Five

MATERNITY AS DEHISCENCE IN THE FLESH IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

Dehiscence occurs when a body opens and spills its internal contents. It happens naturally when a plant comes to reproductive maturity: an anther opens displaying its pollen to the wind; a fruit splits and sheds its seeds; the operculum of moss, fungi, or algae is discarded to release its spores; the seedpods of milkweed burst releasing their tiny downy parachutes. Dehiscence also means the opening of a wound along a surgical suture that causes fluid to leak. Much like being a mother, dehiscence indicates a breach in one’s internal integrity that can be life giving and/or life threatening.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty appropriates the term dehiscence to describe one aspect of our ontological and existential condition.¹ He thinks that each person experiences a prereflective coherence between herself and the world, between himself and others. We do not feel ourselves to be the author of our experiences; they come to us as though written “anonymously” as real beyond individual perception. This sense of the world’s veracity is supported by our social life. Although we do not share the exact outlook of others, our differing perspectives converge in one and the same world. This means that together we inhabit a sensuous unity, but we also suffer a division. While the other is not hidden from me, locked within interiority, she also is not fully laid out for my examination. These structures, described phenomenologically in the Phenomenology of Perception, become ontological in The Visible and the Invisible. In his later work, Merleau-Ponty deems the things of the world, including people, to be expressions of one sensible flesh. While flesh establishes our continuity, it also involves an inherent dehiscence between the sensing and the sensed and between the self and the other. This is not dualism, but a description of the fundamental ambiguity of our relations.

In this chapter I propose that maternity can be aptly characterized as a case of dehiscence in the flesh. From pregnancy to caring for adopted and older children, the mother-child relation illustrates how human beings coconstitute the world with one another. The mother, in particular, is the child’s first environment. Some scholars worry that in taking the maternal as flesh, the mother is equated with nature and her subjectivity is erased. However, this concern is eased if the concept of flesh is properly understood as involving dehiscence, an écart, a necessary separation. For Merleau-Ponty, reversibility is never a perfect or harmonious unity. Likewise, the mother’s relation to her child, as well as her relation to nature, is necessarily ambiguous.

To elaborate on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ambiguous intersubjectivity, I explicate his use of Hegel’s “immanent logic of human existence.” This discussion of Hegel also helps to explain how Merleau-Ponty differs from theorists discussed earlier and highlights the implications of his philosophy for our considerations of ethics. The ambiguity of our intersubjective relations, as described both by Merleau-Ponty and in maternal accounts, results in an ambivalent ethical orientation, contingent as it is on negotiating the interrelated yet discrete interests of the self and the other. Although Merleau-Ponty never wrote an ethics, he describes a life world that comprehends intersubjective ambiguity, provokes the question “What should I do?” and indicates that the answer will often be conflicted and founded in ambivalence.

AMBIGUOUS INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND MATERNAL FLESH

In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes our sense of coherence with the world. Prior to reflection, one does not stand out as situated over and against the world and others. We are immersed in a reality whose qualities and meanings appear as both shared and self-evident: “My consciousness . . . is hardly distinguishable from what is offered to it.”² We inhale the scents of the world, drink its fluids, eat its fruit, we bump into its hard surfaces, absorb its heat, we ache at its beauty and gag at its ugliness, all without a thought of doing so. The sensory is open to me “through a gift of nature, with no effort made on my part” (Phenomenology 251). When I put on some music, there is music. When someone hits me, there is pain. When I eat, hunger is sated. There is no immediate distinction between myself and these perceptions. There is no need to imagine an I or a world over and against one another, in order to perceive the sensory phenomena. “Nothing here is thematized. Neither subject nor object is posited” (281). Even when we do abstract ourselves from this world via reflection, our primary engagement with it is already presupposed and carries on in the background. While I entertain abstract thoughts like my own nonexistence or the illusory quality of reality, the ground retains its solidity, the air remains breathable, coffee still tastes bitter. I do not experience myself as the enactor of these facts, ‘I’ remain anonymous. I am the blind spot in my vision that allows me to believe in the world naively, to not see my own seeing.

For Merleau-Ponty, the sense of continuity with the world extends to other people as well. In the natural attitude others are not minds trapped in an inaccessible interiority. We are all sentient creatures in a sensible world, and we meet in this public world that we both hold in common. Imagine that my gaze shifts from a book on the table to my friend sitting in front of it. She is as apparent to me as the book. As with the rest of the world, I take for granted that she is as she appears to me. This is not to say that to perceive another person is the same as perceiving an inanimate object. I recognize hers as another view upon the world. Though we perceive the world differently, it is, nevertheless, a common world we behold. At the Chicago Institute of Art my friend and I stand on opposite ends of a sculpture of Hyacinth. I am examining the girlish curls tied in a knot on the top of his head. He notes how the right toe delicately scratches the left calf. He sees what I do not, yet I never question if the sculpture is one and the same. Together we take for granted that there is the sculpture of Hyacinth. We do not “conceive our perspective views as independent from one another; we know that they slip into each other and are brought together finally in the thing” (Phenomenology 411). I know my friend by virtue of our inhabiting this same self-evident world. “We are brought together in the one single world in which we all participate as anonymous subjects of perception” (411). When riding our bikes through town, without speaking, my friend and I both stop at an intersection. She observes, as well as I do, that it is a dangerous street to cross. We hear the roar of cars together, feel the breeze they blow in our faces, and smell the exhaust. The street, like the museum, and every other place a human being can go is a public space that we inhabit together. Typically, I experience her in this world, which is common to us both, without needing to conceptualize her as either separate from or similar to me.

Of course, our sharing a world in common does not mean that it always strikes us in the same way. I listen to a new band by myself, but I am eager for my friend to hear it. I try a new dish, and I want her to try it. Why? It is not because her impressions will inevitably be the same as my own. Rather, her differing view adds another dimension to things that they could not have for me alone. Merleau-Ponty explains: “No sooner has my gaze fallen upon a living body in the process of acting than the objects surrounding it immediately take on a fresh layer of significance: they are no longer simply what I myself could make of them, they are what this other pattern of behavior is about to make of them. . . . Already the other body has ceased to be a mere fragment of the world, and become the theater of a certain process of elaboration, and, as it were, a certain ‘view’ of the world” (Phenomenology 411–412).

Without the other, objects have only one “side” at a time, the side that I see of them, but through another’s pattern of behavior—the things that she laughs at, her expressions of exclamation, what she prefers and dislikes—things gain an added contour for me. Her gestures speak to me directly, conveying meaning without need for reflection. As Merleau-Ponty notes, the gesture is understood immediately; there is no need for analogy or interpretation. “The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself” (Phenomenology 214). Consider, for example, your earliest childhood memory of a parent getting angry with you. The facial gestures of anger are as immediately understood as a slap in the face.

Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that communication with others introduces us to the world’s truth. Indeed, before I met my friend, the world did not have the same meaning. Moreover, he rightly claims that there is no time for me before which others were there. We do not begin as a singular point of view to which others are added. Every human infant is born into a human community without which she would not survive. To ask when others’ views came to influence my own is like asking when I realized that objects have a third dimension. The gestures of others are not only acts of communication but also establish a common meaning (Phenomenology 215–216). The faces of one’s primary caregivers are the original source of significance. We can see this in laboratory experiments when an infant or toddler is introduced to an unfamiliar, potentially scary toy (such as a noisy robot with flashing lights): securely attached children look at their caregivers to see how they ought to react. If a mother reacts positively to the toy, the child will typically respond in the same manner. If she responds with a fearful facial expression, the child will retreat.3 When left alone in an unfamiliar place, infants will not explore, but spend the majority of the time crying; those who are left in the room with their mothers take an interest in the toys and the room.⁴ Young children look to a trusted person to tell them the meaning of objects, people, and situations. Infants with no one to rely upon, such as those who are neglected, abused, or raised in institutions, do not explore their environment.⁵ For a human being, there was never a time before others. They contribute to the constitution of the world as I know it before I am aware of it.

The communication of meaning between mother and child is not unidirectional; the child instills the mother’s world with renewed significance. One obvious example is the child’s cry. It impacts one on a visceral level causing an instant feeling of urgency, compassion, and/or irritation. Although one cannot always tell precisely what a child needs when he cries, nevertheless, one is immediately called to action. A child’s smile or even a simple gaze can also suddenly change one’s orientation. Daphne de Marnefffe describes this experience when looking at the face of a nursing baby: “I am not in command of my own joy. The delight I feel at being at the receiving end of those eyes is almost overwhelming, like a gush of uncontrollable laughter.”6 The meaning conveyed by a child’s gesture can insight more than a momentary shift of mood. Recall the Kate Moses story quoted in chapter 3: “My daughter, now two, has started licking me. The start of a hug, arms around my neck; or I’m bending down, picking up little plastic kitty cats off the floor, and her tongue laps my cheekbone, flicks the crater of my eye. . . . Her licks have the power to completely alter my mood, capture my full attention, put me under her spell, which is no doubt part of the reason she loves to lick me.”⁷ The lick is a gesture in which the child achieves an over lapping of bodies. She conquers the distance of adult preoccupations and brings her mother into the immediacy of the shared moment. Just like an adult, the child reveals her perspective through the gesture. To her daughter, Moses’s body is lickable; it is likable and lovable, an opportunity for play. Moses’s daughter endows her body with new meaning: “As a young woman, I thought about my body all the time: how to disguise it, to shape it, to present it, to comfort it; what everyone else thought of it. Motherhood taught me to live in it.”⁸

Merleau-Ponty argues that babies and young children are fully immersed in the public world, unimpeded by a belief in personal interiority; and that the earlier we look into the child’s development the more pervasive is her or his sense of anonymity (Phenomenology 413). In the Child’s Relations with Others, drawing on Jacques Lacan and Jean Piaget, he describes the child as egocentric, meaning that he is not reflectively aware of himself as a unique point of view, that she inhabits a continuous anonymity. The infant is “unaware of himself and the other as different beings . . . egocentricism is not at all the attitude of a me that grasps itself (as the term ‘egocentrism’ might lead us to believe). Rather it is the attitude of a me which is unaware of itself and lives as easily in others as it does in itself—but which, being unaware of others in their own separateness as well, in truth is no more conscious of them than of itself.”9 The young child experiences a sense of unity with the world, just as when “I contemplate the blue sky . . . I am the sky myself” (Phenomenology 249). According to Merleau-Ponty, all of the child’s relations have this character, but, with the mother, he experiences total identification: “The maternal relation is (as the psychoanalysts say) a relation of identification, in which the subject projects on his mother what he himself experiences and assimilates the attitudes of the mother.”¹⁰ Whether children are fundamentally egocentric and/or completely identified with the mother is a topic for endless debate. However, it is clear that sometimes the horizons of mother and child can vividly overlap. Mothers can even be drawn into the immediacy of the child’s perspective, a blissful, temporary self-forgetting free from adult concerns and judgments. If psychologists and philosophers can claim that the child experiences a sense of unity with the world, it is because adults can sometimes share the child’s perspective.

