Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression: Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Theory 9781441111746, 9781472548061, 9781441134783

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Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression

Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Theory Series Editor: Hugh J. Silverman†, Stony Brook University, USA The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Cultural Theory series examines the encounter between contemporary Continental philosophy and aesthetic and cultural theory. Each book in the series explores an exciting new direction in philosophical aesthetics or cultural theory, identifying the most important and pressing issues in Continental philosophy today. 20th Century Aesthetics, Mario Perniola Derrida, Literature and War, Sean Gaston Derrida, Myth and the Impossibility of Philosophy, Anais N. Spitzer Foucault’s Philosophy of Art, Joseph J. Tanke Literary Agamben, William Watkin Philosophy and the Book, Daniel Selcer

Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression Donald A. Landes

L ON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W Y OR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2013 © Donald A. Landes, 2013 Donald A. Landes has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. eISBN: 978-1-4411-3478-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Landes, Donald A. Merleau-Ponty and the paradoxes of expression / Donald A. Landes. pages cm. – (Philosophy, aesthetics, and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-1174-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4411-8971-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4411-2574-3 (ebook (epub)) – ISBN 978-1-4411-3478-3 (ebook (pdf)) 1. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961. I. Title. B2430.M3764L34 2013 194–dc23 2013015958 Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India

to Kathleen, for so many reasons

Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations

ix

Introduction: The Paradoxical Logic of Expression Meaning, communication, and phenomenological disruptions The embodied experience of expression An eidetic versus a phenomenological description of the paradoxes of expression The weight of the metastable: Simondon and the paradoxical logic of expression Metaphor and the trajectory of sense Expression and the practice of reading

1

1 Against the Establishment: Early Hints of an Expressive Logic The union of the soul and the body: An “anxious trembling” “quickly mastered” A young Schelerian against the Sorbonne A young Marcellian: The body, mystery, and creation 2 Expression and The Structure of Behavior Science and the logic of expression Structure and expression: Pensée naturée in the human order “But our conclusion is not that of critical philosophy” 3 Expression and Phenomenology of Perception The logic of expression against classical theories of perception The body as expression Expression and the perceived world Time and freedom as expression 4 The Politics of Expression “The War Has Taken Place” Humanism and contingency

x

5 9 16 22 27 37 41 42 46 52 59 62 68 74 79 80 84 94 98 103 104 108

Contents

viii

Encroachment and expression The adventures of an expressive dialectic 5 The Threads of Silence: Painting, Speaking, Writing “Cézanne’s Doubt” and expressing what exists Saussure and the phenomenology of language Reading the vestiges of The Prose of the World “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”

116 119 127 128 132 136 139

6 “The Fundamental of All Culture”: Painting, Ontology, Reading “Eye and Mind” Philosophical interrogation: Expressing The Visible and the Invisible Expressing the intertwining: The flesh as expression

151

Epilogue

181

Notes Bibliography Index

199

152 161 172

185 207

Acknowledgments The completion of this book bears a heavy debt of gratitude to the many individuals and institutions that have created and sustained the metastable structures from which it has crystallized. First, I offer my sincere thanks to Hugh J. Silverman and Edward S. Casey, who patiently oversaw the initial research that provided the basis for this book. Their thoughtful interventions and diverse influences quietly weigh upon many aspects of this project. In addition, this book could not have been possible without the careful readings of my dissertation offered by Anne O’Byrne and Leonard Lawlor. For their various contributions, I would also like to thank Alia Al-Saji, Renaud Barbaras, Taylor Carman, Megan Craig, Galen A. Johnson, David Morris, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, and Gail Weiss. I have also benefited greatly from my participation in the Montréal Merleau-Ponty reading group: Don Beith, Danielle Landreville, David Morris, Noah Moss-Brender, and Shiloh Whitney. In addition, my reading of Merleau-Ponty was greatly enhanced by the thoughtful questions from the Philosophy 475 course and the doctoral directed reading course I taught at McGill University in Winter 2011. I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for doctoral and post-doctoral support, and the French Embassy in Washington, DC, for granting a Bourse Chateaubriand, as well as Stony Brook University and McGill University for their material support of this research. Of course, I alone bear the responsibility for any errors that remain in my attempt to crystallize a book from these many trajectories of influence. On a personal note, I first thank my parents Ron and Peggy Landes. In my travels around the world, I have yet to find anyone as kind and generous as you. I also thank my sister Megan for being an inspiration to me for so many years and in so many ways. And finally, none of this would have been possible without the incredible support offered by my partner Kathleen Hulley, whose silent sacrifices and innumerable contributions sustain every word in this text. For your unwavering support, your clairvoyance as a reader, and your patience and skill as an editor, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Abbreviations Given the focus of this book, I have provided the completion or publication dates for Merleau-Ponty’s works in brackets following the titles below. An extensive resource for this information can be found in the front materials of the books by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, listed below as ESA1 and ESA2. AD

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

BH1

Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existential Diary, trans. Katherine Farrer (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1976).

BH2

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Being and Having” (1936), trans. Michael B. Smith, in Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry, Jr., 101–7 (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1992).

BPh

Renaud Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Ted Toadvine (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004).

CAL

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language (1949–1950), trans. Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

CD

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945), trans. Michael B. Smith, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson, 59–75 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996).

CR

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Christianity and ressentiment” (1935), trans. Gerald Wening, in Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry, Jr., 85–100 (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1992).

EBEC

Donald A. Landes, “Expressive Body, Exscriptive Corpus: The Tracing of the Body from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Jean-Luc Nancy,” Chiasmi International IX (2009): 249–72.

EM

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” (1960), trans. Michael B. Smith, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson, 121–49 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996).

Abbreviations

xi

ESA1

Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Du lien des êtres aux éléments de l’être: Merleau-Ponty au tournant des années 1945–1951 (Paris: J. Vrin, 2004).

ESA2

Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Le scénario cartésien: Recherches sur la formation et la cohérence de l’intention philosophique de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: J. Vrin, 2005).

EX

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosophy of Existence” (1959), trans. Allen S. Weiss, in Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry, Jr., 129–39 (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1992).

EXR

Jenny Slatman, L’expression au-delà de la représentation: Sur l’aisthêsis et l’esthétique chez Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Peeters, 2003).

FEP

Kerry H. Whiteside, Merleau-Ponty and the Foundation of an Existential Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

HLP

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (1959–1960), ed. Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo, trans. John O’Neill and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002).

HT

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror (1947), trans. John O’Neill (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000).

IL

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1952), trans. Michael B. Smith, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson, 76–120 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

ILFI

Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Grenoble: Jérome Millon, 2005).

IMP

Galen A. Johnson, “Introductions to Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Painting,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson, 3–55 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996).

Inédit

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work” (1951/1952), in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie, trans. Arleen B. Dallery, 3–11 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

IPP

In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. James M. Edie and John Wild (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

xii

Abbreviations

JM

Gabriel Marcel, Journal métaphysique (Paris: Gallimard, 1927).

MO

Renaud Barbaras, “Métaphore et ontologie,” in Le tournant de l’expérience: Recherches sur la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty, 267–87 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1998).

MP

Taylor Carman, Merleau-Ponty (New York: Routledge, 2008).

MPIL

Hugh J. Silverman, “Merleau-Ponty and the Interrogation of Language,” in Inscriptions: After Phenomenology and Structuralism, 2nd edn, 152–71 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997).

MPLV

Douglas Low, Merleau-Ponty’s Last Vision (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000).

MPM

Barry Cooper, Merleau-Ponty and Marxism: From Terror to Reform (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979).

MPO

M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 2nd edn (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998).

NH

Étienne Bimbenet, Nature et Humanité: Le problème anthropologique dans l’oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: J. Vrin, 2004).

Note

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Note on Machiavelli” (1949), in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary, 211–23 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

OPL

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language” (1951), in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary, 84–97 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

PEx

Bernard Waldenfels, “The Paradox of Expression,” trans. Chris Nagel, in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, 89–102 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000).

PH

Sonia Kruks, “Philosophy of History,” in Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, ed. Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds, 70–81 (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2008).

PhEx

Remy C. Kwant, The Phenomenology of Expression, trans. Henry J. Koren (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).

PhP

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012).

PLB

J. Messaut, La philosophie de Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: J. Vrin, 1938).

Abbreviations Pol

xiii

Diana Coole, “Politics and the Political,” in Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, ed. Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds, 82–94 (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2008).

Préface Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Introduction” (1960), in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary, 3–35 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). PSh

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow” (1958), in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary, 159–81 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

PW

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (1951), trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

R

Max Scheler, Ressentiment (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1994).

RM

Paul Ricœur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (New York: Routledge, 1977).

RRMP Hugh J. Silverman, “Re-reading Merleau-Ponty,” in Inscriptions: After Phenomenology and Structuralism, 2nd edn, 123–51 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997). SB

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior (1938), trans. Alden L. Fisher (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1963).

SEG

Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Simondon ou l’encyclopédisme génétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008).

SNS

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (1948), trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

TP

Claude Lefort, “Thinking Politics,” trans. Taylor Carman and Mark B. Hansen, with Alexander Hickox, in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B. Hansen, 352–80 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

TT

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Titres et travaux: Projet d’enseignement” (1951), in Parcours deux: 1951–1961, 9–35 (Paris: Verdier, 2000).

UEP

Lydia Goehr, “Understanding the Engaged Philosopher: On Politics, Philosophy, and Art,” in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B. Hansen, 318–51 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

xiv

Abbreviations

Union

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul (1947–1948), trans. Paul B. Milan (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001).

VArt

Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Vestige of Art,” in The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf, 81–100 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

VGM

Simonne Plourde et al., Vocabulaire philosophique de Gabriel Marcel (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1985).

VI

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (1959–1960), trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000).

VPT

Théodore F. Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale: La genèse de la philosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty jusqu’à la Phénoménologie de la perception (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971).

WMM Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 245–64 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). WTP

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The War Has Taken Place” (1945), in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, 139–52 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

Introduction: The Paradoxical Logic of Expression

Our analyses of thought give us the impression that before it finds the words which express it, it is already a sort of ideal text that our sentences attempt to translate. But the author himself has no text to which he can compare his writing, and no language prior to language.1 Throughout his work, Maurice Merleau-Ponty characterizes phenomenological reflection as a type of “wonder” in the face of the paradoxical structures haunting our most familiar experiences. In Phenomenology of Perception, he describes reflection as the act of stepping back from the world, not to discover “consciousness as the foundation of the world,” but rather to “see transcendences spring forth” and to “loosen the intentional threads that connect us to the world in order to make them appear.” Phenomenological reflection “alone is conscious of the world because it reveals the world as strange and paradoxical.”2 In his final work, The Visible and the Invisible, he characterizes the beginning of phenomenological reflection upon our familiar experiences of the world through an allusion to Saint Augustine’s famous assertion about time: time is “perfectly familiar to each, but [. . .] none of us can explain it to the others.”3 Time, at first glance, appears wholly unproblematic; my present is a limit between a past that is no longer and future that is to come. The world of unreflective experience seems to be merely an ensemble of medium-sized dry objects that I sense or represent as outside of myself. Time and the world sustain our actions and respond to our expectations seamlessly. Yet when we press upon these phenomena and attempt to express their meanings or to identify their deep structures, their initial clarity slips through our fingers. We are left astounded at just how unknown and fleeting such familiar or intimate aspects of our experience could suddenly appear. This wonder is both the motivation for and the engine of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy. The case is no different for Merleau-Ponty’s consistent return to the phenomenon of expression. Thought, it would seem, takes place in mental

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Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression

space, and expression is simply the making public of this inner experience. It  appears that thought exists as an ideal text that our spoken or written words “translate” (IL, 80). Indeed, what could be more obvious than the act of expressing our thoughts? “If you have something to say, say it!” And surely we have all uttered the words: “No, that’s not quite what I meant. I meant to say  . . .” Such experiences seem to reveal a breakdown in the technical translation between thought and its expression. But what justifies this metaphor of having something to say, and where exactly does this inner world or treasure chest of ideas exist? As Merleau-Ponty repeatedly demonstrates, phenomenological disruptions leave us standing in wonder before the paradoxes of expression. For instance, in philosophical reflections on language or aesthetics, cracks begin to appear in the definition of expression as a simple “making public” of inner thoughts, giving rise to paradoxical formulations—aporias of creation, confusions over the endurance or location of the artwork, problems of constituting or communicating a new sense, or of communicating at all, and debates about the nature or existence of ideal meanings or objectivities. Such paradoxical formulations haunt any aesthetic theory that does not posit a transcendental subject behind or before artistic activity or that fails to question the theory of communication that rests upon a mind coding and decoding signs from the safety of (what I will call in this book) an interpretive distance. Just as Saint Augustine’s rethinking of time leads him to an urgent questioning of the presuppositions of the philosophical tradition, I will argue that Merleau-Ponty’s rethinking of expression suggests a reconceptualization of subjectivity, the philosophy of language, and, eventually, of ontology itself. Merleau-Ponty’s approach to philosophical questions via the paradoxical “logic” of expression is, I will argue, his fundamental style, and it shapes his investigation into regions as diverse as the structures of behavior, perception, language, politics, aesthetics, and ontology. Although he never makes this generalization of the logic of expression thematic, his conviction is clear in the following passage: All perception, all action which presupposes it, and in short every human use of the body is already primordial expression. Not that derivative labor which substitutes for what is expressed signs which are given elsewhere with their meaning and rule of usage, but the primary operation which first constitutes signs as signs, makes that which is expressed dwell in them through the eloquence of their arrangement and configuration alone, implants a meaning in that which did not have one, and thus—far from exhausting itself in the instant at which it occurs—inaugurates an order and founds an institution or a tradition. (IL, 104)

Introduction

3

For Merleau-Ponty, all human action is expression (understood in a particular way), and thus understanding the paradoxical logic of expression is an essential task in approaching his varied contribution.4 Moving definitively beyond the realm of language, the paradoxical logic of expression is the thread that unites Merleau-Ponty’s diverse investigations as the very style of his questioning and, true to this paradoxical logic itself, his understanding of expression evolves in dialogue with the very investigations through which it is revealed. This book attempts to capture, through Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with the paradoxes of expression, a form of reflection capable of sustaining this wonder and of raising these paradoxes to speech without thereby locking them down with final eidetic clarity or thereby freezing the open and metastable trajectory to which they belong.5 In the paradoxes of time or the familiar world—that they are “perfectly familiar to each, but that none of us can explain it to the others” (VI, 3)—a priority to the question of expression appears. Experience overflows what is said about it, and the paradox of expression is sparked in the irrepressible space between what we live and what we say, a metastable silence that makes possible both its organization in speech and the simultaneous undoing of that organization. For a subject who can speak, the silence of thought is not a treasure chest of ideas complete in themselves and waiting merely to be transposed into arbitrary signs. Rather, there is a silence that haunts us as a metastable structure of tensions and possibilities, and this silence guides the creative act that, paradoxically, gives it voice and sustains it as silence. The philosopher speaks, and Merleau-Ponty admits “this is a weakness in him,” at least insofar as he or she would assume his/her work to be finished when philosophy coincides with experience, as if it were possible to collapse the irrepressible space by which things appear. “[The philosopher’s] entire ‘work’ is this absurd effort. He wrote in order to state his contact with Being; he did not state it, and could not state it, since it is silence. Then he recommences . . .” (VI, 125). The paradoxical logic of expression names the endless movement of philosophy itself, a hyper-dialectic that never comes to rest, the constant and forever abortive attempt to close the gap between what we live and what we say. For Merleau-Ponty, the responsible philosopher is the one who takes up this inescapable task without wishing to bring it to an end, and hence philosophy in the end will be, properly speaking, a trajectory of ongoing interrogation in the mode of expression. Some readers have emphasized key breaks or “turns” that mark Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical trajectory.6 He seems to have abandoned his earliest investigations of behavior and Gestalt psychology in favor of a predominantly Husserlian phenomenological approach. His studies of child psychology and Saussurean structuralism moved him decidedly away

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Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression

from transcendental phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty himself famously affirms a break when, in his final shift to a mode of reflection he called “hyper-reflection” or “interrogation,” he suggests that his earlier works remained mired in a “philosophy of consciousness” that they had nonetheless attempted to escape. Even his political thought undergoes fundamental revision, moving from Marxism to a new liberalism. And yet, throughout all of these developments, Merleau-Ponty consistently returns to the opening questions of his philosophical reflection: how is it that humans are both subject and object, first person and third person, spontaneous and yet wholly determined?7 As I will argue, his evolving answers reflect less a series of breaks or rejections than an open trajectory of deepening engagements with the paradoxical logic of expression. As such, I will demonstrate in this book how Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical practice itself is deeply marked by the paradoxical logic of expression and how, in a sense, his explicit work on expression is just a moment in an implicit trajectory of his ongoing philosophical interrogation into this logic. He draws from a diverse set of thinkers or methodologies and immediately puts them to work toward his own questioning, but what remains constant is his style of questioning. In this book, I aim to establish that the paradoxical logic of expression is not the “secret” of Merleau-Ponty’s texts, but rather the style of his every philosophical gesture and is thus illustrated across his corpus. As Hugh J. Silverman writes, “[s]tyle is the paradox of expression taken to its limits” (MPIL, 171). This book, then, requires not a collection and evaluation of Merleau-Ponty’s explicit statements about expression, but a return to the movement of his thought along its entire open trajectory, a thought, as he once said of Husserl, that was only turned into a “work” by an “interruption which is always premature.”8 From his initial understanding of the paradox of expression as action between pure repetition and pure creation, to his deepening of this structure to the ontological register by which expressive gestures create and sustain structures that paradoxically transcend them and solicit them, this book offers a reading of Merleau-Ponty in the style of Merleau-Ponty—through a contact with the texts themselves in an attempt to take them up and carry them forward along the unthought trajectory of their metastable sense. It is a reading of the style of his expressive traces insofar as they contain (as potential) not only what he thought, but also how he thought it and where it might have taken him. In order to offer an introduction to this reading, I will begin with a sketch of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the phenomenological necessity of a new theory of meaning and communication, one in which thinking is in fact accomplished by speaking. Following this, I will establish the importance of

