI, 10If., 128; VI, 138, 170).

IV

Interrogative thinking prevails against any attempt to reach a primary or final

state where everything is without question and no question remains open.
This Fraglosigkeit without Fraglichkeit is excluded by the questionability of
Being and thinking itself. But what about the opposite assumption of
Fraglichkeit without Fraglosigkeit, i.e. of a state where everything is put in
question, nothing remaining without question? One may be tempted to presume
that a process of questioning which puts everything in question - the pre-
reflective beginnings as well as the return to the beginning, the positivity of
Being as well as the negativity of Nothingness, the simple facts as well as
the essential structures - will retain nothing but itself: nihil nisi quaestio ipsa.
In the end the only thing without question would be questioning itself; consider-
ed in its pure self-reference, questioning would appear as irrelative, as absolute.
But at this point we fall into a dilemma which haunts every such extreme.
Interrogation leading to itself as interrogatio pura would cease to be interro-
gation; it would be what it is without any further question. Against such a form
of interrogativism which arose in post-war existentialism and often increased
up to a cult of question, Adorno rightly argues: "Radical questioning becomes
for itself the substantial at the cost of any answer; venture without risk". 6
10 BERNHARD W ALDENFELS

This dilemma can be solved only if questioning maintains a reference to

the other, i.e. to something different from itself, and if questionability itself
remains something in difference to something else. The common counterpart
to the question seems to be the answer or the response. Now, according to
Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Searle and many others, we might claim
that every question puts something in question, something which is presup-
posed, not as being there before or after questioning takes place, but as being
inherent to questioning itself. If somebody asks "Who began the war?" he
presupposes that a war took place, initiated by somebody. So we presuppose
answers given to questions which were posed in earlier times or which have
never been posed explicitly. The well-known distinction between what is put
in question (Befragtes), what is questioned (Gefragtes), and what the question
is about (Eifragtes) excludes the possibility that questions presuppose nothing
but themselves. Pure questions would be questions where what is questioned
coincides with what the question is about - and that means that, properly
speaking, nothing is called in question.
As has been shown, Merleau-Ponty, too, rejects the claim that there is
some question without any answer. Instead, he speaks of an "infrastructure
of being" (VI, 120; VI, 160) pervading any kind of questioning and self-
questioning. But if we conceive questioning only as related to an answer
already given or not yet given, we would get into the same trouble encoun-
tered previously. The possible answer would have already overtaken the real
question. Therefore the reference to the other ascribed to questioning must
do more than restrict the range of questionability. Now, as we have seen,
Merleau-Ponty himself suggests a kind of 'answer' philosophy strives for,
and he locates this kind of 'answer' within the sphere of "wild Being" (VI,
121; VI, 162). Why is this kind of 'answer' put in quotation marks? "Wild
Being", which includes more and other things than those realized by a certain
cultural order, is not good for filling-up gaps of knowledge. But what else
might 'answer' or, better put, 'response' mean??
The new form of response cannot be something already given before the
question arises, so that it only has to be found, it must be something which
is given (es gibt, it y a) insofar as a question arises. The "question-knowing"
"What do I know?" (Que sais-je?) proliferates in questions like "What is
there?" (Qu'y a t-il?) and "What is the there is?" (Qu'est-ce que Ie it y a?)
(VI, 129; VI, 171) Such questions are not oriented towards what is the case
or towards existing orders, responsible for what may be the case, but rather
refer to the fundamental event of "there is sense" or "there is order" as Merleau-
Ponty and Foucault often say. Such questions are themselves a kind of response,
responding to questions which disquiet them. Consequently, reference to the
other which we ascribe to interrogative thinking not only means that every
question presupposes answers which are implicitly or explicitly given, but also
that interrogative thinking responds by itself to questions it is confronted
with. This kind of response oscillates between questions which pose them-
selves and questions which we pose. Questions we ourselves raise are
 INTERROGA TIVE THINKING 11

themselves a kind of responding. The responses put in quotation marks by

Merleau-Ponty do not correspond to questions raised by us or to questions
humanity itself raises (VI, 120; VI, 161), but on the contrary, these are
responses to questions posed to us and which only arise in the process of
our responding to them.
This way out of the circle of goals and rules is suggested in Merleau-Ponty's
work in different ways. It takes part in a thought of Being which comes close
to Heidegger's Seinsdenken, but avoids transforming the place of questioning
into a pure place of Being. The "question-knowing, which by principle no
statement or 'answer' can go beyond", may be, as Merleau-Ponty suggests,
"the proper mode of our relationship with Being, as though it were the mute
or reticent interlocutor of our questions" (VI, 129; VI, 171). Questioning would
be a sort of "ontological organ" (VI, 121; VI, 162) which questions the
"antecedent being" and "its own relationship with it" (VI, 123; VI, 164), and
which reveals a Being "behind all formulated questions" (VI, 129; VI, 171).
It would be worthwhile to find out to what extent Merleau-Ponty's thinking
comes close to Heidegger's and even to Levinas' thinking, and to what extent
it remains distant from it. It should be asked how radical Merleau-Ponty's
reorientation is, and if, for example, the reversibility between interrogation and
what is interrogated doesn't still suggest a certain return, although its phases
are displaced. Thus Merleau-Ponty writes: "philosophy is a return upon itself
and upon all things but not a return to an immediate - which recedes in the
measure that philosophy wishes to approach it and fuse into it" (VI, 123; VI,
164). But instead of going further into details I want to close by mentioning
some crucial motives which are capable of changing the traditional concep-
tions of question and response deeply rooted in our traditional view of
rationality and subjectivity.
First, I mention the familiar figure of chiasme. Not only in the case of saying
and being said, seeing and being seen, but also in the case of questioning
and being questioned, the roles are exchanged. Thus Merleau-Ponty declares:
"No question goes toward Being: if only by virtue of its being as a question
it has already frequented Being, it is returning from it"s (VI, 120; VI, 161).
Therefore philosophy means "perceptual faith questioning itself about itself",
and not simply questioning from the outside (VI, 103; VI, 139). It is not a
ready-made answer which precedes our questioning, but rather questioning.
Thus we are called in question by what we experience. Questioning has already
begun by the time we pose questions.
The second motive is the grammatical mode of gerundive. Questioning,
especially philosophical questioning, tunes in to our factual vision and tries
to "correspond with what, in that vision, provides for thought" (a ce qui, en
elle nous donne 11 penser)9 (VI, 4; VI, 19). This important remark, which
reminds us of Merleau-Ponty's earlier verite afaire to be completed by a verite
11 dire,JO points to a certain interpellation-claim (Anspruch) to which we not
only respond, but have to respond. In the heart of the alternation of question
and response an ethical impulse arises. Without this, the question why
12 BERNHARD W ALDENFELS

something should be worth being questioned (jragwurdig) could not be

answered. As Merleau-Ponty stresses in the same context, questioning stands
for more than a mere maybe, peut-etre. This is highly important, because
there is no way from a pure may be to any sort of ought to be.
The third and last aspect may be called responsive. This aspect seems to
be so fundamental that it can be found in every kind of experience and conduct,
in perceiving, speaking, and communicating as well as in historical-political
action, in scientific discovery and in artistic creation. Accordingly, Merleau-
Ponty already makes use of dialogical terms in his earlier writings while
describing what is going on in these different areas. Like some Gestalt-
theorists, he alternatively speaks of 'appeal, interpellation, incitation, solici-
tation, exigence, suggestion', etc. Every behavior thus appears as responsive
behavior, including response in its original, non-behavioristic sense. With
Husserl, we can even speak of a "responding looking at and listening to" (Buss.
XV, p. 462).11 From this point of view, questioning itself is a kind of responding,
and interrogative thinking turns into responsive thinking, because questioning
is related to something other which awakens our thinking and keeps it awake
by the demands it places on us. If we are right in claiming with Merleau-Ponty,
Bakhtin, and others that there is neither a first nor a last word, we should
also assume that there is no first question and no last answer: we are always
in between.

NOTES

1. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. by A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968), p. 103, 121; French original: Le Visible et I'invisible (Paris:
Gallimard, 1964), p. 140, 161. Page numbers following quotations refer to these two works,
hereafter cited VI (English) and VI (French).
2. See The Visible and the Invisible, p. 166. Fr. 61, 70f., 129, 294 and my article "Das
Zerspringen des Seins" in: A. M6traux and B. Waldenfels, eds., Leibhaftige Vernunft
(Miinchen: W. Fink, 1986), pp. 144-161.
3. See Le temps vecu (Neuch1itel 2, 1968), p. 257.
4. See the explication of pathological disturbances of orientation in Phenomenology of
Perception (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), p. 112, Fr. original: p. 130.
5. In this sense one simply cannot put the difference "touching-touched" into the context of
a logo-centric kind of self-affection as a 'certain grammatology' suggests. See De la gram-
matologie (Paris: Ed. de Minuit), p. 237.
6. Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: M. Suhrkamp, 1965), p. 17.
7. As to the difference between 'answer' and 'response', we may distinguish between the answer
I give and the act or event of response. We can respond simply by giving an answer, but
also by giving no answer or by posing a counter question.
8. Not: "returning to it" as the English translator writes; see in French: "eUe en revient".
9. See the German expression: "Etwas gibt zu denken".
10. See my article "V6rit611 faire. Merleau-Ponty's Question Concerning Truth" in: Philosophy
Today (Summer 1991), pp. 185-194.
11. Concerning the idea of responsiveness, see my hints in: Ordnung im Zwielicht (Frankfurt:
M. Suhrkamp, 1987), p. 4lff., 210ff.; a detailed elaboration of this idea is in preparation.
 BURKHARD LIEBSCH

Archeological Questioning:
Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur

Before addressing the idea of archeology in the phenomenological perspec-

tive of Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, which will be the main concern of my
essay, let me first briefly delineate how archeological questioning has gained
philosophical significance at all. In the second part of my contribution, I'll
distinguish, at least in a cursory fashion, main directions of archeological
thinking in phenomenology. In the third and last part of my considerations, I
will focus on one of these directions, namely the one which grew out of an
intermingling of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. I will bracket the more
fundamental question of whether phenomenology itself must be conceptual-
ized as a sort of archeology.
By entering my topic via recourse to some aspects of archeology, under-
stood as a sub-discipline of the more general project called natural history, I
can present here, to be sure, only a superficial sketch. I will indicate, however,
at least in outline, some basic problems which reappear in phenomenolog-
ical thinking, especially insofar as phenomenological thinking links itself to
a psychoanalytic discourse in the footsteps of 19th-century-ideas of natural
history.
In his Anthropology and in his Critique of Judgment, Kant, anticipating
Darwinian thought, wrote about the tasks of an "archeologist of nature", con-
cerned not with the historia of natural things but rather with the real history
of nature itself.! Further development of this line of thought led to what the
historians of ideas, since Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being, have called a
"temporalization" of nature, which finally excluded the then current belief
in the constancy of species. 2 Still believing in such a constancy, Buffon declared
in his famous Histoire naturelle, that historians of nature should meet the
challenge of a patient, time-consuming exploration of the "archives of the
world". In spite of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, and direct divine
interventions into the course of the earth's history, Buffon believed this
exploration would be able to uncover a regular series of developments in nature
up to the present time. He expected it to be possible "to pierce the night of
P. Burke and 1. Van der Veken (eds.), Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, 13-24.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
14 BURKHARD LIEBSCH

past time - to recognize by a study of existing objects the former existence

of those which have been destroyed, and work our way back to this historic
truth of buried facts by the force of existing facts alone ... ". 3 Therefore, a
regressive reading of the "books of nature" would be able to reveal the
originally inverse, that is progressive, way of things up to their actual
condition. This regressive reading is possible because the diachronic natural
history of things has to blend itself into material, synchronic relations,
uncovered by a neighboring discipline of archeology which is nowadays known
as "stratigraphy". Leaving aside how archeology has attained special anthro-
pological significance through excavations of prehistoric men and life, I shall
focus in the following on some formal aspects of the transfer of the idea of
geological layers into psycho-genetic considerations.
In the history of science, Haeckel's famous, later refuted, recapitulation-
thesis was one of the main catalysts of this transfer. This thesis maintains
that especially the embryogenesis, but also the ontogenesis, of the soul is to
be interpreted as an abbreviated "cenogenetic" recapitulation of the natural
history of the genus. {"Cenogenetic" means that this recapitulation may also
include intrusions of heterogenous factors deforming the sequential isomor-
phism of ontogenesis and phylogenesis.)4
Of decisive importance here is the idea that what the earth is for
archeology and geology, the child must be for the natural history of the soul,
experience, and thought. American Darwinists like St. Hall and Romanes
accordingly regarded the child as a "living fossil" or as a "missing link"
between the actual psychic condition of man and his natural prehistory.s Both
linked this idea with a refutation of a genetic logic of what Hegel has called
"subjective spirit". The natural history of the soul, they argued, is no longer
to be regarded as the "realization" of a teleologically predestined potential
(as Hegel would have it), but as a contingent product of an evolutionary
process. Dialectics of a Hegelian type, they claimed, is "in no real sense
genetic"; "absolute precedence" of a psycho-genetic approach to the natural
history of experience is demanded over any metaphysical approach. 6
Thus, what Hall claims is an "archeology of mind" must be established
as an empirical discipline corresponding to the methodological standards of
the sciences of a temporalized nature.
Serious doubts, however, soon emerged concerning the orderliness of
ontogenesis as an archive. The almost forgotten genetic epistemologist, James
Mark Baldwin, for example, compared the task of exploring the prehistory
of experience with the situation of the hermeneutic interpretation of ancient
texts: ontogenesis, especially in its embryogenetic phases, says Baldwin,
resembles a history of which whole chapters have been lost; many pages
seem to have been misplaced, some of them are even unreadable because of
decay. Even worse, secondary alterations of the original text may have led
to forgeries which we today are unable to detect. 7
The possibility of discovering the archeological prehistory of human
experience through a "regressive" reading of sequential ontogenetic orders
 ARCHEOLOGICAL QUESTIONING 15

is severely hindered, first of all, by the fact that the ontogenesis presents
itself in synchronic perspectives like a palimpsest. Secondly, from an
evolutionary perspective, the archeologically accessible "depth" dimension
of ontogenesis does not present itself as a necessary equivalent and
teleological realization of its past. At its best, the regressive reading of the
archive of the mind reveals only one line of an evolutionary range of
development, which is basically infected with contingency, that is, with the
possibility of divergent developmental paths. 8
Any archeological approach to the (pre-) history of experience which utilizes
an evolutionary perspective will be confronted with possibilities of past futures
which, now being closed, have to be imaginatively re-opened in order to get
a view of the selective and exclusive dynamics through which the present
transgresses and fails to realize potentialities of its now past futures.
Here the applicability of the natural historian's old idea becomes ques-
tionable. That is, the belief that present natural archives are a kind of
synchronic equivalent to a prehistory which, deprived of its chronological
dimension, transforms itself into layers, can no longer be held valid in this
simple form.
Additionally, Baldwin's considerations regarding the development of
experience force us to doubt whether an archeological model that presup-
poses a linear concept of time will be seriously misleading in fields of
application where we have to think in terms of the presentness of the past or
of the dimensions of past future. This difficulty obviously turns up in Freud's
frequent allusions to archeological thinking. Freud accepts, first of all, the
Rousseauian premise that the prehistory of culture is to be interpreted as the
infancy of mankind. He asserts, secondly, that the infancy of the individual
may be thought of as his prehistoric phase. Thirdly, he claims that this phase
represents our phylogenetic heritage, so that the notion of prehistory gains a
two-fold meaning, referring at the same time to individual and collective
archaic stages. With a Lamarckian undertone, Freud, referring to the recapit-
ulation-thesis, maintains that the psychic material revealed in regressive
phenomena gives the psychoanalyst direct access to both of these forms of
history.9 Even if we refuse to accept such a schematic and, in its elabora-
tion, highly speculative connection between the individual's prehistory and his
collective heritage, the archeological problem remains.
In 1896 Freud compares the task of establishing an etiology of hysteria with
the work of an archeologist who, in digging under his feet, discovers relics
which may even "interpret themselves" by indicating the former cultural
significance of sacred places. Whereas for the layman the rocks would appear
to be accidentally distributed, for the informed archeologist it is, on the
contrary, as if the stones speak. 10
Something similar to what Freud seemed to have in mind may be true of
a clinician who understands the language of remembrances, which, at least
in cases of hysteria, symbolize instances of traumatic determinations of the
patients' sickness. Some pages later, however, Freud restricts the applica-
16 BURKHARD LIEBSCH

bility of the archeological comparison. In contrast to the archeologist, the

psychoanalyst does not deal with dead material, but with "traces", symbols,
remembrances, etc., which are themselves "alive" - and are possibly all the
more (unconsciously) alive, the more repression spreads the veil of amnesia
over things which should better be remembered. 11
What is to be remembered may also be active insofar as it steadily tries
to build up associative chains, patchwork-like criss-crossing of multiple
connections. Freud compares this with the genealogy of a family whose
members are married to each other. The picture becomes more complicated
if we take into account the fact that elements of associative chains may
change their place and turn up on different masks ... Here, Freud says, we
are in any case far away from a simple reconstruction of inverted chronological
sequences (which, in his opinion, would justify the comparison with archeo-
logical digging in a field of ruins).12

II

I admit that all that has been said so far does not seem to have direct
relevance for the phenomenological significance of archeological thinking -
at least if one accepts the premise that phenomenology is not to be confused
with any natural-historic approach to experience. It may suffice to point to
Husserl's well-known critique of psychological naturalism in order to indicate
the sort of considerations coming (among others) into play here. Nevertheless,
there was a strong affinity between phenomenology and an archeological
type of thinking.
Fink, in his essay "Das Problem der Phanomenologie Edmund Husserls",
which appeared 1939 in the Revue Internationale de Philosophie, tells us
that Husserl "always regretted" that archeology, a label so akin to the essen-
tial tasks of philosophy, was already the title of a positive science. 13 Fink insists
at the same time that even an archeological, genetic phenomenology, in
un-covering hidden origins of experience, in referring to a transcendental
ego, must be something completely different from an archeological genetic
psychology. This holds true even if it may be claimed that an archeology of
consciousness, concerned with the "transcendental history" of experience, must
mirror in itself genetic structures which may be empirically verified. 14 (I am
referring to a proposal by Landgrebe.)
What Husserl himself, in a late manuscript,15 calls a phenomenological
archeology refers, at best, to a formal analogy, if not to a merely meta-
phorical relation, to archeological thinking in the positive sciences. The formal
analogy concerns a regressive type of understanding starting out from already
given complexities, a questioning "backwards", which finally should reach
original structures which could then inversely render intelligible a progres-
sive genesis, i.e. the way of building up the material the archeologists's analysis
started out from.
 ARCHEOLOGICAL QUESTIONING 17

Two essential premises are involved here. The first is that, in Husserl's view,
archeological questioning necessarily takes a "zig-zag" form. Insofar as the
origins must be searched for "backwards", we must connect the origins and
our later starting point in terms of an inversely directed Sinnesentwicklung
in order to be able to grasp the intelligibility of their inherent relatedness.
We know that the motive of such a zig-zag-movement reappears in Hussed's
remarks on the problems of a phenomenology of history, which is, however,
not at issue here. 16
The second premise that comes in here maintains that although we do not
have direct, but only later, access to these structures (Husserl calls them
Archai), this will not invalidate the claim that the constitutive origins (of
experience) are to be uncovered by way of a regressive cleansing of them from
what Hussed calls secondary sedimentations of sense. 17
Medeau-Ponty (who probably read Hussed's manuscript during his studies
in Louvain in 1939) did not only cast his aspersions here. IS In his essay "The
Philosopher and His Shadow", for example, he articulated the suspicion that
archeological questioning could eventually even invalidate well-proven
phenomenological tools, such as 'noema', 'noesis' and 'intentionality' .19 How
can we be sure, he asked, that an archeological phenomenology will not
undermine the seemingly self-evident presupposition that the "original"
structures of experience will present themselves in terms of modalities of being
present to consciousness? How can we be sure, he asked, moreover, that they
will not open up dimensions of "irrevocable absences" intruding even into
the seeming self-givenness of things and that these absences belong, thus,
themselves to the original dimension of our experience?20
This dimension is an object of archeological questioning insofar as the
phenomenologist tries to uncover the whole spectrum of presuppositions
inherent in our experience of things (insofar as they are experienced ...).
Gurwitsch's, Merleau-Ponty's and Ricoeur's analyses of perceptive perspec-
tivity, however, demonstrate that such presuppositions indirectly seem to
refer to something presumed by our experience. 21 Indeed, the paradigmatic case
is our perception of things with respect to their spatiality. Our perception seems
to "presume" the identity of the thing we are looking at, through partial
perspectives which can never grasp all sides of the object at once. In passing,
I wish to draw attention here to the fact that Ricoeur dissociated himself
from the Phenomenology of Perception because he found that the problem
of presuming the identity of perceived objects, which, in his view, must be
counter-balanced by the archeological search for presuppositions, was not taken
seriously enough therein. 22
Merleau-Ponty's reference to the idea of archeology which appears in his
preface to Hesnard's book on psychoanalysis must, in my opinion, be clearly
distinguished from this phenomenological-archeological problem. 23 In this
preface, Medeau-Ponty refers to psychoanalysis as implying an archeolog-
ical conception of the individual's prehistory of conflicts which, in their un-
conscious, bodily dynamics, seem to bring us outside ourselves to existence. 24
18 BURKHARD LIEBSCH

Ricoeur linked the connection he sought between phenomenology and

psychoanalysis to this idea. The unconscious, as the depth-dimension of our
existence, has to be thought of in terms of the ontic model of the body, he
asserts in accordance with Merleau-Ponty.2S And, he adds, it is this dimen-
sion that forces the cogito to acknowledge its essential weakness: that its
apodicticity cannot guarantee its adequacy, i.e. that in order to get a true
consciousness of its history, it must take the intermediate step of going through
the consciousness of another human being who must help it to advance an
appropriation of its hi story. 26 It is this conception of a possible appropriation
of one's history that marks an important germ of divergence between Merleau-
Ponty and Ricoeur.

III

Archeological searching for a hidden sense of his history. says Ricoeur. makes
sense only for a subject already directed towards a telos; that is, directed
towards the (re-) appropriation of himself. If I feel attracted to stages or
modalities of experience of my prehistory. it is. on the other hand, because
my history has the form of a filiation of Gestalten of experience, whereby each
later one realizes the truth of the earlier one and, nevertheless. the earlier
Gestalten promise to cover the still accessible origins of my becoming.27
Ricoeur is cautious enough not to blend eclectically Freud and Hegel into
each other here. Nevertheless, he clearly wants to maintain a structural
homology between a regressive, archeological type of thinking, which should
ideally lead to an adequate consciousness of one's history, and the Hegelian
idea of a filiation of structures of the spirit, which preserve the stages he
has behind him in his present depth. 28
Frequently, especially in his Sorbonne-Iectures, Merleau-Ponty refers
directly or indirectly to this idea. linking it partly to the genetic thinking of
the Berlin branch of Gestalt psychology and partly to the Bergsonian
conception of a mouvement retrograde du vrai. 29 According to Ricoeur's
perspective, this conception is to be interpreted in a Hegelian manner. 30 That
is, the truths of an inferior stage or phase of experience become explicit only
by being mediated through the retrograde light of a superior one, so that the
genetic sense to be uncovered by an archeology proceeds backwardsY Thereby,
however, a teleology is implicitly presupposed which seems to allow us to
maintain an "appropriative" consciousness as both the starting point of
archeological, regressive questioning and as the ideally adequate terminus
ad quem of the progressive movement of the Gestalten of experience. The
hermeneutic detour, to which an injured cogito in its perceived inadequacy
is compelled, presupposes an archeology as an inverse reading of a progres-
sive teleology, thereby further legitimating and eventually even strengthening
the Hegelian idea of an appropriation of the stages of experience, which
spirit finds in its past, in its "historical depth". I will leave the question open
 ARCHEOLOGICAL QUESTIONING 19

here of whether or not this telos is severely restricted through what Ricoeur
calls a decentering of the subject through its existence as desire.32
Referring to Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur speaks here of a certain pre-tempo-
rality of the ontic level of existence in relation to the reflexive efforts aiming
at re-appropriation. 33
All this only seems to indicate a close relation between Ricoeur's great study
of interpretation and Merleau-Ponty. Nevertheless, I will locate a point of
divergence here which at first sight is only minor and subtle, but which will
prove to be far-reaching in its possible consequences.
I'll close the presentation of my considerations with some further thoughts
concerning the relevance of this point, which will bring us back to what I
said at the outset about archeology and natural history.
In the development of his reflections on the possible, the real and the
necessary, Bergson was lead to the conception of a mouvement retrograde
du vrai, which is built into Ricoeur's archeological-teleological model of
hermeneutics. 34 Merleau-Ponty, who several years earlier assimilated this notion
to the Hegelian idea of a present depth of experience as the sediment or
archeological equivalent to the historical past, warns us on this basis, however,
not to explicate the genetic sense of anterior stages of experience (retrospec-
tively brought to light by later ones) as the necessary or teleologically
determined product of these later ones.
The 'retrospective', through which the truth of the past finds its explica-
tion, is in itself contingent. It finds behind itself a past future of possible
developments which found only a highly selective realization in their real future
founding the now present perspective on the past. Retrospectively, says Hannah
Arendt, we may often not be able to distinguish what has become real and
verified, from what could have become SO.35 We must re-open, by way of
the imagination, fields of possibilities that are covered by the suggestive reality
of what has become a seemingly fixed, unchangeable history, if we want to
avoid the illusion of thinking of our regressive perspective as only the inverse
reading of the past historical process. We run into an illusion here insofar as
we get seduced into presupposing that hardly more than a difference in
direction distinguishes the progressive course of history and the regressive
perspective.
If the regressive perspective comes to re-open past possibilities of genetic
divergence and dissipation, it must also come to recognize its own contingency
as the product of a selective and exclusive historical process, which always
must leave possible futures behind. Here we come close to evolutionary
thinking in natural history - even if we keep in mind what distinguishes the
natural "course of things" from structures of human history.
We generally miss the point of human history, Merleau-Ponty says, if we
regard it as only the realization of something already being possible - instead
of being attentive to restructurations of a field of praxis through which
something is made possible. 36 According to this perspective, any attempt to
interpret a retrospectively delineated history as the regressive reading of a
20 BURKHARD LIEBSCH

progressive teleology will lead to misunderstandings, insofar as the spectrum

of possibilities of past futures is implicitly neglected. If we must acknow-
ledge that our retrospective re-opening of past ranges of genetic possibilities
might reveal possible divergences of direction even of the whole historical
process which now forms the depth of our life, then we come to consider, in
accord with Merleau-Ponty, archeological questioning as necessarily casting
into doubt the conception of teleology as the inverse counterpart of archeology.
We come to introduce an element of genetic pluralism into the past, which
an in-itself contingent mouvement retrograde du vrai may be able to explicate.
Leaving aside the question whether or not it is therefore sufficient to talk about
teleologies in the plural, I would like to finish my short tour de force through
some problems of "archeological questioning" by emphasizing a somewhat
paradoxical implication of my considerations.
If a mouvement retrograde du vrai brings to light the sense of the filia-
tion of the Gestalten of experience, it can do this in a legitimate way only if
it leads us to acknowledge that the truth of this sense, seen in the light of its
past futures, can no longer present itself as the truth of our history. On the
contrary: in light of retrospective imagination, the mouvement retrograde du
vrai must be subordinated to a true recognition of our temporality. This
temporality seems to contradict the idea that archeology, in searching back-
wards for the other sides of ourselves, will be able to confirm the truth of
the (always provisional) final Gestalt of our experience with only one
teleological sense of our becoming.
This problem is, however, not at all alien to Ricoeur. In Time and Narrative
he directs serious doubts against a substantialistic notion of identity in the name
of a true recognition of our temporality.37 Against the standpoint of Mink,
who maintains that regressive perspectives cannot take into account the
contingency of past futures, Ricoeur tries, in accordance with Aron, Jauss et
at., to show how we can and even must imaginatively re-open ranges of past
contingencies in order to avoid confusing our knowledge about the now real
future of past futures with former time-perspectives in which this knowledge
was not available. 38 Ricoeur even goes so far as to claim that, in de-reifying
the factual course of things, we might be confronted with a magma of "wild
contingency" which denies ends, beginnings, and other constituents of a
temporal order that found narrative time.
On the other hand, Ricoeur strictly denies that this sort of contingency
represents the ultimate truth of our temporality. On the contrary, he speaks
of an only "supposed" contingency and incoherence of our lives 39 and
maintains, against the nouveau roman and semiotic criticism of narrative,
that, in communicating our histories in terms of narrative order, we legitimately
seek a "triumph of consonance and coherence" - despite the fact that wild
contingency everywhere seems to undermine our identities and reduce them
to purely fictional entities. 40
Against the latter perspective, Ricoeur tries to prove that narrative order
is not just an all too human way of dealing with a chasm of temporality
 ARCHEOLOGICAL QUESTIONING 21

which in truth indicates to us that death has decided our fate as temporal
beings in advance. It is, rather, what allows us to maintain a history beyond
pure temporality which threatens us with the loss of the continuity of
our existence; and which threatens to disperse it in a thousand scattered
events.
The necessarily retrospective form of the efforts that strive for the
continuity of our existence leads, however, to the question of whether the
"self" which, after archeological detours, may be remembered is simply
an "uncovered" one, so far only undiscovered, or whether thinking of a
"discovery" here only indicates illusionary effects of a mouvement retro-
grade du vrai. Ricoeur seems to adhere to the first interpretation in declaring
that for him
Ulysses is [...J the prototype of man, not only modern man, but the man
of the future as well, because he represents the type ofthe 'trapped' voyager.
His voyage was a voyage toward the center [...J which is to say, towards
himself. He was a fine navigator, but destiny - spoken here in terms of trials
of initiation which he had to overcome - forced him to postpone indefi-
nitely his return to hearth and home [... J. We will be a little like Ulysses,
for in searching, in hoping to arrive, and finally, without doubt, in finding
once again the homeland, the hearth, we re-discover ourselves." One may
thus, paradoxically, become a new being in re-discovering oneself, so that
in the end of the story "the hero is what he was". This highest form of
"repetition", says Ricoeur, reflected in narrative order, "is the equivalent
of what Heidegger called fate [...J i.e. the complete retrieval in resolute-
ness .of the inherited potentialities in which Dasein is thrown by birth.41
Merleau-Ponty, in his Phenomenology of Perception, seems to be in
accordance with this line of thought in maintaining that it is always possible
to ascribe retrospectively to one's past, despite its all too often accidental
seeming fa~ade, a final sense in terms of comprehending it in its function to
prepare our realized future, thus founding our historyY However, on this
side of the grave I can never take over the final perspective on my life. Any
seemingly final truth of a reappropriated existence is condemned to remain
provisional until our last moment, being open even for occasions necessi-
tating drastic revisions of our self-reflections.
My hold on the past and the future is precarious, and my possession of
my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand
it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment,
bounded to the horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn further
developments in order to be understood. 43
Perhaps even more important is that Merleau-Ponty insists that what has
retrospectively been verified as making sense of our history is not to be inverted
into a progressively self-determining truth, achieving explication itself by
22 BURKHARD LIEBSCH

way of our history. For Merleau-Ponty, this results in a rationalization, taking

the form of a retrospective fallacy which converts the mouvement retrograde
du vrai into a progressive teleology.
The danger of committing such a fallacy seems, in the last instance, to be
rooted in Ricoeur's ambiguous use of the notion of teleology. On the one hand,
Ricoeur presupposes that an archeological search for a hidden history of
oneself, in "proceeding backwards", is itself teleologically oriented through
what he calls our "striving for existence". On the other hand, Ricoeur seems
to conceptualize the way back into the darkness of this history as the
prolongation of a constitutive teleological dynamics, which is inherent in the
life-history of each individual. What Ricoeur, with Heidegger, calls "repeti-
tion", then, represents the realization of a final fusion of a regressive
(archeological) teleology with the progressive teleology of the latter type.
However, the telos of the "archeological interest" by no means implies a
constitutive teleology of the eventually uncovered historical processes of my
life, which have led to my present retrospective - even if this perspective
may suggest that it is merely the end product of a secret finality which was
in fact already at work in its past and which allows me to speak of my history
as a fate. The contingency of past futures is in danger of being thereby rendered
insignificant - despite Ricoeur's explicit attention to the open possibilities
of past futures - whereas the factual course of my life absorbs the truth of
the avenement of the sense of my life. Here a mouvement retrograde du vrai,
which may verify this sense, tends to convert itself into a mechanism of
historical consciousness which can explain how our histories rest on retro-
spective fallacies. 44

NOTES

1. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, §§80, 82; Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, Zweiter
Teil (E). On Kant's role as a contributor to evolutionary thinking, see R. Low, Philosophie
des Lebendigen (Frankfurt 1980), p. 190; E.-M. Engels, Erkenntnis als Anpassung (Frankfurt
1989), pp. 461-2; W. Lepenies, Das Ende der Naturgeschichte (Frankfurt 1978), pp. 38-40;
A. Seifert, Cognitio Historica (Berlin 1976), p. 191.
2. Cf. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain oj Being (Boston 1933); B. Glass, O. Temkin & W.
L. Strauss (eds.), Forerunners of Darwin 1745-1859 (Baltimore 1959).
3. Cited in S. Toulmin and J. Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (London 1967), p. 145.
4. Cf. E. Haeckel, Die Weltrlitsel (Stuttgart 1984), p. Ill.
5. Cf. D. Ross, Stanley Hall (Chicago, London 1972); A. Vergote, "La psychoanalyse, limite
interne de la philosophie", in Savoir, jaire, esperer: les limites de la raison. T.2 (Bruxelles
1976), pp. 479-504 (cf. p. 496); P. Ricoeur, Die Interpretation (Frankfurt 1974), p. 357.
6. See D. Ross, Stanley Hall.
7. J. M. Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Race (New York 1895), p. 28.
8. This follows from Baldwin's theory of "genetic modes", which he developed in accor-
dance with an ontogenetic application of evolutionary thinking. Here, however, it is not
possible to explain at length the outlines of this theory; cf. J. M. Baldwin, "The Origin of
a 'Thing' and its Nature", Psychological Review (1895), pp. 551-573; Development and
Evolution (New York 1902).
 ARCHEOLOGICAL QUESTIONING 23

9. Cf. A. Vergote (see ann. 5), p. 496; S. Bemfeld & S. Cassirer-Bernfeld, Bausteine der Freud-
Biographik (Frankfurt 1988), p. 237; S. Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einfiihrung in die
Psychoanalyse (Frankfurt 1969), p. 204; Zwang, Paranoia und Perversion (Frankfurt 1973),
p.203.
10. S. Freud, Hysterie und Angst (Frankfurt 1971), p. 54.
11. Ibid., pp. 59-60; cf. A. Griinbaum, Die Grundlagen der Psychoanalyse (Stuttgart 1988),
p.437.
12. Freud, Hysterie und Angst, p. 60.
13. E. Fink, "Das Problem der Phanomenologie Husserls", Revue Internationale de Philosophie
(1939), p. 246.
14. Ibid., pp. 242, 245, 252; cf. L. Landgrebe, "Lebenswelt und Geschichtlichkeit des
menschlichen Daseins", in B. Waldenfels, J. M. Broekrnan and A. Pa:tanin (eds.),
Phiinomenologie und Marxismus (Frankfurt 1977), Bd. 2, pp. 53-55.
15. "Phanomenologische Archaologie, das Aufgraben der in ihren Baugliedem verborgenen
konstitutiven Bauten, der Bauten apperzeptiver Sinnesleistungen, die uns fertig vorliegen als
Erfahrungswelt. Das Zuriickfragen und dann BloBlegen der Seinssinn schaffenden Einzellei-
stungen bis zu den letzten, den 'Archai', urn von diesen aufwlirts im Geist entstehen zu lassen
die selbstverstandliche Einheit der so vielfach fundierten Seinsgeltungen [ ... ] Wie bei
der gewohnlichen Archaologie: Rekonstruktion, Verstehen im 'Zick-Zack'!" (Cited in A.
Diemer, Edmund Husserl [Meisenheim am Glan 1965 2], p. 11.) Husserl's still unedited
manuscript "Phanomenologische Archaologie" bears the number C 16 VI (Husserl-Archives,
Leuven); Merleau-Ponty refers to the notion of archeology in his Eloge de la philosophie,
in his preface to A. Hesnard, L'ceuvre de Freud et son importance pour Ie monde moderne
(Paris 1960), pp. 5-10, and in Le philosophe et son ombre.
16. Cf. R. Bernet's preface to the German edition of J. Derrida, Husserls Weg in die Geschichte
am Leitfaden der Geometrie (Miinchen 1987), p. 16, and, in Derrida's text, p. 67; E. Husserl,
Die Krisis der europiiischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phiinomenologie
(Hamburg 1982), p. 63 (= § 9,1); P. Thevenaz, De Husserl a Merleau-Ponty (Neuchatel
1966), p. 37.
17. Cf. A. Vergote (see ann. 5), p. 501. This problem pervades especially Husserl's late genealogy
of experience; cf. Erfahrung und Urteil (Hamburg 1985), § II.
18. Cf. "Un inedit de M. Merleau-Ponty", in Revue de Mitaphysique et de Morale 67 (1962),
pp. 401-49; Vorlesungen I (Berlin, New York 1973), p. 5.
19. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le philosophe et son ombre, in Signes (Paris 1960), p. 208. cf. Das
Auge und der Geist (Hamburg 1984), p. 50.
20. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et ['invisible (Paris 1964), p. 211; cf. Das Sichtbare und das
Unsichtbare (MUnchen 1986), p. 208.
21. Cf. B. Waldenfels, "Phanomenologie unter eidetischen, transzendentalen und strukturalen
Gesichtspunkten", in M. Herzog & C. F. Graumann (eds.), Sinn und Eifahrung (Heidelberg
1991), p. 75.
22. Cf. P. Ricoeur, Finitude et culpabilite, T II, 1. L' homme faillible (Paris 1960), pp. 44-6.
cf. Die Fehlbarkeit des Menschen (Miinchen 1971), pp. 46-49. P. Ricoeur, "New
Developments in Phenomenology in France: the Phenomenology of Language", Social
Research 34, no. 1 (1967), pp. 1-39; "Philosophie et langage", in R. Klibansky (ed.),
Contemporary Philosophy in France. Philosophie contemporaine (Firenze 1969), pp.
272-295; A l'ecole de la pMnomenologie (Paris 1986), pp. 9-14.
23. Cf. annotation 15.
24. A. de Waelhens, "Refiexions sur les rapports de la phenomenologie et de la psychoanalyse",
Existence et signification (1959), pp. 191-213 (cf. p. 200). See also P. Ricoeur, Die
Interpretation, p. 391.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., pp. 468, 396.
27. Ibid., p. 350.
28. Ibid., pp. 429-504.
24 BURKHARD LIEBSCH

29. "M. Merleau-Ponty lila Sorbonne. Rtsumt de ses cours ttabli par des ttudiants et approuvt
par lui-meme". Bulletin de Psychologie, no. 236, (1964) I. XVIII, 3-6, p. 311.
30. Cf. P. Ricoeur, "Hegel aujourd'hui", Etudes thiologiques et religieuses 49 (1974), no. 3,
p. 347, Die Interpretation, pp. 475, 479.
31. Ricoeur, "Hegel aujourd'hui", p. 347; cf. Hermeneutik und Strukturalismus (MUnchen 1973),
p. 33; Le conflit des interpretations (Paris 1969), p. 25. (In the following annotations, the
italicized references refer to the original editions).
32. Ibid., pp. 1451239.
33. Ibid. Ricoeur seems thereby to imply that the unconscious forever keeps the "bodily origins
of sense" in a distance which no striving for a reappropriate existence could overcome.
34. Ricoeur, Die Interpretation, p. 475.
35. H. Arendt, Das Leben des Geistes, Bd. 2, Das Wollen (MUnchen, ZUrich 1989), p. 133.
36. Cf. M. Merleau-Ponty, Die Prosa der Welt (MUnchen 1984), pp. 69-133/66-160.
37. Ricoeur, Zeit und Erzahlung (MUnchen 1991), Bd. 3, pp. 232-412/1-2, 396-81355-9,
4371392. These doubts finally lead to the notion of ipseite as an itself temporalized struc-
ture of existence - in contrast to any substantialist notion of being a self.
38. In this context, Ricoeur claims that an "ontology of past future(s)" must be developed; cf.
Zeit und Erziihlung, Bd. I, pp. 236/222-3, 240/226, 2811263, Bd. 2, pp. 69163-4. See also
B. Groethuysen, "De quelques aspects du temps", Recherches philosophiques. T. V (1935/6),
pp. 139-195; H. R. Jauss, Zeit und Erinnerung in Marcel Prousts 'A la recherche du temps
perdu' (Frankfurt 1986), pp. 23-5.
39. Zeit und Erziihlung, Bd. 2, pp. 25126-7.
40. Ibid., p. 41140.
41. P. Ricoeur, ''The Human Experience of Time and Narrative", Research in Phenomenology
IX (1979), pp. 17-34 (cf. pp. 331-2). To this idea corresponds the conception of a "reflec-
tive philosophy", which Ricoeur borrowed from Jean Nabert (cf. Die Interpretation, pp.
58-9). Referring to Nabert, Ricoeur keeps up the ideal of reflection as carrying with it
"the desire for absolute transparence, a perfect coincidence of the self with itself [... J" It
is this ideal, however, which phenomenology and hermeneutics "continue to project onto
an ever more distant horizon [... J" On a personal level, the striving for the realization of
a "repetition", which may verify itself through archeological working-through of one's
history, seems to be the equivalent of philosophical "reflection"; cf. P. Ricoeur, "On
Interpretation", in A. Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge 1983), p.
188.
42. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phiinomenologie der Wahrnehmung (Berlin 1966), Dritter Teil,
§§14-15/pp.469-495.
43. Cited from the Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London 1962), p. 346.
44. This statement stresses a problem and is not to be understood as a final judgment about
Ricoeur's thinking about the relation of archeology and teleology.
 FRAN<;OISE DASTUR*

Merleau-Ponty and Thinking from Within

As a preamble, this title requires several explanations. First, it brings to mind,

by contrast, the title of a famous article by Michel Foucault which appeared
in 1966 in an issue of Critique] dedicated entirely to Maurice Blanchot. In
this article, Michel Foucault pointed out that one could see in Blanchot an
example par excellence of the kind of thinking that he contrasted with the
Greek notion of truth as the one which forms the basis of modern fiction
and to which he proposed giving the name of "thinking from the outside." This
type of thinking, whose origin Foucault searches for in Sade and H61derlin,
by contrasting it to a thinking from interiority in which he sees the fabric of
Western culture and of traditional philosophy, characterizes for him the
fundamental experience of our time, this age of the death of man, because it
is the age "of an outside in which the subject who speaks disappears.,,2 That
article is itself an exemplary testimony of the style of thought which domi-
nated the French philosophical scene during this era and upon which the
structuralist wave broke after Maurice Merleau-Ponty's death in 1961. The
then accepted opinion was, as Foucault underscores it, definitely going in
the direction of an "incompatibility perhaps without recourse between the
appearance of language in its being and the consciousness of self in its
identity,,,3 in other words between structures and subjectivity. It is certainly
not a question here of seeing a contra rio in Merleau-Ponty an advocate of
interiority and of subjectivity in the classic sense, but rather of demonstrating
that his entire philosophical undertaking led him to promote a kind of thought
which would no longer oppose interiority with exteriority, the subject with
the world, structures with living experience. This "thinking from within," if
indeed it can be contrasted with this thinking from without which Foucault
speaks of, is not, however, thinking of the interiority of the subject, but, on
the contrary, a thinking of the non-exteriority of the seer and of the visible,
a thinking of the being in the world of the subject. For structures are not already
existing and do not exist without us, but they are this "framework of the
visible" which is always in a state of evolution and which therefore needs

* Translated from the French by Paul B. Milan, Ph.D.

P. Burke and J. Van der Veken (eds.), Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, 25-35.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
26 FRAN~OISE DASTUR

our participation. Merleau-Ponty's thought, especially in his later period, is

a thought of the living structure for which interiority no longer refers to a
subject closed on itself, but becomes the dimension of a being who in losing
its positivity thereby ends up becoming one with the very movement of
experience.
"Truth does not 'inhabit' only 'the inner man,' or more accurately, there
is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know
himself," wrote Merleau-Ponty in his foreword to the Phenomenologie de la
perception. 4 If we are correct to see in this statement the disavowal of a
phenomenology of the constitution which makes the world an egological
problem and which finds inside the subject the key to its relationship with
the exterior,s we should not, however, consider this as a declaration in favor
of a thinking from exteriority for which infinity arrives from the outside to
a subject who remains in separation. 6 To the pure interiority or the pure
exteriority of being, Merleau-Ponty contrasts the idea of a "Being in
indivision,,,7 of promiscuity8 and of encroachment, of a wild9 and non-refined lO
Being to which the relationship is always attachment, adhesion,lI belonging,
interlacing, contact. To the infinite distance or to the absolute proximity of a
being who is pure positivity, Merleau-Ponty contrasts a being who is not closed
on itself, a Being in dehiscence in relationship to which no aerial view nor
fusion is possible,12 since the distance which separates us from being is also
what attaches us to it. 13 The relation which we maintain with such a being
cannot be subtracted, since it is not entered only on the subject's account, since
it is a part of being itself, of this being we are part of without however
becoming one with it.
Now this relationship of belongingness between the subject and the world,14
this implication of the seer in the visible,15 this fundamental homogeneity of
the sensible and the sentiene 6 can in no way be considered in the framework
of what Merleau-Ponty calls the ontology of the In Itself l7 - this naIve ontology
that Western metaphysics is, for which Being is nothing more than the sub-
limation of the entity (l'etant). 18 Hence the proposal mentioned several times
in the working notes of Le Visible et I'invisible of an "ontology from within,,,19
of an "Intra-ontology,,20 or "Endo-ontology.,,21 For what is important to under-
stand is not so much the separation between subject and object, but rather what
Merleau-Ponty calls "the segregation of the 'within' and the 'without,',,22 which
precisely is "never finished"23 but always, on the contrary, in the making.
The opposition drawn between a pure interiority and a pure exteriority, the
naive ontology which distinguishes between the For Itself and the In Itself,
cannot explain this dehiscence or transcendence which is Being itself. For this,
as Merleau-Ponty points out emphatically, "a relation to Being is needed that
would form itself within Being,"24 which implies that being should not be
thought of as pure positivity, that it should not be presented as a great object,
but that it should be seen, on the contrary, as having its own interiority as
opened or penetrated from the inside.
For it is by a kind of internal folding up, of invagination, or of internal
 THINKING FROM WITHIN 27

padding - those are Merleau-Ponty's terms 2S - that Being deepens and opens
in itself according to a differance 26 which is in no way exclusive of an identity.
For just as much as the distinctions between subject and object, between
consciousness and sub-consciousness, the distinction between nature and
culture is abstractly cut in the ontological fabric, since the movement by which
Being becomes consciousness and history has its origin in the polymorphism
of the wild and pre-objective Being.27 What is involved is a break with this
"total philosophical error" which is the belief in an objective presence,zs in
a Being which would stand before me when instead it surrounds me and even
in a sense penetrates me, since the vision I have of it is not formed from
elsewhere or from this never-never land where the Kosmotheoros is found,
but from the midst and from the heart of Being. 29 In fact, it is only for an
objectivist thought, for which all presence is already given - is Vorhandenheit,
presence before and prior to self, Heidegger would say - that we must explain
the enigma of transcendence, of this movement by which consciousness leaves
itself to move toward its other, while for a thinking which gives itself the
task of accompanying the "deflagration of Being,,,30 it is not a question of
constructing the union of the For Itself and the In Itself, nor of putting a
frontal being before us, but only of describing the structure or the articula-
tion by which Being splits indefatigably into within and without, into visible
and invisible. 31
Indeed we would be wrong to see in the Merleau-Pontian enterprise of
describing brute or wild Being the search for an ontological integrity which
might have been lost in the process of culture. For such a mythology of a
restorable origin supposes that with the latter a real fusion is possible, while
the experience of a rediscovered immediateness is by its very essence an
experience of re-covering, of an only partial coincidence, and of a neces-
sarily distant relationship to an original state which can never be presented
such as it was but which, on the contrary, "explodes" and can remain in its
immediateness only by opening the dimension of its alteration and of its future
resumption.32 Philosophy is certainly the study of Vorhabe, of prepossession,
of Being,33 but the interrogative experience which it has of this pre-
objective being can in no way possess the form of a fusion, but only that of
a "coinciding from afar" or of a gap.34 We should not consider this thinking
from within that Merleau-Ponty wants to substitute for overview thinking as
an appeal for fusion with Being, but rather just the opposite, as the only way
of preserving its transcendence, its horizontal structure. Indeed it is with the
aid of the Husserlian notion of horizon, but by taking the word in its strict
sense, that is to say by no longer giving it the meaning of a potentiality of
consciousness, but by giving this term its original meaning, that Merleau-Ponty
characterizes the type of non-positive being that we must think of as
surrounding and including within it the person to whom it opens itself.3s
Because the "in" of "in the world" does not indicate a simple objective relation
of inclusion, as Heidegger had already emphatically pointed out,36 but the
experience of a contact which stems from a relationship of embrace between
28 FRAN<;OISE DASTUR

the body and the world, between the seer and the visible. 37 And if what links
thinking to being is an umbilical cord, and if thinking is already always
circumvented by this inalienable horizon, it must then renounce the idea of
an absolute exterior,38 to the advantage of a complicity or of a close connec-
tion between the visible and the vision that thinking forms of it.
This intra-ontology is in fact an ontology of the visible and of vision and
not a conceptual knowledge or an intellectual possession of the world. As
Merleau-Ponty says in a striking formula in L'Oeil et i'esprit: "Vision is not
a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me for
being absent from myself, for being present at the fission of Being from the
inside."39 This vision at work which is in no way identical with the thought
of seeing, that is to say with this sublimated vision, extracted from the seer
and from his body, which is the Cartesian intuitus mentis, occurs in fact "among
... things - in that place where something visible undertakes to see,,,40 and
where it thus rejoins the internal thrust of the being in its own non-coincidence
with self. For wanting "only" to see is already having abandoned taking, it
is letting being be what it is, dehiscence and transcendence, and establishing
oneself not as impartial observer and overseer of the world, but working
actively for its coming, since "Being is what demands creation of us for us
to experience it. ,,41 It is thus that, as a substitute for the classical theory of
intuition taken as coincidence and fusion by which the separation between
subject and object is cancelled out, it becomes rather a question of promoting
"a theory of the philosophical view or vision as a maximum of true prox-
imity [in relation] to a Being in dehiscence" and the idea of an "intuition as
auscultation or palpation in depth.,,42 Vision is in fact contact with a visible
which remains at a distance which is however also proximity, and the gaze
which opens us to things does not deliver them to us in their native identity,
but envelops them while at the same time uncovering them. 43
For the enigma of vision is really the enigma of presence, but of the
"exploded" presence of beings which, while being different, are absolutely
together,44 it is the mystery of simultaneity,45 of the coexistence of the whole
in and through distance. Such a conception of vision leads Merleau-Ponty to
understand seeing by starting from the experience of touching and from the
reversibility in him of the touching and of the tangible, since if the gaze
"envelops, palpates, molds to the visible things,,,46 it is, as the hand which is
simultaneously felt from the inside and accessible from the outside for the other
hand and which thus is incorporated in the universe which it questions, that
the gaze is an incorporation of the seer in the visible and a search for itself
in the visible,47 in accordance with a proximity similar to the one experi-
enced in tactile palpation of which, according to Merleau-Ponty, "after all,
the palpation of the eye is a remarkable variant.,,48 Indeed, just as the
crisscrossing in my hand of the touching and of the tangible opens upon a
tangible being of which my hand is a part,49 saying that the body is seeing
is the same as saying that it is visible and that it incorporates itself in the totality
of the visible,50 because vision as well as feeling is created from the midst
 THINKING FROM WITHIN 29

of the world and from the inside of being, it emerges from the same being
on which it focuses by "this same dense reflection which makes me touch
myself touching," and because "the same in me is seer and seeing." If it is a
question here of a "dense" reflection, it is because it does not confine us to
the immanence of a disincarnated subjectivity, but because it opens, on the
contrary, the body of flesh to the universal flesh of the world. sl This
reversibility, which Merleau-Ponty discovers moreover not only in the act of
seeing and of feeling, but in every sense in that it is "eine Art der Reflexion,"
a mode of reflection,s2 is nevertheless by its nature incomplete, "always
imminent and never realized in fact,,,S3 since its realization would also
represent the loss of the world, the enclosing in an inside without an outside,
or the loss of self, the exile in an unconscious exteriority of self.
If the visual experience, as the tactile experience and the auditory experi-
ence, encounters a "disruptive motion" and an internal "gap," if the seer
never superimposes himself exactly on the visible and remains for all intents
and purposes always "delayed" in relationship to the latter, it is precisely
because there is no experience except of the metamorphosis of an inside into
an outside and of an outside into an inside. Indeed it is not a matter for
Merleau-Ponty of choosing between a philosophy which is established in the
outside of the world or of other people and a philosophy which is established
in the inside of consciousness, it is not a matter of legitimizing idealism
which sees in experience an inclusion of what is in us, nor realism which
sees in experience quite the opposite, an inclusion of us in what is,54 but
only a matter of questioning experience which is precisely "this turning round
that installs us far indeed from 'ourselves,' in others, in things. ,,55 It is because
total reversibility is never attained, since there is no reflection except in
"disruptive motion," that the identity of the seer and the seen is neither actual-
real nor spiritual-ideal, but is the structuralS6 identity of Gestalt, of a being
which can be multi-dimensional and polymorphous precisely because it is
nothing positive and because it escapes the massiveness of the objective. The
"distanced" reversibility of the seer and of the visible refers back to an
invisible de jure, and not only de facto, which stems from the impossibility
for perception to be present at its own conception and to understand itself in
its own movement. But we must see that there is a success in failure since
if perception fails to perceive its own mobility, it is because it is "a sort of
reflection by Ec-stasy"S7 which sees itself only in the movement which carries
it towards this other than self which it is too. There is certainly a Verborgenheit
in principle, an invisible of the visible, but not an absolute invisibility which
would refer to the infinity of an In Itself, which implies that the finitude of
perceptive consciousness, always delayed in relationship to its own coming,
is in reality an "operative, militant finitude," since by closing to it the access
to an In Itself which is always but an absent positive, it truly opens
consciousness to the world. 58 If there is an invisible de jure, and not only de
facto, which is not only an absent positive, in other words "an other visible
'possible' or a 'possible' visible for an other,,,59 but a true negative, it is
30 FRANC;OISE DASTUR

precisely because it is not separated from us, that "it is there without being
object," like the punctum caecum of the eye which is what allows for vision,
and because it becomes confused with "pure transcendence," that is to say with
this movement of perception which throws me outside myself towards things
and makes me always late in relationship to myself, in a differance or a gap
which is the world itself.
Therefore experience is this "singular reversal" which one of the visible
things is capable of insofar as it makes itself seer. As Merleau-Ponty under-
scores it, "he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by
it, unless he is of it.,,60 This strange adhesion of the seer to the visible 61 can
itself be clarified only by the mystery of feeling, which we must understand
as the return upon the self of the visible, as carnal adherence of the sentient
to the sensed and of the sensed to the sentient,62 as twisting and coiling of
the visible upon itself. For as Merleau-Ponty says: "for me to see it is not
enough that my look be visible for X, it is necessary that it be visible for
itself, through a sort of torsion, reversal, or specular phenomenon, which is
given from the sole fact that I was born.,,63 There is in fact a reflectivity of
flesh, which far from being contingency or chaos, is on the contrary a "texture
that returns to itself and conforms to itself,,,64 the "interiorily worked-over
mass" of a visible body which arranges in itself the visible hollow whence
the vision will come,6S so that at their articulation "a ray of generality and
of light" bursts forth. 66 This reflectivity of the flesh is in reality an eminent
reflectivity on the model of which our conceptualization of the work of the
mind as reflection is calculated. 67 There is indeed a fundamental narcissism
in any vision68 and a specularity of the flesh which "is a mirror phenomenon.,,69
We should not however see in the rehabilitation of the speculative the triumph
of the solipsism of an absolute subjectivity, because for Merleau-Ponty it
involves, on the contrary, seizing the second and more profound meaning of
narcissism which does not consist in recognizing oneself in the spectacle that
one is looking at, but quite the opposite, which consists in feeling looked at
by things, by an inversion of the look which transforms subjective activity into
ontological passivity, so that vision no longer has an identifiable author, so that
vision becomes general visibility, in other words "this anonymity innate to
Myself' that Merleau-Ponty calls flesh,70 this general thing or this elemene 1
which assures the cohesion and the homogeneity of the seer and of the visible
in the dehiscence which makes them cross over into one another.
But if for Merleau-Ponty flesh is the name of this double "dehiscence of
the seer into the visible and of the visible into the seer,,72 which constitutes
the paradox of being itself, this is in no way by metaphor and by transposi-
tion of the corporeality proper to the subject to the whole of materiality. We
must still reaffirm this with insistence, Merleau-Ponty's approach is not derived
from hylozoism,73 it is not the regional problem of corporeality which provides
the solution to the ontological problem; rather, on the contrary, it is the
"general" notion of flesh which permits the understanding of the relation-
ship between the soul and the body.74 It is not by generalizing induction that
 THINKING FROM WITHIN 31

we go from the being of the subject to the being of the world, but, on the
contrary, it is the being of the subject that appears as a variant of the
"general" being of the world. In this regard Merleau-Ponty responds with all
desirable clarity to the objection which would see in flesh only an anthro-
pological notion inappropriately projected on a world whose true being would
remain unclarified: " ... we mean that carnal being, as being from depths,
with several leaves or with several faces, a being in latency, and a presenta-
tion of a certain absence, is a prototype of Being, of which our body, the
sensible sentient, is a very remarkable variant, but whose constitutive paradox
already lies in every visible.,,75 If in fact the body is indeed an exemplar
sensible, it is because this separation between the within and the without which
thus creates a being with two dimensions, with two leaves, with two lips,
constitutes its "natal secret.,,76 This secret is the secret of the genesis of all
being, which is none other than the general movement of the segregation of
within and without.
But to say that the body is double, that it is simultaneously objective body
and phenomenal body, that it has a double belongingness, that it is derived
from the order of subject as well as from the order of object, this is not yet
seeing it from "the inside," it is still taking an aerial view of the body and
remaining blind to what it is in reality, not on the one hand entirely visible
and on the other hand entirely seeing, but on the contrary, the continual
metamorphosis of the visible into the seeing, their passage one into the other.
For the body, just like being, is inobjective, this is why it is never "funda-
mentally ... thing seen only nor seer only" but rather - and this is the
formula that best characterizes the properly ontological level of Merleau-
Pontian thought - it is "Visibility sometimes wandering and sometimes
reassembled," since "to speak of leaves or of layers is still to flatten and to
juxtapose, under the reflective gaze, what coexists in the living and upright
body.,,77 This verticality of the body comparable to the verticality of being,
which is not presented to the reflective gaze and to the intuitus mentis, and
in which is the union of these incompossibles which are passivity and activity,
this is nothing more than existence, this perpetual enterprise of taking our
bearings on the constellations of the world. 78 For to exist - Merleau-Ponty
states it clearly in regards to the Sartrean concept of existence which does
not appear to him to be thought out with sufficient radicalness - is to stand
up, to break out of the objective plane while remaining constantly threat-
ened by the weight of our objective attachments. 79 Existence thus understood
in its verticality as the verticality of a body standing tall before the world
and the existence of a world standing tall before this body, the body and the
world being united in a relationship of embrace,80 this is the paradoxical
identity (in Heideggerian terms) of Existenz and of Instiindigkeit, of ek-stase
and of in-stance,8! of the leaving of self and of the remaining in self, the
identity of the movement by which we leave ourselves and we re-enter
ourselves, this chiasm in which Merleau-Ponty sees the very effectiveness
of the mind and which is the entire object of philosophy, because "The true
32 FRANI;OISE DASTUR

=
philosophy apprehend what makes the leaving of oneself be a retiring into
oneself, and vice versa. Grasp this chiasm, this reversal. That is the mind."82
For Merleau-Ponty, thinking, like perception, takes place in things, since
thinking consists in re-situating oneself in the act of vision, and "true
philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world."83 It is in this sense
that his philosophy is a phenomenology which obeys in an exemplary way
the Husserlian injunction of the "return to the things themselves." This attitude
is, however, in no way abetting a fetishism of identity, since the thing is
never presented to thinking in the actuality of a full presence, but remains
on the contrary essentially "distant", on the horizon. For if the thing, as any
visible thing, is not stripped of a certain positivity, if it is rendered
quasi-observable by the precipitation of its Abschattungen which results from
the work of the senses, these instruments for establishing existing meanings,84
this crystallization of visibilia remains, however, always illusory, ephemeral,
subject to metamorphoses. And in the world no longer understood as a closed
totality, but as an open environment, like a field of being, it is the Etwas,
the undetermined something and no longer the Sache selbst, which is a
principle of distinction.
Therefore let us not be mistaken: thinking from "within" is par excellence
a thinking of the horizon and of the far off, a thinking of proximity as distance,
of density as a means of access and not as an obstacle, and above all a thinking
of depth, a dimension which is never accessible from "the outside." It is the
in-depth thought of a being open in its heart and pregnant with its own
expression. Such thinking from within, far from being identified with a theory
of being as interiority, is on the contrary nearest to asubjective thinking, to a
thinking of unseparated singularity and of momentary individuation. For it
wants to be thinking of "pure transcendence, without an ontic mask,,,85 in other
words a thinking of generalized encroaching and generalized promiscuity.

