Thinking according to the Image
“The problems posed in Ph.P. are insoluble,” Merleau-Ponty writes in a working note, “because I start there from the ‘consciousness’-‘object’ distinction” (VI, 250/200). Were these self-reproaches warranted? Had not Phenomenology of Perception attempted, precisely, to get beyond that impasse by demonstrating how consciousness is inserted into a body and objects into a world? Clearly, that solution was no longer convincing to its author, since the body—one’s own body—ultimately remained subject to the sphere of consciousness, and the world was still determined in relation to the things it contained. Without giving up the primacy granted to the perceptive, embodied situation, his analysis of language led him to question whether the terms he used for addressing this situation were really adequate. Hence, to argue that the body and the sensible are primary may not be the same thing as to produce a philosophy of the body, in that such a philosophy could never extend beyond the purview of a regional ontology and, moreover, would posit the body as an object, thus remaining within an idealistic language, as Jean Beaufret pointed out. If Merleau-Ponty were to bring the body back into philosophy, he would have to abandon the categories inherited from an intellectualist mode of thought1 and replace “the notions of concept, idea, mind, representation with the notions of dimensions, articulation, level, hinges, pivots, configuration” (VI, 273/224). As Mikel Dufrenne notes, Merleau-Ponty thereby inaugurated a new philosophical style: philosophizing without philosophemes.2 Correlatively, that new language, which rejected the crystal clarity of concepts in seeking more transitory or allusive formulations, allowed him to describe what happens around and between things. He would use fleeting concepts, related to what Husserl in his later writings called “fluent meanings” (fliessende Bedeutungen) (PP, 61/51), somewhat reminiscent of Bergson’s “fluid concepts.”
An unpublished note for The Visible and the Invisible encapsulating the later Merleau-Ponty’s self-criticism, indicates that close correlation between practice and philosophical object: “Our corporeality: do not place at the center as I did in Ph.P.: in a sense, it is only the world’s hinge, its weight is only that of the world. It is but the power of a divergence [écart] from the world” (MBN 6, fol. 222v). In following Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of language, we have seen his gradual emancipation from the strictures of a gestural theory of expression. There would thus be an autonomy of meaning, a potentiality for ideation that never takes place completely within its materializations—gestures, words, writing—an independence, then, of linguistic structures from their actualizations. Although Merleau-Ponty undeniably integrated the contributions of Saussure, Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the other structuralists into his thinking, there is a rift between Merleau-Ponty’s “structure” and that of the structuralist movement.3 The discovery of the diacritical allowed him to take his distance from any naturalistic interpretation of expression; nevertheless, the structuralist conception of the diacritical, in reducing it to an immaterial mechanism, fell short. It failed to see the indefectible place of the diacritical within the sensible world, which, by its very presence, introduced a gap, a spacing. In a movement that both revealed and moved beyond what he owed to the diacritical, Merleau-Ponty attempted to give voice to the body in its lateral existence. The being of the body, its corporeality, cannot be conflated with bodies; rather, it manifests how they are joined to one another. And if Saussurean linguistics, in considering only these articulations, pure “differences without positive terms” (PPE, 81/63), helped Merleau-Ponty avoid the aporias of a constituting consciousness that posits its object, it nevertheless overlooked the fact that this interval is not an abstract difference (any more than it is a “hole,” as conceived by Hegelianism, even Sartre’s version of it)4 but a sensible juncture, which Merleau-Ponty chose to call a “hinge.” A new language—language in the making—located between intuitionism and formalism, between positivism and the philosophy of negation, would have to express “at least laterally, an ontogenesis of which it is a part” (VI, 137/102).
In the foreword to Phenomenology of Perception (1945), the real still formed a “solid fabric” (PP, v/lxxiv, trans. modified) on which the entire task of a phenomenology of perception could rest. But Merleau-Ponty had now come to recognize an irreducible infra-corporeal ideality forming the reservoir from which human creativity emerges. He therefore sought a procedure that would allow him to formulate the joint presence of the real and that ideality, without allowing one to be reabsorbed by the other. The third phase of the philosopher’s oeuvre, then, stands at an equal distance between a phenomenology of perception and a phenomenology of expression; its aim was to excavate the common ground between the 1945 book and the investigations of language, to reconstitute the fabric, its weft and warp, on which something can be given to me as visible and through which words can give an account of it. Such a project entails, Merleau-Ponty held, returning to the very roots of the visible. And since painting has always already preceded philosophy in that task, thought would have to take its cues from pictorial practices.
In that respect, it is no exaggeration to say that Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on painting definitively cast off the outer hull of classic aesthetics. He moves from a philosophy of painting to a philosophy after painting (in the sense that a painter who imitates Cézanne’s style paints “after” Cézanne) or—more exactly—a philosophy according to painting, of which Eye and Mind would be the first draft. The article, written in Le Tholonet, in southern France, was the last to be completed during his lifetime. In it Merleau-Ponty develops the idea that the object relation is suspended in the pictorial image, because “I do not look at [a painting] as I do at a thing” (OE, 23/164). “It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it” (ibid.). Among the manuscripts for this article for the review Art de France, which the author revised several times, we find an even more explicit note: “What is a Bild [image]? It is obvious here that the Bild is not looked at as one looks at an object. One looks according to the Bild.… And that segregation opens … What? Not significations (and even less things, like visible things), but beings” (MBN 8.2, fol. 346). Everything seems to indicate, then, that Merleau-Ponty, on the basis of an investigation of the image, came to reformulate his undertaking in the terms of an “ontology of the visible” (VI, 182/140). “One must compare perception of Bild and perception of the thing, but in taking the thing not from its result (the visual picture in itself) but from its ontogenesis” (MBN 8.2, fol. 346).
What, then, is an ontology of the visible? Far from a naïve phenomenology that would merely enumerate what is visible, Merleau-Ponty’s object of inquiry is the very being of the visible: “The visible in the profane sense forgets its premises,” he writes (OE, 30/167), insofar as the visible is still understood as that which is out there, in front of us. By contrast, modern painting teaches us—and here Merleau-Ponty quotes Klee—that the “painter’s vision is not a view upon the outside” (OE, 69/181).5 It looks toward “this secret and feverish genesis of things in our body” (OE, 30/167). The color conjured up on the canvas is neither the repetition of visible things nor their reduction to an idea of the visible. It comes from an “inward gaze” (OE, 24/165, trans. modified). Instead of a repraesentio in the Kantian sense, a Vor-stellung placed before us, we must decipher that “muffled germination” of appearing amid things, of which painting would be the immediate trace. “The picture’s alogical essence,” we read in the last drafts, “absolute visible to which things, picture, and even the painter (the painter in the picture) co-belong” (NC, 390).