Introduction

5

Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of the experience of expression, which leads to a formulation of his particular form of phenomenological reflection, while introducing concepts such as “exscription” and “vestige” from Jean-Luc Nancy.9 This form of thought involves not an eidetic analysis of the phenomenon of expression, but instead an attempt to gear into the metastable structures of experience themselves through an open style of phenomenological description. Drawing upon the work of Gilbert Simondon, I will introduce some concepts, such as metastable equilibriums and transductive logic, which help to structure my reading in the chapters to follow. This makes it possible to offer a Merleau-Pontian theory of metaphor as a new theory of meaning understood as the performance of the sense of the vestiges of expression. I will conclude the introduction by drawing out Merleau-Ponty’s own theory of reading, setting the stage for the chapters of this book that attempt to gear into Merleau-Ponty’s expressive vestiges through a Merleau-Pontian-styled reading of Merleau-Ponty. ***

Meaning, communication, and phenomenological disruptions [L]anguage is not meaning’s servant, and yet it does not govern meaning. [. . .] Here no one commands and no one obeys. What we mean is not before us, outside all speech, as sheer signification. It is only the excess of what we live over what has already been said. (IL, 120)

In commencing a study of expression, one finds the seemingly clear concepts of “meaning” and “communication.” Language is surely a system of signs related to meanings, and through language we have access to a meaningful world and to a community of fellow speakers with whom we can and do communicate our thoughts. As the animal possessing language, we “have” meanings held in some reserve storehouse of memory like ammunition for a potential battle. In communicating, we deploy this arsenal to achieve a particular “end” that itself can be defined outside of the essentially interchangeable “means” by which it is accomplished. Communication is, then, a question of logistics, efficiency, or technique. And yet, this common sense description already points toward Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of the “classical” or “technical” theory of meaning. In short, a classical theory will be one that understands speech as translation and communication as interpretation. A patient study of classical theories is neither the task of this introduction, nor a task that Merleau-Ponty adopted

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Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression

as his own. Rather, he begins by identifying the broad strokes of classical theories and the phenomenological evidence that disrupts their foundational premises in order to situate his own phenomenological position. Thus, the question here is not to evaluate the accuracy of his reading, but to introduce how phenomenological insights into lived experience shape both his critique and his positive theory of expression. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues that, despite their differences, classical “empiricist” and “intellectualist” accounts of language share the common presupposition that, as a phenomenal reality, a “word has no signification” (PhP, 182). In the case of empiricist or mechanistic approaches, a word is understood as a mere sign or stimulus that has the peculiar property of triggering some association of sounds, behaviors, or verbal images that give an external observer the impression of some mental activity happening in some physical body. Conceived as a moment in a causal chain, a word cannot be said to “have” meaning. In the case of intellectualist accounts, the word itself can have no meaning because meaning is reserved for thought. “Thought,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “has a sense and the word remains an empty envelope. The word is merely an articulatory, sonorous phenomenon, but in any case, language is only an external accompaniment of thought” (PhP, 182). By subordinating the word to thought, “one ends up [. . .] devaluating language.”10 Yet Merleau-Ponty is clear—the stakes are higher than simply debunking a misguided theory of speech, since any theory of language has important consequences for, or reveals important presuppositions in, one’s implicit understanding of subjectivity or human being. The study of expression offers nothing less than the opportunity “to leave behind, once and for all, the classical subject–object dichotomy” (PhP, 179). On the empiricist view, there are pure objects, but “there is no one who speaks,” since language is a mechanical process of recording and reacting to stimuli. On the intellectualist account, there is a pure subject, but this subject is a thinking subject, not a speaking one (PhP, 182). The ideas or thoughts of this subject are considered pure, whereas the accidents and particularities of empirical languages are merely inconvenient obstacles to efficient expression and communication. In neither case is there room for the phenomenological subject, and communication is “an exclusively technical problem.” The act of speaking is a simple event in a causal chain or “a piece of clothing for consciousness, an accoutrement of thought” (CAL, 9–10). For Merleau-Ponty, a return to the experience of expression reveals human action as between pure exteriority and pure interiority, between the “pure repetition” of mechanical processes and the “pure creation” of constituting consciousness.11 A sensitivity to the phenomenological subject, however, is

Introduction

7

no guarantee against the illusions that lead these “classical” approaches astray. According to Merleau-Ponty, even Husserl’s Logical Investigations offers an “eidetic of language and a universal grammar” that reduces empirical language to a mere accompaniment of the activity of transcendental consciousness.12 Such a “pure” language presumes a system of available significations devoid of all ambiguity. The desire for a language without ambiguity—a language that would allow for thought to express itself without remainder—is a natural effect of the fact that language is always pointing away from itself and toward the things that are spoken of. Given its adoption of the mistaken presupposition that language is a mere external accompaniment of thought, such a project for a “universal language” is, writes Merleau-Ponty, a “revolt against language in its existing state” and an attempt to “tear speech out of history.”13 Only a phenomenology of expression that begins and remains within lived experience can avoid the pitfalls of classical approaches that offer nothing but a “bad ambiguity,” nothing but the “mixture of finitude and universality, of interiority and exteriority.”14 A return to the phenomenon of expression shows that language, spoken or written, has a meaning, that words accomplish thought. The conversion of the question of language into a technical, structural, or even eidetic question is a refusal to reflect upon the phenomenal reality of speech. If thought existed as complete and self-sufficient prior to its expression, then it seems impossible to explain, as Merleau-Ponty writes: why thought tends toward expression as if toward its completion, why the most familiar object appears indeterminate so long as we have not remembered its name, and why the thinking subject himself is in a sort of ignorance of his thoughts so long as he has not formulated them for himself, or even spoken or written them. (PhP, 182–3)

In other words, the experience of thought, which is assumed to proceed without the contingencies and obstacles of empirical language, in fact reveals that thought is accomplished in language. “Meaning” can be neither reserved for thought, nor reduced to a third person system of associations. Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on expression entails nothing less than a shift in the theory of meaning toward what we might call a theory of sense (sens).15 Moreover, if communication were the coding and decoding of meanings through the medium of written or spoken “messages,” then communication would involve simply overcoming the technical difficulties of accurate interpretation. And yet genuine learning takes place in conversation. If thought were complete and pure in itself, then it would possess in advance everything we would ever think (either alone or in dialogue). But we surely

8

Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression

“have the power to understand beyond what we could have spontaneously thought.” “Through speech,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “there is a taking up of the other person’s thought, a reflection in others, a power of thinking according to others, which enriches our own thoughts” (PhP, 184). We do not translate a speaker’s words into a language of ideas we already possess in our own minds; rather, when we understand and genuinely communicate, we grasp the sense of their speech. Just as learning a gesture or acquiring a habit involves learning not merely some mechanical set of muscle contractions and physical movements, but rather the sense that will allow this gesture to modulate in new and different settings, learning a “meaning” is also more than simply memorizing an association between a word and an idea. Grasping the sense of the word allows me to play it forward into new situations that may bear little resemblance to its original occurrence. To learn a word is to grasp its style as one of the possibilities of my body and to enter into a phenomenal field in which this word is tacitly present and may (or may not) be solicited. Listening or reading are not purely passive; they are expressive insofar as they leave no room in our minds for a pure thought separate from this expressive act; they involve lending our ears or eyes to the thought that is coming into the world as the sense of these sonorous phenomena or material traces. Moreover, the structure of communication reaches to the essence of expression in general, for even in my own acts of speaking “my spoken words surprise me myself and teach me my own thought” (OPL, 88). The phenomenon of expression is always already one of inter-subjectivity, a spacing that divides and connects, the spacing between me and myself that allows the world to appear as the meaningful background of all that I might do, though this background remains the silent support of every spoken word. Speaking, then, must be related to a certain silence, but this silence is not the unspoken and preexisting language of thought. Since we grasp a sense rather than possess a meaning, the silence that permeates our experience of speaking must be the felt presence of so many possibilities that are never made explicit. The silence to which speech responds, then, is not a pure nothingness. For Merleau-Ponty, thought cannot exist outside of its expression, and yet speech is surely a response to something, to the silence that calls to be spoken through the taking up of already spoken or constituted language in a paradoxical response to what will have been said. This is not to fall back into empiricism, where the sedimented language is triggered through some third person process in the impersonal system of acquired meanings. Speech is a creative taking up, a response to the weight of the past and to the urgencies of the present in an act that at once attempts to say what cannot be said and that simultaneously falls into language as spoken, bringing with it all of its latent ambiguity as the surplus of what is said. In

Introduction

9

short, speech is the constant play between silence and institution. Thought is not an ideal text that may or may not be translated into speech; it is the not nothing to which my speech responds and yet that only exists insofar as I am there to repeat it, sustain it, and reshape it by lending it my voice in this new situation. “Our present expressive operations,” observes Merleau-Ponty, “instead of driving the previous ones away—simply succeeding and annulling them—salvage, preserve, and (insofar as they contain some truth) take them up again” (OPL, 95). Thus, in this reading of Merleau-Ponty, I invoke Jean-Luc Nancy’s discussion of the relation between inscription and exscription, by which every inscription exscribes all of this latent content, all that is made present as absent, such as the inscribing gesture and the systems of meaning that support it. For Merleau-Ponty, as I will suggest, it is speech that exscribes silence, the visible that exscribes the invisible, the surface that exscribes depth, and the spacing of every expressive gesture that exscribes Being itself. Thus, the subject that appears in this paradoxical spacing between spoken speech and speaking speech sustains the phenomenological reality of expression and experiences itself from within the “good ambiguity” of expression as “a spontaneity which accomplishes what appeared to be impossible when we observed only the separate elements, a spontaneity which gathers together the plurality of monads, the past and the present, nature and culture into a single whole” (Inédit, 11).16 Merleau-Ponty thus recognizes (by the early 1950s) that the scope of his investigation into expression is as broad as philosophy itself, and that perhaps his early focus on perception kept him from reaching the deepest mysteries of experience, namely, that even perception is expression. Thus, his “turn” to expression is not to something that suddenly arises in the mid-1950s and that is later abandoned for ontology. Rather, it is the recognition that the paradoxical logic of expression—as he discovered it in his early works—goes all the way down, that philosophy needs to sustain this fundamental mystery of experience, and that the paradoxical logic of expression requires a form of reflection that remains open to its deepening character. Hence the urgency of phenomenological reflection as interrogation becomes clear through the phenomenon of expression, and “[t]o establish this wonder would be metaphysics itself ” (Inédit, 11).

The embodied experience of expression Before expression, there is nothing but a vague fever, and only the work itself, completed and understood, will prove that there was something rather than nothing to be found there.17

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Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression

If the above considerations suggest that expression cannot be defined as the act of translation from thought into spoken or written signs, then what kind of act or gesture is it? On the classical model, expression might be characterized as the act of “making public.” For the idealist, that which is made public is a thought or an idea in the mind of the speaker. By translating this into a publicly available manifestation, the speaker invites the audience to repeat, through interpretation or decoding, the same ideas in their own private mental space. For an empiricist, on the other hand, that which is made public is something external to the expression. The phenomenon of expression is less an active gesture than a passive betrayal or indication of the expressed; just as symptoms express an illness but are not in fact the illness, expression manifests some series of external relations or verbal images. A malicious interlocutor guesses my secret, and red blood rushes to my face and ears betraying my anger or embarrassment. Yet these accounts leave no place for the phenomenological subject and lead to the unlikely theory that: “Man can speak in the way an electric lamp can become incandescent” (PhP, 180). For Merleau-Ponty, there is no interpretive distance in understanding a gesture: “The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is the anger itself ” (PhP, 190). In contrast to the interpretation of expression as a making public, I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s subtle account of expression and his use of this paradoxical structure in a diversity of other contexts needs to be understood in the following way: Expression is any enduring response to the weight of the past, the weight of the ideal, and the weight of the present situation, broadly construed. As such, when viewed phenomenologically, expression is experienced as an embodied act that gears into a trajectory of performances that are always between pure repetition and pure creation. That which is expressed only exists insofar as it is (or could be) taken up, and each expression forever overflows itself toward an open future of creative repetitions where this excess is integral to the sense of the expression at any moment in its trajectory. Expression is indeed a sort of making public since, as a gesture, expression always requires friction—the paint on the canvas or the spoken words that echo in the furthest corners of the auditorium. Given that thought, for Merleau-Ponty, is nothing on its own, the expressed must paradoxically arrive into the material trace of the expressive gesture, and this is why the material expressions themselves “bear their sense” (PhP, 408). Prior to its expression, nothing but a “vague fever” begins the expressive process, a determinate nothing that calls for my response insofar as it weighs upon me. The material traces of expression invite further readings and repetitions from other expressive bodies, they endure in the mode of institution by means of a sort of fecundity, and expression is a “response” or taking up from

Introduction

11

among material possibilities in a gesture that nonetheless could have been otherwise. The “weight”—a term that I will develop in the course of this reading—of that to which we respond is always both material (such as the physical capabilities of my body or the expressive habits or techniques I have mastered) and ideal, since anything that bears down upon my gestures and shapes the field of charged possibilities for action, weighs upon my body (such as my past, my history, the presence of others, the structures and vestiges of my culture, and my deepest or most fleeting desires). My body is the hinge and the negotiation between real and ideal weight, and its every gesture is between pure repetition and pure creation, between body and mind, between determinism and spontaneity.18 Moreover, since expression is public and solicits other expressive bodies,19 every expression—from a fleeting utterance or gesture, to an ontological treatise—is a certain form of writing. If thought cannot exist apart from its expression, then every expression is simultaneously a trace to be read. Thus, given the primacy of the paradoxes of expression, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy can be understood—from behavior and perception to language and history—as an ontology of writing and reading. *** In support of this preliminary sketch, consider one of Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of the embodied experience of expression in Phenomenology of Perception. Near the end of the first chapter (“The Cogito”) of Part III, Merleau-Ponty declares that “[o]ur body [. . .] is the condition of possibility [. . .] of all of the expressive operations and all of the acquisitions that constitute the cultural world” (PhP, 408). This emphasis on the body rather than the mind is significant; the acquisitions of the cultural world are stored in neither a personal mind nor an objective Spirit, but rather in the embodied taking up of the past. This is not to say that the body stores the past as a physical trace.20 The body, as the possibility for expressive gestures, is the locus of sense. Although speech “presupposes a system of correspondences” (PhP, 408), such as those presented by a dictionary, it does not simply involve a translation of ideas into corresponding verbal signs. Rather, “it is the sentence that gives each word its sense” (PhP, 408). The meaning of the words is shaped by their use, and yet paradoxically these words are used because of the meaning they will have in this new context. “Meaning,” then, cannot be a thing, an object, or a hermetically sealed idea that corresponds to an indifferent sign; meaning is the sense of a given trajectory of performances in relation to its current performance in this context, with this inflection, and by this particular speaker. Merleau-Ponty thus offers an embodied or

12

Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression

performative theory of meaning—the meaning of a word is the trajectory of the many performances of its trace, and its unity is the unity of a sense. As he writes: “it is for having been employed in different contexts that the word gradually takes on a sense that is impossible to fix absolutely” (PhP, 408). The words themselves somehow “bear their sense,” like an ideal weight that they, rather than us, carry forward as the exscribed sense of this vestige of an expressive gesture, as the necessary other side or friction for movements of the expressing body. Yet this weight is not an ideal “content,” for if all speakers of the language disappeared, the words on the page would be nothing but some peculiar material phenomena. The words bear their sense insofar as they are an opening or a possibility for speaking again, insofar as there are other bodies that can “gear into” these traces, other bodies who can take up again the expressive gesture that will lend these traces of expressions a new life, other bodies who have ears to hear and eyes to see thanks to an experience close enough or open enough that they can follow the story as it looms up between and around the expressive vestiges on some fragile page. Thus, there is a quasi-independent power of words to bear the weight of their past. Sense is a complex relation between a body and its metastable equilibrium, the between and the around of every gesture is supersaturated with the weight of the past, the present, and the ideal that it carries forward, and is felt as the source of potential creative repetitions. Expression, then, is a phenomenon in motion. Merleau-Ponty writes: Thus, speech is this paradoxical operation in which—by means of words whose sense is given and by means of already available significations—we attempt to catch up with an intention that in principle goes beyond them and modifies them in the final analysis, itself establishing the sense of the words by which it establishes itself. (PhP, 408–9, emphasis added)

The gesture of speech (or any human action, properly speaking) involves taking up a constituted structure in order to initiate a new expression in a new context that catches up with a felt sense that is in the process of emerging. Yet this taking up necessarily goes beyond the meanings that the words have in the current system. By their being employed in this new act, they deform and reshape the system itself, and thus the meaning of the words is never “absolutely fixed.” The system of available significations is a weight that resists the possibility of a pure speaking that would spontaneously institute meaning; the felt urgency to speak, the intention that we are trying to “catch up with” in speaking, is a weight that resists any sense of a pure repetition. As the epigraph to this section makes clear, this “felt urgency” is nothing but a “vague fever”; only the expression will prove there was something to be said,

Introduction

13

something that paradoxically only exists once it has been expressed. Thus, what is expressed is not the content of the vague fever; rather, the expression is successful when it establishes a new equilibrium, a “coherent deformation” (IL, 91), when the vague fever is relieved by the crystallization of a certain possibility in response to the situation, and when the movement comes to a momentary though necessarily metastable equilibrium. Consider the feeling of finding just the “right” word. In a sense, we feel that a sentence or a work in progress is tending toward some particular yet still indistinct resolution, but the word is not any particular word prior to its expression; the one that is uttered is felt as “right” insofar as it satisfies the movement of the complex and dynamic expressive situation, a movement whose resolution remains open right up until the very last moment, even in the slight hesitation prior to its arrival. A different person might have hit upon a different “right” word, given their different sensitivity to the tensions that are to be resolved. The right word is “right” insofar as it responds best to the metastable structures for just this speaker in just this context. In a conversation, much the same happens. As I discuss a difficult question with a partner, we respond to each other, sometimes even racing for the “right” answer or the looming punch line. At some point, the conversation pauses, finding a natural equilibrium, and no felt urgency gives rise to further expression. But a “vague fever” looms up again, and I test if the equilibrium is really stable enough for us to withdraw: “but what about . . .?” “did you mean . . .?” With new or lingering tensions exposed, the conversation is off and running again. Expression, whether alone or in dialogue, is a trajectory of metastable equilibriums. A first indication that Merleau-Ponty senses the paradoxical logic of expression as moving beyond the realm of language can be seen from his consistent identification of the gestures of speaking and painting. In speaking, there must be a constituted language, just as the painter must have colors and some given sensory modalities. But the gesture goes beyond the mere sum of its parts: “The painting beyond the sensory givens and speech beyond the givens of constituted language must thus in themselves have a signifying virtue, without reference to a signification that exists for itself in the mind of the spectator or the listener” (PhP, 409). Merleau-Ponty cites Paul Claudel’s striking description of communication: “the expression becomes the primary thing. We impart form to the reader [nous informons le lecteur], we make him participate in our creative or poetic action, we place some object or some emotion into the secret mouth of his mind” (cited at PhP, 409). Since expressing is not a simple making public, it constitutes an “appropriation” rather than a translation of thought. The thoughts are accomplished in the weighty material of the expressive trace, and they are accomplished as my