As I show in chapter 3, this connection between mother and child is not to be taken for granted; indeed, cases of extreme neglect demonstrate its importance. The infant experiences the world through the expressions of others, and, without sufficient social interaction, her world appears small, dull, and flat. For lonely infants the world is not enticing. It is well documented that when a child is raised in relative solitude her sensory development is delayed or curtailed. For example, in Blind Infants and Their Mothers: An Examination of the Sign System, Selma Fraiberg describes a (socially but not physically) neglected infant, Lenny. Lenny had given up any attempts to explore the world visually. Before Fraiburg intervened, caseworkers had assumed that Lenny was blind. Eva Simms provides another example. She describes a neglected infant who showed only very passive sensory engagement. As Simms says,

Moreover, infants who are not cared for show signs of severe sensory and intellectual impairment after only a year. Research in the relatively new field of sensory integration has shown that the development of our sense unfolds in interaction with the world made inviting by caring adults. Children who are kept in non-stimulating, sterile, and isolated environments have difficulty seeing, hearing, touching, and tasting. The infants’ sense, if not engaged by caring adults, will restrict their engagement with the world to familiar structures: the minute shadings of the white crib, a distance that spans a few feet, the touch of others that restricts itself to the feeling of a spoon on one’s lips or maybe the grasp of a hand under one’s arms when placed on a potty chair. . . . The contrast between the development of neglected children and those who receive adequate care shows that feeding a child does not necessarily mean that the child is nourished.11

In The Child’s Relations with Others, Merleau-Ponty also cites studies of the perception of eleven to sixteen year olds that describe how these are influenced by others: “Recent studies have tended to show that even external perception of sense qualities and space—at first glance the most disinterested, least affective of all the functions—is profoundly modified by the personality and by the interpersonal relationships in which the child lives.”¹²

Merleau-Ponty does believe that as we mature we come to realize our differentiation from others. Yet he maintains that anonymous intersubjectivity underlies all our interactions: “the unsophisticated thinking of our earliest years remains as an indispensable acquisition underlying that of maturity, if there is to be for the adult one single perspective” (Phenomenology 414). Effectively, this means that on the level of prereflective experience I do not extricate my view from others, but this does not mean I have an all-access pass to their thoughts, feelings, and perspectives. I still perceive from my point of view, and they do so from theirs. Merleau-Ponty states that “although I am outrun on all sides by my own acts, submerged in generality, the fact remains that I am the one by whom they are experienced” (Phenomenology 417). Each body has its own integrity, and, thanks to its boundaries, perception is possible.13 The softness of my pillow brushes against my cheek. Flavor travels across the surface of my tongue. While the body’s surfaces delimit it, the boundaries of my body are also the point of contact between myself and the sensible world; without them, no world would exist for me. As our commonalities are discovered through the shared world, so one’s separation from others becomes apparent. I like cilantro, but my friend thinks it tastes like soap. I like wheat beer, but my friend thinks it smells like medicine. These seemingly small differences are also indications of a fundamental separateness. Although together we inhabit a sensuous unity, we also suffer a division. She tastes with her tongue and I with mine. Even the pregnant mother maintains her own bodily integrity in this manner. As the fetus breathes her amniotic fluid, the mother does not taste it. The same bodies that permit us sensory experience dictate that we shall each have this access only via our own body. The same bodies that allow us contact keep us from merging. While the other is not hidden from me locked within interiority, she also is not obvious to me.

Merleau-Ponty continues this line of thinking in The Visible and the Invisible. There he also argues that perception happens in a public place, a world that is accessible to one and all. In my relations to others, I do not have access to a “hidden realm of interiority.” Instead “it is in the world that we rejoin one another.”¹⁴ In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes anonymity as, first and foremost, a phenomenon of lived experience. However, in The Visible and the Invisible this phenomenology becomes ontology. Not only do we experience ourselves as “connatural with the world” (252) we are. He writes: “It is to experience therefore that the ultimate ontological power belongs, and the essences, the necessities by essence, the internal or logical possibility, solid and incontestable as they may be under the gaze of the mind, have finally their force and their eloquence only because all my thoughts and the thoughts of others are caught up in the fabric of one sole Being” (The Visible 110). This ontological continuity between self, other and world is named the flesh (123).

The things of the world, including people, are expressions of this one sensible flesh. Flesh is sensible in multiple respects: First, it can be perceived via the senses, smelled, touched, seen, and so on. Second, it is also capable of perception. My nose, ears, brain, etc. are all of the flesh; yet they are also articulations through which the world can bend back upon itself, sense itself, and discern itself. “Color that sees itself, surface that touches itself” (The Visible 135). To take a mundane example, after a strenuous workout I can smell my own sweat. The flesh which sweats is the same flesh that smells it. The skin and nose are apertures upon a world of which they are also a part. Thus perception is not evidence of our dominion over the sensory; it is a possibility inherent to the flesh itself realized in human beings as a part of the flesh of the world. Vision and the visible, touch and the tactile, hearing and the sonorous, are “flesh offered to flesh” (The Visible 131). “He who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it” (134).

The concept of flesh describes more than just our immersion in the world. Also inherent to the flesh is a gap, an écart, a dehiscence between the sentient and the sensed. In Merleau-Ponty’s classic example of reversibility, when the right hand touches the left hand the two do not merge. “I palpate with my left hand only [my right hand’s] outer covering. . . . I am always on the same side of my body; it presents itself to me in one invariable perspective” (The Visible 148). This noncoincidence, the “hiatus between my right hand touching and my right hand touched,” is not a “failure;” it is the distinction without which no relation would be possible (148). When I look at a painting, I may temporarily lose myself, but I do not really become the painting. Reversibility between oneself and the world is never wholly complete: “reversibility [is] always imminent and never realized in fact. . . . I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization” (147). Nevertheless, écart does not reestablish classic dualism either; it does not indicate things that are different in essence. The smell of my sweat is certainly mine, but I can still encounter it as an object or other. I may even be surprised by it. This is neither a contradiction, nor a failure to understand my proper relation to my body and world. I can take my own body as both subject and object at once, without these two perspectives merging and without completely disconnecting them. Similarly, the ambiguity of togetherness and separation are fundamental to the flesh itself.

In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty describes one’s relationship with others as parallel to the reversible relationship with the sensible; “we situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become world” (160). This is an ambiguous intersubjectivity in which I overlap with others, and yet remain distinct. It is analogous to the chiasma of the optic nerves intersecting to create one single view out of binocular vision. Our two eyes maintain their separate viewpoints, but their perspectives converge to reveal the world’s depth. Similarly, the other’s view is set against one’s own. As in the example of the statue of Hyacinth, if one person’s position differs from another, this does not indicate the existence of two realities. Instead, the world gains added dimension and appears that much more real. While the mother shares her child’s perspective, she does not completely lose sight of her own. When my child cries out in the night, I may jump up and go to her feeling full of sympathy, but I may simultaneously resent my own loss of sleep. It is important to recognize that when “we become the others and we become the world” an écart still remains: “It is from the lawn before me that I think I catch sight of the impact of the green on the vision of another, it is through the music that I enter into his musical emotion, it is the thing itself that opens unto me the access to the private world of another. But the thing itself, we have seen, is always for me the thing that I see” (The Visible 11). Without this divergence between self and other, the world would lack the “objectivity” endowed by intersubjectivity (The Visible 142).

Merleau-Ponty often uses metaphors of pregnancy and motherhood to illustrate the meaning of the flesh and to explicate his notion of intersubjectivity.15 For example, in his first mention of the flesh in The Visible and the Invisible he states, “Each landscape of my life, because it is not a wondering troop of sensations or a system of ephemeral judgments but a segment of the durable flesh of the world, is qua visible, pregnant with many other visions besides my own” (123). To be pregnant is to nurture another’s horizon within oneself. This is paradoxical and yet it is our constant condition. Our fleshly incarnation means that we can both perceive and be perceived, and that everything I see is suffused with the visions of others—my partner’s, my child’s, a friend’s, a stranger’s, and so on. Pregnancy and motherhood in general, put this reality into relief. The other, whether one’s child or not, is both familiar and strange. She is made from the same flesh as I am. Like me, she displays her feelings and some of her thoughts on her face with smiles, tears and a furrowed brow. We both encounter the world through smell, taste, vision and thoughts. She sleeps, she dreams, and wakes up, just as I do. Yet there is always something of her that I cannot reach.

Merleau-Ponty’s imagery of pregnancy and motherhood is precisely parallel to his characterization of ambiguous intersubjectivity: He declares that we are of the same flesh, suffused with one another, even while we remain distinct. This relation is embodied in multiple ways as I encounter the other through my body, through my embodied relation to the world, and as the other impacts the manner in which I experience my body. While it is possible to understand this other, to some extent, through analogy with myself, she still remains entirely different from me, both surprising and mysterious.

Merleau-Ponty also briefly considers the relationship between the biological mother and fetus as an excellent literal example of the flesh. He describes the connection between the body and the world as two parts of a complete circuit, and claims that the human fetus in the womb has “prepared but unemployed circuits . . . the seer is being premeditated in counter-point in the embryonic development” (The Visible 147). According to Merleau-Ponty, the possibility of the child’s uniquely human existence and her co-extension with the flesh of the world is already prefigured in the fetal body. In this passage, he describes the fetus as anticipating her emergence into the world, seeming to neglect that the fetus is already part of a living circuit with a world provided through and by the pregnant woman’s body—the sounds of the mother’s heartbeat and voice, the muffled voices and white noise of the world outside her body, the taste of amniotic fluid that is breathed in and out, the swaddling sensation of being nestled in the womb, the rocking motions of the mother’s walk, and so on. Research confirms that the maternal body is a sensory world that engages the fetus, demonstrating that she can hear, move voluntarily, swallow, taste, and touch—that fetuses respond to pressure and pain and loud or soothing noises.16 When the baby is born, she is taken out of a complete environment to which he or she has clearly become accustomed. This fact is recognized by contemporary parenting gurus who advise caregivers to think of the newborn as inhabiting a fourth trimester—still a fetus in terms of its needs and expectations.¹⁷ This fact is especially capitalized on by Harvey Karp’s The Happiest Baby on the Block books and DVDs. He teaches parents to use the “5 Ss”—sshhing (saying sshh in the baby’s ear), swaddling, swinging, side or stomach lying, and sucking—to soothe a crying newborn. The first three of these techniques are intended to mimic the womb environment, and my own experience with these methods indicates that they work remarkably well. Indeed, both folk wisdom and scholarly research agree that neonates are most content when nested in and warmed by another’s body, where it is not too light or loud, hearing and feeling the rhythms of the other’s heartbeat and breath and smelling her familiar smells.