NOTES

1. M. Foucault, "La pensc5e du dedans", Critique no. 229, June 1966, pp. 523-546. This
atticle reappeated in a volume published by Fata Morgana in 1986.
2. Ibid., p. 525.
3. Ibid.
4. Phenominologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimatd, 1945, p. V, cited as PP. English trans-
lation by Colin Smith: Phenomenology of Perception, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1962, p. XI, cited as PhP.
5. In this respect, let us remember that the Cartesian Meditations finish with a quote from
St. Augustine which Merleau-Ponty also cites in a note on page VIXI of his foreword: "In
te redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas."
6. Obviously I am thinking of Emmanuel Levinas and in particulat of Totalite et injini (The
Hague, Nijhoff, 19611English translation by Alphonso Lingis: Totality and Infinity,
Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1969) the subtitle of which is An Essay on Exteriority.
In fact it is in the last pages of this book that being is defined as exteriority and that
Levinas affirms that "no thought could better obey being than by letting itself be domi-
nated by this exteriority" (p. 323/p. 290).
 THINKING FROM WITHIN 33

7. Le Visible et l'invisible, Gallimard, 1964, p. 271, cited as VI. English translation by Alphonso
Lingis: The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1969,
p. 208, cited as VI.
8. VI, p. 307NI, p. 253.
9. VI, p. 256NI, p. 203.
10. VI, p. 255NI, p. 202: "Hence this analysis by the reflective thought, this refinement of Being
(the wax "all naked of Descartes) by-passes the Being already there, pre-critical."
11. VI, p. 183NI, p. 139.
12. VI, pp. 168-169NI, p. 127.
13. VI, p. 178NI, p. 135.
14. VI, p. 48NI, p. 27.
IS. VI, p. 177NI, p. 134.
16. VI, p. 153NI, p. 114.
17. VI, p. 279NI, p. 226.
18. VI, p. 240NI, pp. 186-187.
19. VI, p. 290NI, p. 237.
20. VI, p. 280NI, p. 227.
21. VI, p. 279NI, p. 226.
22. VI, p. 158NI, p. 118.
23. VI, p. 290NI, p. 237.
24. VI, p. 268NI, p. 215.
25. VI, p. 199NI, p. 152.
26. If this way of writing and thinking seems to me to be necessary here, in order to empha-
size the "dynamic" nature of a difference which is never completed and always in process,
obviously this does not imply that I mean to explain Merleau-Ponty's text with the aid of
a concept borrowed from Derrida. Neither should we exclude absolutely, in spite of the
apparent dissimilarity, any possibility of a certain convergence of thought between them.
27. VI, p. 307NI, p. 253.
28. VI, p. 311NI, p. 258.
29. VI, p. 154NI, p. 114.
30. L'Oeil et I'esprit, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, p. 65, cited OE. English translation by Carleton
Dallery: "Eye and Mind" in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on
Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, Ed. J. M.
Edie, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 180, cited as EM.
31. VI, p. 290NI, p. 237.
32. VI, pp. 164-166NI, pp. 122-125.
33. VI, p. 257NI, p. 204.
34. VI, p. 166NI, p. 125.
35. VI, p. 195NI, p. 149.
36. See Sein und Zeit, Niemeyer, Tubingen, 1963, § 12, p. 54f. (Being and Time, Harper, New
York, 1962, § 12, p. 79f.), in which Heidegger points out that the "in" of "In-der-Welt-
Sein" that French translators have persisted in translating as "etre-au-monde" does not
have the meaning of a spatial inherence but constitutes an existential. In this respect
Heidegger reminds us that the German particle in is derived from the archaic verb innan
which means to inhabit. The entire analysis of In-Sein, in the strict sense of "I'etre dans"
rather than "I'etre-a" to which Merleau-Ponty explicitly refers, is therefore an analysis of
an existential "inherence" which has nothing to do with simple spatial inclusion but which,
on the contrary, presupposes this space for a possible meeting which is the world from which
only something like contact can take place.
37. VI, p. 324NI, p. 271.
38. VI, p. 144NI, p. 107.
39. DE, p. 811EM, p. 186 (my emphasis).
40. OE, p. 191EM, p. 163.
41. VI, p. 251NI, p. 197.
34 FRANC;OISE DASTUR

42. VI, p. 170NI, p. 128.

43. VI, p. 173NI, p. 13l.
44. DE, p. 841EM, p. 187.
45. DE, p. 841EM, p. 187.
46. VI, p. 175NI, p. 133.
47. VI, p. 173NI, pp. 130-131.
48. VI, p. 175NI, p. 133.
49. VI, p. 176NI, p. 133.
50. VI, p. 327NI, pp. 273-274.
51. Signes, Paris, Gallimard, 1960, p. 23, cited as S. English translation by Richard C. McCleary:
Signs, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 15-16, cited as S.
52. VI, p. 309NI, p. 256.
53. VI, p. 194NI, p. 147.
54. VI, p. 211NI, p. 159.
55. VI, p. 21mI, p. 160.
56. VI, p. 315NI, p. 26l.
57. VI, p. 308NI, p. 255.
58. VI, p. 305NI, p. 25l.
59. VI, p. 28mI, p. 229.
60. VI, pp. 177-178/VI, pp. 134-135.
6l. VI, p. 183NI, p. 138-139.
62. VI, p. 187NI, p. 142.
63. VI, pp. 20l-20mI, p. 154.
64. VI, p. 19mI, p. 146.
65. VI, p. 193NI, p. 147.
66. VI, p. 19mI, p. 146.
67. VI, p. 325NI, p. 27l.
68. VI, p. 183NI, p. 139.
69. VI, p. 309NI, p. 255.
70. VI, p. 183NI, p. 139.
71. VI, p. 184NI, p. 139.
72. VI, p. 201NI, p. 153.
73. VI, p. 304NI, p. 250.
74. VI, p. 304NI, p. 250.
75. VI, p. 179NI, p. 136 (my emphasis).
76. VI, p. 179NI, pp. 135-136.
77. VI, pp. 181-1821VI, pp. 137-138.
78. VI, p. 140NI, p. 103.
79. VI, p. 325NI, pp. 271-272.
80. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes in the passage already cited (VI, p. 325NI, pp. 271-272) that
"what I call the vertical is what Sartre calls existence," although for Sartre existence is
understood as an operation of the self, while for Merleau-Ponty "existence is not man."
For visibility itself is existence: existence is an ontological category and not simply the
mode of being of the human person. See the preface to Signes (S, p. 30/S, p. 21) in which
"verticality" is quite simply identified with the present.
81. See "I.e retour au fondement de la mitaphysique", 1949 introduction to Qu' est-ce que la
metaphysique? in Questions I, Paris, Gallimard, 1968, p. 34, in which Heidegger under-
lines emphatically that thinking thoroughly about the essence of existence leads to
understanding the ex- not only as indicating the separation in relation to the interiority of
a consciousness but as the opening of being itself in which the existing remains. Whence
the conclusion that he draws from this: "what we must conceive under the term 'exis-
tence,' when the word is used in the interior of thinking which thinks in the direction of truth
and from it, is what the word Instilndigkeit (in-stance) could indicate the best." From this
 THINKING FROM WITHIN 35

passage clearly it appears that the true thinking of "exteriority" of being is not a thinking
of separation but, quite the opposite, a thinking of being in, of existential inherence, in
other words relationship (Verhiiltnis), or in Merleau-Pontian terms, bonding, that is to say,
flesh.
82. VI, p. 252NI, p. 199.
83. PP, p. XVIIPhP, p. xx (my emphasis).
84. PP, p. VIIPhP, p. XI.
85. VI, pp. 282-283NI, p. 229.
 MARC RICHIR*

Merleau-Ponty and the Question of

Phenomenological Architectonics

1. THE ARCHITECTONIC PROBLEM OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL EIDETIC IN THE

YOUNG FINK

It is in his well-known study published in the Kantstudien in 1933, and

approved as we know by Husserl,l that Fink conceives of phenomenological
reduction in such a way that "the idea of being" must itself be "reduced" in
order to allow the concept of "transcendental being" (p. 158) to emerge. The
result, according to Fink, must be a transformation of the eidetic, as naiVe
ontologizing of the pre-givenness of the world, into transcendental eidetics.
On the difficult question of the relation between eidetic reduction and
phenomenological reduction, Fink even states very precisely: "It is a funda-
mental error to strive to comprehend the nature of the (scil. phenomenological)
reduction by starting from the still obscure eidetics or, inversely, to question
the nature of the transcendental eidos as a problem born out of the accom-
plishment of the reduction" (p. 159). For, as he specifies a little further, "the
attitude of knowledge with regard to eidetic states-of-things ... and the
philosophical understanding of the aprioristic form of the world are dogmatic"
(p. 172). This attitude is based, by "eidetic fixation of essences" (p. 171),
on natural worldly experience as athematic pre-knowledge of the essences
of the pre-givenness of the world (p. 171). At least this leads phenomenology
to question, by reduction, "in a constitutive manner, not only the experience,
transcendentally reduced, of a singular 'being' (l'erant),2 but also the
knowledge of essence which belongs essentially to man, thereby making the
aprioristic style of the world the theme of a constitutive analysis" (p. 171).
Otherwise stated, this leads phenomenology to consider the transcendental
constitution of the eidos, and to cast upon the eidetic the kind of critical look
which can free phenomenology from appearance or from the transcendental
illusion in which phenomena would finally intermingle and disappear along
with the eidetic states-of-things. Already the introduction of the Kantian
problematic of transcendental illusion should avert us to the fact that we are

* Translated from the French by Ren~ Maxime Marinoni, Ph.D.

P. Burke and J. Van der Veken (eds.), Merleau·Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, 37-50.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
38 MARC RICHIR

dealing with an architectonic problem, that is to say with a change of register

or of level induced by the phenomenological reduction.
Fortunately, since the recent publication of the VITH Cartesian Meditation
by E. Fink,3 things have become much clearer; within the framework of a
"transcendental doctrine of the method" (which we will not explicate here)
the question of the architectonics of phenomenology, as architectonics or
systematic organization of its problems,4 comes to the fore. It is, as we know,
within the framework of the close collaboration between Husserl and Fink,
both in editing the German text of the Cartesian Meditations and in the
elaborating the project of a systematic account of phenomenology, that the
VITH Meditation was born. We cannot undertake here a study of the detailed
structure of Fink's very original point of departure - which obviously did
not satisfy Husserl completely -, nevertheless let us say, in order to understand
what is going to follow, that it consists, by taking absolutely seriously the
phenomenological epoche, in considering a "phenomenologizing spectator"
who is not totally concerned ("unbeteiligt": we are reminded of the philo-
sophical consciousness in the Introduction to the Phiinomenologie by Hegel)
with what he is supposed to see, and this strictly insofar as he actively suspends
or disconnects, in a doing (Tun), any ontifying and ontologizing "thesis". It
could happen that, in this extremely loaded system, all that would be left for
this spectator would be to find the Vorhandenheit indifferent. But this is not
the case. Again this is only a transcendental appearance, as is shown for
instance, in § 9 ("phenomenologizing as ideation") by the orderly rethinking
of the problematic of the "transcendental eidetic".
First, Fink explains (VITH CM, 86-88) that in the phenomenologizing
experience which constitutes theory there is a "particular logification" which
can be characterized as "eidetic method". This raises immediately the question
of knowing if this "logification", which is in reality "ideation", is the same
for the phenomenologist and for the scientist who is attached to worldly
realities, the question therefore of searching for the possible status of the
transcendental eidetic. In the "regressive" process of phenomenology among
constitutive analyses, we can go as far as the "constitutive origin" of the
eidos in the "constitutions of invariant structures" within the "transcendental
life", that is to say as far as the "accomplishments of granting meaning"
(Sinngebungsleistungen) within the framework of transcendental constitution
of horizon. In that case, the transcendental theory of the eidetic starts with
the monstration of the process of transcendental constitution guided by worldly
essence. The object is, if we borrow Merleau-Ponty's own terms, to gage
what connects and articulates an experience with its variants, in order to
untangle the eidos which seems "incrusted" in its horizons. This corresponds
more or less to what Merleau-Ponty states himself, brilliantly, about the eidetic
in the Foreword to the Phenomenologie de la perception. 5
But Fink goes further in two pages (VITH CM, 88-90) that are remarkable
by their density and no less so by their boldness. Examining the eidetic in
regards to transcendental being, that is to say in regards to the logification
 PHENOMENOLOGICAL ARCHITECTONICS 39

of the phenomenoiogizing explication of the constitution of the world, he

emphasizes that transcendental subjectivity does not become, by being
factitious (jactice), merely an object of theory for the phenomenologizing
spectator, but manifests itself first and foremost in its possibilities of essence.
Essences are therefore related to constituting possibilities which in turn are
no longer simply, in a quasi-Leibnitzian sense, logico-ontological possibilities.
In fact it is then a matter of knowing, Fink goes on to say, whether the eidos
thus considered from the point of view of transcendental being must, by
being naiVely brought back to a "unity of ideal validity", still be "brought
into relief" (herausgehoben) from that being, this, without going as far as
the constitutive accomplishments which are located at the foundation of such
unities; or if, precisely, along with the transcendental eidos, it would not
show the difference between "the direct attitude" (Geradehin-Einstellung)
which is directed toward thematic essence, and "the reflective attitude"
(reflektive-Einstellung) which reflects the transcendental constitution of
essence, that is to say the higher transcendental constitution of the coexten-
sive sense grantings of essences. If we read coherently the text that we
paraphrased above (see VITH eM, 88), this means that the eidetic granting
of meaning is no longer immediate in the Wesensschau, but that it is connected
to constituting possibilities of transcendental life, possibilities that must not be
brought back beforehand to idealities ready-made in their thematic unity. Here,
Fink indicates quite clearly a change of register: "The phenomenologizing
spectator's eidetic is not of the same kind as the eidetic of the natural attitude,
nor does it indicate an affinity with its constitutive-transcendental explica-
tion" (VITH eM, 88). Indeed, all this comes from the fact that in the latter,
the worldly eidos. that is to say the essence which is (seiende Wesen), cannot
serve as guide, under pain of transcendental illusion, namely architectonic error.
What the phenomeno-logizing spectator is supposed to "see", as transcendental
eidos, in the life of transcendental subjectivity, is not the eidos or the eidetic
state-of-things as 'being' (see VITH eM, 88-89). The opposition or the
difference between the two is, finally, that found between, on the one hand,
eidetics as invariance of the possibilities of ontic beings (see VITH eM, 89),
that is to say, beings that are always linked to 'being' and to the finally
logical possibles of 'being', and, on the other hand, the eidetics, if it still
remains, as linked to "transcendental being", that is to say to "what, properly,
is not" (VITH eM, 89), but "has the mode of being (describable only
paradoxically) of the pre-being (Vor-Sein)." (VITH eM, 89).
Let us weigh carefully what is involved here, for it is of the utmost
importance, and Fink, moreover, takes refuge behind the impossibility of giving
fuller explanations (cf. VITH eM, 90). Indeed, this "pre-being" can always
be interpreted, even if looked at only in a cursory manner, as that of the
"pre-givenness" (Vorgegebenheit) of the world, and, qua its Vorhandenheit, the
object of a "vision". Indeed, the term "disinterested spectator" applied to the
phenomenologizing self is, to say the least, ambiguous. But it must be observed
that this "disinterestedness" comes only from the radical phenomenological
40 MARC RICHIR

epoche, which affects not only the praxis but also the theoria, and which
therefore conjointly modifies their meaning. Consequently we understand that,
when Fink tells us that the transcendental being is not, he means that it
is not a 'being'. This is sufficient to exclude it from the sphere of the
Vorhandenheit. Neither is it the being of a 'being', but the pre-being, precisely,
of possibilities, and of possibilities which precede ideality. This is why Fink
still wonders about the possible status of ideation, if indeed ideation occurs,
in the phenomenologizing activity: does ideation participate in the productivity
(underlined by Fink) of the phenomenological theorizing experience? We notice
in return that if, under the circumstances, there is a risk of transcendental
subreption or of architectonic error, it lies in the confusion of the meanings
of the theory before and after the epoche, or in the fact that there may not
be any possible theoretical phenomenological productivity other than ideation
such as it takes place in the natural attitude. If this were to be the case, the
transcendental eidetic would not make any sense, it would be forever impos-
sible, or transcendental eidetics would precisely fall into transcendental illusion.
In a certain way, such is the architectonic aporia on which Fink stumbles
in this VITH Meditation and also in the 1933 study initially quoted. Besides,
the question concerns not only ideation, but also predication and scientificity
which are, rightly, peculiar to transcendental phenomenology, and it concerns
ideation's "secondary" "worldification" (mondification) or "worldization"
(mondaneisation) (Verweltlichung), through which the "pre-being" is recon-
verted into being, in other words into the being of 'being'. In this § 9 of the
VITH Meditation, as if to better disentangle himself from the aporia - for we
are going to see that the aporia will prove intractable -, Fink comes back to
the constitution of ideation in the natural attitude. He starts by making a
distinction between the kind of non-thematic knowledge of the pre-given-
ness of beings, where the eidetic structures of 'being' and the mode of
givenness of essentialities in the act of ideation float in a non-thematic manner
(cf. VITH CM, 90-91). Therefore there is, already and always, in the natural
attitude, an implicit pre-knowledge of essences - the very same pre-
knowledge on which Merleau-Ponty will insist as early as the PhenomenoLogie
de La perception - and there is ideation, as an act that makes this pre-
knowledge thematic. Hence ideation manifests a certain "productivity",
therefore a certain intellectual "spontaneity" which, on the basis of the
anamnesis of this pre-knowledge, leads the non-thematic essence to self-
givenness (SeLbstgegebenheit) in a categorial way - since any eidetic
intuition is a categorial intuition. The "anamnesis", which has, as we see,
something active (before receiving the ready-made eidos in the Wesensschau)
is therefore, according to Fink, already directed by the eidetic pre-
knowledge: there is no eidetic creation, nor any logico-eidetic nominalism, but
so to speak abstractive reflection or reflecting abstraction of the eidos which
was supposed to secretly articulate the natural experience of real existence.
In that way, eidetics constitutes really an express thematization, in and by
categorial activity, of the worldly a priori, and consequently eidetics takes
the meaning of "analytics of the pre-givenness of the world" (VITH CM, 91-92).
 PHENOMENOLOGICAL ARCHITECTONICS 41

What is the present state of transcendental eidetics? It is in this regard,

on the last page of § 9 (VITH eM, 92-93), that the aporia apparently becomes
intractable. Fink states in a very consistent manner that "the transcendental
eidos is not an a priori" (VITH eM, 92) because it does not partake of the
Vorhandenheit of the worldly 'being' and of the worldly pre-knowledge of
its eidetic structures, or rather, quite simply, because transcendental subjec-
tivity freed by phenomenological reduction does not depend on the pre-given
(VITH eM, 92). What then of the aporia? Let us read here the entire text:
The ideation which is related to it, is not a simple anamnesis, by objecti-
vation of an already possessed knowledge, or by a simple method of access
and of appropriation, but it has, considering the (scil. transcendental)
essence, a fundamentally superior function. Productivity comes back to
the phenomenologizing spectator's theoretical experience by bringing into
play what, as 'being' ('being' transcendently), has the constitutive nature
of the pre-being, - this productivity is also peculiar to the transcendental
ideation which logifies this theoretical experience. It ontifies the pre-being's
pure possibilities in validity formations of transcendental eidetics. (VITH
eM,92-93)
The aporia is intractable since the transcendental eidetic of the pre-being
originates from ontification, by logification, of the pre-being which, as we have
seen, is not a 'being'. And we must not think that the analyses of logifica-
tion that Fink offers together with those of § 10 bring the beginning of a
resolution, since, in the end, they lead to a strong demand for a fluidifica-
tion of the language and of the concepts, by a methodical practice of the
neo-platonic coincidentia oppositorum. As if, when dealing with the
transcendental eidetic, the philosophical means of expression failed us. To
tell the truth, Husserl himself repeated this experience many times, in his
courses, in his preparations for seminar work and his Forschungsmanuskripten.
That is the aporia of "transcendental language".
As always in philosophy, when an aporia is intractable, the situation appears
hopeless. Either we admit that the transcendental eidetic, insofar as it origi-
nates from ontification, is decidedly impossible, and then, in a sense,
transcendental phenomenology itself is impossible - which is an attitude
shared, as we know, by certain schools of thought, whether they are "analytic"
in inspiration, or, at the opposite end, Heideggerian; this attitude leaves
Husserlian eidetics in its state of still "naive" practice of "the" metaphysics.
Or we admit that the transcendental eidetic is possible, which is Fink's position,
and certainly Husserl's, insofar as he shares Fink's point of view. In this
instance then the ontification by logification of the "pre-being" is supposed
to bring back, from the depths of reduction, 'being', in a sense other than
that of the natural attitude. But two cases may then arise. Either we admit
that the ontification which logifies the phenomenologizing experience of the
pre-being originates directly from the "disinterested spectator's" phenome-
nologizing productivity and catches itself flayed alive so to speak, and we
end up immediately in the transcendental illusion of an understanding
42 MARC RICHIR

simultaneously archetypal and intuitive, of an understanding which is trans-

parent to its productivity, to something like the Hegelian "absolute spirit" -
this is to some extent, at least tendentiously, the attitude of Fink who conceived
transcendental phenomenology as "meontic" -; or we return, in a critical
manner, from this transcendental illusion, by turning this transparency of the
spectator who phenomenologizes for his own productivity into a regulating
idea of transcendental phenomenology, the telos, which is situated in infinity,
beyond any possible experience: but then, precisely, transcendental phenom-
enology exists at any time only as an idea, in a silent manner for those who
understand it, and never in the effective train of thought, in what, at the very
least, can be expressed in a language and in concepts - this is also, in an
unstable way, Fink's position, and it is, it goes without saying, Husserl's
position.
Now, this situation seems hopeless only as long as we keep its terms as
such. It is enough to acknowledge that here, aporia comes from an
architectonic difficulty: if by transcendental and phenomenological epoche
and reduction we radically change from one level to another, if we effec-
tively reach this level from the field of 'being', and from the being of 'being'
to the field of non-being, and from the pre-being into its possibilities of
essences, it means that any ontification and any logification must thereby be
rejected. It means that transcendental productivity is not reduced to reproducing
and logifying from 'being', but is reduced to something entirely different which
depends neither on the eidos nor on the eidetic state-of-things in the clas-
sical sense. We cannot help thinking, here, of Heidegger, whose starting point
in Sein und Zeit is in fact different. But he is far from appearing to us, if we
think about it, as a "remedy" to the aporia stated here: if there are kindred rela-
tionships between the "pre-being" set forth by Fink and the being - the sense
of the being - which is discussed in Sein und Zeit, the Heideggerian "remedy"
is "a drastic remedy", since transcendental eidetics is swallowed up by it
inasmuch as the categorial is brutally set aside from the existential. 6 The
Dasein's possibilities are never, in Heidegger's work, possibilities of essences,
but possibilities of existence, and in addition, taking into consideration all
of these possibilities under the exclusive horizon of death leads Heideggerian
thinking to a very subtle kind of second degree "archetypal and intuitive under-
standing". In the latter, the Dasein's existentials (les existentiaux) should
disengage without any solution of continuity from the ek-statical horizontal
structure of "authentic" temporality and temporalization - according, there-
fore, to a repetition of the architectonic aporia disengaged here, even if, by
that Heideggerian stroke of genius, it is, so to speak, set off by one notch.
We know how Heidegger, in turn, stumbled during his whole life on the
question of original temporalization, not to mention his veritable "forward
flight" in the "deconstruction" of "the" supposedly unitarian metaphysics. It
is precisely there that, for one or two generations, phenomenology also
evaporated.
However if we come back to the aporia encountered by Fink, there is a
place, that of the possibility of essences of the transcendental pre-being, where
 PHENOMENOLOGICAL ARCHITECTONICS 43

something of the Heideggerian genius can prove to be very valuable: why

not consider that this possibility, enclosed later on in eidetic ideality, there-
fore so to speak proto-categorial or proto-eidetic ideality, is simultaneously,
in the same moment or in the same movement, an existential ontological
possibility in Heidegger's sense? In other words, why not consider that
"essence" - between phenomenological quotation marks -, that is to say the
Wesen, which is not a 'being' nor a state-of-ontic things, stays somehow at
the same distance from the ontic fact (the Vorhandenheit) and from the eidetic
ideality (equally vorhanden and arrived at by ideation), and is, not factual,
but itself factitious (factice) in the Heideggerian sense (faktisch). Why would
there not be facticity of the Wesen in the same sense as facticity of
existence? Why would the Husserlian "I can", "I can" of flesh, incarnated in
a Leib, a body-of-flesh, and not a pure intellectual possibility, why would it
not be an ontological "I can" of existing, and simultaneously of existing the
world (exister Ie monde) and its Wesen which would "ester" (wesen) instead
of being beings? To have shown the way of such a possibility for phenome-
nology, to have already started on that path before being interrupted by death:
such is, as we would like to show now, Merleau-Ponty's inestimable and
profoundly original contribution to phenomenology in Le Visible et
I'invisible, even though his too short life did not allow him to give it his full
measure. The course he took was so much in line with the phenomeno-
logical heritage and with its necessities that, we mention in passing, another
phenomenologist, in Prague, Jan Patocka was, at that time, elaborating
something - his "asubjective" phenomenology 7 - which echoes thoroughly the
breakthrough undertaken in Le Visible et l'invisible.

2. THE DISCOVERY OF THE WILD WESEN in Le Visible et l'invisible

It may appear extremely curious, even excessive, to some, that we would

look for one of the origins of Merleau-Ponty's thinking in Fink's VITH
Meditation. Yet the filiation is obvious if we remember that Merleau-Ponty
quotes the VITH Meditation twice in the Foreword to the Phenomenologie de
la perception (PP, I, XV-XVI; PhP, vi, xxi) - first in regards to "construc-
tive phenomenology," then in regards to the "disinterested spectator" and the
phenomenologizing institution of phenomenology by its reflective return on
itself -, and he quotes also the extensive study of 1933 (PP, VIII; PhP, xii)
concerning reduction as "wonder" before the world. Merleau-Ponty, as we
know, had read the VITH Meditation in a copy that Gaston Berger had sent him.
Also, the conception of the eidetic that Merleau-Ponty develops in the same
Foreword is very close to what Fink understood by transcendental constitu-
tion of the eidos. For instance he writes: "looking for the essence of the
world does not mean looking for what it is in idea, once we have reduced it
to a discursive theme, it means looking for what it is in fact for us before
any thematization" (PP, X; PhP, xv). Or also: "On the contrary eidetic
reduction is the resolution to make the world appear such as it is before any
44 MARC RICHIR

return to ourselves, it is the ambition to match reflection with the non-reflec-

tive life of our consciousness" (PP, X-XI; PhP, xvi). And we find the proof
that Merleau-Ponty was already foreseeing, in 1945, the resolution of the aporia
encountered by Fink in the sense that we have indicated, in the following
two texts, that we isolate in order to give a brief illustration. First: "The
necessity to go through essences does not mean that philosophy takes them
as its object, but, on the contrary, that our existence is set too tightly in the
world to be able to know itself as such when it throws itself in it, and that it
needs the field of ideality in order to know and conquer its facticity" (PP, XIV;
PhP, xiv-xv). Further on: "This facticity of the world is what creates the
Weltlichkeit der Welt, what makes the world be world, just as the facticity of
the cog ito is not an imperfection in it, but on the contrary what makes me
certain of my existence" (PP, XII; PhP, xvii). However, this rapprochement
of facticity and eidetics is still unstable and ambiguous since Merleau-Ponty
adds immediately to the last text quoted: "The eidetic method is the method
of a phenomenological positivism which bases the possible on the real" (PP,
XII; PhP, xvii). This is indeed an extremely ambiguous formula because of
the words "positivism" and "real": it is as if the eidetic had only a heuristic
role - apart from any formal or material ontology - exactly when, as exhibi-
tion of possibles for thought, it bases these possibles on a "reality" about which
we wonder whether it is composed of the reality of things or of beings, or if
it is ultimately of a different order, precisely the order of existence in its
facticity. Or, in still other terms, facticity does not seem to be completely
disengaged from the Vorhandensein of the state-of-things and of the state-
of-facts, and it does not seem to be clearly understood, in its Heideggerian
sense, as facticity of existence, as the always already there of a Dasein which,
when discovering its being-thrown, must henceforth be or truly exist by
returning to the obscure decision which makes its being and its world. We
will have to wait for Le Visible et I'invisible for the "phenomenological
positivism" to be questioned again and left behind: be that as it may, it is in
this tension which creates his working space that Merleau-Ponty, for a period
of slightly more than ten years, will elaborate his phenomenology, his thinking
as phenomenology. In any case this is what constitutes, according to us, one
of the threads in the continuity of his work and justifies our reading retro-
spectively his work, starting with Le Visible et l'invisible.
The resolution of the architectonic aporia encountered by Fink can be found,
in fact, throughout Le Visible et l'invisible, but clearly in the chapter entitled
"Interrogation et intuition," in which Merleau-Ponty takes up again in depth
the question of eidetics, of the opposition between fact and essence. He
accomplishes this resumption explicitly in the opposite direction of the VITH
Meditation - which is not quoted - since it rejects the idea of a "pure
spectator"S and rehabilitates through the notion of "perceptive faith", the
Husserlian Urdoxa. By virtue of this faith we are always already in the world,
somehow we accept readily the world since we are ourselves set in the world
without any possibility, other than imaginary, of retreating from it. This implies,
 PHENOMENOLOGICAL ARCHITECTONICS 45

as the whole work shows, extremely subtle differentiations in this "percep-

tive faith" according to whether it is a matter, for instance, of pre-language
experience ("mute" according to Husserl's expression in the Cartesian
Meditations), a matter of the praxis of the operating word, or of science
directed towards idealities. In any case this implies a fantastic and formi-
dable inchoativity of the experience of the being-in-the-world, and
Merleau-Ponty's genius shows in the way he returns to us, in an exception-
ally fluid style, all the indeterminations which run through this inchoativity.
The rehabilitation of the Urdoxa is in reality, for us, a rehabilitation of the
phenomenological indeterminity in principle (principieUe), and the discovery,
in Husserl's spirit, but undoubtedly more subtly than he, of the fact that what
is the most difficult about phenomenology is to succeed in creating in our mind,
so to speak, connecting series of indeterminities that are always only very
partially determined, and are as variable and ductile as these determinations.
Most certainly, Merleau-Ponty never lacked this "phenomenological sense" but
it reaches its acme in Le Visible et l'invisible.
This distancing from the VITH Meditation is however only apparent; for it
allows the introduction in the "impartial phenomenologizing spectator" of
the "good" difference, which precisely forewarns him of any ontifying and any
logifying and which transmutes the meaning of the "theory" which only the
excessive - and in a sense scandalous - interpretation of Plato by Heidegger9
has unilaterally reduced to the ontic vision of 'being'. The notion of a "dis-
interested" or "unconcerned", "impartial spectator" is in fact ambiguous, and
we have seen how Fink himself was a victim of this notion when he thought
that the ontification of the "pre-being" was inevitable. But on the other hand
another meaning of spectator is possible - moreover exactly as in Hegel, in
the Introduction to the Phiinomenologie - since he "phenomenologizes", prac-
tices phenomenology, or to use our own terms "phenomenalizes". This doesn't
mean, most certainly, that he might be the pure and simple actor of this phe-
nomenalizing, as master of the "process" of phenomenalization (as Hegelian
philosophical consciousness is, in a sense); but it means that he might, with
the epoche, which is a "conversion" of the way we look at things, be the
"locus" where this process happens - a critical and single "locus" from which
the infinite nuances of "perceptive faith" may be differentiated. Therefore, what
Merleau-Ponty actually takes exception to, is a spectator who, because of dread,
fear, or anguish of no longer seeing anything, ontifies the "pre-being" so as
to see something therein, namely the essence as what gives meaning to beings,
to states-of-things and states-of-facts. Such is, from the architectonic point
of view, the transcendental subreption, namely that what we personally call
phenomenalization s radical contingency, which could just as well be called
its facticity, is converted by a spectator who retreats in horror from the anguish
of no longer seeing anything ontic, by being divided between the Vorhandenheit
of the factuality of facts and the Vorhandensein of essences which are supposed
to articulate its linkings. This is a "secondary" division which depends in
fact on what Merleau-Ponty calls "ontological diplopia" and which cannot,
46 MARC RICHIR

on the other hand, be disconnected entirely because it depends on the cate-

gorial-ontic field by elaborating for itself the existential-ontic field, without
displacing thereby the diplopia of this division between facts and essences
to the division between existential facticity and regional-categorial factuality.
It is in this context that Merleau-Ponty's resolution of the aporia must be
understood. ''The possibility of essences," he writes
can surround and dominate facts well (Merleau-Ponty's emphasis), these
possibilities derive themselves from another possibility, which is more fun-
damental (our emphasis): the possibility which works my experience, opens
it to the world and to Being and which, most certainly, does not find them
on its path like facts (Merleau-Ponty's emphasis) but animates and orga-
nizes their facticity (his emphasis). When philosophy stops doubting in order
to become unveiling, explication, since it detached itself from facts and
beings (our emphasis), the field it opens is indeed made of meanings or
essences that are, however, not sufficient, that relate openly to our acts of
ideation and that are removed by them (our emphasis) from a brute being
in which one must find again, in their wild state, the respondents (our
emphasis) of our essences and of our meanings (VI, 149; VI, 110).
Consequently, the possibilities of essence - terms that are almost iden-
tical to Fink's terms - emerge directly from a possibility which is more
fundamental than the logico-eidetic possibility of ideation and the variations
based on facts. These are the very possibilities that open my experience to
the world and to Being: they are, therefore, in the Heideggerian sense, exis-
tential-ontological possibilities, possibilities that I exist the world (j'existe Ie
monde), in the transitive sense, in the world. Henceforth eidetic possibilities
are not there, present under our eyes, in terms of Vorhandenheit, they do not
depend on the play of variations on something factual, and they do not detach
themselves like positive invariants present in the Wesensschau, but they appear
themselves like factical possibilities of existing that are organized by the
possibility which opens my experience to the world and to Being. When
philosophy ceases to doubt (as if to find the basis of what, from its unshake-
able positivity, must make us stop doubting), when therefore, in fact, "by
detaching itself from facts and from beings", that is to say from the ontic level,
it practices the well understood phenomenological epoche and suspends the
capture of the Urdoxa in the 'being' rather than the Urdoxa itself. It still
discovers effectively essences and significations, and the corresponding acts
of ideation, but instead of "obstructing the view", of "saturating" the horizons,
these essences or significations "are not sufficient"; they seem to be in an
unstable situation relative to what is appearing, insofar as they show them-
selves as "removed" or abstracted by ideation from a brute and wild being,
that preceded them, and is non-coincident with them: however there exists
therein for them respondents (and not "correspondents"), in the wild state
that must be precisely found again. These "respondents", that do not belong
to the same register as our essences or significations, are, as we know, wild
 PHENOMENOLOGICAL ARCHITECTONICS 47

"essences". Or rather, if we refer to the passage of Le Visible et l'invisible,

in the same chapter where Merleau-Ponty speaks of their way of being as a
way of "ester", of Wesen in the active or verbal sense (VI, 154; VI, 115), we
prefer to name them wild Wesen. A thorough study of the chapter and of the
whole work, especially of the "Working Notes" published by Claude Lefort,
would show lO that the change of register which forces us out of the ontic
field is remarkably respected in an architectonically coherent way by Merleau-
Ponty, since the wild Wesen do not belong to 'being', do not partake of the
Vorhandensein, and even less, given their wildness, of the Zuhandensein, but
are not, however, nothing. At the frontier of presence and absence, they are
"the tie which connects secretly an experience to its variants" (VI, 155; VI,
116), for they are, to use a formula which is not specifically Merleau-Ponty's,
but which, we think, condenses well what he was looking for, incarnate
existentials. Wesen are indeed each time Wesen of flesh; here we must
understand by flesh the Leiblichkeit of the Leib, of the body-of-flesh or "lived
body", and of the world. It is in this sense also that we will be able to find
in Merleau-Ponty, and in filigree, as we have attempted to show elsewhere, 11
the concept, which seems very strange at first glance, of "existential
(existentiale) sedimentation", in a most original condensation of Husserlian
sedimentation and of Heideggerian existentiality.
Therefore if there is a "transcendental eidetic" in the sense that Fink was
aiming for, it is the "transcendental eidetic" of the wild Wesen. But we would
like to indicate now, at least briefly, that the difficulty that this "eidetic"
presents lies in the fact that it must be without concept (or meaning), because
it is, necessarily, "upstream" from concepts and ideas, from the factical
possibilities of existing. Wild Wesen cannot be reflected in an abstractive
manner, from the logico-eidetic, in the act of ideation, but they must be
reflected differently, without prior concept, that is to say in the same "esthetic"
manner, as Kant called it in the third Critique, which brings us back to an
entirely different conception of the "disinterested spectator", close to what Kant
thought with esthetic contemplation. It is this reflection, and it alone, which
can properly be called phenomenological. This does not mean that phenom-
enology must turn into esthetics - the latter is the only proper place of
phenomenology in Kant's strict architectonics -, but on the contrary, it means
that esthetics, already phenomenological in its Kantian sense, must be gen-
eralized into phenomenology, in what is required by the phenomenon as nothing
but phenomenon, namely its phenomenological reflection devoid of previous
concept. 12 Only this can preserve phenomenological thinking from the
transcendental illusion of a simultaneously intuitive and archetypal under-
standing, for phenomena, henceforth, can no longer be identified nor abstracted,
reduced to the donation in presence of the manifest, but they are "fluidified",
as nothing but phenomena, in the always enigmatic links between our essences
and our concepts and the wild Wesen that we must consider as their wild
phenomenological concretudes - and in this respect, Merleau-Ponty's fluid
style in Le Visible et l'invisible, most often misunderstood by "philosophers
48 MARC RICHIR

belonging to specific schools of thought", is a brilliant illustration of this. That

is to say, how very necessary it appears to us who come after Merleau-Ponty
that his phenomenological attempt be pursued in phenomenology by a
phenomenology of language whose lineaments Merleau-Ponty gives us with
what he conceives of as "operating speech" or "speech praxis" - where we can
uncover, we think, what we call language phenomena. 13 It is indeed
phenomenological reflection without any concept of language phenomena
which allows us, with the hiatus that it opens between this reflection and
abstractive reflection - or reflecting abstraction -, to measure the large gap
which creates what Fink calls "logification" and "ontification", and this,
without the phenomenality of language phenomena being dependent in any
way on self-donation - to believe this would mean to be once more a victim
of transcendental illusion. But if, in compliance with the most fundamental
demands of Kantian architectonics, we uphold that this hiatus or this gap is
in fact - unless we make a "dogmatic", or, if one wishes, a "metaphysical"
leap - insurmountable, if then we conceive of Wesen as being truly wild and
meanings and concepts as really ours, if we admit thus that between these
Wesen on the one hand and significations and concepts on the other hand, there
is no possibility of "derivation" and even less of "deduction", phenomenology's
most fundamental architectonic division becomes the division that must be
performed between the wild phenomenological field and the instituted symbolic
field, between language in its phenomena, and speech in its enunciations and
its statements. But this, even though it is indicated here and there by Merleau-
Ponty, goes already beyond what he had time to elaborate explicitly.

3. CONCLUSION: ARCHITECTONICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY

In the end Merleau-Ponty devoted very little thought to the symbolic institu-
tion of symbolic "systems" and "networks" which cover, as we know, the whole
field of human experience. Although he reached that point around the end
of his life - he contrasts, in notes from his 1959-1960 lectures published in
his Resume de cours, "a tacit symbolism or a symbolism of indivision" with
an "artificial or conventional symbolism,,14 - in a manner which is obviously
still very unsatisfactory, or, at the very least, heuristic, he remained an
extraordinary thinker of phenomenological inchoativity rather than the
philosopher of an architectonically complete elaboration of phenomenology
- and we would be entirely wrong to criticize him for this since he was not
granted the time to finish his work. This gives the impression when we read
him of a remanent "substruction" of his thought by "metaphysical" struc-
tures, or of a kind of quasi-ontological "immanentism" of the flesh, where
everything seems to happen "from within" and where finally even the most
apparently "artificial" would find the key to his enigma. In a sense, this is what
makes him a classic in the best sense of the term and what brings him much
closer to Husserl and to Fink than at first it seems - closer, in any case, to
 PHENOMENOLOGICAL ARCHITECTONICS 49

this phenomenological "great tradition", than to Heidegger, whose exclusive

concentration on the question of being - devastating in reality for it engulfs
everything - must have repulsed him as much as attracted him.
There is a profound reason for this classicism which makes Merleau-Ponty,
to our thinking, one of phenomenology's essential "links", at least of phe-
nomenology taken as a movement: it is that the division which, in our opinion,
must be thought between the phenomenological and the symbolic is
architectonic and by no means ontological, and this insofar as, if we borrow
Husserl's language, there is not a single Gebilde, or rather not a single
Sinngebilde (that we human beings encounter), which is not penetrated
simultaneously, exactly as it appears, by the phenomenological dimension and
the symbolic dimension. In this respect, endowed as he was with the genius
for the "unstable condition" which is present in any Sinngebilde, Merleau-
Ponty was extremely sensitive to the phenomenological dimension. But his
being constantly open to the so-called "social sciences" made him always
pay attention to the symbolic dimension, and he always took care, as compared
to Heidegger, not to turn into "truth" - even if only in the very refined sense
that we know - the symbolic which is supposed to be taken back to the abyss
of its "basis" or of its "foundation". There is no "phantasm" of the "founder"
or of the "beginning" in Merleau-Ponty. Undoubtedly, no one can imagine what
he would have done and thought if he had been allowed to live longer, but
the published work gives at least the idea of a remarkable finesse for
architectonic distinctions, even if this finesse is not reflected in a method. Most
certainly, his thought gives sometimes the impression that there is no possible
return from the phenomenological inchoativity that he has shown us better than
anyone else. that we are always. as he used to say more or less. in an "origin
which explodes". But what we mean is that "what remains" of his unfin-
ished work is undoubtedly that he has made us more sensitive, at the same
time, to the blindness of the operative, in all the fields of human experience,
sensitive to that which, whatever we may think in a living way in praxis,
appears to think in it and to work in it by itself, and to prevent us, in so
doing, from thinking by ourselves. After Merleau-Ponty, as we know the
"structuralist wave" has stressed excessively what seems to "work by itself".
After this "wave", and when we come back to him, we realize that this is
only a tendency, that symbolic "systems" tend to become autonomous, and
if this tendency were fulfilled, it would lead us to the automatism of repeti-
tion as blind "economy" of death - moreover it is useless to insist on the
extremely profound and extremely corrosive nihilism of any structuralist
"ideology". We realize today that Merleau-Ponty's work has also been a defense
of the Lebenswelt, in all its infinite complexity, against the attacks of a
Todeswelt which unceasingly invades us no less subtly. And the reflection of
his work, thirty years later. shows that we must balance the complexities of
the "life" of the "world of life" with the subtleties of the "death" of the
"world of death". For this is possible for us only by means of the architec-
tonic - that is to say non-ontological - division between the phenomenological
50 MARC RICHIR

dimension and the symbolic dimension. Moreover, in regard to this, the

"transcendental doctrine of the method" that Fink contemplated in the VITH
Meditation deserves to be re-written again, in a different way, although this
cannot be undertaken here. And it would be necessary to put at the center of
this doctrine the problem, whose difficulty Merleau-Ponty began to measure,
of the phenomenological encounter of these two dimensions, which is undoubt-
edly the problem of any human life and of any human thought.

NOTES

1. E. Fink, "La philosophie phenomenologique d'Edmund Husserl face a la critique contem-

poraine", Fr. tr. by D. Franck in E. Fink, De la phenomenofogie, Minuit, Coli. "Arguments",
Paris, 1974, pp. 95-175.
2. Translator's note: there are many neologisms in this text which are peculiar to phenome-
no logical literature in French. In order to reflect the author's style and the article's content,
I will give the anglicized version of these neologisms throughout the article.
In order to render in English the distinction between the substantivized infinitive, "l'etre",
generally translated as "being". and I' etant", which is the French equivalent used for the
German "das Seiende" which means literally "what is being", I will use respectively
'"being''' for the substantive "etant" in the singular, and "beings" for the plural.
3. E. Fink, VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil I, Die Idee einer transzendentalen
Methodenlehre, hrsg. von H. Ebeling. J. Holl und G. Van Kerckhoven, Kluwer Acad.
Publ., Husserliana Dokumente, II, 1. Dordrecht, 1988. We will quote with the acronym VITH
CM followed by the page number.
4. See the study by G. Van Kerckhoven, "Consensus, dissension, construction", and our own,
"La question d'une doctrine transcendantale de fa methode en phenomenologie", in Epokhe,
No.1, Le statut du phenomenologique, Jerome Millon, Grenoble, 1990, pp. 45-89 and pp.
91-125.
5. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologie de fa perception, Gallimard, Paris, 1945, pp. IX-XII.
We will come back to this work and quote with the acronym PP followed by the page
number. (In English: Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1962), hereafter cited as PhP.)
6. Translator's note: We retain the author's distinction between "existential" and the related
substantive "existentiaux", which refer to existence's modes of being or categories, and,
on the other hand "existentiel", which concerns existence's qualitative features.
7. See our study: "Possibilite et necessite de la phenomenofogie asubjective", in Jan Patotka,
Philosoph ie, phenomenofogie, politique, Jerome Millon, Coli. "Krisis", Grenoble, 1992,
pp. 101-120.
8. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible, text established by CI. Lefort, Gallimard, Paris,
1964, p. 147. We will quote henceforth with the acronym VI followed by the page number.
(In English: The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968), hereafter cited as VI.)
9. See D. Montet's work, Les traits de ['etre. Essai sur I 'ontologie platonicienne, Jerome Millon,
Coil. "Krisis", Grenoble, 1990.
10. See our work: Phenomenes, temps et etres, Jerome Millon, Coli. "Krisis", Grenoble, 1987.
II. See our work: "Communaute, societe et histoire chez Ie dernier Merleau-Ponty" , in Merleau-
Ponty, phenomenologie et experiences, Jerome Millon, Coil. "Krisis", Grenoble, 1992, pp.
7-25.
12. See Phenomenes, temps et etres, op. cit.
13. See our works: PMnomenologie et institution symbolique, and La crise du sens et la
pMnomenologie, Jerome Millon, Coil. "Krisis", Grenoble, 1988 and 1990.
14. Resumes de cours, College de France, 1952-1960, Gallimard, Paris, 1968, p. 180.
 PART II

Nature, the Unconscious, and Desire

 RUDOLF BERNET*

The Subject in Nature: Reflections on Merleau-Ponty's

Phenomenology of Perception

On the occasion of the commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of

HusserI's birth, Merleau-Ponty wrote:
Establishing a tradition means forgetting its origins, the aging Husserl
used to say. Precisely because we owe so much to tradition, we are in no
position to see just what belongs to it. With regard to a philosopher whose
venture has awakened so many echoes, and at such an apparent distance
from the point where he himself stood, any commemoration is also a
betrayal - whether we do him the highly superfluous homage of our
thoughts, as if we sought to gain them a wholly unmerited warrant, or
whether on the contrary, with a respect that is not lacking in distance, we
reduce him too strictly to what he himself desired and said.!
Today, as we commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Merleau-Ponty's death,
the situation is different. It is true that for many of us, it is difficult to say what
we owe to MerIeau-Ponty: he has considerably influenced our reading of
Husserl, Sartre and even our reading of Heidegger and Derrida. But it is equally
true that for many among us and for the philosophical community as a whole,
the memory of what "he himself desired and said" has faded all too quickly.
The best homage our generation can pay to this thinker, who has marked our
first steps in philosophical thought in such a decisive manner, is thus to re-
read his writings, without losing sight of our own present philosophical
interests. Can there be a better homage than to re-read Merleau-Ponty's writings
from a contemporary perspective? This effort is not only rewarded by a clearer
understanding of what we owe to Merleau-Ponty, but equally of what
phenomenology in its entirety up till its contemporary inquiries has received
and still receives from Merleau-Ponty.
Any re-reading of Merleau-Ponty inevitably invites us to a re-reading of
Busserl as well. There is no interpreter of HusserI's thought more inspired,
more careful to bring to light the most hidden tendencies of HusserI' s thought
and thereby give it an unhoped for future. Proceeding "in the shadow" of

* Translated from the French by R.P. Buckley and S. Spileers.

P. Burke and J. Van der Veken (eds.), Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, 53-68.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
54 RUDOLF BERNET

Husserl, Merleau-Ponty unmistakeably betrays his own interests: trying to

understand unity from difference, insisting particularly on the essentially
unfinished nature of every synthesis and on the subtle bonds between the visible
and the invisible. Although Merleau-Ponty never criticizes HusserI as
explicitly as Heidegger does, his reading of Husserl is nonetheless critical.
Inserting himself into the immanent movement of Husserl's thought, Merleau-
Ponty establishes nevertheless a distance, the critical outcome of which is
certainly very fruitful. To illustrate this, we mention his interest in an inten-
tionality preceeding objectifying representation, his critique of intellectualism
and philosophy of reflection and his fascination for the mystery of a logos
inscribed within the flesh of the sensible world. Perhaps, those who redis-
cover the speCUlative promises of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology
today are not attentive enough to what Merleau-Ponty said about the neces-
sarily unachieved character of every transcendental reduction. Merleau-Ponty's
cherished project of a genesis of the transcendental subject indeed calls into
question the constitutive powers of this subject and the splendour of its
isolation and self-sufficiency that cuts the subject off from its roots in the
perceptual faith of natural life. In my opinion, it is in showing how the "natural
attitude" is already tormented by interrogation and how every human life, even
in its most primitive forms, is already permeated by division, loss and
negativity, that Merleau-Ponty's thought has most renewed Husserl's
phenomenology.
We can only be surprised, then, that MerIeau-Ponty's thought seems no
longer present in contemporary studies about Husserl and even less in those
about Heidegger. Yet Merleau-Ponty has much in common with Heidegger,
whose philosophy he has never ceased to read and study. It is true that
Phenomenology of Perception 2 does not extensively refer to Heidegger and
that its reading of Being and Time is not very original. But this is certainly
not true for The Visible and the Invisible 3 : this work can be read as a unique
and long meditation on the phenomenological meaning of Heidegger's concept
of ontological truth. Through its ideas on the lateral or indirect approach of
Being, the conception of the Invisible as the other side of the Visible or as
the manifestation of a withdrawal of the Visible, this work certainly deserves,
and perhaps more than any other, the title - somewhat usurped by Sartre -
of an "essay in phenomenological ontology".
Together with HusserI and Heidegger, Sartre is certainly the contem-
porary philosopher that Merleau-Ponty has most read and discussed. The stakes
of the discussion with Sartre from Phenomenology of Perception onwards
are ontological. The discovery that an ontological dualism of "being in itself'
and "being for itself' is incapable of giving an account of the most common
human phenomena has "converted" Merleau-Ponty into the philosopher of
the in-between and even of ambiguity. Merleau-Ponty rejects a form of dialectic
that does not do justice to phenomena, because it reduces them to a form of
oppositions of contraries. Following a non-Hegelian thought of difference,
Merleau-Ponty also gives a new meaning to the traditional concepts of
 THE SUBJECT IN NATURE 55

negativity and interrogation. This new thought of difference and negativity

results in an analysis of history as the work of freedom - a history that,
nevertheless, remains rooted in a pregiven nature and that enriches this nature
as (to use a Husserlian term) "historical sedimentation".
Merleau-Ponty's absence on the scene of contemporary phenomenology
is, thus, indeed remarkable. J. Derrida's silence on a philosopher with whom
he has so much in common is even more intriguing than the premature judge-
ment of M. Henry4, who has always distanced himself from any thought of
transcendence and the ecstatic phenomenon, whether in Heidegger's or in
Merleau-Ponty's sense. But it is also surprising that the little work that is
still devoted to Merleau-Ponty's thought today, very often restricts itself to
comment on the posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible.
Consequently, there is little interest in Phenomenology of Perception. There
are some obvious reasons for this: the analyses of intersubjectivity and of social
life provided in this book are not very convincing, and the treatment of
language is poor. The systematic and repeated opposition of intellectualism
and empiricism also becomes tedious after a while, and for a contemporary
reader the long and often laborious discussions of psychological theories now
belonging to the past are hardly attractive. Finally, we recall that in The Visible
and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty himself expressed his severe doubts about
Phenomenology of Perception: "The problems posed in Phenomenology of
Perception are insoluble because I start there from the 'consciousness' -
'object' distinction"s. Is it then worthwhile to re-read this book?
It must be stated at the outset that although Phenomenology of Perception
starts from the distinction 'consciousness - object' , it does not stubbornly cling
to it. It should then be shown what precisely are the "problems posed that
remain insoluble" and how the solution offered in The Visible and the Invisible
in fact differs from that of the previous work. Everybody seems to agree that
the problems arise mainly in the last part of Phenomenology of Perception,
which concerns what one might call a "philosophy of spirit", treating the
"other" and "the human world", the "tacit Cogito", "the temporality" of a
disincarnated consciousness, and "freedom" as the capacity of withdrawal
attributed to a voluntary subject. However, this philosophy of spirit very
logically follows a "philosophy of nature", Le. a philosophy of bodily
existence, of its insertion in the world and its dialogue with things. This
analysis of the natural life of the human body is not repudiated in the notions
of the "flesh", "brute Being" and "savage Spirit" in The Visible and the
Invisible. To the contrary, one could argue that without recourse to the
carefully described "experiences" in Phenomenology of Perception, these
notions of The Visible and the Invisible would remain enigmatic and very
poor in phenomenological content.
A reading of Phenomenology of Perception remains useful and even
fascinating, also because we witness the genesis of a problematic which is,
moreover, much less prominent in The Visible and the Invisible, that is, a
philosophy of nature. It even seems that what in Phenomenology of Perception
56 RUDOLF BERNET

was still called "nature" has very subtly become "spirit" in The Visible and
the Invisible. It is certainly not superfluous, then, to investigate this trans-
formation, which, moreover, goes hand in hand with the claim of definitively
overcoming a philosophy of the "metaphysical subject". The inquiry into the
status of the human subject can learn much from such an analysis of natural
life: a natural life that on the one hand owes nothing to the spiritual life of
human culture, and on the other hand, encounters the structure of the subject
exactly where it was least expected, that is, in the life of things within the
world.