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Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression

own. And so too in communication—the speaker’s expressions are the traces of gestures that I can take up by reading them, by gearing into them, by lending my body to their sense, and by thus making them my own—a creative response to the past, present, and ideal. My brother may have written the letter and I may be silently reading it, but his voice and all that he is, was, and means for me, speaks through the secret mouth of my mind. These traces give form to my expressive reading, and simultaneously solicit my active taking up. Communication, then, is my gearing into the sense of the expressive gestures that I say, hear, see, or read, and it is our ability to “catch on” to a sense (rather than to “possess” a meaning or idea) that allows us to move freely between these modes of expressive gestures. The thought dwells in the material traces of its expression “through the eloquence of their arrangement and configuration alone” (IL, 104). But is every act of speaking and every gesture an expression in this strong sense? Merleau-Ponty occasionally distinguishes between “originary speech” and “secondary speech,” and only the former—including poetry, philosophy, and a child’s first words—seems to be structured according to a robust account of the paradoxical logic of expression. In these cases, thought “attempts to establish itself and [. . .] only does so by bending the resources of constituted language to a new usage” (PhP, 409). And yet, although secondary speech seems to resemble what I have called “classical” theories of language, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the supposed clarity of “non-expressive” or secondary speech rests upon an illusion of acquired meanings drawn from “the fundamentally obscure operation by which we have eternalized a moment of fleeting life” (PhP, 409). And indeed, this paradoxical operation that first gives the words their meaning “must be considered an ultimate fact” (PhP, 409–10). Language is not something we possess; it transcends us in at least two ways. First, each word “means” more than a single idea, it bears its sense as the weight of a large number of thoughts or bodily possibilities. Second, the “thoughts” that are supposed to be the static meanings of secondary language were never themselves “pure”; their institution was a result of “the same effort of thought already thought [pensée pensée] to equal thinking thought [pensée pensante], and the same provisional joining of the two that makes up the entire mystery of expression” (PhP, 410). In other words, constituted language is not a pure set of meanings associated with signs, but the residue of a countless number of past expressive gestures that have sedimented into a structure of merely relatively stable acquired significations that themselves will be reshaped with each new repetition. Or as I have suggested, meaning is forever exscribed between and around its very inscription, and thus experience reveals that a pure or unambiguous meaning is fully present neither in its institution nor in its repetition. Secondary speech is possible because of the relatively

Introduction

15

stable structures of certain language games, but even these structures remain fundamentally metastable: subject to the subtle reverberations caused by every act of expression and open to the sudden disequilibrium that results from originary speech or altering conditions, leading to a new metastable equilibrium. The cultural instruments that express ideas are fragile, yet they offer a sense that seems imperishable because it is equally a solicitation of every other possible expressive body. But if an idea is the sense of a gesture, not a detachable ideal objectivity separable from all material expression, then it only “survives” or “endures” as the other side of a potential taking up, even in the case of mathematical objects or scientific descriptions. As Merleau-Ponty writes: [T]he idea of the triangle along with its properties and the idea of the quadratic equation have their historical and geographical regions, and if the tradition from which we receive them and the cultural instruments that carry them were destroyed, then new acts of creative expression would be necessary to bring them into the world. (PhP, 410)

The institution brings about, through fragile expressions, the sense of a certain idea, and this idea then “remains shared between us like an inexhaustible possession,” not because it hangs over us in an intelligible and unchanging sky, but insofar as it remains available to be taken up again. The sense of the expression can be re-performed in a new context or in a new medium that— whether subtly or dramatically deforming its meaning by informing this new reader—remains within the trajectory of the many performances of it. This reading clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s enigmatic suggestion that “ideas endure or pass away, and the intelligible sky subtly changes color” (PhP, 410). Some expressions have the “pretension of expressing a truth of nature in itself. We know that there is no such thing, and the modern critique of the sciences has clearly shown that there is something constructive to these types of speech” (PhP, 411). In short, the paradoxical logic of expression goes all the way down: Thus, there is no fundamental difference between the modes of expression, and no privilege can be granted to one of them on the assumption that it expresses a truth in itself. Speech is just as mute as music, and music is just as eloquent as speech. Expression is everywhere creative, and the expressed is always inseparable from it. (PhP, 411)

When I speak, I understand without any explicit thoughts intervening, and I am understood thanks to the lived unity and clarity of expression

16

Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression

that nevertheless slips through our fingers the moment we introduce the interpretive distance of the perspective of an external observer. Just as Saint Augustine discovered in the study of time, the attempt to systematize the components of lived expression fails to capture the phenomenon of expression because we can never remove the “fundamental obscurity of the expressed or reduce to zero the distance between my thought and itself ” (PhP, 412). Merleau-Ponty concludes: To express is not to substitute for the new thought a stable system of signs that can be connected to thoughts that are certain; rather, it is to ensure, through the use of already well-worn words, that the new intention takes up the heritage of the past; it is, in a single gesture, to incorporate the past into the present and to weld this present to a future, to open an entire cycle of time where the “acquired” thought will remain present as a dimension without our needing to ever again summon it or reproduce it. (PhP, 413)

An eidetic versus a phenomenological description of the paradoxes of expression The ambiguous, equivocal phenomenon Merleau-Ponty calls the paradox of expression echoes one of Husserl’s statements [. . .]: “The beginning is the pure and, so to speak, still mute experience, which now it is the issue to bring to the pure expression of its own sense.” (PEx, 89)

The discussion thus far has offered an initial sketch of Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to come to terms with the embodied experience of the paradoxes of expression, and I have discussed a provisional definition of expression as a creative response to the weight of the past, the present, and the ideal, and of sense as the between and the around exscribed in every inscription in the trajectory of performances of the traces of expression. Nevertheless, I have resisted the impulse to give an essential or eidetic structure of what counts as expression, suggesting rather that the logic of expression be generalized beyond linguistic structures to all human action, following Kwant in thinking of expression as a “fundamental characteristic” of human existence (PhEx, 5). In fact, Merleau-Ponty’s approach to phenomenology is unique insofar as he attempts a description that gears into its object without totalizing or freezing that object, a philosophical practice he comes to describe as an ongoing “interrogation” and that seems to share little with Husserl’s eidetic approach. For Merleau-Ponty, phenomenological description must be “as painstaking

Introduction

17

as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valéry, or Cézanne—through the same kind of attention and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to grasp the sense of the world or of history in its nascent state” (PhP, lxxxv). As such, phenomenological practice itself must be expression—it does not systematize or reveal the fixed essences or preexisting objects, it “merges with” or gears into the trajectory of “modern thought” (PhP, lxxxv).21 And yet, just as Merleau-Ponty himself begins his descriptive reflection from the eidetic groundwork laid down in Husserl’s phenomenological investigations,22 it is worth considering an eidetic approach to the phenomenon of expression, and a particularly helpful point of departure is to be found in Bernard Waldenfels’ article “The Paradox of Expression.” In this important contribution, Waldenfels offers what might be called a Husserlian eidetic reduction of the paradoxical phenomenon of expression to the key “operative concepts” at work in Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of (primarily linguistic) expression. In fact, Waldenfels must do the eidetic labor of extracting the operative concepts because Merleau-Ponty never explicitly presents them, but rather deploys them throughout his diverse descriptions of embodied experience. The result of Waldenfels’ approach is a presentation of the essence of linguistic expression, albeit a paradoxical or contradictory essence. Such an account, nevertheless, ultimately remains hovering above the phenomenon of expression, repeating the gesture of a certain pensée de survol (high-altitude thinking) that Merleau-Ponty consistently sought to replace by entering into the concrete description of the diverse regions of expressive experience. The reason for Waldenfels’ more narrow approach than the one pursued in this book may be found in his opening description of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the paradox of expression. Waldenfels notes how Merleau-Ponty invokes, at several reprises, Husserl’s phrase included in the epigraph to this section. And indeed, Waldenfels’ move to the eidetic register has some plausibility insofar as the first occurrence of Husserl’s phrase in Merleau-Ponty’s work in fact appears within a discussion of Husserl’s notion of essences and the method of eidetic variation (PhP, lxxix). Assuming Husserl’s phrase to be the “motto” for Merleau-Ponty’s paradox of expression, Waldenfels’ analysis takes the question to be how “mute experience” is brought to the pure expression of its sense, as if this transition from silence to speech involves a technical paradox of translation. Yet in the context of its occurrence, Merleau-Ponty is after more of an existential structure than a technical difficulty. For Merleau-Ponty, originary experience “is too tightly caught in the world in order to know itself as such at the moment when it is thrown into the world” and since we do not thereby possess mute experience as a thing in itself, “our existence needs the field of ideality in order to know

18

Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression

and to conquer its facticity” (PhP, lxxviii). Moreover, the “silence of originary consciousness” is neither a positive set of ideas nor an absolute nothingness, since “all the significations of language are measured against this experience and it ensures that language means something for us” (PhP, lxxix). Thus, originary experience is already meaningful, but it is meaningful as metastable, that is, it is always already a solicitation to expression. Merleau-Ponty is explicit: the problem identified in Husserl’s statement is not to account for the technical difficulties of the passage of preexisting experience into expression; rather, the problem is to understand how our very experience of the world “establishes, once and for all, our idea of truth” that sets an open and endless trajectory of expression in motion (PhP, lxxxi). In the paradox of expression, truth is exscribed as that toward which all expression tends, though its full inscription is forever deferred. “The world is not what I think, but what I live; I am open to the world, I unquestionably communicate with it, but I do not possess it, it is inexhaustible” (PhP, lxxx– lxxxi). The paradox of expression marks out the spacing that initiates the task of reaching the truth (which it exscribes) while simultaneously precluding that goal, since what is exscribed overflows every possible inscription and yet only exists as the excess of inscriptions. The world we experience is always already mysterious or metastable, and phenomenology is forever beginning again “because phenomenology’s task was to reveal the mystery of the world” (PhP, lxxxv); this requires nothing less than gearing philosophy into the open and endless task of expressing our experience and expressing what exists.23 Hence Silverman’s important emphasis that “the ambiguity of experience is a lived language which is oriented toward the achievement of the paradoxes of expression” (MPIL, 170).24 Waldenfels does not mention the other occurrence of Husserl’s phrase about expression in Phenomenology of Perception, but its context again confirms the interpretation just offered. The context is not an attempt to understand linguistic expression or its relation to mute experience, but rather an invocation of the paradoxical structure of experience itself. Merleau-Ponty suggests that with the development of an attitude of “radical reflection,” in contrast to transcendental reflection, the phenomenologist is not attempting to meet up with a preexisting subject (a pure for-itself) or an independent world (a pure in-itself). In truly radical reflection, what is given is “neither pure consciousness nor pure being”: As Kant himself said with insight, what is given is experience, or in other words the communication of a finite subject with an opaque being from which the subject emerges, but also in which the subject remains engaged. It is “that pure and, so to speak, still-mute experience that

Introduction

19

must be brought to the pure expression of its own sense.” We have the experience of a world, not in the sense of a system of relations that fully determines each event, but in the sense of an open totality whose synthesis can never be completed. We have the experience of an I, not in the sense of an absolute subjectivity, but rather one that is indivisibly unmade and remade by the course of time. (PhP, 227–8, emphasis added)

Here we see a first description of what I will call the paradoxical logic of expression in Merleau-Ponty, a logic illustrated in a diverse range of experiences beyond the linguistic realm. The question is one of an act that emerges from an opacity that it sustains and reshapes, and yet that it does not envelop, a metastability that it exscribes through its inscription. Prior to its self-expression, the subject is not some “real unity” hiding from view in our still mute originary experience; the subject is a “presumptive unity within the horizon of experience,” a lived or metastable unity in its “nascent state” (PhP, 228). The task of phenomenology is to discover a means of reflection that can approach our experience of this presumptive or metastable unity and yet leave open the necessity of forever returning to the lived and embodied experience of the world as the metastable source of all philosophical investigations. Nevertheless, even if Waldenfels privileges a more narrow version of the paradox of expression, his analysis offers a valuable starting point for the reading of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the paradoxes of expression that will be offered in this book.25 Due to a tension between what is to be expressed (mute experience) and the available means of expression, Waldenfels suggests that “two extremes become impossible here, namely, to regard an event of expression either as pure action and pure creation of newness or, in contrast, as pure passion and pure reproduction” (PEx, 92). Waldenfels is correct that expression is forever between pure creation and pure repetition, and I adopt this insight throughout this book, but this characterization risks (as Merleau-Ponty’s early work does) focusing to much upon the centrifugal direction of expression—a complete picture needs the paradoxical structures of experience more generally, what I will call exscription, or the metastable structure of the paradoxical logic of expression and the open trajectories of sense. Waldenfels concludes that creative expression is paradoxical because it “exhibits contradictory aspects and contradictory determinations” that cannot be resolved by some higher more comprehensive determination. Thus, the paradox of expression as described by Waldenfels appears to be a paradox observed by a third party, not one that is lived from within. For Merleau-Ponty, expression reveals that experience itself sustains these contradictions, and thus we must provide a phenomenology of the paradoxical

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logic of expression—and as I will demonstrate in this book, his entire corpus constitutes just such a description.26 Waldenfels identifies four interdependent operative concepts that can “deal with the paradox without resolving it” (PEx, 93) and that can “articulate the expressivity of expression” (PEx, 95). To stay close to Merleau-Ponty’s project, we must understand these eidetic concepts (divergence, translation, après coup, and excess) as useful orienting structures rather than final products of his investigation, and they in fact seem to already overflow themselves in calling for some initial supplementation. Waldenfels’ first operative concept is “divergence” (écart), which refers to the manner in which expression “proceeds indirectly, laterally, not directly and frontally” (PEx, 95). Expression involves introducing a certain spacing or deviation into the linguistic field, a certain coherent deformation, to adopt Malraux’s term (IL, 91–2). No matter how small, each expression deforms and reforms the fields of meaning to which it responds and yet that it paradoxically sustains. Waldenfels emphasizes the structure of the event, but Merleau-Ponty is interested in how each act is a taking up of the field and a response to that which will, if successful, be expressed in the expression—that is, the trajectory of the field. The “field” that undergoes coherent deformation is not at first a stable field of relations, it is sensed as a reservoir of potentials, a “metastable” structure and my expression responds to it in order to move it toward a new equilibrium. The interesting point is not that a field is deformed, but that it is deformed coherently, even though it is never fully “possessed” in advance of the expression. In other words, the ideal is metastable, the gesture crystallizes a new phase in the trajectory of the field, and the field itself is never exhausted. The second operative concept is a paradoxical notion of “translation.” Following Proust, the event of expression is characterized as a movement of translation that is both the reading of an “inner book” of experience and also the creation of that experience. “The paradoxical character of this creative translation and creative reading,” explains Waldenfels, “rests on the fact that the reading neither simply finds an original text nor simply produces a text” (PEx, 95). This structural description needs to be supplemented by noting that the possibility of this “paradoxical” translation is importantly dependent upon the experience of communication as the gestural side of expression that necessarily takes place in the weighty. Moreover, this notion of communication is not an “interpretive distance,” but rather the distance of a spacing (speaking, reading, or hearing) by which the trace emerges as an address (even from me to me), a spacing that exscribes Being itself, and the exscribed metastable structures are what allow for this creative translation. The third concept identified by Waldenfels is a certain après coup temporality to the expressive event. As he writes, “the event precedes itself”;

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“present and past do not follow one another but are entangled within one another” (PEx, 96). The expressed fulfills the expressive movement retroactively: “expression antedates itself.”27 Yet such a description leads back to the experience of expression. If the urgency to express is not taken up, or if a question that looms up in a conversation flickers but disappears before we lend it our weight, then the “vague fever” that is passed over, left unspoken, is not in any sense a what at all. Beginning from the authority of successful expressions, we assume the expressed must have preceded its expression, yet Merleau-Ponty always returns to expression in its nascent state.28 That which exists as metastable is merely virtual, and only appears to have had a positive existence after crystallization. “Excess” is the final operative concept given by Waldenfels. In addition to preceding itself, the event of expression “also remains behind itself [. . .] as an ‘excess’” (PEx, 96). No expression could become the master of its own limits and frontiers without ceasing to be a field phenomenon. This is why, as Silverman stresses, Merleau-Ponty repeatedly “rejects the ideal of a ‘successful’ language which can stand disembodied from experience” (MPIL, 164). If expression did not overflow itself, if it made possible a mere repetition without any excess, then it would presuppose an original text complete in itself. It must overflow itself in the event and in its openness to a future of creative repetitions that it can never master, since it belongs to a trajectory of real acts of reading or speaking that will introduce further divergences. The paradoxical logic of expression is what points toward how we can sense and gear into this excess in a gesture that is necessarily between activity and passivity, and suggests the ontological peculiarity of being within a structure we institute and sustain and yet that transcends us. The supplementations I have included in the descriptions of these operative concepts suggest the questions that motivate Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical investigations: How is the painter’s gesture felt as creative and yet constrained by the demands of the work that is being born beneath her brush? How can we feel and respond to the weight of the past without having any explicit memories in mind? How can the acquisition of a habit allow me to gear into a new situation that bears little material resemblance to the context of its learning? How does the political actor respond to and yet shape the sense of History? How can I be responsible for my intentions and the consequences of my actions? How can I read a philosopher without merely repeating his or her words, and yet without simply imposing upon their traces my own interpretation? These questions suggest a “lived logic” that calls for a phenomenology of the paradoxes of expression. Only by returning in the chapters that follow to Merleau-Ponty’s marvelous and cascading phenomenological descriptions of the experience of being the

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locus of this paradox will we fully grasp the subtlety and the scope of his insight. Merleau-Ponty’s corpus is a deepening illustration of the paradoxical logic of expression, and rather than remaining upon the eidetic register, we ought to follow Merleau-Ponty’s prescription when he writes that, against the illness of a pensée de survol, “[t]he best remedy [. . .] is contact with the texts” (HLP, 6).