The mother herself is both sensing and sensed in a reversible relation with the fetus who alternately seems to be a part of her own body and to be the body of another. She is the first world with which the infant is in chiasmic relation. In this respect, this quote rings especially true: “we situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become world” (The Visible 160). However, in this case a greater passivity is at work than this statement implies. The fetus does not situate herself; she is situated in the gestational mother who, at least initially, is all things, all others, and the entire world to the fetus. Thinking the birth mother as flesh suggests that intersubjectivity extends beyond sharing perspectives on a common world, beyond our filtering, highlighting, and obscuring the world for one another. It suggests that, from the start, we are this common world for one another. More specifically, the gestational mother (not just any other) is the first landscape within which we find ourselves.

Upon birth, the infant is exposed to a much wider world than before, but if cared for she continues to be nestled close to the bodies of her caregivers; they continue to constitute the world for her. For example, as I describe it in chapter 3, mother and child share one physiological process in breast-feeding. Eva Simms also describes this “primal housedness and well-being” drawing on Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, and her own experience.¹⁸ Simms reflects on how she was her daughter’s first environment: “I was her house, but more than that I was the field that nourished her, the rain that quenched her thirst, the sun that warmed her skin . . . milk is the visible sign of the invisible, the in-between body, the chiasm, mother-infant flesh.”¹⁹ Breast-feeding is a symbiotic relationship as, for example, the rooting reflex already suggests the existence, location, and shape of the breast and as the amount of milk produced meets the baby’s demand for it. “Implicit in the first cry, the first turning of the head toward the (m)other’s voice, the first search for the breast is intentionally a directedness that presupposes that there is something to turn to.”²⁰ Simms illustrates how the maternal can indeed be thought as first flesh: “In the beginning, the maternal world and thing-world are the same.”²¹

In the case of mother and child, shared flesh is deeply ambiguous. Simms describes the aspect of breast-feeding in which the perspectives and bodies of mother and child are aligned. Of course, as I have explained in chapter 3, women also feel that breast-feeding and other aspects of childcare threaten to consume their vitality. They liken these same beloved children to parasites and cannibals. Clearly there is a divergence of perspectives as well—the écart that Merleau-Ponty describes as integral to intersubjectivity on the levels of experience and ontology.

Merleau-Ponty may have planned to consider the maternal body an instantiation of the flesh, as his working notes for The Visible and the Invisible seem to imply: “Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother” (267). However, there is some concern among feminist scholars that drawing a parallel between the mother and flesh erases the subjectivity of the mother and conflates her with nature. In the next section of this chapter, I will review these concerns. Then in the following segment I will address this concern by further clarifying the logic of his theory of ambiguity intersubjectivity. There is textual evidence that Merleau-Ponty employs principles from Hegel’s logic; investigating these principles will help us to better understand his notion of ambiguous intersubjectivity and address feminist concerns.

FEMINIST READINGS OF MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

In “Only Nature is Mother to the Child” Dorothea Olkowski critiques Merleau-Ponty for denying the sociality of human origins. According to Olkowski, Merleau-Ponty denies maternal subjectivity, placing our origins in a wild nature. “All signs of the female, the woman who gives birth, who cradles, caresses, nurses, and cares for the infant, are erased. As such, in place of the personal, intimate relation with this fully human woman, the infant comes to itself from out of the prepersonal and anonymous realm of nature.”²² In Olkowski’s view, Merleau-Ponty conflates the maternal with nature, reinstating women’s traditional exclusion from culture.

A similar objection is made by Luce Irigaray in “The Invisible of the Flesh: A Reading of Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ‘The Intertwining—the Chiasm.’” She criticizes Merleau-Ponty for failing to consider that only the maternal-feminine gestates and gives birth. As a result, she claims, he misunderstands perception, sexual difference, and the flesh. Irigaray argues for the radically passive origin of perception: the formation of the eyes, optic nerve, and brain in “this mystery of the prenatal night where he was palpated without seeing”;²³ vision developing within the obscurity of intrauterine life, “the infant’s nocturnal abode” (152) where nothing can be seen and the sense of touch (and perhaps hearing) is primary. One’s origin necessarily remains in darkness, an obstacle between the passive and active dimensions of perception, an interruption in one’s continuity with the world. In opposition to this, Irigaray says that Merleau-Ponty denies the obscurity of our beginnings, reducing the (m)other to the same, and therefore “nothing new happens, only this permanent weaving between the world and the subject which presupposes that the subject sees the whole” (170). Within his “closed system” (161), this “solipsistic relation” (180), it is as though Merleau-Ponty’s seer has never been born, because he remains in a prenatal continuity with the world (173). “It has no spacing or interval for the freedom of questioning between two” (183). Irigaray claims that to overcome his “labyrinthine solipsism” a radical other is needed—the other of sexual difference, the maternal-feminine, an other who cannot be seen (as the fetus cannot see the mother; 157).

According to Irigaray, the maternal reveals a fundamental irreversibility at the source of the reversibility. The child is unequal to the mother, since the mother gives birth to the child and never the reverse. The child (especially the male child) can never appreciate her perspective; he can never witness the same landscape. But Merleau-Ponty, she claims, mistakenly assumes a persistent mutuality, eliminating alterity, and thus never escapes solipsism. For Irigaray, fecundation is not mutual; we do not diverge from a common flesh. The child comes from the mother’s flesh, and this indicates the source of all difference—sexual difference.

Scholars agree that Merleau-Ponty does not have any explicit theory of sexual difference, and he has been thoroughly critiqued for this neglect.24 For example, Judith Butler worries that while Merleau-Ponty wants to describe concrete, existential structures, at times “he offers a description of bodily experience clearly abstracted from the concrete diversity that exists.”²⁵ In “Through the Wild Region: An Essay in Phenomenological Feminism,” Jeffner Allen also claims that Merleau-Ponty ignores the uniqueness of women’s embodied experience. She believes that this omission does not simply create a lack in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy; it reaffirms the masculinist assumption that men’s experiences can serve as the model for all: “Women are the concealed term that is purportedly included in the term ‘human beings.’ In androcentric culture, where women’s situation is that of the other, ‘human being’ is not a term that pertains directly to women, for we are unlike human beings in general, i.e. men. . . . Neuter neutral inquiry, including the claim that ‘I am my body,’ is not harmless. It acts, rather, to further conceal women’s experiences of our embodiment.”²⁶ Shannon Sullivan also critiques Merleau-Ponty along these lines in Living Across and Through Skins and “Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.” She agrees with Allen that Merleau-Ponty assumes a gender neutral body unmarked by race, class, or sexuality. She specifically targets the concept of the anonymous body arguing that it is, in fact, the masculine body posing as “body for all.” Sullivan says that Merleau-Ponty is guilty of “ethical solipsism,” because he merely generalizes his own experiences.27

A related but different criticism is that Merleau-Ponty may be dependent on an implicit theory of sexual difference for his notion of the flesh (as Irigaray implies). Elizabeth Grosz raises this concern in “Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the Flesh”:

Merleau-Ponty does not explicitly address the question of sexual difference in The Visible and the Invisible, yet, if Irigaray’s reading is appropriate, it is clear that his work derives much from a kind of implicit sexualization of ontology, the utilization of a whole series of metaphors embedded within and derived from relations between the sexes. The metaphors are the condition of the possibility of his understanding of the flesh, which is itself the condition of the possibility of the division and interaction of subjects and objects. In this sense, the feminine may be said to be the unspoken, disembodied underside of the flesh: the flesh as a point-for-point convergence with the attributes of femininity.²⁸

This denial of sexual difference connects to the concern that Merleau-Ponty is in denial of alterity more broadly speaking. In “From the Body Proper to Flesh: Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity,” Beata Stawarska, claims that Merleau-Ponty fails to preserve the other’s “free subjectivity and autonomy” and collapses bodily relations into a single universal.²⁹ She considers this move as emblematic of the way that “the masculine frame of mind continuously misrepresents the structures of intersubjectivity (and not only gender), in its tendency to reduce the other to the same.”³⁰ In particular, she objects to his classic example of reversibility—one’s hands touching each other. “Merleau-Ponty takes a specific, intrasubjective experience of the body, as in my right hand touching my other hand, to be a paradigm for relations to other embodied subjects, as in my right hand touching the hand of the other when we greet each other by shaking hands.”31 Stawarska argues that a relationship to one’s own body should not be used as the exemplar for relations with others.³² In doing so, she thinks that Merleau-Ponty forgets the particularity of perspectives and that “this basic distinction between self and other is disregarded or regarded as a secondary phenomenon.”³³

The scholars discussed raise a number of important concerns, which I will address in the next few pages. First, Merleau-Ponty has no theory of sexual difference. This is undeniably true. Yet the fact that he does not explicitly deal with sexual difference does not mean that he considers all bodies to be the same. Butler, Sullivan, and Allen mistake anonymity for universality. Merleau-Ponty is defended against this view by Silvia Stoller in “Reflections on Feminist Merleau-Ponty Skepticism” and Gail Weiss in “The Anonymous Intentions of Transactional Bodies.” Stoller argues that anonymous corporeality is not neutral: “In equating ‘anonymous body’ and ‘neutral body’ [Sullivan] confuses anonymity with neutrality; anonymous does not mean that subjects face each other ‘neutrally,’ nor does it mean that their bodily identity is completely ‘unknown,’ or even one of ‘anyone and thus of everyone’ (5). Given the fact that for Merleau-Ponty the human subject is always a situated subject—and this applies also to its anonymous mode of being—such a conclusion is unfounded.”³⁴ Similarly, Weiss asserts:

To say that an experience operates anonymously, then, is not equivalent to saying that it is universal or that it is trans-historical. It is worth noting that the examples of anonymity provided by Merleau-Ponty are always grounded in the experience of a particular body in its concrete engagement with the world. . . . To say that these transactions tend to be anonymous does not mean that we are not, at the same time, two particular bodies, marked by our race, class, gender, etc., engaged in a social relationship. The point is that this very social relationship is predicated on its anonymity.³⁵

My view of anonymity supports that of Weiss and Stoller. For Merleau-Ponty the body is always situated within a biological, social, and historical context, even in its anonymous mode. This means that sex and gender will necessarily be a factor in embodied experience.