According to Merleau-Ponty, in the history of painting no one incorporated that correlation—which cannot be ripped apart—at a deeper level, no one sought to render more intimately the essence of the visible through the visible itself, than Paul Cézanne. In the ontology of the visible he elaborated at the end of his life, Merleau-Ponty takes Cézanne as his starting point and inverts the asymmetry between method and object. The author of Eye and Mind concedes that Cézanne’s art is also a “figural philosophy of vision” (OE, 32/168, trans. modified). More than that, however, Merleau-Ponty evaluates his own process of thinking in terms of pictorial practices. Instead of comparing the “thought in painting” embraced by this rigorously philosophical painter, he makes up his mind to think “in” or “according to” painting himself. Thinking as a painter means submitting to the laws of resistance and experiencing feelings within the limits of the sensible. As Cézanne would say repeatedly: “Everything, especially in art, is theory developed and applied in contact with nature.”
In 1942—even before finishing Phenomenology of Perception6—Merleau-Ponty wrote “Cézanne’s Doubt,” an essay that attests to the dazzling speed with which he had assimilated the painter’s poetics. The dense web of quotations is sometimes indistinguishable from the philosopher’s own investigations. How, he asks, is one to avoid the alternative (and hence the hierarchy) between the natural world and the human world, the perceptual world and the world of the intelligence? Merleau-Ponty reports the remarks of the Provençal painter in dialogue with Émile Bernard. “But aren’t nature and art different?” asks Bernard. Cézanne replies, “I want to make them the same” (SNS, 18/13). In these dialogues, “it is clear … that Cezanne was always seeking to avoid the ready-made alternatives suggested to him: sensation versus judgment; the painter who sees against the painter who thinks; nature versus composition; primitivism as opposed to tradition” (ibid.). Merleau-Ponty sees Cézanne’s art neither as a form of painting that aspires merely to reproduce the immediate givens of sensation nor one that reconstructs a world in accordance with an abstract organization. In his paintings he sees the will to manifest a world in its nascent state, a universe making itself. Cézanne, “rather than apply to his work dichotomies belonging more to schools that perpetuate traditions than to the philosophers or painters who found them,” paints “matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization” (ibid., trans. modified).
Although that general judgment remained in place until Eye and Mind, some of Merleau-Ponty’s other ideas were modified or even abandoned as he became more familiar with the painter’s art. In “Cézanne’s Doubt,” the laborious exercise of the Husserlian epoché (the “bracketing” of all beliefs), which brings to light the pre-objective ground against which an emerging world stands out, has its equivalent (or, in Cézannian terms, its “realization”) in Cézanne’s method of painting. “We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in houses, streets, cities, and most of the time we see them only through the human actions of which they may be the points of application” (SNS, 22/16, trans. modified). Cézanne’s painting “suspends” these habits, and the human figures are strange, “as if viewed by a creature of another species” (ibid.). In one picture, “there is no wind in the landscape” (ibid.), “no movement on the Lac d’Annecy; the frozen objects hesitate as at the beginning of the world” (ibid.). The painter seems to be coming back to Husserl’s primordial earth (Erde), “beneath the constituted order of humanity,” which reveals to us “the base of inhuman nature on which the painter has installed himself” (ibid., trans. modified).
“The Thing and the Natural World,” a chapter from Phenomenology of Perception, quotes the words of the art historian Fritz Novotny to reach the conclusion that these landscapes are “those of a pre-world where there were still no men” (PP, 372/337). Here, however, the idea of a preworld is nothing less than a synonym for the “natural world” to which one must return, a world that stands in opposition to the “human world.” Just a few years later, during the radio lecture series recorded for Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française in 1948 and published under the title The World of Perception, Merleau-Ponty explained, in the section titled “Art and the World of Perception,” that, on the contrary, the “purity” of art must be restored (C, 53/94), and art, far from imitating the world, is “a world of its own” (C, 56/96). That second option, which some have tried to interpret as a thesis about the autonomy of art (a notion generally alien to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology), doubtless stems instead from a more intense reflection on linguistic signs, which share no perceivable traits with their referent yet do not betray it in any way.7 Both the idea of art’s “world of its own” and that of an inhuman “preworld” revealed by painting remain problematic, however, in that they confirm the subjection of the human world to the natural world or vice versa. Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, believes it imperative to conceive of their simultaneity.
The Styles of the World
How, then, are we to understand what perception and expression have in common, while not resorting to a transcendental a priori? In fact, one path had already been indicated. In Phenomenology of Perception, no doubt under the influence of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty compares the unity of the world to the unity of style that can be recognized in a person’s behaviors or a city’s familiar sites (PP, 378/342). Paradoxically, Merleau-Ponty seems to have rediscovered the pertinence of the notion of style on reading André Malraux’s Voices of Silence, which makes it a key for understanding art, even as the book adheres to a rigorously classic semantics.8 In Malraux’s eyes, style constitutes the artist’s signature, his mark, his stylus. In a passage from Voices of Silence, he says style is nothing other than “the means of re-creating the world according to the values of the man who discovers it” (quoted in SG, 83/53). As “a fragile human perspective of the eternal world which draws us along according to a mysterious rhythm into a drift of stars” (SG, 83/53), style in Malraux’s view reiterates the rift between natural world and human world. It cannot fail to open onto a consideration of modern art—where style is at once the imperative and the unique, undisputed belief—as a ceremony glorifying the individual. If, as a passage from The Creative Act, the second volume of Malraux’s Psychology of Art,9 has it, style is “the expression of a meaning lent to the world, a call for and not a consequence of a way of seeing” (SG, 83/53), then there is every reason to speak of an “annexation of the world by the individual” (ibid., trans. modified).
According to Merleau-Ponty, however, style is not produced by a subjectivity: It is a feature of the world as it manifests itself. Far from being confined to the realm of art, style is what in-forms the world; it is the guarantee that a world is never given once and for all but is constantly modulated, articulated, rhythmicized. “Perception already stylizes,” Merleau-Ponty claims in a famous passage from The Prose of the World (PM, 83/59), thereby obliterating the dichotomy between receptivity and activity. It is the correlation itself that undergoes a certain inflection, and that correlation does not precede the dichotomy between receptivity and activity but constitutes its nexus. Husserl may have already glimpsed as much in the manuscripts of Ideen II (PM, 79/56), where the notion of style is not limited to the permanent, unitary style (einen gewissen durchgängigen einheitlichen Stil) of a personality in its judgments and acts. There is also what could be called habitus or overall style (Gesamtstil), a concordant unity that characterizes all the activities (and passivities) of a subject.10 In The Crisis of European Sciences, Husserl will go even further. Style is now characteristic not of an ego but of the world itself: “Thus our empirically intuited surrounding world has an empirical over-all style [empirischen Gesamtstil].”11 For the later Husserl, it is in the world that one must seek “that which gives the character of belonging together to bodies which exist together simultaneously and successively, i.e., … that which binds their being [Sein] to their being-such [Sosein].”12 It would seem that Merleau-Ponty in turn superimposes Husserl’s insight onto the successive developments of Heidegger—whom he read carefully in the 1950s—regarding a “style of the welten [worlding].” What, in Heidegger’s German, could mean either world-being or world-making now indisputably takes on the second sense. To avoid putting style on the side of a “universal causal regulation” of the world independent of our variations,13 Merleau-Ponty understands it as the attribute of a correlation by means of which a world becomes visible; style casts into relief its manner of welten, of “world-making.” As a result, painting would be nothing but the attempt to manifest that very manifestation, which is prior to the division between human and world. “The painter knows nothing of the antithesis of man and the world … since man and signification are sketching themselves against the background of the world through the very operation of style” (PM, 83/59).