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty tries to clarify the meaning

of the distinction between philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit by
starting from a phenomenological description of human existence. Indeed,
human existence abides in these two milieux, on the one hand as a "pre-
personal" or anonymous life, and, on the other hand, as a "personal" life.
As for HusserI, this personal life is conceived as a life of free acts of a
subject, who decides voluntarily about its actions, a subject who takes a
position (Stellungnahme). However, "position-taking" presupposes something
to which the position is taken, that precedes and conditions this free act. In
other words, freedom is situated, the autonomous decisions of personal life
have the character of "resumption" (reprise) (254, 169) or a taking-in-hand
of prepersonal existence. One could also talk about a relation between
reflection and the unreflected, on the condition however, that this reflection
is not understood as an objectification or thematization of the unreflected in
order to obtain a better theoretical understanding. The prepersonal and personal
acts both imply an existential engagement of the subject in the world, and their
relation necessarily has a practical character.
When Merleau-Ponty considers prepersonal life as the "natural" life of
the subject, he relies on a conception of nature in which nature is taken as
the foundation of spiritual existence, that is, of personal life: "There is, there-
fore, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here,
and who marks out my place in it" (254). This natural seat of human spirit
is of course something else than formless matter. This nature is by its essence
living, and the animating life is neither totally human, nor totally non-human.
Nature is that which in the heart of the subject affects the subject from beyond.
It is that "space" in which the subject can come to its proper being, or, in
other words, the place of the "birth" (215, 254) of the subject. In the summary
of his course of 1956-57 on the concept of nature, Merleau-Ponty presents
at the same time the main lines of a philosophy of nature, as it had been already
outlined in Phenomenology of Perception:
... nature is not simply the object, the accessory of consciousness in its
 THE SUBJECT IN NATURE 57

tete-a-tete with knowledge. It is an object from which we have arisen, in

which our beginnings have been posited little by little until the very moment
of tying themselves to an existence which they continue to sustain and
aliment. Whether in the case of the individual event of birth, or the birth
of institutions and societies, the originary relation between man and being
is not that of the for-itself to the in-itself, for this relation occurs in each
man capable of perception. However surcharged with historical significa-
tions man's perception may be, it borrows from the primordial at least its
manner of presenting the object and its ambiguous evidence. Nature (... )
presents itself always as already there before us, and yet as new before
our gaze. Reflexive thought is disoriented by this implication of the
immemorial in the present, the appeal from the past to the most recent
present. 6
A closer look shows that this "nature" is that which simultaneously presides
over and precedes natural or prepersonal life. We will certainly have to
investigate this ambiguity. It is clear, nonetheless, that a nature, out of which
a properly human form of life can arise, cannot be the nature-in-itself that is
the concern of natural science. Nature in Merleau-Ponty's sense is not foreign
or opposed to human existence, but has rather an essential relationship with
it. Nature is "something" at the heart of human existence that does not properly
belong to the human subject: a ground (Grund) of its constituting capacities,
that is at the same time a non-ground or abyss (Abgrund), a capacity that evades
constituting reason. If there is, as Merleau-Ponty always repeats, an "impos-
sibility of a complete reduction," it is precisely because of this natural ground
of human existence. The phenomenological reduction in Husserl's sense can
only let appear the correlation between the constituting activity of the tran-
scendental subject and the accomplishments of this constitution. It can not
recuperate or let appear that which precedes and supports this constitution.
Letting nature appear as a dimension of human existence that refers to
and calls for constitution without being enclosed in it, requires a new form
of phenomenological reduction. Instead of a reduction of natural life, this
phenomenological reduction in Merleau-Ponty's sense is rather a reduction
to natural life: "What resists phenomenology within us - natural being, the
"barbarous" source Schelling spoke of - cannot remain outside phenomenology
and should have its place within it.,,7
When Phenomenology of Perception talks about the "anonymous" (215,
238) character of a natural life governed by an indetermined and general
"They" (On) (215, 240), these terms borrowed from Husserl and Heidegger
have a new meaning: prepersonal life is neither the life of a transcendental
subject that accomplishes its activity of constitution of objects without being
conscious of this activity, nor the inauthentic existence of a Dasein that flees
from its personal responsibility by identifying with a silent majority. Operative
intentionality (jungierende lntentionalitiit) which carries along natural life is
not an objectifying intentionality, in which only a reflexive self-conscious-
58 RUDOLF BERNET

ness is missing, but is rather an intentionality without any representation of

an object at all. The "They" of prepersonal life is not a personal subject that
melts into the anonymity of the masses, but is a subject interwoven with the
natural world, because it lives only through its body. Natural life, in Merleau-
Ponty's sense, is indeed a life that is "bodily" through and through.
It is well known that Merleau-Ponty uses the word "corps" to translate
Husserl's term "Leib" and that this "Leib" is the principle of animal nature
(animalische Natur) in the system of regional ontologies developed in the
Second Book of the Ideas. Animal nature is situated in-between material nature
(materielle Natur) and the spiritual world (geistige Welt). Does this mean
then that for Merleau-Ponty bodily existence is the feature that distinguishes
us from inanimate nature, but equally prevents us from ever appropriating
entirely the spiritual world of symbolic meanings? We will see that on this
point Phenomenology of Perception remains ambiguous: on the one hand, there
are clear remnants of a spiritualistic subjectivism; but on the other hand, bodily
existence implies and even expresses systems of rich symbolic meaning which
are highly articulated. (If we should look for a phenomenological predecessor
of this philosophical analysis that examines the natural life of the human subject
in the realm of a nature that precedes the human subject, we should look
more to Scheler than to Husserl, and this in spite of Merleau-Ponty's own
explicit declarations, notably in his essay "The Philosopher and His Shadow".)
When one says that the natural life of the living subject is situated in the
body, this excludes considering the body still as an object for a separated
consciousness, or as mere matter without form: "the body is a natural self
and, as it were, the subject of perception" (206). A closer look shows that
the body is at one and the same time both the effective subject of natural
life and the symbolic frame in which this life inserts itself. The body perceives,
but it also unfolds the "field" in which perception can take place. As Merleau-
Ponty says repeatedly, it is an empirical and transcendental subject at once,
a contingent fact and also the possibility of this fact: "Bodily experience forces
us to acknowledge an imposition of meaning which is not the work of a
universal constituting consciousness, a meaning which clings to certain
contents. (... ) My body is that meaningful core which behaves like a general
function, and which nevertheless exists, and is susceptible to disease" (147).
When the body perceives a thing, it apprehends its meaning: and this meaning
is dependent upon a symbolic system that is precisely the symbolic system
of the internal organization of the body, of its movements and its capacity to
grasp the world. Bodily existence has its own "existentials" (in the
Heideggerian sense) and these correspond to the symbolic structure of the
world. "The body (... ) is that strange object which uses its own parts as a
general system of symbols for the world, and through which we can con-
sequently 'be at home in' the world, 'understand' it and find significance in
it" (237).
Phenomenology of Perception examines this symbolic structure of the
body and its effects in great detail. The result is that in all its aspects, this
 THE SUBJECT IN NATURE 59

structure is a form or Gestalt that reunites and encompasses very heteroge-

neous parts. Thus, the sensuous experience of one and the same thing differs
according to whether this thing is seen, touched, felt, etc. Each sense the subject
possesses due to its natural constitution unfolds a different phenomenal field
that has its own "sensuous" logic. The apprehension of a thing and its
signification(s) is rooted in a visual, tactile, olfactive, etc., pre-given field,
which Merleau-Ponty designs as "a gift of nature" (216). This fragmentation
of sensuous experience according to the different senses is another example
of the transcendental value (portee) of a natural or contingent fact. Yet, the
difference between the various sensory fields does not exclude that these fields
communicate with each other (224) and link their respective capacities of
exploration to form a "synaesthesia" (227-230). A "pure" sensuous experience
restricted to one sense, for example touch, would be rather an exceptional
case and could only be the result of a "sensuous abstraction" (119). Inversely,
when a blind person regains sight, this will considerably modify the organi-
sation of his touch (221ff.). Without going further into these concrete analyses,
it should be stressed nonetheless that this bond between the whole and its parts
is not a matter of subordination or inductive generalization. Since the part
already anticipates the whole and since the whole is nothing without its parts,
we should rather talk about a logic of "reversibility" of the flesh, to use the
expression of The Visible and the Invisible. Each sense constitutes a different
point of view on the world, and this world is not a closed totality, but the
open totality of the manifold points of view that it calls for. "It is neither
contradictory nor impossible that each sense should constitute a small world
within the larger one, and it is even in virtue of its particularity that it is
necessary to the whole and opens upon the whole" (222).
With this last quotation in mind, it is hardly surprising that Merleau-Ponty
understands the unity of the body and the unity of the world in analogy to
this unity of the senses. Just as the different senses communicate with each
other, so too the different parts of the body "imply", "envelop" and "encroach"
upon each other to build up systems of practical "equivalence": "If I am sitting
at my table and I want to reach the telephone (...) I can continue leaning
back in my chair provided that I stretch my arms further, or lean forward, or
even partly stand up" (149). Just as the different senses associate within synaes-
thesia, so the different organs of the body tend towards the realization of the
same goal and form a "synergy". "My body is not a collection of adjacent
organs, but a synergetic system, all the functions of which are exercised and
linked together in the congealed fact of existence" (234).
This synergy between the organs of the perceiving body plays an impor-
tant role in the experience of unity and reality of the thing. It occurs equally
- and in a new way - in the framework of the self-perception of the body.
The hand that touches a thing knows nothing of its capacity to grasp. It
abandons itself in exploring the relief of the thing and ignores itself as touching
hand. It is only when the other hand touches the touching hand lost in the
world, or when the gaze follows the hand's movement, that it can awaken to
60 RUDOLF BERNET

itself. Thus a kind of sensuous or bodily reflection is established, an inter-

play between the different organs of the body, in which the other hand or
the gaze functions as the reflective consciousness of the touching hand. This
sensuous reflection has to take the roundabout way of exteriority and differ-
ence. There is a synergy between the different organs with an eye towards
the self-perception of the body, but this synergy does not annul the hetero-
geneity and separation between the organs: the body apprehends itself only
through the difference of its parts and as the place where the different sensuous
capacities, that originally had nothing in common, cross and bind themselves.
In this return to itself through a fragmented exterior perception, the body
perceives itself only partially and thereby, simultaneously, loses its effective
grasp of the world.
This body which functions as the subject in natural life indeed proves to
be a symbolic system, in which each moment is defined in function of its
difference from the other moments. Consequently, the relations between these
moments are also of a symbolic nature: Merleau-Ponty particularly insists
on the relations of "equivalence" and "pregnancy." The same symbolic
structure ultimately determines as well the relation of parts and wholes: in
its referring to all the other parts, each part of the body equally functions as
a symbolic - metaphorical - representative of the whole.
This symbolism of the body, this synchronic and fixed system, however,
is nothing without the diachronic movement of bodily existence that realizes
it and breathes life into it. But this does not mean that this symbolic system
is something that an individual body could constitute by itself. Rather, the body
is much more a being the natural existence of which develops in the frame-
work of a bodily symbolic system that is pregiven. As the non-constituted basis
of natural life, this symbolic system of the body can indeed be called "nature".
But this nature is no longer understood as the ground of spiritual activities
alone: it is rather the pregiven system of the bodily structure of the subject,
in which every movement of bodily existence necessarily must be inserted.
It is that which is most "natural" in the natural bodily existence of the subject,
and yet a symbolic system that functions very much in the way a linguistic
code rules manifold concrete speech-acts. Far from representing the purely
immediate, formless and non-human aspects of human existence, this nature
is a finely articulated symbolic system that governs human existence without
being issued by it. Nature thus appears as a primordial form of transcendence
that, from the beginning, is intertwined with the movement of bodily existence.
Everything that Merleau-Ponty says about the symbolic structure of the body
and the synergy of its parts, about the way in which this synergy responds
to the solicitations of the world and the need of unification of things, is
summarized in the notion of "Body image" (schema corporel): "With the notion
of the body image we find that not only is the unity of the body described
in a new way, but also, through this, the unity of the senses and of the object"
(235). The body image is to be understood as an anticipatory mobilization
of the symbolic system of the body in light of a specific situation in percep-
 THE SUBJECT IN NATURE 61

tive life. The body knows in advance - through bodily knowledge - what to
do and how to do it. Its gestures and the order of their execution are consis-
tent with what it wants, and what things demand of it. The body image is
thus the result of a manifold of constraints; it has to take into account the
particular "project" of a subject and its realization within the limits of its bodily
constitution; but it should also reply to the call emanating from a certain
constellation of things, to their sensible texture and the basic frame of the world
in which these things have their place. Nature, out of which bodily behav-
iour arises, can thus not be restricted to the limits of the symbolic system of
the perceiving body. Nature encompasses also things and the world, and
nothing allows us to say that nature necessarily has its centre in the body of
the perceiving subject. If the body is only one part or aspect of nature, if
this body also has subjective capacities, one is then tempted to attribute a
subjective capacity to the other parts as well, i.e. to things and the world.
We will see further on that Phenomenology of Perception indeed goes in this
direction.

II

Each perceptive experience is the result of a subtle equilibrium between

different and sometimes even antagonistic forces. Merleau-Ponty particularly
insists on the fact that the influence of the subject on the course of the
perceptive process can vary considerably. The distinction between the concrete
movement of "prehension" (Greifen) and the abstract movement of "showing"
(Zeigen) is a good example of this. Merleau-Ponty stresses that the latter
requires an active and voluntary intervention of the subject, whereas the former
is merely a bodily reflex provoked by a given situation (111). The concrete
movements are animated by an anonymous "locomotive" intentionality that
is inscribed within the structure and the habits of the perceiving body, whereas
the abstract movements introduce a subjective form of intentionality. Merleau-
Ponty hastens to add, however, that the latter is therefore not yet an objectifying
intentionality, but still dependent upon an existential "attitude" or "project".
This analysis of two types of bodily movement repeats another, previous
distinction, that between the habitual and the actual body (82ff.). The actual
body is the body insofar as it is engaged in serving a present and effective
interest of the perceiving subject, whereas the behaviour of the habitual body
pursues old projects that are, as it were, sedimented in the subject. One can
say to a certain extent that the habitual body bears witness to an erosion of
the power of the subject over its own body. Inversely, the abstract movement
of the body is the indication of a refinement of bodily movement towards a
greater subjective control over the body and the circumstances of percep-
tion. The border between these two forms of bodily existence is nevertheless
very flexible, since both forms of perceptive behaviour are interrelated and
flow into each other continuously. One might say that their separation does not
62 RUDOLF BERNET

originate in the phenomena themselves, but is the result of the principles of

a philosophy that wants to measure the extent of the immersion of the subject
in nature, or rather, the extent of its emergence and its spiritualization.
From all this, it is clear that there are indeed remnants of a spiritualistic
SUbjectivism, even in what Phenomenology of Perception says about bodily
existence, and we have to dwell on this, before advancing with our investi-
gation of its philosophy of nature. In fact, it would be better to speak of a
"psychological" subjectivism, that tries to arrive at a better understanding of
the relation between the soul and the body: "What has to be understood then,
is how the psychic determining factors and the physiological conditions mesh
into each other" (77). The answer is as follows: "The body is the vehicle of
being in the world" (82). "Its permanence near to me" (91) gives me access
to the physical presence of things, but it is "not a permanence in the world,
but a permanence from my point of view" (90). The body is considered here
as the instrumental prolongation of the constituting subject. Its proximity to
the subject distinguishes the body from the things of the world: it is a
particular material object used by constituting consciousness to function and
make itself known in the world.
Thus, in fact, Merleau-Ponty is merely repeating what Husserl already
said in the second part of the Second Book of the Ideas, and he explicitly
acknowledges this (Cf. 92, footnote). It goes without saying that such a
conception of the body as "organ of the will" (Willensorgan) (Ideas II, § 38)
not only presents great inconveniences, but that it is also to a large extent
surpassed by what Phenomenology of Perception teaches us about a body
permeated, supported and guided by a natural life that infinitely transcends
it. Furthermore, Husserl's text clearly shows that such a view which reduces
the body to an instrument of consciousness cannot clarify the "meshing" of
the psychical with the physical and thus does not go beyond the description
of a "psychophysical parallelism". A consciousness of which the vital essence
is not bodily can at most be related to a body, but cannot live in it as its
incarnation.
Such a conception of the body as a mere "vehicle" of subjective life doesn't
meet the most basic ambitions of Merleau-Ponty's work and it is therefore
quickly abandoned. I would like to show briefly how such a spiritualistic
account of the bodily subject is surpassed by referring to those analyses
which give particular emphasis to the expressive force of the body.
What Phenomenology of Perception says about sexual experience serves
as a first example how the parallelism between consciousness and body must
give way to a description of the "ambiguity" (167) of their relation, and even
of the impossibility of a clear distinction "between sexuality and existence":
"Thus there is in human existence a principle of indetermination ( ... )
existence is indeterminate in itself, by reason of its fundamental structure"
(169) and this excludes the possibility "to determine what we owe to nature
and what to freedom" (ibid.). Phenomenology of Perception takes a further
step towards the overcoming of the separation of consciousness and body in
 THE SUBJECT IN NATURE 63

the comparison of the body with a work of art, the ideal significance of
which cannot be separated from the sensuous texture of the unique and irre-
placeable object to which it belongs:
A novel, poem, picture or musical work are individuals, that is, beings in
which the expression is indistinguishable from the thing expressed, their
meaning, accessible only through direct contact, being radiated with no
change of their temporal and spatial situation. It is in this sense that our
body is comparable to a work of art. 8
The body is thus an expressive sign of a particular kind, a sign in which that
which is signified is not clearly separable from the sign: "But as we shall
see, the body does not constantly express the modalities of existence, in the
way that stripes indicate rank, or a house-number a house, the sign here does
not only convey its significance, it is filled with it; it is, in a way, what it
signifies" (161). Or again, "understood in this way, the relation of expres-
sion to thing expressed, or of sign to meaning is not a one-way relationship
like that between original text and translation. Neither body nor existence
can be regarded as the origin of the human being, since they presuppose each
other" (166).
The significance of these passages is not only to show how the analysis
of the expressive body leads Merleau-Ponty to take his distance from a certain
spiritualistic subjectivism (such as Husserl's), but also to indicate how the
opposition between "nature" and "spirit" gradually loses its meaning. The body
is indeed a nature loaded with symbolic significations which contribute
significantly to the formation and transformation of the world of human culture.
However, this symbolic system of nature inscribed in the body is only very
partially the result of human action and history. The life that animates the
human body owes as much to prehuman nature as to human culture. The
body is thus the place in which spiritual interests and natural impulses mix
and finally melt. If every place is either in nature or in culture, then the body
is a "nowhere-place" (a-topos).
It is indeed through the body that the subject builds a human world, but
at the same time it is through this same body that the subject is dispossessed
of it. Instead of being the center of the human world, the bodily subject is
thus transported to its periphery. This does not mean, as such, a relapse into
a "barbarous" and formless nature, but rather a familiarization with a life
from which culture has estranged the subject: the life of animals and things.
Merleau-Ponty actually says very little about animals, but much more about
things. He shows that in abandoning his control over things and in being
attentive to what they have to say, the human subject discovers a new world
that, however, resembles him very much. The subject comes to understand that
things, despite their apparent indifference, are hardly different from himself.
In becoming a bodily subject open and exposed to the solicitations of the world
- thing among things -, the human subject becomes aware of the bodily
subjectivity belonging to things. When the human subject abandons itself to
64 RUDOLF BERNET

things, these respond by becoming subjects themselves inviting the human

subject to dialogue. The "return to nature" by and through the analyses of
the natural life of the body thereby acquires its ultimate significance, that is,
an immersion in the "flesh of the world". Even before The Visible and the
Invisible, Phenomenology of Perception already sketches the generalized
incarnation in which the "body" becomes "flesh".

III

The theme of a bodily subjectivity of things is announced very early in

Phenomenology of Perception, i.e. in the first pages of the analysis of the
"Body":
Thus every object is the mirror of all others. When I look at the lamp on
my table, I attribute to it not only the qualities visible from where I am,
but also those which the chimney, the waIls, the table can 'see'; but back
of my lamp is nothing but the face which it 'shows' to the chimney. I can
therefore see an object in so far as objects form a system or a world, and
in so far as each one treats the others round it as spectators of its hidden
aspects and as guarantee of the permanence of those aspects. Any seeing
of an object by me is instantaneously reiterated among all those objects
in the world which are apprehended as co-existent, because each of them
is all that the others 'see' of it. 9
Thus, there is not only a symbolic system of the body, but also a symbolic
and bodily system of things, to which my gaze must submit, if I am to perceive
anything. Indeed, a thing can only be perceived through and according to
the things that surround it, and therefore Merleau-Ponty says that "the absolute
positing of a single object is the death" (71) of perception. This diversion of
the gaze from one thing to another not only has a symbolic and bodily
character, but it is also essentially perceptive. It is because the chimney
"sees" the table that it can show it to me. The symbolic system of things
and even the system of every single intersensory thing (317) reflects the
structure of the symbolic system of the body. Does it then follow that this
symbolic, bodily and perceptive system of things, like the system of the body,
still has to be animated and permeated by life to produce its effects? But
then, what sort of life would it be that would actualize the system of things
and interrogate my gaze?
Merleau-Ponty's answer is as foIlows: the life that animates things is their
expressive capacity. The thing is a bearer of a current of significance: "The
significance of a thing inhabits that thing (... ) the significance of the
ash-tray (... ) animates the ash-tray, and is self-evidently embodied in it.
(... ) Prior to and independently of other people, the thing achieves that miracle
of expression: an inner reality which reveals itself externally, a significance
which descends into the world and begins its existence there, and which can
 THE SUBJECT IN NATURE 65

be fully understood only when the eyes seek it in its own location (319-320)".
Yet, this significance that inhabits the thing is not properly its own, it
originates in a life of expression that merely traverses and unites it to other
things and to the gaze that wanders among these things. As this life of expres-
sion of perceptual sense does not belong to anyone in particular, one could
be tempted to say that it is anonymous or even a-subjective. Merleau-Ponty
seems, quite to the contrary, to consider it as being of an intersubjective nature:
"The relations between things or aspects of things having always our body
as their vehicle, the whole of nature is the setting of our own life, or our
interlocutor in a sort of dialogue (320)."
Paraphrasing W. Benjamin's remarks on the work of artlO, we could say
that things are invested with a kind of "aura" that captivates my gaze by means
of a superabundance of meaning. The gaze has never exhausted the exploration
of things, since these things always have something more to say and to ask.
The extensive and noteworthy analysis of hallucination (334ff.) functions as
a kind of proof a contrario of this interrogative capacity of the thing. It states
that what distinguishes the hallucinated thing from the real thing is precisely
the absence of depth - the depth that makes the meaning of the real thing
appear as a kind of promise calling for further exploration. Moreover, Merleau-
Ponty specifies that this infathomable depth of significance and the endless
dialogue between the gaze and the thing concern not only works of art or
any other cultural object (e.g. the ash tray), but so-called "natural" objects
as well: "As I contemplate the blue of the sky, I am not over against it as an
acosmic subject, I do not possess it in thought, or spread out towards it some
idea of blue such as might reveal the secret of it, I abandon myself to it and
plunge into the mystery, it 'thinks itself in me', I am the sky itself as it is drawn
together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself, my consciousness is
saturated with this limitless blue (214)."
It is therefore true that in making itself a thing among things, the perceiving
body awakens things to their status of perceiving bodies and unites itself to
them in the same mode of existence: "Perception and the perceived necessarily
have the same existential modality" (374). One's own body and the thing
"coexist" within a unity that Merleau-Ponty calls "symbiosis" (317), "coition"
(320), "communion" (320) or "communication" (320). This unity of the body
and the thing in the world thus goes beyond a dialectical reunion of opposites
- the in-itself and the for-itself - or an association based on the analogy of
their modes of functioning: rather it bears witness to an authentic connatu-
rality. If not only the body, but also the thing sees things; if my gaze can
only see what things are willing to show, this is because the body and things
are made up of the same tissue, or permeated by the same indivisible life.
It is true that Phenomenology of Perception hesitates to draw from this
the implied ontological consequences. It is also true that such a naturaliza-
tion of the subject goes hand in hand with a subjectivization of nature: we
find "the real (...) overlaid with anthropological predicates (320)". It seems
to me that this conception of nature owes a lot to Cassirer. It is indeed striking
66 RUDOLF BERNET

how much the analysis of natural life, in which the body is interwoven with
things in one world, resembles the description of the primitive world domi-
nated by the symbolic structure of myth, as formulated in The Philosophy of
Symbolic Forms. According to Cassirer, however, myth is already a first
step towards science and philosophy, and the Phenomenology of Perception
explicitly agrees with such a "phenomenology of spirit" (293) or "teleology
of reason" (294). Thus, if Merleau-Ponty's early work, though anticipating a
new philosophy of nature, never completely gives up the opposition between
nature and spirit, nor the conception of natural life as the life of a primitive
subject, this is due probably to this influence of Cassirer as much as the
influence of HusserI.
The last word of Phenomenology of Perception is not yet the common
"flesh" of bodies and things, but the function of flesh is nonetheless antici-
pated in what this text says about the world. Bodies and things intertwine within
a natural world that is animated by a cosmic life. If, as we have seen, the
body is the symbol of the unity of the world (235), it is not surprising then
that the analysis of the world proceeds in the same way as the analysis of
the body and the thing. That is, the world is also a pregiven symbolic system
that only produces its effects to the extent that it is animated by natural life.
Moreover, this system of the world is such that it makes up a unity with the
system of things and the system of the body:
The natural world is the horizon of all horizons, the style of all possible
styles, which guarantees for my experiences a given, not a willed, unity
underlying all the disruptions of my personal and historical life. Its
counterpart within me is the given, general and pre-personal existence of
my sensory functions in which we have discovered the definition of the
body). 11
Like a thing, and yet different, the world is an "unfinished" unity, a unity in
"becoming", an "essentially temporal" (330) unity. What distinguishes the
world from any thing is above all that there is an infinity of things, but only
one world. Consequently, the world cannot acquire meaning from its differ-
ence with other worlds. But there is also no world without things or bodies.
Does the world then receive its meaning from these bodies and these things?
Haven't we already claimed, on the contrary, that the connaturality between
things and bodies is founded on their common belonging to the world? Does
this not lead to the conclusion that the meaning of the world does not belong
to the world, nor to things, nor to bodies? Or that the meaning of the world
does not belong to anyone in particular, and that its meaning is precisely this
natural life that pervades the world, bodies and things and weaves them into
a single braid? The meaning of natural life would then be this universal and
yet always new reversibility, thanks to which things refer to each other, things
interrogate our gaze, and the gaze - in letting itself be driven away by the
references of things - still remains tied to the world.
Although Phenomenology of Perception does not neglect the reversibility
 THE SUBJECT IN NATURE 67

between things and the world, it insists particularly on the unique and original
character of that link which unites the perceiving body to the world: "Our
own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible
spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and
with it forms a system (203)". This passage should be completed by adding
that the world, in its turn, sustains the body in offering it this spectacle, in
stirring up its desire to always see more. This mutual stimulation of the body
and the world presupposes a kind of visceral attachment of the body to the
world; "each act of perception appears to itself to be picked out from some
all-embracing adherence to the world (241)". Through the spectacle of things
that appear and disappear, that complement and contradict each other, a
primordial "faith" of the perceiving subject in the world establishes and rein-
forces itself: "underlying explicit acts which enable me to posit before myself
an object at its distance (... ) there is, then, sustaining them, a deeper function
without which perceived objects would lack the distinctive sign of reality
(...) it is the movement which carries us beyond subjectivity, which gives
us our place in the world (... ) through a kind of 'faith' or 'primordial opinion'
(343)."
It is only on the basis of the mutual affiliation of the body and the world
that the gaze can meet things, transform itself into a thing among things, and
become attentive to what these things have to say. If Phenomenology of
Perception reveals a common flesh of the world, things and the body, it stiII
tries to understand this within the horizon of bodily subjectivity. This is why
the philosophy of nature leads to a naturalization of the perceiving subject that,
in its turn, goes hand in hand with a subjectivization of nature. However,
this philosophy of nature, surmounting the opposition between nature and
the subject, and providing a genealogy of the subject, also gives birth to a
new conception of the subject as well as of nature.
Arising out of things within a common world and affirming its identity
through its difference from things, the human subject is at once itself and
another, one and manifold, present and absent, visible and invisible. Within
the universal intersubjectivity or "intercorporeity" of the world, the subject
is that singularity by which the world is articulated as an open system of
diacritical differences. This advent of difference is as an earthquake, the
shock of which propagates itself through the totality of the world; every-
thing is shaken by it, even the subject that has brought forward the wave of
universal vibration that traverses the symbolic system of the flesh of the world.
Indeed, the human subject is nothing without things or without the world,
and yet it distinguishes itself from the world by leaving its mark of differ-
ence upon it: the subject is merely passing by, but this passage leaves "a
wake of the negative,,12. Nature, in which the subject is born and which
nourishes the subject thus is nothing else than the universal life of meaning,
this always new pulsation of a system of differences that precedes human
constitution and to which human constitution necessarily returns (Einstromen)
as "sedimentation". This life of nature can just as well be called a life of
68 RUDOLF BERNET

"spirit", if this spirit is no longer conceived of as a spiritual mortal or immortal

subject. Therefore, in his later work, Merleau-Ponty will talk about the
"savage" spirit, and we can better understand now that nature in
Phenomenology of Perception and the savage spirit in The Visible and the
Invisible, in other words, a natural symbolic system permeated by an
indomitable life and a spirit attached to the universal intercorporeity of the
flesh, are one and the same thing. Could we not say that Merleau-Ponty's work,
far from being the result of a linear and continuous development, is itself
permeated by the flow of this inexhaustible life of difference, of resumption
and sedimentation? Does the fascination of a contemporary reader for this work
not owe much to the fact that, in the fluidity of its style, this work itself
manifests the elusive and manifold life of savage spirit, the analysis of which,
broken off by the circumstance of a premature death, by its essence had to
remain unfinished?

NOTES

1. M. Merleau-Ponty, "The Philosopher and His Shadow," in Signs, trans. R. C. McCleary

(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 159.
2. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1962). All page references in the text itself refer to this translation which
we occasionally modify.
3. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968).
4. M. Henry, Phinomenologie materielle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), p.
5: "Qu'apporte de v6ritablement nouveau par rapport 1t Husserl, Heidegger ou Scheler, et
cela en d6pit de son immense talent, un penseur comme Merleau-Ponty?".
5. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 200; cf. also p. 183.
6. M. Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures (1952-1960), trans. J. O'Neill (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 64-65.
7. M. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, p. 178.
8. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 151.
9. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 68.
10. W. Benjamin, "Some Motives in Baudelaire" (1939) in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet
in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. H. Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973).
11. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 330.
12. M. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, p. 172.
 M. C. DILLON

The Unconscious: Language and World

The unconscious is ripe for radical renewal: even the name is misconceived.
"Unconscious" means what it means in polar opposition to "consciousness."
That was explicit in Freud's definition from the first to the last of his writings.
Freud was an avowed dualist, and never seemed to be troubled by the
conceptual problems generated by his dualistic posture. But dualism does create
problems, problems which remain insoluble within the context of binary
opposition and mutual exclusion. These problems are problems of media-
tion, chorismos, continuity.
Consider the standard attributes of the unconscious: it is organic, it is
timeless, it is determined/determining, it is impersonal, it is defined topo-
graphically by place or dynamically by energy, etc. And yet it stands in relation
to mind, time, freedom, identity, and meaning. The problem is always to
explain how these mediations can be conceived. How does organic quantity
merge with conscious quality? How does periodicity generate meaning? How
can talking alter the unalterable? How can a place define a will? How can
an impersonal agency deliberately conceal a meaning it is unable to compre-
hend as a meaning? These questions are not new, but it may be possible to
address them in a fresh way by regarding them as arising from the fundamental
problem of Freud's dualism and approaching that problem from the stand-
point of Merleau-Ponty's non-dualistic ontology.
The questions just raised cannot be answered so long as the relation of
consciousness and its other is conceived as one of mutual exclusion: in every
case, the proliferation of intermediaries can only compound the problem by
deferring it. Quantity cannot transform itself into quality if the two are
conceived as mutually exclusive. Periodicity is not a solution - just because
frequency is not color - it only names a magical resolution which allows Freud
to ignore the problem. 1
There is no need to labor the point: the dualistic ontology presupposed by
the definition of the unconscious as everything psychical excluded from
consciousness renders the unconscious incomprehensible. No need to labor the
P. Burke and 1. Van der Veken (eds.), Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, 69-83.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
70 M. C. DILLON

point about the poverty of a psychology of energetics, but perhaps there is need
to make the correlative point that the dualist posture is just as incomprehen-
sible on the other side of the ontological divide. An unconscious which is
structured like a language may generate signification - or transmit it, or be
its unwitting vehicle - but it is impossible to conceive how syntax can desire
or satisfy desire. Indeed, the insatiability of desire - Lacan's transcendental
deduction of perpetual dissatisfaction - is a direct result of the reduction of
desire to a play of signifiers which, being limited to jouissance, can have no
cUlmination. 2
Mechanistic thinking seeks to overcome the dualism of consciousness and
the unconscious by a reductive principle that relegates the recalcitrant aspects
of conscious experience to an epiphenomenal domain which, even though it
remains inexplicable, can be safely ignored because it is not needed to explain
anything else. The reduction in the other direction, the semiological reduc-
tion, also reduces the phenomena traditionally associated with consciousness
to unconscious functions, but now the unconscious is conceived, not as a
blind causal mechanism, but as a self-effacing grammarian with a self-
constructing lexicon. Conscious life is reduced to the entertaining of repre-
sentations whose sole significance derives from the signifiers which
differentiate them. This differentiation goes on at the unconscious level through
a process named by another oxymoron: original repetition.
As I interpret Derrida,3 his critique of phenomenology focuses on the
conception of presence underlying Husserl's definition of consciousness as
presence to an intentional object which is at the same time presence to itself.
The crux of Derrida's argument seems to be that identification of an object
requires that the object have a significance (provided by the signifier) which
is constant over passages of time and changes in empirical circumstances. 4 This
significance has to be ideal since, according to Derrida, ideality is a
condition for the formal identity presupposed by identification. But that ideality
is, itself, the product of repetition, i.e., constancy over time. 5 Thus, there can
be no original presence since every object that appears, i.e., every represen-
tation, must be a re-presentation: its identity as a present object presupposes
an ideal meaning dependent upon repetition. Every presentation is, thus, a
re-presentation which acquires its identity or significance from a signifier
whose ideality depends upon original repetition.
Original repetition cannot take place at the conscious level since all
consciousness is the conscious of an intentional object which, as just explained,
presupposes an original repetition. Derrida explicates this unconscious process
of original repetition by appealing to the Freudian notion of Bahnung
(path-breaking or facilitation). The differentiation which constitutes meaning
is itself the result of iterated jracta, inscriptions upon the unconscious; only
after these breakings have opened a path (or inscribed a trace) is it possible
for consciousness to entertain a representation of the object. Whence Derrida's
famous conclusion: there never was any perception. Or, as I interpret the
assertion, the perception cannot be a present origin, as Husserl mistakenly
 THE UNCONSCIOUS 71

thought, because presence to consciousness presupposes the "subterranean toil"

of facilitation, which is an unconscious process.
The truth that cannot be ignored here is that language does sediment itself
in culture in such a way that objects present themselves as having meanings
dependent upon their names or their places within a linguistically structured
matrix. Derrida's incontrovertible insight is that - under the synchronic view
- our experience of the world and its objects is for the most part mediated
by language, by language which is not our creature but is rather our master
insofar as it predelineates the relations among things that constitute - at least
in part - the meanings that things have. But this partial truth also becomes
oppressive when, in seeking to be exclusive, it renders originating speech
incomprehensible by denying us access to perceptual meaning which does
not depend on signifiers but which demands appropriate expression.
Unconscious as blind mechanism, unconscious as significance generator:
in both cases, the defining characteristic of the unconscious is its noumenality,
its inaccessibility, its black box functionality. So conceived, the unconscious
is the necessary condition for the possibility of a transcendence within
immanence: a self that is not a self - at the same time both less and more
myself than I - which accounts for my opacity to myself. The unconscious
is an immanent agency defined as transcending reflection. Where there is a
de jure ontological barrier between immanence and transcendence - where
the realms of form and matter, linguistic significance and its other, etc., are
divided by an ontological Spaltung - no system of mediation, be it conceived
as periodicity, facilitation, transgression, differance, inscription of traces,
etc., can overcome the mutual exclusion that defined the barrier at the start.
One can appeal to the oxymorons mentioned earlier, artificial intelligence
and original repetition, but that merely elevates contradiction to the level of
principle and compresses a conundrum into a magical formula that explains
everything while remaining itself inexplicable.
If my premises are credible, the conclusion is inexorable: there must be
a continuity of immanence and transcendence, the domains cannot be
conceived as mutually exclusive; in a word, there cannot be a dualism of
consciousness and its other.

II

In one of the most lucid essays I have read on the subject,6 J. B. Pontalis set
forth in 1961 an outline of Merleau-Ponty's treatment of the unconscious in
writings up to, but not including The Visible and the Invisible. Pontalis observes
that, in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty subsumed the
unconscious "under the rubric of the prepersonal. ..7 This is the domain of
pre-reflective experience which Merleau-Ponty describes as anonymous and
associates with perception. 8 For any of my acts to be experienced as a personal
act, the quality of experience must be reflective; it is in reflection that I
72 M. C. DILLON

appropriate my experience as mine and thematize it as circumscribed by the

vantage point I occupy. Although it is possible for me to appropriate my
perceptual experience in a reflective mode - as, for example, when I choose
a position as the perspective from which I will witness a sporting event -,
typically, however, I do not reflect upon my experience, but rather dwell in
the perceptual field and tacitly occupy a mUltiplicity of positions through
the "I can" and the ek-stasis of motility. When Husserl spoke of appresenta-
tion he was referring to the same generality of perception: the phenomenon
is not typically experienced as mine, but as ours; and the collective here
refers to the mute testimony of objects as well as other humans. To re-phrase
Kant's famous dictum, the "I think" typically does not accompany sensuous
experience, but it can.
This apparently simple and uncontroversial characterization of perception
has far-reaching consequences for the theory of the unconscious, many of
which have become controversial. Perception is unconscious for Merleau-Ponty
in the manner described above, but it is unconscious for Derrida in an entirely
different way. The difference lies in accessibility, in the continuity Merleau-
Ponty allows between pre-reflective experience and its reflective appropriation.
For Derrida, it is never possible for me to be reflectively conscious of a present
perception: all consciousness must be consciousness of a re-presentation, and
that which is re-presented can never have been present to consciousness, but
presupposes repetition in its original path-breaking or tracing. Every re-
presentation, then, might be said to draw upon "a kind of original past, a
past which has never been present" [PhP, 242; PP, 280].9
The phrase quoted here is the closing line of the chapter on sense experi-
ence in the Phenomenology of Perception. It has often been quoted to me as
evidence that Merleau-Ponty was groping toward the position subsequently
articulated by Derrida. 1o That this is not the case is easily demonstrated by
putting the phrase in context. Here is the context:
... We have seen that primary perception is a non-thetic, pre-objective,
and pre-conscious experience .... From every point of the primordial
field intentions move outwards, vacant and yet determinate; in realizing
these intentions, analysis will arrive at the object of science, at sensation
as a private phenomenon, and at the pure subject which posits both. These
three terminal concepts are no nearer than on the horizon of primordial
experience. It is in the experience of the thing that the reflective ideal of
positing thought will have its basis. Hence reflection does not itself grasp
its full meaning unless it refers to the unreflective fund of experience which
it presupposes, upon which it draws, and which constitutes for it a kind
of original past, a past which has never been present [PhP, 242; PP, 279-80].
In context, it is clear that the "past which has never been present" has never
been present to the reflective consciousness which must draw upon that
anonymous past in its appropriating reprise: never present to reflective con-
sciousness, but fully present to pre-reflective perceptual consciousness. When
 THE UNCONSCIOUS 73

Merleau-Ponty writes that reflection "does not grasp [the] full meaning (sens)
[of the experience of the thing] unless it refers to the unreflective fund of
experience which it presupposes,,,11 I interpret that to mean that it is possible
to refer to that fund of experience.
When, 23 years later, Derrida speaks of "a 'past' that has never been
present," he is articulating a position directly opposed to Merleau-Ponty's.
At stake here is the issue of presence. As I have shown in previous essays,'2
Derrida's polemic against the notion of presence is directed against a
specifically Husserlian understanding of presence as presence to an intentional
object which is at the same time presence to itself. The reflexivity of self-
presence here is thematic reflexivity, i.e., the Cartesian cogito as opposed to
Merleau-Ponty's tacit cogito of corporeal reflexivity. Whereas Derrida is on
the right track when he argues that thematic reflexivity is not a condition
for perception, i.e., that perceptual experience is for the most part un- or
pre-reflective, his polemic denies the possibility of any kind of presence to
a perceptual object. Given his own binary opposition of consciousness and
its other,'3 Derrida is committed to a thesis of discontinuity between con-
sciousness (which is always consciousness of a representation) and perception
(understood as the "subterranean toil" of an unconscious which is radically
discontinuous with and inaccessible to consciousness). For Derrida, we simply
do not see things: there can be no present origin of percepts.
A certain alterity - to which Freud gives the metaphysical name of the
unconscious - is definitively exempt from every process of presentation
by means of which we would call upon it to show itself in person .
. . . The alterity of the 'unconscious' makes us concerned not with
horizons of modified - past or future - presents, but with a 'past' that
has never been present, and which never will be ... One cannot think
the trace - and therefore, differance - on the basis of the present, or of
the presence of the present. '4
This is ontological dualism. What we perceive is the trace 2 of a trace, that
effaces itself completely. Trace, is the "original repetition" inscribed upon
the unconscious by the process of path-breaking (Bahnung); we can have no
conscious experience of it. Trace2 is a re-presentation; it is always already
mediated by signifiers in the play of differance necessary to differentiate it
at the unconscious level. Given the radical discontinuity between conscious-
ness and its other, there is no possibility of measuring the re-presentation
against an experience of that which it re-presents. Here, in this self-dissem-
bling dualism, is the basis of the skepticism inherent in the philosophy of
deconstruction.
Given the dualism of the trace, denomination must be an unconscious
process: signifiers are applied to things beneath the level of conscious
awareness. According to Derridian doctrine, the percept cannot be present to
consciousness. In order for it to reach consciousness as a re-presentation, it
must be differentiated, made meaningful and placed in relation to other objects
74 M. C. DILLON

of representation, by subsumption under an ideal type, i.e., a signifier. Only

then can it be elaborated or re-designated through substitutions in the chain
of signifiers: once we see (re-present) the rabbit as a rabbit, we can call it
mammal or a furry creature or a bunny. But we can never account for having
seen it as a rabbit in the first place. That designation must be assigned through
the subterranean toil of a self-effacing master grammarian with a self-
constructing lexicon. 15
The intelligence presupposed in the selection of the term 'rabbit' instead
of another term must operate beneath the level of conscious awareness: the
cognition of this perceptual Gestalt as calling for the signifier 'rabbit' must
be an unconscious cognition. And if, at the conscious level, one should ask
whether it were really a rabbit, one could only consult the representation
already differentiated and designated as a rabbit to provide the reassurance that
one could never need: if ever a mistake were made, one could never become
conscious of it. The experience of perceptual correction could only occur if
one were to attribute to the unconscious all the processes of interrogation
that Merleau-Ponty attributes to the questing eye.
The main line of argument in the Phenomenology of Perception is that
phenomena must be primordially meaningful, autochthonously organized,
presented as figures on grounds, etc., in order to account for categorization,
subsumption under noemata, etc. Unless experience is gestaltet at the per-
ceptual level, unless phenomena have a sens of their own, then any attribution
of meaning would have to be arbitrary. To push perception beneath the level
of conscious awareness is to attribute to an unconscious process the wonder
of discovering the sense of things. It also revives Descartes' dream argument:
if all consciousness is re-presentational and presence to its original is deemed
impossible, then there is no way to distinguish dreams, illusions, hallucina-
tions, etc., from veridical experience - just because the notion of veridical
experience has been emptied. For the same reason, schizophrenia and other
pathologies in which the patient has difficulty sepatating the diseased and
solipsistic sphere of encroaching fantasy from the public world in which the
rest of us operate more or less efficiently can no longer be recognized as
pathologies.
In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty articulates a percep-
tual worldscape which is not bifurcated by an ontological wedge between
immanence and transcendence, but rather demonstrates that this phenomenal
world must be an in-itself-for-us. Although the world he describes is replete
with ambiguity and opacity, although its becoming precludes certainty and
translucency, the very model for the modicum of finite knowledge to which
we may lay hesitant claim is present to us in an anonymous perceptual
unfolding which provides the measure of that claim. As in-itself-for-us, as tran-
scendent-immanent, the perceptual world reveals itself across the full spectrum
of phenomenal modalities from pre-reflective and general to reflective and
personal. Unconscious and conscious modalities mark limiting points at the
extremes of one dimension of this spectrum, but as Merleau-Ponty portrays
 THE UNCONSCIOUS 75

them, these limiting points are not mutually exclusive: consciousness is not
sheer lucidity and the unconscious is not an absolute absence discernible
only in its self-dissembling effects. 16
For Derrida, on the other hand, the unconscious is an in-self which cannot
reveal itself to us, a trace I that effaces itself in leaving behind another trace 2
which cannot be traced to its origin. And the Spaltung that Freud identified
as the Ursprung of psychopathology becomes the condition for psychic life
at large.

III

As soon as one begins to speak about the unconscious, one it drawn into the
categories of binary opposition and dualistic thought. On the other hand, to
maintain a thesis of continuity between consciousness and the unconscious -
to abandon the dualistic conceptual scheme upon which the traditional Freudian
opposition is based - is to reconceive the phenomena designated in those
maladroit ways.
This ontological re-orientation does not leave the phenomena intact. The
Freudian unconscious was a conceptual jungle, a variegated bestiary of outcast
demons. Every entity shy of light could be found within it from the archaic
vestiges of phylogenesis to the unacceptable events of childhood and yesterday
afternoon. This dark domain was portrayed as timeless and resistant to change;
it was also portrayeq as the changing room for ceaseless metamorphoses.
It was the locus of the phenomena of passivity - sleep, dreams, memory -
and also the origin of all psychic energy, initiative, desire. It has been the
reservoir of ancient symbols, and now it is becoming the substrate of linguistic
signs. Whatever cannot be explained in the familiar lexicon of the arts and
sciences finds a convenient resting place in the recesses of the unconscious.
Beyond the dualism of conscious and unconscious is the deeper dualism of
light and dark, reason and unreason, familiarity and its other.
Merieau-Ponty's ontology is as robust as it is because it is non-
reductionist: the principle of intelligibility for Merleau-Ponty's brand of
phenomenology is a principle of individuation. Each phenomenon demands
its own treatment, its own place in the world-matrix, its own description.
Sexuality cannot be reduced to or deduced from economics or history or
semiology or - for that matter - embodiment. If it was apt for Sartre to name
Husserl's project as aimed toward a monism of the phenomenon, then it
might be apt to characterize Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as a radical
pluralism - despite the well-intentioned enthusiasts who would reduce all
the species of animals, vegetables, and minerals to a substrate of animate flesh.
Furthermore, although Merleau-Ponty is pre-eminently a philosopher of
meaning, of sens, his attempt was always to stretch the logos to fit emergent
phenomena instead of trying to cram the entire world into preconceived
categories. Merleau-Ponty sought to find the categories of reason within the
76 M. C. DILLON

phenomenal world rather than to constitute the latter by means of the former.
If we are looking for a single explanatory principle that will, once and
for all times, circumscribe the field traditionally designated by the unconscious
within an encompassing conceptual scheme - and at the same time do justice
to every denizen of that field - then we will not find it within Merleau-Ponty.
(Nor, I suspect, will we find it anywhere else.) Sleep, dreams, repression,
denial, the archaic, etc. - all demand their own conceptual spaces. Everything
that can be named can find a place within language, but to investigate language
as though Being were a text is to forget that the research for that book is
still in progress. Since, then, it is beyond the scope of the present work to
do justice to the full range of phenomena traditionally placed under the rubric
of the unconscious, I will focus here on the phenomenon of perception and
issues associated with it that have already come to the surface - reflexivity,
identification, and signification.
Merleau-Ponty conceives the perceptual unconscious in horizonal rather than
thematic terms: it is not a thing or place; it is the open-ended framework within
which things appear, within which we communicate with others .
. . . Perception ... is of itself an openness upon a field of GestaliUngen -
And that means: perception is unconsciousness. What is the unconscious?
[That which] functions as a pivot, an existential, and in this sense, is and
is not perceived. For one perceives only figures upon levels - and one
perceives them only by relation to the level, which therefore is unper-
ceived ... [VI,189; VI,243]
Perception is an unconsciousness, that is, it is and is not perceived in the
manner of a level (niveau) or background. l ? Here, in The Visible and the
Invisible, Merleau-Ponty makes the same point he had stressed earlier in the
Phenomenology of Perception. Perception is unconscious and unperceived in
the manner that backgrounds are overlooked. Nonetheless, backgrounds are
given, present; they are explorable, thematizable - although that thematiza-
tion necessarily involves an alteration and distortion of their horizonal
character.
Here is Merleau-Ponty's account of the inaccessibility of the unconscious,
its self-dissemblance: it is not the case that an alien or demonic intelligence
dwells in the depths of the psyche and deliberately (or mechanically) obscures
its emissaries, it is rather the case that reflection, in its attempt to retrieve
and explore an experience, tends to modify the mode of givenness of the
experience. Somewhat as the naming of a mood tends to dispel the mood by
thematizing it and obscuring its global pervasiveness, so does the clarifying
nature of reflective scrutiny tend to distort the rich ambiguity of the
perceptual manifold. More to the point, reflection personalizes the pre-
personal or anonymous nature of the given. As Sartre would say, it imports
an ego into a field in which it was at most an impending presence. Or as
Freud would say, it brings the experience to the conscious level. But these
descriptions are inept; they suggest the discontinuities characteristic of
 THE UNCONSCIOUS 77

dualistic ontology: either the ego is fully present or it is totally absent, either
the experience is conscious and lucid or it is unconscious and opaque. For
Merleau-Ponty, there is a change of aspect rather than a quantum jump, a
movement of appropriation [Er-eignung, an occasion of making one's own]
of something which was never entirely alien and never will be entirely my
own.
When reflection becomes aware of its own tendency to distort, it can work
to identify and counterbalance its intrusion through a compensating effort
Merleau-Ponty calls hyper-reflection [sur-reflexion, reflection on reflection,
reflection aware of its own structure].18
It is important to notice the crucial role of presence in the reflective reprise
of perceptual experience. If "there never was any perception," if all experience
is re-presentational, then the distinction between perception and recollection
begins to fade, and there is no question of reflecting upon the scene I now
inhabit. An artist or art historian could not point to a work present at hand
and lead me to see aspects I had neglected. The tool which breaks while I
use it and thereby suffers a shift from Zuhandenheit to Vorhandenheit could
only be recognized as the same tool through a linkage in a chain of signi-
fiers rather than by its abiding presence in my hand. I could not become
aware of my tendency to flinch when I pull the trigger, actually witness myself
in that process when I am shooting skeet - and then know how to begin to
correct myself when the next clay bird flies. Under Merleau-Ponty's analysis,
it is possible to perceive in a deliberate way, to train the movements of my
body, to touch your body and feel you touch me .
.. . . . There is a fundamental narcissism of all vision" [VI, 139; VI, 183],
writes Merleau-Ponty, but he does not mean to say that we see only our own
productions, that we can live only through repetitions of a world predelin-
eated by an unconscious agency that it is forever impossible to rejoin. He is
rather pointing to the fact of corporeal reflexivity. Corporeal reflexivity is
one of Merleau-Ponty's terms for the self-reference Hegel found to be intrinsic
to consciousness and Sartre developed into his own notion of Being-for-itself
modelled on the tacit or pre-reflective cogito. For Sartre and Hegel, this
reflexivity was definitive of consciousness and sundered from the domain of
materiality. But Merleau-Ponty found reflexivity in the body - and later in
the flesh of the world - thereby healing the ontological wound that has crippled
Western philosophy from its inception.
It is the phenomenon of reflexivity - and the designation of its object as
consciousness, psyche, soul - that forms the root of the ontological fissure
from which dualism and binary opposition have grown. Here is the primary
source of the theses of discontinuity. When we reflect we come into contact
with something that is not a thing and different in kind from all the things
we know, a different kind of being: invisible, inner, higher, unchanging. Not
a thing, but the condition for all things, at least insofar as they appear to us,
thus a super-thing. This is the thought that permeates the tradition in which
we are steeped. And the problem to which this thought immediately leads is
78 M. C. DILLON

the problem of the relations of this super-thing to all the other things around
us. This is the problem of mediation, the problem of chorismos and methexis.
One of the traditional solutions to this problem has been to postulate an
inaccessible sub-thing whose own dark mechanism contains the system of
mediations necessary to provide the linkage between reason and unreason,
super-thing and other things. Here is the unconscious. Latterly, the medi-
ating functions of this sub-thing have been assigned to language, a system
of signs which masters us from beneath, behind, and within. The sign is the
intermediary between the thing and the meaning it has for us when we reflect
upon it. Just how it does this, just how a sign-thing becomes at the same
time a sign-meaning, remains still dark and unknown - we have a designa-
tion for the mediator, but the original problem of the relation between
consciousness and thing remains untouched.
If the reflexivity that defines consciousness - and at the same time defines
things by its absence from them - is the source of the problem, then it must
also be the locus of the solution. The solution, which has gradually reached
the surface of historical awareness through the work of Hegel, Sartre, and their
predecessors, is articulated by Merleau-Ponty as corporeal reflexivity, as the
reflexivity in things, pre-eminently in the body, in the flesh of being. Here
is a thing from which reflexivity is not absent. A thing which is, at the same
time, reflexive. A thing whose reflexivity need not be postulated, but can
actually be touched, felt, experienced, perceived: "the concrete emblem of a
general manner of being" [VI, 147; VI, 193] in which materiality and relation,
thingness and meaningfulness, coincide. And coincide in an elemental way,
not hooked up through a system of mediators.
Is this another magical resolution? Is this another sub-thing, another black
box, another deferral of the problem which perpetuates the problem by stuffing
it into an oxymoronical name?
Once again, the crucial role of presence comes to the fore. This coinci-
dence of matter and meaning need not be postulated and attributed to a
noumenal agency; it can be witnessed in the flesh - just by reaching out and
touching someone or something and reflecting [hyper-reflecting] on what
one has just accomplished. Without the accessibility to self and world named
by 'presence,' there is, as Derrida correctly infers, no ground for truth claims.
But the further inference that every appeal to a ground is an appeal to an
absolute ground is not a correct inference: it presupposes that all reflexivity
is the absolute self-coincidence that defines the traditional godhead. And this
presupposition is overthrown, as we have just seen, by the uncovering of
corporeal reflexivity, a reflexivity that leads, not to infinite mind, but to finite
bodies.
If one wants to overthrow traditional metaphysics, there is a better way
to do it. Metaphysical answers to questions of ultimate sources of meaning
have gone awry just because they were meta-physical. Or meta-physical in
an incomplete way. The physical embodies the meta of the meta-physical;
'meta' here means reflection upon, and the reflection went awry by setting
 THE UNCONSCIOUS 79

itself apart from its source and reifying itself, or fell short by failing to reflect
on its own tendencies to reify.
When reflexivity is located in the flesh, found there, experienced hyper-
reflectively there, transcendental philosophy can open itself to the world
empiricists have studied with such success. There is, as noted earlier, a
tendency among enthusiasts to attribute reflexivity to every thing, including
boulders and glaciers as well as plants and animals. This enthusiasm is fostered
by Merleau-Ponty's ill-considered generalization of the ontology of flesh and
the concomitant projection of reflexivity and vision on to all things. 19 One does
not know whether this moment of his thought would have survived the
editorial re-vision that precedes the decision to publish. In any case, it is, I
think, sufficient to note that this pan-animism is not a necessary feature of
Merleau-Ponty's discovery of corporeal reflexivity as the means to overcome
ontological dualism. He is a pluralist, not a monist, and there is theoretical
room in his ontology to accommodate the entire range of worldly phenomena
from the elements in the periodic table through all the complexities of organic
and inorganic being. The problem of the evolution of the organic from the
inorganic can be properly recognized as a problem of bio-chemistry - instead
of onto-theology - just as soon as one removes the ontological barrier between
reflexivity and materiality.
The point that is germane to our inquiry, however, is that corporeal reflex-
ivity provides a common ground for the thematic reflexivity designated as
consciousness and the horizonal reflexivity designated as unconscious. They
are not the same, not coincident - just as figure and ground are not coinci-
dent - and the relative clarity and distinctness of the one cannot finally absorb
the relative obscurity and rich ambiguity of the other. But just as it is possible
to thematize an erstwhile ground, so is it possible to become reflectively present
to a phenomenon originally experienced in the mode of anonymity, taken-
for-grantedness, and fascinated engagement. There is a difference between
figure and ground, between spatio-temporal presence and absence - Merleau-
Ponty calls this difference by several names: ecart, dehiscence, fission - and
here lies the truth of Derrida's differance. The untruth of differance is its
pure diacriticality - difference without positive terms - which, in denying
all significance to what is differentiated except that which is generated in
the act of differentiation, makes that act purely arbitrary, purely conventional,
and necessarily groundless. The truth is that phonemes are sounds, sounds
that can be heard even when they are not adequately differentiated, as when
we hear someone speaking in an unfamiliar tongue. The truth is that thema-
tizationldifferentiation is not completely arbitrary and ungrounded: we see
meaningful wholes because the world is autochthonously organized, because
persons have discrete bodies, because the trees in the forest are individu-
ated, one continuing to live when the other dies.
80 M. C. DILLON

IV

Here, at the end,. we return to the names and signifiers with which we began.
What of language and the unconscious? Although Merleau-Ponty did not
respond directly to Derrida by name, he does refer to Lacan in several places. 20
Since both Derrida and Lacan operate within the semiological reduction, the
response of Merleau-Ponty to Lacan's re-definition of the unconscious in terms
of the autonomy of the signifying chain has direct bearing on the critique of
Derrida being developed here. Once again, Pontalis offers a guiding insight.
He reports that "in the course of a meeting with psychoanalysts [in 1961],
Merleau-Ponty spoke of his discomfort in seeing the category of language cover
everything. 21 Pontalis then points out that "when [Merleau-Ponty] analyzes
language, he always relates it to forms of pre-linguistic expression, like
painting, where he sees meaning emerge, but in a less 'articulated way.'022
This point is crucial for those of us who ask about the relation between
Merleau-Ponty and the postmodern movement. The fact is that Merleau-Ponty
grounds the logos of language in the "nascent logos of the perceptual world"
- and postmodern writers such as Lacan and Derrida do just the reverse. In
The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty describes what is at stake here,
"the bond between the flesh and the idea," as "the most difficult point," but
he states his view in a straightforward way that leaves no room for doubt:
... the ideas we are speaking of would not be better known if we had no
body and no sensibility; it is then that they would be inaccessible to us .
. . . They could not be given to us as ideas except in a carnal experience
[VI, 149-50; VI, 196-97].
The ideas he refers to are those of "literature, music, the passions, but also
the experience of the visible world," ideas whose ideality "is not alien to the
flesh" and "streams forth ... along the contours of sensible things" [VI,
152; VI, 199-200].
In the last pages of the chapter on "The Intertwining - The Chiasm"
Merleau-Ponty describes the relation of language and flesh of the world as one
of reversibility.23 As I have attempted to show in detail elsewhere,24 the
reversibility relation is a development from the notion of Fundierung which
plays a central role in the Phenomenology of Perception. In both cases, the
relationship is one of asymmetry, with priority being assigned to one of the
relata. The privileged term in the relationship between perception and language
is the "silent" or pre-linguistic domain of "vision" or the perceptual world.
The thesis of the primacy of perception, maintained throughout the corpus
of Merleau-Ponty's writings, has clear implications for his understanding of
the unconscious and the process of symbolization or, in Merleau-Ponty's terms,
the process of expression. 2s The meaning expressed in symbols or signs or
signifiers is a meaning whose origins lie in "silent vision," in perception, in
the phenomenal world where we dwell. Our dwelling is, at the primordial level,
not yet thematically reflective in the sense of the Cartesian cogito, but
 THE UNCONSCIOUS 81

horizonally reflexive in the sense of the tacit cogito. This inherence in the flesh
of the world by the tacitly reflexive flesh that we are is an inchoate
apprehension of the sense [sens] of the world. Corporeal reflexivity is the
manner in which the world presents itself to itself through that part of itself
that we are. The meaning of the world is its touch upon us which is at the same
time our tacitly reflexive experience of being touched. Here is the intersec-
tion of meaning and being.
In expression, there is a fission in which meaning, the "ideality that is not
alien to the flesh" [VI, 152; VI, 199] but embedded within it, detaches itself
and "abandons the flesh of the body for that of language" [VI, 153; VI, 200].
Derrida is correct in associating this ideality with repetition, but he goes astray
in following Husserl's assertion that this repetition, this ability to find another
instance of the eidos (or physiognomy of the phenomenon), must be a pure
ideality preceding its instantiation. The eidos, the ideality - as the ancient
Greeks knew - is that which is seen. 26 This ability to recognize, to find again
in another instance an aspect of what one has seen before, is a pre-linguistic
ground of language. We know it is pre-linguistic because animals have the
ability. The de facto reality is supported by the de jure necessity: the meaning
resides in the flesh of the world - as it must if the world is to be meaningful.
The meaning resides in the flesh of the world, and the human body is an
instance of worldly flesh that senses itself and has developed the ability to
express what it has seen and felt. As Merleau-Ponty puts it," . . . the
structure of [the human body's] mute world is such that all the possibilities
of language are already given in it" [VI, 155; VI, 203].
Merleau-Ponty speaks of the reversibility of language and world as a
mirroring or "specular phenomenon" [VI, 154; VI, 202] in which the
typicality manifest in the perceptual world, once thematized and expressed
in language, is sedimented in the world and subsequently recognized there. 27
This is apt, at least in two respects. 28 It underscores the primacy of the original
and the derivative nature of the linguistic representation. And, secondly, it
suggests that the structure of linguistic signs reflects or re-capitulates the
structure of the world. This latter point has a direct bearing on the question
of the unconscious which I offer as a concluding thought.
If the unconscious is structured like language, that is no doubt because
language is structured like the world.