Although Merleau-Ponty did not directly address sexual difference, this is not grounds for dismissing his feminist potential. His fascination with unique experiences of embodiment is demonstrated throughout The Structure of Behavior and The Phenomenology of Perception. His insightful remarks on pregnancy in his lectures on child psychology and pedagogy (which I will present further on in this chapter) are good evidence for a specific interest in female embodiment. Furthermore, his metaphorical treatment of maternity is not the “unspoken, disembodied underside of the flesh”;36 to employ images of a phenomenon is not to ignore it. Rather, these depictions of motherhood demonstrate an unusually subtle understanding of maternity, especially when compared to Levinas’s attempt. Although Merleau-Ponty did not complete the work for us, many feminists have found that he contributes invaluable resources for thinking about embodied sexual difference.³⁷ Their excellent work demonstrates that, while he does not address sexual difference himself, Merleau-Ponty provides some helpful theoretical groundwork for feminists to think about women’s embodied experience in its particularity.

The second major concern of Merleau-Ponty’s feminist detractors is that he eliminates alterity. Unlike Irigaray, Merleau-Ponty does not found all difference in sexual difference. For this reason, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy could never satisfy her. However, reading Merleau-Ponty on his own terms, I think it is clear that Irigaray and his other critics underestimate the importance of alterity to his philosophy. As I have explained, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intersubjectivity is ambiguous: I overlap with others and yet remain distinct. It is precisely because the two (or more) views that come together are different that they add greater depth to the world; the solitary individual, were such a creature even possible, would perceive a flattened world in which objects have no backside. Although there is a prereflective sense of unity with others and the world, an écart between perceiver and perceived and between self and other remains a necessary aspect of these relations. The world’s depth is a consequence of there always being an inaccessible aspect to people and things that can be perceived by others while remaining (at least temporarily) invisible to me.

Irigaray claims that for Merleau-Ponty the subject sees the whole, but this is not true to his account. The prereflective experience of continuity does not deny the fact of alienation. He writes: “Reversibility between oneself and the world is never wholly complete: “reversibility [is] always imminent and never realized in fact. . . . I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization” (The Visible 147). Even as we are in and of the world, the world still escapes us, and for this reason he would agree with her claim that there is irreversibility at the heart of reversibility. Reversibility never achieves complete or harmonious unity.

In “Vision, Mirror, and Expression: The Genesis of the Ethical Body in Merleau-Ponty’s Later Works,” Alia Al-Saji makes a similar claim about reversibility. She explains that a difference remains between hands when one touches another. This is true whether or not it is my two hands touching each other or my hand touching another person’s hand. “In Merleau-Ponty’s account, there is some slight difference (écart) between two bodies that resists the cycle of totalizing vision, a singularity that cannot be incorporated into it. For my hand and that of the other remain distinct, as do my two hands that touch.38 Al-Saji would agree with Stawarska that the relationship to one’s own body is distinct from that of the relationship to another’s body. However, Al-Saji thinks that Merleau-Ponty also agrees with them that an écart exists in both cases, but that one relationship is not reducible to the other. I would argue, and I think Al-Saji would agree, that the case of my hand touching my other hand is not meant to be paradigmatic of all relations of reversibility. Rather, my self-touching is analogous to my touching another. To say that they are analogous is to say that there is both similarity and difference between these two cases.

There is more noteworthy support in secondary literature for my claim that alterity is a vital element of the Merleau-Pontian universe. In “Écart: The Space of Corporeal Difference,” Gail Weiss describes écart as “a space of noncoincidence that resists articulation”—at the heart of our relations.³⁹ She agrees that Irigaray does not realize how foundational écart is for Merleau-Ponty. Weiss describes its role in his philosophy as follows: “Écart, as the moment of disincorporation that makes all forms of corporeal differentiation possible, is also precisely what allows us to establish boundaries between bodies, boundaries that must be respected in order to respect the agencies that flow from them. From a Merleau-Pontian perspective, these boundaries can best be respected by not artificially viewing bodies as isolated from one another but by acknowledging the reversible relationships that are exhibited within and across them.”40 Interestingly, Weiss turns Irigaray’s criticism back upon itself and says that one could accuse her of ignoring nonreversible difference between the mother and fetus: “It is also possible to take Irigaray to task for offering an idealized account of intrauterine existence characterized by fluid interactions between mother and fetus, in which each resonates, aggressively as well as lovingly, to the movements and demands of the other (the same could be said of her depiction of female sexuality).”⁴¹ According to Weiss, it is Irigaray who presents us with a closed system, not Merleau-Ponty, leaving no central role for others in the mother-child relationship. Weiss insists that it is always mediated by others. I will make this case more strongly in chapter 6, but for now I will say that social support, or its lack, can make a dramatic difference in the woman’s attitude toward the fetus.

In “Grounding Agency in Depth: The Implications of Merleau-Ponty’s Thought for the Politics of Feminism,” Helen Fielding also insists that écart is critical to Merleau-Ponty: “In my contact with others there is a coming close, a contact with the more determinate qualities, but this is accompanied by a spreading and a fading away of our backgrounds, our pasts and our futures. Others always remain distant from me in their own depth.”⁴² She reaffirms this view again in “Envisioning the Other: Lacan and Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity” and adds that the écart between people parallels the écart between different senses.

In Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of reversibility, there could never be a fusing together of sensibilities but nor is there an absolute isolation from others. Rather, our relations with others involves a reciprocity and mirroring that demand not a possession of the other but a dispossession (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 266). Although there is a “surface of separation” between self and the other, this is also the place where people come together—it is the “geometrical locus of the projections and introjections.” The negativity to which they both refer is, then, for Merleau-Ponty, the hinge or the écart that separates the senses, that allows our lives to “rock into one another” while remaining distinct (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, 234).43

Fielding argues that for Merleau-Ponty, in regards to both the senses and other human beings, there is neither fusion with nor isolation from the other. In both perception and human interactions, there is a “surface of separation” that makes both distance and proximity possible. Indeed, the depth of the other is witnessed precisely in her distance, just as the thickness of things only becomes apparent when held at a distance from the eyes.

Although there are significant disparities of interpretation in the secondary literature on Merleau-Ponty, on the issue of alterity there is primarily a difference in emphasis. That is, while some scholars concentrate on Merleau-Ponty’s overcoming of dichotomy and theory of connection between self and other, others focus on the écart between self and other. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy demonstrates that both these aspects are vital; both alterity and interconnection are characteristic of self-other relations. Understanding this requires a speculative moment in the Hegelian sense. That is, both alterity and interconnection describe a way of relating one term to another, but we need to understand the relationship between these two relationships—the relationship between alterity and interconnection. It is important to look at the logic at work in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in order then to address how the mother can be understood as flesh in a nonreductive manner.

THE LOGIC OF THE FLESH

Merleau-Ponty presents us with a view of human relations that may seem paradoxical.⁴⁴ On one hand, the other appears to me as a pattern of behavior, publicly observable in a world that we share. Yet, she also remains inaccessible to me, perceiving the world in unique and surprising ways. This seeming contradiction begins with his early work. For example, in the Phenomenology of Perception, he declares, “But this alien life, like mine with which it is in communication, is an open life” (412). How can an alien life be like mine? How can another be both open to me and alien? How can one communicate with an alien? To this, Merleau-Ponty answers, “Solitude and communication cannot be the two horns of a dilemma, but two ‘moments’ of one phenomenon, since in fact other people do exist for me” (418). In these passages Merleau-Ponty’s thinking and language are distinctly Hegelian. He asks us not only to take opposing terms together: intimacy and alienation, similarity and difference, community and individuality, and so on, but he also asks us to think about the relationship between these “moments.” For Merleau-Ponty such oppositions reveal the immanent logic of human experience. In this section I will show the textual evidence that Merleau-Ponty employs Hegel’s logic in his thinking of ambiguity. Clarifying how these principles work will help address feminist concerns and further illuminate the ambiguous intersubjectivity of mother and child.

According to Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Hegel’s Existentialism,” in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel proposes “to reveal the immanent logic of human experience in all its sectors. . . . Experience here no longer simply means our entirely contemplative contact with the world as it did in Kant; the word reassumes the tragic resonance it has in ordinary language when a man speaks of what he has lived through. It is no longer a laboratory test but is a trial of life.”45 According to Merleau-Ponty, Hegelian logic is not arbitrary or abstract, but comprehends the challenges of human existence: “We will not admit a preconstituted world, a logic, except for having seen them arise from our experience of brute being, which is as it were the umbilical cord of our knowledge and the source of meaning for us” (The Visible 157).

Merleau-Ponty judges as bad dialectic a logic that imposes its own laws upon the ineluctable (The Visible 94). Here Merleau-Ponty may be referring to “the late Hegel, who treated history as the visible development of a logical system. . . . But if the Hegel of 1827 may be criticized for his idealism, the same cannot be said of the Hegel of 1807.”⁴⁶ He might also be referring to that flimsy oversimplification of Hegel’s logic which describes it as a process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis (terms that Hegel does not use), assumed to be applicable to any dichotomy.47 As I will indicate, he could be describing Sartre’s appropriation of the master-slave dialectic. To better understand what Merleau-Ponty means by good and bad dialectic, we will look to the mature (though abbreviated) formulation of Hegel’s logic, The Encyclopedia Logic.

In the Logic, Hegel declares that thinking is not subject to a preconceived set of formal laws but its own self-given laws and determinations, the preconstituted logic that Merleau-Ponty also eschews. Hegel does not believe that one can make whatever connections they see fit between one thought and another and call it logic. For Hegel, such a thinker takes the reins from thought itself. He believes that the thinker must humbly follow where thought leads; conducting what is essentially a phenomenology of thinking. As we will see in more detail, these determinations and laws—the Logic—arise as thought reflects upon itself; the Logic is conceived by thinking as thinking conceives of itself. The three moments of the logical are the side of abstraction or of the understanding, the dialectical or negatively rational side, and the speculative or positively rational one.⁴⁸ Note that these are the actual terms used by Hegel in the Logic, not the shorthand terms of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis critiqued by Merleau-Ponty.

Understanding helps one make the straightforward determination between what a thing is and what it is not. This moment of thinking is necessary and helpful to the practical sphere and includes such particular realizations as “This is a chair, not a table.” It allows us to form universal categories, as in “All chairs are objects that are made for sitting upon.” The understanding also enables us to make distinctions and to identify, for example, elements of a theory—matter, color, magnitude, etc. Hegel also affirms that ordinary understanding has many useful functions: it allows us to focus our interests, to choose a profession, to make judgments (as in jurisprudence), to distinguish between the duties of a government’s branches, to make decisions, to stay on topic, and to think in a linear fashion. Without the understanding we could not distinguish one thing from another, determine a preference, devise a theory, or carry on practical business of all sorts. In short, the understanding is what enables us to be reasonable in the everyday sense of the word. “It should not be absent, and . . . to the degree that it is absent, its absence must be considered a defect” (127).