The weight of the metastable: Simondon and the paradoxical logic of expression We have to find a meaning in the development of language, and conceive of language as a moving equilibrium [. . .] a new conception of the being of language, which is now logic in contingency—an oriented system which nevertheless always elaborates random factors, taking what was fortuitous up again into a meaningful whole—incarnate logic. (OPL, 87–8, emphasis added)

Even if Merleau-Ponty resists an eidetic analysis of expression, he often suggests that the paradoxes of expression point toward something like a lived or incarnate logic. In The Structure of Behavior, he develops an organic form of dialectical logic in the complex relation between levels of behavior. In Phenomenology of Perception, he discusses an “unspoken logic,” a “lived logic,” and a “tacit logic” (PhP, 50, 230). When he writes about history and Marxism, he emphasizes a nonlinear (adventurous) dialectic. In his explicit project on expression, he refers to the “allusive logic of the world” (PW, 65) and the “clouded logic of a system of expression” (PW, 37). In The Visible and the Invisible, he invokes a “logic in action whose philosophical status must be defined if we wish to get out of the confusion in which the ready-made notions of thought, subject, and object throw us, and if we wish to know finally what the world is and what being is” (VI, 100).29 Yet Merleau-Ponty never explicitly establishes the “philosophical status” of this lived logic. In my reading of Merleau-Ponty, I draw extensively upon concepts developed by Gilbert Simondon, including individuation, metastability, and what he calls “transductive” logic, which I believe offer the most promising development of the open movement of Merleau-Ponty’s incarnate or expressive logic of experience. Although Simondon was a student of Merleau-Ponty’s and dedicated the first part of his thesis “à la mémoire de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” it may be difficult to see a philosophical lineage between their approaches. Simondon neither discusses nor cites Merleau-Ponty’s work, and his method

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is a decidedly nonphenomenological philosophy that aspires to be a first philosophy derived from “physical schemas.”30 His focus on reinterpreting scientific theory implies a strident critique of taking perception as the starting point for philosophical reflection.31 He even asserts that “the body can only be called flesh as a possible cadaver, and not as a real living being” (ILFI, 270). Although pre-dating Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh, the comment is surely a reference to Merleau-Ponty’s work on embodiment. In other words, it seems prima facie difficult to reconcile the positivism of Simondon with the phenomenological work of Merleau-Ponty.32 Such a hasty conclusion would fail to recognize the notion of mémoire suggested by Simondon’s dedication. As Jacques Garelli notes in his “Introduction à la problématique de Gilbert Simondon”: “memory implies recognition, and thus loyalty.”33 This “loyalty” harmonizes with the notion of taking up that I have invoked, and can be readily seen in Simondon’s adoption of the critique of Gestalttheorie or in his call to rethink the “elemental.” Garelli compares Simondon’s philosophical relation to Merleau-Ponty with Merleau-Ponty’s own relation to Husserl. Rather than “simply repeating” Husserl, Merleau-Ponty proposes to take up “the very movement of his thought” (OPL, 84). And indeed, as Simondon writes, “every act takes up the past and encounters it anew” (ILFI, 334). Given his “loyalty,” Simondon’s concepts are perhaps contained in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy “in the way French literature is contained in the French language or a writer’s future works in his style” (PW, 131). Thus, Simondon and Merleau-Ponty must be brought together less through the specific content of their philosophies than through their shared philosophical style, which I will argue is captured by the paradoxical logic of expression. As Jean-Hugues Barthélémy remarks, Simondon is perhaps “the most well-known unknown,” or the “most ignored of the great French thinkers of the 20th century.”34 Moreover, given that he is often associated with the influence his ideas had on Deleuze’s anti-humanism, his work is rarely explored for its own subtle humanistic post-phenomenological “encyclopedism” (SEG, 4). Simondon’s adoption of highly technical fields of knowledge (from quantum mechanics to biology to cybernetics) has resulted in a slow engagement with his central insight into the importance of individuation, which names the complex and relational process of becoming at the heart of Simondon’s ontology. Just as Merleau-Ponty returns to “language as being in the process of being made, in the process of striding” (HLP, 55), Simondon focuses on the processes of individuation and the pre-individual metastable state from which individuation emerges. Echoing Merleau-Ponty’s style, Simondon suggests that the two main traditional accounts of individuation begin from a common error: the privileging of the static individual. On the one side,

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substantialist approaches take the individual to have an essential unity; on the other side, hylomorphic approaches understand the individual to be a union of form and matter. In both approaches, “the individual as constituted individual is the interesting reality, the reality to be explained” (ILFI, 23). The tradition, then, sees becoming as an inessential aspect of ontological explanation, a mere ontic unfolding of the deeper truth of the preexisting principle of individuation. For Simondon, the process of individuation is essential because the individual is a relational being (ILFI, 12), or as he says, “more than a unity” (ILFI, 29). The essence of the individual cannot be grasped from the individual alone, but rather must be approached through its relation to the milieu and its reservoir of potential further individuations. He writes: [The individual] would thus be understood as a relative reality, as a certain phase of being which presupposes in itself a pre-individual reality, and which, even after individuation, does not exist all by itself, for individuation does not erase, in a single stroke, the potentials of the pre-individual reality. On the other hand, individuation does not only bring about the individual, but also the individual-milieu couple. (ILFI, 24–5)

There is thus a doubling of the ambiguity of the individual: an “individual” is neither complete in itself (since it bears the weight of a pre-individual set of metastable possibilities of which it is but a phase), nor separable from its milieu (since its nature is essentially relational). The pre-individual itself is relational, and the individual is both the “theater and the agent” of individuations (ILFI, 63). As such, the individual is much more virtual than real, but paradoxically, this virtual is no less real for being virtual, which is to say that the individual is “more and less than a unity” (ILFI, 29). Like an expression that carries forward a potential set of intensities beyond its literal meaning and that responds to both the weight of the past and the weight of the present, the individual too is a double-edged relation, a crossing of relations, a chiasm between the pre-individual–individual relation and the individual–milieu relation—a chiasmatic structure of the between and the around. Individuation shows that being can fall out of phase (se déphaser) through a crystallization, and this, concludes Simondon, is only possible if “being” is a “tensed system, supersaturated, above the level of unity, not consisting only in itself, and not being able to be understood by means of the principle of the excluded middle” (ILFI, 25). This new ontology, then, requires a new logic, and the concepts of unity and identity only apply to a single phase of being, and not to the ontologically primary process of individuation.

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As Barthélémy writes, “the relation that is the individual is a relation between orders of magnitude, which do not exist in themselves except relative to each other and thus are no longer substantial terms canceling anti-substantialism” (SEG, 14). In other words, a realism of relations can de-substantialize the individual without thereby making the individual unreal (SEG, 14). Being is the pre-individual, as the reservoir that may (or may not) crystallize into actions or individuals that paradoxically carry that pre-individual forward and sustain it; in short, being, for Simondon, should be understood according to the paradoxical logic of expression. Philosophy, argues Simondon, lacks a properly expanded notion of “equilibrium,” limiting itself to two types of mutually exclusive equilibriums: stable or unstable (ILFI, 27–8). A stable equilibrium is a state of the lowest possible potential energy; an unstable one is any system in motion or undergoing transition, and thus not an equilibrium at all. Simondon draws from science a notion of equilibrium that is neither stable nor unstable: the metastable equilibrium. A metastable state is one that is precariously stable. Incorporating the reality of relations into his understanding of potential energy, Simondon argues that the metastable is the possible or potential of an individuation, but that this potential is not “contained” by any individual; rather, it is in the relation. In other words, the metastable is the pre-individual— the between and the around of individuals—which is radically different from any particular phase but that is nonetheless centered there in that individual, insofar as the individual is the trajectory of phases.35 This shifts the potential to the between, in the sense of a chiasm.36 The pre-individual is a reservoir of intensities and probabilities and the individual is a certain phase of this ongoing phenomenon of becoming. Once this is observed, the idea of a “stable” equilibrium is displaced: [T]he general case of states is perhaps that of metastable states: the equilibrium of a realized structure is only stable within certain limits and on a single order of magnitude, not having any interaction with others; it apparently hides the potentials which, if freed, could produce an abrupt alteration leading to a new, equally metastable, structuration. (ILFI, 326–7)

In short, all structures or phases of individuation are metastable, even though within certain conditions they remain stable and do not “manifest” their potentials. We cannot work backward from the products to the process to understand individuals; we must explore the individual as a moment in a trajectory of individuation. Moreover, the description of the individual as “more than a unity” or as the center of a metastable field throws into question

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the idea that individuals can be treated by a logic based on identity or on the excluded middle (ILFI, 25). Being needs to be understood through a “transductive logic” because it “possesses a transductive unity, that is, it can fall out of phase with itself, overflow itself on both sides of its center” (ILFI, 31). As Simondon writes: We understand by transduction an operation—a physical, biological, mental, or social operation—by which an activity gradually propagates within a domain, in grounding this propagation upon a structuration of the operative domain here and there: each region of structure constituted serves as the principle of constitution for the following region. (ILFI, 32)

Crystallization, then, provides the image of transduction. Every phase of crystallization is shaped by the weight of the previous crystallizations, and thus propagation is not deduction. Each individual serves as an essential part of the milieu for subsequent individuations. In transduction, the related terms do not preexist the relation. Thus, transduction is the moving logic of expression. According to Simondon, “this notion can be used to understand all the different areas of individuation”; it is both “metaphysical and logical,” it “applies to ontogenesis and it is ontogenesis itself ” (ILFI, 33). Consider Garelli’s example of the transductive relation between an initial sketch and a finished painting.37 In creating the sketch, the painter engages a metastable field in which the lines, materials, her trained gestures, and the desire to express progressively crystallize into the work that is coming into individual existence. Each gesture transductively builds upon the previous one, or may invalidate a previous line, requiring it to be adjusted. As the image stabilizes on the paper, the expression becomes more or less individuated as a resolution to the multiple dimensions and tensions of the emerging expression. The sketch bears forward its explicit structure as well as the potentials that it left to the side, exscribing into the metastable all of the pathways not taken. This sketch, now leaning against a larger canvas in the painter’s studio, opens for the painter a new metastable field that includes colors, brushes, different techniques, different time and economic constraints, the original charge of the pre-individual to be expressed, and the weight of the sketch itself. As the painting crystallizes, this new set of dimensions becomes more or less stable. When finished, it again invites an individuating process when the viewer approaches, steps back, and allows the painting to express through her own history, allows it to speak through her own situated body and life. Or again, the painting may become a weight in other metastable fields: for the creative activity of the curator, or for the act of including it in a montage or in a brochure. Individuations remain forever open and unpredictable, and so

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too then does the “meaning” of the painting. Transduction is a logic of open trajectory, and it offers a way of understanding the lived logic of expression from within the structures that expression sustains and takes up, and yet that transcend every expressive act. This, I argue, offers a description of the being of language that can account for the incarnate and contingent logic of expression alluded to by Merleau-Ponty throughout his work. Language is a metastable structure insofar as it is an oriented system that is sustained in the individual but that is not “contained” by that individual. Moreover, as the speaker engages with the milieu of other speakers and new situations, language crystallizes into speech in ways that are not definitively predictable, much like the precise configurations of a crystal or a snowflake in a physical individuation. The speaker must take up the entire language in expressing themselves, or to use the language from before, the speaker exscribes the metastable structure through a particular inscription. And yet, the event of individuation or expression simultaneously reshapes the metastable equilibrium. Since every individuation or expression is between pure creation and pure repetition, every expression is a coherent deformation of the system. The essential nature of expressive performances between pure creation and pure repetition, which are the very engine of the moving equilibrium named “language,” offers, I will now argue, a new interpretation of metaphor.

Metaphor and the trajectory of sense A “direction” of thought—this is not a metaphor—There is no metaphor between the visible and the invisible (the invisible: either my thought for myself or the sensible given to the other for me): metaphor is too much or too little: too much if the invisible is really invisible, too little if it lends itself to transposition. (VI, 221–2)

Even if Merleau-Ponty rejects the idea that expression is the simple making public of a meaning in the head of the speaker, expression nevertheless has something to do with meaning. The “meaning” of an expression is not a thing or a signification, but rather a moving negotiation between the weight of the past, the present, and the ideal; that is, meaning is a trajectory, a sens never “irrevocably accomplished.”38 Each expressive gesture both takes up and alters the trajectory of sense from within the evolving metastable equilibrium, and by lending our bodies to the expression we make ourselves responsible for a past that we are allowing to repeat in our words and for an open future that will draw its legitimacy, at least in part, from our voices. And

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indeed, just before the passage quoted in the epigraph above, Merleau-Ponty writes: “every painting, every action, every human enterprise is a crystallization of time, a cipher of transcendence—At least if one understands them as a certain spread (écart) between being and nothingness, [. . .] a certain manner of modulating time and space” (VI, 208). Thus, every gesture is a metaphor in the original Greek sense of a bearing over or across. Merleau-Ponty shows, then, that there is no “metaphor” in the modern sense of the word, but also that metaphor, properly understood, is everywhere. Every gesture is a certain divergence, a certain spacing between being and nothingness, between repetition and creation; that is, every gesture is metaphorical. Thus, in order to come to terms with the paradoxical logic of expression, it is essential to develop Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of meaning as a trajectory of sense in the many performances of the expressive trace that “torment static language, opening or narrowing the meaning of words.”39 I will attempt such an account by offering in this section a Merleau-Pontian understanding of metaphor in contrast to traditional approaches.40 Although many modern theories of metaphor offer quasi-phenomenological descriptions of the experience of hearing or reading metaphors, in their tendency to offer reductive accounts from a third-person perspective outside of the dynamics of metaphors in action, they introduce a problematic “interpretive distance” that masks the paradoxical structures of the event of metaphor itself. Consider the cognitivist or “interactive” view offered by Max Black.41 Black insists that there is a positive metaphorical or figurative meaning, echoing the theories of language Merleau-Ponty names “intellectualist.” Black’s account begins from a quasi-phenomenological description of what the hearer of the metaphor does in order to decode the meaning. In the metaphor “man is a wolf,” the generally accepted meanings of “wolf ” (and the particular understanding of the hearer) offer a filter through which “man” is viewed, and this has the effect of emphasizing, de-emphasizing, or obscuring aspects of the primary term to reveal the meaning intended by the speaker. Such a process would require an interpretive distance between speaking the metaphor and understanding its meaning, whereas in experience the metaphor is meaningful because we can immediately see man as a wolf without doing this filtering or decoding work. Alternatively, Donald Davidson defends a non-cognitivist account of metaphor, arguing that metaphors mean nothing beyond their literal meaning.42 Romeo’s phrase “Juliet is the sun” is simply a false claim that “Juliet is the sun,” and any subsequent attribution of meaning to the utterance is the work of imagination. For Davidson, metaphors are interesting, but not because there is something like a “figurative” meaning existing behind the utterance. The activity of metaphor is different from linguistic activity, properly understood. Metaphors are like an “unfamiliar

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noise”43 that “makes us attend to some likeness, often a novel or surprising likeness, between two or more things” (WMM, 247). Metaphor may initiate a seeing of similarity in dissimilars, as Aristotle says, and give rise to a lot of language, but for Davidson an interpretive distance separates the hearing of the metaphor and the subsequent figuring out of its meaning, whereas “literal” meaning solidifies when the interpretive distance is reduced to zero—a metaphor dies when it is no longer surprising. Davidson does suggest that “an adequate account of metaphor must allow that the primary or original meanings of words remain active in their metaphorical setting” (WMM, 249), but he does not explain how this metastable field remains active. The interpretive distance must be removed (without utterly collapsing the distance to coincidence) if we are to approach an account of metaphor through Merleau-Ponty. Moving closer to a Merleau-Pontian approach, Mark Johnson and George Lakoff argue, in Metaphors We Live By, that particular acts of metaphor are made possible by the metaphorical structure of conceptual systems. They suggest that entire fields of expression are governed by umbrella metaphors such as “argument is war,” which allow for particular utterances: “Your claims are indefensible” or “He attacked every weak point in my argument . . .” Alternatively, in a culture where “argument is dance,” the nature of argument itself is different.44 Thus, metaphor involves a certain fecundity in terms of its structure, but this focus on structure fails to provide an account of the creative side of the finding of metaphor in the first place. Their description hangs on the meaning of the words in the metaphor, but each metaphor paradoxically shifts the meaning of the words. When Lakoff and Johnson write “argument is dance,” they respond to a metastable possibility and gear into an emerging structure of sense. Simultaneously something shifts in the possibilities for what they will subsequently write or what their readers might take away from their next viewing of the evening news. Understanding metaphor requires not merely having the fixed meanings of the words, but also being able to gear into the open trajectory of the many performances of the trace, and this occurs from within the metastable structures that transcend us even while existing as nothing other than the exscribed of our real and potential expressive inscriptions. If the modern approach to metaphor seems to fall short of a Merleau-Pontian account, some insight can be gained by following Paul Ricœur’s approach in The Rule of Metaphor, which involves first turning back to Aristotle. In Poetics, Aristotle writes: “But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor [. . .]. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor (literally: to metaphorize well [. . .]) implies an intuitive perception of the similarity [. . .] in dissimilars”