NOTES

1. In the Project of 1895, Freud "explains" the qualitaiive aspect of perceptual conscious-
ness by appeal to the periodicity of the quantity comprising the stimulus. This is the sole
account of the genesis of qualitative experience within a universe deliberately conceived
in exclusively quantitative terms. There are two problems here. (1) As noted above, the
physical attribute of the frequency of a light wave does not explain the psychical sensa-
tion of color - indeed, cannot provide that explanation so long as physical and psychical,
quantitative and qualitative are defined as mutually exclusive. (2) Even if one were to accept
82 M. C. DILLON

this account of the experience of color, it does not suffice to explain the genesis of the
rest of the qualitative domain of experience: taste, smell, signification in general, etc.
2. See M. C. Dillon, "Beyond Signifiers," in Writing the Politics of Difference, eds. H.
Silverman and D. Welton (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), pp. 177-191.
3. The interpretation I present here in truncated form is fully articulated in my essay
"Temporality: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida," in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and
Postmodernism, eds. Thomas W. Busch and Shaun Gallagher (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).
4. Or, using Husserl's term, changes in "modes of givenness [Gegebenheitsweise)."
5. The argument is patently circular. This circularity may be celebrated as an instance of
hermeneutic reasoning or decried as begging the question. In the essay cited above, I argue
that it begs the question.
6. 1. B. Pontalis, "The Problem of the Unconscious in Merleau-Ponty's Thought," trans. Wilfried
Ver Eecke and Michael Greer, in Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, Vol XVIII,
nos. I, 2, & 3 (1982-83), pp. 83-96.
7. Ibid., p. 85.
8. "Every perception takes place in an atmosphere of generality and is presented to us anony-
mously .... If I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that
one perceives in me, not that I perceive."
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 215. Henceforth PhP. Where I have altered Smith's
translations I provide the original French text.
Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 249. Henceforth PP.
9. " ... un passe originel, un passe qui n'a jamais ete present."
10. Most recently by my friend and esteemed colleague Michael Smith at the 1991 meeting
of the Merleau-Ponty Circle held at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Smith
was not so much asserting the affinity of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida as questioning it: if
Merleau-Ponty's position was as diametrically opposed to Derrida's on this issue, then
how might one account for this curious phrase? My response to him was flawed, and I
offer the text to follow here as a correction - a secondary elaboration, perhaps.
11. "La reflexion ne saisit donc elle-meme son sens plein que si elle mentionne Ie fonds irreflechi
qu'elle presuppose ... " (PP, 280).
12. "The Metaphysics of Presence: Critique of a Critique," forthcoming in Working Through
Derrida, ed. G. B. Madison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992). Also,
"Temporality: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida," in Merleau-Ponty: Hermeneutics and
Postmodernism, eds. Thomas W. Bush and Shaun Gallagher (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).
13. I assert this opposition on the basis of an interpretation of Derrida's essay, "Freud and the
Scene of Writing," elaborated in a paper entitled "The Derridian Freudian Unconscious: A
Critique" which was written as a prelude to the work at hand.
14. Jacques Derrida, "Differance," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 21-22. Emphasis added. ["Differance," in Marges
de la philosophie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972).)
15. The lexicon must be self-constructing because, within the confines of Derrida's strict
conventionalism, there is no theoretical room for the evolution of language, since every
identification or discrimination presupposes differentiation which, in turn, presupposes
signification (i.e., mediation by signifiers).
"What is written as differance then, will be the playing movement that 'produces' ...
differences .... Differance is the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin
of differences." Derrida, "Differance," op. cit., p. 11.
16. What Merleau-Ponty says about the relations between self and others applies as well to
relations both between the self and itself and between the self and its world: " ... if the
perceiving I is genuinely an I, it cannot perceive a different one; if the perceiving subject
is anonymous, the other which it perceives is equally so ... " (PhP, 356; PP, 408-09).
It is because the self is not a self-transparent transcendental subject that it can perceive
others, and it is because the anonymous self is not an unconscious placed forever beyond
 THE UNCONSCIOUS 83

reach that other selves fall within our limited ken. This statement is a straightforward
assertion that an ontology based on the radical discontinuity of mutual exclusion between
the self and its other, be that other the unconscious, other humans, or the world neces-
sarily results in a skepticism that fails to do justice to the fund of limited knowledge
without which these questions could not arise.
17. "The occult in psychoanalysis (the unconscious) is of this sort (cf. a woman in the street
feeling that people are looking at her chest, and ... closes her coat). [If she] were ques-
tioned, she would not know what she has just done. She would not know it in the language
of conventional thought, but she would know it as one knows the repressed, that is, not as
a figure, but as ground" [VI, 190; VI, 243].
18 ...... We are catching sight of the necessity of another operation besides the conversion
to reflection, more fundamental than it, of a sort of hyper-reflection that would also take
itself and the changes it introduces into the spectacle into account" [VI, 38; VI, 61].
19 ...... I feel myself looked by the things .... ", " ... The seer and the visible reciprocate
one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen" [VI, 139; VI, 183].
20. See "The Child's Relations with Others," trans. William Cobb, in The Primacy of Perception,
ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). ["Les Relations avec
autrui chez l'enfant," Les Cours de Sorbonne (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire,
1960).] Also, "Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard's L'Oeuvre de
Freud," trans. Alden L. Fisher, in Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, Vol XVIII,
nos. I, 2, & 3 (1982-83), pp. 67-72.
21. Pontalis, "The Problem of the Unconscious ... " op. cit., p. 92.
22. Ibid.
23. "When the silent vision falls into speech, and when the speech in turn, opening up a field
of the nameable and the sayable, inscribes itself in that field, in its place, according to its
truth - in short, when it metamorphoses the structures of the visible world and makes
itself a gaze of the mind, intuitus mentis - this is always in virtue of the same funda-
mental phenomenon of reversibility which sustains both the mute perception and the speech
and which manifests itself by an almost carnal existence of the idea, as well as by a
sublimation of the flesh" [VI, 154--55; VI, 202-03].
24. Merleau-Ponty's Ontology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), chap. 9, "The
Reversibility Thesis."
25. Continuing his reflection on Merleau-Ponty's analysis of painting as a form of prelin-
guistic expression, Pontalis writes the following: "Does this not signify that for
Merleau-Ponty ... the unreflected is pervaded by a primordial symbolization anterior to
the linguistic discrimination? [Is it] not the case that the sensible has a power where the
dialectic of absence and presence are already at play, and which is a core that constitutes
what we call the unconscious? Thus, one should not look for the origin of the unconscious
in the process that introduces the subject in the symbolic play. The essence of the uncon-
scious must not be equated with a discourse made of relations between discrete terms but
should rather be understood with reference to the field of perception .... "
Pontalis, "The Problem of the Unconscious ... ," op. cit., pp. 92-93.
26. Etoro, to see.
27 ...... Just as my body sees only because it is a part of the visible in which it opens forth,
the sense [sens] upon which the arrangement of the sounds opens is reflected by that arrange-
ment" [VI, 153-54] .
.. . . . Et, comme mon corps ne voit que parce qu' il fait partie du visible ou il eclot, Ie
sens sur lequel ouvre I'arrangement des sons se repercute sur lui" [VI, 201].
28. In other ways, the mirror metaphor is misleading. It led Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, to
view language as an exact replica of the world, and this ignores the transformational
aspects of the transcendental function of language. When language sediments itself in the
world, it can change the manner in which things appear to us.
 GALEN A. JOHNSON

Desire and Invisibility in "Eye and Mind":

Some Remarks on Merleau-Ponty's Spirituality*

Henceforth movement, touch, vision, applying

themselves to the other and to themselves, return
toward their source and, in the patient and silent
labor of desire, begin the paradox of expression
(Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible).l

Rene Magritte probably unwittingly wrote one of the most telling appraisals
of "Eye and Mind": "Merleau-Ponty's very brilliant thesis is very pleasant
to read, but it hardly makes one think of painting - which he nevertheless
appears to be dealing with.,,2 Indeed, "Eye and Mind" is not a straightfor-
ward study of painting, rather it is a metaphysical experiment in fashioning
a new philosophy of nature that privileges the eye of the painter over the
mind of the scientist. "Eye and Mind" condenses what it seems would have
been the continuation of The Visible and the Invisible according to Merleau-
Ponty's last plan for his new ontology: I. Visible and Invisible; II. Nature;
III. Logos. "Eye and Mind" corresponds to Part II: Nature, and lays down
telling hints regarding Part III: Logos.
In this paper, I would like us to study the unusual way Merleau-Ponty so
intricately interweaves the depth of the world with the depths of desire in
"Eye and Mind". Doing so will bring us to challenge Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard's
now landmark critical reading of Merleau-Ponty's essay published in Discours,
Figure. In the first section of the paper, we will study the themes of depth
and desire as they appear in Merleau-Ponty's study of color. In a second and
final section, we will attend to the philosopher's thoughts on the depths of
invisibility, a theme that tends to be paired with Merleau-Ponty's study of
line. We will be led into an inquiry regarding the question of spirituality in
Merleau-Ponty.

I. DEPTH AND DESIRE: COLOR

"Eye and Mind" tells us that there are the frontal phenomenological proper-
ties of the visible that reach our eye and body directly. There is also, however,
P. Burke and 1. Van der Veken (eds.), Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, 85-96.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
86 GALEN A. JOHNSON

a "profound postural latency" (EM, 187; OE, 86) submerged in the heavi-
ness of our bodies that trans-descends from below, as there is a transcendence
toward the light from above, like the phenomenon of flight that "participates
no longer in the heaviness of origins" (EM, 187; OE, 86). Merleau-Ponty
conveyed these two kinds of transcendence in the word ecart (gap, spread)
and both kinds are included in the questions of depth and desire. What is
this heavy descendence from below and what is this transcendence toward
the light from above? Depth is this paradox of contact and distance, union
and separation, presence and absence. We see this intertwining of presence
and absence, for example, in the definition of vision Merleau-Ponty gives in
the fourth part of "Eye and Mind,,:3 "Vision is not a certain mode of thought
or presence to self; it is the means given me for being absent from myself,
for being present at the fission of Being from the inside" (EM, 186; OE,81).
Or, speaking of "light's transcendence," he writes that "no more is it a question
of speaking of space and light; the question is to make space and light, which
are there, speak to us" (EM, 178; OE, 59).
The philosophical lesson that Merleau-Ponty drew from Paul Klee and
modern painting is that the thickness and voluminosity of things is not a
derivative dimension from one-dimensional perspective line or from two-
dimensional mirror surfaces. Depth is the primitive experience from which line
and plane may be abstracted. Depth is the originating or "most existential
dimension," as he had put in the Phenomenology (PhP, 256; PP, 296).
Geometry gives us position in space as a point in a three-dimensional matrix.
Depth is a matter of situation, and we will never get a sense of it by setting
a point in motion to generate a line, a second line, then a third. Depth is the
criss-crossing and simultaneous strife or tearing apart of colors, lines, and
things.4 Depth is Being rent in two. In the Phenomenology's chapter on
"Space," Merleau-Ponty concluded that breadth and height are the dimen-
sions in which things are juxtaposed, but depth is the power of things and parts
of things to envelop each other (PhP, 265; PP, 306). Two things are both
present in a simultaneous temporal wave in which both are implied but are
mutually exclusive. The foreground hides the background. The near covers the
far. Without depth, everything would be out in the open. Nothing could be
hidden. In a phrase borrowed from Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty says that without
depth, things would be "all naked" (VI, 131; VI, 173). Variously-shaped
surfaces would simply be next to one another. In the famous words of
Heraclitus, "Nature lives to hide." This is but to say that the world is
transcendence in depth. "Depth thus understood," Merleau-Ponty concludes
in "Eye and Mind", is a global locality "from which height, width, and depth
(as a third dimension) are abstracted, of a voluminosity we express in a word
when we say that a thing is there (EM, 180; OE, 65).
In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty spoke of spatial depth
as this envelopment, but also in reference to the subject and in terms of
levels. A level is the anchorage or grasp a bodily subject takes on the world
in order to gear into it. There is a customary level at which eyes achieve a
 DESIRE AND INVISIBILITY 87

maximal sharpness and at which hands assume their customary scope of

gestures. Merleau-Ponty gave this example: if we suddenly confront a human
face lying upside down on a bed with the mouth and teeth in the middle of
what we expect to be the "forehead" but is actually an inverted chin, we
must readjust our grip by walking around the bed or performing a mental
inversion. Every new level therefore presupposes a prior established level. This
finite regress quickly shows that depth is not only in the world as the encroach-
ment and rivalry among things, depth is also latent in ourselves who are a level
upon levels plunging toward an anonymous, original, and primordial space
of the self, a space of natality. The depth of things is disclosed in relation to
the depths of the self. In his recent essay titled "The Element of
Voluminousness," Edward Casey has set Merleau-Ponty's conception of depth
in tension with the account of levels offered in the Phenomenology.s I cannot
see that subject and object should be pulled apart in this way. The world makes
demands upon the self, and spatial depth in the world is naturally paired with
the levels, layers and gaps within the genesis of the self.
"It is because of depth," The Visible and the Invisible asserts, "that the things
have a flesh" (VI, 219; VI, 272). In "Eye and Mind", Merleau-Ponty seems
to prefer the word 'Being' to the word 'Flesh'. However, the term "Flesh" does
occur in Section IV of "Eye and Mind", and Merleau-Ponty introduces it
with an account of what he means by reversibility. This is how he speaks in
"Eye and Mind": Flesh is rent in two (EM, 189; OE, 91), Being is in tatters,
subject and object, opposed rivals, yet reclining and inclining mysteriously into
one another. This doubling with difference is the meaning of Flesh. The strife
and rivalry among colors, shadings, and lines is both their bond and their
separation. Between our two chiasmic hands, as between our binocular eyes
and our stereoscopic ears, there is all the difference of embracing and being
embraced, caring and being cared for. This is why the Kantian term 'synthesis'
of subject and object sometimes found in the Phenomenology of Perception
disappears from "Eye and Mind" and the other later writings in favor of the
word 'metamorphosis.' Touching is changed in being touched, transformed and
transubstantiated, Merleau-Ponty says, "through the offices of an agile hand"
(EM, 165: OE, 26). The metamorphosis of subject into object and back refers
to a strife between things and between self and things, and within the self
that does not destroy their bonding synergy, that therefore does not announce
a divorce into separate substances or categories of Being. Green rivals red,
yet there is a mysterious chemistry or alchemy, a spark, that holds them to
one another.
The doubling without fusion patterned in our own flesh prefigures our
contact with things and others. Chiasm is a powerful and pervasive ontolog-
ical truth, Merleau-Ponty believed. "Why would not this generality which
constitutes the unity of my body," he asks, "not open it to other bodies? The
handshake too is reversible .... Why would not the synergy exist among
different organisms, if it is possible within each? Their landscapes inter-
weave, their actions and their passions fit together exactly" (VI, 142; VI, 187).6
88 GALEN A. JOHNSON

Others, Merleau-Ponty says, are "my twins or the flesh of my flesh. Certainly
I do not live their life; they are definitively absent from me and I from them.
But that distance becomes a strange proximity as soon as one comes back to
the perceptible world" (S, 15; S, 22). What is this strangely turned synergy that
binds the folds of my ragged body and binds it to its twin?
The Phenomenology takes note of the way in which daytime "clear space"
slips so easily into nighttime dream space, the way, for example, rising and
falling are taken over as the movements of respiration and sexual desire. In
writing of painting, Merleau-Ponty remembers this element of air in "Eye
and Mind". "We speak of 'inspiration,'" he says, "and the word should be taken
literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, action and passion
so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between what
sees and what is seen, what paints and what is painted" (EM, 167; OE, 31-32).
Merleau-Ponty also conveys the binding synergy in the heart of depth with
images of water. He speaks of the froth and crest of waves, the water's
thickness as it bends the tiling at the bottom of a pool, and above all, the
nostalgic longing for "that place where there persists, like the mother water
in crystal, the undividedness of the sensing and the sensed" (EM, 179, 182,
163; OE, 62, 70, 20). Remembering also terms like spark, fission, explosion,
and dehiscence, we begin to see that an analysis of the synergy of the chiasmic
Flesh is moving us toward all four elements of the Greek alchemy of earth,
air, fire and water. All that remains is inclusion of earth as element from the
theme of Merleau-Ponty's late study of Husserl.
Nevertheless, it is the figure of Fire that dominates "Eye and Mind" 's
account of the synergy that clothes the tatters of rent body and Being. "There
is a human body," Merleau-Ponty writes, "when between the seeing and seen,
between the touching and the touched, between one eye and the other, between
hand and hand, a blending of some sort takes place - when the spark is lit
between sensing and sensible, lighting the fire that will not stop burning" (EM,
163: OE, 21). Flesh signifies the strife, the difference (ecart) that separates;
Fire signifies the desire that binds and unites.
In the Timaeus, Plato had offered an account of vision that included a
"rational theory of colors" that parallels Merleau-Ponty's conjunction of depth
and desire as Flesh and Fire. Merleau-Ponty would have strenuously opposed
Plato's geometrical cosmology and resolution of the material world into
geometrical forms, just as he opposed the geometrical reduction of spatial depth
to a planar third dimension. Yet there are items of great interest in the Platonic
theory of colors for Merleau-Ponty's account of Flesh as depth and desire.
According to the Timaeus, the demiurge fashioned everything that exists from
the four primal and eternal elements, earth, air, fire, and water. The material
elements themselves were created from innumerable rectangles and triangles
by the rational activity of the demiurge. Fire, the most mobile and pene-
trating of bodies, must be created from the pyramid, the triangular solid with
the fewest possible bases and the acutest angles. Therefore, Plato concluded,
colors are created from the interaction of the pyramidal form of fire with the
 DESIRE AND INVISIBILITY 89

water of the eyes. Colors are varying intensities of flame (light) which emanate
from bodies and dilate the eyes, forcing their way into the passages of the
eyes and eliciting a union of fire and water that we call tears. All sorts of colors
are generated by the moisture of tears, dependent upon the sharpness of the
flame mixing with the moisture of the eyes and ranging from the bright,
flashing, and dazzling brightness of white through the intermediate then less
acute colors of red, auburn, purple, yellow, blue, green, and black.7
As far as Merleau-Ponty's ontology of Flesh is concerned, what should
be emphasized from Plato's account of Fire and color is the conjunction that
was already established in Greek cosmological speculation between the primal
element of Fire and tears. Merleau-Ponty re-established the conjunction when
he connected the synergy of the Flesh with Fire. Of course, when Merleau-
Ponty spoke this way about Flesh and Fire, he should be understood adverbially
rather than substantially.8 We mean that things are fleshly and fiery, not that
Flesh or Fire are some all-pervasive cosmic substance, thus opening our-
selves to refutation by noting the absence of fleshly substance in a stone or
the absence of fire in a snowball. The world is made of the things we see
around us, with their surfaces, textures, colors, and lines. Flesh or Fire, or Flesh
as Fire, is an "incarnate principle" of doubling, difference and desire crocheted
into all that is there. Jean-Franlr0is Lyotard, whose Discours, Figure is helpful
about so much in "Eye and Mind", somehow completely missed both the
difference and the desire in Merleau-Ponty's treatment of depth in "Eye and
Mind". Merleau-Ponty's account does not overlook the gaps, splits, and
disunities within world and self, eliminating what is strange, foreign and Other
in favor of conceptual sameness, and Merleau-Ponty's account has much to
do with desire, dreams, and Eros.9 It was Merleau-Ponty who said that painting
mixes up the imaginary and the real, dream space and clear space, "in laying
out its oneiric universe of carnal essences" (EM, 169; OE, 35).10

II. DEPTH AND INVISIBILITY: LINE

The search for depth does not end when we have sunk down into the
heaviness of origins, into the thick textures of color and desire. Depth also
invokes a lightness like the phenomenon of flight that "participates no longer
in the heaviness of origins" (EM, 187; OE, 86). "The proper essence of the
visible," "Eye and Mind" says, "is to have a layer of invisibility in the strict
sense, which makes it present as a certain absence" (EM, 187; OE, 85). Though
the Greek alchemy outlines the contours of Being in "Eye and Mind", Merleau-
Ponty was not content to say earth, air, fire and water, he said "Flesh." In many
ways, the term Flesh (la chair: meat) evokes a carnality one would take as
opposed to invisibility or spirituality.
The Phenomenology of Perception took the position that desire is an
"atmosphere" of the sexual body (PhP, 168; PP, 196). It surrounds our
interactions like an odor or a sound, like a kerosene waiting to be ignited.
90 GALEN A. JOHNSON

In this ambiguous atmosphere, a wisp of hair or wiggle of a toe can be

transformed into a sudden sensuality. Thus, Merleau-Ponty rejects the thesis
that desire is a positivity, a thing or force in our bodies like an instinct or
mechanical unconscious that overtakes us. Likewise, he also rejects Sartre's
thesis that desire is a lack or sheer nothingness, the negative intuition of
absence. Rather, desire is a boundary figured in the joints between our bodies
and the world. It is what Merleau-Ponty called an "existential" (VI, 232: VI,
285). Desire is a boundary visible, that is to say, an in-the-visible, that can
be attended to but is for the most part forgotten. The visible is pregnant with
this atmosphere of invisibility.
There need be little mystery over why Merleau-Ponty was not content
with the word Being or with the Greek alchemy. The Milesian sense of element
meant that which is always presupposed but always forgotten, that from
which everything comes and to which everything returns. Water was an element
as the atmosphere in which fish and all things have their origin, life, and to
which they return in death. The Greek elements were, therefore, eternal.
Merleau-Ponty's term Flesh was meant to convey a genesis and growth in
contrast to this eternality. In the "Working Notes", the philosopher was very
direct: "I call the world flesh," he wrote, "in order to say that it is a
pregnancy of possibles" (VI, 250; VI, 304). Paired with this term "preg-
nancy" we also find the birthing term "labor:" "in the patient and silent labor
of desire, begins the paradox of expression" (VI, 144: VI, 189). The painter's
vision, "Eye and Mind" says, "is a continued birth" (EM, 168; OE, 32). Visible
color and line are a pregnancy, a labor of desire that is the birthplace of
expression.
Thus it is that the pregnancy of the Flesh with expression renders this
new ontological term as a correlative of the old term, Logos. Together, Flesh
and Logos are icons of a Biblical theme - "and the Word became Flesh and
dwelt among us," and these two words suggest to us an inquiry regarding depth
and spirituality in Merleau-Ponty. We recall the range of the word esprit in
the title of "Eye and Mind" - consciousness, wit, spirit. This is the term chosen
by Jean Hyppolite, French translator of Hegel, as the closest available French
term to convey the sense even of Hegel's Geist. The attentive reader must
also wonder about the pervasive sacramental language of "transubstantia-
tion" found in "Eye and Mind", so readily related to the creedal phrase, "maker
of all things visible and invisible," found in the title for Merleau-Ponty's last
work.
In writing of Bergson in Signs, Merleau-Ponty did not flinch from speaking
of God as element; God is, Merleau-Ponty wrote, "the element of joy or love
in the sense that water and fire are elements" (S, 190: S, 239). During the
course of his Inaugural Lecture, Merleau-Ponty seems to have been speaking
somewhat for himself when he said: "Everything happens, according to
Bergson, as if man encountered at the roots of his constituted being a
generosity which is not a compromise with the adversity of the world and
which is on his side against it" (IPP, 26-27; EP, 33).
 DESIRE AND INVISIBILITY 91

However, if we are to interrogate "Eye and Mind" in relation to Spirit,

such an inquiry must proceed under the light of two cautions. First, the
invisible is not the non-visible. The word "invisible" is perfectly chosen.
The lines of visible things are doubled by a lining of invisibility, and this
in-visible lining is in the visible. Merleau-Ponty stresses this, and by doing
so de-centers the ordinary religious or aesthetic search away from the pursuit
of an invisibility that would be a separate reality, a heavenly world apart
from this world. Merleau-Ponty's spirituality, therefore, remains quite
consistent with his early break with Catholicism and his 1936 withdrawal from
Emmanuel Mounier and the journal, Esprit.l1 For Merleau-Ponty, spirit could
never mean that distortion of God into the omniscient and absolute Other,
nor the distortion into a rationalistic principle of sufficient reason. This sort
of false piety or philosophic absolutism is the exact opposite of the philoso-
pher's basic sensitivities centering on contingency, porosity, openness and
genesis. Paradoxical as it may sound, therefore, Merleau-Ponty's spirituality
is quite consistent with a certain qualified atheism.
This leads us to the second caution. Our inquiry must be permeated by
Merleau-Ponty's description: invisibility is "present as a certain absence." This
caution draws Merleau-Ponty's thought on Spirit close to Nietzsche's reflec-
tions on the absent God. In fact we do find references to "abyssal Being"
and to the "unfathomable God" in the text of "Eye and Mind" (EM, 177;
DE, 58): "God's being is for us an abyss" (EM, 177; DE, 56). The Notes to
The Visible and the Invisible cite Heidegger: the abyss is upsurge of a Hoheit
which supports from above, "we fall into the high" (VI, 250; VI, 303-304).
Not only should the Nietzschean themes be kept in view, we should also
remember that the first hints of the movement from a phenomenology of
reversibility to an ontology of Flesh occur in the Epilogue to The Adventures
of the Dialectic, where Merleau-Ponty amplified the meaning of reversibility
as reciprocal action, inside and outside, and perpetual genesis. The Marxian
context is reflected in a remarkable text on flesh and sublimation from Marx's
German Ideology: "In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends
from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say,
we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as
narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh .
. . . The phantoms formed in the human brain are sublimates of their material
life-process.,,12 Merleau-Ponty's elemental term Flesh marks out a spiritu-
ality that is the invisible lining of the visible line, but a paradoxically turned
spirituality that has much to do with the absence of Spirit in our times and
the "hammer" of Nietzsche's genealogical destruction of idols and the "power
of flesh" in the social criticisms of Marx.
With these cautions before us, first comes the question regarding the visible
line, then the question regarding the invisible lining given birth by the line.
What is a line? What is a line of thought? To whom belong these lines from
Merleau-Ponty, or these that we now set down? A line, Merleau-Ponty says,
sets in motion a certain disequilibrium within the space of a surface, within
92 GALEN A. JOHNSON

space. It balances and unbalances, it symbolizes, it is a generating axis for

perception, representation, creation, self-understanding, a cultural world and
a relationship with natural space, earth and sky. Lines, like color, trace a
metaphysics of space.
In short, Merleau-Ponty says, a line is a certain value. It is a "ray of the
world" that impacts on vision and gives vision "the value of an index of the
curvature of space" (VI, 247; VI, 301). In "Eye and Mind"'s discussion of line,
Merleau-Ponty continues his protest against the prosaic line that narrows our
values and flattens our vision. Almost nowhere in a landscape or seascape
do we see straight and inflexible lines. Rather we see irregular curves, swirls,
slopes, thickets, and waves, the tangible and visible thickness of things
concealing and encroaching upon one another. There are some lines, or
approximately so: the sheered-off edge of a rock or cliff, the towering trunk
of a pine tree, and at sea there is the expansive line of the horizon. There is,
however, no domination of straight line. Among humanly manufactured things
appear linear rigidity and angularity: the power lines and erect poles that
lord over the trees, the angular pitch of house roofs, the sharp edges of
apartment buildings and the lines of the roads, signs, and stripings they bear.
The beauty and spirituality of the natural scene is marked and marred by the
touch of linear rationality.
Merleau-Ponty contended that prosaic line is not capable of generating
spatial depth or nurturing a natural and human world, that therefore a society
built about prosaic line is an artificial one-dimensional society lacking depth.
It lacks the dialogue and dialectic of perspectives necessary to genuine thought,
it lacks the many voiced plurality necessary to just politics, it lacks the porosity
and openness necessary to creative, integrated life with nature, and it lacks
the wonder and meditation necessary to a genuine spirituality. The priority
of linear rationality in our seeing and thinking has today culminated in our
highly visual and kinetic culture of the television and space age. Lines of
sight and lines of thought have become actual lines of communication and lines
of flight. That combination of space flight and tele-vision inscribes the meaning
of our technological epoch in the same way Stonehenge or the Great Sphinx
inscribed the meaning of past ages. These buildings and these launchings,
on the one hand expressions of the power of the mathematical-mechanical line,
are, on the other, expressions of a certain cultural spiritual emptiness.
Merleau-Ponty sought to replace the artificial, mechanical line with the
sinuous, flexuous, bending and swaying lines of bodies, of melodies, of lineage.
This is the line of chiasm. 13 His goal in "Eye and Mind" was to free line, to
"let line muse" or "to go line" (d' aller ligne), in the words of Klee. 14 He
thought that we have available to us a resource for understanding the less
prosaic and more flexuous line in the drawings and paintings of modern
artists as over against the thinking and inventions of modern science and
technology. In addition to the bending and swaying, vibrating, inclining and
reclining, criss-crossing lines of the paintings and drawings of Leonardo, Klee,
Matisse, and Giacometti, we can also keep in view the growing. expanding
 DESIRE AND INVISIBILITY 93

and contracting, sinuous lines of dance and the polyphonic, harmonic lines
of music. Merleau-Ponty was struck with modem painting where he found
ways of drawing and building that free the line and thereby disclose the
invisible essence of natural things, rather than dominating or distorting by
imposing a univocal, fixed perspective. One solution, shown in the arabesques
of Henri Matisse's lines, moves toward simplification, to discover a single
organic line that discloses what a thing is (Matisse, Bather with long hair).
Another solution moves toward complexity, as shown in the tangled lines of
Alberto Giacometti's drawings in which a face emerges from a multitude of
relatively straight and curved lines drawn from a host of different positions
and planes (Giacometti, Portrait d'Aime Maeght, 1960). A third solution is
shown in the swaying and bending, playful and childish hieroglyphs of Klee's
late works (Klee, Park near Lucerne, 1938). Leonardo himself was well aware
of the more flexuous and organic, simple or complex line, as appear in his
drawings of storms, clouds, and faces.
If line is a ray of the world that figures a way of valuing, have we not already
spoken of a first in-visibility? The invisible lining of things is this order or
disorder, beauty or horror, the calls of ethical concern. Things express an
imperative force that commands our respect or demands our repair. This is
easier to encounter with living, organic things, especially where we encounter
a face with eyes that are filled with joy or heartache or that are vacant and
empty. We also rightly speak of the "face" of the earth, for natural places
are anchorages in the world with horizon and boundaries. These rays of the
world are a demand, a call, an imperative for eye and mind, for all who see,
paint and think.
By following Merleau-Ponty's protest against prosaic line and fixed,
univocal perspective, we have become entangled with the dominant way invis-
ibility operates in Merleau-Ponty's writings. Invisibility is that which is not
seen but can be seen. It is not seen because we have forgotten to look, or
because our linear, fixed seeing and thinking is entrenched and blots out the
sky. However, the term "invisibility" also operates on other levels in Merleau-
Ponty's writings. We know that while Merleau-Ponty was writing "Eye and
Mind" during the summer, 1960, he was also recording his notes for The
Visible and the Invisible. In May, 1960, Merleau-Ponty wrote a four-part outline
of invisibility:
The invisible is
(1) what is not actually visible, but could be (hidden or inactual aspects
of the thing - hidden things, situated "elsewhere" - "Here" and "else-
where")
(2) what, relative to the visible, could nevertheless not be seen as a thing
(the existentials of the visible, its dimensions, its non-figurative inner
framework)
(3) what exists only as tactile or kinesthetically, etc.
(4) the lekta, the Cogito (VI, 257; V,311).
94 GALEN A. JOHNSON

As we would expect, as soon as Merleau-Ponty had jotted this down, he imme-

diately denied that this outline should be construed as a logic or architectonic
of the invisible.
Merleau-Ponty's spirituality and the aesthetic insight he found in painting
pertains to noticing the hidden things, having eyes that genuinely see and minds
that genuinely think. It also pertains to the lekta and the cogito. Lekta is not
the same as the Cogito, as their grouping above might lead one to think.
Lekta is from the Greek noun lektos, and means both (i) that which is gathered,
chosen and picked out, and (ii) that which is capable of being spoken. Vision
is a gathering that is also a speaking. Merleau-Ponty is thinking along a path
similar to Heidegger's reflections on legein and logos. The flesh of the world
is gathered as the flesh of the word. Words name things and inscribe their
meanings when they are absent or long after they have perished. A word is
not only a spoken vocal line or written line on a surface, it is a transcendent
line tracing the Wesen of things. Merleau-Ponty explicitly denies that this is
a hylomorphism (VI, 250; VI, 304), yet undoubtedly Aristotle's account of form
and matter is the one Merleau-Ponty has in mind as an approximation for
the intertwining of word and world. There is an essence of red, which is not
the essence of green. This essence, though, like a painting, is accessible only
through the seeing, and not through a thinking separate from the seeing. The
essence exists (este) in the red, Merleau-Ponty says, "like the memory of a
high school building is in its odor" (VI, 247; VI, 301). For the painter whose
canvas is given a title, Merleau-Ponty says there are two possibilities. Either
one may decide, with Paul Klee, to hold to the integrity of the genesis of
the visible on a surface, to the principle of absolute painting, and then bestow
a title post facto as Klee used to do in his christening ceremonies. Or one
may decide, with Matisse, to put into a single line of a drawing the visible
essence of a thing as nude, as face, or flower (EM, 184; OE, 75-76). In
either case, the title is in the frame and word and world are interlaced.
Invisibility, Merleau-Ponty says, is also the cogito, an invisibility to myself.
My back shall always be hidden from my view. I am always on "this side"
of my body. This is a blindness of consciousness in principle. The lines of
sight and representation traced out by the eyes in vision and the hand in
drawing extend outward toward things. Now we seek to stop them and turn
them around, to reverse the lines of sight and make them bounce back so
we can see our own eyes and our own face. This is the painterly fascination
with mirrors. The mirror is a technical object that outlines the metaphysical
structure of flesh. In the mirror, the entire room is digested in reverse, what
is on my left becomes what is on my right. In the mirror I am both seeing
and visible. This is why, Merleau-Ponty says, artists have so often liked to
draw themselves in the act of painting, adding to what they saw of things
what the things saw of them. This is the metamorphosis of seeing into seen
that defines both the flesh and the painter's vocation (EM, 169; OE, 34).
Late in his life, Leonardo drew his self-portrait, a mysterious work of severity
and secrecy. Leonardo must have worked while he looked at himself in a
mirror. Yet the face he saw in the mirror was not his face as others were
 DESIRE AND INVISIBILITY 95

able to see it, it was his face frozen and reversed. IS My own invisibility is
invested in the bodies of the others who see me. The self is divided from its
Source, yet there persists a longing in the ragged and tattered folds of our
bodies, lives, and history. This is the longing for vision, for self-comprehen-
sion, and this longing is the desire for the Other.

In the end we have done little more than point out three lines of thought as
a gesture toward the invisible lining in the visibles: the call of ethical care
for a world that has not been seen, the gathering of the word, and the question
of self and its Source. Flesh is the pregnancy of the world, mother and child
rent in two. This doubling with difference, without fusion, is the meaning of
Flesh, and reversibility is this mysterious synergy of erotic desire that heals
the strife between the ragged folds of my body, between my body and yours.
As the visual is a metamorphosis of desire, so this desire is transubstanti-
ated into the mystery of invisibility, of the word, of the command and criticism,
of self-comprehension.
Interrogating Gilbert Ryle in 1960, Merleau-Ponty stated: "The question for
a philosopher is not so much to know if God exists or does not exist ... as
to know what one understands by God, what one wishes to say in speaking
of God:,16 Merleau-Ponty remained aware of the mysterious depth of the visible
that is its invisible lining. This mystery and this despair had become the
meaning of his philosophy, as of ours. This too, as Merleau-Ponty would
say, is the discovery not of a thing, a force, or a destiny; "it is the discovery
of a questioning, and, you might say, a kind of anguish."17

NOTES:

* I would like to express my thanks to Professor Patrick Burke of Seattle University for sharing
with me his original reading of Merleau-Ponty's late ontology in both seminars and
conversations at the University of Louvain during my Spring, 1991 sabbatical leave from
the University of Rhode Island.
1. The opening quotation from Merleau-Ponty may be found in the English translation of
The Visible and the Invisible, p. 144, and in the French original on p. 189. Hereafter, the
writings of Merleau-Ponty will be cited within the body of the text according to the
following abbreviations, English citation first, followed by the French:
English:
EM "Eye and Mind," trans. Carleton Dallery in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James
M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 159-190.
PhP Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1962).
IPP In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1964).
S Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
VI The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968).
French:
EP Eloge de la philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1953).
OE L'Oeil et l'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
PP Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945).
96 GALEN A. JOHNSON

S Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960)

VI Le Visible et l'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
2. Rene Magritte, "Letter to Alphonse de Waehlens, April 28, 1962," in Magritte: Ideas and
Images, Harry Torczyner, ed., Richard Miller, trans. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,
1977), p. 55.
3. In "Eye and Mind", Merleau-Ponty cites Klee's Journal translated by P. Klossowski in 1959.
The German edition that appeared in 1956 was edited by Ralph Mannheim and subse-
quently translated into English in 1961 as Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye (New York: George
Wittenhorn).
4. Cf. Robert Delaunay, "Light" (1912), in The New Art of Color: The Writings of Robert
and Sonia Delaunay, ed. Arthur A. Cohen, trans. David Shapiro and Arthur A. Cohen
(New York: The Viking Press), pp. 81-86.
5. Cf. Edward Casey, "The Element of Voluminousness," in Merleau-Ponty Vivant (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1991), pp. 1-29. I have benefited greatly from Professor
Casey's essay, as well as from Anthony Steinbock's, "Merleau-Ponty's Concept of Depth",
Philosophy Today, (Winter, 1987), pp. 336-351.
6. Here is the reply to Levinas's criticisms of Merleau-Ponty's views on alterity. See Levinas's
essays titled "Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty" and "Sensibility," recently trans-
lated by Michael B. Smith in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, ed. Galen A. Johnson
and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. 53-66.
7. Plato, Timaeus (53b-67d), trans. Benjamin Jowett in The Collected Dialogues of Plato,
ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).
8. This point is developed with great care by Martin Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), Chapter Nine: "The Reversibility Thesis."
9. Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard's insightful discussion of Merleau-Ponty's late work, including the
development of these criticisms, may be found in Discours, Figure, 4th edition (Paris:
Editions Klincksieck, 1971, 1985), especially pp. 18-23 and 53-59.
10. Charles Baudelaire, "The Desire to Paint", from Prose Poems, translated in Baudelaire,
Rimbaud, Verlaine: Selected Verse and Poems, ed. Joseph M. Bernstein (New York: Citadel
Press), p. 147.
11. For an account of Merleau-Ponty's involvement with the "friends of Esprit, cf. Theodore
F. Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendentale: La genese de la philosophie
de Maurice Merleau-Ponty jusqu il la "Phenomenologie de la perception" (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 25-27.
12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Section A, in The Marx-Engels
Reader, Robert C. Tucker, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1972), p. 154.
13. Cf. Samuel B. Mallin, "Chiasm, Line and Art," in Merleau-Ponty: Critical Essays (The
Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, University Press of America, 1989),
pp. 219-50. I have also been aided by an advance copy of Michael Munchow's paper,
"Painting and Invisibility - Merleau-Ponty's Line," forthcoming in The Journal of the British
Society for Phenomenology.
14. Cf. Henri Michaux, Aventures de /ignes. Cited by Merleau-Ponty in "Eye and Mind,"
translated by Carleton Dallery in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1964), p. 183.
15. On reversibility in self-portraits, cf. Hugh Silverman, "Cezanne's Mirror Stage," in British
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 40, 4 (Summer, 1982), pp. 369-379.
16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy (1960)," in Texts and
Dialogues: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hugh Silverman and James Barry, eds. (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991), p. 66. This item originally appeared in French as
"Phenomenologie contre The Concept of Mind" in La philosophie analytique (Paris: Minuit,
1960).
17. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Discovery of History (1956)," in Texts and Dialogues: Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, p. 128. This item originally appeared as "La decouverte de I'histoire" in
Les Philosophes celebres (Paris: Lucien Mazenod, 1956).
 PART III

Expression, Creation, and Interpretation

 EDWIN WEIHE

Merleau-Ponty's Doubt: The Wild of Nothing

... where every something, being blent together,

Turns to a wild of nothing, save of joy,
Express'd and not express'd.
Merchant of Venice, III.ii, 183-185

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness! was published serially in Blackwood's

Magazine in 1899. At that time Paul Cezanne, in his last years at Aix-en-
Provence, was beginning Les Grandes Baigneuses, with its anxious nudes
playing on the border of earth and blue air - figures we will see again, in
fact, in the young Picasso. Unlike Picasso, Cezanne rarely painted from a
model. He mistrusted women, as did Conrad's protagonist, Marlowe, who
thought they were "out of touch with truth," living in a world of their own "too
beautiful altogether," which, like the shallow spectacle in the Impressionist's
eye, "would go to pieces before the first sunset" (C, 27).
Conrad disliked Cezanne, and the Impressionists generally, preferring the
peasant realist, Millet, the only painter he ever mentioned as a model. Still,
scholars insist on describing much of Heart of Darkness as impressionistic.
They cite particularly the novel's climactic section in which Marlowe, com-
manding his small steamer up the Congo river, approaches the Inner Station
and finally meets the infamous Kurtz who has "stepped over the threshold
of the invisible" and, Marlowe hopes, has something to say. Whether Heart
of Darkness is impressionist or post-impressionist, Cezannean, in fact, is
something the perspectives and language of Merleau-Ponty's "Cezanne's
Doubt,,2 may help us decide. Our approach here is to reveal Marlowe's journey
as a metaphor for the very process of expression, the artist's search for
something to say, risking the "horror" there will be nothing. And if we fail
to arrive safely, perhaps we may, if not shed new light, at least remind
ourselves what Merleau-Ponty meant by "expression" and what it might imply
about the expressive approach of his own philosophical essay.
Heart of Darkness begins with five men, the frame-narrator among them,
at rest on the deck of the Nellie, a cruising yawl, waiting for the tide in the
sea-reach of the Thames. Marlowe sits crossed-legged in the pose of the
P. Burke and 1. Van der Veken (eds.), Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, 99-107.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
100 EDWIN WEIHE

meditating Buddha, an early reminder of Marlowe's ascetic disposition and

openness to heightened reality. The tale he tells is not the Ancient Mariner's
penitent repetition. Rather, one assumes it is a modulation of earlier versions
now in doubt, as Marlowe returns again to the lived experience, the mass of
color, and the "chaos of sensation." In fact, the novel's narrative frames
signal these adjustments to the telling, each more uncertain than the next, begin-
ning with Conrad himself who, choosing silence, defers to his frame-narrator,
who soon gives the nod to the meditative Marlowe who recounts another
one of his "inconclusive experiences." Marlowe will eventually succumb to
a troubling uncertainty in his own voice, as he grows anxious to bow, with
unabashed reverence and relief, to Kurtz's supreme Voice. These voices, like
brush strokes temporally sequenced, advance the narrative first to Brussels,
the sepulchre city, where Marlowe secures the Congo assignment arranged
by his Aunt (and, ominously, has his skull measured), then quickly, by means
of French steamer, down the African coast. That is where he witnesses the
righteous man-of-war, with phallic can(n)on incomprehensively firing into
the continent, a foreshadowing of not only the impotence of colonial exploita-
tion, but the resistance of nature, with its "inexhaustible reserves," to an
ideological assault.
It is thirty miles up river to the First Station, where the composed and
unseeing chief accountant, in his high starched collar, has fortified himself
against a world of moral and physical decay. The shadows of enslaved natives
lie among the machinery: the undersized railway truck on its back, the rail
track rusted and deadened, a boiler "wallowing in the grass" - more images
on the colonialist's failed logic. This is where Marlowe first hears of Kurtz,
the mysterious, "remarkable" superagent far up river at the Inner Station,
and to whom Marlowe begins to attach his hope for a redeeming idea, and a
magnificent voice to express it. From there Marlowe makes the fifteen day trek
to the Central Station, where he finds the unoccupied boiler maker, the brick-
maker who does not make bricks, the hollow General Manager, and the
steamboat, to which he had been assigned, now underwater, a hole in its
side.
And here, where things fall apart, Marlowe realizes:
What I really wanted was rivets, by Heaven. Rivets. To get on with the work
- to stop the hole. Rivets I wanted. There were cases of them down at the
coast - cases - piled up - burst - split! You kicked a loose rivet at every
second step on that station yard on the hillside. Rivets had rolled into the
grove of death. You could fill your pockets with rivets for the trouble of
stooping down - and there wasn't one rivet to be found where it was wanted.
We had plates that would do, but nothing to fasten them with." And then
Marlowe adds, so that the metaphor of rivets is not lost on us, that "rivets
were what Kurtz really wanted, if he had only known it (C, 42).
And here at the Central Station, Marlowe comes upon Kurtz's painting, a
small sketch in oils, "representing a woman, draped and blindfolded, carrying
 THE WILD OF NOTHING 101

a lighted torch. The background was somber - almost black. The movement
of the woman was stately, and the effect of the torchlight on the face was
sinister" (C, 39). While this is unmistakably a metaphor for European
colonialism, bringing light to the savage darkness while it is itself morally
blinded, it also suggests the eagerness of expression for godhood, to speak
the illuminating first Word which, though the speaker is blinded, touches the
real.
The approach to the Inner Station, and to Kurtz, three hundred miles up
river, is described in increasingly suggestive and naggingly imprecise language,
words and phrases which seem less and less riveted to things, and, like
haunting, drumbeat music, more riveting as disembodied sounds. Even Kurtz,
toward whom Marlowe's steamboat crawls in this darkness, seems at this point
disembodied. "He was just a word for me," Marlowe says. "I did not see the
man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story?
Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making
a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-
sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a
tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible
... " (C, 42). It is interesting that now, at night, to his captive listeners on
board the Nellie, Marlowe himself is only a disembodied voice, causing in
them a "faint uneasiness."
Many of Conrad's critics and biographers share this uneasiness. They
complain of the novel's foggishness, its "misty edges," the many unforgive-
ably obscure passages, particularly as Marlowe approaches the Inner Station,
which are either philosophically overburdened or simply emotionally
insistent upon a presence which cannot be described. Conrad's apologists argue
that, as a powerful dream of self-discovery, Heart of Darkness is necessarily
ambiguous, as a dream is ambiguous, and that consciousness, after all, is no
match for the dark immensity confronting it. Conrad's language of uncer-
tainty exposes, at the boundary where truth might finally be glimpsed, the limits
of language itself - reinforcing, in fact, Marlowe's own stated conviction
that his "telling must fall short of perfect truth," must settle for the impres-
sionist's integrity of sensations unspoiled by concepts and categories. It is
exactly these sensations, or immediate impressions, which Marlowe seems
to cling to, intuitively or consciously, as the "redeeming facts of life." At
the helm, he fixes his steady gaze on the steamboat's prow and the
immediacy of the river itself with its snags and shallows, its real, present
dangers, which the pilot, his consciousness now on task, can navigate.
But there, along the river, at the edge, in the bush, and deeper still, in the
immense jungle, we come upon that visual vagueness again, and aural
ambiguity, perhaps of humans screaming as much in sorrow as in fear, of drums
beating, or finally, at the Inner Station, of Kurtz's mad mutterings, which
Conrad's language is at a loss to credibly translate. Is it possible that, in
taking his hero up the snaking river toward the boundary of what he calls
primordial reality, where the once solid world suddenly vibrates with
102 EDWIN WEIHE

irreducible contingency, Conrad had been tempted beyond the mere

atmosphere of sensory impressions, and written himself into a dark corner?
After all, every painting risks madness, and every voyage the heartbeat at
the edge of silence.
He had his doubts, certainly. In a despondent letter to Cunninghame Graham
in 1898, Conrad suggests that "we don't even know our own thoughts. Half
the words we use have no meaning whatsoever and of the other half each
man understands each word after his own folly and conceit.... Thoughts
vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as
shadowy as the hope of tomorrow - only the string of my platitudes seems
to have no end" (C, 127). And while a year later he stressed that he did not
start the novel with an "abstract notion" but with "definite images," he writes
apologetically to Elsie Hueffer in 1902: "What I distinctly admit is the fault
of having made Kurtz too symbolic or rather symbolic at all. But the story
being mainly a vehicle for conveying a batch of personal impressions I gave
the rein to my mental laziness and took the line of least resistance" (C, 123).
Has Conrad failed? Succumbing lazily as he claims he has to a batch of
personal impressions, has he floundered at the Inner Station, hesitated at the
boundary of his own craft, just where he promised to bring the impatient reader
within at least touching range of the indescribable? Has the anxious artist come
all this way for nothing?
Merleau-Ponty tells us that Cezanne's own "nature was basically anxious."
His morbid constitution, reclusiveness, nervousness, suggest perhaps a
schizophrenia of the sort we might discover in Conrad, and may account for
the inhuman character of his paintings, his radical devotion to the visible world
and the alienation from humanity which that devotion seemed to require.
Still, Merleau-Ponty argues, it is on the "basis of his nervous weaknesses"
that "Cezanne conceived a form of art which is valid for everyone"
(SNS, 11).
We are reminded that Cezanne's first canvasses were painted fantasies,
dreamscapes projected outward from the dreamer, but, thanks to the
Impressionists, particularly Pissarro, he soon turned his attention away from
the studio to nature itself and to the exact study of appearances. The
Impressionists had settled for immediate appearances and, to render them
accurately, limited their palates to the seven colors of the spectrum, modified
local colors in nature by contrasting them with other local colors, height-
ened color intensity by eliciting its complement in nature, and created vibrant
hues by color juxtapositioning. But Cezanne was not satisfied with what this
achieved. In depicting the atmosphere, the Impressionists had, in effect,
submerged the object, causing it to lose the solidity and weight which made
it real.
Cezanne's aim, then, was to truly represent the object, to discover it again
behind the atmosphere, but without giving up its sensuous surface. But how
was it possible to capture both the surface and the weighted depth of things,
since weight and depth were traditionally achieved by the imposition of line,
 THE WILD OF NOTHING 103

and line, the conceptual framing, diminished the vibrant immediacy of color?
Emile Bernard called this "Cezanne's suicide" because he had denied himself
the means to attain the reality he sought.
Cezanne's approach, as we know, was to employ "graduated colors, a
progression of chromatic nuances across the object, a modulation of colors
which stay close to the object's form and to the light it receives" (SNS, 12).
Sacrificing exact contour, he gave priority to color over line. The result, as
Merleau-Ponty tells us, is an object which is "no longer covered by
reflections and lost in its relationships to the atmosphere and to other objects."
Instead, "the object seems subtly illuminated from within," producing an
"impression of solidity and material substance" (SNS, 12). The object becomes
meaningful in the action of our expressing it.
It emerges, then, like a first word. The painter's task is to depict this activity
of emerging, of matter taking on form, of order arising out of spontaneous,
rather than imposed, organization, so that the stable object and the shifting
manner in which it appears are inseparable. The result is a lived object, vibrant
and vibrating (which the warmer blues, in particular, encourage). We do not
see it with absolute clarity because it swells, indicating several outlines
simultaneously; it oscillates, contorts, germinates, in fact, as in a primordial
world.
The method to achieve this aim involves not only an expansion of the palate,
but the use of contour. Unlike the exacting, superficial line, contour is simply
suggested by color modulation and several outlines from which our eye,
rebounding among them, captures a share. The contour, then, takes the eye
to the ideal limit toward which the sides of an object - an apple, for instance
- recede in depth, the dimension in which the object is presented (has come
forth, we might say) as an "inexhaustible reality full of reserves" (SNS, 15).
In sum, the structure of contours vibrates as it is formed from the modula-
tion of colors. "Outline and color are no longer distinct from each other,"
Cezanne tells us. "When the color is at its richest, the form has reached
plentitude" (SNS, 15). With form at plentitude, the object seems not the
creation of our senses, but the source of them, the center from which they
radiate, the object presenting itself as presence, the lived object, the real.
This becomes immediately clear to us when we see any of the still-lifes
of the 1880's and the studies of La Montagne Ste.-Victoire, or, at the end of
the decade, the portrait of Madame Cezanne, where the personality of the
subject is seen, as Merleau-Ponty notes, "in a glance" - thought and vision
inseparable, in the primordial experience of the painting. The primordial reality
is pre-interpreted, containing mystery, renewed every time we look at someone,
at the person's "appearing in nature," going, as we must, straight to the thing
the appearance presents (SNS, 16).
The painter, Merleau-Ponty tells us, converts into visible objects "the
vibration of appearances which is the cradle of things. Only one emotion is
possible for this painter - the feeling of strangeness - and only one lyricism
- that of the continual rebirth of existence" (SNS, 18).
104 EDWIN WEIHE

Perhaps this is why many viewers find Cezanne's paintings cold, and
mistaking method for ends, intellectual. The objects in his paintings seem
frozen, hesitating "at the beginning of the world," the "base of the inhuman
nature upon which man has installed himself" - what there is, in short, before
we have found any use for it, or imposed any meaning on it. It is an
unfamiliar world, then, "in which one is uncomfortable and which forbids
all human effusiveness" (SNS, 16). We cannot relax in a Cezanne painting.
Merleau-Ponty's Cezanne brings us back to the Inner Station, for in Conrad,
at least, this is the boundary of the primordial world. Early in the novel
Marlowe has reminded us of the Roman legionnaires who, in the very old
times, ventured across the Gauls to what was there before London, the very
end of the world, the river of sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages, the
mysteries in the "midst of the incomprehensible." And now Marlowe has
ventured up another river to another place which, when Conrad was only a
boy, was a white space, like a blank canvas, on the map of Africa. At the
Inner Station, he was "at the farthest point of navigation and the culminating
point" of his experience (C, 21).
This is, of course, the mythical night-sea voyage in which the Hero journeys
to the center of the earth or underneath the sea to encounter the dark forces
of evil, or unreason, or unconsciousness, to be reborn. It is a journey to and
back from the root of things.
What Marlowe experiences is the station at the extremity, and the forest:
"red gleams that seemed to sink and rise from the ground amongst confused
columnar shapes of intense blackness .... The monotonous beating of a big
drum filled the air with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration ... a strange
narcotic effect upon my half-awake senses" (C, 79). This "heavy, mute spell
of the wilderness" - this alone, Marlowe tells us, had beguiled Kurtz's
"unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations .... He had kicked
himself loose of the earth," the visible world itself, and now Marlowe, normally
sure-footed, faces him, confused, not knowing whether he himself "stood on
the ground or floated in the air" (C, 82).
And so there Kurtz is. And what, after all, has he seen with his "fiery,
longing eyes," that stare which "could not see the flame of the candle, but
was wide enough to embrace the whole universe"? (C, 86). Marlowe assures
us it is something which had candor, conviction, "a vibrating note of revolt
in its whisper ... the appalling face of a glimpsed truth" (C, 86). It is not
his own extremity he remembers best,

a vision of greyness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless
contempt for the evanescence of all things ... No! It is his extremity that
I have seemed to live through. True, he had made that last stride, he had
stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my
hesitating foot. ... perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity,
are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we
step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! (C, 87).
 THE WILD OF NOTHING 105

Still, what, we must ask, is that glimpsed truth? Of course Marlowe, unable
to finally extricate himself from the world of perception, cannot quite say.
"What's the good," he tells us, in even trying. Kurtz had spoken "common
every day words - the familiar, vague words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken
in nightmares" - words, Kurtz's harlequin worshiper promises us, that "enlarge
the mind" (C, 82).
For Cezanne, the landscape, the living, emerging organism, the lived truth,
had to be caught in a net," a net of paint, "which would let nothing escape"
(SNS, 17). In a letter to Ford Madox Ford, Conrad writes "How fine it would
be if the thought did not escape - if the expression did not hide underground,
if the idea had a substance and words a magic power, if the invisible could
be snared into a shape" (C, 108).
This is Conrad's doubt, as Marlowe represents it. Marlowe's journey is
always a journey in search of the right words, for the power of expression, a
power he insists on attributing to the eloquent Kurtz who "had something to
say." In fact, he projects onto Kurtz his and every artist's yearned-for, visionary
self, the self for whom he despairs, the wondering self who Marlowe wants
to believe has arrived at the source of its wonder, and has seen, has named.
Kurtz's voice, Marlowe infers, is eloquent precisely because he has seen;
the gift of expression has been received from the primordial source. His
"stare" implies his utter openness to the wilderness, his "motif' thinking itself,
making itself conscious, in him. Kurtz, Marlowe tells us, has "loosed" himself
finally from the formulated life - from Colonial Europe, from tradition and
society, from moral restraints, even from eating - and has crossed the
vibrating frontier, where every action is open and therefore menaced with
the possibility of chaos, into the primordial, finally pre-perceptual, reality.
In doing so, of course, Kurtz has broken his social and moral bonds
with the world, as the skulls on the posts testify. He had fallen off the
canvas into the indescribable. Marlowe, here Conrad, though clearly loyal to
Kurtz to the last, cannot faithfully repeat his words (only "The horror, the
horror!," a response to the Unspeakable at the moment of his death), because
he cannot have really heard them as speech. He has only arrived again
at what Merleau-Ponty calls "the source of silent and solitary experience"
(SNS, 19). Words here, heard in faith, are in the savage silence; they are
wild words anticipated but unexpressed, which have drawn Marlowe, word-
searcher, in a "vague fever" up the snaking river to the very heart of the
real. And there at the boundary, he listens to what cannot be repeated in
words (to ideas he can never see, freedom he can never face), and then,
unlike Kurtz or Narcissus, Valery's monsters of "pure freedom," both turns
back and is turned back.
Kurtz, who is variously described as writer, painter, and musician, is exactly
as Marlowe is compelled to imagine him: the visionary artist who, unlike
himself, has bravely arrived at what he was called to create. The wilder-
ness's primordial reality had given him something to say, and he had said it.
Marlowe clearly wants to catch this elusive self, capture him as the uncer-
106 EDWIN WEIHE

tain artist might his shadow, and at one point, in fact, when Kurtz is "crawling
on all-fours," thinks, "I've got him." (C, 80).
But Conrad gives us fair warning at the beginning of Heart of Darkness that
this journey will not be like the seaman's simple yarn, "the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut" (C, 19). The meaning of
Marlowe's story is not to be found as a kernel of truth inside Kurtz's hollow
message, but rather outside, "enveloping the tale which brought it out only
as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that
sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine"
(C, 19). For Conrad, then, the tale is neither a veil hiding truth nor a record
of shimmering appearances, but a solid, lived object, illuminated from within,
which Marlowe struggles to bring forth with each telling. It is his strength,
in fact, that he is situated in the visible world, and that his loyalty, which
Cezanne would have understood, is finally to the quest for the right words
which bring us in "touch" with the real. The tale glows, then; it brings out
meaning like a vibrating haze, or a "halo of Being," and this bringing out,
which is never finished, is expression. As Merleau-Ponty describes it, the
meaning of a work of art, or a philosophical theory, is "as inseparable from
its embodiment as the meaning of a tangible thing - which is why the meaning
can never be fully expressed" (SNS, 4), is always incarnational, can never
be adequately reflected in words. The artist's task, Merleau-Ponty tells us, is
to "awaken the experience" (SNS, 19), bring it to life from within, so that it
can take root in the listener who is ready to see or hear.
Marlowe returns to Brussels, sepulchre city of lies, the formulated life. There
to report Kurtz's death to his Intended, he resents the sight of people "hurrying
through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their
infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignifi-
cant and silly dreams ... the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a
danger" they are unable to comprehend. Marlowe has "no particular desire
to enlighten them" (C, 87). When he arrives at the home of the Intended,
who, you recall, is "too beautiful altogether," a "soul as translucently pure
as a cliff of crystal," and who might "go to pieces before the first sunset,"
he tells her the saving lie - that Kurtz's last word was her name - and, we
must assume, quickly finds his way to the dock and the first sail.
And so Marlowe is both Conrad's and Merleau-Ponty's doubt. The artist's
doubt is the experience of uncertainty, of irreducible contingency, at the Inner
Station of primordial perception. It originates and is sustained in that
interrogative wonder which, in shutting down on the constructed world,
becomes a "general possibility of human existence. It becomes so when this
existence faces the phenomenon of expression" (SNS, 20). Marlowe is free
by virtue of his story-telling, and the fidelity to primordial perception which
each new telling requires. His freedom is his being called forth by the tale it
is his work to tell. Conrad, Cezanne, and Merleau-Ponty are journeymen artists,
tireless revisers of the tale which can never be finished, whose style
struggles for an obscure clarity, and for whom the process of expression is
 THE WILD OF NOTHING 107

only an "approach" to the real, an "endless task" - or, like Marlowe catching
now the tide in the sea-reach of the Thames, at once a voyaging out and a
return.