Nevertheless, Hegel insists that thinking must go further. This is not meant as a moral imperative for the thinker. Rather, this means that the understanding is thinking in its most stilted form and quickly reveals itself as such. Ordinary understanding is merely one-sided; it is not the whole truth, but only one moment of it. Since the understanding is only one-sided, the abstractions of the understanding will turn into their opposite. This is when we encounter the dialectical moment—“the self-sublation of these finite determinations on their own part, and their passing into their opposites” (128).

The dialectical moment is when we find that the one-sided determination of the understanding is insufficient. In this moment it becomes apparent that while a thing is what it is, it also is what it is not. Consider this classic example: the oracle at Delphi stated that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens. According to Plato, Socrates stated that he did not understand how this could be, since he knew nothing at all. After some dialogue and thought, Socrates believed that the oracle must have considered him wise because Socrates was aware of his own ignorance. Ordinary understanding would indicate that either Socrates is wise or he is not. However, this rigid way of thinking does little to reveal the true nature of Socrates’ wisdom. In fact, and as the dialectical moment would have it, Socrates is both wise and ignorant at the same time. Furthermore, Socrates could not be wise were he not also ignorant. Here we see that wisdom also includes ignorance and vice versa; the two cannot be considered mutually exclusive.

One might say that, according to the dialectical moment, one thing can never be distinguished from another. Hegel anticipates this unfortunate interpretation: “The dialectical moment, taken separately on its own by the understanding, constitutes skepticism [simply that one doubts what others take to be true]. . . . Dialectic is usually considered as an external art, which arbitrarily produces a confusion and a mere semblance of contradictions in determinate concepts” (128). In ordinary understanding one thing is often explained in opposition to what it is not—its negative. But for Hegel, negation is the movement when one thing becomes its opposite. Nevertheless, the two do not collapse into one another. In the dialectical moment, both difference and sameness must be admitted. In this sameness the two do not become equivalent, rather their intimate relationship is revealed. We can already see here much in common with Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of intersubjectivity.

The dialectical is not superior, or opposed, to the understanding. Rather the two are meant to be taken together. “The dialectic is the genuine nature that properly belongs to the determinations of the understanding, to things, and to the finite in general” (128). Thus the dialectical moment does not raze the understanding. Rather there is an ambivalent toggling back and forth between one thought (Socrates is wise) and its negation (Socrates is ignorant) in order to have a better understanding of both (wisdom embraces ignorance, ignorance can indicate wisdom). Clearly this is an unsteady state, and the Logic does not rest in the dialectical moment. However, in order to better understand the impetus to move beyond the dialectical we must consider one of the Logic’s actual thought determinations.

Hegel’s Logic begins with pure being. “Pure being makes the beginning, because it is pure thought as well as the undetermined” (136). Without presupposing too much, the most that can be said about thought in the beginning is that it is. To comprehend what we mean when we say that thought is, we must know what is meant by the is itself. In order to understand thought, therefore, we must understand being. Since we are concerned with thought itself, pure being must not be considered a representation of anything else. In other words, pure being must not refer to what is, but to the is itself. This is why, at this moment, we speak of being as pure being. Pure being exists only in the moment of understanding. As Hegel states above, it is totally undetermined—it has, as yet, no other, no relation to any dialectical opposite. For these same reasons, pure being is the most abstract thought in the Logic. It is being in its initial one-sided determination.

In trying to understand pure being, it quickly becomes apparent that pure being is so abstract that it is, in fact, nothing at all. Since pure being has no actual content, when one thinks of pure being one thinks of nothing. “The true situation is that being as such is not firm and ultimate, but rather something that overturns dialectically into its opposite—which, taken in the same immediate way, is nothing. . . . This pure being is the pure abstraction, and hence it is the absolutely negative, which when taken immediately is nothing” (139). Nevertheless, thinking of nothingis still not not-thinking. Nothing is that of which one thinks. The being of nothingis indicated in the thought of nothing. Thus, when we think of nothing, we have continued to think of pure being. At this point, we are left moving between the two thoughts “pure being is nothing,” and “nothing is pure being.”

We seem to be left in limbo—unable to proceed and unable to go back. Still, one can strain too much in trying to distinguish pure being from nothing. Hegel predicts our inclination to move beyond these abstractions and explains that this is a force behind the progression of the logic: “All that really matters here is consciousness about these beginnings: that they are nothing but these empty abstractions, and that each of them is as empty as the other; the drive to find in being and in both [being and nothing] a stable meaning is this very necessity, which leads being and nothing further along and endows them with a true, i.e., concrete meaning” (140). The fact that being and nothing are difficult to distinguish is precisely that which we ought to observe. We are not meant to simply think “being and nothing,” but to reflect upon the process of thinking them. Each one vanishes into its opposite. As we think being, it becomes nothing. As we think nothing, it becomes being. It is the particular relation between being and nothing that is now worthy of note—this is a relationship of becoming. “As their unity, becoming is the truest expression of the result of being and nothing; it is not just the unity of being and nothing, but its inward unrest—a unity which in its self-relation is not simply motionless, but which, in virtue of the diversity of being and nothing which it contains, is inwardly turned against itself” (143). The moment in which becoming is discovered is the speculative moment. As Hegel explains, the nature of the speculative moment is a sustained unrest. It is neither anxious, like the ambivalence of the understanding and the dialectic, nor is it static, like remaining in either ordinary understanding or the skeptical. “The speculatively or positively rational apprehends the unity of the determinations in their opposition, the affirmative that is contained in their dissolution and in their transition” (131). In the speculative moment, the opposition between the understanding and the dialectical becomes a totality.

We can see why this moment is called speculative, because it is the moment when we take a step back from thinking and reflect upon it. We cannot just think it through, but must also think it over. This is how movement is gained in the Logic. It is how we come to understand how thought proceeds and it is the most truly philosophical moment of the Logic: “But it is one thing to have feelings and representations that are determined and permeated by thinking, and another to have thoughts about them. The thoughts about these modes of consciousness—generated by thinking them over—are what reflection, argumentation, and the like, as well as philosophy are comprehended under” (25). In the Logic, thought is its own nourishment. “But what we have here is the free act of thinking putting itself at the standpoint where it is for its own self, producing its own object for itself thereby, and giving it to itself. . . . Philosophy shows itself as a circle that goes back into itself” (141). For Hegel, speculative philosophy does not simply mean to contemplate one’s reflection, but to catch one’s reflection contemplating itself. In philosophy, for Hegel, thought comes to self-knowledge simultaneously as it comes into being (becomes).

Bad dialectic, for both Merleau-Ponty and Hegel, rests in the negative moment; it “ends up at cynicism at formalism, for having eluded its own double meaning” (The Visible 94). The cynic or skeptic as described in the Phenomenology of Spirit experiences a false sense of freedom which arises from a sense of division from the object: “What skepticism causes to vanish is not only objective reality as such, but its own relationship to it.”49 The skeptic actively negates the possibility of objective reality; she is in control of what qualifies as truth, and the only truth she recognizes is the power of her own negation. Thus the skeptical is merely the negative dialectical moment. The speculative moment in Hegel’s logic goes beyond this to what Merleau-Ponty refers to as good or hyper dialectic. He writes: “The bad dialectic begins almost with the dialectic, and there is no good dialectic but that which criticizes itself and surpasses itself as a separate statement; the only good dialectic is the hyperdialectic. . . . What we call hyperdialecitc is a thought that on the contrary is capable of reaching truth because it envisages without restriction the plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity” (The Visible 94). Ironically, bad dialectic is a moment within good dialectic. It is a one-sided negation, a short-sighted ambivalence. Hyperdialectic observes this ambivalence and sees the truth in the relation between terms—neither being nor nothingness, but becoming. The result is an ambiguous and complex manifold; a relation that should not be reified.

The association of Merleau-Ponty with Hegel will not be sufficient for most readers to overcome the charge that Merleau-Ponty eliminates alterity; Hegel has been frequently and famously critiqued on this point. Gilles Deleuze, for instance, argues that Hegel subsumes difference to identity.50 Similarly, William Desmond claims that Hegel subsumes the other within the greater whole.⁵¹ However, other scholars defend Hegel on the grounds that speculative logic is about the relationship between opposites, which makes no sense if there is no real difference between them.⁵² For example, in “Identity, Difference, and the Logic of Otherness,” William Maker writes that the “view of Hegel’s system as an intolerant omnivore . . . suffers from one defect. It is wrong.”⁵³ As I have argued, my reading of Hegel is consistent with this more recent scholarship that “not the elimination but the proliferation of difference is the heart of Hegel’s system.”⁵⁴ In my view, Merleau-Ponty and Hegel privilege neither identity nor difference. Both Aufhebung and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of ambiguity highlight the relation between opposites, a relation that disappears if they are merely synthesized.

Like Hegel, Merleau-Ponty fetishizes neither identity nor difference. For the purposes of this book, it is most relevant to see how speculative logic is at work in his account of intersubjectivity. This also provides the opportunity to review some of the characterizations of intersubjectivity presented in the previous chapters of this book and their relation to Merleau-Ponty’s notion.

The first movement of the logic, the understanding, dictates that the self = the self. Antonio Damasio’s principle of the singularity of self (“one body goes with one self”) exemplifies this type of thinking.⁵⁵ Recall, from chapter 3, in The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio argues that “things are [either] in or out of you” and that for each body there is no more than one person.⁵⁶ Of course, Damasio is not entirely wrong. This understanding is true, necessary, and practical. It is important that one not continually confuse oneself with others, not to live in a diffuse fusion with the world as Merleau-Ponty claims the infant does. If one goes to the doctor, one needn’t bring one’s entire family. But this characterization of the self is incomplete. It raises problems of egoism, solipsism, and narcissism. It invites the question: why be ethical? It does not recognize the contributions of others to my own existence or how integral they are to who I am. As Irigaray and Kristeva have argued, it is also a forgetting of the maternal and of nature.

The second moment is the dialectical, when the first determination is revealed as insufficient. In chapter 3 maternal experience was shown to contradict Damasio’s first principle. In pregnancy, breast-feeding, and beyond to relationships with older and adopted children, maternal subjectivity is not simply singular. Care ethicists also argue that individualist notions of the self stand in stark denial of the mother-child relationship, of the fact that our existence is dependent on others before we can even entertain the possibility of individuality. In this moment it becomes apparent that while a mother is who she is, she also is who she is not; the self = the other.