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(1459a, 3–8).45 For Ricœur, Aristotle understands the act of metaphor to be a “calculated error” (RM, 23), and we can now say that this “calculation” is possible thanks to a genius that gears into the metastable possibilities of the situation. This also harmonizes with what Merleau-Ponty calls the “genius for ambiguity” that defines humans as embodied and expressive subjects. Merleau-Ponty would likely understand “calculated” errors as an overly intellectualist description, and would prefer his notion of coherent deformation instead, where the genius involves the embodied art of taking up the acquired language and bending it to express oneself in an act between pure repetition and pure creation. An “eye for resemblances” is a genius for “coherent deformation” because, from within a metastable equilibrium, not just any deformation will do. As Ricœur observes, Aristotle’s definition subtly introduces an uncommon and normative verb structure: “to metaphorize well” (RM, 25). By focusing upon the gesture of metaphor, Aristotle suggests that the “process prevails over result,” and thus the metaphor is a “de-constructive intermediary phase between description and redescription” (RM, 25, 24). Metaphor must be understood through a phenomenology of expression because it is essentially a seeing of similarity in difference, a gearing into the metastable that is neither a pure repetition (description) nor a pure creation (re-description). But neither Aristotle nor Ricœur could be said to launch a genuine phenomenological account from these important descriptions that nonetheless characterize metaphor through its creative gesture. For his part, Ricœur sets to unfolding the narrative of theories of metaphor, from Aristotle to Derrida, and never fully returns to the experience of metaphor itself. It is worth exploring why this narrative account falls short. Following Ricœur’s analysis, it is useful to identify three main approaches to metaphor. The first is Aristotle’s, in which the vehicle of metaphorical meaning is the word. Aristotle posits that the metaphor does not “bring any [new] information: it could be the object of an exhaustive paraphrase,” and yet, as Renaud Barbaras emphasizes, this fails to account for how a metaphor can “say it better” than the proper name (MO, 268). Metaphor as substitution, then, falls short of the creative and normative power of metaphor. A second set of theories shifts to the “propositional structure” of metaphorical sentences, which entails a shift from meaning to reference. The proposition implies a world about which one is speaking (MO, 269), yet it again fails to explain the creative function of metaphors. Metaphors actually add “to the ways in which we perceive” (RM, 224) and “burst the previous categories and create new logical frontiers” (MO, 270). The third position is the hermeneutical point of view, taking discourse as a whole as at stake in the metaphor’s ability to “re-describe reality” (RM, 5). Hermeneutics distinguishes between the structure of the work and the “world” of the work, and the interpretation of

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metaphor is less about its meaning than about the world displayed before and by a text (RM, 260). Ricœur worries that even the focus on discourse may obscure the metaphor’s power to re-describe reality, and thus he writes: “the ‘place’ of metaphor, its most intimate and ultimate abode, is neither the name, nor the sentence, nor even discourse, but the copula of the verb to be. The metaphorical ‘is’ at once signifies both ‘is not’ and ‘is like’” (RM, 6). This shift to what might be called an existential hermeneutics (given the focus on the verb to be) nevertheless takes us farther away from the living context of speaking and hearing metaphors. If understanding metaphor involves working out how Juliet is and “is not” and “is like” the sun, then interpretation becomes the condition of understanding while failing to provide a description of understanding. Granting the interpretive distance the status of a condition of possibility, Ricœur both completes the classical account of metaphor and precludes a genuine return to the experience of metaphor. The metaphor, however, initiates us into its world without delay; there is neither the time nor the need to complete this hermeneutical work. Ricœur is certainly right about the power of metaphors to re-describe reality, but by limiting the investigation to their textual manifestation and then taking that role to be exemplary, he leaves his theory without the resources to account for how we speak and hear metaphors all the time. Ricœur’s understanding of the is/is not/is like of the metaphor suggests that we are left with a hopeless paradox of expression, an endless oscillation between the real and the ideal depending on the attitude of the interpreter. On the one hand, it preserves everyday or literal reference in which the is functions normally; on the other hand, it suggests a fictive universe in which the is does not have a referential function, but a heuristic one. As Merleau-Ponty once said about his early work in Phenomenology of Perception, this results in a bad ambiguity that offers only a “mixture of finitude and universality, of interiority and exteriority,” or here we can add, literal language and fiction. The event of metaphor surely is a phenomenon of expression, which reveals what Merleau-Ponty calls a “good ambiguity,” “a spontaneity which accomplishes what had appeared to be impossible [. . .] gathers together [. . .] the past and the present, nature and culture, [and we might now add: literal language and fiction] into a single whole” (Inédit, 11). When Romeo declares that “Juliet is the sun,” there is neither the time nor the need to complete some heavy hermeneutical work, since we gear into the rich and open possibilities of the metaphor as the metastable structures taken up and carried forward. On my view, Romeo’s words articulate the place of the meaningful and expressive event of intertwining that relieves us of the task of doing precisely this sort of interpretation.

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Before offering my own Merleau-Pontian approach to metaphor, it is worth considering Barbaras’s Merleau-Pontian inspired approach in his essay “Métaphore et Ontologie.” Departing from Ricœur’s emphasis on textual interpretation, Barbaras argues that the very possibility of metaphor requires that we accept Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology, that is, metaphor reveals the need to understand how a thing can “be another thing while also not being that other thing” (MO, 274). Thus, metaphor requires not a logical curiosity in the verb to be, but rather a full-blown ontology that already contains the relations implied by the metaphor, one in which Juliet already “is/is not/is like” the sun. This suggests that a metaphor functions, for Barbaras, much like literal language, but with reference to ontological relations rather than empirical ones. In other words, the possibility of metaphor requires an ontology rich enough to sustain the paradoxes of expression beyond mere (re-) description. The metaphorical “is/is not/is like” is only viciously paradoxical given a classical logic based upon the excluded middle. Invoking Simondon, Barbaras suggests that there might be an alternative logic and ontology “that permits us to remove the paradox in such a way that a being would never be itself except in not fully being itself ” (MO, 274). There is a nondescriptive form of reference that shows how the real cannot be reduced to the literal (MO, 275). Each thing is less a static individual than a certain harmony or melody whose parts are essentially related in a metastable equilibrium. As Barbaras writes, “I do not perceive the thing; I perceive according to it. It does not appear then as a definite individual, but rather as a certain accent or a certain coherent deformation of the world” (MO, 279). Here we find Barbaras transposing Merleau-Ponty’s notion of coherent deformation, developed in the context of expression, to the ontological register. Even the perception of things follows the paradoxical logic of expression, and the world is a world of “pregnancy, participation, lineage, in short the world as the place of an originary metaphoricity” (MO, 281). Given such an ontology, the paradoxes dissolve because each metaphor is an ontological-literal description of a preexisting intertwining of everything with everything else. Juliet is not the sun, is the sun, and is like the sun, and Shakespeare is simply laying bare this ontological fact. For Barbaras, metaphor inscribes—rather than exscribes— the originary “empiétement”46 or intertwining of its terms. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s invocation of the paradoxical logic of expression is no more an attempt to dissolve the paradoxes that it is an attempt to see them as hopeless. It seems to me that Barbaras’s ontological interpretation goes too far, and risks overlooking the important nascent phenomenology of metaphor in Merleau-Ponty’s account of expression. Moreover, it represents a perhaps overly robust interpretation of Simondon’s notion of the metastable equilibrium. Barbaras’s interpretation stems from one of the only mentions

Introduction

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that Merleau-Ponty makes of metaphor, which occurs in a working note to The Visible and the Invisible, and appears above as the epigraph to this section. What does Merleau-Ponty mean by the claim that there is “no metaphor between the visible and the invisible” in the metaphor “the direction of thought”? For Barbaras, this justifies the ontological interpretation that metaphors are a special class of literal-ontological descriptions. Despite this tempting interpretation, if we follow Merleau-Ponty’s thought in these working notes, it does not necessarily lead to the robust intertwining suggested by Barbaras’s originary metaphoricity. The metaphor in question is “thought is a direction,” and Merleau-Ponty gives two reasons why this particular statement is not a metaphor. First, thought can be said to have a direction because it requires a certain locality. Even if this locality is not a spatio-temporal point, a thought has at least a place, or “a locality by investment” (VI, 222). As such, thought takes place or has a place within the world, and can thus be directional. Second, for Merleau-Ponty, “A direction is not in space: it is in filigree across it” (VI, 222). Again, directions and orientations have to do with place, not space. Neither of these two reasons requires that thought always already is a direction because of a fundamental metaphoricity. Rather, thought becomes a direction because it was a direction as a metastable possibility, and in so becoming it also maintains all of the other possibilities it might have become, thereby being at once meaningful in experience and sustaining the paradoxes of expression. “Juliet is the sun” is not meaningful because we discover that she was always already both not the sun and the sun; the metaphor takes up a latent possibility in the metastable equilibrium and alters the meanings of the words by instituting the place of this intertwining. This also applies to the metaphor of “the weight of the past,” for here too there is no metaphor in any of the modern senses discussed above. “Weight” in physics refers to that which causes bodies to move along certain dimensions, and this is precisely what the past does. There is no metaphor at work when Merleau-Ponty writes, “[i]deas are the centers of our gravitation, this very definite void which the vault of language is built around, and which has actual existence only in the weight and counterweight of stones” (Préface, 20). Thus, although Merleau-Ponty’s statement may indeed appear to reject the possibility of modern understandings of metaphor, it does not (at least not explicitly) imply that the richness and creativity of metaphor as a phenomenon of expression needs to be replaced by a fundamental metaphoricity that turns metaphor into literal-ontological description. Rather, it suggests an account of metaphorical events that remains within the phenomenological account of how expressions articulate the place where thought might become a direction or by which the sun might shine with Juliet from the balcony. To follow Barbaras would require populating our

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ontology with an actual intertwining, rather than a potential intertwining, and that is why it seems he understands the metaphor to inscribe already existing relations. But the metaphor does not simply inscribe a relation, and the ontology of intertwining could never be the subject of a complete set of inscriptions. As Merleau-Ponty writes, his ontology represents a new ontology of a “single dimensionality, a polymorphous Being, which justifies all [ontologies] without being fully expressed by any of them” (EM, 134). The event of metaphor exscribes the fundamental metaphoricity, not in the mode of actual relations, but in the supersaturated structure of a metastable equilibrium, to invoke Simondon’s term. For Simondon, the metastable equilibrium is precisely the pre-individual, and so cannot “contain” individuals and actual relations in advance of their expression. Even if the paradoxical activity found in the metaphorical gesture shows the insufficiency of the figurative/literal distinction itself, the fundamental metaphoricity is exscribed, or “made present,” in the metaphor, not inscribed there. The metaphor inscribes relations, and exscribes all that would outstrip even the most thorough paraphrase. Moreover, the fundamental metaphoricity is sustained by the intertwinings brought about through expressions, not vice versa. This demands that we emphasize the phenomenon of expression itself and what I call the trajectory of sense as prior to the ontology of intertwining, which is indeed sustained by expressive bodies and their proliferating traces. In a related working note, Merleau-Ponty writes: “new as our initiatives may be, they come to birth at the heart of being, they are connected onto the time that streams forth in us, supported on the pivots or hinges of our life, their sense is a ‘direction’” (VI, 221). Sense is not a thing captured in literal (even literal-ontological) phrases, but rather the lived coherence of a trajectory of creative repetitions and performances of the weighty traces of expression. The experience of metaphor is thus a paradigm of the paradoxical logic of expression. There is no pure creation—the metaphor does not come from nowhere, there is no pure subject as a punctual and self-transparent moment of transcendental consciousness, and yet there is no pure repetition, because the source of all metaphors is the metastable trajectory of originary experience. The life of an expressive body is an historical trajectory, and any given moment is but a phase in a long process of becoming. The expressive body is subject to the weight of the past that it itself bears and sustains by carrying it forward in its metastable structures. The past sediments in numerous ways, into personal habits and into the things that “everyone knows.” Yet none of these are wholly impersonal, since even the cultural sedimentations for which we seem free of responsibility still depend upon our taking them up and playing them forward in our lives. The structures of language, for instance, are merely trans-individual metastable structures

Introduction

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of the general working together of many personal copings along with the vestiges of successful expression and communication, and yet the language is not the mere summation of these parts. Languages themselves are metastable trajectories shaped by the actual situated activities of speaking subjects. Thus, the paradoxical logic of expression describes our being within the metastable. What is to be expressed is, prior to its expression, not a thing, and yet not nothing. It is anticipated in the structures that are coming together as the intertwining of the trajectory of the language, the trajectory of the personal life of the speaker, and the milieu it is in the process of reshaping. Out of all of the language she knows, out of all of the life she has lived, she speaks. Her expression crystallizes as a response, a creation, and an institution. She does not possess the past in memory, her body takes it up into the new situation, breathing new life into its trajectory while thereby forever changing it by the mere act of repeating it here and now. As such, there is much more exscribed in the moment of inscription than the “meaning” of the expression. I exscribe there my gesturing body, my entire language, my entire life, my entire culture, and my responsibility for them all. As a result, there are no eternally living and no definitively dead metaphors. When an expressive body stumbles upon “Juliet is the sun” for the first time, the trace comes to life in the reading, and no number of banal repetitions or explanations of this metaphor can kill it off once and for all. The material expression itself initiates a trajectory of repetitions and alterations because the lived experience of this utterance provides the place where Juliet and the sun intertwine, along with the possibility for so many other and contradictory relations and metaphors not chosen, such as “Juliet is the moon.” As Romeo’s words echo throughout the theatre, the sun shines forth from the balcony and Juliet takes her place simultaneously at the center of his universe and upon the eastern horizon. The metaphor reconfigures the very meaning of Juliet and of the sun through a coherent deformation of the metastable structures of language and of the scene. And this reconfiguration transductively shapes where the Bard might take us next—when Juliet’s eyes, twinkling in the heavens in the absence of two vacationing stars, would shine so bright so as to call forth the bird’s song as if it were not night. This expressive event, along with the weighty trace that solicits re-performances, initiates a trajectory of repetitions and alterations because it reconfigures a real part of the world—the marks on this page, or the vibrations received upon an eardrum. The sense of these traces is the exscribed intertwining of Juliet and the sun, which can never be reduced to the material traces, to a literal-ontological description, or to some paraphrase. The act of metaphor allows for this possibility to become real for this life and for this situation, and only then do the terms of the relation even appear.

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The weighty vestiges of the event of metaphor thus provide the place for this tradition of reading. In the moment of expressing a metaphor, the expressive gesture falls away from the tip of the pen into the weighty material whose alteration marks the event of this meaning. As Jean-Luc Nancy writes, Meaning needs a thickness, a density, a mass, and thus an opacity, a darkness by means of which it leaves itself open and lets itself be touched as meaning right there where it becomes absent as discourse. Now this ‘there’ is a material point, a weighty point: the flesh of a lip, the point of a pen or of a stylus, any writing insofar as it traces out the interior and exterior edges of language. It is the point where all writing is ex-scribed [. . .]. This ex-scription is the ultimate truth of inscription.47

Even if the metaphor crystallizes in spoken words, there is a physical disturbance and the alteration of the weight of a body. Since vestiges are fleeting, the existence of meaning is as precarious as the fragile bodies through which it survives along its open trajectory. But because of the vestiges, the act of expression is always a making public, not of an inner idea, but of the production of sense, which is the exscription of the passing by of a world, both enveloped by and shaping the ideal structures to which it is responding. Thus, if Juliet can be the sun, this is not because she already is the sun in an ontological intertwining, but because the metastable structures brought to the trace by the reader, and the rich and evolving reality of all that is exscribed in the situation of this reading, make this intertwining possible once again—a lived intertwining that is never reducible to its parts. Although it would resist all paraphrases, the richness of this metaphor is carried forward by us as the metastable equilibrium that may or may not lead to future related expressions. There is no the meaning of a metaphor. Rather its sense is re-born and altered each time in a specific reading, and this reading opens up the possibility for repetitions, alterations, and re-crystallizations. The sense of the metaphor is an open tradition of expression, shifted and altered by the many bodies that lend themselves to it through the very real weighty traces that sustain it as an institution. Each re-performance re-negotiates its sense, again and again, placing it into contact with new historical situations. On my reading, then, a Merleau-Pontian theory of metaphor reminds us that all expressive gestures are in fact writing, as the exscription of sense, and that all communication is reading, as the gearing into the traces of expressions—and this holds as much for spoken conversation as it does for communicating with the vestiges of lost cultures. The expressive trace supports a single trajectory of sense à plusieurs, a contingent and open trajectory of incessant transformation, long dormant periods, and long shadows cast. The

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written is the suspension of life and the creation of the cultural field, an appeal to community, and the institution of the gearing together of my life and the life of the vestiges of expression. Meaning is thus always between and around the figurative and the literal; it is carried, sustained, communicated, and expressed by bodies, or preserved in the physical traces of expressive gestures awaiting a re-performance. The act of expression leaves behind a vestige, and marks both the death of the author and the possibility of reactivation, repetition, and performance; the meaning of a metaphor is the contingent and open trajectory of the many performances of its trace, its sense, and the paradoxical logic of expression reveals the urgency of developing a philosophy that is a practice of responsible reading.