NOTES

1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, A Casebook in Contemporary Criticism (New York:

St. Martin's Press, 1989), hereafter cited as C.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Cezanne's Doubt," in Sense and Non-Sense, translated by Hubert
L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), here-
after cited as SNS.
 RUDI VISKER

Raw Being and Violent Discourse:

Foucault, Merleau-Ponty and the (Dis-)Order
of Things*

Phenomenology has been too pacifying, Deleuze tells us, and he suggests
that we leave Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty for what they are and turn to
Foucault in order to discover a more profound Heracliticism.! Genealogy is
too much a war-machine, others respond, and they recommend different
remedies. There is nothing extraordinary about this situation. We are, in fact,
all too familiar with it. We have come across it in different philosophical
settings, with different parties engaging one another and with different choices
to be made. We all know from our own experience - and lest we forget,
there will always be a flourishing para-philosophical literature to remind us
- that this "originating" miracle we know as the philosophical tradition has
been "breaking up" (cf. VI, 124/VI, 165). And, now as always, the question
is not whether we will be able to live with it, but how we will do so, how
we will "accompany this break-up, (... ) this differentiation" (ibid.). Hence,
perhaps, my hesitation and the uneasiness which haunted me at the thought
of having to enter in this arena crowded by all those choices that, like the
war, "have taken place" (cf. SNS, ch. 10): for or against "the" subject, for
or against universality, for or against the origin of truth. Either Foucault or
Merleau-Ponty, either discourse or existence - no doubt such apparently
clear-cut choices confront us with questions ranging far beyond method. For
does not the standard academic response against the kind of pseudo-politi-
cization of philosophy which I have been evoking, suffer from the ills it is
supposed to cure? Is there really such a difference between those who bid
us to take sides and "merge" with one of the "existing" positions (VI, 127/VI,
169) and those who, in refusing to do so, nestle themselves in the comfort-
able teichoscopic position from which they can observe the heroes at the
foot of the wall (Iliad, 3, 121-244) and report in a completely detached manner
on the choices that others found themselves making? Did not Merleau-Ponty
himself commit the best of his efforts to showing that both the attempt to retain
an infinite distance and the attempt to replace it with an absolute proximity
express - as a soaring over (survol) or as fusion - the same positivistic
relationship to philosophy itself (e.g. VI, 127/VI, 169)? Is it not the belief
that the world of philosophy is an objective world, where the meditating subject
P. Burke and J. Van der Veken (eds.), Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, 109-129.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
110 RUDI VISKER

is in no way implicated in that upon which it reflects, is it not paradoxically

this same basic creed in the presence of a set of already available philosophical
positions which underlies both the error of those who urge us to side with
one of them, and the error of those who end up distorting philosophy's internal
structure through trying to look at it from above (survoler) and to think it
from no point of view (PhP, 62, 2041PP, 76, 236)?
As one can see, these questions are not merely methodological. Or rather,
what they reveal is that the whole of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is already
implied in any attempt to approach it and that such an approach is always open
to the risk of already belying, by its very way of proceeding, the position which
it tries to articulate. But since we have already shown ourselves that our
topic here ('raw being and violent discourse'; 'Merleau-Ponty and Foucault';
'existence and discourse') can only exist for those who are under the spell
of a positivistic illusion, should we not by the same token accept that it is,
in fact, perfectly superfluous once one has witnessed the issue itself become
but another illustration of that web of problems Merleau-Ponty was referring
to under the item 'raw being' and, in particular, of the fact that a certain
kind of violence will be involved in each and every attempt to express it? In
other words, shouldn't we drop the reference to Foucault altogether and devote
our efforts to bringing into the philosophy of reflection a moment of hyper-
reflection which would break the positivist's curse by stumbling upon that
unreflected given which "dispossesses" us (e.g. VI, 2661VI, 319), since we
can neither coincide with it nor constitute-it? But it is precisely this conclu-
sion which Merleau-Ponty drew from positivism's failure, which should arouse
our interest in Foucault's "happy positivism" (AK, 125/164).
For Foucault the problem of the kosmotheoros (VI, IS/VI, 32) whose
prejudice of the objective world makes him forget his own implication in it,
derives not from the fact that he is too positivistic, but from the fact that he
is not positivistic enough. Instead of wishing, like Merleau-Ponty, to bring
positivism back to earth, Foucault tried to follow it way up into the sky, to
those austere heights from which the archaeologist could detect, instead of a
single continuous philosophical tradition, the cracks and the fissures which
explode it from within and which let the space of global history drift apart
into different epistemic "tables" on which things will be ordered ever anew,
until it dawns on us "that we are difference, that our reason is the difference
of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference
of masks" (AK, 131/172). Once more then, we find ourselves confronted
with another, not altogether similar, 'dispossession' which reminds us that in
our very way of proceeding we already stumble upon the crux of the problem
we had hoped to approach in a more gradual and controlled manner. For now
we have learned that the only legitimate way to inquire into the relation
between the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and that of Foucault does not consist
in overcoming positivism but in deepening it until we discover the epistemic
rift which demarcates the set of 'statements,2 referred to as 'raw being' from
that referred to as 'violent discourse'. Unmistakably, then, we find ourselves
 RA W BEING AND VIOLENT DISCOURSE III

back where we started and it appears that we must choose if we want to

avoid being chosen. But since such choice amounts to either absorbing Foucault
into Merleau-Ponty or Merleau-Ponty into Foucault, would not the best bet
be simply to remain silent?
And yet, as Merleau-Ponty reminds us, the philosopher speaks, and if this
speech is more than an "inexplicable weakness" in him, if there is more to
it than a simple breach of silence (VI, 1251VI, 166), it is perhaps because he
never finds himself in the clear-cut situation we have been assuming, where
the metaphilosophical problems raised by such and such a philosophical
architecture forever darken the windows of the building it had been raising
in the hope of reaching out to others. If there is any light in there, it is because,
as we all know, inevitably the architect falls into the pits of his own drawing
and suddenly finds himself in a backroom where he is no longer the only
one doing the talking and where none of those present could even in
principle decide at any given moment just what question or what answer
belongs to each (S, 159IS,202). Such, then, might be our issue (in both senses
of the word): to grow (into) such a room by outrunning those signifiers
("Foucault", "Merleau-Ponty") between which we were supposed to choose,
until their shadows leave their bearers and mingle with the echo of voices it
would be pointless to try to identify.
Let us warm up for the first run: "violent discourse".

Paradoxically, the book that established Foucault's fame overnight, was not
about words, nor about things, nor even about that point where "an obscure
web of things" intersects with "a manifest, visible, coloured chain of words"
(AK, 48/66). Neither that evanescent surface of contact between a reality
and a language, nor the intrication of a lexicon and an experience, discourse
should rather be compared to a "table", or to a grid of identities, similitudes
and analogies according to which every culture sorts out so many different and
similar things (OT, XIXI11; AK, 48/66). Neither the effect of "an a priori
and necessary concatenation", nor simply deriving from "immediately
perceptible contents" (OT, XIx/11), this primary "coherence" constitutes a kind
of "middle region" which forever loosens "the apparently so tight embrace
of words and things" (AK, 49/66). In short, what we are confronted with
here is not an order in things, but an order of things, not a group of signs
that refer to already constituted objects eagerly awaiting the moment when
they finally will be discovered (e.g. AK, 42-3, 45158, 61), but a set of
"practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak" (AK,
49/67).
From this, one can easily understand why Foucault thinks that discourse
is violent and that it cannot be but violent. For if discourse were not "a practice
which we impose on things" (ODis, 67/55), but simply that smooth surface
112 Rum VISKER

on which they can patiently inscribe themselves; if it were not that moment
where communication finally becomes possible by a "rarefaction" imposed
on our language and by a difference established between the things that could
be said and those that in fact are said, 3 but simply that inexplicable void due
to the speaker's finitude, his inattention or to a defective synthetic act; if it
were not that anonymous field the configuration of which defines the possible
place for speaking subjects (AK, 1221160), if it were not that "transcendental
field where the conditions of subjectivity appear",4 but merely "the verbal
translation of a synthesis established elsewhere" (AK, 55174), in short, if we
were to think of discourse as meek rather than "violent" (ODis, 67/55), and
if we were to try to elide its reality by referring it back to the themes of
originary experience, universal mediation, or constituting subject (ODis,
65ff.l49ff.), we would rob ourselves of the means to understand the bare fact
that "there is order" (OT, XXlI2).
The striking thing about this argument is that it seems, both in its aim
and its structure, in perfect solidarity with what Merleau-Ponty had already set
at stake from the Phenomenology of Perception onwards. In its aim: to remain
faithful to a certain phenomenal field, to accord a positive significance to
the voids it may contain (PhP, 111PP, 18; AK, Part III, ch. 4); to look for its
conditions of reality, and to ground the possible in the real, rather than the
other way round (e.g. PhP, 4391PP, 501; AK, 127/167); to see in it the birth
of a norm rather than a birth according to a norm (PhP, 611PP, 74); to think
of reason as that which becomes possible through a moment of facti city,
rather than as that which is threatened by it (ibid.). And in its structure: neither
subjugate discourse to the constitutive powers of transcendental immanence,
nor let it be absorbed into the world of objects; neither try to derive it from
that ideal point where it is constituted, nor regard it as the effect of a series
of events in 'reality'; neither reduce it from above, nor from below. In other
words, just as Merleau-Ponty had argued that perception can not be con-
ceived in empiricist or intellectualist terms, so Foucault tries to think of
discourse as that tertium quid which cannot be accounted for by empiricism
or intellectualism. Since that parallel is so striking, let us freeze the picture
here for a while and concentrate on that strange overlap of the shadows of
two authors whose names already by themselves are commonly taken to refer
to a radical break in the history of French philosophy.
One of the most interesting features of Merleau-Ponty's treatment of
empiricism and intellectualismS is that he regards their disagreement over
the ontological status of the world ('realism' versus 'idealism') as but the
flip-side of their agreement as to which world should be given an onto-
logical status. Since both positions suffer from what he calls "a dogmatic belief
in the 'world'" (a reality in itself for the empiricist; an immanent term of
knowledge for the intellectualist) (PhP, 291PP, 37), neither of them manages
to account for "the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness consti-
tutes its object" (PhP, 261PP, 34). Whereas empiricists rely on the explanatory
powers of a third-person process and intellectualists refer us to an epistemo-
 RA W BEING AND VIOLENT DISCOURSE 113

logical subject bringing about the synthesis (e.g. Php, 2321PP, 268-9), Merleau-
Ponty tries to conceive of such a constitution as something more akin to a
co-constitution, a "knowing" in the biblical sense, a marriage or a commu-
nion between our lived body - "the fabric into which all objects are woven"
(PhP, 2351PP, 272) and hence only in a weak sense the "subject" of percep-
tion - and a perceptual field which is "already pregnant with an irreducible
meaning" (PhP, 21-21PP, 29). Unable to free themselves from subject-object
thinking and to grasp the rootedness of their "objective world" in a lived world
to which "consciousness", i.e. the lived body, is open and in which it finds
itself "as the heart in an organism" (PhP, 2031PP, 235) "breathing life into it
and sustaining it inwardly, and with it forming a system" (ibid.), empiricism
typically ends up with having absorbed the subject into the world (realism),
whereas intellectualism, in its eagerness to correct empiricism, veers off into
an idealism which absorbs the world into the subject. But behind the
intellectualist world which has become "the correlative of a thought of the
world and which has thus come to exist only for a constituting agent," there
still lurks the "ready-made world" of the empiricist, to which is simply added
the indication 'consciousness of ... ' and we seem to have gained nothing
with this reversal from the 'natured' into the 'naturing' (PhP, 208/PP, 241).
A state of consciousness simply becomes the consciousness of a state and
perception, like discourse, is left with the poor choice of being reduced either
from below or from above. Or to fully spell out the parallel: just as Foucault
tried to save discourse from the grip of empiricism or intellectualism, so
Merleau-Ponty tries to conceive of "a perceptual element (milieu) which is
not yet the objective world [of the empiricist or the intellectualist], a perceptual
being [Being?, - R.V.] which is not yet determinate being [Being?, - R.V.]"
(PhP, 471PP, 58). Just as Foucault tries to account for a "there is order" (OT,
XXlI2) by introducing discourse, so Merleau-Ponty tries to conceive of a
"consciousness" which would not be "too poor" (as in empiricism: PhP, 261PP,
34) to account for a "there is meaning" (PhP, 2961PP, 342; PriP, 231PriP,
63), nor already containing everything in itself and hence too rich to accept
a meaning already intimating itself before its constitution (as in intellectualism:
PhP, 28ff.lPP, 36ff.).
This parallel is not too beautiful to be true, but, like consumption art, its
beauty and its truth derive from the fact that once erected, it crumbles down.
Discourse, for example, may not be the mere "translation of a synthesis
established elsewhere" (AK, 55174), but isn't it itself the operator of a
similarly conceived synthesis? In other words, Foucault may have been aware
of the danger of an idealist reduction of discourse, but has he been able to
prevent discourse itself from behaving like some idealist super-subject,
absorbing its objects into it? Granted, it would be "a mistake to try to discover
what could have been said of madness at a particular time by interrogating
the being of madness itself' (AK 32145), but to conclude from this that "mental
illness was constituted by all that was said in all the statements that named
it" (ibid. - my emphasis) is to verge dangerously close to the brink of
114 RUDI VISKER

discursive idealism, unless one clarifies how exactly these statements which
constitute mental illness by naming it "give it speech by articulating, in its
name, discourses that were to be taken as its own" (ibid. - my emphasis);
unless, that is, one answers just those questions Foucault, the archaeologist,
decided to exclude. What is this 'it' to which speech is being given and in
the name of which discourses are articulated? What is this 'own' to which such
discourses were taken to (or mistaken to, as the French text suggests) remain
faithful? What is this intrication between a discourse and its referent, where
do they and how can they meet? How can they meet beyond intellectualism
and empiricism?
Should it surprise us that, once the archaeology which refused to go into
a history of the referent (AK, Part II, ch. 3) has given way to the genealogy
which seems to aim at nothing else, this same question of a meeting - or in
Merleau-Ponty's language: a mating - beyond intellectualism and empiri-
cism will now draw the genealogist into the abyss of the latter position, in spite
of his effort to jump over it? To be sure, Foucault wants to break away from
a conception where the operations of power would be comparable to those
of "a searchlight (which) illuminates objects pre-existing in the darkness" (PhP,
26/PP, 35); power would not be merely pro-ductive in the etymological sense,
it would inscribe itself in whatever gets caught in its beams of light, it would
be productive in the industrial sense of creating new objects6 • In other words,
the operation of power would have to be compared to the operation of that
creative act of attention which the Phenomenology of Perception tries to set
off against empiricist and intellectualist misconceptions which refuse to see
it as an "efficient cause of the ideas which it arouses" (PhP, 26/PP, 34) and
insist on treating it as an empty "light which does not change its character with
the various objects which it shines upon" (PhP, 28/PP, 36). But once more,
the parallel breaks, for we witness Foucault literally putting between
quotation marks all those supposedly new objects produced by power, like
the soul, the sexualized body or the disciplined body in generaf, and we cannot
but wonder whether this problem of a production, which is not a true
production after all, does not derive directly from Foucault's failure to provide
what Merleau-Ponty already found lacking in empiricism, namely some
"internal connection" between (power's) attention and that which awakens
it, a connection which could show how attention is awakened and then how
it develops and enriches that which awakened it, how, in short, its result would
not have to be found in its beginning (PhP, 26-7, 311PP, 34-5, 39). Unable
to resolve or to highlight what Merleau-Ponty considers to be "literally a
question of creation" (PhP, 29/PP, 38), the genealogical approach to
discourse fails both to convincingly set itself off against empiricism and to
correct archaeology's tendency to collapse into discursive idealism. Hence, this
discourse which seemed so similar in its aim and structure to that tertium
quid Merleau-Ponty was looking for between the legs of empiricism and
intellectualism, in fact remains caught in an ambiguity which is even worse
than the one into which, according to some commentators the Phenomenology
 RA W BEING AND VIOLENT DISCOURSE 115

of Perception found itself trapped in having been unable to come up with

the ontology for that 'communion' or that "coition (accouplement) of our body
with things" to which it so often referred (e.g. PhP, 3201PP, 370). In other
words, and to put it bluntly though not without the piety and the sober
earnestness such reflections command: the question for which both Merleau-
Ponty and Foucault needed an answer, the question that as much triggered
the former's so called 'turning' as it hindered the latter's attempt to make a
truly new start, is this: what is the ontological status of copulation, what
ontology is going to make it possible, or, at least, is not going to make it
impossible, and how, if not as a simple midwife, are we to conceive of a
father who, upon entering the stage, is confronted with "a whole already
pregnant with an irreducible meaning" (PhP, 2l-2IPP, 29 - my emphasis)?
What is the ontological status of this immaculate conception and how can there
still be the need for a "mise enforme" - a 'putting into form' - of a "matter
pregnant with its form" (PriP, 12, 151PriP, 42, 48 - my emphasis)? An
Augustinianism for the late twentieth century? Rationes seminales which we
did not put there, yet somehow create by breathing life into them? How to
conceive of this communion with a text which although already present,
nonetheless is not simply copied, but constituted (e.g. PhP, 9IPP, 16)? How
to conceive - and how to live - a creation which is not simply ex subjecto?
At the heart of his writings, and yet not fully his own, these could be the
questions that we might have wished Merleau-Ponty to have addressed to
Foucault. But since, as the Working Notes tell us, "the others' words make
me speak and think because they create within me an other than myself"
(VI, 2241 VI, 277) we might expect them to turn back on him and to have
already provided us with a "grillwork" (VI, 2241VI, 278) through which we
can see his texts dislocating themselves and diverging from what we thought
them to be. It is time, then, for a second run which will bring us right back
to the Renaissance.

II

Merleau-Ponty does not seem to have liked the Renaissance. Its paintings
tended to be too adult, too prosaic and not spontaneous enough. Or at least,
that is what they would have been, had Renaissance painters done exactly what
their artbooks told them to do (SO, 519). The ideal of painting was to
represent, even to replace nature. The canvas was not yet, as it will be
from Manet onwards, that silent witness of a momentary and always dated
contact between the painter and the world. It was to be an object out of time
that bore no trace of the hand that drew it and that could have been the work
of anyone and in fact was more often than not the work of several who
came and went without endangering the end-product, for all they had to do
was to carry out an exact construction based on the techniques that were
described by the theoreticians of the "perspectiva artijicialis"g. But these
116 RUDI VISKER

theoreticians, Merleau-Ponty tells us, were "not without bad faith" (PriP,
174/0E, 49): they left out the inconvenient parts from their translations of
Euclid, disrespectfully referred to the angular perspective of preceding periods
as but a common or natural, i.e. mistaken, perspective and pretended to have
found a way to produce a copy of the world, whereas all they did was give
man one more way "for projecting the perceived world before him" (S, 48/S,
61).
Perspective, then, was not what it pretended to be. Far from being that
"secret technique for imitating a reality given as such to all men" (S, 50/S, 63),
it was the attempt to domesticate "things disputing for my glance" (S, 49/S,
62), to impose a false harmony on these "incompossibilities" (VI, 216/VI, 269),
to install "a space without transcendence" (VI, 21O/VI, 264) by imposing a
(pseudo-) Euclidean mask on savage perception (VI, 213/VI, 266), and letting
a polymorphous perception "orient itself by the system" (VI, 212/VI, 265), -
to summarize: it was the attempt to order things by introducing "a notation
of the world that would be valid for everyone" (PW, 149/PM, 207). But such
two-dimensional perspective "does not give me a human view of the world"
(ibid.), it is "monocular" and in order to represent what is thus perceived, it
has to "congeal lived perspective" and transport me into the position of "a
god who does not get caught in finitude" (PW, I 49-50/PM, 207). In short,
perspective is "the invention of a world which is dominated and possessed
through and through in an instantaneous synthesis which is at best roughed out
by bur glance when it vainly tries to hold together all these things seeking
individually to monopolize it" (S, 50/S, 63).
Foucault would not have understood this anathema on Renaissance
perspective. He would have remarked that it was not "bad faith", but a
different discourse that expurgated Euclid and to underscore his view that
the VIII th Theorem of the Oros at a certain moment literally became
unreadable, he might have reminded Merleau-Ponty of the fascinating pages
where Panofsky shows how the Renaissance attempt to make sense of this
theorem, which was already slightly modified by the Arab translation on which
the Medievals had to rely, gradually led them - in all good faith - from one
translation to another to turn it into a demonstratio per demonstrandum 9 • Or
he might have quoted the famous lines from the Phenomenology of Perception
where Merleau-Ponty himself had referred to the "alleged transparency of
Euclidean geometry" as an illustration of the fact that "there is not one truth
of reason which does not retain its coefficient of facticity" (PhP, 3941PP, 451).
Whatever arguments he might have come up with, Foucault, no doubt, would
have been unable to appreciate the critical role which Merleau-Ponty's many
remarks on wild or brute perception and on raw or vertical being seemed to
play in his assessment of the 'age of the world-picture'. He would have taken
this conclusion to be biased since the case itself merely seemed but another
confirmation of his thesis that every culture can be expected to emancipate
itself "from its linguistic, perceptual and practical grids" by superimposing
on them "another kind of grid which neutralized them" and "both revealed and
 RA W BEING AND VIOLENT DISCOURSE 117

excluded them at the same time, so that the culture, by this very process, comes
face to face with a raw being of order (l'etre brut de l'ordre)", "anterior to
(the) words, perceptions and gestures" that are "more or less happy expres-
sions of it" (OT, X-XI/12 - my emphasis). Has Foucault been reading too
quickly? Would he have been mistaken in assuming that it was simply the
theme of an originary experience (e.g. ODis, 65/49-50; AK, 47/64 and passim)
which prevented Merleau-Ponty from accepting Renaissance-discourse, or
better still: Renaissance as discourse? What lies at the basis of these diverging
positions? What difference does Merleau-Pontian "raw being" make to the
'order of things'? What exactly could be the place of this "savage" and
"baroque" world where "things are no longer there simply according to their
projective appearances and the requirements of the panorama, as in Renaissance
perspective, but on the contrary upright, insistent, flaying our glance with their
edges (and) claiming an absolute presence" (S, 1811S, 228)? What is the
place of raw being? And does it have a place?
Interestingly, raw being for Merleau-Ponty, just as for Foucault, is what
motivates him to undertake an archaeology. But for him that archaeology is
not the attempt to unearth an archive containing the rules and the basic
operations that together form that primary coherence Foucault called discourse
and which he thought, as we have seen, to be anterior to lived experience.
To the contrary, it has to be an archaeology of the lived or the perceived
world and its goal seems to be just the opposite of Foucault's: "to regain
possession of that wild region in (us) which is not incorporated in (our own)
culture" (S, 120/S, 151 - my emphasis). Hence for example the questions
that occupied him so much while studying Renaissance perspective: "how
can one return from this perception fashioned by culture to the "brute" or
"wild" perception? What does the informing [i.e. in-forming, - R.V.] consist
in? By what act does one undo it (return to the phenomenal, to the "vertical"
world, to lived experience)?" (VI, 2121VI, 265 - my emphasis). These
questions are less unambiguous than they might seem at first sight, since
they could be taken to suggest that Merleau-Ponty thinks of raw being as some
sort of archaeological layer, whereas he explicitly denies this in more than
one passage and stresses the fact that his ontology should not be confused with
the attempt to return to "precomprehension or prescience" (VI, 182/VI, 236)
or to "a 'first layer' of experience" (VI, 158/VI, 209). The "mistrust with regard
to lived experience" (my emphasis) would be of the essence of philosophy and
philosophy would have "nothing to do with the privilege of the Erlebnisse"
(VI, 181-2/VI, 235). But since we were told before and elsewhere that the
philosopher is in search of contact with raw being (S, 22/S, 31 and VI, 102,
212/VI, 139, 265 quoted above) and since raw being is explicitly identified
with the perceived world (or the "lived", silent, prelinguistic world: e.g. VI,
170/VI, 223-4), it may seem, of course, as it has seemed to many a
commentator, that here at best we have come across an unresolved tension,
if not an alternative within his conception of raw being and, to be sure, there
might be some truth there, though not the truth we are in need of. For example,
118 Rum VISKER

after having explained that we should not, like Piaget and Luquet, try to reduce
the child's experience to our own and regard his drawing as but an imper-
fect approximation of our own due to his inattentiveness (empiricism) or
synthetic incapacity (intellectualism) "as if perspectival drawing were already
there before the child's eyes and the whole problem were to explain why he
was not motivated by it" (PW, 149/PM, 206), after having made it clear that
to consider it in that way would be once more to resort to an empiricist or
intellectualist concept of attention instead of seeing in it a creative "power
to restructure" (SO, 516) that transforms the object and allows us to conceive
the passage from child to adult drawings as "a different structuration,"
involving different norms for drawing, a different relation to the object, in
short, a different world, a different order, Merleau-Ponty all of a sudden goes
on to tell us that the child's drawing is not only different from, but "richer
than" (SO, 517) perspectival perception which leads to "an impoverishment
of the perceived" and produces a "reduced vision" which "translates" rather
than "expresses" (ibid.). But then Renaissance perspective and adult drawing
are not merely "different conceptions of painting" (SO, 519), and the adult's
"polymorphous contact with the world when it ends with representations" (SO,
524) does not merely seem to have "a different structure" (ibid.) from the
one of the child. Rather, this contact now seems farther off, if not lost
altogether, and in the very moment one begins to see what might be at stake
in Merleau-Ponty's attempt "to restore the world as a meaning of Being
absolutely different from the represented" (VI, 253/V/, 306), one is left without
a clue as to how he can enchain "that is, as the vertical Being which none
of the 'representations' exhaust and which they all reach, the wild Being" (ibid.
- same sentence ctd.; my emphasis). Isn't Merleau-Ponty implying here that
both adult and child drawing, both Renaissance perspective and a-perspec-
tival art are all "reaching" wild Being without exhausting it and that hence
there would be no reason to speak of "reduced vision" since vision is
reductive anyhow and since there is a moment of violence in every percep-
tion, as the Phenomenology had already told us (PhP, 239-40, 361, 3821PP,
276-7 (attaque du monde sur mes sens), 415, 438)?
If we were to read Merleau-Ponty in this way, we would have drawn him
very close to Foucault and both could be taken to represent an interesting
continental variant of what Putnam dubbed 'internal realism'lO, i.e. the idea
that "there is more than one 'true' theory or description of the world" (Putnam,
49) and that" 'objects' do not exist independently of conceptual schemes"
but that we "cut up the world into objects when we introduce one or another
scheme of description" (Putnam, 52). Being would then be "what requires
creation of us for us to experience it" and such creation would at the same time
be "an adequation, the only way to obtain an adequation" (VI, 197/V/, 251)
(Putnam's cut-ups which somehow 'fit' - Putnam, 55, 64). There would be "an
inexhaustible reserve of being" (VI, 169/V/, 223), a "perpetual resource ...
which contains no mode of expression and which nonetheless calls them
forth and requires all of them" (VI, 170/V/, 223). For example, this "poly-
 RA W BEING AND VIOLENT DISCOURSE 119

morphous" (VI, 170, 270/v/, 223, 323 and passim) or "amorphous" (ibid.)
Being would somehow "justify all (metric systems) without being fully
expressed by any" (PriP, 174/0£,48) and Renaissance perspective would be
but "a particular case, a date, a moment in a poetic information of the world
which continues after it" (PriP, 175/0£,51). But whereas this reading would
not make it impossible for Merleau-Ponty to make some sense of Foucault's
notion of discourse, it is not far from letting them both, like Putnam, simply
historicise Kant (culturally different cut-ups rather than one set of categories)
and from putting them into a corner which they were each keen to avoid ll .
Shall we revert then to our first reading and simply equate raw being with
the perceived and the lived world, a pre-linguistic and pre-cultural layer of
originary experience which somehow would be reduced, if not forgotten,
impoverished, if not betrayed, but in any case: incompletely expressed by
that aboriginal sin we call culture?
Equating raw being with an archaeological first stratum would not only turn
Merleau-Ponty's archaeology into the most extreme counter-position to
Foucault, it would also seem to counter a great many of the benefits Foucault's
readers seem to expect from adopting something like 'discourse'. Whereas
Foucault wanted to shock us by pointing to that 'dissociation' existing between
'our' order of things and that of other epistemic formations, hoping that we
would lose some of our narcissism and come to realize "that we are differ-
ence" (AK, 1311172, quoted in full above), the kind of Merleau-Ponty this
reading provides us with would be more like a soothing old bore who tells
us that at the heart of this experience of difference, e.g. in our contract with
other cultures, we "gain possession" (S, 120/S, 151) of that raw or vertical
Being "by which we pass into one another" (VI, 204/VI, 257). Communication
between cultures would pass through that wild region where they all were born
(VI, lI5/VI, 154) and it would be from that layer, from that "sensible world
which forms our bond with the other" (VI, 214/VI, 267), that we could derive,
all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, our basic trust ultimately to
share the "same world" (e.g. VI, lIO/VI, 148 and passim). But this cannot
be what is meant by "lateral universality" (S, 120/S, 150), it rather looks
like a universality from below which is now taking the place of an overarching
universality from above, were it not for the fact that it cannot even be the
universality it pretends to be since as the opening pages of the Phenomenology
remind us "if we set ourselves to see as things the intervals between them,
(... ) there would not be simply the same elements differently related (... ),
the same text charged with a different sense, the same matter in another form,
but in truth another world (PhP, 16/PP, 23, my emphasis). Perception itself
is already an expression, it stylizes, as we read elsewhere (PW, 59-60/PM,
83-4), and since there is no reason to assume that we would all - as cultures,
or even as individuals within a culture - be bearers of the same style, since
style, to the contrary, is for Merleau-Ponty the moment of singularity, we
are left with the question of "how one can communicate without the help of
a pre-established Nature" and "how we are all grafted to the universal by
120 RUDI VISKER

that which is most our own" (S, 52/S, 65). But to that question we, in fact,
already have all the elements of an answer.
What has blinded us hitherto is the search for a place, a topos at which to
locate raw being. Either it would be that pre-linguistic, pre-cultural moment
we thought to be an originary experience in all of us, or we tended to look
at it as a "radical alterity"12, an inexhaustible reserve which we never managed
to fully represent. But in the first case we turned raw being into nature and
we forgot that even "our perception is cultural-historical" (VI, 2531VI, 307);
whereas in the second case we were led to believe that we are all culture
and we forgot that "everything in us is natural" as well, and that "even the
cultural rests on the polymorphism of the wild Being" (ibid. - my emphasis).
The trick, of course, is not to regard raw Being as a being (small b) which
can be localized somewhere, but as radically a-topic and hence a dimension,
instead of a first layer of experience. The trick is to realize that raw Being
is not merely another name for our perceptual contact with the world, but
that it is precisely there where it is revealed in an exemplary way. The trick
is to realize that if Merleau-Ponty equates raw Being with the 'perceived
world', the stress is not on perceived but on world, since is it there that in
an exemplary - though not in an exclusive - way I come to realize that world
is not something with which I would be in a subject-object relation (VI, 2221VI,
276). "Sensing" (Ie sentir; 'sense experience') precisely is not "the intellec-
tual possession of 'what' is felt, but a dispossession of ourselves in favour
of it, an opening toward that which we do not have to think in order that we
may recognise it" (TLC, 130IRC, 179 - transl. corrected; my emphasis), and
"the sensible is precisely that medium in which there can be being without
it having to be posited" (VI, 2141VI, 267). Here Being can manifest itself
without becoming positivity, without ceasing to be ambiguous and transcen-
dent (ibid.) and it is precisely this "silent transcendence" (VI, 213IV/, 266)
which robs "the sensible world" of its alleged positivity and, in making it
"ungraspable" for me (VI, 214IV/, 267-8) and yet something from which I
cannot detach myself, confronts me with that "paradox of transcendence and
immanence" (e.g. PriP, 161 PriP, 49) which made Merleau-Ponty compare
perception to a communion or to a copulation (see above and VI, passim).
For isn't a copulation precisely that experience of almost losing myself in
the other and yet at the brink of fusion losing hold of him in the uncon-
trolled movement of my spasms? Immanent and transcendent this "indivision
of sensing", this "initial yes", this "primordial unconscious" which would be
a "letting be" rather than a "positing" of the perceived world CTLC, 131/RC,
179; VI, lO2IV/, 138) would at the same time be a division which is not yet
that of the no (VI, 216/V/, 270) or of the Sartrean cut between the For Itself
and the In Itself (VI, 215/V/, 268) but that of a chiasm where "every relation
with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken, where the hold is
held C... ) and inscribed in the same being that it takes hold of' (VI, 266/VI,
319). This inscription is not a fusion but rather the indicator of its impossi-
bility: hence Merleau-Ponty's reservations against any metaphysics that, like
 RA W BEING AND VIOLENT DISCOURSE 121

Bergson's, resorts to coincidence and tend to forget that the fact that I am
"of the world" means at the same time that I am not it (VI, 127/VI, 169; and
on Bergson e.g. VI, 127/VI, 170). But it is an inscription and hence of course
his attempt to push Husserl out of idealism and to conceive of the reduction
not in terms of transcendental immanence, not as a reduction of the natural
world, but as a reduction to it, as that successful failure which in its attempt
to break away from it reveals our ineradicable attachment to it, in short as a
reduction which is necessary to reveal a tension, but uninhabitable as such 13 •
Ineffaceably inscribing me into the world to which I am open (Offenheit,
e.g. VI, 2511VI, 305), the sensible is both "the being which I reach in its
raw or untamed state," but also "the being which reaches me in my most secret
parts" (S, 171/S, 215) and confronts me with the 'mineness' (Jemeinigkeit)
of my singularity.
But how, then, could I forget it? How could I "not see what makes me
see, my tie (attache) to Being" (VI, 248/VI, 301)? What other dramas am I
to expect if my perception is "of itself ignorance of itself as wild percep-
tion, imperception" that "forgets itself' as "being at" (VI, 213/VI, 267), as
com-munion? What sort of conscience is this which "as a matter of principle
disregards Being and prefers the object to it" (VI, 248/VI, 302, trans!.
corrected)? And can I even hope to reduce it now that I learned that its
immanence is forever postponed, never to be washed of this "original stain"
(souillure originelle VI, 45/VI, 69) which prevents our philosophy from
becoming "total and active grasp, intellectual possession, since what there is
to be grasped is a dispossession" (VI, 266/VI, 319)?
Before we let these questions take us on a third run, we would do well to
recapitulate, since we have come a long way and by now may be gasping
for breath.

m
As one will remember, first we were taken from a series of prima facie
epistemological problems (the impossibility of understanding discourse or
perception in either intellectualist or empiricist terms) to the brink of a
metaphysical problem concerning a creation which is not ex subjecto and yet
more than a mere reproduction of already pre-existing givens. Though in the
subsequent discussion of the various possible readings of the notion of 'raw
being' we did come up in passing with a Merleau-Pontian variant of internal
realism as a means of coping with the epistemological problem that first
aroused our curiosity, the focus of our attention imperceptibly shifted to the
strange status of that new ontology that, far from pretending to make us under-
stand the metaphysics of creation by providing us with its conditions of
possibility, seemed to have set itself the no less radical aim of teaching us
how to live this creation by confronting us with the conditions of reality for
the communion that we are. This ontology, then, cannot be neutral. It is not
122 RUDI VISKER

positivistic. Rather, its aim seems to be to intervene in "our state of non-

philosophy" since "never has the crisis been so radical" (VI, 165/VI, 219). The
pathos of such passages notwithstanding, one may wonder whether the crisis
to which Merleau-Ponty is referring, may not be yet one more crisis but, rather,
a moment endemic to the 'human condition' , a moment the criticality of which
ultimately derives from the fact that, once its ontological structure is revealed,
it becomes apparent that it might not be easy to inhabit this condition or to
dwell in it in an authentic sense of 'dwelling'. In order to introduce or to
'express' (in the Merleau-Pontian sense - see below) this Heideggerian moment
to which I alluded before, let us join our relay-race at the point we left it.
What really emerged during our second run, though it might have gone
unnoticed, is that the originary (l'originaire)14 has "broken up" (VI, 124/VI,
165). For two reasons. First, we have seen that raw Being is not to be located
in an originary experience. Instead of an origin-al (e.g. pre-linguistic) layer,
it is that dimension (VI, 182/VI, 236) revealed to us by sensing (Ie sentir), since
on that level at least we are confronted both with an indivision and a division
and find ourselves unable to either coincide or to detach ourselves, unable even
to coincide with our attachment since it is precisely what exposes us (e.g.
VI, 35ff.lVI, 57ff.). But what has been said about sensing need not be restricted
to that domain. To the contrary, it has an exemplary status. Raw Being as a
dimension is the atopos in every topos and not just in the layer known to us
as perceptual experience. Perception is simply the "archetype of an origi-
nary encounter," the paradox of which one finds "imitated and renewed"
(VI, 158/VI, 210) on all other levels, which Merleau-Ponty insists on seeing
related to it by what he calls 'expression'. Just as pre-linguistic perception
itself had to be considered against empiricism and intellectualism as a process
that is neither a mere reproduction, nor a creation out of the void, but a
communion, i.e. a creation "which is at the same time an adequation" (VI,
197/VI, 251, my emphasis), now everything which relates to the perceived
world as that primal "source of meaning for us" (VI, 157/VI, 209) is shown
by Merleau-Ponty to have exactly the same structure: the structure of an
expression which does not simply copy or reproduce already pre-existing data l5 •
Far from letting such givens leave their imprint on a perfectly flexible mould,
the expressive medium (e.g. language) itself seems to have a logic of its own
which makes it impress itself on that which it was at first naively supposed
to simply ex-press and make readable. Far from being that unproductive pro-
duction, that perfectly colourless medium of which, as Derrida has shown,16
Husserl was dreaming, language or expression in general (e.g. painting) has
its own power of refraction, which is why it betrays as much as it translates.
But it still translates (Le. translates) and the difficulty is precisely to come
up with a theory of expression that does not have the consequence of
annihilating the experience that is expressed, and that at the same time does
not make the expression itself superfluous 17 by turning it into 'a voice which
would have to remain silent' (Derrida). In other words, the problem is to
avoid turning language (expression) into an absolute or to find such an absolute
 RA W BEING AND VIOLENT DISCOURSE 123

in experience 18 • And the solution is Derridean avant la lettre: expression is

an "original" supplement and it is the supplement to an origin that has broken
up. It is not in spite of the fact that the origin has been shattered, but rather
because of it, that there can and must be expression and that upon interrogating
our experience "in order to know how it opens us to what is not ourselves"
we come across this strange "movement toward what could not in any event
be present to us in the original and whose irremediable absence would thus
count among our originary experiences" (VI, 159/VI, 211, trans!. altered).
Expression, in short, is a translation which produces its own original 19 : it trans-
lates an experience "that only becomes text by the word that it inspires"
(TLC, 261RC, 42). In other words, there is an original, but precisely because
it has broken up, there is this never ending attempt to translate that which
one in fact produces. And yet this attempt is still an attempt to express an
irremediable absence, which is why it does not end in sheer whimsicality, in
mere dissemination, in total creation. Philosophy for example is caught in
this virtuous circle of being both more and less than a mere translation (VI,
36/VI, 58), and this is why we can and must always call it into question without
having - or needing - the hope of arriving at an ultimate expression. Indeed
this hope itself can only be the hope of those who are unable to accept and
to dwell in the "paradox of expression" (VI, 144/VI, 189) and who seek to
console themselves by dreaming the sweet dream of a fusion or a soaring-
oVer (survol). Philosophy can not coincide with what it expresses, nor can it
have a bird's-eye-view of it.
The important thing to realize here is that for Merleau-Ponty, precisely
because of the way he conceives of the relation of expression, not only is
the original (in the first and naIve sense of l'experience originaire, Ie vecu)
going to further disappear, but, also. the 'original stain' (souillure originelle)
(VI, 45/VI. 69) of my attachment (attache) is going to colour all attempts to
express it. In doing philosophy I belong to it and yet I am not it. my
attachment (j' en suis) is such that it constantly seems to draw me away from
universality and always brings me back to a position within that wider field
we call the philosophical tradition. And this is why, since we have here its
prime example, we need to reconceive our notion of universality and to
understand how we can be grafted onto it by our own singularity. And because
this grafting is a difficult operation, we need to come up with an ethics, in
the sense of an ethos which tells us how to live our attachment since the
mere fact that one is 'in' philosophy (or 'in' any other world) does not
automatically mean that one's dwelling there is as it should be, - the reverse,
as we all know, is more often the case. And this is why finally Merleau-
Ponty came up with "a wholly new idea of subjectivity" (VI, 269/VI, 322)
to account for, as I will show in a moment, the alethic structure of a truth
that in its singularity is not cut off from universality.
One last step then. If raw Being is that which demands creation of us and
if this creation or expression is "the only way to obtain an adaequation" (VI,
197/VI, 251), then the kind of truth that is at stake here of necessity involves
124 RUDI VISKER

a certain kind of violence which is not yet ethical. If I am to come up with

an answer that gives form to those raw or "poorly posed questions" (PhP,
214/PP, 248; TLC, 34/RC, 51; e.g. VI, 39/VI, 61) with which I am
confronted, and if my answer is only one among many, all of them reaching
and none of them exhausting raw Being (e.g. VI, 170/VI, 223), if it is but
one possible way to give form to those questions or to those demands of
experience, then the fact that of necessity it will always fall short and betray
cannot by itself have an ethical significance. And yet it may not be without
some bearing on the ethical problem. For how can I avoid becoming totally
absorbed in the particularity of my response Which, like discourse (and here
Foucault comes in again), is of necessity selective and exclusive and, by that
constitutive limitation, produces an excess or a moment of alterity to which
it at the same time seems blinded? Should I, and why should I, be concerned
about this excess that I cannot account for but also am in no need of accounting
for? Whereas it is clear that we would have to pay an incredibly high price
for failing to come up with an answer to these questions and that we would
simply become one more victim of the 'law of the heart' which is, as is well
known, not a law at all (hence its terror), the bare fact is that it seems
difficult to avoid paying that price. To be sure, it may be the case that "with
every demand one meets in experience, something comes up that produces
selective and exclusive formations" that in their tum are unable to fully absorb
it20 , but the problem is precisely that that which confronts us here is too wild
to be an interlocutor and that once it gets tamed by our finite domestication
it seems in danger of losing its alterity. "Things", Merleau-Ponty tells us,
are "no interlocutors", "like madmen or animals they are quasi-companions"
(VI, l80/VI, 234, my emphasis), which is why this moment of transcendence
in raw Being, the fact that being "is not only what it is" and is inflated "with
the possible" (ibid.) is not going to solve our riddle. For why should we care
about this transcendence, why should we follow Ponge in his 'parti pris pour
les choses,21, why should we be worried about the fact that our rationality is
both responsive and finite in its response, unless we reintroduce some kind
of metaphysics of plenitude22 from which to generate a teleology that, contrary
to Merleau-Ponty's advice, would not have "to be written and thought about
in brackets" (S, 18l/S, 228)? And yet, were there not some kind of "desire"
driving expression beyond itself (VI, 144/VI, 189) and confronting it with
the limits of its factical vision (ibid.), we would find ourselves in the crudest
of culturalisms or solipsisms. Hence we will have to generate this desire
from within. We will have to derive it not from that which exceeds a response
which always falls short, but from the structure of response itself which, as
one will remember, always involves a moment of attachment (attache,
adherence), of singularity. And this is precisely what Merleau-Ponty hoped
the reduction could do: not as a guarantee for authentic dwelling, but as a
possible revealment of the need for it.
At first sight the chances for such a reduction seem almost nil. Expression
tends to regard itself as mere ex-pression, perception doesn't perceive what
 RA W BEING AND VIOLENT DISCOURSE 125

makes it perceive (VI, 213/VI, 266-7), consciousness inevitably is mystified

(VI, 248/VI, 302), and language finally is more often than not a merely
spoken speech (parole partee) that makes us forget the instituting moment
of speaking speech (parole parlante) and, like a worn metaphor, seems to
consist merely of a set of signs on which an already constituted thought can
depend in order to make itself communicable23 • And yet all these mystifica-
tions are precisely what is going to save us. For if language or expression
would immediately confront us with our attachment, they would lose their
attraction. It is precisely because the Being of language withdraws, that I
can trust those heavily trodden tracks that seem there to guarantee that my
alleged self-presence will not get frustrated. It is precisely because spoken
speech presents itself as that highly reliable realm into which I can be absorbed
or disappear without running the risk of getting so tangled up in it that I
might be altered by it myself, it is precisely because it seems to provide me
with this possibility of a fusion in which I will not be losing myself, that I
am attracted by it and see in it the means to accomodate that "patient and silent
labor of desire" (VI, 144/VI, 189) with which expression starts. This desire
may be none other than that for an origin the breaking up of which has been
covered over - which is, as MerIeau-Ponty reminds us, a paradox of Being
as well as of man (VI, 122/VI, 162). Hence, for example the fanaticism with
which I start to read the texts of the other, and try to translate them into my
own thoughts, without altering them. For at first I do not want to read these
texts to find out what might be wrong with them, I want to know what is in
them and instead of being vigilant I treat them as signs governed by a code
I will be able to break if only I pay enough attention. Hence my frustration
at my lack of success and the renewed attempt to manipulate that key to the
reality that seems to lie beyond those texts, and to lose myself in them and
in that respect I am not unlike the painter who starts by copying the old masters
(VI, 2111VI, 264). And yet it is precisely because of this desire to disappear
that I ean be confronted with my subjectivity. It is precisely at that moment
when the painter discovers his own hand or when I fail to lose myself in the
other or to absorb him in me, that I ean become attentive to that "diaphragm"
in me (VI, 99/VI, 175) to which MerIeau-Ponty so often seems to refer (e.g.
VI, 201, 246/VI, 254, 299) and from which the Working Notes try to generate
a new concept of subjectivity which would not be identity with oneself, but
non-difference with oneself (VI, 204/VI, 257) or, if one insists: an identity
that would be "difference of difference" (VI, 264/VI, 318), a same which would
be "the other than the other" (ibid.), in other words: separation (eeart)
(VI, 216/VI, 270). And this gap (eeart) which "forms meaning" should not
be conceived of as "a no I affect myself with, a lack which I constitute as a
lack by the upsurge of an end which I give myself' but as "a natural
negativity, a first institution, always already there" (VI, 216/VI, 270, my
emphasis). It is this separation which prevents my communion from becoming
mere indivision, mere fusion. It is this primordial 'no' constituting the
singularity of my 'attachment' that explains why Merleau-Ponty can under-
126 RUDI VISKER

stand something Foucault at best could only postulate - a subjectivity which

is both dependent and indeclinable (cf. PhP, 400/PP, 459)24 - and why we
do not have to choose between both of them. For what is this primordial
'no' if not the moment where existence escapes discourse, but in such a way
that it does not make discourse impossible? What is this 'no', this 'relief'
(VI, 269/VI, 323) which I bring into language, if not the point at which a
difference between what is said and what could be said 25 , is established? To
be sure, what is at stake here is not the attempt to reduce discourse to
existence, or existence to discourse, but to find in their mutual intrication some
indication of what it could mean for us to be those subjects who take up
positions we did not ourselves generate. And also, it is the attempt to turn
discourse into something less spectacular that calls for solutions with which
we are - or could be - already familiar. For here I am, I am the voice of
truth, with this text here I am in the truth of my expression,and although I
did not choose to be there, although I did everything possible to be out there
with the others in the truth of their texts, at this moment when I would have
wished them to be here, I no longer care about their absence. For while their
presence would make my truth less solitary, "they are not gods" that would
make it more true, and their absence doesn't make it less true26 • And in this
moment in which I am confronted with an attachment to something in me
which is more me than me, in this moment where I am at the crossroads of
a truth I did not choose and a singularity I cannot control, in this face to
face with the alethic structure of my truth I can only burst into the laughter
of the adult who, unlike the infant that cries in order not to disappear in its
hunger, is betaken with fits of laughter for having, no matter how hard he tried,
failed to disappear into the other. This laughter is not self-complacent. It is,
in Kundera's terms, both angelic and diabolic since it reacts to a truth which
is both too full and too void of meaning 27 • In this laughter I realize that there
is this something around which all my thoughts circle and without which I
would not make the effort toward truth, and that this something is not that
of the other. In this laughter, I realize that my conscience is but "a figure against
a background" (VI, 1911VI, 245, transl. altered) and that what is figure for
me may be background for another. It is as if for a moment I see the Gestalt
that I am and that, no matter how hard I try, I remain unable to make the picture
switch. And in that moment in which I am confronted with the full shape of
my own shadow, just before he and I will walk the same road again, a certain
"dehiscence" (e.g. VI, 123/VI, 165) is produced which is not large enough
to make me lose him and yet not small enough to prevent me from becoming
grafted to the universal by that which is my own. In other words, I become
appealable by the other not in spite of the fact that I have a center different
from his, but precisely because of my awareness that I will have to dwell in
my own shadow and stop treating it as simply "the actual absence of future
light" (S, 178/S, 225). Such dwelling, I know, will not have taken me into
ethics. Without it no ethics may be possible, but it is not by itself enough to
establish the ethical as such. Make me listen - whereas this commandment
 RA W BEING AND VIOLENT DISCOURSE 127

could be the desire of desires, the ultimate prayer without which there could
never be any ethics, the ethical is that moment when I finally look up from
these pages which obsessed me for such a long time and listen.

NOTES

* References to Foucault use the following abbreviations: AK: The Archaeology of Knowledge,
London, Tavistock (1974), L'Archiologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1977 (1969 1); ODis:
The Order of Discourse in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, (ed. R. Young),
Boston, London and Henley, Routledge (1981), L 'ordre du discours, Paris, Gallimard, 1971;
OT: The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London, Tavistock (1977),
Les mots et les choses. Une archiologie des sciences humaines, Paris, Gallimard, 1979
(1966 1). Abbreviations for Merleau-Ponty: IPP: In Praise of Philosophy (trans!. John Wild
& James M. Edie), Northwestern University Press, Evanston (1970), EP: Eloge de la philoso-
ph ie, in Eloge de la philosophie et autres essais, Paris, Gallimard (Collection Id~es), 1960,
p. 7-79; OE: L'Oeil et ['esprit, Paris, Gallimard (Folio Essais), 1964; PhP: Phenomenology
of Perception (trans!. Colin Smith), London and Henley/New Jersey, Routledge & Kegan
PaulfI'he Humanities Press (1981), PP: Phinomenologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard
(Collection TEL), 1945; PriP: The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on
Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics (trans!. James M.
Edie), Northwestern University Press, Evanston (1964), PriP: Le Primal de la perception
et ses consequences philosophiques, Grenoble, Cynara, 1989; PW: The Prose of the World
(trans!. John O'Neill), Northwestern University Press, Evanston (1973), PM: La prose du
mande, Paris, Gallimard (nrf), 1969; S: Signs (trans!. Richard C. McCleary), Northwestern
University Press, Evanston (1964), S: Signes, Paris, Gallimard (nrf), 1960; SNS: Sense
and Non-Sense (trans!. Hubert L. Dreyfus & Patricia Allen Dreyfus), Northwestern University
Press, Evanston (1964), SNS: Sens et Non-Sens, Paris, Les Editions Nagel (1966); SO
Merleau-Ponty a la Sorbonne - resume de cours 1949-1952, Grenoble, Cynara (1988); TLC:
Themes from the Lectures at the College de France 1952-1960 (trans!. John O'Neill),
Northwestern University Press, Evanston (1970), RC: Resumes de cours. College de France
1952-1960, Paris, Gallimard (Collection TEL), 1968; VI: The Visible and the Invisible.
Followed by Working Notes (trans!. Alphonso Lingis), Northwestern University Press,
Evanston (1970), VI: Le Visible et I'invisible suivi de notes de travail, Paris, Gallimard
(Collection TEL), 1964. English pagination is given first.
1. Deleuze, G., Foucault, Paris, Minuit, 1986, p. 120 ("la pMnom~nologie est trop pacifi-
ante, elle a Mni trop de choses") and passim.
2. On this notion of 'statement' (enonce) and its function in Foucault's archaeology see AK,
part III.
3. In 'R~ponse h une question' (Esprit, 1968 (36: 5» Foucault defined discourse as that which
is "constituted by the difference between what could be correctly said in a given epoch
(according to the rules of grammar and of logic) and what is effectively said" (p. 863, -
my trans!.).
4. The phrase is Hyppolite's, from his intervention at the famous 1957 Royaumont-
colloquium on Husserl, where he coined the expression "a transcendental field without a
subject" (un champ transcendantal sans sujet) which, as the preceding quote suggests, seems
to have been taken up by Foucault, who was his student and successor at the College de
France. (See Husserl. (Cahiers de Royaumont. Philosophie N· III). Paris, Minuit, 1959, p.
323).
5. For a lucid account see Russell Keat's "The Critique of Objective Thought" which is the
fifth chapter of the jointly written Understanding Phenomenology (M. Hammond, J. Howarth,
R. Keat), Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1991.
128 RUDI VISKER

6. On this shift see my "Michel Foucault". Genealogie als Kritik, MUnchen, Fink, 1991, p.
78 ff.
7. On the strategy behind Foucault's quotation marks, see, apart from the book in note 6, the
summary remarks in my "Can genealogy be critical? A somewhat unromantic look at
Nietzsche and Foucault", in Man and World, 1990 (23: 4), pp. 441-52.
8. Merleau-Ponty's view that classical Italian painting "lacked any idea of the subjectivity of
the painting" (SO, 518) should perhaps be qualified somewhat in the light of recent research
pointing to "an increasingly articulate sense of the artists' individuality" in the course of
the 15th century Italian Renaissance, which was, however, primarily based on differences
in skill (e.g. the mixing of colours, the drawing of faces, etc.) and does not yet seem to imply
the notion of subjectivity Merleau-Ponty seemed to have had in mind (Baxandall, M.,
Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, Oxford/New York, O.U.P., 1991, p.
20 ff.).
9. Panofsky, E., La perspective comme forme symbolique et autres essais, Paris, Minuit (1975),
pp. 63-6. Merleau-Ponty quotes repeatedly from Panofsky's famous 1924 piece on 'per-
spective as symbolic form' in "Eye and Mind" (see PriP 174-510E, 49-51).
10. For a brief exposition see Putnam, H., Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge, C.U.P.,
1981, esp. chapter 3.
11. As can be inferred from Merleau-Ponty's discussion with Kant throughout PP and in the
opening chapter of VI or from Foucault's explicit disclaimers in AK 126 ff.l166 ff. (on
'conditions of reality') and in the 1973 interview "An Historian of Culture" (in Foucault
Live (Interviews, 1966-84), New York, Semiotext(e), 1989): "What I called episteme in
The Order of Things has nothing to do with historical categories, that is with those
categories created in a particular historical moment" (p. 75).
12. Raw being seen as an 'inaccessible radical exteriority' makes Jean Pierre Le Goff, in an
otherwise interesting article, interpret Merleau-Ponty's last writings as an attempt to turn
philosophical reflexion into "an intellectual mysticism" ("Le paradoxe du language et I' etre
brut", in Actualites de Merleau-Ponty (Les Cahiers de Philosophie 7), pp. 69-84, esp. p.
76 ff.).
13. In his intervention at Royaumont, Merleau-Ponty stressed that "the transcendental attitude
is not an attitude where one can stay (se tenir) or install oneself (s'installer)" (Husser!, p.
159 - my trans!.).
14. At the cost of introducing a gallicism, I have tried to accomodate for the double meaning
of the French originaire (both 'original' (i.e. 'first', 'primitive') and 'originating') by simply
transcribing it as 'originary' in order to remain faithful to the semantic resonances of Merleau-
Ponty's text (Lingis's translation which opts for the sole 'originating' (VI, 124) seems to
lose an essential ambiguity).
15. On this "transition from the mute world to the speaking world" (VI, 154/VI, 202) which
was already a major theme in PP, see Taminiaux, J., "Experience, Expression and Form
in Merleau-Ponty's Itinerary", in Dialectic and Difference: Finitude in Modern Thought,
New Jersey, Humanities Press (1985), pp. 133-54 and Thierry, Y., Du corps parlant. Le
langage chez Merleau·Ponty, Brussels, Ousia, 1987.
16. Most succinctly in "Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language", in
Derrida, J., Margins of Philosophy, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press (1982), pp.
155-73.
17. Rainville, M., L'Experience et I 'expression. Essai sur la pensee de Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, Montrtal, Editions Bellarmin, 1988, p. 119.
18. Lefort, C!., 'Editor's Foreword', in VI, p. XXX.
19. Waldenfels, B., "Vtritt h faire. Merleau-Ponty's Question Concerning Truth", in Philosophy
Today (1991), (35: 2), p. 189.
20. Waldenfelds, B., Ordnung im Zwielicht, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, (1987): "Mit jedem
Anspruch, der in der Erfahrung auftritt, tritt etwas auf, das selektive und exklusive Formungen
produziert, aber in diesen nicht aufgeht," (p. 178). Waldenfels' attempt to generate from
this insight a notion of a 'responsive rationality' is further documented in some of his
 RA W BEING AND VIOLENT DISCOURSE 129

essays in the two companion volumes to Ordnung im Zwielicht: In den Netzen der
Lebenswelt, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1985 and Der Stachel des Fremden, Frankfurt a.M.,
Suhrkamp, 1990.
21. As is suggested in Waldenfels, B., "Das Zerspringen des Seins. Ontologische Auslegung
der Erfahrung am Leitfaden der Malerei", in Leibhaftige Vernunft. Spuren von Merleau-
Pontys' Denken, (ed. A. M6traux and B. Waldenfels), MUnchen, Fink (1986), p. 185.
22. A solution which, it should be noted, is explicitely rejected in "Das Zerspringen des Seins",
p. 159.
23. One will find this theme of a 'retreat of language' differently developed from the PhP,
through the PW to the VI. For a good overall account of Merleau-Ponty's views on language
see, e.g. Schmidt, J., Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Between Phenomenology and Structuralism,
LondonlBasingstoke, MacMillan, 1985, chapter 4 (with literature).
24. In Foucault this problem becomes most apparent in his later 'genealogy' which tries to
understand the 'subject' as the 'subjected' (on the double sense of 'subjectivation'
(assujettissement) and its theoretical aporia: Genealogie als Kritik, p. 98 ff.), but it is already
present in AK: "I wanted not to exclude the problem of the subject, but to define the posi-
tions and functions that the subject could occupy in the diversity of discourse" (AK, 2001261).
25. See note 3.
26. I am, of course, putting a twist upon the famous passage from In Praise of Philosophy:
"Our relationship to the true passes through others. Either we go towards the true with
them, or it is not towards the true that we are going. But the real difficulty is that, if the
true is not an idol, the others in their turn are not gods. There is no truth without them,
but it does not suffice to attain to the truth to be with them" (IPP, 311EP, 39-40 - my
emphasis). Moreover, the necessity of this twist, which follows from our reading of Merleau-
Ponty, is but another illustration of the point I am making here.
27. Kundera, M., The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, London, Penguin Books, 1983, p. 61
ff. ('On Two Kinds of Laughter').
 JAMES RISSER

Communication and the Prose of the World: The

Question of Language in Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer

In the course of his writings from the Phenomenology of Perception to his

working notes of 1961, one could justifiably say that Merleau-Ponty was
concerned with the theme of language. t Of course one does not find this
concern expressed by a systematic development of the theme. In fact, it would
appear that quite the opposite is true: the work on language in The Prose of
the World, for example, is abandoned for a yet to be thought more encom-
passing work on truth, or - to look at the same matter from a different
perspective - an account of communication in literary experience is replaced
by an account of the structure of being in which language now receives its
determination. Nevertheless, one can still detect within the horizon of the theme
a certain continuity, especially from 1947 on. 2 Already in the lecture course
on Language and Communication given at the University of Lyon in 1947,
Merleau-Ponty makes it clear that the question of language is not about fixed
structures, as if language functions merely as a technique for deciphering ready-
made significations. The question of language, in other words, is not captured
by a scientistic linguistics, for it fails to take into consideration what language
is for a speaking subject. In The Prose of the World, written in the early
1950s, Merleau-Ponty extends this critique, pointing directly at those who
would attempt to find in language a field of pure signification. The field of
pure signification stands outside experience and the sphere of expression,
and thus stands outside the real foundation of language found in the order
of speaking. For Merleau-Ponty language arises in the order of speaking as
such in which we "rediscover the concrete universality of a given language,
which can be different from itself without openly denying itself.,,3 No matter
what other turns in thought occur for Merleau-Ponty on the question of
language, he never abandons this essential insight. The question of language
remains for Merleau-Ponty a question of what I want to call the vibrancy of
speaking.
What is remarkable about this direction in the philosophy of language taken
by Merleau-Ponty is that it comes to stand in such close proximity to the
position of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. 4 For philosophical
hermeneutics the question of language is also not about linguistics, but is
P. Burke and 1. Van der Veken (eds.), Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, 131-144.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
132 JAMES RISSER

directed at the topic that is spoken of in the text. To be more precise, for
philosophical hermeneutics the question of language is a matter of a com-
municative event, of a voice that comes to speak again in the liveliness of
speaking wherein a "potentiality of being other lies beyond every coming to
agreement about what is common."s For Gadamer too the question of language
pertains to the order of speaking.
To the extent that this point of intersection between Gadamer and Merleau-
Ponty can be established in some detail it is even more remarkable that one
finds so little said about hermeneutics in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of
language. And yet, in an oblique fashion, Merleau-Ponty has much to say about
hermeneutics when we consider that his word for hermeneutics is communi-
cation. 6 The task of this paper takes its orientation from this point. The task
here is not to work out the details of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of language,
rather, the task is one of drawing out that common thread between a philos-
ophy of ambiguity and a philosophical hermeneutics such that one comes to
see just how hermeneutical Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of language really
is, and in doing so places before us the question of the relation between a
philosophy of ambiguity and a philosophical hermeneutics. We are able to draw
out this common thread through the formulation of what I want to call Merleau-
Ponty's three hermeneutical moves. The first hermeneutical move is more
appropriately preliminary to hermeneutics proper and consists of the peculiar
orientation into the question of language that we have just described, namely,
the turn from the field of pure signification into the speaking word which
requires interpretation. The second hermeneutical move consists of the analysis
of the speaking word as such, of language's hermeneutical structure in the
vibrancy of speaking. But ultimately this speaking for both Merleau-Ponty and
Gadamer is not that of a subject; the third hermeneutical move will thus pertain
to what one could call the deformation of the voice in the dispossession of
the speaking subject (the issue of ontological vibration). It is only in terms
of this third hermeneutical move that the question of the relation between a
philosophy of ambiguity and a philosophical hermeneutics can be properly
raised.