There is truth to this view, as Levinas’s characterization of epiphenomenal subjectivity demonstrates. The maternal metaphor helps him clarify how subjectivity can be understood as “an irreplaceable hostage”; how as ethical beings we are captivated by the needs of others.⁵⁷ In his respect, Levinas accurately (though inadvertently) characterizes the experience of maternal ambivalence: the way a mother often experiences her child as a monstrous Other who keeps her captive, threatens her body, eats away at her vitality, upsets her sense of self, invades her home, and commandeers her life. Levinas explains how when subjectivity seeks internal self-coherence it seeks the understanding that the self = the self, but this attempted self-satisfaction will inevitably be foiled (except perhaps in the case of a sociopath) by the intrusion of the Other. As there is no unity with oneself, there is also no union to be found with the other. For Levinas, our relations are fundamentally asymmetrical, the Other is held high above the self. Thus, in his account, proximity and alterity form an irresolvable ambivalence, “not a dialectical unity of unity and difference.”58 Though Levinas seeks to provide the conditions for the possibility of ethics, he effectively demonstrates why one would vacillate between wanting to destroy or nurture the other.

Levinas is an example of how one can become stuck in the dialectical by failing to take the speculative view. Unfortunately, he understands the third movement of Hegel’s Logic in its simplified form, as synthesis, and claims that “dialectical unity” is a mere exercise of reason.⁵⁹ Unlike Merleau-Ponty, who sees the immanent logic of human experience at work in (early) Hegel, Levinas believes that the relation to the Other precedes and defies reason. In elevating the Other above the self, Levinas institutes a perverse and tormenting infinite responsibility that devastates women’s actual abilities to care for their children, undermining the very ethics he would establish.

The dialectical movement is an overcorrection; “the philosophy of the negative bypasses the goal” (The Visible 88). No mere synthesis would correct this course. This is evidenced in Sartre’s partial appropriation of Hegel in Being and Nothingness. When Sartre attempts to bring self and other together, intersubjectivity becomes an eternal conflict. In the encounter with the other, I am objectified. Without the other’s existence I could never conceive myself from an outside perspective. Yet the other’s look leaves me feeling judged, defenseless, enslaved, endangered, fixed, and irredeemable. “Fear is . . . the discovery of my being-as-object on the occasion of the appearance of another in my perceptive field.”⁶⁰ Thus, with the other’s look, a world that was once mine now escapes me and I must instead take responsibility for the stranger that I have become to myself. Sartre then adds that in order to cope with this situation and free myself from being objectified, I objectify the other in response. For, by objectifying or negating the other, her negation of me is no longer central to my experience. In Being and Nothingness intersubjectivity is reciprocal negation. Adding the negation of the other to one’s own negation becomes an eternal power struggle. Sartre provides no way of moving forward from this difficulty. Like Levinas, Sartre neglects the speculative moment in Being and Nothingness.61

Merleau-Ponty critiques this “philosophy of negativity” in the chapter “Interrogation and Dialectic” from The Visible and the Invisible. He addresses Sartre directly in this passage:

Whence comes this uneasiness that a philosophy of the negative leaves: it described our factual situation with more penetration than had ever before been done—and yet one retains the impression that this situation is one that is being surveyed from above, and indeed it is: the more one describes experience as a compound of being and nothingness, the more their absolute distinction is confirmed; the more the thought adheres to experience, the more it keeps it at a distance. Such is the sorcery of the thought of the negative.

(187)

Philosophy of negativity is ambivalent, unable to integrate multiple meanings (The Visible 91), ignorant of “where the two moments cross, there where ‘there is’ something” (95). In contrast, Merleau-Ponty’s (and Hegel’s) logic demonstrates that two seemingly contradictory aspects of human relations can be taken together; both alterity and interconnection are characteristic of self-other relations. Solitude and communication are two moments of one phenomenon—ambiguous intersubjectivity. As in perception, a mother can temporarily lose herself in visceral and ecstatic relation to her child. Yet, even as “we become the others,” irreversibility remains (The Visible 160). Every intimacy is also a slipping away.

We can see this “immanent logic of human existence” in the lives of mothers. Mothers are strikingly aware of their distinction from their children; this is the point of view of the understanding. The mother has her own needs for sleep, food, work, and play, which are frequently interrupted by her child. In some cases women are able to find time for themselves and negotiate healthy boundaries between themselves and their children.

Nevertheless, women recognize that meeting their own needs is more complex than simply seeking space from their children. This is the dialectical moment. Just as Socrates is both ignorant and wise, the mother is both more and less than one. If she feels an investment in her child’s well-being, then her own desires often feel directed against herself when they are in opposition to her child’s needs and wishes. At these moments a woman can feel most displaced by motherhood, as she simultaneously loses and finds herself in relation to her child. This is the negative moment, the bad dialectic, when one can become trapped in ambivalence, torn between one’s own needs and the needs of a beloved child. It can persist in the form of Sartrean-style struggle for dominance or Levinasian-style maternal self-sacrifice.

But this is not the end of it. Mothers too entertain a speculative moment, a stepping back to reflect on the contradictions inherent to the relationship. In chapter 3 we saw examples of the speculative moment in art, poetry, and philosophy. Mierle Laderman Ukele’s performance piece “Some Kinds of Maintenance Cancel Others Out, Keep Your Head Together—1,000 Times, or Babysitter Hangup—Incantation Ritual,” is an excellent example. As a part of this performance Ukele calls the babysitter a total of one thousand times to ask if her children are OK. Ukele’s piece is not just a synthesis of her art and mothering, it is a simultaneous reflection on and enactment of the tensions in the ambiguity of her relationship with her children and her own ambivalent Befindlichkeit. Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater” is another brilliant example, where the author’s poetic description of motherhood continually interrupts her scholarly writing on the topic. Creative work by mothers on motherhood enacts the simultaneous immersion within the mothering relation and the reflective distance needed from it.

The speculative moment is at once a preservation of contradictions and a transformation of them into something more useful and true. Indeed, this reflective distance can help to realize the creative force of maternal ambivalence. The ability to think through ambivalence and ambiguity seem to make all the difference in whether or not a mother’s rage can be checked. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty argues that we must have an understanding and acceptance of ambiguity in order to deal with emotional ambivalence. In “The Child’s Relations with Others,” Merleau-Ponty writes:

In sum, the subjects who carry within themselves extremely strong conflicts are precisely those who reject, in their views of external things, the admission that there are particular situations that are ambiguous, full of conflicts, and mixed in value. This occurs in such a way that one can say that a very strong emotional ambivalence shows up, at the level of understanding or perception, as a very weak ambiguity in the things and in his view of things. Emotional ambivalence is what demands the denial of intellectual ambiguity. In subjects whose intellectual ambiguity is strong it often happens that the emotional foundation is much more stable than in other subjects.62

An understanding of ambiguity is necessary to emotional maturity and entertaining the speculative moment can be one method of coming to this realization and dealing with maternal ambivalence. This reinforces my earlier claim that when reflection is possible a woman can better understand herself and her actual child; a purely emotive response will be insufficient. Maternal thinking is the vehicle through which mothers can negotiate the contradictions of their relationship, recognition of both union and radical divergence. Hegel’s logic helps to clarify how the ambivalence engendered by the dialectic between mother and child is not overcome through a synthesis that would be an ossification. Its tension cannot be resolved, but it can become productive insofar as it reveals our fundamental ambiguity.

Accusations that Merleau-Ponty denies maternal subjectivity are based on one-sided readings that overemphasize continuity over alterity. The concept of the flesh neither eliminates individual subjectivity nor declares an easy unity with the world and with others. A key dialectic of the body is the dehiscence between subject and object, the outcome of which is not an either/or but a both/and. Yet the “constitutive paradox” remains (The Visible 136). “The body is a being of two leaves” (The Visible 137). This “double reference” informs us “that each one calls for the other” (137). As the subject and object call for one another, likewise the baby calls for the breast and the breast calls for the baby. These two aspects do not dissolve into one another; they work in concert. The body, both sensed and sentient, is “two segments of one sole circular course which goes above from left to right and below from right to left, but which has one sole movement in two phases” (138). Merleau-Ponty points to this circularity of dialectical relations between organism and environment as early as The Structure of Behavior.63

This dialectic of dehiscence is especially evident in the embodied and intersubjective lives of mothers, where the child is both a subject and object to the mother. There is no reason to think that even in prenatal life there is pure unity. Every cell is created through its own division. Likewise, the human being comes to exist through splitting and dividing. Childbirth is itself a form of dehiscence. The body is “born of segregation” from the flesh of the world and from the flesh of a woman (The Visible 136). This ambiguity, complementarity, and divergence persists: “Eight years in, I can’t always tell the difference between my children’s needs and my own. . . . The needs of our children and our world and our selves merge and divide and merge again, until sometimes you can’t tell one strand from another.”⁶⁴ Even for the mother whose child has died, the dialectic is not resolved. She loses a piece of herself, one of her own vital organs.⁶⁵ Contrary to critics such as Irigaray, the dehiscence of motherhood is consistent with the orientation of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy.

Merleau-Ponty’s logic also addresses the criticism that he equates the mother with nature. He argues that all human beings are natural beings. We are embodied creatures who cannot escape the needs for clean air, water, and food. We were gestated within another, feeding, breathing, and excreting through her body. These bodies will someday return to inert matter; they will become food for other creatures or be burned to ashes and smoke. Merleau-Ponty describes this aspect of our relation to nature as anonymous because it is not the result of my own volition or reflection. Yet this prereflective life describes only half of our relation to nature; we are also alienated from it. This alienation is evidenced in our ignorance of our intimacy with it. We do not always recognize that which is personal, unique, and deliberate, founded in a prereflective nonvolitional body. We pollute our soil, water, and air. We struggle through science and philosophy to understand nature as though it were a stranger. Indeed, we are never completely able to thematize nature or our relation to it; it is irreducible to our attempts to know it. Our relation to nature is ambiguous because it exceeds us, yet it is us.