In that mode of thinking according to the image, style will constitute a first stopping point in the descent to the process of appearing. Merleau-Ponty strove tirelessly to return to the near side of the separation between activity and giving and to grasp the enigma of visibility (OE, 26/166). Indeed, there is truly a “gift of visibility” in both senses: the fact that something appears to us unexpectedly, although we never asked for it, and the fact that some have the talent to visualize this very event, in the sense that one says of an artist that he is “gifted.” Painters are the privileged beneficiaries of that gift; they have the gift of visibility “as it is said that the inspired man has the gift of tongues” (OE, 25/165, trans. modified). Through painting, then, Merleau-Ponty will arrive at an ontology of the visible, whose starting point is not visible-as-being-visible but visible-as-becoming-visible. All his later meditations echo a line from Cézanne that will serve as the epigraph for Eye and Mind: “What I am trying to translate to you is more mysterious; it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the impalpable source of sensations” (OE, 8/159). In willing himself to think like a painter, Merleau-Ponty endeavored to “restore painting and the arts in general to their rightful place … [and] allow them to recover their dignity” (C, 55/94), even while irremediably broaching the possibility of an autonomy of art of some sort. Art is not an alternative to the natural world but an intensification of its operations. Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics in its entirety is therefore a making-sensible of thought, leading to dés-oeuvrement, the putting out of work of the work.14 Art is no longer to be sought in works but rather in an amplification of the sensible bonds that connect us to the world. These bonds will henceforth be called “flesh.”
To compensate for the shortcomings of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty does not simply replace “consciousness” and “thing” with “body” and “world,” which would risk once again perpetuating ontological dichotomies. Rather, he says, we must install ourselves in the “inter-world,” in the “invagination” (VI, 197/152) of a “a raw, original being,” which, while still the movement of an originary differentiation, precedes any individuation. In his famous analysis in The Visible and the Invisible, this diacritical differentiality will be applied to a patch of red color. Merleau-Ponty, invoking the whole range of possible reds, from that of the flags of gatekeepers and of the Revolution, to that of tiled rooftops and the colorful dresses of gypsy women on the Champs-Élysées, to the reddish soil of Madagascar, affirms that red is nothing in itself. Red is not a “chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered completely naked to a vision that could be only total or nil; it is rather a strait of sorts, always wide-open, between external horizons and internal horizons, something that touches lightly and makes various regions of the colored or visible world resonate at a distance, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world—less a color or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors” (VI, 173/132, trans. modified). How to conceive of this difference between things and colors, between objects and qualities, without referring to a transcendental subjectivity that would provide their unity? Merleau-Ponty’s approach is to search for a constitutive principle that, rather than being a priori, is materially immanent in the sensible itself. This sensible element (which is to be thought of less as an elemental atom than as an elemental fabric) is to be sought in the interstices of perception: “Between the so-called colors and visibilities, we might find anew the fabric that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things” (VI, 173/132–33, trans. modified).
As is clear from the context, Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh” is not to be seen as some kind of deeper, more fundamental body. If, as “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” already declared, “the meaning of philosophy is the meaning of a genesis” (SG, 103/82), then philosophy must abandon the idea that the body—or whatever comes to replace it—represents the promise of access to the origin. On the contrary, philosophy must give up the quest for ultimate positivities and become a genetic phenomenology, radical in the etymological sense of the word: It must dig down deep to the origin, which proves to be, as it were, always already fissured, in order to “accompany this break-up, this non-coincidence, this differentiation” (VI, 163/124).
Phenomenology, then, cannot confine itself to a philosophy of genesis. It will have to become a phenomenology of the genesis of genesis—in other words, ontogenetic. Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to rethink phenomenology as a whole culminates in a confrontation with an ontological mode of questioning; as a result, phenomenology and ontology, traditionally placed in opposition to each other, come to coincide. The “new ontology” he sought to elaborate in the late 1950s15 is the exact opposite of a Porphyrian Tree of categories culminating in substantial being. It is rather an “ontological rehabilitation of the sensible” (SG, 210/167), a phenomenology of “Being … of the depths,” one that digs an “abyss” that is unfathomable because bottomless (VI, 236/77, trans. modified). The need for a return to ontology that brings to light a “wild,” “vertical” Being also reveals the kinship between “the being of the earth and that of my body (Leib)” (RC, 169/190). The problematic of the milieu as it appeared in the early works is thus radicalized. The body is no longer a “means” in a world-milieu; rather, body and world proceed from a common fabric, belong to a “formative milieu” (VI, 191/147, trans. modified).
Ontology of the Flesh
How to name what lies between beings, what sustains them and forms a common thread between them? Merleau-Ponty concedes that this thing “has no name in any philosophy” (VI, 181/147) and thus remains literally anonymous. Aristotle used the term anonymos to indicate that natural language cannot account in equal measure for all the givens of reality. As Aristotle explains, the set of animals equipped with feathered wings was given the name “bird,” but language (Greek in this case) remains silent about those animals with membranous or skin wings.16 The language of scientists, but also that of philosophers, confers names on what had remained empty slots, subsequently revealed through the study of the real (let’s remember that in nineteenth-century chemistry, Mendeleev’s periodic table anticipated empty slots for certain elements long before these were actually observed). From the late 1940s on, the thing that “has no name in any philosophy,” Merleau-Ponty’s anonymos, having already come to the fore at the end of Phenomenology of Perception, will receive an (ambiguous) name, which will come to occupy the center of his later writings: flesh. The term is ambiguous in the “bad” sense of the word, both because of its connotations, which have given rise to many misunderstandings,17 and, no doubt, because it is inadequate for truly naming what is at issue for Merleau-Ponty.