In his essay from his "Paris exchange" with Derrida in 1981 - "Text and
Interpretation" - Gadamer remarks that when considering the nature of a text
as a hermeneutical concept, which is to say as an experience of meaning,
the standpoint of the linguist is always insufficient. The linguist regards the
text as an end product in terms of the task of explaining the functioning of
language as such. For the hermeneut, on the other hand, the functioning of
language merely serves as a precondition for reading a text: the text must be
readable in order to take up the topic of the text as the proper object of the
reader's concern, and thus the text itself is not an end product but an inter-
 COMMUNICATION AND THE PROSE OF THE WORLD 133

mediate product. The question of language arises for philosophical hermeneu-

tics precisely at that point where the topic of the text is taken up. In this
regard the functioning of language serves a communicative understanding in
which what is spoken of in the text comes to speech as an event of under-
standing itself. Following Gadamer, this coming to speech is the effort of
dialogue, of reaching an agreement in understanding whereby the ideality of
the word - that reification of what is announced in language - is transformed
into the spoken word. Thus not only is the spoken word not to be confused
with the system of symbols that constitute language, but it is also not to be
confused with mere words as such. In an obvious way we can see how written
words attain an ideality, for writing, unlike speech, is freed from the contin-
gencies of origin and the necessary repetition of oral tradition. But the issue
of understanding is not one of the understanding of writing on the basis of
its supplement, for writing, despite the loss of oral immediacy in which
intonation and accent lends itself more readily to human communication and
understanding, has for Gadamer an "astonishing authenticity." The issue here
is simply that written texts present the real hermeneutic task of transforming
the ideality of the word back into language as speaking - i.e., communica-
tive event. Ideality, Gadamer tells us, "befits not only the written structure
but also original speaking and hearing insofar as their content can be separated
from the concrete speech act and can be reproduced.,,7 The ideality of writing,
which makes it contemporaneous with every present, is an abstraction from
the event of language itself. Accordingly, coming to speech is the interpreta-
tive effort of making the text speak again, and thus the text is an intermediate
product in the fullest sense as a phase in the execution of the communica-
tive event (TI 35).
There is no question that Merleau-Ponty wants to make a similar hermeneu-
tical turn in his philosophy of language. In fact it is interesting in this regard
to see that Merleau-Ponty is more explicit than Gadamer about the failure of
a system of pure signification with respect to the problem of communica-
tion. In The Prose of the World Merleau-Ponty makes a distinction between
language and speech, or to be more precise between sedimented language
and speech, that corresponds to Gadamer's distinction between the ideality
of the word and the spoken word. This distinction serves to articulate the
difference in language as it pertains to "the stock of accepted relations between
signs and familiar significations" and "the operation through which a certain
arrangement of already available signs and significations alters and then
transfigures each of them, so that in the end a new signification is secreted."
(PW 13) For the sake of communication, which for Merleau-Ponty is tanta-
mount to the experience of experience, 8 speech is privileged over language.
Communication is thus not simply an instrumental transference of significa-
tion within thought but the turn into experience whereby signification moves
beyond thought, that is to say whereby a meaning never before objectified is
captured as in the case of literary expression. In the order of communication
this functioning of non-ordinary language in which words are no longer fixed
134 JAMES RISSER

to the pages as signs does not rest solely with the writer, but applies to the
reader as well. In Merleau-Ponty's words, the place where author and reader
meet is borne by a language that hides itself from us "in an encounter between
the glorious and impalpable incarnations of my own speech and the author's
speech." (PW 14)
For Merleau-Ponty it is precisely when one takes communication in its most
prosaic sense as an instrument that never carries us "beyond our own powers
of reflection" that one turns from the dynamics of language as it occurs in
speech to sedimented language from which can appear "the specter of a pure
language." In this turn in language that wants to turn from the field of
experiential expression, one is faced with the task of replacing "the confused
allusions which each of our thoughts makes to all the others with precise
significations for which we may truly be responsible, because their exact sense
is known to us." (PW 5) This belief that expression is most complete when
it is unequivocal issues in a search for pure signification culminating with
the algorithm as the mature form of language. But, in refusing to depend on
the confusions in everyday language, the algorithm, which is antipodal to
hermeneutics, can succeed only by tearing speech out of history and enclosing
thought within itself.9
In his rejection of the algorithm, Merleau-Ponty is not, strictly speaking,
rejecting all linguistics as he is rejecting a certain intellectualism with respect
to the operation of language. That he is not rejecting all linguistics is evidenced
by the effect that Saussure had on Merleau-Ponty's own work. Merleau-Ponty
begins to draw on the work of Saussure after the publication of the
PhenomenoLogy of Perception, as a way of legitimating "the perspective of
the speaking subject who lives in his language" against the view that would
"spread language before the linguist like a natural object."10 Merleau-Ponty
finds confirmation in the work of Saussure that there can be no direct link
between thoughts and things, for according to Saussure language has an
arbitrary relation between the signifier and signified, between word and
concept, which produces a play of difference. ll But, as is so often the case with
thinkers Merleau-Ponty comes in close proximity with, Merleau-Ponty wants
to make use of Saussure for his own purposes. In this middle period of
Merleau-Ponty's own work in which he fervently takes over the essential
insight of Saussurean linguistics, Merleau-Ponty is still thinking the problem
of language in terms of a phenomenology of speech-acts. 12 What this means
is that the classical distinction between La Langue and La paroLe initially
formulated by Saussure is appropriated by Merleau-Ponty in a peculiar way.
The distinction according to Saussure is one between the system of signs
that allows for the construction of words in an oppositional phonological
play (La langue) and the actual experience of speaking (La parole). It could
be argued, however, that the distinction was made by Saussure in order to point
to the proper object of linguistics, namely, the system of signs, the science
of which would be a synchronic linguistics, without a consideration of the
experience of speaking. Merleau-Ponty, though, would see no contradiction
 COMMUNICATION AND THE PROSE OF THE WORLD 135

in reading Saussure to be saying that the object of synchronic linguistics is

ultimately a description of the structure of the act of speaking that occurs in
communication. In a remark that could just as well have been made by
Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty writes: "From the phenomenological point of view
(that is, for the speaking subject who makes use of his language as a means
of communicating with a living community), a language regains its unity."
(S 86) The question of language, in other words, for Merleau-Ponty as well
as Gadamer, is about language in use as the actuality of speaking where
language is neither a natural object nor the workings of a constituting con-
sciousness.

II

Let us look again, but now with greater precision, at how the phenomenon
of language and with it the event of understanding is understood by Gadamer.
In his essay "Man and Language" Gadamer remarks, in response to his question
about how language is present to us, that language is always there preceding
our speaking, and under normal conditions no individual is aware of his
speaking when he speaks. This insight allows Gadamer to point to three
features of language. First of all, there belongs to language an essential self-
forgetfulness. In the genuine form of speaking, which is nothing other than
the speaking in conversation, we are not aware of the traits of language that
linguistic science makes thematic. It is only by an abstraction that we bring
our grammar to an explicit consciousness, thus the real being of language,
Gadamer argues, consists in what is said in it which "constitutes the common
world in which we live." Secondly, language has the feature of I-Iessness.
When I speak I always speak to someone in the sense that what is said in
language is placed before the other to whom I speak. My speech is unavoid-
ably dialogical, carrying me beyond myself into a movement that is not of
my own making. Every genuine dialogue for Gadamer fractures the centering
in every speaking subject. Thirdly, the nature of language is to be all-encom-
passing. This means, according to Gadamer that "language is not a delimited
realm of the speakable, over against which other realms that are unspeak-
able might stand." Enlarging this third feature, Gadamer writes:
There is nothing that is fundamentally excluded from being said, to the
extent our acts of meaning intends it. Our capacity for saying keeps pace
untiringly with the universality of reason. Hence every dialogue also has
an inner infinity and no end. 13
For philosophical hermeneutics, then, the fixation of meaning, meaning's
eternal character, evaporates in the face of what is always unsaid in dialogue.
The experience of translation offers an example of what is meant here: although
one is bound to what stands there as the matter to be translated, the trans-
lator can never simply copy what is said, but rather, places himself in the
136 JAMES RISSER

direction of what is said "in order to carryover what is to be said into the
direction of his own saying." For Gadamer the realm of language in which
our interpretive efforts are situated is the realm of common understanding.
On the basis of these features Gadamer contends that what goes under the
name of language always refers beyond that which achieves the status of a
proposition. But this does not mean that language is simply a means of
communication, for if such were the case language would be secondary to
the priority of the subject, and it is precisely the decentering of subjectivity
that marks the dialogical situation. It means that language is there as language
in use. Language occurs in its lived execution, in actus exercitus. Accordingly,
the production of meaning transpires in the linguistic event, in the doing, so
to speak, and no where else.
It is precisely in the stretch of this linguistic event that we begin to see
how for Gadamer there is no mere reproduction of meaning. Gadamer insists
that in our speaking there is always a "virtuality of speech," the opening of
new possibilities of meaning by holding within itself possible being. Gadamer
writes:
Every word causes the whole of language to which it belongs to resonate
and the whole world-view that underlies it to appear. Thus every word, as
the event of a moment, carries with it the unsaid, to which it is related by
responding and summoning. The occasionality of human speech is not
a causal imperfection of its expressive power; it is, rather, the logical
expression of the living virtuality of speech [die Virtualitiit des Redens] that
brings a totality of meaning [Sinn] into play, without being able to express
totality. All human speaking is finite in such a way that there is laid up
within it an infinity of meaning to be explicated and laid OUt. 14
This unsaid within language whereby there is a creative multiplication of the
word is not to be understood as a potential waiting to be actualized. Such an
Aristotelian view cannot make sense in the context of Gadamer's insistence
that in the language of dialogue there is a speculative structure. As specula-
tive, language does not function in its expressive power as representing the
topic spoken of in language, but rather, functions in a way that the intelli-
gible is first formed. Gadamer writes:
To come into language does not mean that a second being is acquired.
Rather, what something presents itself as belongs to its own being. Thus
everything that is language has a speCUlative unity: it contains a distinc-
tion, that between its being and its presentations of itself, but this is a
distinction that is not really a distinction at all. (WM 450, TM 475)
All traditionary material displays this paradox of being one and the same yet
different. Such difference always exists within identity, otherwise identity
would not be identity. The event of speech as the realization of meaning in
language is thus for Gadamer speculative: "To say what one means ... means
to hold what is said together with an infinity of what is not said in the unity
 COMMUNICATION AND THE PROSE OF THE WORLD 137

of the one meaning and to ensure that it be understood in this way." (WM
444, TM 469)
It appears in light of what has now been said that we have already lost
the speaking subject to the nexus of interpretation in the speaking event. The
speaking event is for Gadamer self-presentation that in expressing a relation
to the whole of being produces an increase in being.
In a preliminary way we have already pointed to the corresponding creative
dimension of speech in Merleau-Ponty: speech, unlike sedimented language,
is the operation in which signs and significations are altered such that a "new
signification is secreted." But just how similar these notions are remains to
be seen. That a new signification occurs suggests that in a way parallel to
Gadamer there is for Merleau-Ponty a coming to speak again in the vibrancy
of speaking. One can see precisely what Merleau-Ponty means here in his
discussion of the abandonment of sovereignty that occurs in reading. Speaking
of Stendhal, Merleau-Ponty writes:
I create Stendhal; I am Stendhal while reading him. . . . The reader's
sovereignty is only imaginary, since he draws all his force from that infernal
machine called the book, the apparatus for making significations .... [But]
the expressible moment occurs where the relationship [between the reader
and the book] reverses itself, where the book takes possession of the reader.
(PW 12-13)
This expressive moment happens in speech when "Stendhal's own language
comes to life in the reader's mind," which at once transforms the reader in
understanding that language.
How though does this new meaning come about for the reader? In Merleau-
Ponty's description of reading one cannot help but notice that language
functions, as Gadamer described it, as an event of understanding insofar as
every speaking involves conversational partners, grafted to a common effort.
The will to speak whereby I am carried beyond myself is identical to the
will to understand. IS But for Merleau-Ponty the question of new meaning as
the question of understanding is not simply a matter of dialogical play. Parallel
to the speCUlative structure of language in Gadamer, the question of meaning
also pertains to what happens in the vibrancy of speaking as such, in the
mystery of language where language is obsessed with itself such that "it is
enabled through a kind of excess to open us up to a kind of signification." (PW
115) It would seem that the vibrancy of speaking - the creative dimension
and thus the peculiarity hermeneutic dimension of speaking - receives its sense
from the way in which language is enveloped in excess.
Merleau-Ponty has another word for this excess: silence. In order to do
justice to expressive speech, Merleau-Ponty suggests that "we must consider
speech before it is spoken, the background of silence which does not cease
to surround it and without which it would say nothing." (S 46)16 How though
are we to understand the nature of this silence? As a first approximation we
can look again at what goes on in dialogue. In reaching into the meaning of
138 JAMES RISSER

what is said, the words of the dialogical partners are never simply present.
When speaking occurs it does so against the background of what is not speech,
namely sedimented language. Sedimented language does not speak and in
this sense it is silence which is not nothing. 17 But this sense of silence does
not seem to agree with Merleau-Ponty's claim in "Indirect Language and the
Voices of Silence" that when we rid ourselves of the idea that language is a
translation of an original text, where translation is understood simply as a
reproduction, we see that "all language is indirect or allusive - that it is, if
you wish, silence." (S 43) It would seem then that silence pertains directly
to the living speech that takes us beyond our thoughts. Living speech not
only requires, but embodies in its performance a "thread of silence from which
the tissue of speech is woven." Since the meaning of a word in dialogue
does not adhere to a word "like butter on the bread", this thread of silence
is suggestive of a sphere of openness in terms of which there arises the pos-
sibility of moving beyond ourselves. One could then say as Merleau-Ponty
does that this sphere of openness is that which is between my thoughts, "my
afterthoughts and underthoughts," inasmuch as my "thought crawls along in
language," or as Merleau-Ponty says later in the same text, "language expresses
as much by what is between words as by the words themselves." (8 45)
There is though a second way of understanding silence, not unrelated to
the first. The creative dimension of speaking says that language does not yet
contain its meaning for it is not yet performed. 18 In this sense silence pertains
to the notion of possibility that we found in Gadamer. And here too, as is
the case for Gadamer, possibility is not a potential waiting to be realized.
And yet on this very point we can begin to see a fundamental difference
between Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer. This difference, in its most general form,
pertains to the ground of difference that invades our speaking such that
language is always related to what is unsaid, and thus to possibility. As noted
earlier, Merleau-Ponty takes 8aussurean structuralism, and with it the insight
that difference invades the sign whereby each sign "does not so much express
a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs"
(8 39), as his point of departure for an understanding of language. From this
orientation Merleau-Ponty is able to talk about the way in which meaning
emerges in the interval between words. For Gadamer, on the other hand,
difference arises in the context of a hermeneutics of finitude. Dialectics, which
is the mark of difference for Gadamer, enters the fabric of interpretation
precisely because "the word that interpretively fits the meaning of a text
expresses the whole of this meaning, i.e., allows an infinity of meaning to
be represented within it in a finite way." (WM 441, TM 465)
More significant, however, is the fact that Merleau-Ponty wants to extend
his notion of difference in language into the framework of the ontological
doubling - or better, oppositional interweaving - of visible and invisible.
Language comes to speak for Merleau-Ponty in the gap/divergence between
visible and invisible, or as Merleau-Ponty says in Signs, language must become
"almost invisible." The question of the vibrancy of speaking on which our
 COMMUNICATION AND THE PROSE OF THE WORLD 139

question of hermeneutics rests requires that something be said about this

connection between silence and "ontological vibration."19

III

In the writing that comprises The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty
wants to suggest a more intimate connection between language and ontology,
a connection that, at least by virtue of the indeterminacy of language, one might
call the recasting of a philosophy of ambiguity. In a context that now reflects
this connection, Merleau-Ponty writes:
... language lives only from silence; everything we cast to the others has
germinated in this great mute land which we never leave. But because he
has experienced within himself the need to speak, the birth of speech as
bubbling up at the bottom of his mute experience, the philosopher knows
better than anyone that which is lived is lived-spoken, that born at this depth,
language is not a mask over Being, but - if one knows how to grasp it
with all its roots and foliation - the most valuable witness to Being.
(VI 126)

In the most obvious sense, language, here understood as the vibrancy of

speaking, is a witness to Being in that it does not stand in relation to Being
as an operation of reflection, but by virtue of its performance is present at a
site that is at once a separation. Language is a witness to Being, in other words,
as speaking word, as word that does not have meaning in and of itself. It is
"that operative language which has no need to be translated into significa-
tions and thought ... that language that can be known only from within,
through its exercise . . . called forth by the voices of silence and continues
an effort of articulation which is the Being of every being." (VI 126-27) In
the vibrancy of speaking, a communicative event arises for Merleau-Ponty
because language contains the hold Being has over our thoughts.
Accordingly, as a witness to Being it is no longer the subject who speaks;
rather, it is now Being that speaks in the sense things are said by a speech
which we do not have but which has us. (S 19) If one were to ask in this context
whereof lies Being's voice, one would have to say, following Merleau-Ponty,
that the voice is of no one and yet is the very voice of things. 20 The voice
of Being is at once the voice of silence, which is not nothing. It is the voice
that can only echo if we are to think the non-identity of Being that occurs in
the intertwining of visible and invisible, in the reversibility in the self-
mediation at the heart of Being. This reversibility is precisely what occurs
in the invisibility of speech and what it signifies. If words have a meaning it
is because they are able to refer back to themselves. Merleau-Ponty writes:
Like the flesh of the visible ... speech is a relation to Being through a
being, and like it, it is narcissistic, eroticized, endowed with a natural magic
140 JAMES RISSER

that attracts the other significations into its web, as the body feels the
world in feeling itself. In reality there is much more than a parallel or an
analogy here, there is solidarity and intertwining.... No longer are there
essences above us ... but there is an essence beneath us, a common nervure
of the signifying and signified, adherence and reversibility of one another.
(VI 118)
For Merleau-Ponty, speech is the body of thought, the flesh of the world that
folds back upon itself. The vibrancy of speaking is nothing less than a
resounding speaking as a responding speaking.
Already our existence as seers ... and especially our existence as sonorous
beings for others and for ourselves contain everything required for there
to be speech from one to the other, speech about the world. And, in a
sense, to understand a phrase is nothing else than to fully welcome it in
its sonorous being, or as we put it so well, to hear what it says (I 'entendre).
The meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second
layer of 'psychic reality' spread over sound: it is the totality of what is
said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given
with the words for those who have ears to hear. (VI 155)
One takes up the responding speaking in the interrogative which pre-
supposes the incompleteness of all speaking and bears witness to the
intertwining of silence and speech. The interrogative is precisely that practice
that aims at something which cannot be surpassed by any statement or answer,
and thus can be said to be the "proper mode of our relationship to Being, as
though it were the mute or reticent interlocutor of our questions." (VI 129)
The task of philosophy is now to display this non-posited Being. But this means
that Being calls for interpretation, even if the interpetation is nothing other
than Being's self-interpretation. Herein lies Merleau-Ponty's third hermeneu-
tical move, and the parallel with Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics appears
to remain in force.
In the context of his concern with the problem of the relation between
language and world Gadamer points out that philosophical hermeneutics is
not to be confused with the essentially theological answer to the problem
that appears in Greek thought.
In considering the being of beings, Greek metaphysics regarded it as a being
that fulfilled itself in thought. This thought is the thought of nous, which
is conceived as the highest and most perfect being, gathering within itself
the being of all beings. The articulation of the logos brings the structure
of being into language, and this coming into language is, for Greek thought,
nothing other than the presencing [Gegenwart] of the being itself, its
aletheia. (WM 432-33, TM 456-57)
Gadamer is emphatic in saying that he cannot follow this way of thinking,
for the hermeneutic phenomenon is guided by the finitude of historical
 COMMUNICATION AND THE PROSE OF THE WORLD 141

experience. It is true that language is the medium within which our relation
to the world transpires, but this means for Gadamer that language is the
record of finitude, and as speakers we are caught up in the "trace of language,"
that is, in the paths of language in which the structure of experience itself is
formed amidst its constant change. It is in this context in which language is
not governed by an eternal order that Gadamer would say that Being that
can be understood is language. In our speaking, which is always a response
to what addresses us in language, there is a virtuality of speech, the opening
of new possibilities of sense by holding within itself possible being.
Again, possibility in language is not a potential waiting to be realized,
because the center of language is for Gadamer speculative in the sense that
what is at stake in living language is the very formation of the intelligible. This
speculative structure of language is what we find in the poetic word where
the word as such can always say more than what it can ever at once say.
The poetic word is an excess of meaning. The word itself, in its internal
vibration by which it resonates with the whole of language, places meaning
at once out of reach (an infinity of what is not said) but not out of reach
(the word's self-fulfillment). In this self-fulfillment, the poetic word does
not mirror an existing thing, but simply says what is. 21 What is, for Gadamer
as well as for Merleau-Ponty, is not something thus already known.
Philosophical discourse for Gadamer takes up the same kind of speaking found
in the poetic word. In the effort of having the tradition speak again in a new
voice, of having language say what it has not yet said, the interpreting subject
is dispossessed in a responding summoning. Here the vibrancy of language's
speaking occurs in its formal structure in the logic of question and answer
through which the interlocutor hears the voice of the other. This other is both
same and other in the communicative situation, for the communicative event
is being's self-presentation in its non-identity.22 Hermeneutic conversation is
thus language on the move (kinesis), a movement of discourse in which word
and idea first become what they are. What occurs in language is "the play
of language itself, which addresses us, proposes and withdraws, and fulfills
itself in the answer." (WM 464, TM 490)
As a conclusion let us return to the question that we raised at the outset
but which we sought to defer until the end of our analysis. That question
pertained to the question of the relation between a philosophy of ambiguity
and a philosophical hermeneutics. It is quite apparent that our analysis of
the relation has attempted to make the most of identity rather than differ-
ence, and thus properly speaking we have not yet raised the question of the
relation. If we were to broach this question of the relation now, at that point
where the analysis of identity itself raises the question, we would begin to
ask about the ontological commitments that enter and sustain the matrix of
the vibrancy of speaking. For Merleau-Ponty, in the vibrancy of speaking
one detects the echoes of all speaking, of the reversibility that sustains speech,
of a voice that is not that of a speaking subject, but rather a voice of silence
as Being's voice. Here, it we follow Merleau-Ponty into his last writings,
142 JAMES RISSER

we can say that the philosopher is drawn into the vibrancy of speaking through
an engagement with what is abyssal. The ardor of speaking is a "listening at
the abyss.'>23 For Gadamer, on the other hand, one hears in the vibrancy of
speaking the voice of the other, who has no particular name, not even silence.
Here the philosopher can only listen to what one says. And yet, in both the
task is, by virtue of the vibrancy of speaking, to be able to speak, to inaugurate
a tum toward the voice - a communication in the prose of the world.

NOTES

1. Merleau-Ponty's principal essays on language are as follows: "Language and Com-

munication," an unpublished text from 1947-48; "Consciousness and the Acquisition of
Language" (1949), published in the Bulletin de Psychologie in 1964; "On the Phenomenology
of Language" (1951) and "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" (1952), both pub-
lished in Signs; "The Prose of the World" (1950--52); "An Unpublished Text by Maurice
Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of his Work" (1953), published in the Primacy of Perception;
Themesfrom the Lectures at the College de France 1952-1960; The Visible and the Invisible
(1959-61). For a complete account of these writings see Hugh Silverman, "Merleau-Ponty
and the Interrogation of Language," Research in Phenomenology, Vol. X (1980), 122-141.
2. It could be argued that language is not simply an important theme in the later writing, but
in fact is Merleau-Ponty's central preoccupation insofar as it is regarded as the privileged
model of the whole of our experience of meaning. This is the position taken by James
Edie. See his Speaking and Meaning (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1976).
3. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. by John O'Neill (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1973), pp. 39-40. Hereafter PW.
4. One could attribute this commonality to Heidegger as a common source for both thinkers.
But one should not give this common source an undo importance which would detract
from seeing the independent thinking in both Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer.
5. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Text und Interpretation" in Hermeneutik /I, Gesammelte Werke, Band
2 (Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1986), p. 336. English translation appears as "Text and
Interpretation" in Dialogue & Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. Diane
Michelfelder & Richard Palmer (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), p. 26. Hereafter in English
translation TI.
6. The connection between the word 'communication' and hermeneutics is most obvious in
the German language where Verstiindnis, which is a root variation of Verstehen (under-
standing) can mean 'understanding', 'comprehension', 'communication', 'intelligence'.
For Gadamer the event of agreement in understanding which is in play between people is
a Verstiindigungsgeschehen.
7. Gadamer, "Philosophy and Literature," trans. Anthony J. Steinbock, Man and World, Vol.
18, (1985), 247.
8. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes: "In a sense the whole of philos-
ophy, as Husser! says, consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a
wild meaning, an expression of experience by experience, which in particular clarifies the
special domain of language. And in a sense, as Val6ry said, language is everything, since
it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, the forests."
The Visible and the Invisible, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1968), p. 155. Hereafter VI.
9. Thought, Merleau-Ponty writes, "signifies outside itself through a message which does
not carry it and conveys it unequivocally only to another mind, which can read the message
because it attaches the same signification to the same sign, whether by habit, by human
convention, or by divine institution" (PW 7).
 COMMUNICATION AND THE PROSE OF THE WORLD 143

10. Merleau-Ponty, "The Metaphysical in Man" in Sense and Non-sense, trans. by Hubert and
Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 87. This essay, written
in 1947, marks Merleau-Ponty's first reference to Saussure. For a thorough discussion of
Merleau-Ponty's relation to Saussure, see Stephen Watson, "Merleau-Ponty's Involvement
with Saussure" in Continental Philosophy in America, ed. by lohn Sallis (Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press, 1983).
11. In ''The Problem of Speech" in Themesfrom the Lecture at the College de France 1952-1960,
Merleau-Ponty writes: "The well-known definition of the sign as 'diacritical, oppositive, and
negative' means that language is present in the speaking subject as a system of intervals
between signs and significations, and that, as a unity, the act of speech simultaneously
operates the differentiation of these two orders." Themes from the Lectures, trans. by lohn
O'Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 19-20.
12. In the opening paragraph of "On the Phenomenology of Language," a paper presented at
the first Colloque international de phi!nomenologie in Brussels in 1951, Melleau-Ponty claims
that the problem of language "provides us with our best basis for questioning phenomenology
and recommencing Husserl's efforts instead of simply repeating what he said." Signs,
trans. by Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 84. Hereafter
S.
13. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. by David Linge (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1976), p. 67.
14. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundziige einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tiibingen:
1. C. B. Mohr, 1960), 2nd and revised edition, 1965, p. 434. English translation by loel
Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad Publishing,
1989), p. 458. Hereafter WM and TM respectively.
15. Merleau-Ponty's description of dialogue is remarkably similar to Gadamer's own descrip-
tion. In The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty writes: "Between myself as speech and
the other as speech, or more generally myself as expression and the other as expression, there
is no longer that alternation which makes a rivalry of the relation between minds. I am
not active only when speaking; rather, I precede my thought in the listener. I am not
passive while I am listening; rather I speak according to ... what the other is saying. Speaking
is not just my own initiative, listening is not submitting to the initiative of the other,
because as speaking subjects we are continuing, we are resuming a common effort more
ancient than we are, upon which we are grafted to one another, and which is the manifes-
tation, the growth of truth." (PW 143-44) Compare this passage with Gadamer's description
of dialogue in Truth and Method, pp. 362-379. The last sentence of the section summa-
rizes Gadamer's point: "To reach an understanding in dialogue is not merely a matter of
putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one's point of view, but being transformed
into a communion in which we do not remain what we were" (WM 360, TM 379).
16. Merleau-Ponty makes an almost identical assertion in The Prose of the World: "We should
consider speech before it has been pronounced, against the ground of silence which precedes
it, which never ceases to accompany it, and without which it would say nothing." (PW 45-6)
17. This notion that silence can be tied to la langue can be found in Speaking and Meaning.
See p. 102ff.
18. See "An Unpublished Text," The Primacy of Preception, ed. by James Edie (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 8.
19. This phrase is taken from The Visible and the Invisible. In the section "Interrogation and
Intuition" Merleau-Ponty writes: "[W]e are experiences, that is, thoughts that feel behind
themselves the weight of the space, the time, the very Being they think. .. [that] have about
themselves a time and space that exist by piling up, by proliferation, by encroachment, by
promiscuity - a perpetual pregnancy, perpetual parturition, generativity and generality, brute
essence and brute existence, which are the nodes and antinodes of the same ontological vibra-
tion" (VI 115).
20. See note 8 above.
21. In his essay "On the Contribution of Poetry to the Search for Truth" Gadamer writes:
144 JAMES RISSER

..... what appears in the mirror [of the poetic word] is not the world, nor this or that
thing in the world, but rather this nearness or familiarity itself in which we stand for a
while .... This is not a romantic theory, but a straightforward description of the fact that
language gives us our access to a world in which certain special forms of human experi-
ence arise.... " The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. llS.
22. For Gadamer, the model for this self-presentation is play (Spiel).
23. See Patrick Burke. "Listening at the Abyss" in Ontology and Alterity. ed. Galen Johnson and
Michael Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 1990). pp. 81-97.
 PART IV

Politics, Ethics, and Ontology

 STEPHEN WATSON

Merleau-Ponty, the Ethics of Ambiguity,

and the Dialectics of Virtue

Le Vieldeutigkeit n'est pas ombre ~ c5liminer de la

vrai lumiere (PNP: 115)

La 'gc5omc5trie naturelle' ou Ie 'jugement nature!'

sont des mythes, au sens platonicien (PhP: 298)

It would be something of an understatement, granted developments in recent

continental thought, to claim that the research program inaugurated by Edmund
HusserI did not, and probably on its own terms in principle could not, provide
an ethics. On the other hand when this claim has been merely asserted the
result has often seemed an all but ideological or rhetorical matter. Granted
the complexity of this history - not only with respect to internal challenges
to philosophy raised by such figures as Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud - but
also the complex and critical issues which pivot around the concept of
'consciousness', the complications that attend such polemics are, if not outright
unavoidable, then at least understandable. Add to this the fact that the very
figures around whose work these challenges arose in the end refused ultimately
to separate their work from that of HusserI, and things become even murkier
perhaps.'
To concentrate, as will be the proposal here, upon figures who intervene
within this complex itinerary, tracing in effect its coherent deformation, may
seem a matter of explaining the obscurus per obscurus. Yet it may be
precisely here that what is at stake emerges in the underdeterminability these
arguments interface - even notwithstanding standard interpretations which
viewed classical existentialist views as ones having 'ontological' founda-
tions. Instead (and in this regard 'existentialism' is indeed the 'floating
signifier' those captured by it claimed) what is at stake involves the opening
of this interface (one instead as much 'epistemic' as 'ontological,' and as much
'ethical' and 'logical'). If, that is, those who labored under the sign of

P. Burke and J. Van der Veken (eds.), Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, 147-170.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
148 STEPHEN WATSON

'existentialism' would not have the last word on this matter, what I shall
claim is that they have an inextricable role to play in its eruption, and perhaps
too an inextricable word at that. In fact, as will be seen, it involved a word
no more eruptive or 'ambiguous' than that invokes in the final enigmatic
sentences of MerIeau-Ponty's preface to Signs' appeal to virtu. And, in the end
it may be not only necessary to the internal dynamics of phenomenology,
but - insofar as it marked equally the echo of a piece devoted over a decade
earlier to Machiavelli - crucial to polemics about the rise of ethical (and
political) modernism. Like much of MerIeau-Ponty's later writing, however,
and especially in this case, striking in a statement for which he was peremp-
torily condemned, it can be made significant only by tracing the complex
relations which form its antecedents within the phenomenological 'archive.'

II

As we now know overtly from Husserliana XXVIII, Vorlesungen uber Ethik

und Wertlehre (1908-1914), the question of ethics was not simply absent
from phenomenology - and not even from the start - if it was neither central
nor foundational to it. The account of the ethical remained bound by the
specificity of the paradigms in which 'phenomenology' had been articulated
and, in particular, Husserl's idea of the sciences in general [cf. LI, section
62]. Phenomenology was from the outset an endeavor formulated on
foundations which were to be demonstrably ultimate with regard to rational
enquiry in general, renewing the classical idea of Wissenschaftslehre, an
enquiry concerning "what makes science science," one for which even the
rubric of epistemology was unsuitable [LI: 59]. If it is critical to see that
HusserI's considerations on ethics remained subsumed beneath his account
of analytics, it may also be necessary to recognize the extent to which this
account remains theory laden, bound, that is, to the very intransitivity of this
(Transcendental) Ideal [LI: 225]. Instead, as the recently published lectures
on ethics and theory of value demonstrate, HusserI's logicism left his attempts
to deal with ethical issues inevitably impoverished - notwithstanding the
fact, as fragments dating from 1902 indicate, that he had himself already railed
against Kant's formalism and its subjectivization of the passions. From the
outset, that is, the question of ethics was based upon a "parallelismus" with
questions of logic. In this respect, to speak Wittgensteinian, HusserI's account
of ethics remained throughout mystified, captivated by a 'picture' in its attempt
to mimic the (deductive) determinacy of logic.
Analytic phenomenology, as Husserl originally called it, was not simply
'analytic' with respect to its pure descriptions of the appearance, it was likewise
analytic with respect to a certain conception of the rational, one which remained
univocal, indisputably decidable, demonstrably determinate, and consequently
devoid in all respects of internal epistemic shortfall. What Husserl had gleaned
from Bolzano concerning the objectivity of truth could be reinstated in the
 THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY 149

moral domain, it being a merely analogical extension of the fulfillment of

the manifolds of reason. Husserl's demands for reason could then be seen to
imply a praxis of reason, its genitive fully objective, embarking once more
upon a stoicism of internal necessity which had accompanied philosophical
modernism's commitment to certainty from its origins.

III

In this regard nothing could be more dissonant than to compare Husserl's

parallelismus with the locus classicus of 'phenomenological' ethics. In fact
Max Scheler's Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values
(1913-1916) has always been ambiguously related to its discipline's founder,
Scheler's work in general often described as lacking in Husserl's rigors. In
retrospect, as will become evident, such claims must be evaluated carefully.
First, it must be said, Scheler's allegiance to the history of ethics led him to
retain the classical distinction between practical and theoretical matters which
remained paradigmatically at odds with Husserl's Cartesian philosophy of strict
science. Equally, however, even on matters of epistemic or 'scientific' cer-
tainty, Scheler had probably realized in advance of Husserl the necessity of
distinguishing between static or analytic and synthetic or 'genetic' explication.
The latter depended at least implicitly on the recognition that the in-
tuitional or perceptual experiences which underwrote Husserl's foundationism
would depend less upon a static insight than upon the epistemic process
constituting its teleology, i.e., the historical extension and unfolding of
consciousness for its fulfillment. The verificational series itself generated its
own rational - if transcendental - history. And granted this transformation from
static to genetic analysis, as Husserl himself would realize, "immediately the
problem becomes extended to include the other intentional references, those
belonging to the situation in which, for example, the subject exercising the
judicative activity is standing and to include, therefore the immanent unity
of the temporality of the life that has its history therein ... (FTL: 36). This
meant, however, that phenomenology and history, far from being set off in
opposition to one another, as Husserl's early logicism had demanded, would
be essentially conjoined.
If Scheler had not pursued the point of this alteration from within the
genre of Wissenschaftslehre in which the transformation became evident to
Husserl, the point had been latent in Scheler'S Formalismus's account of the
rationality of ethical consciousness. 2 From its opening pages Scheler's account
denied any identification of the hierarchy of values with classical ontologies
concerning the good, the latter being dependent upon the synthetic acts through
which they acquire their 'valuability' i.e. "a good is related to a value as a
thing to the quality that fulfill its properties (F: 20). In this sense Scheler's
1926 preface could both claim that his account overcomes Kant's formalism,
while depending upon the latter's critical "destruction" (Zerstorung).3
150 STEPHEN WATSON

The resulting account of values, barring "a return to the ancient static
objectivism of goods" (F: xxviii), was phenomenologically relational in origins
- and in this regard conditional, dependent upon a discrete and finite encounter.
Indeed he had claimed that in principle "there are still infinitely more values
than anyone has ever felt or grasped" (F: 270), that like Husserl's transcen-
dental genesis, the absolute had been consigned to an infinite process of
elaboration (hence a certain inadequation), and that what was at stake in an
analysis of evaluation would consequently be "more, not less, historico-
relativistic than Kant's, but without giving up the idea of an absolute ethics
itself' (F: xxix). The rationalization of ethics, consequently, requires both
differentiation, and infinite elaburation, and hence further reference to Husserl's
extended and "other intentional references" - without however turning simply
relative. 4

IV

In order to fully grasp the impact of Scheler's theoretical difference vis-a-

vis Husserl, however, it is important to realize that, for all its explicit
commitments to non-formalism. it was not without formal implications. Indeed
Scheler's account too rests upon a very specific formal account of evidence.
If the evidence in question is never complete, if the absolute is never simply
determinable, if identity and difference are inseparable, and if analysis and
synthesis implicate one another, this is not the failure but the formal
condition of evidence: to be underdetermined without being dissolved. If
Scheler's work dating from the same time period as Husserl's commitments
to a logical parallelismus between 'logic' and ethics can rightly be seen to
anticipate Husserl's own later developments, it must also be seen to depart
from its account of the formal. While Wissenschaftstheorie for Husserl was
both more than metaphysics and more than epistemology, Scheler disagreed
on both counts: metaphysically, regarding the account of theoretization and the
absolute; epistemologically, regarding the origins of e-valuation; logically,
regarding the relation between syntax and semantics. In fact nothing could
be more portentous in this regard than Scheler's analogy between formal
science and 'material' or concrete evaluation. Openly he declares, "by way
of analogy I could say that the discovery of new geometries with different
axiomatic systems, which is to be sharply distinguished from the discovery
of new propositions within each system does not make geometry more relative
than it was from the very start" (F: 302).
It is a quick 'analogy' but a decisive one nonetheless - one which only serves
to truncate the complex relations between the two positions. First, the geo-
metrical 'analogue' is one that occurs in Husserl's own discussion of ethics
(Wert I: 173). And, that it occurs in this context is not surprising, since it is
not simply analogical but paradigmatic for Husser!. In fact from the begin-
ning (cf. LI 59f.) to the end of his career, culminating in the 1936 "Origin
 THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY 151

of Geometry," it remained exemplary to his foundational concerns. If HusserI's

account of justificatory investigations alters during this period, moving from
intuition to perception, or static to genetic accounts, the point remains the same,
the truth in question beyond all axiomatic or calculative enumeration. As the
"Origin of Geometry" would repeat again: "Original self-evidence must not be
confused with the self-evidence of axioms" (OG: 168), the latter being founded
- even if they (genetically) always "appear on the scene in the form of
tradition" (OG: 170) - in the invariant essential structures, the universal a priori
of consciousness.
Any systematic explication of propositions presupposes the self-evidential
origin from which they derive, and presupposes therefore the science of such
an origin. From this, however, Scheler had not swerved (F: 74). It was -
again - instead the rational question of adequation which had caused him to
pause. If HusserI had learned from Kant the idea of a categorical imperative
and the purity of an ethics of values, Scheler countered with Kant's destruc-
tion. No determinate articulation could deliver the finality of a truth (or value)
in-itself.
While we should not attempt to fully arbitrate this complex issue in detail
here, two additional comments should be made. In changing from the static
to the genetic account, HusserI's Formal and Transcendental Logic all but
openly admitted to being overly indebted to Hilbert in the attempt to model
the phenomenological evidence at stake upon the idea of complete axiomatic
enumeration (cf. FTL: 94ff.). On the other hand, the Origin's commitment to
complete disclosure doubtless still attests to it (OG: 168 f.). In fact it is not
insignificant that Heidegger (who as early as 1912 had written on advances
in mathematics and logic, already citing the work of Russell and Whitehead,
for example), was closer on this matter to Scheler. In 1925, for example, he
openly declared Hilbert's formalism to be opposed to phenomenology and
Brouwer and Weyl, on the otherhand, to be "influenced" by the latter (HCT:
3).5 Bolzano's idea of science as a closed system of objectively decidable truths
in themselves (LI: 222ff.) would ultimately conflict with the phenomenolog-
ical account of evidence. 6 Later in the 1940's, Cavailles, who would both
defend and surpass Husserl in this area, realized that the enquiry into pure logic
- and the Wissenschaftstheorie which remains - resulted not simply in a
sequence of identically determinate repeatables but a series which, as both
equally revelatory and creative, could not be apodictically "dominated" from
the beginning by pure form. Instead it involved an event, to speak Hegelian,
where matter and form could not be separated. 7 The demand for a pure
parallelism between pure form and pure matter (semantics) would consequently
be naIve. Husserl's attempts to imitate Hilbert were bound to fail:

The possibility of assembling some privileged assertions at the outset is a

source of illusion if we forget the operational rules which alone give them
meaning. Concrete axiomatics, like those of Hilbert for geometry, are in part
responsible for the error by their reference to well-known notions. s
152 STEPHEN WATSON

While HusserI's own position here might be claimed to be oblique in the

end, granted his own alterations of the account of science and evidence -
especially regarding the Cartesian equivalence between apodicticity and
adequacy - Cavailles in any case had already realized that the result of genetic
analysis conflicted with HusserI's reductivism, its pure semantic types
inevitably confounded in the syntatic explicative sequences which under-
wrote "the science of infinite tasks.,,9 While it is clear that those students of
HusserI whom Van Breda in the late thirties identified as a new Parisian school
(Cavailles, Hyppolite, MerIeau-Ponty, Tran-Duc-Thao) all saw the unpublished
manuscripts as not simply an enrichment of the phenomenological program,
but, to cite the latter, manifestly "incompatible" with the logicism of its
"philosophical framework;" Cavailles in a sense faced HusserI most directly
only in his own theoretical research. 1O

If the material a priori required by an 'ethics of values' originates in a

non-empirical insight, its articulation would in fact always be finite. It was
on this insight that the static account had floundered, turning its search for
truths (or values) in themselves prejudicial [FTL: 277]. The process of genetic
differentiation or explication would never be exhausted, now a regulative -
if still infinite - idea. As a result, the plurality of value estimations, far from
providing a threat to this origin, would instead attest both to its abundance
and the 'infinite task' of its elaboration, its 'objectivity' always schema or
perspective specific. Hence the crucial problem of the genesis and hidden
intentional meanings of multiplicity. As Scheler put it in discussing the
emergence of an ethos in general:
It is precisely a correctly understood absolute ethics that strictly requires
these differences - this value-perspectivism of values among peoples and
their times and this openness in the formative stages of the ethos (F:
303-304).
Scheler's Auseinandersetzung with HusserI operated as much from a certain
internal dissonance within its own system as it did from a failure to live up
to its systematic requisites. In the end the search for an ultimately adequat-
able parallelismus between logic and ethics was a misguided project - seen
'Kantian,' a failure to distinguish the sensible and the intelligible.
Notwithstanding both HusserI's and Scheler's condemnations of Kant's
marginalization of feeling, their mutual allegiance to the critical project turned
antinomial, an event not without impact on the ethical, in connecting the
adequation of truth to matters of context and genesis. But in this respect -
on either account - things will become complex for the account of ethical
judgment. Far from it being the case that questions in axiology could be
subsumed beneath the pure categories of reason, it would be incumbent to trace
 THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY 153

the complexity of their emergence and the encounter in which they arise.
And it was perhaps just the complexity of this event, its contingency or
ambiguity, to invoke their terms, which would make the departures instituted
by Scheler both attractive and 'phenomenological' to the existentialists.

VI

First, however, we should witness the emergence of the question of value in

the early works of the 1930's. In one sense Levinas' 1931 The Theory of
Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology had in effect already opened French
students not only to Husserl's work, but to the critical status of ethics with
respect to it. Having elaborated what he too saw to be a certain fluctuation
in Husserl's thought concerning its dual commitments to the primacy of theory
and its explications concerning "concrete life," Levinas ventured that this
difficulty would be ultimately resolved in the "affirmation of the intentional
character of practical and axiological life."u In many respects those who
followed in his wake would affirm the same strategy. If already by 1936 and
the Transcendence of the Ego Sartre too had been led to question the
transcendental certainty of reflection and its Kantian stronghold, the notebooks
of 1939 reveal the importance of his discovery of the question of value by
reading Scheler:
(R)eading Scheler made me understand that there existed values. Basically,
until then, quite absorbed by the metaphysical doctrine of salvation, I'd
never understood the specific problem of morality. The 'ought-to-be' seemed
to me to be represented by the categorical imperative; and since I rejected
the latter, it seemed to me that I rejected the former with it. But when I
understood that there existed specific natures, equipped with an existence
as of right, and called values; when I understood that these values, whether
proclaimed or not, regulated each of my acts and judgments, and that by
their nature they 'ought to be': then the problem became enormously more
complex (WD: 88).
Four years previous to the entry in Sartre's notebooks, roughly then
contemporaneous to Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego, Merleau-Ponty's first
publication, a review of Scheler's book on ressentiment affirms "the a priori
materials, that is to say, some objects of concrete intention" (CR: 11) provided
by what he referred to as Scheler'S "alogical" intuition of values. Here Merleau-
Ponty praises Scheler's account precisely for its "super-abundance of life" (CR:
5) in responding to the failures of nineteenth century moral thought (Mill,
Bentham, Nietzsche). In one sense this opposition could be characterized as
an insistence upon moral realism, the right of 'nature' as Sartre had put it. 12
Still, it was even as such inevitably more complex.
The existentialist's discovery of the early masters of phenomenology
doubtless remained in many respects both conditional and naive, not only
154 STEPHEN WATSON

with respect to how phenomenological resources might be applied to their own

problems, but no less significantly, naive with respect to the viability of the
options (the internal coherence) of the phenomenological research program
itself. And much still needs to be said of the dialogue constituted by the
works of the major figures of the Parisian school of interpreters of phenom-
enology in figures such as Cavailles or Tran-Duc-Thao. Still, if both Sartre
and Medeau-Ponty found the origins of their ethical accounts in Scheler in
the mid-thirties, it was not simply because Hussed's writings in ethics were
unavailable, but rather because they were finding, in the difference that arose
between Scheler and Hussed, a difference which resonated with their own
confrontation with that project. And this confrontation itself revolved around
the issue of realist commitments to ontology and non-Cartesian accounts of
judgment - around the issue therefore of ambiguity.

VII

Tied to existentialism, however, the problem of ambiguity both fully assumed

- and fully transformed - its Hegelian ancestry, the issue of historical genesis
now becoming more openly a problem of explication and determinacy. In a
sense already anticipating Scheler's critique of formalism, Hegel's 1803 treatise
on Natural Law, openly concerned itself with problems in explicating the
substance of ethical life. 13 For Hegel, that is, this problem involved both not
only what he referred to as a certain "lack of skill" in positive law's expli-
cation of the ethical, but the lack of determinacy which undercuts its formalism.
If Hegel doubtless overstates the case in arguing that "there is nothing whatever
which cannot in this way be made into a moral law," it surely is true that
the task of existentially instantiating formal criteria runs the risk of resulting
in conflicting interpretation, "(b)oth of which (are) equally capable of being
thought" .14 Positive law is always in this regard problematic insofar as it moves
from event to its judgment, intuition to concept, it being then the role of phi-
losophy to bring to light false interpretation in the "ambiguous nature of
what is called experience" [in der zweideutigen Nature dessen. was Erfahrung
genannt wirdJ. 1s Philosophy, that is, in seizing the totality above the part, is
to provide the bridging principles between being and understanding. "There
in the dimension of time, this totality secure in its absolute equilibrium balances
between the opposites" and thus makes them available for univocal analysis
and systematization. 16
As early as the War Diaries Sartre had argued that intuition and principle,
ethos and law were not univocally one, invoking Kierkegaard and an
ambiguity which "would have been shocking to a systematic thinker" (WD:
120). The ambiguity here instead would be acknowledged to be irreducible.
an event with both ontological as well as epistemic implications. What Sartre
still calls human nature is now claimed to be at a distance from itself, one
which is 'unbridgeable'. If he agrees that it is historical, that is, if one grasps
 THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY 155

the world only through "a technology, a culture, a condition" (WO: 107), it
is true too that one never fully encompasses that nature through the totaliza-
tion of consciousness. Consciousness exists, as Being and Nothingness later
will impart, precisely as a de-totalized totality. While the specific type of human
reality is still essentially connected with value, one by which the future thus
become projected and the world intelligible, this totalization is declared to
be always a transcendental illusion (WD: 108-110). The adequation and
realization of this totality is always divided from itself, as the present is divided
from the future. The totality, consequently, remains always irredeemable.