The mother’s place in nature, like all human beings, is also ambiguous. Yet her ties to embodied existence are especially difficult to ignore. As one mother said regarding her pregnancy and delivery: “It was the most intensely physical experience I had ever gone through. For a long time I was totally reduced to my ‘body.’”66 In the case of a biological mother, her immersion in bodily nature becomes acutely obvious because of a combination of bodily changes and social context. Consider breast-feeding. When a woman breast-feeds, she experiences an additional bodily process, one that is not shared by the majority, considered disgusting by many people, and inadequately accommodated by society.⁶⁷ The production of breast milk depends on its expression, either by the baby, by hand, or by a breast pump. If the milk is not expressed at regular intervals, not only does its supply diminish, but it causes leaking, painful engorgement of the breasts, and mastitis (breast infection). The expression of milk, including direct breast-feeding, cannot be done just anywhere. It is unsanitary to express milk or breast-feed in a restroom (you would not consider eating your lunch there), and women who breast-feed in the open risk exclamations of outrage, looks of disgust, and charges of indecency.⁶⁸ Unless a woman can afford the four-hundred-dollar-hand-free breast pump, expressing her milk necessarily entails an interruption of whatever else she is doing for at least twenty minutes, approximately every three hours (depending on the age and needs of the child). The breast-feeding mother may rightfully find her personal existence overwhelmed by the demands of nature and the limitations of society.

If you have never breast-fed it may be difficult to identify with this example. Compare it to an imaginary scenario in which you are one of only a few people who needs to urinate. It is a bodily process that you must attend to periodically or suffer embarrassing leaks, pain, and risks to your health. Since the majority of people do not urinate, most public places have no place for you to do it. Obviously, you cannot just urinate anywhere or you risk arrest and the revulsion of others. Now imagine that it takes at least twenty minutes for you to urinate, and it can take a total of approximately eight hours per day (as breast-feeding a newborn can). Anyone suffering these conditions would find himself newly “submerged in nature” and isolated in the home. Not only would one be spending a considerable amount of time attending to one’s body, it would limit one’s ability to engage in activities outside the home or a few urinating-friendly locations. Since it takes up so much time and can only be done in certain locations, it would interrupt one’s usual activities, work, and social life. One could come to feel that one’s life was devoted to merely caring for the body, in the private realm, not participating in public meaning-making activities.

Of course, we need not refer to this imaginary scenario to understand the situation of the breast-feeding woman. Consider the person in a wheelchair trying to get into a building that has stairs at every access point. Think of the person with a mental disability whose only access to income requires filling out complicated forms. In each of these cases, society neglects to consider the brute facts of an individual’s life. This lack of accommodation means that the individual’s difference becomes a grave disability. A person in such a situation may feel herself trapped in an unforgiving body, punished by nature, but in fact human beings built the stairs and designed the bureaucratic forms. Societal practices impinge on the body and are at least partially responsible for disabling many people.

It is not only the breast-feeding or pregnant mother who finds herself subject to her body/nature. The mother of older children may also be acutely aware of her embodiment. Her ability to meet her own needs for sleep, nourishment, and exercise can greatly impact her ability to interact with her children positively.69 This, of course, is not always a negative change. As Kate Moses describes it in chapter 3, having children can retrieve one’s living relation to the body, transforming it from one of domination to cooperation.⁷⁰

Even to the extent that motherhood is “natural,” this does not exclude it from human significance, reflection, and resistance to “biological destiny.” As the above examples illustrate, mothers can justifiably find themselves at odds with their bodies, especially when societal practices exacerbate their physical needs and limitations. This is a key factor in maternal ambivalence. Merleau-Ponty himself acknowledges this difficulty in his lectures on child psychology and pedagogy. In the lecture titled “The Adult’s View of the Child,” Merleau-Ponty describes ambivalence in pregnancy:

[The pregnant woman] feels her own body to be alienated from her; it is no longer the simple extension of her own activity. Her body ceases to be entirely hers; it is systematically inhabited by another being. Her body will shortly bring another consciousness to the world. Her own pregnancy is not an act like others she accomplishes with her body. Pregnancy is more an anonymous process which happens through her and of which she is only the seat. . . . In addition, pregnancy is accompanied by all sorts of anxieties, worries, and ambivalent feelings. The woman’s sentiments regarding her pregnancy are always mixed sentiments, since there is always a latent conflict between her personal life and the invasion of what could well be called the species-life.71

In this passage Merleau-Ponty acknowledges the bodily burden of the pregnant woman, but does not equate her with nature. On the contrary, her sense of alienation is heightened by the “invasion of . . . species-life.” Even while she is the “seat” of a process that she cannot control (short of having an abortion), she remains an individual who can reflect on and object to her own role in nature or “species-life.” Yet Merleau-Ponty argues that human interrogations of nature are another instance of nature’s dehiscence, that nature is necessarily divided within and against itself. Thus even this resistance to species life does not sever the mother from nature.

To say that the maternal is a place of fleshly dehiscence is not to turn the female reproductive role into an ontological principle. The maternal body is one place where the physical and metaphysical, and the human and nature, immanence and transcendence intersect. It is true that the maternal body and mothering person is the first world of the fetus and the infant. And it may also be true that the fetus, infant, and young child live in a sense of union with the mother or other primary caregivers. But this does not mean that the mother is or experiences herself as undifferentiated flesh. Merleau-Ponty directly denies any simple fusion between pregnant mother and embryo in The Visible and the Invisible: “The vortex of the embryogenesis suddenly centers itself upon the interior hollow it was preparing—a certain fundamental divergence, a certain constitutive dissonance emerges” (233–234).72 If the maternal body is to be thought of as flesh, then the child comes to be through a process of self-othering, a radical divergence in which the terms self and other are not, themselves, mutually exclusive. This relation overcomes the bad dialectic of self versus other and of being and nothingness. As there is no simple unity here, there also is no harmony without “constitutive dissonance.”

MERLEAU-PONTY’S ETHICS (IMPLIED OR INFERRED)

Some Merleau-Ponty scholars have inferred an ethics from his philosophy and believe that, although he does not directly prescribe rules of behavior, he makes ethics philosophically possible and psychologically explicable. In secondary literature we can again see the difference in emphasis between those who see alterity as most critical and those who stress commonality.

Numerous scholars agree that by upsetting the distinction between self and other Merleau-Ponty undercuts the egoism/altruism dichotomy and opens new possibilities for thinking about ethics. In “Vision, Violence, and the Other: A Merleau-Pontian Ethics,” Jorella Andrews makes this case: “First, then, a truly ethical situation for Merleau-Ponty can only emerge when participants understand that they are internally related to each other in ways that are as yet indeterminate, and that they are profoundly together in their respective differences.”⁷³ Similarly, in “The Foundations of Merleau-Ponty’s Ethical Theory,” Douglas Low declares that connection makes ethics possible, “[Ethics] involves recognizing the other as a being like oneself, who can experience and suffer like oneself. There is here an empathy, and identification with the other, an overlapping of ego boundaries to include others.”⁷⁴ In “Sociobiological and Social Constructionist Accounts of Altruism: A Phenomenological Critique,” Edwin Gantt and Jeffrey Reber claim that in describing human beings as fundamentally interconnected, “always already being-for-the-other,”75 Merleau-Ponty undermines the assumption of humans beings as disparate egos that are at base selfishly motivated—an assumption that renders ethics impossible.

In “Responsivity of the Body: Traces of the Other in Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Body and Flesh,” Bernhard Waldenfels makes a similar but more subtle argument that there is a proto-ethics in the human’s responsiveness to and primordial unity with the world. He writes: “Stretching throughout the work of Merleau-Ponty like a red thread is what I call the motif of responsivity (or answerability) . . . between the organism and its world.”⁷⁶ According to Waldenfels, since Merleau-Ponty’s “subject” is constituted in terms of its responsiveness to its environment, the “alien” is thus fundamentally constitutive of the “self.” Waldenfels claims that this responsiveness goes beyond that notion of a subject seeking knowledge; it has a distinctly ethical flavor. Responsiveness is “consenting to the offers (Angebote) and demands (Ansprüche) of the other. In this expanded sense, demands have to be understood in the double sense of an ‘appeal to someone’ (Anspruch an) and a claim to something (Anspruch auf).”⁷⁷ Waldenfels claims that our relationship to the natural world and our relationships with other human beings are parallel. As our perceptual responses make us who we are, so do our responses to other people. He thinks that responsiveness eliminates the need to posit egoism and altruism as the only alternatives, by upsetting the radical distinction between oneself and the alien. The other’s demands are “intertwined with my own being . . . otherness penetrates into the heart of self-presence.”⁷⁸ “Bad ambiguity” is when otherness is subsumed to a totalizing whole, but he thinks the notions of flesh and reversibility overcome this. For Waldenfels it might be said that perceptual responsiveness is necessary but not sufficient for ethical responsibility.

These accounts prioritize connection for a viable theory of ethics. As Waldenfels notes, even if sympathy with and responsiveness to others is necessary for ethics, it is not sufficient. The phenomenon of maternal ambivalence demonstrates that the desire to commit violence can occur even when there is a feeling of sympathy and connection with the other. In fact, intense intimacy can lead to feelings of claustrophobia and thus instigate violence. Misappropriations of Merleau-Ponty that base ethics solely in a sympathetic response, do not explain why it is often a struggle to respond to others, why our actions and desires can conflict, and why we can respond to others’ needs even when we don’t want to do so.

In contrast, Alia Al-Saji claims that the possibility of a Merleau-Pontian ethics would be found in his theory of alterity:

There is no longer a mere difference of number between my body and that of the other, but a differentiation that spans the dimension of the flesh. This new dimensionality, this multiplicity of dimensions of the flesh, represents for us the concrete possibility of an ethics. It opens up between myself and the other, beyond the numerical distinction of our bodies or our two looks, all the possible differentiations that can be generated between us, and that express the singularity of each. Hence, voice, gesture and speech, as well as thoughts, are inserted between us.79

According to Al-Saji, our differences are discovered through our expressions. The immediacy of the other’s anger, for example, does not simply unite us to one another; it demonstrates a division. It makes the other before me a particular other. If we inhabited an undifferentiated group life, I would necessarily be angry as well, and the anger of one would be the same as the anger of another. But my responses to an expression of anger will vary; I can be sad, reasonable, indifferent or terrified, and this will depend on the particular person who is angry with me. This communication between us is also a divergence. This recognition of difference means that our vision is not hegemonic “that vision can become part of ethics.”⁸⁰

Similarly, in “‘All Things Considered’: Sensibility and Ethics in the Later Merleau-Ponty and Derrida,” Ann Murphy says that Merleau-Ponty’s account of sensibility provides an opening for ethics—“it is an elaboration of embodiment that provokes the question of response but no definitive or prescriptive answer. Hence the structure of sensibility begs the question of ethics and the problem of response but can provide nothing by way of a normative ethics.”81 Murphy acknowledges that both violence and hospitality are possible under Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy; the opening to responsibility provides the opportunity and the compulsion to both of these options.⁸²

For each of these scholars Merleau-Ponty’s characterizations of sensibility and intersubjectivity already imply a latent Merleau-Pontian ethics. Andrews, Low, Gantt, and Reber think that he explains why human beings are not just selfishly motivated, why we can be generous. They believe that to be ethical means to be connected and to have empathy. Unfortunately, these four do not rigorously observe the is/ought distinction. They read Merleau-Ponty as describing humans in communion and then claim that we ought to be in harmony with one another. Waldenfels, AlSaji, and Murphy are more cautious in their conclusions. They do not think Merleau-Ponty ordains specific attitudes or behaviors, but rather that he opens up the possibility of ethical theory. There are some indications Merleau-Ponty intended to provide such a foundation. At the end of his posthumously published prospectus for The Visible and the Invisible, he states that to establish “good ambiguity . . . a spontaneity which gathers together the plurality of monads . . . would be metaphysics itself and would at the same time give us a principle of an ethics.”⁸³ What principle would this be? What ethics would it establish? He did not elaborate.