Expression and the practice of reading Language is virtual communication [. . .]: the words, the texts exist objectively in the fashion of physical things, [. . .] as an activity which has fallen into obscurity but which is reawoken and which can again be transformed into activity. The conveyed sense is “forgotten,” “sedimented,” and “reactivatable” [. . .] insofar as humans are sprechende Wesen [speaking-beings]. (HLP, 25)

Merleau-Ponty recognized the importance of what might be called “expressive reading” as early as Phenomenology of Perception, where he writes: “I begin to understand a philosophy by slipping into this thought’s particular manner of existing, by reproducing the tone or the accent of the philosopher in question” (PhP, 184–5). If the paradoxical logic of expression indicates that one understands a word or text less by possessing a certain set of ideas than by being able to take up the sense of the expressive vestiges into new situations, then truly understanding the sense of a philosophy is to gain a way of speaking and being in the world. What is important here is less the actual speaking than the fact that the “power of speech” is what is “necessary for understanding any text whatsoever” (PhP, 185); to be an expressive body is, ultimately, to be a reading body. As will be demonstrated throughout this book, Merleau-Ponty does not engage with the history of philosophy to reconstruct or to simply repeat the ideas of the tradition; rather, he takes up the history of philosophy into his own trajectory by engaging with the sense of the works that help him to further his own pursuits. In short, Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with the history of philosophy is first a practice of reading prior to becoming an explicit theory of reading. A responsible expressive reading in the style of

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Merleau-Ponty is what Jenny Slatman calls “a generative repetition” (EXR, 6), or what Emmanuel de Saint Aubert calls the “Merleau-Pontian hermeneutic” (ESA1, 20). But his practice of reading is shaped by his deep understanding of communication, and reading is expression, that is, an act between pure repetition and pure creation, a gearing into the trajectory of thought of the tradition or of particular philosophers in order to take it up anew and to carry it toward a more complete truth in negotiation with the urgencies and contingencies of the present performance. When Merleau-Ponty reflects upon his own approach to reading Husserl, he begins to thematize the practice of reading. For instance, in summarizing his 1959–60 course at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty raises the difficulty of offering a definitive reading of Husserl’s thought prior to the full publication of Husserl’s Nachlass. A course on Husserl can hardly pretend to be an “objective” reading of “Husserl’s thought” without the stable apparatus of the complete works upon which to build such a reading. And yet, behind this need for an objective understanding is a prejudice that reifies an impossible object, namely, “the thought” of Husserl as a “system of neatly defined concepts, of arguments responding to perennial problems, and of conclusions which permanently solve the problems” (HLP, 5). As Merleau-Ponty had already indicated in 1951, the reader does not merely “repeat,” but actually takes up and “resume[s . . .] the very movement of [another’s] thought” (OPL, 84). This would be an act accomplished (we can now say) by gearing into the traces or vestiges of that expressive gesture. The metastable sense of Husserl’s “thought” is not some idea or system of ideas possessed in advance by Husserl, but rather, “[j]ust as the perceived world endures only through the reflections, shadows, levels, and horizons between things [. . .], so the works and thought of a philosopher are also made of certain articulations between things said.”48 The “thought” of a philosopher is not, even for the philosopher herself or himself, a pure system of ideas, and thus we can only truly be “faithful” to a philosopher by taking up the trajectory of their thoughts and by being mindful of the inevitable deflections and deformations they will undergo in our new performance of them. This practice of reading would be, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “what Husserl called ‘a poetics of the history of philosophy,’ which is a participation in an operative thought” (HLP, 5). In such a reading, it would be impossible to decide who is the one “speaking,” the philosopher who wrote or the one who is reading her expressive traces (PSh, 159). The history of philosophy is thus to be pursued as a practice of reading that remains between pure repetition and pure creation, or in other words, reading as expression. When I stumble upon the trace of an expression, my body gears into it because there is a “familiarity of all human activity with all human activity,”

Introduction

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because my body immediately sees in this weighty trace the “pretraced possibilities” of my own body’s expressive gestures (HLP, 20). Prior to any mental activity that would take place across an interpretive distance, I am drawn into the trace as meaningful; it comes to life through an unknown and transductive logic. I do not awaken some pure ideas or thoughts that an author intentionally locked into these vestiges; I gear into the sense of the vestige, taking up its exscribed historicity into my own life and into my own emerging and evolving metastable field. There is no dilemma between an objective reading that finds “the truth” of the thought and a subjective reading that comes from an ultimate freedom of the reader to project her meaning upon the texts. The structure of the written is the metastable trace that offers itself up for a speaking again, and so despite his emphasis on speaking, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of speech is already a philosophy writing and reading. The material support of the expression, the real weight left behind in the expressive fields and reconfigurations of potential actions of real bodies are solicitations to a retracing that both joins with the expression and alters it through what I bring with me.49 The sense of the trace will be the trajectory of its many performances, and its meaning in this context will be “the outcome of this field in me” (HLP, 20). If expression is a “making public,” then what is made public is the activity of expression, of responding to ideal weight by reconfiguring real weight, and thus: “Every spiritual production is a response and an appeal, a co-production” (HLP, 8). Re-performing, not re-presenting, is the basis of communication, and expression is the forever open appeal to expressive bodies to share meaning. The paradoxical logic of expression thus shows us that the ontology of empiétement is fundamentally one of communication and trajectory by which weight continually distances itself from itself through the spacing or dehiscence of Being, which is the originary experience of an expressive body within the metastable structures of the world. *** Such is the basis for the present book, which offers a reading of MerleauPonty in the style of a Merleau-Pontian practice of reading. In fact, although I will argue that the paradoxical logic of expression permeates MerleauPonty’s work, the aim of this approach is not to establish or uncover the paradoxical logic of expression as the “secret” of Merleau-Ponty’s texts, but to demonstrate expression as the style or sense of his every gesture and to explore where this “unthought” might take us today.50 Moreover, a Merleau-Pontian style of reading does not focus on the objective correctness of his engagement with the history of philosophy. The concern is less to point out the accuracy or inaccuracies of his reading of Husserl, Bergson, or any other philosopher

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than the attempt to take up the movement of his thought toward its furthest reaches. Such a goal follows Merleau-Ponty’s demand to be “faithful” to written work by taking it up and “thinking again” (PSh, 160). And finally, such a reading could only artificially deny what may, on an objectivist construal, appear to be anachronistic references to thinkers such as Simondon or Nancy, whose weight is already shaping the emerging sense of the reading offered in this book. As is now clear, any reading is an expressive outcome of several trajectories, including the reader’s own, gearing together toward a more complete understanding. And indeed, as Merleau-Ponty himself says of his reading of Husserl, “[t]he unthought can appear only through contact” (HLP, 15). The following chapters thus offer a reading as a taking up of MerleauPonty’s inscriptions in the hopes of catching the sense and the style of all that he exscribed and of all that remains within his texts as metastable.

1

Against the Establishment: Early Hints of an Expressive Logic

My first published works approach a problem that is constant in the philosophical tradition [.  .  .]. We must therefore ask how man is simultaneously subject and object, first person and third person, absolute beginning and yet dependent. (TT, 11–12) Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is born of a self-conscious attempt to ease a tension or to bridge an antinomy in the history of thought. There is, he argues, a fundamental discord between the internal perspective that a human being can have on their own experience through introspection or reflection and the external perspective he or she might adopt through the methods of the physical or human sciences. These two perspectives appear complete and indubitable in themselves and yet are wholly incompatible with each other. The resulting discord across philosophy and the human sciences in general had, he observes, resulted in a highly structured “crisis” (TT, 11–12).1 In fact, there is more than a mere discord between these perspectives; there is an antinomy that generates the paradoxes that will take Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy deeper and deeper toward a new genre of reflection. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is often divided into various chronological stages, and studies of his work tend to focus on one of these stages, or on the relation between them according to the differences they represent.2 And yet if, as he confides in 1945, the discovery of the work of phenomenology gave him and his contemporaries less the feeling of “encountering a new philosophy than of recognizing what they had been waiting for” (PhP, lxxxi), then even phenomenology must be understood as a solution to a problem that structured his philosophical landscape such that phenomenology might be immediately felt as providing the resolution demanded. In other words, Merleau-Ponty commits to phenomenology only insofar as its methods can help him develop a form of reflection that can understand this fundamental antinomy.

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Moreover, what is at stake in his own phenomenological investigation is less an eidetic description of perception, which is an internally defined goal of the phenomenological tradition, than the chance to resolve the crisis in philosophy by describing the indeterminate, ambiguous, or paradoxical nature of lived experience. The continuity of his philosophy is found in his obsessive return to this fundamental discord and in his continual attempt to resolve it through a deepening description of what I have named in this book the “paradoxical logic of expression.” A return to the philosophical landscape of Merleau-Ponty’s training and his initial stance “against the establishment” of early twentieth-century French thought—which he perceived as institutionalizing the crisis mentioned above—thus represents an important (though sometimes neglected) step in understanding his subsequent work. Merleau-Ponty’s trajectory is, from the beginning, oriented toward a philosophy that can sustain the mystery of expressive embodiment through a careful form of reflection and description en route from the very formulation of his initial philosophical questions and his initial choice of philosophical mentors in the 1930s. In this chapter, I will first clarify Merleau-Ponty’s identification of the origin of the “crisis” in the Cartesian problem of the union of the soul and the body, and then demonstrate that Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Gabriel Marcel’s embodied existentialism and Max Scheler’s phenomenology of affectivity are two important influences upon his philosophical trajectory.

The union of the soul and the body: An “anxious trembling” “quickly mastered” The crisis or antinomy in question can be traced, according to Merleau-Ponty, to a single source: Descartes, and particularly his elaboration of a dualistic ontology of body and mind as distinct substances.3 This fundamental division structures debates between incompatible worldviews in the human sciences that, nevertheless, share a commitment to Cartesian ontology. Rather than focusing on the details of the relevant theories, Merleau-Ponty examines what Emmanuel de Saint Aubert calls the “Cartesian scenario.”4 On the one side, there is idealist philosophy, “intellectualism,” or the philosophy of reflection. This includes any theory that posits a mind transparent to itself and secure in its knowledge because it is a constituting consciousness. On the other side, there is realism, “empiricism,” naturalism, or the mechanistic philosophy that undergirds the empirical sciences. This includes any approach that reduces human existence to an intertwining of externally related causes and explains inner experience as merely an epiphenomenal illusion. Philosophy, as the

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playing out of this antinomy, cannot offer a definitive reason for supporting one side over the other, while the logic of expression—by finding a place between pure creation and pure repetition prior to the division of the subject and the object—offers Merleau-Ponty a way of embracing it. The job of philosophy should not be to remove paradoxes, but to raise them to a philosophical status; not to solve antinomies, but to identify the place that can sustain them and embrace their contradictions. Lived or embodied experience is just that ambiguous and mysterious place between a world existing fully in itself, partes extra partes, and a mind existing fully for itself as a constituting consciousness. Thus, Descartes is, in a sense, Merleau-Ponty’s most consistent interlocutor, and a certain Hegelian form of thought is his deep inspiration.5 Glancing through Merleau-Ponty’s corpus, Descartes’s presence can hardly be ignored. In The Structure of Behavior (1942), the final chapter takes up the question of the union of the soul and body. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), the argument of Part III offers a rethinking of the Cartesian cogito. His lectures from the late 1940s explore the relation between mind and body, and his articles in the early 1950s allude to this fundamental problem as their motivating force. Descartes’s ontology is the theme of Merleau-Ponty’s final course at the Collège de France in 1960–1,6 and Descartes’s Dioptrics is an important focus in his final published essay, “Eye and Mind.”7 When Merleau-Ponty died suddenly at his desk on May 3, 1961, the following working note, which he had “clearly read and re-read, underlined and marked in the margins with several red lines” (ESA2, 23), was found on his desk: Transgression or Encroachment, which I take philosophy to be, is but confusion for Descartes, that is, nothing. The philosophy of distinct thought [. . .] is a philosophy of objective, horizontal being, the opposite of our philosophy of vertical Being. And it is the same philosophy that makes the other person inaccessible [.  .  .] because it seeks the other behind an objective Being that is impenetrable.8

For Descartes, we can only grasp the union by living it, and thus it must be left outside the realm of philosophy and science, foreign to the properly circumscribed domain of philosophical reflection. In short, he caught a glimpse of the answer to the antinomy he himself institutes, but promptly retreated from it into the safety of the distinctions that it generates: he felt “an anxious trembling” that he “quickly mastered” (EM, 137). As the working note above makes clear, Merleau-Ponty’s corpus is an attempt to raise the moment of “confusion” to a philosophical status, to develop a philosophical reflection that gears into “vertical” Being, or the metastable structures of

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weight in lived experience, and to develop a manner of thinking that does not begin by setting up an in principle impenetrable wall between the self and others. As Barbaras writes, “the issue for philosophy is to find a way of speaking that reaches the world again as mute expression, [. . .] or rather, that initiates us to the world as the birthplace of expression” (BPh, 66). Merleau-Ponty is, properly speaking, more a “reader” than a “scholar” of Descartes’s work—he explored contemporary philosophical problems through a tension in Descartes’s texts. As Saint Aubert argues, Merleau-Ponty’s “Cartesian scenario” connects Descartes’s fundamental dualism with the problem of philosophical anthropology, and this “quasi-mythical reading of Descartes” will “lead Merleau-Ponty to progressively pass from the problematic of incarnation to that of the flesh” (ESA2, 17–18). Although Merleau-Ponty’s thought may take on different forms and different methods, the fundamental question he asks and the answer he repeatedly offers reveal a distinct trajectory of his thought. Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Descartes is an example of his reading practice, what Saint Aubert calls the “Merleau-Pontian hermeneutic”—outside of the conventions and expectations of a strict history of philosophy, Merleau-Ponty “interrogates Descartes beginning from the present and beginning from Merleau-Ponty’s own questions. For Merleau-Ponty, it is not about [.  .  .] reconstructing what he said, but rather of articulating what he says to us” (ESA2, 20–1). In an unpublished note, Merleau-Ponty writes: “Free reflection on certain incontestably Cartesian themes, not to reconstitute their arrangement in the order [of ideas], but to appreciate their discordant unity and perhaps to propose a new ontological beginning” (ESA2, 21). The conviction that Descartes represents both the source and the potential solution to the crisis in the human sciences animates Merleau-Ponty’s earliest reflections. In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty invokes a moment in one of Descartes’s letters to Princess Elizabeth dated June 28, 1643. In the letter, Descartes acknowledges that the union of the soul and the body can be lived, but insists that it cannot be thought.9 The same moment is invoked again in Phenomenology of Perception, where Merleau-Ponty concludes that Descartes was “well aware” of the “strange knowledge” we have of the union through our lived experience, but immediately excludes this experience from the realm of philosophy properly so-called (PhP, 205). In his lectures in 1948–9, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes passages from the letters that demonstrate Descartes’s acknowledgment that the mind is in some sense “corporeal.”10 This reveals, suggests Merleau-Ponty, that the union of the soul and body is more than a mere “speculative difficulty,” that for Descartes “the problem is to account for a paradoxical fact: the existence of the human body” (Union, 13). For Merleau-Ponty the challenge is clear:

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develop a mode of reflection capable of grasping the mystery or confusion of the lived union of mind and body. How is Descartes implicated in the more general crisis in the human sciences? There is a difference, argues Merleau-Ponty, between the Descartes of the Dioptrics, in which Descartes rejects from the explanation of perception any input from the presupposition of a world existing in itself, and the Descartes of the Meditations, in which he admits something of a confusion or mixing of the soul and the body through the experiences of hunger, thirst, and pain (SB, 191–7). As Théodore Geraets notes, for the Descartes who would take the mind to be wholly transcendental, there would have to be a perfect identity between the “thing” itself in the world and the signification “thing” that exists in thought. Indeed this must be true of the body as well, for such a philosophy takes the body as one thing among many at the same time that it makes the body an object of thought.11 “But for Descartes,” concludes Geraets, “the identification of the thing with the signification ‘thing’ is never completed, and this is precisely Descartes’s hesitation that never ceased to attract Merleau-Ponty’s attention” (VPT, 86). Merleau-Ponty concludes that Descartes introduces, via the discussion of imagination and perception, “an alterity irreducible to the mind” and thus, in Meditations, the world of the mind does not encompass the universe without remainder.12 The naturalism of Descartes’s scientific writings persists despite his most idealist reflections. When Merleau-Ponty returns to Descartes in “Eye and Mind” (1960), he suggests that if space is not a “network of relations between objects such as would be seen by a third party,” as it is for Descartes in the Dipotrics, and if “we are a compound of soul and body,” then there must be a philosophy that can explore this body and soul in the concrete world in which they act (EM, 138). Merleau-Ponty writes, “[t]his philosophy, which is yet to be elaborated, is what animates the painter—not when he expresses opinions about the world but in that instant when his vision becomes gesture, when, in Cézanne’s words, he ‘thinks in painting’” (EM, 138–9). The philosophy that can embrace Descartes’s trembling will be a philosophy of expression, a philosophy of a world that sustains the mystery of the soul and body without trying to master it or to explain it away. Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, the crisis in the human sciences is a result of the fact that “our science and our philosophy are two faithful and unfaithful offshoots of Cartesianism, two monsters born of its dismemberment” (EM, 138). Indeed, how could philosophy allege that there is not some truth to the subjective claim of the self-transparent mind, at least in the form of an inherent mineness of thought? And yet, on the other hand, how could the claims of the positive sciences and the inescapable certainty of perception itself be without any foundation in the real world, partes extra partes? As Étienne Bimbenet

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argues, any full account of the intellectual history of nineteenth-century France would have to emphasize this long-standing discord between philosophers and scientists, or “between spiritualists and materialists.”13 Philosophy remained enclosed in the ivory tower of introspection, renewing and deepening one side of the Cartesian gesture. Emboldened by its own successes, the scientific community moved dramatically toward an absolute empiricism, radicalizing the opposite Cartesian gesture. Such a division was “more than a mere sharing of duties” (NH, 14). Rather than leading toward a unified philosophical anthropology, the distinction became a manner of brandishing “all or nothing” positions predicated upon the utter failure of the opposition’s theoretical resources. Science and philosophy were definitively broken apart, with both sides claiming to “totalize the human phenomenon, either from below, beginning from the physiological roots of consciousness, or from above, beginning from the animating power of the mind” (NH, 15). Merleau-Ponty’s generation was called to the task of repairing this split, and “throughout his work, ‘human being’ gives the name of a sought after unity, against the opposition of the two perspectives of which each one had long declared itself invincible, since total” (NH, 15–16). This initial sketch begins to identify the stakes of the terrain upon which Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy was nourished, and against which he felt compelled to respond. There is a nascent recognition of the paradoxical logic of expression at work beneath his identification of the antinomy, and his solution will emphasize the failures of the causal logic upon which the separation is predicated. For Merleau-Ponty, there is an urgent need to reflect philosophically upon the lived experiences of the union, a union accomplished paradigmatically in expression.