VIII

While the early Sartre had concentrated upon the inevitable illusions of reason,
Merleau-Ponty time and again argued that it was not thereby impossible.1 7
Instead, from the outset he argued that we would need to alter our idea of
reason and our accounts of human actions in order to grasp it. If it is true
that our actions are at least overdetermined, in the Freudian sense of having
more than one meaning, it is again true that they are underdetermined: "All
life is undeniably ambiguous and there is never any way to know the true
meaning of what we do. Indeed perhaps our actions have no single true
meaning (SNS: 34).18 There is then no "moral sense" which might furnish
the Truth or the Good in their immediacy (SNS: 40). And yet Merleau-Ponty
refused from the outset a certain 'existential' nihilism. Indeed we see him
arguing as early as the mid-forties for a "new classicism" (SNS: 63) ora
"humanism in extension" (HT: 176), finding in fact his precursors in
Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Pascal. As he says in his 1948 piece on
Montaigne:
The critique of passions does not deprive them of their value if it is carried
to the point of showing that we are never in possession of ourselves and
that passion is ourselves. The only effect of our whole critique is to make
our passions and opinions more precious by making us see that they are
our only recourse ... (S: 206).
The ambiguity affecting values neither negates their validity nor the respon-
sibility required in the art of their interpretation. If there is no univocal 'moral
sense', even were there no demonstrable natural law, there remains the problem
of the contingency of value itself. This is evident, in fact, already in the
concluding lines to Merleau-Ponty's 1945 Temps Modernes discussion of de
Beauvoir's L'[nvitee:
True morality (La vrai morale) does not consist in following exterior rules
or in respecting objective values: there are no ways to be just or to be saved.
One would do better to pay less attention to the unusual situation of the
three characters in L'[nvitee and more to the good faith, the loyalty of
156 STEPHEN WATSON

promises, the respect for others, the generosity and the seriousness of the
two principle characters. For the value is there (Car la valeur est la.). It
consists of actively being what we are by chance, of establishing that com-
munication with others and with ourselves for which our temporal structure
gives us the opportunity and of which our liberty is only the rough outline
(SNS: 40).
It is a fortuitous text. First it is a review of the author soon to write a
classical text on 'existential ethics', The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), and
who would seven years later finish her account of the ambiguous by trouncing
Merleau-Ponty's pseudo-Sartreanism. 19 Secondly, Merleau-Ponty himself
truncated its importance. In the text submitted to Martial Gueroult to accom-
pany his candidacy for the College de France, Merleau-Ponty privileges it
as outlining a theory of intersubjectivity, and includes it among the works of
1945 which "will definitively fix the philosophical significance of his early
works, while they, in tum, determine the route and the method of these later
studies" (UP: 6). This synopsis ends, however, in fact 'ambiguously' in a sense
condemning the Phenomenology of Perception in exactly the same way the
working notes to The Visible and the Invisible a decade later would condemn
it;
The study of perception could only teach us a 'bad ambiguity', a mixture
of finitude and universality, of interiority and exteriority. But there is a 'good
ambiguity' in the phenomenon of expression, a spontaneity which accom-
plishes what appeared to be impossible when we observed only the separate
elements, a spontaneity which gathers together the plurality of monads,
the past and the present, nature and culture into a single whole. To
establish this wonder would be metaphysics itself and would at the same
time give us the principle of an ethics (UP: 11).20

IX

Merleau-Ponty never finished elaborating the principles of this metaphysics

and its 'gathering together'. Not only because, as was true in other cases, he
never lived to complete his work, but equally because when it came to the
study of communication and history, he came more and more to doubt the
principles which might form propaedeutics to the metaphysics in question,
aware more and more of the errancy which underwrote a philosophy of
consciousness.
First, however, should be recognized the extent to which the protocols of
the 1945 review of de Beauvoir already had broken with the ethics of ambi-
guity. As early as 1946 it is clear that the transformation he had begun would
depart from 'existentialism' and its ambiguous opposition between universal
and particular. Instead of the standard predicates of existentialism (paradox,
division, anxiety, and decision (RT: 187) he states: "A more complete defin-
 THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY 157

ition of existentialism than we get from talking of anxiety and the contradic-
tions of the human condition might be found in the idea of a universality which
men affirm by the mere fact of their being and at the very moment of their
opposition to each other, in the idea of a reason immanent in unreason" (SNS:
70).
Sense and Non Sense's preface had proclaimed accordingly "we must form
a new idea of reason".21 It would in fact form something of his itinerary insofar
as it remained 'phenomenological'. While hoping that phenomenological
description would make the question of reason unproblematic, the Pheno-
menology of Perception had blinkingly admitted that Husserl himself -
for reasons already evident - had made reason problematic (PhP: 365n).
Transcendental reflection, positing consciousness, the a priori of logicism
always depended upon what exceeds reflection. The Phenomenology instead
revealed a lesser reason to which all reason answers, one which escapes the
dilemma of the in-itself and the for-itself (PhP: 215) - but only by relying upon
an event anterior to truth and falsity (PhP: 296) and a synthesis of the inex-
haustible (PhP: 219) which has already taken place, one upon which it relies
beyond all hope (PhP: 127). What was at stake was not an origin in which
all events receive their ideal determinacy univocally, but a prereflective lived
world to which all reflection returns. But far from being the guarantor of
determinacy, this 'space' prior to thematic space remained too indeterminate
to receive in an original baptism its univocal, typical and essential identity.
Indeed to return again to the Husserlian rational exemplar, 'lived' space itself,
lacking in univocal determinacy, remains for Merleau-Ponty "no less amenable
to non-Euclidean than Euclidean geometry (PhP: 391). Moreover - accord-
ingly - rather than a Cartesian community of reflective investigators, another
intersubjective rationality emerges, one, as The Structure of Behavior had
already intimated, that remains far removed from a reflective a priori. Here
morality would occur not by right but by contingency and acquisition -
acquired, that is, elucidated, and verified, as The Structure of Behavior had
already concluded, in "the dialectics of body and sou)" (SB: 223).

x
Nonetheless it is precisely here that the departure from the early work enters.
This 'embodied dialectic' (like its account of the tacit cogito in general [VI:
176]), while demurring from a certain skepticism which threatens to turn
existentialism into "a renewal of classical skepticism" (HT: 188), still falls
short, telling us less how things are possible than that they are not impos-
sible, remaining inhibited by its own strategy. The account remains, that is,
still abstract.
Even the metaphysics of the novel only begins this articulation, its con-
clusion merely a demonstration of its lineaments. If philosophy and literature
are in concurrence that in default of pure concepts the task becomes less a
158 STEPHEN WATSON

matter of explaining (explicitation) than explication (SNS: 27), the explica-

tion of narratives (histoires) still remains more descriptive than prescriptive.
And if all existence is historical, as the dialectics of embodiment had shown
(PhP: 170L), we would need an extended account of this incarnate history
in its specificity, indeed an extended phenomeology of spirit (PhP: 293). To
use Tran-Duc-Thoa's claim, transcendental Generativitiit would need to be
related to actual genesis. 22
Hence, as the manuscript to Geuroult indicated, the problem of 'intersub-
jectivity' would need to be completed in the philosophy of history itself, an
analysis, he indicated, which had been provisionally undertaken in Humanism
and Terror. And, in this regard, whether one may agree with Aron's claim
that existentialism did not (and perhaps could not) lead to Marxism in its
classical version - as Merleau-Ponty realized, Sartre's analysis does not solve
the problem of social: he merely poses it (SNS: 81) - it would surely be
mistaken to think that Merleau-Ponty's own version conflicted with it in this
manner.23
Humanism and Terror remains faithful to the previous analyses, however,
in refusing to adopt the philosophy of reflection: here too the reign of uni-
versal reason remains problematic. Reason, like liberty, has to be made in a
world not predestined to it (RT: lxiii). It will again then be a question of
articulating its 'ambiguous' depths. The classical account of political reflec-
tion, classical liberalism, will accordingly fall short, its categories - intention
and act, circumstance and will, objective and subjective - mystified (HT:
43). If the account of the practice that results still remains Hegelian, if you
will a critique of theory which examines its actual relation to ethos, the meta-
narrative for its articulation now became, for the existentialists, Marxist.
The issue of Merleau-Ponty's Marxism is again complex, Whatever else
is to be said however this much is clear: the synthesis of Marxism and
Phenomenology - here as elsewhere - was an unstable one, indeed to use
Lefort's term, one which was stricken with an essential "vascillation."24 While
in 1947 Merleau-Ponty could insist that the privilege of Marxism was to
have thought the proletariat as bearing within itself this ambiguity, and could
speak of the democracies of Western liberalism only in terms of "their
fundamental hypocricy" (RT: 179), he equally admitted that the problem is
knowing whether those conflicts can be overcome, and whether the predictions
of Marxism recognizably bore upon problems of this sort. On the one hand
Marxism remained attractive for him not only "as moral criticism but also
as an historical hypothesis" (HT: 157) - even to the extent that he claimed that,
if the proletariat is not the universal class nothing else can replace it, since
apart from it "there is only the power of the few and the resignation of the
rest" (RT: 156). And yet it was true too that he had already realized that
Marxism could not be taken as a demonstrable solution.
When people demand a 'solution' they imply that the world and human
coexistence are comparable to a geometry problem in which there is an
unknown but an indeterminate factor and where what one is looking for
 THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY 159

is related to the data and their possible relationships in terms of a rule

(HT: 186).
To think the algorithm could be provided simply by the test of time was
always the failure of historicism, Marxist versions included. Instead from
the outset Merleau-Ponty realized too that "we can no longer count on an
immanent force in things guiding them toward an equilibrium more probable
than chaos" (SNS: 124). If transcendental genesis raises the issue of its relation
to actual history, it could not be, as Tran-Duc-Thao would argue, a matter of
"dialectical materialism (as) the truth of transcendental idealism" - again
reducing transcendental constitution to material processes, exchanging one
theory of types for another, the ontic for the ontological and the ecart of
transcendental reduction for its commencement. 25
Even as critique, Marxism at the time in fact shared the same shortfall as
the simple idea of democracy for him, its weakness being that it remained
less political than moral, since "it poses no problem of social structure and
considers the conditions for the exercise of justice to be given with humanity"
(SNS: 103). If the categories of liberalism could be claimed to be abstract in
divorcing intention and consequence, and if he thought "Western humanism
is warped because it is also a war machine," it was equally true that he realized
that neither could simply be dissolved (HT: 43; 186). Values in either case
become both laden with and complicated by facts. The necessity of the
political was a factual one, the result of historical necessity. Instead, "G)ustice
and truth, whose source men think they possess insofar as they are
consciousnesses, are in reality based upon lawcourts, books, and traditions,
and are therefore fragile like these and like them are threatened by individual
judgment" (SNS: 103). The relation between positive institution and moral
substance, to recall Hegel's terms, will as a result never be "easily
demonstrated in each case." 26 Instead, the (Spinozistic or Schellingian) totality
which bound their immanent relations in equilibrium, facilitating univocal
theoretical analysis, would be withdrawn. Hegel - and, it should be added,
Heidegger after him27 - always presupposed that the ambiguity which called
forth interpretation might be dissolved. For Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand,
as he had already indicated in a protocol from the Phenomenology of
Perception, what was essential was grasping the "positive indeterminacy
(['indetermination positive) of these modes of consciousness" (PhP: 446).
Still, Hegel's later work itself provides a key for this failure of substance.
The analyses of the Philosophy of Right itself undercut the positive philos-
ophy's commitment to moral substance and ethos. For Hegel virtue could be
univocally a matter of custom so long as the state is Sittlich. As Hegel put
it, "when individuals are simply identified with the actual order, ethical life
(das Sittliche) appears as their general mode of conduct, i.e. as custom (Sitte)";
the ethical substantial order has attained its right and its right its validity,
right and duty coalesce. But talk about virtue in this sense "readily borders
on empty rhetoric" without its own legitimation. 28
This coalescence is what modernity and the 'decomposition' of tradition(s)
160 STEPHEN WATSON

within civil society calls into question. 29 Hegel hoped however, having realized
the interruption of tradition, to replace it by the axioms of history and
actuality in the realized constitution of the State - proceeding as if power were
DOt somehow in all of its instances problematic. Hegel's work proceeded as
if, to use Merleau-Ponty's terms, "whether new or hereditary, power" were
mot always "questionable and threatened" (S: 213). Hegel's work proceeded,
that is, as if the justifications of legal positivism were not always shrouded
in mysticism. Moreover, it is not insignificant that this recognition appears
in the 1948 "A Note on Machiavelli". It was, after all, Machiavelli who first
attested to the political realm as a play of forces divorced from the founda-
tional virtues of tradition, the first to realize, in Merleau-Ponty's terms, that
"values are necessary but not sufficient" (S: 221). In this regard Machiavelli
was the fim: to recognize what Merleau-Ponty would call in 1960 "the abyss
of modern society". 30

XI

Merleau-Ponty's 'conversion' from Marxism, his 'metamorphosis' into

liberalism, and his 'retreat' from politics, are all notoriously impacted. In
one sense, however, his eventual 'withdrawal' from political theory had
occurred from the start, resulting precisely in the thought of the political
itself as this withdrawal. The vacillation Lefort attributes to Humanism and
Terror in one sense already prefigures the emergence of the political itself.
As his remarkable book on Machiavelli attests, no one knows better than Lefort
himself that this withdrawal and this vacillation is the space of modernity,
the space of the political without substance, without ultimate foundation. 31 The
Adventures of the Dialectics would only stake out the foundation of political
philosophy more directly on this oscillation. "Politics, whether of understanding
or of reason, oscillates (va-et-vient) between the world of reality and that of
values, between individual judgment and common action, between present and
the future" (AD: 6). Hence, as has been seen, its fragility. The privilege of
Marxism was to have openly acknowledged it.
Marxism is, like all the others, undemonstrable. The difference is that
Marxist politics understands this and that it has more than any other,
explored the labyrinth (AD: 6).
The early existentialists might simply have said that Marxism - like the
war - had taught them contingency and the necessity of decision. From the
outset, it is clear, Merleau-Ponty rejected the simplicity of such a decision, and
he would reject decisionism outright in his discussion of Weber (AD: IOf.).
Instead the logic of events, the logic of theory and practice, is more complex.
This discovery of the labyrinth, as Lefort put it, this pensee de La
politique, marked instead - in accord with Merleau-Ponty's revalorization of
the positivity of ambiquity - that of politics as determined indetermination. 32
 THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY 161

In one sense it seems again simply a hermeneutic problem regarding the

conflict of interpretations. But the discovery of this labyrinth now purged of
its substantialism meant something more, enforcing the question of their own
errancy as much as their own heroicism - if not the falsification then the
mystification and errancy as well as fecundity of the political judgment itself.
And if it betrayed a certain logic of history, it was a logic which had certain
impact upon the institutions comprising it and which had motivated a new
reading of the political. The 1951 address "Man and Adversity," written soon
after the events of (on the Sartrean view) Merleau-Ponty's 'conversion,' attests
to its complexity. Once again it is led by Machiavelli:
There would be room here to analyze a whole series of curious practices
which clearly seem to be becoming general practices in contemporary
politics. For example, the twin practices of purging and crypto-politics or
the politics of the fifth columns. Machiavelli has pointed out the recipe
for it, but in passing; and it is today that these practices are tending on
all sides to becoming institutional. Now if we really think about it, this
presupposes that a government always expects to find accomplices on the
side of its adversary and traitors in its own house. It seems to us that today's
policies are distinguished from former ones by this doubt which is extended
even to their own cause, coupled with expeditious measures to suppress this
doubt (S: 236-7).
The indeterminacy and oscillation of the political, in effect its desubstan-
tialization, opened instead in the withdrawal of the political, its eruption, a
matter of the errancy of judgment. As a result, neither the world of events
nor the world of theory could be carved up into binary oppositions - (in
particular, at the time, neither East nor West, neither communism nor
capitalism could accountably confront the challenges of the 'third' world).
Moreover it was perhaps only in terms of this experience of the 'vacilla-
tion' of politics and the experience of errancy that the Adventures of the
Dialectic could have undertaken its reaffirmation of democratic institutions.
While Humanism and Terror had allowed itself to speak only of the hypo-
cricy of democracy, having purged liberalism heroically of its decisionism,
the Adventures of the Dialectic nonetheless traces its return. Parliament, far
from being simply an institution founded on inalienable right and the veracity
(or cognitive competency) of rational conscience - or, on the other hand, having
been 'dispersed' in utilitarian skepticism - turns out to be the only institu-
tion which acknowledges the complexity of this event, "the only known
institution that guarantees a minimum of opposition and truth" (AD: 226).
Hence, in the same moment that it links the chiasm of the political to the
complex intertwining of truth, in identity and difference, it likewise safeguards
it (if not perhaps strongly enough) from the other danger of political
modernism, which would substitute, as Arendt and Adorno had likewise seen,
the logic of totalitarianism for the failure of substantialism.
The fact is, in any case, that rather than being simply 'converted' from
162 STEPHEN WATSON

Marxism by an event, the invasion of Korea for example, or simple having

exchanged or confused Marx and Kant, as de Beauvoir would argue, what
was at stake was not only the 'falsification' of a political theory but of the
metaphysics which underwrote its assertion. 33 If events had occasioned the
complexity of its judgment, in the end it was as much a theoretical as a
political lesson that had been at stake in the 'abandonment' of Marx, And
this is precisely what we learn almost a decade later when Merleau-Ponty
returns to these 'premises' in the preface to Signs.
While Humanism and Terror had claimed that there would be no philos-
ophy of history apart from the proletariat, the preface to Signs demurred,
denying in fact that any doctrine could endure because of a miraculous
adequation or correspondence between them and an invariable 'reality'" (S:
10). Instead, to think that traditions and judgments arise and fall, find univocal
verification or falsification, is declared itself to be barbaric (barbare). Instead
the formal model returns again as it had for his phenomenological progenitors:
Marx's theses can remain true as the Pythagorean theorem is true: no longer
in the sense it was true for the one who invented it - but as a property of
a certain space among other possible spaces (S: 10).
As he put it more directly in 1958, Marxism, underwritten still by "the
matrix of the true human society" was "still too geometrical," - 'Hilbertian'
in any case, it might be said. 34 If its idea of the logic of history was
historicist, - it was not because it was relativist but because it remained logicist,
"a Marxism which remains true whatever it does, which does without proofs
and verifications" (AD: 232). And if as Sartre had put it in 1936, historical
materialism was a fecund hypothesis, it remained both too hypothetical
(hypothetically deductive) and yet still not hypothetical enough, still, that is,
reductive. The de-substantial space of the political is in itself instead
pluralized. If still a space of essential difference and essential identity, to speak
Hegelian, it is now a space of indeterminate identity. Here, if phenomenology
will remain necessary. It will not be sufficient (PNP: 76n).35 Like the notion
of value which it involved, both will need to undergo the 'reciprocal
envelopment' of institutions and intentions, necessity and contingency - virtu
and fortuna, as Machiavelli put it. 36

XII

Returning now upon its origins, however, what of the extension upon which
phenomenology had relied? And more to the point, returning to its epistemic
motivations, what prevents this 'plural' from simply and vacuously turning
relative? And finally, what distinguishes this plural from the admission of
any system that admits such axiomatic coherence?
Merleau-Ponty appeals still in the 1960 preface to what extends beyond
coherence, a rationality 'otherwise than proof' - again not in the sense of
 THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY 163

providing the univocal foundation of determinacy, but rather in the sense

that all systematics display the variation of a matrix, an element of being. In
Merleau-Ponty's wake Castoriadis was surely right to point out in this regard
that "the given is logically incomplete only when completeness has been
posited as logical or rational completeness," rightly pointing out too that "for
the vast majority of societies, that is, mythical societies, the given does not
appear as logically incomplete, not because they have classified everything
that is classifiable, nor because their classifications are watertight and complete,
but because this is not their criterion."31 Yet, if appeals to the given are
inextricable, they are inextricably both rational and mythic (narratological)
at the same time. If such appeals are like Platonic myths, to use Merleau-
Ponty's term, they indicate thereby a complex event, one in which reason
and the symbolic function are mutually implicated (VI: 186). The hope for
simple adjudication - even by 'phenomenological appeal' to the given - will
itself then always be mythic.
The history of thought does not summarily pronounce: This is true; that
is false. Like all history, it has its veiled decisions. It dismantles or embalms
certain doctrines, changing them into "messages" or museum pieces. There
are others on the contrary, which it keeps active. These do not endure
because there is some miraculous adequation or correspondence between
them and an invariable 'reality' - such an exact and fleshless truth is neither
sufficient nor necessary for greatness of a doctrine - but because, as
obligatory steps for those who want to go further, they retain an expres-
sive power (parLantes au delil) which exceeds statements and propositions.
These doctrines are the classics. They are recognized by the fact that no one
takes them literally (a La Lettre), and yet new facts are never absolutely
outside their province but call forth new echoes from them and reveal new
lustres (reliefs) in them (S: 11).
What remains then of 'Marx' within the new classicism is not a matter of
a hypothesis falsified by an event. Such an event would be neither necessary
nor sufficient - which is not to say that it would be either impossible or
undesirable. The point is that the rationality of such events cannot be exhausted
by such criteria. Lacking such ultimate demonstration does not imply that
the text has been made Aufgehoben, - if it does acknowledge that what is at
stake in the Marxist text extends beyond it. It is in this sense that, Marx's
theoretical shortfalls notwithstanding, it retains along with all classics the status
of a "secondary truth," one whose 'invalidity' as Humanism and Terror already
recognized, does not mitigate against the fact that it "cannot be surpassed" -
precisely insofar as "it is still valid as a critique of the present world and
alternative humanisms" CRT: 153).
Still this appeal to a secondary, contingent - if not a 'reliable' than an
obligatory - truth smacks perhaps of romanticism: if nothing else a certain
nostalgia, a refusal to abandon what one already knows to be in ruins. We
may miss what is at stake here, however. The archive of 'expressivism' is after
164 STEPHEN WATSON

all more complex - as was Merleau-Ponty's nascent appeal to the unfolding

or ex-plicatio of rational tradition in its step beyond, its parlantes au deta.
It suffices in this regard to view the itinerary of his notion of 'secondary' truths,
one which occurs decisively in at least two previous contexts. In The Prose
of the World this itinerary intervenes in the midst of formal considerations
which return again to impact phenomenological paradigms, both regarding
its rational exemplar and its experience:
It may well be that in the end we realize that we have not reached the things
themselves and that this halt in the volubility of our spirit occurred only
to prepare for a new departure. Similarly, Euclidean space, far from
possessing an ultimate clarity, still has the opacity of a very special case,
and its truth proves to be of a second order which must be grounded in a
new generalization of space (PW: 103).
Still, it has become evident that this excess of the signifier over the
signified was never simply formal, never simply syntactic but structural, its
extension the 'extension' which underlay the venture of phenomenological
experience itself. 38 Accordingly, in his final piece on Husserl which opens
by claiming that "tradition is a forgetting of origins" (translation altered)
(S: 159/210), Merleau-Ponty again traces its economics. Here the transfor-
mation in question however becomes radicalized, precisely in opening the
passage of the rational epoche itself. The event of the transcendental reduc-
tion, that is, involved exactly the institution of this transformation (and the
'forgetting') of the natural attitude, a venture of the primordial which itself
traced "a secondary, derivative truth of naturalism" (S: 164). The exchange
between primary and secondary - between the ontic and the ontological, nature
and institution, origin and tradition - would thus be both ventured and
(transcendentally) overdetermined in the oscillation of this event. 39 At stake,
doubtless, was a certain differential of the real and the ideal - a certain
(expressive) logic of l'imaginaire - one upon which the existentialists' account
of determinability had relied throughout their engagement with the
equivocity of the ambiguous.
Still, if it can be said then that the phenomenology of the spirit opened
up thereby never simply disappeared from the itinerary of Merleau-Ponty's
writing, neither here nor elsewhere did it go unchanged. If the interrogation
of the specific oscillation of the political would not then collapse into nihilism,
it would yield neither positive terms nor ultimate rational solutions. Moreover,
in this regard the preface to Signs has travelled far beyond the orbit of both
the Marxist and the existentialist protocols of his youth:
Freedom and invention are in the minority of the opposition. Man is hidden,
well hidden, and this time we must make no mistake about it: this does
not mean that he is there beneath a mask, ready to appear. Alienation is
not simply privation of what was our own by natural right (droit de nature);
and to bring it to an end, it will not suffice to steal what has been stolen,
to give us back our due. The situation is far more serious: there are no
 THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY 165

faces underneath the masks, historical man has never been human, and
yet no man is alone (S: 33-4).
Simple rebellion would fail here just as much as would the hope to simply
reinstitute humanism. We would require still that humanism en extension that
he had defended in 1947 against the failure of classicism and the forgetting
of origins, one which is as much without telos as much as it was without arche,
acknowledging in the end that the whole of human history is in his regard a
'step-beyond' which was at the same time stationary (PW: 189-90).
It was here, however, that the recognition of the later works is rejoined.
No more than epistemology can ethics or politics be either simply a matter
of return or a reduction to foundations. Here too the event will be as much
complicated as explicated in the recognition that the "originating is not all
behind us," that "the appeal to the originating goes in several directions"
(VI: 124). Instead it arises in this 'expressive' step beyond, "this non-
coincidence, this differentiation." Moreover here again the issue of right and
even, as the above passage indicates, that of Naturrecht returns, precisely,
that is, once more in the recognition that practices, institutions, habits, and
judgments will be ventured in discontinuity - beyond the metaphysics of nature
as "continuous ground" (VI: 27), in a certain heterogeneous l'etre sauvage,
neither simply reducible to, nor opposed to transcendence, but their venture
of its fragmentation. 40
Finally it was this complexity which made the youthful and romantic
answers of despair impossible, the fact, as had been first realized over against
Sartre's political naiVete two decades before, that far from being deprived,
we are condemned to meaning: the problem is not the deprivation but the
pluralization of meaning. We are similarly condemned to responsibility. Neither
are simply a matter of indeterminate choice, nor events with full determi-
nate history and effect. And both issues show their effect in Merleau-Ponty's
closing words on this topic, now ventured beyond the mythic antimonies of
nature and culture, 'species being,' and 'revolution:'
La conclusion, ce n'est pas la revolte, c'est la virtu sans aucune resigna-
tion (S: 47).
It was a syntagm with a complex responsibility and a complex history,
betraying in the most ancient of words its modern political effect - precisely
in the complexity of its interruption. While invoking the most ancient of moral
resources, that is, these had been apprehended in their modern effect, from
Machiavelli, who had after all seen the space of this oscillation of value and
event at the outset. The rationality of its event would involve a certain differ-
ence, the incarnate and irreducible difference of a transcendental between, both
of an internal and external magnitude, between traditions, practices, articu-
lemes, and their matrixes; the venture of origins and their forgetting, autho-
rizing perhaps neither eschatological nor utopian hope, nor simple restoration.
It has been said by a defender of virtue (and perhaps the strongest critic
of Machiavelli) that "men often speak of virtue without using the word."41
166 STEPHEN WATSON

In Merleau-Ponty's case it was less out of ignorance or for lack of commit-

ment than out of respect for the withdrawal in which virtue would now be
ventured, out of the experience of the difference and oscillation in which it
became both threatened and legitimated - an oscillation in a sense as threat-
ening to demands for its simple dissolution as the conservative denial of that
venture's necessity. But to think that either might be possible - either the
dissolution of the risk or its denial - is to miss both the inevitability of this
withdrawal as well the complexity of Merleau-Ponty's appeals within it: his
Machiavelli, his Pascal, his Montaigne and the labyrinth in which they had
been explored in the passage through Marx.42 If Merleau-Ponty had demurred
from the latter it was out of respect for what had been at stake in them all.
What in the end conjoined these figures, after all, was the oscillation between
the extension and collapse of tradition, at the same time acknowledging the
fragility in which they had been sustained - and without, as Merleau-Ponty
demanded from the outset, either nostalgia or relativism. And if his legacy
remains one of unremittingly acknowledging both this complexity and its
risk, it is in this vigilance that it retains prominence.

ABBREVIATIONS

Edmund Husserl
LI Logical Investigations, Vol. I and Vol. II, tf. 1. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities,
1970).
Wert Vorlesungen aber Ethik und Wertlehre (1908-1914), herausgegeben von Ullrich Melle,
Husserliana, Bd XXVIII (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988).
FTL Formal and Transcendental Logic, tr. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1978).
OG "The Origin of Geometry", The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, tr. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty
CR "Christianity and Ressentiment" (Review of Scheler's "L'homme du res sentiment",
[French translation]. tr. Gerald Wenning, Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry,
Vol. IX, Winter 1968.
SB The Structure of Behavior, tr. Alden Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).
PhP Phenomenlogy of Perception, tr. Colin Smith, revised by Forrest Williams and David
Guerri~re (New Jersey: The Humanities Press, 1981).
SNS Sense and Non-Sense, tr. H. L. Dreyfus, P. A. Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1964).
HT Humanism and Terror, tr. John O'Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
UP "An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work" (text
submitted to Martial Gueroult), tr. Arleen B. Dallery in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James
M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
PW The Prose of the World, tr. John O'Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
AD The Adventures of the Dialectic, tr. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1973).
S Signs, tr. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
PNP "Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel" tr. Hugh J. Silverman, Telos, Number
29, Fall 1976.
 THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY 167

Max Scheler
F Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, tr. Manfred S. Frings, Roger L.
Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

lean-Paul Sartre
TE The Transcendence of the Ego, tr. Forrest Williams, Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Noon
Day Press, 1957).
WD The War Diaries, tr. Quinton Hoare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
BN Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966).

NOTES

I. Compare in this regard Heidegger's "My Way to Phenomenology" in On Time and Being,
tr. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) or recent remarks of Levinas for
example in the debate to be found in Autrement que savoir, introd. by Pierre Jean Labarriere
and with contributions by Guy Petitdemange and Jacques Rolland (Paris: Editions Osiris,
1988), ch. III.
2. For further discussion of this issue see my "On the Agon of Phenomenology: Intentional
Idioms and Justification," Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Winter, 1986.
3. Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception cites Scheler's 1926 edition.
4. By comparison, one can point similarly to Hermann Weyl's transformation of Husserl's
account of evidence in his Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Sciences (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1949) - most of which dates from the twenties. Justification here
too became both "subjective-absolute" while at the same time "objective-relative," a
distinction which, Weyl claimed, is "one of the most fundamental epistemological insights
which can be gleaned from science" (116).
5. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, tr. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1985), p. 3.
6. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:
Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 493-494.
7. Jean CavaiIles, "On Logic and the Theory of Science" tr. Theodore J. Kisiel in
Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, ed. J. Kockelmans and T. Kisiel (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 360.
8. Ibid., p. 406.
9. Ibid., p. 401.
10. H. L. Van Breda "Maurice Merleau-Ponty et les Archives-Husserl i\ Louvain", Revue de
Metaphysique et de Morale, Vol. LXVII (1962), p. 419f; Tran-Duc-Thao, Phenomenology
and Dialectical Materialism, tr. Daniel J. Herman and Donald V. Morano (Dordrecht: D.
Reidel, 1986), p. 123.
II. See Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl' s Phenomenology, tr. Andre
Orianne (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 158.
12. On the face of it the texts of the early extentionalists alone did not radically distinguish
their readings of Scheler from Husserl, indicative inter alia of a certain plasticity in the
texts themselves perhaps. Even Scheler himself acknowledged his position to being amenable
enough that it was not dissimilar to Moore's (F: xxi). For a general discussion of the the-
oretical status of axiology as both related to and extending beyond ethics as its presupposition,
the question of what is worthwhile per se. See J. N. Findlay, Axiological Ethics (London:
Macmillan, 1970) pp. 3-4. As such, far from being simply an ontic enumeration reducible
to calculation, axiology was from the outset an articulation fraught with ontological
difference, the question of is and ought, of being and the good.
l3. G. W. F. Hegel, Natural Law, tr. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1975). This issue (as well its text) were likewise part of Kojeve's famous lectures of the
thirties. See Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, tr. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell
168 STEPHEN WATSON

University Press, 1969). Compare Scheler's own affirmation of Hegel's critique in F: 185.
14. Ibid., p. 77.
15. Ibid., p. 118.
16. Ibid., p. 124.
17. Accordingly, continuing his arguments against the unity of transcendental apperception
outlined in TE (TE: 32f.), in Being and Nothingness Sartre claimed that "this identity of
temporal essence does not prevent the incommunicable diversity of times any more than
the identity of essence of man prevents the incommunicable diversity of human con-
sciousness" (BN: 308). Merleau-Ponty argued however, without simply denying the claim,
that if two consciousnesses preclude one another two temporalities do not.
18. The same complex logic concerning ambiguity, the relations between overdetermination
and 'underdetermination' or 'indetermination' appears in Sartre's Introduction to Les Temps
Modernes (Yol. 1, No.1, 1945). It is precisely this complexity which distinguishes both
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty from earlier existentialist (Kierkegaardian) versions of ambi-
guity. And yet, as will be seen, in large part, what was at stake between Merleau-Ponty
and Sartre concerned the implications of this logic.
19. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, tr. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel,
1948) and "Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism," tr. Yeronique Zaytzeff, International
Studies in Philosophy, Vol. XXI, 1989.
20. For further discussion of Merleau-Ponty's evolution and critical alteration with respect to
his itinerary, see my "Pre-texts: Language, Perception, and the Cogito in Merleau-Ponty's
Thought," in Merleau-Ponty: Perception, Structure, Language, ed. John Sallis (Atlantic
Highlands: Humanities Press, 1981).
21. For further discussion of this text and its account of the rational, see my "Cancellations:
Merleau-Ponty's Standing Between Husserl and Hegel," Research in Phenomenology, Vol.
XVII,1987.
22. Tran-Duc-Thao, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, p. 127.
23. See Raymond Aron, Marxism and the Existentialists, tr. Helen Weaver (New York: Harper
& Row 1965), p. 21ff.
24. Claude Lefort, "Introduction" to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur (Paris:
Gallimard, 1980), p. 37.
25. Tran-Duc-Thao, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, p. 129. Likewise see the 1953
Esprit review by Paul Ricoeur which (similarly) both affirms the importance of Tran-
Duc-Thao's text while at the same time criticizes its reductive and naturalistic reading of
phenomenology. This review is translated in Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Yol 5, No.
4, 1974.
26. Hegel, Natural Law, p. 118.
27. This is true in any case of the Heidegger of Being and Time where Zweideutigkeit becomes
articulated by means of Veifallenheit, indicative in the end not only of the extent to which
Heidegger remains still bound by Husserl's reductive and foundational accounts of the
rational (and the authentic - cf. LI: 725f.), but equally his inability to positively come to
grips with civil society and the everyday - both of which will require a positive account
of Vieldeutigkeit.
28. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox (Oxford University Press, 1952), 151-5, p.
108f.
29. The point is that the rise of modem freedom, unleashed from the sacred or metaphysical
metanarratives which provided it unity, is then the opening of an alterity which ruptures
the transcendental unity of Being (and the Good) underlying the virtues. Instead the event
of this rupture, as Kant had seen, is the opening of alterity, transforming its narratives
into antinomies. Freedom by itself "as a separate principle" then becomes contingent
negation, the emergence of the possibility of nihilism. See The Logic of Hegel, the
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, tr. William Wallace (Oxford University Press,
1968), p. 87. Hence the attempt to overcome the intricacies of freedom, necessity, and
contingency in the event of actuality (158 ff). Compare in this regard Merleau-Ponty's
discussion of the rupture between the Good and Being and Sartre's conception of freedom
 THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY 169

in "The Battle over Existentialism". Here Merleau-Ponty claims that the battle is not between
Christianity and Marxism but Aristotle and Descartes or St. Thomas and Pascal - proto-
cols, as will be seen, which reemerge in his reading of Machiavelli (SNS: 75).
30. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, interview with Madeleine Chapsal, Les ecrivains en personne (paris:
Union ~n~ale d'Editions, 1973). Compare Hegel's similar reading of Machiavelli's Prince:
This book has been thrown away in disgust, as replete with the maxims of the most
revolting tyranny; but nothing worse can be urged against it than that the writer, having
the profound consciousness of the necessity of a State, has here exhibited the princi-
ples on which alone states could be founded in the circumstances of the times . . .
(ones in which) an indomitable contempt for principle and an utter depravity of morals,
were thoroughly engrained in them.
See G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956),
p.403.
31. Claude Lefort, Le travail de ['oeuvre Machiavel (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
32. Claude Lefort, "La Politique et la Pens~e de la Politique," Les Lettres Nouvelles, No. 32,
Feb. 1963, pp. 68-9. The Phenomenology had in fact already articulated the "existential
project" of political action as "une vie vers un but d~termin~ - ind~termin~ dont elle n'a
aucune repr~sentation" PhP: 4461509.
33. Unlike Merleau-Ponty, Sartre's own account of morality, couched in the problem of values
as negation, turned in the end emphatically determined, the negation of the ought resolv-
able by means of 'revolutionary efficacity'. See the Critique of Dialectical Reason, tr.
Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: NLB: 1975), p. 249:
The source of the ambiguity of all morality, past and present, is that freedom as human
relation reveals itself, in the world of exploitation and oppression, in opposition to this
world and as negation of the inhuman through values ... (E)very system of values, in
so far as it is based on a social practice, contributes directly or indirectly to estab-
lishing devices and apparatuses which, when the time comes (for example, on the basis
of a revolution in techniques and tools) will allow this particular oppression and exploita-
tion to be negated; every system of values, at the moment of its revolutionary efficacity,
ceases to be a system and values cease to be values ...
34. Interview with Madeleine Chapsal, Les ecrivains en personne, p. 210.
35. The same doubtless can be claimed about the phenomenology of 'carnal' or embodied
intersubjectivity, which likewise opens a symbolic field of which history, culture, ethics
and politics are the reciprocal envelopment, Ie intermonde. Consequently, if the ethics of
obligation, as writers from Scheler to Sartre and Levinas attest, involves a concrete, lived
phenomenological encounter, any sufficient account of its implications will require the
explication of the symbolic and historical field (ethos) in which its justice is both ventured
and at risk. Returning once more to de Beauvoir's Invitee in The Visible and the Invisible,
Merleau-Ponty denies once again that the other can be simple valorized as absolute negation
of myself. The other appears not as "what contest my life but as what forms it" and as a
variant "of a life that has never been only my own." At stake consequently, is not simply
"a problem of access to another nihilation" but "a problem of initiation to a symbolics
(symbolique) and a typicality (typique) of others." (VI: 82n).
36. See Lefort's similar remarks concerning Machiavelli's "critique of tradition (which) must
oscillate between two poles," its affirmation as well as transformation of classical virtue,
in Le travail de I'oeuvre Machiavel p. 400ff. If the extension upon which phenomenology
had relied since Husserl's Investigations had founded reason in the priority of Being's
irreducible semantic transcendence, it nonetheless remained theory laden by Husserl's formal
investment in the Euclidean model. Only by abandoning its deductive and determinate
exemplar could 'political phenomenology' acknowledge the fertility of democratic judgment
- in both its errancy and fecundity. As Lefort put it perhaps affirming Merleau-Ponty's
legacy: "The political originality of democracy - and it appears to me to have gone unrec-
ognized - is signalled by a double phenomenon: a power which is henceforth involved in
170 STEPHEN WATSON

a constant search for a basis because law and knowledge are no longer embodied in the
person or persons who exercise it, and a society which accepts conflicting opinions and
debates over rights because the markers which once allowed people to situate themselves
in relation to one another in a determinate manner have disappeared."
See Claude Lefort, "Human Rights and the Welfare State" in Democratic and Political
Theory, tr, David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 34.
37. Cornelius Castoriadis The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1987), p. 237.
38. See for example, Merleau-Ponty's contribution in Sens et usages du terme structure dans
Ie sciences humaines et sociales, ed. Roger Bastide (,s-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1962), pp.
152-155. Having delineated the use of the term in mathematics, psychology, anthropology
etc., he concludes that it requires that we reform our ontology, detaching it from our "old
attachment to the object." This is surely inter alia the project of The Visible and the Invisible.
Compare on the other hand L6vi-Strauss' attempt to retain the exclusively formal charac-
teristics of the term denying any attribution of reality to it (157). While the latter position
may achieve a certain parsimony for theoretical practices in the philosophy of science, it
fares less well elsewhere.
39. For further discussion of this economics, in effect tracing the economics of the oscillation
of the political new as the chiasm of ontology, one moreover actively reinvesting the Wechsel
of classical transcendentalism, see my "Merleau-Ponty, Transcendental Imagination, and
Body-Schema: On the Delineation of the Visible," in my Extensions (Albany: SUNY Press,
1992).
40. Here too the 'space' of l'etre sauvage, which as the working notes to The Visible and the
Invisible attest, now in having fully all but traded in Euclidean axiomatics for tropes, Merleau-
Ponty claims that Euclidean space, the space of perspectivism in fact, "is a space without
transcendence" (210). The articulemes of Wechsel, envelopment, reversal, encroachment,
laterality, verticality pay tribute to the same passage: the plural, the heterogeneous, the
discontinuous involve not simply the dispersion of equivocity, nor its Zugrundgehen, but
the opening of a certain step beyond upon which all reflection and judgment - theoretical
or practical - rely in venturing the fragments of transcendence.
41. Leo Strauss, "Niccolo Machiavelli," Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 210.
42. It would in this regard be wrong to view the emergence of virtu as something of an after-
thought in Merleau-Ponty's itinerary. From the outset it had been recognized that, if the
fallibility or 'ambiguity' of judgment were insurpassable, the interrogation of its extension
remained equally unavoidable. It demanded instead the reemergence of a certain form of
phronesis now purged of its metaphysical underpinnings, a 'mixed' event which appeals still
to the virtues of a certain courage whose resoluteness precludes neither humility or honesty.
As the review of de Beauvoir put it: "We have no other recourse at any moment than to
act according to the judgments we have made as honestly and as intelligently as possible,
as if these judgments were incontestable. But it would be dishonest and foolish ever to
feel acquitted by the judgment of others. One moment of time cannot blot out another" (SNS:
37).
The same tenor (and claim) doubtless reappears again in the encounter with Machiavelli
and the attempt by means of its "Marxist Machiavellianism" to "alter ambiguity through
the awareness of ambiguity" (HT: 120) and the fortuna which divides power - the claim,
that is, that "Our role is perhaps not very important. But we should not abandon it" (HT:
179).
It requires again the frailty of l'humanisme en extension:
To seek harmony with ourselves and others, in a word, truth, not only in a priori reflec-
tions and solitary thought but through the living experience of concrete situations and
in a living dialogue with others apart from which internal evidence cannot validate its
universal right, is the exact contrary of irrationalism, since it accepts our incoherence and
conflict with others as constants but assumes we are able to minimize them. It rules
out the inevitability of reason as well as that of chaos (HT: 187).
 LAURA BOELLA*

Phenomenology and Ontology:

Hannah Arendt and Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The refusal of ontology underpins the principle philosophical positions of

Hannah Arendt. The "dismantling of metaphysics" - her term for the "basic
assumption" of her last book, The Life of the Mind l - signifies first of all
the impossibility of ontology, of the identity of Being and thinking. Only
after the fact can the dismantling of metaphysics become a technique for
deconstructing, and eventually reassembling, the traditional conceptual appa-
ratus. It is in this context that we should understand Arendt's preference for
defining herself as "a kind of phenomenologist" and her refusal of the term
"philosopher". Indeed, ontology is not, for Hannah Arendt, merely a traditional
form of thinking that one can easily dispense with. It is rather the profes-
sional form of thinking, arising from the attitude that philosophers (even
those who revolted against that attitude) assumed with regard to what Arendt
calls the historico-political "fact" represented by the loss of the context of
tradition. As a student of Heidegger and Jaspers, Hannah Arendt very seriously
reflects on the problem of Being. But she is convinced that when it is
translated into a "philosophy" or "theory" of Being, the problem becomes a
professional or "status" response. Within the context of modern, contemporary
thought, on the contrary, the question of Being can be considered solely in
terms of the gap between Being and thinking, or more precisely as the
experience (in other words something other than reflection) of this gap, the
continuous movement between the two poles. The principle theses of Arendt's
thought are most deeply rooted in this position on the question of Being.
The refusal of ontology is closely tied to the demarcation between thought
and action, between singularity and plurality, such as it is emphasized in
Arendt's first philosophical essay, The Human Condition (1958). Ontology
is criticized from the perspective of existence understood as a sphere of finitude
and of the negative (the broken links of tradition, the impossibility of giving
a sense to reality).
However, the "meaning" of the negative and, analogically, the boundary
between the finite and the infinite, do not, for Arendt, result from the solution

* Translated from the French by Victor Reinking

P. Burke and 1. Van der Veken (eds.), Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, 171-179.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
172 LAURA BOELLA

to the problem of Being, but rather from that of nothingness or from the
question of authenticity and in authenticity. They result, in the language of
The Life of the Mind, from the reality of the negative and of finitude, from
the appearing of appearance, from the fact that what is invisible is made visible,
comes into the world, becomes an element of the collective being of humans.
Hannah Arendt's connection to the philosophical currents and the thinkers
who had a remarkable influence on her - the phenomenology of Husserl,
Heidegger, Jaspers - is articulated precisely in the effort to move away from
the ontological positions (even though those positions were transformed in
relation to tradition) that her teachers suggested to her. Ultimately, for Arendt,
the point is to move away from the totalization of the activity of thinking;
the movements of thought - the quest for the "meaning" of Being - always
reproduce a rupture, between Being and thinking. Hence they lead to a
boundary, to the limit of what thinking can no longer think. This defeat of
thinking is the only path that allows the human to free himself or herself of
the illusion of pure thought and to turn back to the real world, finally
actualizing his or her freedom.
The reading of Merleau-Ponty in The Life of the Mind, at once transparent
and enigmatic, sums up very well the complex attempt to escape from the
trap of ontology while at the same time - especially following Heidegger's
lead - dealing with the question of Being. The later Merleau-Ponty who, in
The Visible and the Invisible, had attempted to present the general outline of
the new ontology, thus becomes the support for a philosophy of appearance,
a radical "phenomenism", the motivations of which no longer belong to the
order of thinking, but rather to that of experience, of being-in-the-world and
being in the world of humans.
The quest for the meaning of Being is thus established as experience
(discontinuous and intermittent), a kind of experimental and deconstructive
metaphysics which precisely reflects the "modern" condition of thinking, the
eclipse of sensory certitude, the loss of the world. For Hannah Arendt,
"dismantling metaphysics" means in effect taking Cartesian doubt seriously,
and the shock of a hollowed-out reality, in order to break apart the supposed
unity of thinking and Being. This definitely does not lead to a repudiation
of the thesis that the everyday world is the necessary ground of perception.
The destruction of metaphysics is based rather on the assessment that philoso-
phers, who asserted the superiority of the intelligible world (of thinking) in
relation to the world of the senses, in fact renounced the latter.
The problem of the critique of ontology, in the first part of The Life of
the Mind, dedicated to the act of thinking, is expressed in the form of
commenting on the fact that, in withdrawing from the world, in completely
losing the sense of reality (sensus communis), the human who thinks remains
irrevocably part of that world, given that, as an incarnate sentient being, he
or she lives in the ordinary world and abandons it only when he or she dies.
Given the non-coincidence of Being and thinking, it becomes a problem of
defining the kind of reality which is specific to the common world, from which
 PHENOMENOLOGY AND ONTOLOGY 173

certainty and solidity have disappeared, but which is "signaled" by the human
condition of plurality, and which is and remains the irrepressible locus of
action, the only space in which humans are capable of undertaking an action
that will produce change.
It is in this way that the destruction of metaphysics becomes a construc-
tive act, the aim of which is to illuminate the composition of a world from
which one withdraws and to which one returns ceaselessly.
The philosophy of the appearance presented in The Life of the Mind
sanctions the divergence between Being and thinking and proposes an image
of the world as "zwischen, in-between", the temporality of which is actual-
ization (thus a present in opposition to duration) and in relation to which the
movements of thought do not proceed from Being to nothingness, but rather
from the visible to the invisible and vice-versa. This point shows the first
connection between Hannah Arendt and Merleau-Ponty. One need only refer
to the preface of Signs, in which Merleau-Ponty states that "instead of Being
and nothingness, it would be better to speak of the visible and the invisible,
remembering that they are not contradictory .. ."2 Describing herself as "a
kind of phenomenologist" Hannah Arendt indeed arrives at a conception of
reality that is filled with tragic echoes and paradoxes: through her passion
for the concrete, her phenomenism leads her in the direction of a discontin-
uous conception of reality, a conception centered on the temporality of the
instant, and which is placed in the background of the deep melancholy of
thinking and the incalculable and unforeseeable nature of acting. By ener-
getically suspending the question of Being, Hannah Arendt in any event goes
her own way relative to Heidegger and his return to the place of loss and silence
which gives rise to the poetic and philosophical Sagen. The question of origins,
of Being instead of nothingness, and even Jaspers' question of transcendence,
are set aside in favor of the question (dangerously internal in the concrete)
of the "in-between", of the gap in the present, of the appearing or disappearing
of the world, which is never its disappearance.
"In this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere, and from which
we disappear into a nowhere, Being and Appearing coincide" (Arendt's
emphasis, LM, p. 19). This central thesis, formulated at the beginning of The
Life of the Mind, explicitly denounces the direction taken by the criticism of
ontology. The declaration of the "fundamental error of metaphysics", the
dualism of body and mind - which constitutes the major theme of Arendt's
analysis of thinking - can be interpreted as an adherence to the Husserlian
motto: Soviel Schein, soviel Sein. Yet in her criticism of the "two world" theory,
characteristic of traditional thought, Hannah Arendt enters into a direct dialogue
with the philosophy of the flesh of the later Merleau-Ponty.
It should be noted first of all that Hannah Arendt could not follow Merleau-
Ponty in his ontological project because of the fundamental corollary of her
criticism of ontology: the question of "meaning" is not the same as the question
of the human's concrete experience in the reality of the everyday world -
thinking and acting are two completely different forms of activity. Yet after
174 LAURA BOELLA

her confrontation with Merleau-Ponty, we will again see Hannah Arendt turn
towards Heidegger. In a tight, implacable dialogue with the theses of the
later Heidegger on thinking, she formulates her idea of the world as an
intervalic reality. But this follows directly from the attempt to cope with the
nearly insoluble dilemma of her conflictive encounter with Merleau-Ponty.
We have seen that the central thesis of Hannah Arendt's last reflection
has a phenomenological aspect. Indeed, in The Life of the Mind the problem
of the world, which, in her previous works (I am thinking of Rahel Varnhagen
and the essay on Lessing) had been expressed in the terms of a critical
philosophy of existence, is now expressed as a theory of appearance as the sole
reality. More generally, Arendt's position can now be considered "phenome-
nological", given the fact that, by opposing the traditional theoretical attitude,
she focuses her attention on the experiences of thinking or daily life - what
Arendt generally refers to as the "facts" - considered as human modalities.
It must be said that Hannah Arendt remains polemical with regard to Husserl's
"philosophy", particularly in reference to the epoche, when it is put forth as
a methodology. If the epoche is to indicate the suspension of the feeling of
reality, says Hannah Arendt, it is simply "a matter of course" as far as the
activity of thinking is concerned, and not a special method that can be taught
and learned.
The thesis of the coincidence of Being and appearing is instead traced to
what Arendt refers to in The Life of the Mind as "Husserl' s basic and greatest
discovery", intentionality. But the intentionality in question here is inter-
preted in the framework of Merleau-Ponty's thesis of "perceptual faith". The
fact that any act of consciousness has an intentional object, regardless of
whether it is real or imaginary, implies that "objectivity is built into the very
subjectivity" (LM, p. 46) of consciousness. Analogically, appearances
"indicate" a subject and have a "built in subjectivity". Living beings are thus
both subjects and objects, perceivers and perceived, touchers and touched, seers
and seen. The fact of living in a world where sentient beings, humans and
animals, "are no less objective than stone and bridge" (LM, p. 19), or in
other words, are appearances, destined and likely to appear, constitutes the
basis of perceptual faith which, for Hannah Arendt, coincides with the sensus
communis, the sense of reality, " ... our certainty that what we perceive has
an existence independent of the act of perceiving" (LM, p. 50). Common
sense is the guarantee of the common, shared world, but it is not a matter of
similarities or analogies between the sensations of particular individuals. It
is, rather, a question of the situation of inter-subjectivity, which is part of
the world of appearance. Common sense creates the sensation of reality because
it corresponds to the existence of a shared, relational context, within which the
five senses perform their functions. On the one hand, then, there is a world
in which each individual feels, sees, hears from a perspective that is
different from other individuals' perspectives; on the other hand, what each
individual sees, hears, etc., in plural, infinite perspectives is always the same
world, the real world. Following from the tacit recognition on the part of others
 PHENOMENOLOGY AND ONTOLOGY 175

of the reality of the world in its appearing is Arendt's well-known thesis that
"Not man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth" (LM,
p. 19).
Once one has affirmed the phenomenal nature of the world, that is, that it
is not representation, solipsism becomes the prototype of intellectual activity.
This is what Merleau-Ponty criticized in Descartes - and for Arendt, Merleau-
Ponty was "brilliantly right". Her reference is to The Visible and the Invisible,
where we read: "To reduce perception to the thought of perceiving ... is to
take out an insurance against doubt whose premiums are more onerous than
the loss for which it is to indemnify us: for it is to ... move to a type of
certitude that will never restore to us the 'there is' of the world.,,2 Hence it
is not representative consciousness that is original, but rather the existence
of the world and beings who are of the world, before they are in the world.
Hannah Arendt's description of appearance is clearly influenced by Merleau-
Ponty and is interesting, first of all, because it leads to the conclusion that there
is nothing immediate about perception, nor does it directly confirm the subject's
own existence or the existence of things. Instead, perception places the subject
before a world that is not made up solely of things that rise up in front of
us like walls that block our sight, but also of gaps, emptiness, failures and
fantoms. Arendt fully agrees with Merleau-Ponty's idea that appearances
both reveal and conceal, expose and protect from exposure, hide. The expe-
rience of sight, more tactile than visual, is the experience of the enormous
distance of things and the impossibility of grasping them, given the fact that
things block the visual field, limit it, and trace its contours. At the same
time, the solidity of the world seems to dissolve in the fog of illusions and
fantoms, once perceptual experience is considered from the subject's
perspective. It then seems that things come closer, to the point that they enter
into the subject and lose all corporeity. The duplication of the world in a subject
and an object, in a disincarnate spiritual entity and in a being that would be
its product, a being in itself that is substantial, can thus be explained by the
duplicity and ambiguity of perception.
Perception is characterized by moments that are complementary although
different, and depends on the smallest vibrations, partialities and adumbrations
of the visual field. In any event, its fluidity and extreme mobility, linked to
its individual and incarnate nature, do not call into question the manifest-
ness of things, do not, in other words, place perception in opposition to the
presence or density of the world, which is in part constitutive. Hence the
existence of a world is elusive and obscure in the sense that it is impossible
to justify it or think of it in terms of representative thought or a logical rational
order, but at the same time it is undeniable, since the world is the horizon
that makes possible the communication between different, private worlds,
different subjects and objects. Communication makes each individual the
witness of a single world, in the same way that the synergy of the eyes gives
evidence of the unity of things. Beings communicate in the world and through
the world.
176 LAURA BOELLA

Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the "shifting" (bouge) of appearance enables

Hannah Arendt to formulate in phenomenological terms (i.e., not in nihilistic
terms) Nietzsche's theses concerning the end of metaphysics. With the death
of God, it is not only the realm of the supra-sensory that has disappeared,
but also the realm of the sensory. The end of metaphysics, adds Hannah Arendt,
signifies the end of the distinction between that which belongs to the sensory
sphere and that which is situated beyond that sphere. More importantly, it
signifies the end of the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever
is beyond the senses (God or Being or the Ideas, etc.) is more truthful, more
real and more meaningful than what appears.
The appearance operates in the play between Schein and Erscheinen: in
the movements from one appearance to another the world is revealed as the
scene of multiple apparitions and dispositions. The duplicity and ambiguity
of perception, according to Arendt, come from the fact that natural things spring
up and are made manifest in the light of day while coming from a ground
of shadows. Thus arises the question of what makes appearances appear. This
is Kant's question of the thing in itself, but also, for Arendt, the "everyday
fact" that "every living thing, because it appears, possesses a 'ground which
is not appearance', but which can be forced to the light of day . . ." (LM,
p. 41). There is a "transcendence" of the object which determines appearances,
a gap, a passage from darkness to light. Yet this does not imply the passage
from one world to another, or from one ontological plane to another, but
rather a passage from the order of the invisible to that of the visible, a
disappearing and appearing in relation to the same world.
The sensus communis, the sensation of reality par excellence, only confirms
this thesis: in effect, it is not a sensation, since " ... it relates to the context
in which single objects appear as well as to the context in which we
ourselves as appearances exist among other appearing creatures" (LM. p. 51).
Arendt stresses that "The context qua context never appears entirely; it is
elusive. almost like Being, which qua Being never appears in a world filled
with beings, with single entities" (LM, p. 51).
Arendt's thesis of the primacy of appearance - a thesis, as we have seen,
that is radically anti-metaphysical - finds an essential development in the
confutation of the notion of the soul, and in particular of the identification
of the soul with consciousness and mind. Arendt follows Merleau-Ponty on
this point, and his idea that no spiritual organ is accessible to introspection.
The primacy of the real world signifies that the perceptive-sensory apparatus
and the emotions, the passions, far from becoming objectified in the body
and the soul, are intertwined in the "more or less chaotic whirlwind of events"
that signals our co-belonging to the world. Arendt's thesis of the primacy of
appearance here reveals a radically anti-subjectivist implication. What appears
is prior to the separation of the subject and object, a separation that
presupposes an objectification of the subjective and the objective, as it is
practiced in the sciences of the mind and the sciences of nature. Here the
idea of the self as substance and the idea of self-awareness are radically
 PHENOMENOLOGY AND ONTOLOGY 177

questioned, as well as the science of inner vision. Self-awareness is possible

only when the "perceptual faith" is suspended. But if one assumes that can
happen, one is not in the presence of a substance, the ego, nor its constitu-
tive representations of the intelligible world, but simply in the presence of
the thinking ego, involved in the activity of thinking.
If we accept the fact that perceptual faith, the certainty of the existence
of a world, depends on the appearing of others in the world, the thinking
ego is thus a void, a non-being or, in the words of Hannah Arendt, "either
the appearance or the being is transcendent."
Hence appearance is the movement that connects the body to its emotions
(the fields of variation of the same world, reflexes, adumbrations, horizons),
the encroachment of the soul upon the body and vice-versa. Before and beyond
this movement there is not a cause that determines the subordination of
appearance to Being. But if the thesis of the primacy of appearance fully
justifies Hannah Arendt's criticism of the dualism of Being and appearing, it
may at first seem surprising that she replaces this dualism with a model of
"non-relation" between the sensory realm (the "there is" of things) and the
realm of the mind, a model which is one of distinction-relation.
It is at this point the essential divergence from Merleau-Ponty can be located.
We should note that this divergence is expressed with a certain ambiguity
with regard to the connection that Merleau-Ponty establishes between body
and mind. Indeed, Hannah Arendt clearly refuses the idea of "chiasmata",
but she then returns to what Merleau-Ponty says with regard to thinking "that
is bottomless". Let us quote Hannah Arendt's complex passage in its entirety:
Merleau-Ponty, to my knowledge the only philosopher who not only tried
to give an account of the organic structure of human existence but also tried
in all earnest to embark upon a 'philosophy of the flesh', was still misled
by the old identification of mind and soul when he defined 'the mind as
the other side of the body' since 'there is a body of the mind, and a mind
of the body and a chiasm between them.' Precisely the lack of such
chiasmata or crossings over is the crux of mental phenomena, and Merleau-
Ponty himself, in a different context, recognized the lack with great clarity.
Thought, he writes, [in Signs] is 'fundamental because it is not borne by
anything, but not fundamental as if with it one reached a foundation upon
which one ought to base oneself and stay. As a matter of principle,
fundamental thought is bottomless. It is, if you wish, an abyss.' But what
is true of the mind is not true of the soul and vice versa. The soul, though
perhaps much darker than the mind will ever manage to be, is not
bottomless; it does indeed 'overflow' into the body; it 'encroaches upon
it, is hidden in it - and at the same time needs it, terminates in it, is anchored
in it'3 (LM, p. 33).
The phenomenological approach of Hannah Arendt, which very clearly
moves in the direction of the later Merleau-Ponty - even though the styles
of the two philosophers remain completely different - hesitates at the
178 LAURA BOELLA

"philosophy of the flesh" and the ontological project based on the concept
of a "brute Being" [un etre brut], an "enveloping Being" [un etre d' enveloppe-
ment]. In rediscovering the world which living beings are both of and in,
Hannah Arendt finds in effect an "epiphanic" dimension, an "in-between"
that introduces both analogies to and differences from Merleau-Ponty's concept
of the "vertical Being" that "stands up before my upright body" [se dresse
devant man corps dresse], We have seen that Arendt fully agrees with the
new questioning of perceptual faith in terms of a critique of thinking that
withdraws into itself to the point of encompassing perception, as if percep-
tion were its end result. The visible and the invisible are also, for Hannah
Arendt, related in a way very similar to that posited by Merleau-Ponty: the
visible is the texture of internal and external horizons, of what is far away
and what is close. It is a "surface of a depth', a "section" which presupposes
a background, which in turn is not visible, but represents a "constitutive
absence". We have seen that, for Hannah Arendt, within appearance is a
"transcendence" analogous to that which, in Merleau-Ponty, gives the "relief
and depth", the "density" of the visible and consequently represents a "void"
that "holds together"; in the same way that the thrust and counter-thrust of
stones support an arch, or a "center of gravity" makes for the cohesiveness
of a mass, a "secret axis" congeals things and ideas. Yet such terms in Merleau-
Panty's work reveal an emphasis for which there is no correspondence in
Arendt. Hannah Arendt cannot accept the idea that the gap between philos-
ophy and sensory experience (time, history, the world of appearance) is situated
at the interior of the "framework" of a "massive Being" and that, consequently,
thinking can be located "next to the things thought or coming from them" in
the sense of a co-belonging or reciprocal crossing-over. For Arendt, unlike
Merleau-Ponty, meaning is not everywhere, that is, there is not an "echo which
comes from every direction", there is no "universal substitution", no "mirac-
ulous multiplication of the tangible world". The "transcendence" of which
Hannah Arendt is speaking, between what appears and what determines the
appearing, corresponds to something - the invisible - which is not nothing-
ness, but at the same time is not Being, and which has, in a sense, the tragic
feature of the Abg rund, the groundless. The fact that appearance does not inhere
in representation, as an object and a construct of thought, but rather in the
movements of perception, does not establish the proof of an "opening of our
flesh which is immediately filled with the universal flesh of the world", but
rather the definitive failure of any hypothesis of a link between experience and
the senses, even when experience no longer presents itself in the form of an
act of consciousness, but in the form of a circuit between other bodies. The
"shifting" [baugel of experience is simply the "quel" (Dass) which requires,
in order to endow it with meaning, a leap, an act of transcendence that has
nothing to do with the ontological constitution of the world, but instead
involves acting, human freedom, the possibility of giving a sense to non-sense,
of living temporality as an attribution of a meaning to things. Given this
interpretation, one can understand the importance for Hannah Arendt of the
 PHENOMENOLOGY AND ONTOLOGY 179

notion of thinking as withdrawal from the world, a temporary suspension of

the texture of the tangible world.
It now becomes clear that Hannah Arendt interprets Merleau-Ponty's idea
of the invisible as the "secret counterpart of the visible" in the sense of an
actual passage from absence to presence, from withdrawal from the world to
manifestation. The withdrawal from the world is, for Arendt, the unavoid-
able prerequisite of the activity of thinking, its desolate syndrome of solitude,
isolation and solipsism. Yet it would seem that Arendt is not willing to abandon
this notion, since she also sees in the gap between thinking and the tangible
world the space of the autonomy and criticism of thought.
But the autonomy of thinking marks the boundary of what can be thought,
by stressing the primary ethical significance of self-awareness (the Socratic
question of good and evil, which is located solely in the duality internal to
consciousness) and, beyond solipsism, the acceptance of the "there is" as
pre-reflexive and pre-categorical. In this way, thinking opens itself to
plurality and to the poetic Sagen and, ultimately, to the political context of
discourse and action on the world's stage. In this sense Hannah Arendt remains,
in comparison to Merleau-Ponty, more existentialist and more Husserlian.
For her there is no transitive movement; there is the tragic quality of finitude,
the idea of acting as culpability, even though finitude does not have the sense
of a failure, but rather the character of discontinuity, of a going and a returning,
of a reversal (d'un aller-retour).
Thus Hannah Arendt moves away from Merleau-Ponty and turns again
towards Heidegger, introducing into her discourse the moment of the unthink-
able and the finitude of existence. In particular, by repeating Heidegger's thesis
of thinking as Andenken, Danken, Hannah Arendt affirms a tight link between
philosophy and poetry, and stresses a conception of history and action as
"wandering", a realm of dispersal, foreign to any teleology or meaning. In
this sense Hannah Arendt remains linked to her existentialist training, but at
the same time sets forth an idea of critical thinking, which collides with the
world, which does not deny itself the power of negation while remaining,
nonetheless, bound to the world, whose finitude and meaninglessness it accepts.

NOTES

1. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). All
further references to this work will be indicated parenthetically in the text and abbreviated
as LM, followed by the page number.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1964), p. 21 (trans. altered).
3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), p. 18.
 PART V

Epilogue
 G. B. MADISON

Merleau-Ponty in Retrospect

For Clovis, "the Other,"

intimior intimo meo.