How did these misunderstandings come about? A deep-rooted prejudice would have it that what Merleau-Ponty calls chair (and which is commonly translated into English as flesh) would be the exact equivalent of Husserl’s notion of Leib. When Husserl was translated into French, a second term had to be found to capture the terminological distinction that German allows between Körper (the physical, objective body) and Leib (the lived, experiential body). Körper (body-object) was translated as corps, and Leib, generally, as chair. It must have seemed obvious to early commentators of Merleau-Ponty that his use of the notion had to be understood within that context. Hence Theodore Geraets was led to say that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “la chair … translates exactly what Husserl calls Leib.”18 Nothing could be more misleading, however. Despite how often such a statement has been repeated, it stands in open contradiction to Merleau-Ponty’s claim that la chair “has no name in any philosophy.” As Emmanuel de Saint-Aubert has shown, Merleau-Ponty never bothered to distinguish his notion of chair from Husserl’s notion of Leib for the simple reason that he never thought the two would be conflated. Although he provides various translations for Leib (corps vivant, corps propre), Merleau-Ponty does not once use the term chair in that context.19 What is the relevance of such philological questions? They undercut the still-persistent idea that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh was, if not an exact equivalent of Husserl’s Leib, then at least a generalization of it. Merleau-Ponty himself is not totally innocent in this matter: In his “Nature” course, he says that the “flesh of the body makes us understand the flesh of the world” (N, 280/218). Is flesh, then, simply a bodily structure that has been generalized to the world as such?
Although some statements may be interpreted to point in that direction, the majority of relevant passages seems to exclude such a reading. Merleau-Ponty expressly refrains from understanding the word “flesh” in terms of a hylozoism of the Leibnizian strain, in which the characteristics of the living thing would simply be transposed onto the nonliving (VI, 304/242). A May 1960 note is unambiguous: “The flesh of the world is not explained by the flesh of the body” (VI, 298/250). Or, even more plainly: “The ‘flesh of the world’ is not [a] metaphor of our worldly body. One could put this the other way round: it’s rather our body that is made of the same sensible stuff than the world is made of” (NC, 211).
These few passages are certainly not sufficient to provide a solution to a long-standing debate within Merleau-Ponty scholarship, and Merleau-Ponty’s own exploratory style in the later working notes attests that he was himself ambivalent about the ultimate status of “flesh.” Given its reception, one may wonder whether the term itself was not ill-fated from the outset, since it suggests a kind of interiority, whereas Merleau-Ponty was actually looking for the opposite. At one point in the “Nature” course, Merleau-Ponty even offers an alternative—and possibly more felicitous—word for “flesh”: the sensible. “The sensible is the flesh of the world, that is, sense on the outside” (N, 280/218, trans. modified). Sense would therefore be nowhere to be found on the inside, neither in subjects nor in objects, but would emerge in the interstices of their relationship.
Why did Merleau-Ponty not simply use the expression “the sensible”? One can only speculate. A likely explanation is that he feared that such a notion would still be caught up in the subject-object opposition of the metaphysical tradition he was overtly attempting to overthrow. Whereas the notion of the sensible (that which is capable of sensibility) has the advantage of allowing for both an objective and a subjective meaning (that which is capable of being sensed and of being sentient), it is still trapped within a mode of thinking (in terms of alternatives) that Merleau-Ponty’s later writings sought to overcome. “Flesh” might have appeared to offer a divergent path: Flesh is neither a sentient being nor an object sensed in itself, but that through which something sensible is sensed, its operative medium. As such, the “stuff” that allows for sensibility is specific neither to a single living being nor to a single act of sensing but must belong to the structure of the world. The world is a space where beings can appear insofar as the world is sensible, and it is sensible insofar as it does not itself appear but lets other beings appear, by simultaneously withdrawing and resisting phenomenalization. In a way, it could be argued that “flesh” is Merleau-Ponty’s ontophenomenological reformulation of Saussure’s notion of the diacritical: Flesh as embodied diacritical, as that which structures, introduces spacing, and hence enables the emergence of sense-objects. Flesh would thus be the tentative name to designate this anonymos, neither substance nor matter nor spirit, which would therefore be closer to an “element” in the pre-Socratic sense, a generative material that would have no proper place and would nevertheless be everywhere. More than a milieu, but not to be confused with the Welt, flesh is both an “ultimate notion” and the fabric underlying Being, “lateral investment” (VI, 266/217). Because all flesh is development and envelopment of another flesh, what is prefigured here is the sensible coiled around itself, which offers Merleau-Ponty the model for reflexivity as a whole.
The example chosen to clarify that pre-objective reflexivity returns to the Husserlian problematic of the left hand touching the right.20 Jacques Derrida, while pointing out in Voice and Phenomenon that auto-affection is in some sense the primal scene of phenomenology,21 overlooks the fact that the reciprocity of touching/touched is not simply the last stage in an ideology of presence; on the contrary, it is the inception of a philosophy of nonpresence and nontransparency. Merleau-Ponty, who is almost systematically left out of Derrida’s writings,22 already affirms that essential paradigm shift in Phenomenology of Perception: “When I touch my right hand with my left hand, the object ‘right hand’ also has this strange property, itself, of sensing.” But he adds, precisely, “the two hands are never simultaneously both touched and touching. So when I press my two hands together, it is not a question of two sensations that I could feel together, as when we perceive two objects juxtaposed, but rather of an ambiguous organization” (PP, 109/95). And he goes on to say that the meaning of the “double sensations” noted by Husserl is that “in the passage from one function to the other, I can recognize the touched hand as the same hand that is about to be touching; in this package of bones and muscles that is my right hand for my left hand, I glimpse momentarily the shell or the incarnation of this other right hand, agile and living, that I send out toward objects in order to explore them” (ibid.). Insofar as the body surprises itself from the outside in exercising a knowledge function, it “begins ‘a sort of reflection’ ” (ibid.). In so-called reflexive philosophies (also known as German Idealism), the identity between the reflecting and the reflected ensures a perfect epistemic transparency. Here, however, the noncoincidence between the touching and the touched entails an incessant turning back on oneself that cannot be resolved into a permanent state. Beyond any comforting specularity, the reversibility of touching/touched calls for a reflection that is never entirely in possession of itself, a reflection that, more than a reflexive philosophy—which in Hegel “returns to itself” (SG, 112/73)—is a twisting, a reversal.