A young Schelerian against the Sorbonne Tormented by the archaic secrets of his own prehistory, [Merleau-Ponty] was infuriated by these well-meaning souls who, taking themselves for small airplanes, indulged in “high-altitude” thinking [pensée de survol], and forgot that we are grounded from birth. (Jean-Paul Sartre14)

By invoking the phrase “pensée de survol,” Sartre is alluding to one of Merleau-Ponty’s most consistent ways of characterizing the philosophical establishment of the 1930s. For Merleau-Ponty, any attempt to think from a third-person perspective or to assume a God’s eye view of the world is bound to obscure the true structures of experience, and this conviction shaped his (at times audacious) relationship to critical idealism and its

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central figure Léon Brunschvicg. Studying under Brunschvicg at the École Normale Supérieur in Paris between 1926 and 1930, Merleau-Ponty identified Brunschvicg’s position as a particularly Kantian fulfillment of the Cartesian scenario discussed above. As one commentator from the era notes: “the name Descartes evokes, for Brunschvicg, an intellectual revolution that freed the modern mind from the yoke of the Aristotelian tradition,” and with Kant “human intelligence discovered the true norms of its activity.”15 Kant discovers that the mind supplies forms that make the universe comprehensible as a phenomenon, but that these same forms unravel into antinomies in the realm of uncritical ontology (PLB, 14). With his powerful fusion of the Cartesian and Kantian traditions, Brunschvicg established himself as the center of gravity for academic philosophy in France in the 1920s and 1930s. Merleau-Ponty’s relationship to Brunschvicg was in fact somewhat ambivalent. As Saint Aubert writes, “Merleau-Ponty’s general attitude toward Brunschvicg first fulfilled the duty of a formal respect toward a venerable personality, in order to be able to later devalorize Brunschvicg’s ‘intellectualism’” (ESA2, 61). Although he is rarely named, Merleau-Ponty’s sustained critique of “intellectualism” and the pensée de survol in Phenomenology of Perception can be seen as aimed at Brunschvicg and the community of professors at the Sorbonne. Consider the following reflection from 1959 in which Merleau-Ponty offers the following recognition of Brunschvicg’s influence: Around 1930, when I finished my philosophical studies, [.  .  .] the key philosophical thought of the epoch in France had been Léon Brunschvicg. [. . .] He was a man of the first order, not so much because of the conclusions of his doctrines, but because of his personal experience and talent, which were considerable. [. . .] [T]his philosophy principally consisted of a reflexive endeavor, a return to the self [. . . and] sought to grasp both exterior perception and the constructions of science as creative and constructive activities of the mind. [.  .  .] Such was, in short, the allure of this philosophy, though it must be mentioned that its content is quite meager.16

Meager or not, Merleau-Ponty repeatedly invokes Brunschvicg’s philosophy in defining himself against Cartesian or Kantian positions. Moreover, even if Sartre at times refers to Merleau-Ponty as delicate, Saint Aubert is right to remind us of the “audacity” of Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with what was effectively the official philosophy of the Sorbonne (ESA2, 63). In 1938, for instance, Merleau-Ponty did not mince his words in front of Brunschvicg himself when he argued at a meeting that weakening student performance

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on the Agrégation17 was a direct result of the persistent focus on formal and idealist topics from the Kantian tradition, instead of the “material a priori” questions that would connect with the students’ true passions: lived experience and engaged description. Merleau-Ponty concluded this bold intervention with a defense of the philosophy of existence and a plea that post-Kantian philosophers, such as Nietzsche and “even Husserl,” be taught at the Sorbonne.18 Nothing could have been more anti-Brunschvicgian than suggesting a move away from critical idealism in the official philosophical curriculum, an audacious intervention from a young philosopher in front of Brunschvicg himself. This certainly shows how deeply Merleau-Ponty’s passion against the pensée de survol of the establishment ran. But what was it about Brunschvicg’s philosophy that left him, as Sartre says, “infuriated by these well-meaning souls”? Given the emphasis on “norms” mentioned above, Brunschvicg believed in the necessity of a nonreligious “conversion” of humans to their true and proper nature of the interior life of the mind. That is, he sought a religion of the human mind, thus identifying in the Cartesian meditation a moment of revelation. All knowledge, then, needs to be established upon the transparent and free nature of the mind, leading to a normative humanism “in the style of an absolute rationalism” (PLB, 10). Brunschvicg’s philosophy thus brought together Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant in order to fashion a philosophical anthropology and thereby laid claim to the normative structure of all reflection. As Brunschvicg writes: “Philosophy is intellectual activity becoming self-aware, the integral study of integral knowledge.”19 The thing in itself can never be known, and the transcendental conditions of possible thought must guide the knowledge and truth claims of all positive science. What Merleau-Ponty found “meager,” then, was Brunschvicg’s understanding of intentionality and expression in embodied experience. Brunschvicg’s humanism is predicated upon the absolutely free and rational mind, and against this pensée de survol, Merleau-Ponty heeded Jean Wahl’s call to return “toward the concrete.”20 Indeed, our experience is entirely rooted in the concrete or lived world, never sustaining more than a fleeting glimpse at the abstract moment of a pure and self-transparent mind that is posited at the heart of Brunschvicg’s humanism. Yet returning to the “concrete” did not mean, for Merleau-Ponty, returning to a naïve realism. As Bimbenet writes, Merleau-Ponty sought a form of “research deliberately oriented toward a certain truth of lived experience—a truth defined as originary and that could precede the subsequent abstractions put together by the work of knowledge, science, or philosophy” (NH, 154). In the final pages of Merleau-Ponty’s first article, “Christianity and Ressentiment,” he draws together Wahl, Scheler, and Marcel as offering a philosophy against the prevailing head-winds of

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idealism: “if objectivity cannot exhaust existence, will it not be the act of the philosopher to try a rediscovery, a description of existence in all its forms? Such is the aim of Mr. Wahl or Mr. Marcel. And it is also the claim of a descriptive philosophy which Scheler has made worthwhile.”21 Yet more than the emphasis on the concrete attracts Merleau-Ponty to these thinkers; he is drawn toward the emerging hints of a philosophy of expression at the heart of a reconceived philosophical anthropology. Merleau-Ponty’s first article was a review of Scheler’s Ressentiment,22 which is a development of Nietzsche’s understanding of “ressentiment” in Genealogy of Morals and a defense of Christianity against Nietzsche’s argument that it represents the pinnacle of slave morality. Scheler emphasizes how unexpressed emotions sediment into the sufferer’s personality as ressentiment. In this unexpressed state, the emotions fester and seek out ways of relieving the weight of their failure. With no avenues for expression available, they eventually find relief through an almost “creative” revaluation of the value structure that holds their existence in contempt: weakness, sickness, or fear, unable to express themselves and held in contempt in comparison to strength, health, and courage, invert the value structure to valorize themselves, and hence slave morality is born. Although this revaluation fails to be, properly speaking, a “creative act,” because it is determined from the outside as a mere inversion, the opposite solution (“the triumphant affirmation of oneself ”) is no less problematic (CR, 87). A healthy response to the festering emotions would require an expression as “a positive perception of new values” and an “acknowledgment” of one’s own shortcomings. “Such acts leave the value of others in tact and make us share joyfully in all their nobility” (CR, 86–7). For Scheler, Nietzsche’s description is a profound contribution to “the explanation of morality” (CR, 87). This “explanation” is not a return to a transcendental reflection or a reductive empiricism since Scheler’s emphasis is on the experience of ressentiment rather than on the abstract idea that might be possessed of it or the vital impulses that might be detected therein. By developing a “descriptive psychology” that involves understanding “the units of experience and meaning which are contained in the totality of man’s life itself and have not merely been created by an artificial process of ‘division’ and ‘synthesis’” (R, 23), Scheler returns to concrete and lived experience and attempts to be both a naturalist and an idealist, at least insofar as he aims to include both vital causes and super-terrestrial values in his concrete description of Christian morality. Scheler’s phenomenology, then, attempts to resist the extremes of empiricism and intellectualism. “To admit, as does Nietzsche, that everything which manifests itself to consciousness is a direct or indirect product of physiological and vital causality, is an unjustifiable postulate according

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to Scheler” (CR, 90). Nietzsche’s radical empiricism fails to recognize that it presupposes the “positive content of consciousness” (CR, 91). Resisting also the opposite danger of imposing upon Nietzsche’s insights the need for a pure reflection or introspection, Scheler turns to phenomenological description of human action as intentional or oriented. Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s initial understanding of phenomenology and intentionality is importantly influenced by Scheler’s notion of “oriented acts.”23 Since the emotional content of consciousness must be included in their description, the content of “oriented acts” cannot be reduced to purely conscious or to merely biological causes. Phenomenology is not a new form of introspection, but rather “an introduction to a new mode of knowledge which moreover manifests the world as well as the self ” (CR, 91). For Scheler, this introduces a whole class of intentional acts that cannot be detached from their objects—such as sympathy, love, or hatred—for which “‘intentionality’ is essential” (CR, 91). “Intentionality,” then, is the very first term that Merleau-Ponty discovers for the realm of experience between pure idealism and pure empiricism. Merleau-Ponty suggests that ressentiment characterizes a general movement of theoretical systems that, being unable to conquer the experience they set out to understand, end up reducing “reality” to that which can be comprehended by their theoretical instruments. Whether idealist or empiricist, “these philosophers no longer know ‘through a direct intercourse with the world and things.’”24 In essence, Merleau-Ponty is suggesting that empiricism and intellectualism are the expression of a ressentiment that stems from our failure to express and sustain that trembling felt by Descartes in the face of the mixing of the soul and the body—philosophy’s failure to express the things themselves. Perhaps, then, the vitriol that fuels the debate is a diversion from the inherent inadequacy of either side to capture the whole terrain of truth. A responsible philosophy would remain attentive to the phenomena and thereby give rise to a “positive perception of new values.” In short, Brunschvicg’s pensée de survol is nothing less than a highly sophisticated expression of ressentiment, and his humanism of the pure mind a type of slave morality. Phenomenological description, then, reveals what Scheler calls a “sensible expressivity” in moral or affective conscious acts that cannot be reduced to an intellectual act, which is what Merleau-Ponty will later call an “operative intentionality” (PhP, lxxxii). Sensible expressivity is a manner of thinking prior to the interpretive distance between the subject and the object. The conscious act does not give meaning in the sense of bestowing or imposing it upon an indifferent material; rather, a “content of consciousness can naturally have a meaning [sens]” (CR, 93). From this understanding of a paradoxical place between intellectualism and biological reductionism, Merleau-Ponty

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draws several concepts that begin to point toward the paradoxical logic of expression. For instance, Scheler’s understanding of transcendence does not require a turn away from vitality, but rather an embracing of life. The expressive quality of vital action embraces a “sense” rather than contains a “meaning” by taking up a new meaning that only exists in the moment of expression, a new meaning that is always in excess of itself as the possibility for new actions in new situations. Merleau-Ponty concludes his review by defending Scheler against the attacks of a philosopher from Brunschvicg’s camp, Ramon Fernandez. Fernandez had published a critical review pointing out that Scheler’s argument was necessarily the work of an intellect, and thus despite its radical claims it remained implicitly complaisant with Brunschvicg’s idealism. Although this bears some similarity to Scheler’s own approach to Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, in a thinly veiled attack on Brunschvicg, characterizes Fernandez’s point as entirely “critical and French.” Merleau-Ponty argues that Scheler indeed demonstrates that the “universes of perception, art, emotions, [and] religious acts” do have a sense in themselves (CR, 32–3/99–100). Idealism, for Merleau-Ponty, had changed its approach to these mysterious or lived phenomena as often and “as easily as cloud formations”—and he reminds the critical idealist that “philosophy has not yet rendered an account of their intentional nature that is compatible with evidence” (CR, 100), or in other words, that is compatible with the appearing of the things themselves in phenomenal experience. In short, philosophy would do well to take the paradoxical logic of expression seriously and to address our concrete experience such as to come to terms with intentional activity that is not reducible to the act of a pure consciousness. Looking a little more deeply, this early attraction to Scheler further suggests the importance of the logic of expression for Merleau-Ponty. Developing his notion of “sensible expressivity,” Scheler concludes that “‘expression’ is indeed the very first thing that man apprehends of what lies outside him, and that he only goes on to apprehend sensory appearances of any kind, inasmuch and insofar as they can be construed as expressions of mind. [. . .] Everything whatsoever is given, for him, as ‘expression’.”25 Intentionality, insofar as it both aims at and responds to meaningful unities offered to perception, provides Merleau-Ponty with a first name for his fundamental insight into the mysterious or paradoxical place of expression. As Bimbenet characterizes the point: Nascent perception makes us think of the emergence of human significations that are in principle inseparable from the sensible content in which they are embodied: what the infant grasps prior to perception

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Thus, Scheler’s account of intentionality appeals to Merleau-Ponty because it allows for a characterization of perception as a nonpassive response to a sensible expressivity, and this underscores the key early feature of Merleau-Ponty’s logic of expression, the inseparability of the expression and the expressed.

A young Marcellian: The body, mystery, and creation I do not use my body, I am my body. (Gabriel Marcel26)

In 1959, Merleau-Ponty suggests a distinction between the “philosophy of existence,” broadly construed, and the more narrow one that had come to be associated with the title “existentialism,” centered in the philosophy of Sartre. In addition to some of the key figures that remain pillars in the more general category of “philosophy of existence” (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre), Merleau-Ponty also names two figures who for him define that movement: Edmund Husserl and Gabriel Marcel (EX, 129). Although much is rightly made of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl, Marcel’s thought also plays an important role in Merleau-Ponty’s formation. As Saint Aubert notes, Merleau-Ponty’s encounter with Marcel’s work would not only spark his critical stance against French idealism, represented preeminently by Brunschvicg as discussed above, but would in fact lay important groundwork for his encounter with the phenomenological insights that he would discover in the unpublished manuscripts at the Husserl Archives in Louvain in 1939.27 In this section, I will explore the emerging clarity of the paradoxes of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s most sustained engagement with Marcel’s work, his 1936 review of Marcel’s Being and Having.28 In fact, several Marcellian influences continued well past Merleau-Ponty’s break with Christian existentialism in the mid-1930s,29 including Marcel’s emphasis on the experience of “one’s own body” (le corps propre), his repeated appeal to the “mystery” of Being—which becomes something of a leitmotif throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work—and Marcel’s account of creativity. In Marcel, Merleau-Ponty discovers a unity for his emerging philosophy in the mystery of the expressive body whose lived gestures are between pure activity and pure passivity. Confirming that Marcel’s work represents a response to the “crisis” discussed above, the opening lines of Merleau-Ponty’s review literally stage

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the Cartesian scenario: The curtain opens, and Descartes is standing at his window, looking down at, and reflecting upon, some walking and talking structures wearing coats and hats (a literal pensée de survol). The experience, according to Descartes, is reducible to the raw observation of some “colored patches and lines,” and the judgment that “there are some men walking on the street” (BH2, 101). Merleau-Ponty links this initial Cartesian scene with two perspectives that stress either an inert mass of sense data that tends toward organization on its own, or a judgment that organizes this data from above. Both perspectives begin from the assumption of scattered and meaningless givens presented to some form of judgment (natural or intellectual) that organizes them. Marcel offers Merleau-Ponty an attractive alternative to this scenario and, as Saint Aubert aptly writes, Merleau-Ponty’s second article “goes beyond the genre of a book review, [and this time] in an even more pronounced mode against the establishment” (ESA2, 81). While Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Brunschvicg was tentatively slipped into the final lines of the Scheler review, in his review of Marcel just a few years later, the attack on Brunschvicg begins from the opening lines. As he later writes: “In reaction against philosophy of the idealist type—both Kantian and Cartesian—the philosophy of existence is primarily explicable by the importance of a completely different theme, that of incarnation” (EX, 132). The role of incarnation30 in Marcel’s work is the first major theme of the 1936 review, and it is presented as nothing less than a “protest against [Cartesian] reductions and against the theory of knowledge they contain” (BH2, 101). Following Marcel, Merleau-Ponty proposes that we turn our attention to le corps propre, “one’s own body” or the “lived body,” which will become the central focus of Phenomenology of Perception ten years later. The Cartesian worldview is identified as solidifying the interpretive distance between subjects and objects, and incarnation offers a rejection of the external relation between things as mere objects (partes extra partes) and knowing subjects as pure minds. Merleau-Ponty names three relations that call into question the classical subject–object structure and that remain the focus of all of his subsequent research. The first, contra Descartes, is that when another human being is “present to me,” their body cannot be reduced to a set of objective properties from which I infer the presence of a “you” (BH2, 102). The second is my relation to my own body, which cannot be reduced to one between a subject and an object in the scientific sense of the word. “I and it form a common cause,” writes Merleau-Ponty following Marcel, and “in a sense I am my body” (BH2, 102). Incarnation does not leave room for a separation between myself and my body; the relation is one of being (être), not one of having (avoir). A mind has an object, but I am my body. Finally, “in so far as I really believe in objects and grasp their physiognomies rather than

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their ‘characteristics,’ they become something like the extension of my body” (BH2, 102). As Merleau-Ponty later writes: “The blind man’s cane has ceased to be an object for him, it is no longer perceived for itself; rather the cane’s furthest point is transformed into a sensitive zone, it increases the scope and the radius of the act of touching” (PhP, 144). For Marcel, the experience of these three relations shows that classical understandings of perception are inadequate and that bodily consciousness is a fundamental fact that underlies any and all secondary affirmations of existence that may be offered from a third person perspective. As Marcel concludes: “Embodiment, the central given of metaphysics [, . . .] is the given on the basis of which a fact is possible (which is not true of the Cogito)” (BH1, 11–12; BH2, 102). These observations relate to an article by Marcel (included as an appendix in Jounal métaphysique) that Merleau-Ponty likely read as early as 1929, entitled “Existence et objectivité.”31 In both his 1936 review and his return to Marcel in his 1959 lecture, Merleau-Ponty links Marcel’s reflection on existence and objectivity to phenomenology. Marcel’s investigation does not just mark off a peculiar region of being, “one’s own body, the domain of the ‘you’” (BH2, 103), which resists being grasped as an object through a detached and disinterested epistemic gaze. His analyses also open up a “new type of knowledge,” because “phenomenology, insofar as it refuses to conjure up, behind the actual or virtual object of our thoughts, things that might not bear any resemblance to it, immediately confers undeniable value upon distinctions established between ‘contents of thought’” (BH2, 103). Thus, Marcel’s philosophy is “an understanding of life, of the entire set of situations lived through by human beings, each with its own atmosphere” (BH2, 103). The body is not a mere object among other objects; it is at “‘the border of what I am and what I have,’ at the line of demarcation between being and having” (BH2, 103). As Merleau-Ponty later writes, the world is no longer a set of objects over there to be known, they “are given to us in the flesh— carnally” (EX, 132). A Marcellian philosophy must lead to phenomenology by describing subjects who are engaged in a world (“perceiving, thinking, wanting . . .”) and a set of objects as intended in these acts (“perceived, known, wanted . . .”) (BH2, 103). This is, I would argue, precisely the recognition that our experience is always from within a metastable trajectory, and that we are at once subject and object as a paradoxical structure that can be captured neither by taking an interpretive distance from it nor by absolutely coinciding with it. And as this discussion indicates, it is “phenomenology” that promises a philosophy capable of approaching such paradoxes; this is and remains the character of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology. This paradoxical experience of incarnation points toward a “field of research” that stretches beyond the analysis of “one’s own body” to all forms of