The overarching question of Merleau-Ponty’s work is our place in the world and our responsiveness to it. Any responsibility we do take up necessitates the ability to respond, which in Merleau-Ponty is revealed through consideration of the sensible. But does being able to respond necessarily mean that we are responsible? Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy describes our social and physical embeddedness. With this intertwining comes a vulnerability to one another. We are dependent on others for our very perception of reality. The character of our fleshly ontological condition means that we are capable of responding to others both as we interconnect and as we differ. This means that the other can be disruptive. Consider the false friend. Given that I depend on others for my sense of “objectivity” and the solidity of the world, finding out that I have been lied to by a trusted friend undermines the very reality that we have coconstituted. “The relations with the other are always complicated,”84 and ethical life is thus necessarily conflicted. We cannot take others’ or our own positive ethical response for granted. Even when our intentions are good, we may not know how to get the best result. In short, it is a fact of ethical life that we will sometimes fail to help the other and that she may fail us. Recognizing this inevitability (overlooked by Levinas) is paramount.

In his Sorbonne lectures on child development, Merleau-Ponty claims that ambivalence undergirds our conscious experience. He advocates replacing Freud’s notion of the unconscious with ambivalence: “We should prefer this notion of ambivalence, which paints perfectly all that is equivocal in certain behaviors, ‘resistances’ to treatment, in which the subject is partially complicit, attitudes of hate that are at the same time love, desires that express themselves as agony, and so forth” (73). Emotional ambivalence is the prereflective underside to intellectual ambiguity. Thus to the extent that that intersubjectivity is togetherness, this mutuality will involve love as well as hate.

Merleau-Ponty describes the mother-child relationship as a paramount instance of this ambivalence. He writes:

Evidently major troubles will arise from the manner in which [the mother] envisages her connection with the child. This connection is essentially ambivalence: the infant belongs to her, but she also belongs to him. A variety of positive and negative feelings are activated by this connection. . . . Pregnancy returns the mother with another being to the current of common life in communion. At the same time, in a negative sense, it becomes necessary to renounce many personal projects, to endure exhaustion and fear of deformation. She feels that this mysterious operation which is occurring in her puts her in danger (i.e., the symmetry between birth and death). Moreover, in this difficult situation, a situation over which she has no control, she must passively await its development. She is accompanied by all sorts of fantasies. The child is sometimes imagined to be a hero, sometimes a monster. . . . Hence, Hegel [states], “the birth of the child is the death of the parents.” The birth of the child is at the same time the fulfillment of their union as well as its transformation.

(79)

Merleau-Ponty realizes that the mother’s relationship to her child will be among the most conflicted. And it is clear that Merleau-Ponty sees a combination of natural-physical factors and cultural factors conspiring to amplify maternal ambivalence: the shared embodiment of mother and child, the physical dangers of pregnancy, the uncertainty of the child’s future, and the interruption of the mother’s personal aspirations all seem to be inevitable facts. Merleau-Ponty does not take for granted that a mother will bond to her infant once it is born. He writes: “At the same time, we must give the mother flexible time, long enough to take possession of her child, to identify with the infant, and to love him as her own. The relation between mother and child is partly a weak instinctual relation and also a human relation” (80). The woman’s socially imposed role is another critical factor: “The father’s attitude toward his children is as ambivalent as the mother’s. He identifies with the child and oscillates between domination and sacrifice. . . . However, the father’s problems with the child are much less acute than those of the mother for several reasons . . . our customs give the man a greater serenity in his conflicts with the child from the fact that he is separated from the child most of the day” (82).

Merleau-Ponty recognizes that the maternal-child relation is even more ambiguous than most relations and that the mother will be highly ambivalent in her relationship to her child. Because of her physical and psychic ties to a dependent other, her embodied existence is more difficult to ignore than average and she is more likely to feel at odds with it. Even in pregnancy, when mother and child seem most closely joined, there is “constitutive dissonance” between them. Though the mother finds herself to be a place of fleshly dehiscence, and while this can serve to undermine her personal life, it can never erase her subjectivity or her humanity. It is the flesh that makes possible both individual and social life. And maternal experience demonstrates that the ambivalence incited by our ambiguous social life can be a productive tension.

Thus far in this book we have explored different moments that characterize the phenomenon of intersubjectivity. According to the more straightforward understanding of intersubjectivity, I am me and you are you; self ≠ other. It is important to be able to distinguish oneself from others in this way. Yet maternal experience demonstrates that this understanding is only a half-truth; maternal subjectivity is not merely singular. The other side of this coin is the dialectical move made by Levinas; the self = the other. This is no simple equation, but it does mean that to the extent that there is subjectivity it is attributable to the other’s ethical appeal. This position illustrates our fundamental interconnection with others and makes our ethical being more comprehensible. For Levinas, this view affirms an infinite responsibility of the self for the other, which I argue is ultimately detrimental. Such a self-sacrificing take on ethical obligation has been especially damaging to women. The negative dialectical approach to intersubjectivity sets up an irresolvable ambivalence between self and other for either dominance (as in Sartre) or submission (as in Levinas). The negative dialectical position merely reinstates a dualism between self and other. Through taking the speculative or hyperdialectical view, Merleau-Ponty helps us to think how these apparently opposing truths can be taken as two sides of the same phenomenon. Merleau-Ponty’s logic “envisages without restriction the plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity” (The Invisible 94).

It is Merleau-Ponty who best characterizes the ambiguity of our intersubjective relations. He enables us to see how we can communicate with one another across the abyss between us. He renders moot the question “Why be ethical?’ by demonstrating that we are already intertwined with others, hence already immersed in ethical relations of some kind. What remains is to better understand one’s place in the world. This view of the human condition is precisely what Merleau-Ponty believes he has in common with Hegel. He writes, “Hegel’s thought is existentialist in that it views man not as being from the start a consciousness in full possession of its own clear thoughts but as a life which is its own responsibility and which tries to understand itself.”85 The meaning of our ethical life must follow from our orientation to our existence and to others, and this is what Merleau-Ponty helps us to understand more clearly.

Of course, being in ethical relations does not mean that we will necessarily care for one another. And it does not indicate the best course of action. Since ambivalence undergirds our relations with one another, these relations are always complicated and conflicted. Merleau-Ponty demonstrates the possibilities for both responsibility and irresponsibility. As Mauro Carbone says in “FLESH: Towards the History of a Misunderstanding”: “The stranger, as flesh of my flesh, is just because of that my brother. But my brother could well be Cain. I myself could be such. As a condition for all these possibilities, as a condition of ‘a reversibility always imminent and never realised in fact, flesh founds every possible ethics and every possible politics, that is, does not found any particular ethics or politics.”86 In “The Ineradicable Danger of Ambiguity at Ch[i]asm’s Edge,” Phillip E. Young even demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy could be co-opted by totalitarians. All this is to say that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy does not inevitably dictate a moral scheme that we would embrace. He invites us to ask the question “What should I do?” but does not answer it for us. To ask this question for oneself is to begin to take responsibility.

Merleau-Ponty writes: “The very productivity or freedom of human life, far from denying our situation, utilizes it and turns it into a means of expression.”⁸⁷ One’s situation provides her with the means to expression, thus one’s own guilt and responsibility cannot be merely individual. Still, one’s freedom is an indication of personal accountability. “There is equal weakness in blaming ourselves alone and in believing only in external causes.”⁸⁸ This ambiguity between our immanence and transcendence in our ethical life invites us to ask different kinds of questions with regards to our treatment of one another. For example, instead of just asking why an individual man raped an individual woman (What makes him do something so horrible?), we need to look at the bigger picture, a society in which such acts are not only common, but both subtly and bluntly condoned. What was the situation that enabled or encouraged this act? Clearly, ethics are not only a matter of individual virtue. Even Aristotle, the original virtue ethicist, insisted that a certain amount of luck is required to enable one to live the good life. If we take luck to mean the situation that surrounds a person, her influences, opportunities, and resources, then it is not something to be left to the fates alone.

Merleau-Ponty shows that ethical discourse is relevant to creatures such as us, beings who are knitted within their context, who are points of convergence and divergence in the flesh of the world, who are situated within relations that are individual, societal, and historical. One’s situation will undoubtedly impact one’s answers to the ethical questions posed by life. Merleau-Ponty says “A moral imperative only emerges in contact with a situation.”89 This principle certainly applies to mothers.

In this book I argue that maternal ambivalence is both predictable and understandable. However, I take it for granted that harming a child is not. Indeed, it seems that a great number of women experience maternal ambivalence without acting out their aggressions. How does a woman’s situation influence this outcome? It is never easy to draw a cause-and-effect relationship between a certain situation and a particular action. Since the individual person is a variable factor in this equation, it would be imprecise to claim that Situation A causes Behavior B. How then are we to consider the situation of mothers with respect to their (inter)subjectivity, ambivalence, and ethical orientations?

The way in which our ethical response is situated is considered more robustly by Simone de Beauvoir. In the next chapter we will consider how Beauvoir helps to further develop Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on situation and makes it more concrete. She articulates how immanence and transcendence converge in our ethical relations and specifically considers the conditions for maternal responsibility: “The mother’s relation with her children is defined within the overall context of her life; it depends on her relations with her husband, her past, her occupations, herself; it is a fatal and absurd error to claim to see a child as a panacea. . . . The young woman must be in a psychological, moral, and material situation that allows her to bear the responsibility; if not, the consequences will be disastrous.”⁹⁰ Given our interdependence, Beauvoir articulates how the burden of ethical life should not rest solely on the shoulders of the individual. Yet she also asserts that the individual is strictly responsible for the way in which she takes up her situation.