In the edited part of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty develops the idea of a “hyper-reflection” to take into account that reversibility, always imminent and never realized (such is the meaning of the statement that reversibility is an “ultimate truth” [VI, 201/155]). In opposition to reflexive philosophy, which in its impregnable ivory tower no longer experiences any obstacles, hyper-reflection would exhibit the organic connection from which it arose (VI, 60/38) and would in that way remain bound to the self “not through transparence” but “through confusion” (OE, 19/162–63). Already Phenomenology of Perception “radicalized” reflection, in the sense of going back to the roots, the origins. “Reflection grasps its own full meaning only if it mentions the unreflected ground that it presupposes” (PP, 280/289, trans. modified). But what exactly does “the unreflected ground” mean here? Is it not another formulation of what transcendental philosophies understand as a reflection on the “conditions of possibility”? The passages from Phenomenology of Perception (which, it must be said, are not very clear) might suggest so. It is not until the chapter “Reflection and Interrogation” in The Visible and the Invisible that the irreducibility of the unreflected to reflection will be postulated. If we understand the unreflected as something that reflection has not yet thought, says Merleau-Ponty, we overlook its radicality in two respects. First, in considering it as thinkable in the future, we immediately normalize the unreflected, align it with the other objects of reflection; and second, any transcendental philosophy of reflection, in its desire to move beyond experience, overlooks not just a certain radicality but radicality as such. The starting point ought to be not the suspension of perception but faith in it. In place of a philosophy of reflection whose radicality “uproots” thought (VI, 66/43), we must dig down to the roots of the embodied being, practice what from here on in will bear the name hyper-reflection. Indeed, if I reflect, it is by virtue of my body, which shares the horizon with others, by virtue of a persistent bond that unites me with the world and is not reducible to a simple discursive operation. To reflect on reflection, then, consists less of adding on another degree of abstraction; on the contrary, hyper-reflection must “plunge into the world instead of looking at it from above, it must descend toward it such as it is instead of working its way back up toward a prior possibility of thinking it” (VI, 60/38–39, trans. modified). It is not that I place myself back “at the origin of a spectacle that I could never have had unless, unbeknown to myself, I organized it” (VI, 67/44); rather, the starting point for the reflection is dislocated onto the experience of the “adversity of the things” (ibid.). Indeed, there is truly “some” world, and every time something appears to us, inasmuch as it appears, something is. Therefore, to ontologize reflection means nothing other than to reflect on the being from which reflection proceeds, a being that is for me and, in equal measure, of which I am. A “promiscuous Being,” an “enveloping being” (SG, 30/22, trans. modified), a being in which I am inherent but also, without my ever renouncing it, a being that appears to me, a being phenomenalizing itself and giving itself on the outside, an outside that is always receding.
To conceptualize that duality, Merleau-Ponty makes use of the rhetorical figure of the chiasm. Like the letter χ (chi) of the Greek alphabet from which its name is derived, a chiasm is composed of nonparallel lines, each of which binds two elements together. These lines intersect in the middle, an indication of the interdependence of the linked terms. In the most simple scenario, a chiasm articulates a relationship of inversion among four terms, each placed at one corner of a square (see Figure 1).
Figure 1
But this diagram overlooks the fact that the chiasm, in its poetic and rhetorical usage, is never visible but unfolds as one reads a text or listens to spoken language. In Baudelaire’s short but extraordinary poem “À une passante” (“To a Woman Passing By,” 1855), we find a chiasm that could almost go unnoticed:
Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais
For I know not where you flee, you don’t know where I go
In the first place, this is a grammatical chiasm, the most common kind: The pair of personal pronouns, I/you, in the first part of the line is inverted in the second, becoming you/I. A semantic chiasm complements the grammatical one (know not / don’t know—flee / go), which, in its very repetition, underscores the change that has occurred. In the following line, Baudelaire confirms the complicity born in the furtive moment of that fortuitous encounter:
Ô toi que j’eusse aimée, à toi qui le savais!
O you whom I might have loved, to you who knew it!
The intertwining of the two people at the point where they briefly cross paths remains, but it has become increasingly virtual, because the two movements (go / flee) are centrifugal and divergent. The verbs Baudelaire uses in the previous line take on a new meaning, and the spatial dimension is transformed into a moment in time. “For I know not where you flee, you don’t know where I go”: if we read “où tu fuis” as having the effect of a paronym of “où tu fus” (“where you were,” fus being the passé simple of être, to be), then an entire existential dimension unfolds. In other words, fuis/ fus points to the impenetrable history of the anonymous passerby before the encounter, whereas “where I go” indicates the speaker’s future and inscrutable horizons.
The example from Baudelaire demonstrates the principal characteristics of the rhetorical chiasm, which Merleau-Ponty retains in his notion of ontological chiasm. The close relationship between the terms indicates a simultaneous co-implication (“the idea of chiasm, that is: every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken” [VI, 313/266]). And yet the chiasm cannot be carried over to a structural schema in which the terms could be inverted at will. If such were the case, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of chiasm would indeed simply be, as Levinas asserted, another figure for the metaphysical concept of reversibility, in which “the terms are indifferently read from left to right and right to left.”23 That allegation of symmetricality remains to be proven, however, since it leaves out some of the most crucial aspects of the chiasmatic relationship.
As a matter of fact, the key lies once again in the fact that the structure Merleau-Ponty describes is not abstract but fundamentally situated. In other words, the chiasm is of a perspectival nature, and, as a result, it can always only be considered—as attested by its deployment over time—with reference to one of the terms in the relationship. Along with a simultaneity of co-belonging, then, there is a real asymmetry in any relationship of the type a → B / B → a (and Levinas has identified the ethical stakes of such an asymmetry). This asymmetry is literally complicated, in that the chiasm does not allow one to determine definitively a “high” and a “low” position. In the chiasmatic relationship, the asymmetry is replicated, duplicated, in the form of a cross (a → B / B → a | A → b / b → A), thus guaranteeing a divergence within inherence, a noncoincidence within simultaneity.
The elaboration of the idea of chiasm may therefore constitute one of the best ways to escape the clinamen of transparency, which inevitably leads thinking to become conflated with its objects. Phenomenology, in proceeding according to the image of a chiasm, holds onto the idea of an originary intertwining but offers more resistance to the inevitable temptation of reductionism. To permanently undo the knot of the relationship, to bring it back to a crystalline relation, is to lose it forever. Instead of cutting the Gordian knot, the new ontology of the chiasm opts to plunge deeper into the knottedness of sensible experience, where a co-belonging in noncoincidence takes shape. That cohesion is not produced by a conceptual reconstruction post factum; rather, it is a cohesion of conceptless adherence. Even so, it does not give up the ideality of reflection—the precondition for taking one’s distance from the given—since to locate it in the suprasensible would be to miss the point: “There is a strict ideality in experiences that are experiences of the flesh: the moments of the sonata, the fragments of the light field, adhere to one another with a conceptless cohesion” (VI, 196/152, trans. modified). In that way, the new ontology—an ontology of proximal adherence—will not only analyze the sensible as a privileged object; it will find in the sensible the model for its own armature. We move from an ontological reestablishment founded on the sensible toward an aesthesic description of the beams and joists of Being.