For a number of years now Merleau-Ponty's work has been relegated to obscu-
rity.1t has, to be sure, continued to be a subject of lively discussion (especially
in North America), but only in relatively narrow circles. For the most part
the attention of those interested in what in North America is now referred to
as "Continental" philosophy has come to be focused mainly on various
post-structuralist and post-Merleau-Pontian figures, figures such as Derrida
and Deleuze, Lyotard and Foucault, as well as, to a somewhat lesser extent,
Critical Theory, Le., Habermas and his predecessors in the Frankfurt School.
In a newspaper interview published (in English) a decade ago, Claude Lefort
remarked on how, as he said: "There's been an odd repression of [Merleau-
Ponty's] thought." And he added: "I think that many of those who later took
over the limelight owe him a good deal. But they've shirked the rigour of
his questioning."l It is hard to disagree with Lefort on this point. And while
one can obviously only speculate on such matters, Lefort is also perhaps
right, at least in part, when he says: "[G]enerally speaking, what we've seen
flower has been a triumphantly destructive approach to philosophical
tradition which would not have had the same repercussions had Merleau-Ponty
been around."
One thing that can safely be said is that the relevance of Merleau-Ponty's
thought to issues which have come to the fore since his time has been largely
- and unjustly - ignored. In this essay I would accordingly like to make an
attempt at redressing this situation. I propose therefore to take a retrospec-
tive look at Merleau-Ponty's work, viewing it in relation to three subsequent
developments in the philosophical world: hermeneutics, poststructuralism, and
critical theory. It goes without saying that for reasons of space my remarks
will have to be of a highly schematic nature. I cannot set forth detailed
arguments but can only formulate a few suggestions which, though unsub-
stantiated, will not, I hope, be without potential argumentative merit?

P. Burke and J. Van der Veken (eds.), Merleau·Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, 183-195.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
184 G. B. MADISON

HERMENEUTICS

Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode appeared in 1960, shortly before Merleau-

Ponty's untimely death. Since then hermeneutics has become one of the major
topics of philosophical discourse. Talk about hermeneutics has, however, tended
to displace talk about phenomenology, and it is exceedingly rare that one
encounters references to Merleau-Ponty in contemporary hermeneutical
literature. This silence is something that I find rather strange. After all,
hermeneutics is rooted in the same intellectual soil as Merleau-Ponty's own
thought, in the phenomenology of HusserI and Heidegger's existentializing
of it, and hermeneutics is an attempt to elucidate the nature of human under-
standing, just as was MerIeau-Ponty's work. Indeed, MerIeau-Ponty's critique
of objectivism Cia pensee objective), a central feature of his work, continues
to be one of the major focuses of hermeneutics. I do not see how anyone
interested in hermeneutics could read - or re-read - Merleau-Ponty without
being struck by the many affinities between his thought and the concerns of
hermeneutics, with, in effect, the way in which MerIeau-Ponty seems - when
viewed retrospectively - to have anticipated much of present-day hermeneu-
tical theory. Consider, simply by way of example, some of the following
remarks in the Phenomenology of Perception.
In the chapter entitled "Other People and the Human World" MerIeau-Ponty
says, speaking of the attempt on the part of an individual to seize hold of
the meaning of his or her own life:
My hold on the past and the future is precarious, and my possession of
my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand
it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment,
bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in its tum further
developments in order to be understood. 3
What MerIeau-Ponty is pointing to here is the retrospective nature of human
understanding that hermeneutics has so much emphasized and that Gadamer
is referring to when he says: "All beginnings lie in darkness, and what is more,
they can be illuminated only in the light of what came later and from the
perspective of what followed.,,4 And like Ricoeur, who has argued the point
at length in his Temps et recit, MerIeau-Ponty knew - his reflections on the
work of Proust demonstrate this concretely - that it is chiefly through the
act of narration that meaning is retrospectively constituted; as MerIeau-Ponty
said, I understand my past "by following it up with a future which will be
seen after the event as foreshadowed by it, thus introducing historicity into
my life."s
In this same chapter Merleau-Ponty also points to the horizonal nature of
understanding, to, as Gadamer would say, the fact that understanding consists
in a "fusion of horizons," when he writes:
Objective and scientific consciousness of the past and of civilizations would
 MERLEAU-PONTY IN RETROSPECT 185

be impossible had I not, through the intermediary of my society, my

cultural world and their horizons, at least a possible communication with
them ...6
To cite one final example of hermeneutical observations on Merleau-Ponty's
part, in the chapter on "The Cogito" Merleau-Ponty remarks: "A telling utter-
ance or a good book impose their meaning upon us. Thus they carry it with
them in a certain way.,,7 One can find, scattered throughout Merleau-Ponty's
writings, a great many allusions to the way in which texts carry their meaning
within themselves (i.e., the way in which the meaning of a text is not reducible
- as hermeneutics maintains that it is not - to the psychological intention of
the author) and to what is involved in the act of reading, i.e., the business
of textual interpretation. Had Merleau-Ponty developed these remarks in a
systematic way, he would have been a full-fledged hermeneuticist. In any event,
it is hard today not to view Merleau-Ponty as precursor of (phenomeno-
logical) hermeneutics.
(In this regard, I am tempted to interject a personal note - for whatever
it's worth. When in the mid '60s I was working on my Merleau-Ponty book,
I let myself be guided in my reading of Merleau-Ponty by principles of textual
interpretation that I had discovered in Merleau-Ponty's own writings. 8 Now
at that time I knew nothing about hermeneutical theory per se. The Merleau-
Pontian principles I relied on, it is now apparent, were nevertheless
hermeneutical in the most proper sense of the term. Does this not indicate
that Merleau-Ponty was himself a hermeneuticist avant La Lettre, so to speak?)
The affinities between Merleau-Ponty's work and hermeneutics are deep
and far-reaching. And what accounts for these affinities is no doubt Merleau-
Ponty's underlying existential orientation. For it is this which led him to
emphasize, as hermeneutics also does, the situated nature of human being
and knowing. The notion of finitude is absolutely central to both Merleau-
Ponty's work and hermeneutics. "No philosophy can afford to be ignorant of
finitude," Merleau-Ponty said, "under pain of failing to understand itself as
philosophy.,,9 Gadamer says in effect the same thing. Indeed, hermeneutics
is, from one point of view, nothing other than an attempt to draw all the
necessary consequences from the fact that we are finite beings; it is a sustained
attempt to elaborate a theory of human understanding which takes seriously
the fact of our finitude. This is what leads hermeneutics to emphasize both
the historicity and the linguisticality of human understanding, two themes
which weighed heavily in Merleau-Ponty's own thinking. to
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological existentialism is also what led him to
reject with vigor the referential-representationalist paradigm of human under-
standing or knowing that was so central to all of modem philosophy, to reject
what Richard Rorty has called "epistemology centered philosophy." And here
too Merleau-Ponty directly anticipates later hermeneutical thinking. Just as
Merleau-Ponty rejected all copy or correspondence theories of truth, so likewise
hermeneutics, following up, as it were, on the imminent logic of Merleau-
186 O. B. MADISON

Ponty's critique of empiricistic realism, maintains, as one of its cardinal

principles, that to understand something is not to form a "mental representa-
tion" of it. All understanding (even on the perceptual level) is interpretive
and transformative. ll To the degree that hermeneutics is aptly characterized,
in Rortian-type terms, as a discipline which completely displaces modern
epistemology, to that degree Merleau-Ponty too was a hermeneuticist and
not an epistemologist. No hermeneuticist could be more adamant in his or
her rejection of all the brie-a-brae of mentalism and psychologism than was
Merleau-Ponty himself. Rather than conceiving of the relation between self
and world in terms of a mimetic, representationalist correspondence, Merleau-
Ponty conceived of it on the model of an active, transformative dialogue. 12
Now we all know how basic a paradigm the notion of dialogue is for
hermeneutics. The importance of this notion in Merleau-Ponty's own thinking
is, however, often overlooked. Consider, though, the following text from the
Phenomenology:
In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person
and myself a common ground; my thought and his are interwoven into a
single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by
the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation
of which neither is the creator [cf. Gadamer's notion of "play"]. We have
here a dual being where the Other is no longer for me a bit of behavior
in my transcendental field, nor I in his. We are collaborators in a con-
summate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we coexist
through a common world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself,
for the other person's thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my own
making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being, or
even anticipate them. And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises
to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed,
so that at the same time that I lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by making
me think toO. 13
There can be no doubt that, as one commentator has perceptively remarked:
"The dialogical relation is at the heart of Merleau-Ponty's thought.,,14
Merleau-Ponty also anticipates hermeneutics on the issue of methodology.
Unlike traditional philosophy, hermeneutics does not appeal to necessary or
ideal conditions in an attempt to account for what effectively is. As Gadamer
stated: "Fundamentally I am not proposing a method, but I am describing what
is the case . ... I consider the only scientific thing is to recognise what is,
instead of starting from what ought to be or could be.,,15 It is surely no accident
if this sounds like an echo to Merleau-Ponty's rejection of what he called
"the method of the 'thing without which' ," of "analytical reflection of the
traditional type, which seeks the conditions of possibility without concerning
itself with the conditions of reality.,,16 From the vantage point we now occupy,
it is clear that hermeneutics has pursued, in a deliberate and sustained fashion,
the anti-foundationalism that was already practiced by Merleau-Ponty.17
 MERLEAU-PONTY IN RETROSPECT 187

To conclude these remarks on the ways in which Merleau-Ponty's concerns

have been effectively taken up by hermeneutics, let me simply note that
Merleau-Ponty was greatly concerned with the human sciences and that this
concern continues to be absolutely central to the entire hermeneutical enter-
prise. As Gadamer said here in Louvain a number of years ago in a series of
lectures entitled Le probleme de la conscience historique: "The human sciences
are not only a problem/or philosophy, on the contrary, they represent a problem
0/ philosophy."18 I might also mention that one of Merleau-Ponty's aims in
reflecting on the human sciences was that of articulating a "new humanism."
Contemporary hermeneutics for its part continues to view itself as a humanism,
the widely proclaimed announcement of the "death of man" on the part of
Merleau-Ponty's post-structuralist successors notwithstanding.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM

In the interview with Claude Lefort that I have already cited, Lefort was
asked: "Do you think there will be an end soon to this ignorance of a
philosopher who - in his time - was a precursor?" To which Lefort replied:
"I hope so. In fact there are signs of return to Merleau-Ponty for inspiration,
along with signs of weariness with theories which, under the sign of anti-
theory, have multiplied new versions of dogmatism and which can easily be
condensed into a few statements." Whether or not one can in all fairness say
of the anti-theoretical positions adopted by a number of poststructuralists
that they can "be condensed into a few statements" is not a question I wish
to take up here. I do believe, however, that a poststructuralist such as Derrida
owes more - immensely more - to Merleau-Ponty than he seems prepared
to admit.
Let me hasten to add that I do not mean to imply by what I've just said
that Derrida actively or knowingly borrowed from Merleau-Ponty, and that
he failed to acknowledge this. I have no access to Derrida's thought processes
and am not prepared to second-guess him. I would be prepared to argue,
however, that many of Derrida's central motifs are already to be found in
Merleau-Ponty, the later Merleau-Ponty in particular. If they were not fully
developed by Merleau-Ponty, they are at least there in statu nascendi. I believe
that, should he ever give Merleau-Ponty a serious reading, Derrida would
find in Merleau-Ponty an author to his own liking; he would find in him
"traces" of his own thoughts. Here too, Merleau-Ponty was a precursor in
the fullest sense of the term.
Even before Derrida came along Merleau-Ponty's whole enterprise was
one of "deconstruction." The Phenomenology is a good example of this. This
book is actually rather unique in the philosophical literature in that (like
Derrida's own subsequent works) it does not really attempt to defend any
"positive" theses. Merleau-Ponty's strategy in this work is essentially
"negative," by which I mean that he limits himself to undermining -
188 G. B. MADISON

deconstructing - various received theories as to the nature of perception. As

to what perception is "in itself," Merleau-Ponty has nothing to say, except
to say that it is neither this nor that nor yet some other thing. 19
When Derrida once said, "Now I don't know what perception is and I
don't believe that anything like perception exists,,,20 he was not uttering an
original thought. The Phenomenology of Perception is itself a sustained attack
on the very notion of perception; it is an attempt to argue that perception, as
it was conceived of in modern philosophy, simply does not exist. 21 That is,
if by "perception" one means the way in which an isolated subject, cognizant
only of its own inner "sensations," somehow manages to represent to itself
an "external" world, then Merleau-Ponty denied that there is any such thing
as perception. Rejecting all modernist versions of referentialist-representa-
tionalism, Merleau-Ponty advocated in its place what could in effect be called
a "linguistic" theory of perception. The perceiving subject and the perceived
object were for him diacritical entities, and perception itself was, like language,
a matter of pure diacriticality. In other words, for Merleau-Ponty perception
was not some kind of reproductive, mirroring process whereby what is
"outside" is duplicated "inside" but was, instead, a process of semiosis, a
system of differential or diacritical relations wherein each term of the relation
(perceiving subject, perceived object) is (or becomes) what it is only in terms
of the other.
Now, the modernist view of perception rejected by Merleau-Ponty is itself
part and parcel of what Derrida was subsequently to call the "metaphysics
of presence." And Derrida is obviously quite right in asserting that "whatever
strikes at the metaphysics [of presence] ... strikes also at the very concept
of perception." But note what this entails. It means that when Merleau-Ponty
launched his all-out attack on the modernist notion of perception, it was in
effect the "metaphysics of presence" itself that he was attacking. It thus appears
that Derrida's own deconstructive project was simply a radicalization of some-
thing already begun by Medeau-Ponty; Merleau-Ponty's philosophical project
was itself a decisive step in the overcoming of the objectivistic metaphysics
of presence. In addition, I might point out how in attacking the way he did
the very notion of "sensation," in both its empiricistic and intellectualistic
versions,22 Merleau-Ponty's whole enterprise amounted to a deconstruction
of what modern philosophy had hitherto referred to as the "mind" (an original
realm of immediate self-presence). For Merleau-Ponty there was no such thing
as the "mind."
So far I have spoken only of the early Merleau-Ponty. The Visible and the
Invisible was a conscientious attempt on Merleau-Ponty's part to radicalize his
own critique of what we now call the metaphysics of presence. In this late,
unfinished work Merleau-Ponty even went so far as to abandon the very term
"perception," preferring to speak instead of the flesh - a term, he said, which
has no equivalent (which is "sans equivalent") in traditional philosophy. The
term "flesh" may (or may not) be without equivalent in the previous litera-
ture, but it does have an equivalent in subsequent literature. In Derrida's own
 MERLEAU-PONTY IN RETROSPECT 189

neologism, difjerance, I can hear quite distinct echoes of Merleau-Ponty's

"flesh."
For Derrida difjerance designates a kind of primordial productivity, "the
process of scission and division whose differings and differences would be
the constituted products or effects.'t23 Merleau-Ponty for his part character-
ized the flesh as a kind of primordial productivity as well, as the always absent
"origin" of both the visible and the invisible, the sensible and the sentient;
in Derrida-like terms, he spoke of a process of "segregation," "fission," "defla-
gration," "differentiation," or "dehiscence" of which the seer and the seen are
the constituted effects. At one point Merleau-Ponty uses the term "invagina-
tion,,24 to refer to the chiasmic reversibility and intertwining which is the flesh.
If one were ignorant of the chronology of the writings of these two authors,
one would surely be inclined to wonder who is borrowing from whom. What
exactly is the difference (avec-un-e) between Derrida's differance and Merleau-
Ponty's "flesh"? Were one to explore this issue in a detailed way, one would,
I believe, have to come to the conclusion that Derrida and other poststruc-
turalists have been exploiting a rich philosophical load vein that Merleau-Ponty
had himself previously unearthed by means of his careful yet relentless under-
mining of the very notion of "presence" (Priisenifeld) which was so central
to Husserl's philosophy of consciousness and his phenomenological idealism.
It is perhaps time to res take Merleau-Ponty's rightful claim in these matters.
I should perhaps append to what I've said a word of caution, for I do not
wish to give the impression that the worth and significance of Merleau-Ponty's
work boils down to his having been a kind of proto-poststructuralist. Merleau-
Ponty's work clearly anticipates themes developed more fully by the
poststructuralists, but, in my opinion, it also exceeds their work in terms of
its significance for our own times. How many affinities there may be between
Merleau-Ponty and his post-structuralist successors - and I have been
suggesting that there are a great many indeed - there remains for all that
some important differences. The difference that above all makes a difference
(as Richard Bernstein might say) is that, however much in his later writings
Merleau-Ponty may have criticized all forms of subjectivism, and even
anthropocentrism, he was not, as I see it, tempted to lend his support to the
antihumanist movement encouraged by Heidegger and elaborated upon by
his postmodernistic epigones. Merleau-Ponty wanted not to dissolve the notion
of the "subject" ("man") but to reconceptualize it in a thoroughly non- or post-
metaphysical way. And, as I have argued on another occasion, I believe that
the "new humanism" defended by Merleau-Ponty has a relevance to our
contemporary, post-1989lifeworld that is not to be found in the antihumanism
of his post-structuralist successors.2S For it would be exceedingly difficult to
make sense of this world, of the current struggles on the part of peoples around
the globe for greater freedom and democracy, without the notion of universal
human rights, a notion which Merleau-Ponty's post-Marxian thinking on the
social world and his "new liberalism" legitimates but which is utterly foreign
to the anti-humanist and anti-liberal mind-set of the poststructuralists. 26
190 G. B. MADISON

CRITICAL THEORY

Habermas is another contemporary figure in the pages of whose writing

Merleau-Ponty is conspicuous by reason of his absence. It would of course
be hard, from one point of view at least, to think of two thinkers who are so
radically different from one another. Merleau-Ponty's style of writing (and thus
thinking) was almost the complete opposite of Habermas'. Whereas Habermas
composes lengthy, ponderous tomes which seek to incorporate in an ultra-
systematic, quasi-encyclopedic fashion all manner of empirical "evidence,"
Merleau-Ponty never sought to "ground" his theses on "empirical research"
(his use of empirical data, e.g., Gestalt psychology, was always highly
selective, and he never accepted it simply as a "given"), and his utterances
were more often than not sketchy, vague, and underdeveloped or, to put it in
a perhaps more complimentary way, allusive. But just as a great many of the
themes subsequently developed by hermeneutics and post-structuralism are
to be found already in Merleau-Ponty, so likewise Habermas' key notion of
communicative rationality was an absolutely central element in Merleau-
Ponty's own thinking.
If Merleau-Ponty's contribution to the all-important notion of communica-
tive rationality (a notion which is not merely "Habermasian" but which is as
vital to hermeneutics as it is to critical theory) has not hitherto received the
recognition it deserves, this is no doubt due to Merleau-Ponty's habitually
unsystematic and allusive way of saying what he had to say. Yet I believe
that an "interpretive reconstruction" of Merleau-Ponty's work in this respect
would reveal that he had a quite clear awareness of the nature and signifi-
cance of communicative rationality. He explicitly linked "rationality" up with
"communication,'m seeking to underscore thereby (as Habermas was later
explicitly to do) the unavoidably universalist nature of all claims to truth on
the part of speaking subjects. There exists, Merleau-Ponty said, "a universality
that men affirm or imply by the simple fact of their existence.,,28 In accordance
with his anti-foundationalist way of thinking, Merleau-Ponty did not seek to
ground this universality on some metaphysical essence that all human beings
are supposed to possess in common; its "foundation," he insisted, is nothing
other than the realm of intersubjective, communicative praxis - what he
referred to as an inter-monde or the "communicative world.,,29 The similari-
ties between Merleau-Ponty's and Habermas' views on the subject of
communicative rationality are so strong that the following remark by Habermas
is one that could easily have been uttered by Merleau-Ponty himself:
There is no pure reason that might don linguistic clothing only in the second
place. Reason is by its very nature incarnated in contexts of communica-
tive action and in structures of the lifeworld. 3o
A great deal of current discussion in Haberrnasian circles has focused on
the question of ethics, as informed by the concept of communicative ratio-
nality.3! I would like in this respect to indicate very briefly how the ontological
 MERLEAU-PONTY IN RETROSPECT 191

underpinnings to the idea of a communicative ethics can be found in Merleau-

Ponty's own work (I must confess, however, that one must engage in a bit
of "active interpretation" here). At the time he was being considered for the
College de France, Merleau-Ponty, summing up his work to date and out-
lining his future projects, stated that the direction of research he envisaged
would "give us the principle of an ethics.,,32 An ethics is something Merleau-
Ponty never even so much as outlined, but I believe that one can indeed find
in Merleau-Ponty's later writings the principle of an ethics, and I believe,
moreover, that such an ethics, fully articulated, would be none other than an
ethics of communicative rationality.
The "principle" of this ethics is to be found in Merleau-Ponty's notion of
the flesh and, more specifically, in the notion of reversibility, which can
easily be said to be one of the most basic notions in his later thought - Merleau-
Ponty in fact referred reversibility as "verite ultime." The reversibility of the
flesh - which (as in the instance of the two hands touching/touched) makes
of the self, in its innermost self, the other of its own self - is what intro-
duces alterity into the very heart of selfhood (ipseity).33 What the reversibility
of the flesh thus "means" is that intersubjectivity is as primordial as is sub-
jectivity itself. Self and other are, Merleau-Ponty says, "like organs of one
single intercorporeality.,,34 Now, the reversibility of the self and the other in
the very flesh of their being is what enables two selves to exchange or reverse
their perspectives, such that each confirms the other in his or her own selfhood,
as, precisely, an "I," a subjectivity. Reversibility is thus that which "grounds"
the ethical demand for reciprocal recognition (Anerkennung); it is thereby
the ultimate source of the "moral point of view" (La conscience de La morale).
Were one to seek to conceptualize, on the level of ethical theory, this
carnal demand for reciprocity, and were one to adhere to the inner logic of
Merleau-Ponty's own thought, one would necessarily be led to uphold, as
the core requirement of any defensible philosophical ethics, the principle of
universalizability. This is of course precisely what Habermas has done. He has
in fact addressed this issue much more extensively than Merleau-Ponty ever
did. It is important to remember however - especially in light of the
anti-universalist stance taken by the post-Merleau-Pontian anti-humanists -
that Merleau-Ponty was a staunch defender of the universalist claims of
philosophy and, indeed, of the universalist notion of "humanity" itself. But
even though Habermas has contributed more than Merleau-Ponty did to the
actual working-out of a universalist, communicative ethics, there is a sense
in which Merleau-Ponty "went further" than Habermas has: Merleau-Ponty's
philosophy of the flesh provides us with an ontological grounding for the
communicative ethics that Habermas for his part seeks to justify in a more
abstract as well as a more limited way by appealing to speech act theory and
theories of psychological development, on the one hand, and, on the other,
the counterfactual and utopian notion of an ideal speech community. This is
in itself no mean accomplishment on Merleau-Ponty's part and is certainly one
we ought not to lose sight of.
192 G. B. MADISON

CONCLUSION: READING MERLEAU-PONTY TODAY

It sometimes almost seems as though there has been a conspiracy of silence

in regard to what Merleau-Ponty said and what he effectively accomplished.
He himself would perhaps not have been unduly surprised by this, since, as
he knew, history is shot through with ironies and contingencies and is as
much a matter of forgetting as it is of remembering. But Merleau-Ponty's
disappearance from the contemporary philosophical scene is not without its
advantages, from a hermeneutical point of view. For it means that his work
can now be approached afresh - as, for instance, Heidegger's still cannot -
and can be read as it now should be read, namely as a classic. Classics,
Merleau-Ponty said, "are recognizable by the fact that no one takes them lit-
erally, and yet new facts are never absolutely outside their province but call
forth new echoes from them and reveal new lustres in them ... 35
Even though more recent work in hermeneutics, poststructuralism, and
critical theory may have failed unjustly to acknowledge what Merleau-Ponty
had to say in his own lifetime, this work can nevertheless enable us to under-
stand him better, in that it can serve to call forth new echoes from his work
and reveal new lustres in it. As Merleau-Ponty himself knew and insisted,
an author's texts invariably take on meanings he neither foresaw nor intended.
And this can, and does, occur even at the hands of those who may not have
either read or acknowledged them. If it is true, as I have sought to suggest,
that many of the themes that have been developed more fully in recent
philosophy are already to be found, in at least a nascent state, in Merleau-
Ponty, then Gadamer's statement that I quoted earlier is fully applicable here:
"All beginnings lie in darkness, and what is more, they can be illuminated only
in the light of what came later and from the perspective of what followed."
As a radical critic of the mainline tradition in philosophy,36 and as a post-
modern avant la lettre - as such, Merleau-Ponty, "the great inceptor," is
understood best when understood in retrospect.

NOTES

1. "Philosoph's [sic] Mainspring," interview by Christian Delacampagne with Claude Lefort,

The Manchester Guardian, June 28, 1981.
2. For a more detailed treatment of many of these issues I refer the reader to various recent
papers of mine. See: "Merleau-Ponty and Postrnodernity" in Madison, The Hermeneutics
of Postmodernity: Figures and Themes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); "Flesh
As Otherness" in G. A. Johnson and M. B. Smith, eds., Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-
Ponty (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990); "Merleau-Ponty and the
Deconstruction of Logocentrism" in M. C. Dillon, ed., Merleau-Ponty Vivant (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1991); "Merleau-Ponty Alive," in Man and World,
26, No. I, 1993; "Did Merleau-Ponty Have a Theory of Perception?" and "Rereading
Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and (Post)Structuralism," in T. Busch and
S. Gallagher, eds., Merleau-Ponty: Hermeneutics and Postmodernism (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1992).
 MERLEAU-PONTY IN RETROSPECT 193

3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 346.
4. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. F. G. Lawrence (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), p. 140.
5. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 346.
6. Ibid., p. 362. In regard to the "horizonal" nature of human understanding (both perceptual
and linguistic), see my "Merleau-Ponty and the Deconstruction of Logocentrism."
7. Ibid., p. 388.
8. See the introduction to my La phenomenologie de Merleau-Ponty: une recherche des
limites de la conscience (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1973).
9. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 38.
10. In regard to historicity, see Signs, p. 109: "Since we are all hemmed in by history, it is up
to us to understand that whatever truth we may have is to be gotten not in spite of but through
our historical inherence. Superficially considered, our inherence destroys all truth: consid-
ered radically, it founds a new idea of truth. As long as I cling to the ideal of an absolute
spectator, of knowledge with no point of view, I can see my situation as nothing but a source
of error. But if I have once recognized that through it I am grafted onto every action and
all knowledge which can have a meaning for me, and that step by step it contains every-
thing which can exist for me, then my contact with the social in the finitude of my situation
is revealed to me as the point of origin of all truth, including scientific truth."
11. Cf. the following text of Gadamer, which reads as though it could almost have been written
by Merleau-Ponty himself (like Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer also refers to Scheler): "[I]nter-
pretation is not an isolated activity of human beings but the basic structure of our experience
of life. We are always taking something as something. That is the primordial givenness of
our world orientation, and we cannot reduce it to anything simpler or more immediate....
Is sense perception something given or is it an abstraction that thematizes an abstract constant
of the given? Scheler, aided by his contacts with American pragmatists and Heidegger,
demonstrated with vigor that sense perception is never given. It is rather an aspect of the
pragmatic approach to the world. We are always hearing-listening to something and extracting
[sic] from other things. We are interpreting in seeing, hearing, receiving. In seeking, we
are looking for something; we are just not like photographs that reflect everything visible"
("The Hermeneutics of Suspicion" in Hermeneutics, ed. Shapiro and Sica [Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1984], pp. 58-60).
12. Cf. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 320: "The relations between things or aspects of things
having always our body as their vehicle, the whole of nature is the setting of our own
life, or our interlocutor in a sort of dialogue."
13. Ibid., p. 354.
14. Thomas W. Busch, "Ethics and Ontology: Levinas and Merleau-Ponty," paper presented
at the 16th annual meeting of the Merleau-Ponty Circle, University of Colorado at Colorado
Springs, September 1991.
15. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), pp. 465-66.
16. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 439.
17. Merleau-Ponty was an anti-foundationalist (in the sense in which the term is used today,
to designate one of the main thrusts of postmodern thought, in both its hermeneutical and
post-structuralist variants) throughout his philosophical career. In the Phenomenology of
Perception he characterized phenomenology as a discipline without foundations or, as he
put it, one which "rests on itself, or rather provides its own foundation" (pp. xx-xxi: "se
fonde elle-meme"). In his later writings he characterized his thought as a search for Ie
fondemental ("It is the aim of an inquiry such as we have pursued here on the ontology of
Nature to sustain through contact with beings and the explorations of the regions of Being
the same attention to the fundamental that remains the privilege and the task of philos-
ophy" [Themes from the Lectures at the College de France. 1952-1960, trans. John O'Neill
(Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 112]). When he said that he was
searching for "Ie fondemental" he hastened to add, however, that fundamental thought is
194 G. B. MADISON

"not fundamental as if with it one reached a foundation upon which one ought to base oneself
and stay. As a matter of principle, fundamental thought is bottomless. It is, if you wish,
an abyss" (Signs, p. 21).
18. Gadamer, "The Problem of Historical Consciousness" in Paul Rabinow and William M.
Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1979), p. 112.
19. In regard to these and the following remarks see my "Did Merleau-Ponty Have a Theory
of Perception?"
20. Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Discourses" in The Structuralist
Controversy, ed. R. Macksey and E. Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1972), p. 272.
21. See Phenomenology, p. 281: "In the natural attitude, I do not have perceptions."
22. Cf. Phenomenology, pp. 3-5, where Merleau-Ponty says of "pure sensation": "This notion
corresponds to nothing in our experience .... This pure sensation would amount to no
sensation, and thus to no feeling at all. The alleged self-evidence of sensation is not based
on any testimony of course, but on widely held prejudice .... We make perception out of
things perceived."
23. Derrida, "Difference" in Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allison (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 137.
24. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 152.
25. See my "Merleau-Ponty Alive," paper originally presented at the seminar on
"Sozialphilosophie und Lebenswelt: M. Merleau-Ponty," Dubrovnik, April 1991.
26. There has been a general tendency on the part of the post-structuralists (the philosophers
of '68 as Ferry and Renaut refer to them) to equate the "rights of man" with - as Marx
did - "abstract bourgeois individualism" and, accordingly, to reject the whole idea of rights
out of hand. As Lefort remarked in 1980: "The spread of Marxism throughout the whole
of the French Left has long gone hand in hand with a devaluation of rights in general and
with the vehement, ironic or 'scientific' condemnation of the bourgeois notion of human
rights" ("Politics and Human Rights" in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy,
Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed., John B. Thompson [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986],
p.240).
27. See Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H. L. Dreyfus and P. A. Dreyfus (Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 95.
28. Merleau-Ponty, "An Unpublished Text" in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 10.
29. See Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. R. C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 1964), p. 19.
30. Jiirgen Haberrnas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. F.
Lawrence (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), p. 322. For further remarks on Merleau-
Ponty's notion of communicative rationality see my "Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernity" and
"Merleau-Ponty Alive."
In defending "a concept of communicative rationality that escapes the snares of Western
logocentrism," Habermas refers to the "network of a bodily and interactively shaped, his-
torically situated reason," from which, he says: " ... our philosophical tradition selected
out only the single thread of propositional truth and theoretical reason and stylized it into
the monopoly of humanity. The common ground that unites both von Humboldt and prag-
matism with the later Wittgenstein and Austin is the opposition to the ontological privileging
of the world of beings, the epistemological privileging of contact with objects or existing
states of affairs, and the semantic privileging of assertoric sentences and propositional
truth" ("Questions and Counter-questions" in Richard J. Bernstein, ed., Habermas and
Modernity [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985], pp. 196-97).
To speak in this way of "a bodily and interactively shaped, historically situated reason,"
 MERLEAU-PONTY IN RETROSPECT 195

to mention in this context Wittgenstein and Austin, but to fail to make the slightest refer-
ence to Merleau-Ponty testifies to a historical oversight of serious proportions.
31. As instanced by the following two recent publications: Seyla Benhabib and Fred Dallmayr,
eds., The Communicative Ethics Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, Press, 1990); Michael
Kelly, ed., Hermeneutics and Critical Theory in Ethics and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1990).
32. Merleau-Ponty, "An Unpublished Text," p. 11 (" ... donnerait en m€me temps Ie principe
d'une morale").
33. See in this regard my "Flesh As Otherness."
34. Signs, p. 168. On p. 174 ("The Philosopher and His Shadow") Merleau-Ponty says: "What
'precedes' intersubjective life cannot be numerically distinguished from it, precisely because
at this level there is neither individuation nor numerical distinction. The constitution of others
does not come after that of the body; others and my body are born together from the
original ecstasy".
35. Signs, p. 11.
36. See my "Merleau-Ponty et la contre-tradition," Dialogue, 17, no. 3, 1978 (English transla-
tion reprinted in my The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty [Athens: Ohio University Press,
1981]) and my "Merleau-Ponty et la deconstruction du logocentrisme," Laval thiologique
et philosophique, 46, no. I, 1990 (expanded English version in M. C. Dillon, ed., Merleau-
Ponty Vivant [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991]).
 Notes on Contributors

CO-EDITORS:

Patrick Burke is associate professor of philosophy at Seattle University. In

recent autumns, he has been adjunct associate professor at Gonzaga University
in Florence, Italy. An invited research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy
of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1976 and in 1990, he publishes in
the area of contemporary French philosophy, and is presently completing a
book on Merleau-Ponty and Schelling.

Jan Van der Veken is Professor of philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy,

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). He wrote a doctoral dissertation on
The Absolute in the Philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He has published
extensively on Process Thought and is the chairperson of the European Society
for Process Thought. At Leuven, he is the Director of the Center for
Metaphysics and Philosophy of God. He also has published in the area of
phenomenology and religious language.

CONTRIBUTORS

Rudolf Bernet was educated at the Universities of Louvain and Heidelberg.

He holds a Ph.D. from Leuven (1976). He is presently Professor of Philosophy
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, member of the Board of Directors of the
Husserl-Archives and editor of the series Edmund Husserl, Collected Works.
He has edited texts by Husserl, translated texts by Heidegger and written
numerous articles on Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Freud and
Lacan. He is the author of Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology,
Northwestern University Press, 1992 (in collaboration with I. Kern and E.
Marbach). His main interests are temporality, imagination, language, and more
recently the philosophy of the (non-egological) subject.

Laura Boella teaches the history of moral philosophy at Universita Statale

197
198 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

di Milano. She is the author of II giovane Lukacs (1977), Intellettuali e

coscienza di classe. II dibattito su Lukacs 1923-24 (1977), and several essays
on the last phase of Lukacsian thought. She has edited the Italian edition of
numerous writings of the "School of Budapest" (a group of students of Lukacs
who constituted the most important nucleus of opposition in Hungary during
the '60's and the '70's), including Lafilosofia radicale by Agnes Heller (1987)
and Sistemi sociali oltre Marx by Mihaly Vajda (1980). In 1987 she
published Ernst Bloch. Trame della speranze (Jaca Book, Milano) and in
1988 Dietro it paesaggio. Saggio su Simmel (UNICOPLI, Milano). She has
also brought-out the Italian edition of several important works of Ernst Bloch:
Tracce (1989), Geographica (1991), and Eredita del nostro tempo (1992).
She has published on the phenomenology of Hannah Arendt and is currently
working on a book on the philosophy of Hannah Arendt.

Fran~oise Dastur is "Maitre de conferences" at the Universite de Paris-I

(Pantheon-Sorbonne) in the Department of Philosophy where she teaches
general philosophy and the history of philosophy with an emphasis on German
philosophy. In addition, she is attached to the Phenomenological Seminar, a
research unit of the "Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique" (C.N.R.S.).
She has published several articles in French and English on Husser!, Heidegger,
and Merleau-Ponty. She is the author of Heidegger et la question du temps
(1990) and of Holderlin. Tragedie et modernite (1992).

M. C. Dillon is professor of philosophy at Binghamton University, author of

Merleau-Ponty's Ontology (1988), and editor of Merleau-Ponty Vivant (1991).
He is currently completing work on a book entitled Semiological Reductionism:
A Critique of Derrida.

Galen A. Johnson is professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island,

author of Earth and Sky, History and Philosophy: Island Images Inspired by
Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (1989), and co-editor of Ontology and Alterity
in Merleau-Ponty (1990).

Burkhard Liebsch teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the Ruhr-

University of Bochum. He has published articles on Merleau-Ponty and his
relationship to the history of science, Foucault, and Ricoeur, and, most recently,
a book on Piaget and Merleau-Ponty, Spuren einer anderen Natur. Piaget,
Merleau-Ponty und die ontogenetischen Prozesse.

Gary Brent Madison is professor of philosophy at McMaster University.

He is author of La phenomenologie de Merleau-Ponty, une recherche des
limites de la conscience (1973; English trans. 1981), Understanding: A
Phenomenological-Pragmatic Analysis (1982), The Logic of Liberty (1986),
and The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and Themes (1989). In
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 199

addition to numerous journal articles on contemporary continental philos-

ophy, Madison's interest in the hermeneutics of the social sciences has also
led him to write in the areas of political and economic theory. He is a founding
member and former director of the Canadian Society for Hermeneutics and
Postmodern Thought.

Marc Richir, a Senior Research Fellow with the Belgian National Fund for
Scientific Research (FNRS), is a tenured lecturer at the Universite Libre de
Bruxelles. In addition, he is director of the curriculum at the College
International de Philosophie. He is author of numerous works in contemporary
continental thought, notably La crise du sens et La phenomenoLogie (1990)
and Du sublime en politique (1991). He also serves as editor of the collec-
tion "Krisis" for the Jer6me Millon publishing house of Grenoble.

James Risser is associate professor of philosophy and the current holder of

the Pigott-McCone Chair of Humanities at Seattle University. In addition to
several publications in the area of hermeneutics, he is editor of a forthcoming
volume of essays on Heidegger's work from the 1930's. At present, he is
completing a book on Gadamer's hermeneutics.

Rudi Visker is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy,

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, under the auspices of the Belgian National
Fund for Scientific Research, and Fellow of the University of Essex. In addition
to several publications in the philosophy of economics and in modern and
contemporary philosophy, he is author of Michel Foucault. Genealogie als
Kritik (Miinchen, 1991).

Bernhard Waldenfels is professor of philosophy at the Ruhr-University of

Bochum, and has lectured as a visiting professor in various university cities,
including Rotterdam, Paris, New York, Rome, Louvain-Ia-Neuve, San Jose
(Costa Rica), and Debrecen. He has authored a number of books, including
Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs (1971), Der Spielraum des Verhaltens (1980),
Phiinomenoiogie in Frankreich (1983), In den Netzen der Lebenswelt (1985),
Ordnung im Zwielicht (1987), and Der StacheL des Fremden (1990). He is
the German translator and editor of several books by Merleau-Ponty, and, in
collaboration with A. Metraux, edited a volume of essays on Merleau-Ponty:
Leibhaftige Vernunft: Spuren von Merleau-Ponty's Denken (1986).

Stephen Watson is associate professor of philosophy at the University of

Notre Dame and has published widely in recent French philosophy. He is
especially interested in poststructuralist thought.

Edwin Weihe is associate professor of English and former academic dean at

Seattle University where he currently teaches interdisciplinary courses on
200 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

modernism and postmodernism. He is an award-winning teacher, a published

fiction writer and poet, and a Fulbright scholar who has lectured widely in
Europe on American fiction. Each summer in Paris, he conducts a popular
course on expatriate artists and writers.

TRANSLATORS:

R. Philip Buckley is visiting assistant professor of philosophy at the University

of Saskatchewan, and author of Husserl, Heidegger, and the Crisis of
Philosophical Responsibility (1992).

Rene Maxime Marinoni is professor of French at Seattle University, and

has published in the area of foreign language instruction. A native of Grenoble,
he is one of the principal founders and directors of Seattle University's French-
in-France program.

Paul B. Milan is associate professor of French at Seattle University, and has

published in the areas of French literature and foreign language develop-
ment. In collaboration with Patrick Burke and Andrew Bjelland, Jr., he is
bringing forth the English edition of Merleau-Ponty's L'union de I'arne et
du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson.

Victor Reinking is assistant professor of French at Seattle University, and

is finishing a Ph.D. dissertation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the University
of Washington; he is active in translating the French language works of North
African writers.

Steven Spileers is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Philosophy of the

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and a member of the professional staff of
the Husserl-Archives at Leuven.
 Name Index
Adorno, Theodor, 9,161
Aquinas, Thomas, 169(n.29)
Arendt, Hannah, xxxi, xxxii, 19, 161,
171-179
Aristotle, 94, 136, 169(n.29)
Aron, Raymond, 20, 158
Augustine, Saint, 32(n.5), 115
Austin, J. L., 194-195(n.30)
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 12
Baldwin, James Mark, 14-15, 22(n.8)
Benjamin, Walter, 65
Bentham, Jeremy, 153
Berger, Gaston, 43
Bergson, Henri, 18-19,90, 121
Bernard, Emile, 103
Bernstein, Richard, 189
Blanchot, Maurice, 25
Buffon, Comte G. de, 13-14
Bolzano, Bernhard, 148, 151
Casey, Edward, 87
Cassirer, Ernst, xxv, 65, 66
Castoriadis, Cornelius, 163
Cavailles, Jean, 151, 152, 154
Cezanne, Paul, xxvii, xxviii, 99, 102-105
Claudel, Paul, 6-7
Conrad, Joseph, xxvii, xxviii, 99-102,
104-106
Darwin, Charles, 13
De Beauvoir, Simone, 155, 156, 162
De Waehlens, Alphonse, xiv
Deleuze, Giles, 183
Derrida, Jacques, x viii, xxv, xxxii,
201
33(n.26), 53, 55, 70-73, 75,78-81,
82(nn. 10,13, 15), 122-123, 132, 183,
187-189
Descartes, Rene, 28, 33(n.1O), 73, 74, 80,
149, 152, 157, 169(n. 29), 172, 174
Edie, James, 142(n.2)
Euclid, 116, 157, 164, 169(n.36),
170(nAO)
Fink, Eugen, xxiii, xxiv, 16,37-50
Foucault, Michel, xxviii, xxix, 10, 25,
109-119, 124, 126, 127(n.3), 128
(nn.7,11), 129(n.24), 183
Freud, Sigmund, xxvi, 15, 16, 18, 69, 70,
73,75,76, 81(n.l), 147, 155
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, xviii, xxix, xxx,
131-138, 140-142, 142(n.6), 143
(nn.15,21), 184-187, 192, 193(n.ll)
Giacometti, Alberto, 92, 93
Gurwitsch, Aron, 17
Habermas, Jiirgen, xviii, xxxii, 183,
190-191, 194(n.30)
Haeckel, Ernst, 14
Hall, Stanley, 14
Hegel, G. W. F., 14, 18, 19,38,42,45,54,
77,78,90, 151, 154, 158-160, 162,
169(n.30)
Heidegger, Martin, 10-11,21, 22, 27, 31,
33(n.36), 34 (n.81), 41-46, 49, 53-58,
68(nA), 91, 94, 109, 122, 151, 159,
168(n.27), 171-174, 179, 184, 189,
192, 193 (n.l1)
202 NAME INDEX

Henry, Michel, 55 Mounier, Emmanuel, 91

Heraclitus, 86, 109
Hilbert, David, 151, 162 Nabert, Jean, 24(n.41)
Holderlin, Friedrich, 25 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxi, 86, 91, 147,
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 194(n.30) 153,176
Husserl, Edmund, xxv, xxxi, 6, 8-10, 12,
16, 23(n.17), 27, 32, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, Panofsky, Erwin, 116
45, 48, 49, 53-58, 62, 63, 66, 68(n.4), Parmenides, 176
70, 72, 73, 75, 81, 82(n.4), 88, Pascal, B., xxxi, 155, 166, 169(n.29)
121-122, 143(n.12), 147-154, 157, Patocka, Jan, 43
168(n.27), 172-174, 179, 184, 189 Piaget, Jean, 118
Hyppolite, Jean, 90, 127(n.4), 152 Picasso, Pablo, 99
Pissarro, Camille, 102
Jaspers, Karl, 171-173 Plato, 45, 88, 163
Jauss, Hans Robert, 20 Pontalis, J. B., 71, 80,83(n.25)
Proust, Marcel, xxvii, 184
Kant, Immanuel, xix, xxiii, 13, 22(n.1), Putnam, Hilary, 118-119
37,47,48, 72, 87, 119, 148, 149-153,
162, 164, 168(n.29), 169(n.36), 176 Ricoeur, Paul, xiii, xxii, 17-22, 24
Kierkegaard, Soren, 154 (nn.33,37,38,41,44), 184
Klee, Paul, 86, 92, 93, 96(n.3) Rorty, Richard, 185
Kojeve, Alexandre, 167 (n.13) Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 15
Kundera, M., 126 Russell, Bertrand, 151
Ryle, Gilbert, 95
Lacan, Jacques, xxv, xxvi, 70, 80
Lamarck, Chevalier, 15 Sade, Marquis de, 25
Lefort, Claude, 47, 158, 160, 169(n.36), Sartre, Jean-Paul, xiv, 4, 31, 34(n.80), 53,
183, 187, 194(n.26) 54,75-78, 120, 153-156, 158, 161,
Leibniz, Gottfried, 39 163, 165, 168(nn.17,18), 169(nn.29,33,
Leonardo da Vinci, 92, 94 35)
Lessing, Gotthold, 174 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 134, 138
Levinas, Emmanuel, 11, 32(n.6), 96(n.6), 143(n.lO)
153, 167(n.I), 169(n.35) Scheler, Max, xxv, 58, 68(n.4), 149-154,
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 170(n.38) 167(n.12), 169(n.35), 193(n.ll)
Lovejoy, Arthur, 13 Schelling, Friedrich, xiii, 57, 159
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 85, 89, 96(n.9), Searle, John, 10
183 Spinoza, Baruch, 159
Stendahl, 137
Machiavelli, Niccolo, xxx, xxxi, 148, 155,
160-166, 169(nn.29, 36), 170(n.42) Tran-Duc-Thao, 152, 154, 158, 159,
Magritte, Rene, 85 168(n.25)
Manet, Edouard, 115
Marx, Karl, xviii, 91, 147, 158-160, 162, Valery, Paul, 105, 142(n.8)
166, 194(n.26) Van Breda, Herman, xiv, 152
Matisse, Henri, 92, 93, 94
Michaux, Henri, 9 Waldenfels, Bernhard, 128(n.20)
Mill, J. S., 153 Weber, Max, 160
Millet, Jean Fran~ois, 99 Weyl, Hermann, 151, 167(n.4)
Minkowski, Eugene, 7, 8 Whitehead, Alfred North, 151
Moore, G. E., 167(n.12) Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8, 10, 83(n.28),
Montaigne, Michel de, xxxi, 6,155, 166 148,194-195(n.30)
 Phaenomenologica
44. E. Holenstein: Phiinomenologie der Assoziation. Zu Struktur und Funktion eines
Grundprinzips der passiven Genesis bei E. Husser!. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1175-4
45. F. Hammer: Theonome Anthropologie? Max Schelers Menschenbild und seine
Grenzen.1972 ISBN90-247-1186-X
46. A. Paianin: Wissenschaft und Geschichte in der Phiinomenologie Edmund Husserls.
1972 ISBN 90-247-1194-0
47. G.A. de Almeida: Sinn und lnhalt in der genetischen Phiinomenologie E. Husserls.
1972 ISBN 90-247-1318-8
48. J. Rolland de Reneville: Aventure de l'absolu. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1319-6
49. U. Claesges und K. Held (eds.): Perspektiven transzendental-phiinomenologischer
Forschung. Fur Ludwig Landgrebe zum 70. Geburtstag von seiner KOlner Schillern.
1972 ISBN 90-247-1313-7
50. F. Kersten and R. Zaner (eds.): Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism. Essays
in Memory of Dorion Cairns. 1973 ISBN 90-247-1302-1
51. W. Biemel (ed.): Phanomenologie Heute. Festschrift fUr Ludwig Landgrebe. 1972
ISBN 90-247-1336-6
52. D. Souche-Dagues: Le developpemenl de l'intentionnalite dans la phenomenologie
husserlienne. 1972 ISBN 90-247-1354-4
53. B. Rang: Kausalitat und Motivation. Untersuchungen zum Verhaltnis von Perspek-
tivitat und Objektivitat in der Phanomenologie Edmund Husserls. 1973
ISBN 90-247-1353-6
54. E. Levinas: Autrement qu' hre ou au-dela de l' essence. 2nd. ed.: 1978
ISBN 90-247-2030-3
55. D. Cairns: Guidefor Translating Husserl. 1973 ISBN (Pb) 90-247-1452-4
56. K. Schuhmann: Die Dialektik der Phiinomenologie, I. Husser! tiber Pfander. 1973
ISBN 90-247-1316-1
57. K. Schuhmann: Die Dialektik der Phanomenologie, II. Reine Phanomenologie und
phaoomenologische Philosophie. Historisch-analytische Monographic tiber Husserls
'IdeenI'.1973 ISBN 90-247-1307-2
58. R. Williame: Les fondements phenomenologiques de la sociologie comprehensive:
Alfred Schutz et Max Weber. 1973' ISBN 90-247-1531-8
59. E. Marbach: Das Problem des lch in der Phanomenologie Husserls. 1974
ISBN 90-247-1587-3
60. R. Stevens: James and Husserl: The Foundations of Meaning. 1974
ISBN 90-247-1631-4
61. H.L. van Breda (ed.): verite et verification / Wahrheit und Verifikation. Actes du
quatrieme Colloque International de Phenomenologie I Akten des vierten Inter-
nationalen Kolloquiums fUr Phlinomenologie (Schwabisch Hall, Baden-Wurttemberg,
8.-11. September 1969).1974 ISBN 90-247-1702-7
62. Ph.J. Bossert (ed.): Phenomenological Perspectives. Historical and Systematic Essays
in Honor of Herbert Spiegelberg. 1975. ISBN 90-247-1701-9
63. H. Spiegelberg: Doing Phenomenology. Essays on and in Phenomenology. 1975
ISBN 90-247-1725-6
64. R. Ingarden: On the Motives which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism. 1975
ISBN 90-247-1751-5
65. H. Kuhn, E. Ave-Lallemant and R. Gladiator (eds.): Die Munchener Phanomen%gie.
Vortrlige des Internationalen Kongresses in Miinchen (13.-18. April 1971). 1975
ISBN 90-247-1740-X
 Phaenomenologica
66. D. Cairns: Conversations with Husserl and Fink. Edited by the Husserl-Archives in
Louvain. With a foreword by R.M. Zaner. 1975 ISBN 90-247-1793-0
67. G. Hoyos Vasquez: Intentionalitiit als Verantwortung. Geschichtsteleologie und
Teleologie der Intentionalitat bei Husserl. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1794-9
68. J. Patocka: Le Monde naturel comme probleme philosophique. 1976
ISBN 90-247-1795-7
69. W.W. Fuchs: Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence. An Essay in the
Philosophy of Edmund Husserl. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1822-8
70. S. Cunningham: Language and the Phenomenological Reductions of Edmund Husserl.
1976 ISBN 90-247-1823-6
71. G.C. Moneta: On Identity. A Study in Genetic Phenomenology. 1976
ISBN 90-247-1860-0
72. W. Biemel und das Husserl-Archiv zu Lowen (eds.): Die Welt des Menschen - Die
Welt der Philosophie. Festschrift fiir Jan Patocka. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1899-6
73. M. Richir: Au-dew du renversement copemicien. La question de la phenomenologie
et son fondement. 1976 ISBN 90-247-1903-8
74. H. Mongis: Heidegger et la critique de la notion de valeur. La destruction de la
fondation metaphysique. Lettre-preface de Martin Heidegger. 1976
ISBN 90-247-1904-6
75. J. Taminiaux: Le regard et l'excedent. 1977 ISBN 90-247-2028-1
76. Th. de Boer: The Development ofHusserl's Thought. 1978
ISBN Hb: 90-247-2039-7; Pb: 90-247-2124-5
77. RR Cox: Schutz's Theory of Relevance. A Phenomenological Critique. 1978
ISBN 90-247-2041-9
78. S. Strasser: Jenseits von Sein und Zeit. Eine Einflihrung in Emmanuel Levinas'
Philosophie. 1978 ISBN 90-247-2068-0
79. R.T. Murphy: Hume and Husserl. Towards Radical Subjectivism. 1980
ISBN 90-247-2172-5
80. H. Spiegelberg: The Context of the Phenomenological Movement. 1981
ISBN 90-247-2392-2
81. J.R. Mensch: The Question of Being in Husserl's Logical Investigations. 1981
ISBN 90-247-2413-9
82. J. Loscerbo: Being and Technology. A Study in the Philsophy of Martin Heidegger.
1981 ISBN 90-247-2411-2
83. R Boehm: Yom Gesichtspunkt der Phiinomen%gie /I. Studien zur Phanomenologie
der Epoch«!. 1981 ISBN 90-247-2415-5
84. H. Spiegelberg and E. Ave-Lallemant (eds.): Pfiinder-Studien. 1982
ISBN 90-247-2490-2
85. S. Valdinoci: Les fondements de la phinomen%gie husserlienne. 1982
ISBN 90-247-2504-6
86. I. Yamaguchi: Passive Synthesis und lntersubjektivitiit bei Edmund Husserl. 1982
ISBN 90-247-2505-4
87. J. Libertson: Proximity. Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication. 1982
ISBN 90-247-2506-2
 Phaenomenologica
88. D. Welton: The Origins of Meaning. A Critical Study of the Thresholds of Husserlian
Phenomenology. 1983 ISBN 90-247-2618-2
89. W.R. McKenna: Husserl's 'Introductions to Phenomenology'. Interpretation and
Critique. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2665-4
90. J.P. Miller: Numbers in Presence and Absence. A Study of Husserl's Philosophy of
Mathematics. 1982 ISBN 90-247-2709-X
91. U. Melle: Das Wahmehmungsproblem und seine Verwandlung in phiinomeno-
logischer Einstellung. Untersuchungen zu den phanomenologischen Wahrneh-
mungstheorien von Husserl, Gurwitsch und Merleau-Ponty. 1983
ISBN 90-247-2761-8
92. W.S. Hamrick (ed.): Phenomenology in Practice and Theory. Essays for Herbert
Spiegelberg. 1984 ISBN 90-247-2926-2
93. H. Reiner: Duty and Inclination. The Fundamentals of Morality Discussed and
Redefined with Special Regard to Kant and Schiller. 1983 ISBN 90-247-2818-6
94. M. J. Harney: Intentionality, Sense and the Mind. 1984 ISBN 90-247-2891-6
95. Kah Kyung Cho (ed.): Philosophy and Science in Phenomenological Perspective.
1984 ISBN 90-247-2922-X
96. A. Lingis: Phenomenological Explanations. 1986
ISBN Hb: 90-247-3332-4; Pb: 90-247-3333-2
97. N. Rotenstreich: Reflection and Action. 1985
ISBN Hb: 90-247-2969-6; Pb: 90-247-3128-3
98. J.N. Mohanty: The Possibility of Transcendental Philosophy. 1985
ISBN Hb: 90-247-2991-2; Pb: 90-247-3146-1
99. J.J. Kockelmans: Heidegger on Art and Art Works. 1985 ISBN 90-247-3102-X
100. E. Levinas: Collected Philosophical Papers. 1987
ISBN Hb: 90-247-3272-7; Ph: 90-247-3395-2
101. R. Regvald: Heidegger et Ie Probleme du Neant. 1986 ISBN 90-247-3388-X
102. J.A. Barash: Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning. 1987
ISBN 90-247-3493-2
103 J.J. Kockelmans (ed.): Phenomenological Psychology. The Dutch School. 1987
ISBN 90-247-3501-7
104. W.S. Hamrick: An Existential Phenomenology of Law: Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 1987
ISBN 90-247-3520-3
105. J.C. Sallis, G. Moneta and J. Taminiaux (eds.): The Collegium Phaenomenologium.
The First Ten Years. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3709-5
106. D. Carr: Interpreting Husserl. Critical and Comparative Studies. 1987.
ISBN 90-247-3505-X
107. G. Heffernan: Isagoge in die phiinomenologische Apophantik. Eine Einfiihrung in die
phanomenologische Urteilslogik durch die Auslegung des Textes der Formalen und
transzendenten Logik von Edmund Husser\. 1989 ISBN 90-247-3710-9
108. F. Volpi, J.-F. Mattei, Th. Sheenan, J.-F. Courtine, J. Taminiaux, J. Sallis, D.
Janicaud, A.L. Kelkel, R. Bernet, R. Brisart, K. Held, M. Haar et S. IJsseling:
Heidegger et l'Idee de la Phenomenologie. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3586-6
109. C. Singevin: Dramaturgie de I 'Esprit. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3557-2
 Phaenomenologica
110. 1. Patocka: Le monde naturel et Ie mouvement de l" existence humaine. 1988
ISBN 90-247-3577-7
111. K.-H. Lembeck: Gegenstand Geschichte. Geschichtswissenschaft in Husserls
Phanomenologie. 1988 ISBN 90-247-3635-8
112. J.K. Cooper-Wiele: The Totalizing Act. Key to Husserl's Early Philosophy. 1989
ISBN 0-7923-0077-7
113. S. Valdinoci: Le principe d'existence. Un devenir psychiatrique de la pheno-
menologie. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0125-0
114. D. Lohmar: Phiinomenologie der Mathematik. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0187-0
115. S. IJsseling (Hrsgb.): Husserl-Ausgabe und Husserl-Forschung. 1990
ISBN 0-7923-0372-5
116. R. Cobb-Stevens: Husserl and Analytic Philosophy. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0467-5
117. R. Klockenbusch: Husserl und Cohn. Widerspruch, Reflexion und Telos in
Phanomenologie und Dialektik. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0515-9
118. S. Vaitkus: How is Society Possible? Intersubjectivity and the Fiduciary Attitude as
Problems of thc Social Group in Mead, Gurwitsch, and Schutz. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-0820-4
119. C. Macann: Presence and Coincidence. The Transformation of Transcendental into
Ontological Phenomenology. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0923-5
120. G. Shpet: Appearance and Sense. Phenomenology as the Fundamental Science and Its
Problems. Translated from Russian by Th. Nemeth. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1098-5
121. B, Stevens: L'Apprentissage des Signes. Lecture de Paul Ricoeur. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-1244-9
122. G. Soffer: Husserl and the Question of Relativism. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1291-0
123. G. Rbmpp: Husserls Phiinomenologie der IntersubJektivitiit. Und Ihre Bedeutung flir
eine Theorie intersubjektiver Objektivitat und die Konzeption einer phanomeno-
logischen.1991 ISBN 0-7923-1361-5
124. S. Strasser: Welt im Widerspruch. Gedanken zu einer Phanomenologie als ethischer
Fundamentalphilosophie.1991 ISBN Hb: 0-7923-1404-2; Pb: 0-7923-1551-0
125. R. P. Buckley: Husserl, Heidegger and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility.
1992 ISBN 0-7923-1633-9
126. J. G. Hart: The Person and the Common Life. Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics.
1992 ISBN 0-7923-1724-6
127. P. van Tongeren, P. Sars, C. Bremmers and K. Boey (eds.): Eros and Eris. Contribu-
tions to a Hermeneutical Phenomenology. Liber Amicorum for Adriaan Peperzak.
1992 ISBN 0-7923-1917-6
128. Nam-In Lee: Edmund Husserls Phiinomenologie der Instinkte. 1993
ISBN 0-7923-2041-7
129. P. Burke and 1. Van der Veken (eds.): Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective.
1993 ISBN 0-7923-2142-1

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