Touching the Visible
“To touch and to touch oneself (to touch oneself = touched-touching) They do not coincide in the body,” notes Merleau-Ponty in May 1960. But he adds: “This does not mean that they coincide ‘in the mind’ or at the level of ‘consciousness.’ Something else than the body is needed for the junction to be made” (VI, 302/254). At this point, Merleau-Ponty introduces a surprising notion: The other-than-the-body where the junction is made is “the untouchable” (ibid.). This is a troubling category at first sight, so freighted is it with assumptions both metaphysical and religious. Merleau-Ponty hastens to explain that this is not a negation (normative or logical) of touching: “The untouchable is not a touchable that is de facto inaccessible” (ibid., trans. modified).24 Beyond a symmetry between touching and touched, which, through mutual envelopment, guarantees the reversibility of the two terms, there is truly something in the tangible that resists total inversion, and which Merleau-Ponty calls “untouchable” (l’intouchable). It is as if touching contained a dimension of imperception, an irreducible punctum caecum, a blind spot signaling toward the back side of sensible Being (VI, 303/255). It is striking that, in Merleau-Ponty’s writings, the question of touch invariably spills over into a metaphorics—even a problematics—of vision, and that, conversely, the problematics of the visible is continually brought back to a semantic register of touching.25
What is the meaning of that chiasm between the tangible and the visible? And are the two orders really commensurable? Jacques Derrida aptly points out that, in this same note of May 1960, Merleau-Ponty opened a parenthesis on the invisible when addressing the question of the untouchable. “The untouchable (and also the invisible: for the same analysis can be repeated for vision …” But the parenthesis on the invisible is never closed, and the return to the untouchable will never take place.26 The question remains open: Why, among the many titles considered for his second magnum opus, did Merleau-Ponty never opt for The Touchable and the Untouchable? Why will what was presented as a parenthesis interior to the question of the body’s tactility shatter that frame, establishing the realm of an ontology of the “visible and the invisible”? Is it true, as Claude Lefort asserted, that Merleau-Ponty’s entire oeuvre converges on the question “What Is Seeing?”27 Reflections such as “To be sure, our world is principally and essentially visual; one would not make a world out of scents or sounds” (VI, 113–14/83) seem to leave no room for ambiguity. Might Derrida be right, then, when—against the view that Merleau-Ponty rehabilitated the sense of touch—he accuses him of being one of the last representatives of “photological metaphysics,” which, since Heraclitus28 or Aristotle,29 has privileged vision over all the other senses? Is Merleau-Ponty yet another agent of the alleged “denigration of touch” in Western philosophy?30
To answer that question, we must consider the relation between vision and touch in “The Philosopher and His Shadow” and the implicit redefinition of that relation in Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl’s Ideen II. In this article, Merleau-Ponty is primarily concerned with §§36 and 37 in Husserl’s manuscripts (which were not published until 1952, but which Merleau-Ponty had consulted at Leuven), in which the philosopher shows how, at the level of Leiblichkeit, the distinction between subject and object is seemingly blurred by the fact that the living body is double, both a physical thing and a source of sensations. When the right hand touches the left, the left hand ceases to be a mere physical object (bloss physisches Ding); it “becomes body” (es wird Leib).31 In moving beyond the dualism between “constituting consciousness” and “constituted world,” the later Husserl thus undeniably grants to touch a privilege he denies to vision. In fact, there is in the primal experience (Urerlebnis) of the touching-touched hand an experience of constituting one’s own body that is not so much dualist as bifid, an experience Husserl will then extend to bodies other than one’s own (Fremdkörper) and to nature. By means of that perception, he will go so far as to write, in Cartesian Meditations, “I experience … my own body, which therefore in the process is reflexively related to itself.”32 Not only does it seem that this antepredicative reflection could “play out beyond the visual sphere”; Husserl will even come to deny the reflexivity of the gaze. According to him, if one were to hypothesize a purely ocular subject, he would have no phenomenal body, since his own body would appear to him as a purely material thing.33 From the outset, then, the gaze separates the local sphere of one’s own feeling body from the sphere of the perceived sensible objects. The example of perceiving oneself in a mirror cannot be invoked either, since it is only after the fact that one reconstitutes the seeing eye, indirectly and by means of “empathy” (Einfühlung). As a result, vision will never attain the reversibility of touching and touched; I can never perceive the seeing eye as seeing (das sehende Auge als sehendes).34 I can touch my hand touching, whereas the eye that appears to me in the mirror is not presented as seeing but rather as one visual element among others. For Husserl, then, there is expressly a privilege (Vorzug) of touch over the other senses—even over the sense that, since Aristotle, has been called “the most noble.”35 In §37, which is devoted to the “differences between the visual and tactual realms,” he endeavors to challenge the transposition of tactile qualities onto looking: “To be sure, sometimes it is said that the eye is, as it were, in touch with the Object by casting its glance over it. But we immediately sense the difference.”36
If, therefore, it is possible to speak of a “collapse of any parallelism between vision and touch” that Husserl had established,37 how are we to explain that Merleau-Ponty restores that parallelism without explanation and even justifies it by citing the example of Husserl? Indeed, though Merleau-Ponty observes in a note that vision and touch are “not superposable” and that “one of the universes overhangs the other” (VI, 304/256), it is indisputable that he not only reestablishes the parallelism—“we could not possibly touch or see without being capable of touching or seeing ourselves” (S, 23–24/16)—but also goes so far as to reverse the priorities, replacing the “surprising ontological privilege” that Husserl granted to touch with an “exorbitant privilege” of sight.38 Nevertheless, we must still come to an understanding of what that reversal means, since the privilege given to sight does not necessarily entail a return to an “oculocentrism” of the metaphysics of presence. When Merleau-Ponty makes flesh a “visible thing par excellence,” he defines the sensible as both inherence and distance (and the fate of phenomenology hangs in the balance of every nuance). Recall that the experience of touching/touched had allowed Husserl to move beyond the dualism between subjective sensation and objective perception, as it existed in the epistemology of Hermann von Helmholtz and the dominant conception of physiology in the late nineteenth century, toward a characterization of one’s own body (Eigenleib) no longer as constituted but as self-constituting. Even so, Husserl realizes that, though such an approach can account for immediate “archipresence” (Urpräsenz), it is incapable of describing the giving in “co-presence” or even “absence.” As he will note in §42, that approach “from the inside” remains trapped in a solipsistic position. Parallel to that phenomenology of Urpräsenz, Husserl will develop, on the model of vision, a phenomenology of “appresentation” (Appräsenz), where the sensation in one’s own body is achieved only a posteriori, by empathy or feeling-into (Einfühlung).
The later Merleau-Ponty takes on precisely that aporia between solipsism and naturalism, which Husserl does not believe can be resolved through a juxtaposition of the two. Noncoincidence is not to be sought in separation or absence: It lies at the very heart of the experience of feeling/felt. In opposition to a philosophy of pure archipresence as it emerges in Husserl’s description of the touching/touched body, Merleau-Ponty confers on that body the characteristic of vision, that is, the constitutive gap between seeing and seen: “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” (OE, 81/186). In determining flesh as visibility par excellence, he does not return to a heliotropic philosophy of immediate intuition, but takes the exact opposite path. What he outlines rather is an ontology of absence in presence, inherence in distance.
For Merleau-Ponty, this entails redefining the meaning of touch and vision and their relation, and he does not limit that redefinition to declarations of intentions and programmatic announcements that paradigms have shifted. Rather, he excavates these paradigms from the inside and proceeds, therefore, to an immobile overtake, a “surpassing in place” (VI, 198/153, trans. modified). That return to within the Western philosophical tradition (with analyses of Descartes and Hegel in particular, to whom Merleau-Ponty’s last courses at the Collège de France were devoted) then takes on the features of a Heideggerian “Erinnerung in die Metaphysik,” a remembrance into metaphysics, as a means to bring to light unthought presuppositions.
Diplopia
In the plan dating to January 1959 and still bearing the title of the work announced in 1952, “The Origin of Truth,”39 Merleau-Ponty announces a “reflection on Descartes’s ontologies—the ‘strabism’ of Western ontology” (VI, 217/166).40 We can only conjecture about the meaning of the dash (does it unite or separate, mark an identity or a juxtaposition?), but we cannot dismiss the plural form Merleau-Ponty gives to Cartesian ontology. Could the diversity and contradictions of Descartes’s ontological positions shed light on the ambiguity that seems to characterize Western ontology? Before answering that question, it is necessary to emphasize that the later Merleau-Ponty did not suddenly discover that he was a historian of philosophy. As he explains in the last course he taught in 1960–61, “Cartesian Ontology and Present-Day Ontology,” he was hardly seeking to restore “what Descartes said, in the order in which he said it, in answer to his problems,” as Martial Guéroult understood it,41 or to impose “our problems” on him (NC, 223). There is no philosopher within the tradition to whom Merleau-Ponty returned more persistently than Descartes, from the early chapters of Phenomenology of Perception to the book that lay open on his work table at the moment of his death, the treatise Optics.42 This can perhaps be explained by the resistance provided him by Cartesian thought, attributable both to the extreme proximity of the questions he and Descartes were asking and to the supreme distance in how they treated them. It is striking that the question of vision runs through Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Descartes like a guiding thread. Whether within an epistemological context, such as the chapter on the cogito in Phenomenology of Perception, or in his reflections on the sciences in Eye and Mind, or finally, within an ontological context, in the class notes and the notes for The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty seems to associate Descartes’s name with a certain vision of things, a vision pursued far beyond the historical figure to the very bedrock of the Western tradition. What, then, does that “strabism,” that double vision, consist of?
It is noteworthy that, from The Structure of Behavior on, Merleau-Ponty’s writings oppose dualisms, which will take the form, by turns, of intellectualism and empiricism, intuitionism and naturalism, criticisme (critical philosophy) and positivism. To privilege one term over another would once again be to move along the ground of a “bad dialectics” (to use Hegel’s vocabulary), in which, since no position can contain its opposite, the dialectic remains unstable in the sense chemists give that word, constantly decomposing and recomposing, which would make any position, precisely, impossible. Even Hegel’s synthetic dialectic does not escape that movement, since it still presupposes a single viewpoint, from which the synthesis could be carried out “from above.” To escape that unstable position, Merleau-Ponty practices from the start what he will later call a “hyperdialectic”—and which, in contrast to Hegel’s method, might rather be called an infra- or hypodialectic—which commentators early on termed a “philosophy of ambiguity.”43 Yet the last texts indicate that Merleau-Ponty was seeking to give a different foundation, both historico-philosophical and ontological, to that ambiguity, which, subsequent to an analysis of vision in Descartes, would take the name “visual dualism,” or “diplopia.” Merleau-Ponty finds in Descartes the exordium of dualist metaphysics, and, far from rejecting it outright, he will excavate that metaphysics to bring to light the causes of dualism.44
Descartes saw vision in the material sense (vision in the flesh) as scandalous because it was “action at a distance.” Therein lay both its difficulty and its virtue (OE, 37/169). Various texts, from the Optics to Rules and Meditations, would thus express the need to stabilize that hybrid vision by polarizing it, to better exorcise the specters it produces (OE, 36/169). The “enigma of vision,” this thing that is neither here nor elsewhere but properly “ubiquitous,” would thus be wrenched apart and assigned two different locations, one in the physical realm and one in the mind. Thanks to the emergence of the new physics, Descartes thought he could put an end to the mixture of physical and mental he detected in Aristotelianism, which had been dominant until the sixteenth century. The notion of aistheton central to De anima, and which would have to be translated as “the sensible,”45 precedes the distinction of physical perception and mental sensation. Merleau-Ponty, referring to Descartes’s famous analogy between vision and a blind man’s cane, claims in Eye and Mind that “the Cartesian concept of vision is … touch” (OE, 37/170). More exactly, as he will say in the lecture course on Descartes, it is touch in the sense of “contact” (NC, 177). Vision then becomes a purely mechanical procedure, and the topography of perception is constituted by levels of resistance, in accordance with the archetype of the cane gliding over tree roots, stones, and sand.46 Just as a wall’s hardness conditions how a ball bounces,47 vision is shaped as a function of the opacity of things. No sensible qualities are required for that physicalist explanation, therefore, only quantities such as “length, breadth, and depth.”48 To defend himself against the sixth objection of the theologians, who reproached him for reducing man to a machine, Descartes reintroduced sensation, this time locating it in the human mind and denying it any existence “outside my thought.”49 Every sensible quality must therefore be detached from a relation to the object perceived; instead, it is to be conceived in the same terms as an idea, which, as we know, bears no resemblance to what it designates. Between blind contact and clear and distinct intuitus mentis, there is no place for actual vision; perception “in the act” (OE, 34/176, trans. modified) can have no place.50
In that way, Merleau-Ponty would find in Descartes the source of the dualism underlying the Western tradition, the separation of the phenomenal fabric between two opposing but complementary poles. The contradiction between a world of opaque objects stuffed to capacity and the ethereal strata of a transparent ideality is only apparent. “Philosophy is flattened to the sole plane of ideality or to the sole plane of existence,” the only choice remaining being that between “internal adequation of the idea or self-identity of the thing” (VI, 166–67/127). Once again, the interdependence of opposites—identified from The Structure of Behavior on—manifests itself at the ontological level as well: “This infinite distance, this absolute proximity express in two ways—as a soaring over or as fusion—the same relationship with the thing itself” (VI, 166/127). That “same relationship” will establish a unified metaphysics, which Merleau-Ponty also calls a metaphysics of coincidence (VI, 167/127). To destabilize that philosophy of coincidence, which is blind to the fact that every “vision is tele-vision” (VI, 321/273), one would have to return to the ambiguity manifested in the visible: “this idea of proximity through distance” (an idea that already appears in Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on language),51 “of intuition as auscultation or palpation in depth” (VI, 168/128). In short, one would have to move beyond a strabic, dual-plane ontology toward an ontology rooted in sensible experience.
But is an ontology of experience truly imaginable? That, at least, is the question Merleau-Ponty asks following a reflection on phenomenological reduction and variation: “In order to really reduce an experience to its essence, we should have to achieve a distance from it that would put it entirely under our gaze, with all the implications of sensoriality or thought that come into play in it, bring it and bring ourselves wholly to the transparency of the imaginary, think it without the support of any ground, in short, withdraw to the bottom of nothingness” (VI, 147–48/111). The grasping of essence would entail the possibility of a “total variation” (VI, 148/111), which would itself require extracting oneself from any place of belonging and situating oneself within the perspective of nothingness itself. Every be-ing, therefore, would stand out against the ground of a nothingness understood as nonbeing, which would determine every be-ing as positive being. But the thing, thus defined as positivity, self-identity, plenitude, “is not the thing of our experience; it is the image we obtain of it by projecting it into a universe where experience would not be bound to anything, where the spectator would abandon the spectacle—in short, by confronting it with the possibility of nothingness” (VI, 213/162, trans. modified). The metaphysics of coincidence would in fact rest on a misuse of the principle of sufficient cause, or, in Leibniz’s famous formulation, on the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Such an inquiry falls under the category of what Bergson would call pseudo-problems, the interrogative form masking the fact that, concealed behind the alternative between existence and nothing, is the thesis of a prior nothingness, one that comes earlier.52 Merleau-Ponty draws on Bergson’s critique of nothingness in order to distance himself, once more, from Jean-Paul Sartre. Although Sartre also set out to destroy objectivist ontology, in Being and Nothingness he remained captive to a positive conception of being, precisely because that notion still rests on the position of a prior nothingness. According to Merleau-Ponty, such a move still involves reversing the proper order, given that no one can have the experience of logical nothingness. On the contrary, “Is not the experience of the thing and of the world precisely the ground that we need in order to think nothingness in any way whatever?” (VI, 213/162). We are faced with a strange parallelism between objectivist ontology, justified by a thesis that posits nothingness, and an ontology of nothingness that determines it as a plenitude to which nothing can be added. Between the self-transparency of nothingness and the be-ing’s fullness, a metaphysics of overdetermination invites itself on the stage which drags along behind itself an ontology of experience, which we force “to say more than it said” (VI, 213/162). To say that nothingness is not is still to say too much about it; to posit being is also to bring it back into the company of be-ings, thereby missing its meaning. As a result—and this remark, from a note of May 1960, is key—any dialectic of Being and Nothingness “disregards Being and prefers the object to it” (VI, 296/248).
We have seen that any theory of perception can rise above reifying dualisms only by becoming ontology. Conversely, ontology can be only an ontology of the sensible—otherwise, it would contradict its ambition to undo the anthropocentric privilege—since the sensible “is precisely that medium in which there can be being without it having to be posited” (VI, 262/214). The matter at hand, then, is to conceive a new ontology of the sensible, which Merleau-Ponty, after Valéry, will also call “aesthesiology” (VI, 220/168). It will consist of the “unveiling of a Being that is not posited because it has no need to be, because it is silently behind all our affirmations, negations, and even behind all formulated questions” (VI 169/129, trans. modified). The Being of the sensible, neither grafted onto nothingness nor plastered onto the world of determinate qualia, is riddled with negativity. Sartre “constructs” the union of Being and negativity, but one must rather conceive that sensible Being as always already “shadowed [doublé] by nothingness” (VI, 286/237, trans. modified). In a note dating to May 1960 titled “Visible Invisible,” Merleau-Ponty announces: “The sensible, the visible, must be for me the occasion to say what nothingness is” (VI, 306/258). Although the tradition attempts to move beyond the constitutive duality by distributing the two orders on different planes, thus producing ontological “strabism,” one must rather accept the encroachment of the two orders on each other, within a single perspective.
Merleau-Ponty will designate that encroachment with a term borrowed from Maurice Blondel, diplopia.53 In L’être et les êtres (Being and Beings), Blondel postulates that the history of Western ontology has followed two different axes: One ascends from existing beings to Being as essence (ontological anabasis); the other descends (katabasis) from essence to existing beings. The beginning of a chapter heading no doubt attracted Merleau-Ponty’s attention: “Can our ontological diplopia be brought back to the unity of a binocular vision? And in what way phenomenology is not sufficient for founding ontology.”54 An immediate echo can be found in one of Merleau-Ponty’s course descriptions: “Could we not find what has been called an ‘ontological diplopia’ (Blondel), which after so much philosophical effort we cannot expect to bring to a rational reduction and which leaves us with the sole alternative of wholly embracing it, just as our gaze takes over monocular images to make a single vision out of them” (RC, 127/158, trans. modified). Reformulated in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s own horizon, that amounts to saying that the ontology of the visible will have to be combined with a reflection on voids, the holes of latency with which it is pocked, a nothingness that turns out to be more than a purely logical category: a nothingness of this world, inserted into the visible as its underside, since “nothingness is nothing more (nor less) than the invisible” (VI, 306/258).
Merleau-Ponty adds, however, that we must not conceive of that invisibility as a nonvisibility added onto the visible, an objectivity that is simply elsewhere: “The invisible is not another visible (‘possible’ in the logical sense) a positive only absent” (VI, 300/251). Beyond Husserl’s unresolved dualism between Urpräsenz (primal presence) and Appräsenz (derived presence), one must describe “a certain relation between the visible and the invisible, where the invisible is not only non-visible (what has been or will be seen and is not seen, or what is seen by an other than me, not by me), but where its absence counts in the world (it is ‘behind’ the visible, imminent or eminent visibility, it is Urpräsentiert precisely as Nichturpräsentierbar, as another dimension) where the lacuna that marks its place is one of the points of passage of the ‘world’ ” (VI, 277/228).