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“involvements” (including relations with others), that is, to all of the “weight” to which our actions respond—real and ideal. Merleau-Ponty stresses Marcel’s distinction between “problems” and “mysteries.” In this early review, Merleau-Ponty explains that problems have to do with evidence or proof, while mysteries have to do with action (BH2, 104). With this distinction, Marcel opens a new field of research that includes mysteries such as promises, commitments, and sacrifices, all of which are experiences that cannot be explained through externally related causes. In approaching mysteries, a philosopher’s goal is not to provide proof or demonstrations; she offers hope for resolution or understanding when she simply “points out an irreplaceable experience by showing why it is so.” Philosophical reflection needs to act as a “witness” of what exists from within experience rather than as an external observer providing “explicit judgments and clearly circumscribed concepts” (BH2, 104). Marcel’s philosophy gives Merleau-Ponty a sense of the importance of the concept of “weight.” In the analysis of promise-making, Merleau-Ponty shows how some acts are not simply carried forward by an organism as a “state of consciousness,” but rather have a weight in “a new world that contains the physical world and is not contained by it” (BH2, 105). In this “new world,” bodies can be subject to the weight of the past, since a promise shapes the movements of a physical body but is not contained within the  physical world—the promise haunts the landscape and restructures the sense and possibilities of my gestures. Merleau-Ponty thus identifies in Marcel a rethinking of time and space as an intertwining of presence and absence: a deceased friend weighs upon me, is present to me much more than a “‘living’ person I don’t like” (BH2, 105). My deceased friend weighs upon the gestures and possibilities of my body, and thus exists. Philosophy need not prove this existence, it ought to show us this paradoxical weighing as experienced from within our metastable structures. Or again, Merleau-Ponty shows how we can act not only upon the present, but also upon the past and the future, through our commitments. To make the commitment is not to simply utter a promise, it is to take on the burden of its fulfillment, to bring about the weight to which my future acts will be called to respond. And the act of the promise, even if its weight has disappeared for me tomorrow when it was to come due, if it was sincere, still weighs in my existence and in my life; such is the metastable structure of the trajectory of expression, and an initial hint at Merleau-Ponty’s distance from Sartre in terms of freedom. In Marcel, Merleau-Ponty identifies just this place between being and having, this mysterious border zone, as the human condition itself. In fact, even as late as the 1959 lecture, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that mysteries are the proper domain of philosophical reflection and that

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problems should be left to other disciplines. Problems demand a deductive or inductive investigation, whereas mysteries require an active and creative engagement, an expression: “A problem is a question I pose to myself and then resolve by considering different givens which are external to me,” while in mysteries, “the one who poses them is also engaged. This person is not a spectator in relation to the problem, but is rather caught up in the matter” (EX, 133). Thus, the notion of mystery is rooted in the experience of the sensible world, which always precedes my investigation of it, and because as a body I am both perceiving and perceptible, “caught up in the game at the very moment I attempt to understand what is happening” (EX, 133). As Saint Aubert explains, Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of this notion of mystery is grounded upon the notion of incarnation, and Marcel’s distinction continues into Merleau-Ponty’s evolving understanding of embodiment, including his late ontology of the reversibility of the flesh (ESA2, 85).32 Incarnation is a mystery because it is an ambiguous formula that is accomplished in an act that overflows its parts. Saint Aubert thus seems justified in suggesting that Merleau-Ponty’s enthusiasm for Husserl’s late phenomenology was prepared for, and guided by, his reading of Marcel. In Husserl, Merleau-Ponty found a seemingly rigorous and scientific grounding of the ideas that had begun to shape his own reflection as much as ten years earlier (ESA2, 85–7). Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s consistent use of the family of words around “mystery” (including “wonder,” “enigma,” “ambiguity,” “obscurity,” and “paradox”) suggests that the paradoxical logic of expression as embodied action between pure repetition and pure creation emerges with Marcel’s characterization of ontological mystery. As Saint Aubert summarizes: Mystery is [. . .] not a closed door with a no-entry sign, nor the secret of an initiation quest, but rather the unfinished nature of that beyond which there is always more to think. The ontological mystery—and this is what Merleau-Ponty will cultivate throughout his final writings—is the depth of a space of transition and transgression [empiétement]. (ESA2, 91)

Mystery is a paradoxical relation in which the knower is neither a product nor a constituting force. The knower envelops that which envelops her in a reciprocal relation or intertwining, and hence being is “enveloppant-enveloppé,” to invoke the formula used much later by Merleau-Ponty (ESA2, 92). The paradoxical logic of expression is thus already at work in his initial understanding of Marcel and how he begins to take up phenomenology, the question of others, and the movement of history (EX, 134). The perspective of modern Cartesian ontology tells us that we cannot know the other, that we are wholly isolated, while history and language tell us that humans are never

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“alone,” that they must always be considered “in the presence of others, in an extraordinarily complex relation with them [. . .] a sort of human tissue which is sometimes called a ‘collectivity’” (EX, 134). This overcoming of the problem of the other in the tissue of history and community is precisely what is accomplished by expression. In speaking or acting, I join myself both to the past and to the community that I take up and that will receive and take up my expression; I am enveloped by and yet shape this collectivity. If Marcel reveals to Merleau-Ponty the problems of history and of the other, he also suggests the mysterious or paradoxical involvement that is required to fully embrace these phenomena. Although Merleau-Ponty does not discuss Marcel’s understanding of creativity and aesthetic expression, there are some striking similarities, and given the prevalence of expression in Marcel’s work, Merleau-Ponty would likely have been familiar with his position. For Marcel, expression involves a mysterious form of normativity. Reflecting upon his own existence as a “created being” in the world, Marcel feels himself to be, at first glance, a body wholly “caused” or determined by biological or physical forces. To accept this initial picture, however, would be to accept a “radical dualism” between what I am as a thinker and what I am as a body (JM, 6). Were this radical dualism the case, argues Marcel, action itself would be impossible. “I can only act,” in the full sense of the word, “insofar as I negate this dualism, action is this very negation” (JM, 6). Marcel describes creativity as an act that negates the dualism of the tradition, for creation cannot be in any way reduced to mere external causality (JM, 119), and I cannot be merely in the world. Marcel observes that an artist does not merely imitate nature or a particular model, nor is art reducible to a simple diversion.33 An activity in the service of imitation or entertainment is simply technique, and thus not artistic expression at all. Moreover, an artist engages in a paradoxical gesture that is at once active and passive, that both creates and receives in the same movement. As Marcel writes: “There is surely no creation without a certain mystery that envelops the creator and springs forth through him; to the extent that what we call creation is at root a mediation at the heart of which [. . .] passivity and activity are united and melt together” (VGM, 156). This is precisely an act that brings about and sustains structures that nonetheless transcend each act and each actor. At the outset of the expressive activity, as Marcel writes in a passage that Merleau-Ponty quotes in his 1936 review, “I myself do not know what I believe” (BH1, 122). With this emphasis on expression now clear, Marcel’s position seems to guide Merleau-Ponty’s claims about the vague fever at the outset of expression, or his suggestion that in speech “my words surprise me myself and teach me my own thought”

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(OPL, 88). Marcel’s notion of creativity speaks directly to the paradoxical logic in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Marcel does not limit the paradoxical structures of expression to moments of artistic genius. Expression permeates and structures our being in the world with others. As Marcel writes, “each person is called to create his or her own being and to participate in the creation of others through love” (VGM, 156). In our gestures and actions we create our own being, and this takes place essentially in and through relations with others. Merleau-Ponty’s attraction to this conception is clear, and it offers a direction in normative thinking that is radically different from the one offered in Brunschvicg’s philosophy. Brunschvicg argued that one must constitute oneself on the absolute ground of self-transparent rationality, leading to a spiritual perfection through the purification of any contamination by others.34 This activity is decidedly one of discovery, not creation; of rationality, not love. On the contrary, Marcel’s understanding of creation and incarnate action leads to the conclusion that we cannot begin from this type of self-transparence, that action is never pure, but always imbued with a past and caught in an “extraordinarily complex relation” with others (EX, 134), and that expression reveals the unavoidable intersection between love and empiétement. *** Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy thus begins from his early sense that the true practice of philosophy is to embrace the paradoxes of the lived and concrete experience that so much energy had been spent upon explaining away. In the phenomenology of Max Scheler, he discovered the possibility of a perspective on this side of “consciousness” or mind; in the notion of le corps propre and the existential analyses of Gabriel Marcel, he discovered the possibility of a perspective on this side of the body as an object. Moreover, as I have emphasized, these insights open through and upon the question of expression, and the paradoxical place between pure repetition and pure creation—as action that creates and sustains that to which it responds and that which paradoxically transcends it—is at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical style from the very beginning.

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Expression and The Structure of Behavior

The phenomenon of life appeared therefore at the moment when a piece of extension, by the disposition of its movements and by the allusion that each movement makes to all the others, turned back upon itself and began to express something, to manifest an interior being externally. (SB, 162) From the opening lines of The Structure of Behavior, defended as his minor thesis in 1938 and published subsequently in 1942, Merleau-Ponty affirms that the Cartesian tradition motivates his study. “Our goal,” he writes, “is to understand the relations of consciousness and nature” (SB, 3). Yet although he was significantly attracted to the phenomenological and existential work of Marcel and Scheler as discussed above, his first book offers an altogether different approach to the general Cartesian problem, one that begins from science. Rather than critiquing theories of mind, Merleau-Ponty sets to illustrating all that overflows mechanistic theories of body. Nature, for the purposes of his study, will be considered in the manner of classical science, as a network of causal or external events and relations. This understanding of nature had, on Merleau-Ponty’s reading, been adopted by the two major traditions emerging from the Cartesian worldview, although they posit different modes of its constitution. On the one side, philosophy takes the unity of nature to be the result of a constituting activity of consciousness; on the other, the sciences treat mind and body as two orders of reciprocal causes and effects, described without remainder through the language of mechanical causality. Yet a simple return to “critical” or transcendental thought is insufficient as a way of overcoming this schism. For Merleau-Ponty, phenomenological reflection is less about bracketing what we “know” of our experience through objective third person theories than it is about properly recognizing the erroneous presuppositions in these forms of knowledge and thereby allowing a place within philosophy for a properly reinterpreted “nature.” Thus, rather than beginning “from above” by proposing ex nihilo a new form of transcendental thinking that might itself repeat the errors of

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transcendental philosophy (which was his consistent criticism of Husserl’s early work), Merleau-Ponty here proposes to begin “from below” with an analysis of behavior, a concept that he argues “is neutral with respect to the classical distinctions between the ‘mental’ and the ‘physiological’ and thus can give us the opportunity of defining them anew” (SB, 4). As I will demonstrate in this chapter, behavior offers this opportunity precisely because behavior is between pure repetition and pure creation, that is, behavior is expression. As Merleau-Ponty implies in the epigraph above, “expression” must play a fundamental role in a theory of life. Life appears in the world as expression, or better, life is expression. The formulation he offers, that life appears when an interior expresses itself on the outside, should be carefully distinguished from the classical formulation of a simple making public. In this first extended work, Merleau-Ponty is already pursuing an understanding that leaves behind such classical formulations, and he argues that this interior does not preexist its expression. The first stop on his developing philosophy of expression, then, is Gestalt theory, and what is expressed is first characterized as an internal unity or signification understood as a “structure” rather than as a pure idea held by a mind.1 Nevertheless, the notion of manifestation is meant to capture the phenomenological characteristic of manifestation for consciousness, a fact that must be connected below to the claim that “form” (and sense) is a perceptual reality, not a physical or objective one. Thus, behavior is for Merleau-Ponty a paradigmatically ambiguous or paradoxical event that establishes the reality of relations in his account of life, a fact that leads Merleau-Ponty toward a deeper account of equilibrium that foreshadows what I am calling (following Simondon) the metastable equilibrium. Before turning to the paradoxical logic of expression as it emerges in this text, it is worth discussing two methodological points: Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the concept of “structure” and his adoption in this study of “the outside spectator” perspective (SB, 162). These two points constitute his explicit attempt to describe the mysterious place between empiricism and intellectualism as a place of expression without thereby dissolving it to either a sum of its parts or the consciousness of the whole. There is a deep connection between Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Gestalt theory and his reflections on the paradoxical logic of expression. Consider the following passage: What is profound in the notion of “Gestalt” [.  .  .] is not the idea of signification but that of structure, the joining of an idea and an existence which are indiscernible, the contingent arrangement by which materials begin to have meaning in our presence, intelligibility in the nascent state. (SB, 206–7)

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For Merleau-Ponty, a material arrangement has a sense insofar as, in our presence, there is an intelligibility in its “nascent state.” In its simplest Gestalt theory definition, structure is a whole whose parts cannot be defined independently of their place in the whole.2 In other words, a structure is a set of parts whose relations must be given a real status in their definition— structure is Merleau-Ponty’s original account of a realism of relations in the manner described above with Simondon. “We will say that there is form,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “whenever the properties of a system are modified by every change brought about in a single one of its parts and, on the contrary, are conserved when they all change while maintaining the same relationship among themselves” (SB, 47). Changing just one note in a melody, for instance, produces a different musical object, whereas transposing the melody into a different key does not. Structure points to a certain unity or internal harmony held by a system, but this internal harmony is not something that preexists its expression, it is accomplished in the expression or manifestation. And this nascent intelligibility is importantly related to our potential presence; a form or a structure is that which solicits our expressive activities to take them up as meaningful. It may be the explanatory scope of “structure” that is emphasized by Merleau-Ponty’s analysis—since structure is able to unite the strata of being (physical, vital, human) without reducing any single order to a mere epiphenomenon of the others—but the motivation behind his exploration is the paradoxical logic of expression. Although the insights of Gestalt theory will continue to shape his later work, there is an important difference in this early text, namely, the adoption of “the outside spectator” perspective. This represents for Merleau-Ponty the decision to begin “from below,” that is, by taking up the question of behavior and its structures through a particular form of concrete description, a striking difference from his major thesis and most important work, Phenomenology of Perception, where “we install ourselves in [perceptual behaviors] in order to pursue the analysis of this exceptional relation between the subject and its body and its world” (Inédit, 4). The Structure of Behavior begins from the perspective of the classical scientist and, by working through this outside perspective, aims to unravel the ontological categories presupposed by empiricism. As he writes: “By going through behaviorism, however, one gains at least in being able to introduce consciousness, not as a psychological reality, but as a structure” (SB, 5). By approaching it as a paradoxical expression that emerges in the world, not as the theoretical presupposition of a transcendent mind, the introduction of “consciousness” can be made in a manner faithful to the phenomena. In short, The Structure of Behavior aims to provide the foundations for a concrete phenomenology of expression.

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Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on beginning from the external perspective is an important illustration of his conviction, following Paul Guillaume,3 that our understanding of ourselves is enriched through the positive sciences in such a way not possible through introspection or reflective analysis alone—the short route of introspection or reflection would give a “truncated” knowledge of ourselves.4 “Our knowledge of ourselves owes much more to exterior knowledge of the historical past, to ethnography, to mental pathology, for example, than it does to the direct elucidation of our own life” (TT, 12). Phenomenology, for Merleau-Ponty, is not first and foremost a “formal” and “transcendental” logic; rather, it leads him deeper into the description of the incarnate logic of concrete experience, and from the beginning demands an expanded or genetic phenomenology. What is striking is that this longer pathway is necessary because otherwise one risks overlooking the paradox of expression. As he writes, reflection itself could have taught us that “behavior is constituted of relations; that is, it is conceptualized and not in-itself (en soi), as is every other object. [. . .] But by following this short route we would have missed the essential feature of the phenomenon, the paradox which is constitutive of it: behavior is not a thing, but neither is it an idea” (SB, 127, emphasis added). The fundamental philosophical gesture is to develop a reflection that can identify this paradoxical structure of experience between things and ideas, between the real and the ideal, between determinism and spontaneity, or precisely what I am calling expression.

Science and the logic of expression What is demanded by the actual content of science is certainly not the idea of a universe in which everything would literally depend on everything else [. . .], but no more so is it the idea of a nature in which processes would be knowable in isolation [.  .  .]; what is demanded is neither fusion nor juxtaposition, rather it is structure. (SB, 140)

This passage demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty’s critique of scientific theories is motivated by an exploration of the content of science itself. In short, the results of experimental science or psychology demonstrate the impossibility of science without a concept of structure. And yet, his analysis does not suggest simply adding the notion of form or structure to the linear or mathematical explanations of physics. The development of an account of behavior reveals something important about the behavior of the scientist and the need to think not merely with the concept of form, but to think according to form. The recognition of the necessary role of the concept of

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structure for scientific reflection leads Merleau-Ponty to conclude that not even scientific investigation can raise itself to the level of a pensée de survol; the logic of expression emerges from the critique of scientific practice. As Bimbenet writes, “this critical pathway will allow Merleau-Ponty in the end to preserve, on the interior of a newly conceived transcendental attitude, a certain truth of realism.”5 By drawing out the implicit structures obscured by the presuppositions of classical scientific theory, Merleau-Ponty is able to develop his own contribution as a reshaping from within. As I will now indicate, it is the paradoxical logic of expression that implicitly governs the early phases of his critique.

The implicit logic of expression in reflex behavior The paradoxical logic of expression is implicit in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of reflex behavior at the very beginning of the text.6 The explicit argument is a critique of scientific reductionism and its suspicion of common sense descriptions of experience. The classical approach is characterized as a “realistic analysis and causal explanation” (SB, 9) that rejects any contribution from anthropomorphic internal observation, any notion of intentionality, and claims to account for all behavior through a physiological analysis of stimuli and response mechanisms. This reductive explanation, however, fails to recognize that a “stimulus often acts much less by its elementary properties than by its spatial arrangement, its rhythm, and the rhythm of its intensities” (SB, 10). Moreover, a complex stimulus often leads to unpredictable responses. As a result, the notion of causal dependency breaks down very quickly, leaving a significant explanatory gap in the classical model. A reaction in a complex situation is always “something other than the sum of its elements” (SB, 12), but this “something other” need not indicate the presence of some independent, conscious element. Rather, this “something other” reveals the role that form or structure must play in the explanation of reflex behavior, and suggests the role of expression in a complete account. For a behaving body, the form of the stimulus shapes the response, but the organism also moves itself, and here, following the work of Kurt Goldstein, Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of Umwelt (milieu), which indicates a meaningful environment to which the organism adjusts and orients itself. The organism–Umwelt relation “is a constellation, an order, a whole, which gives its momentary meaning to each of the local excitations” (SB, 14). “Form” is below consciousness, and yet is not reducible to linear or mechanical causality. In a move that foreshadows Simondon’s work, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the idea of an absolutely simple stimulus is impossible, and that classical reflexology is purely conjectural. Hence, the second suggestion

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of the paradoxical logic of expression emerges as the notion that the “fate” of an excitation is not predetermined, but is rather creatively determined in relation to the accidental structural arrangements that it encounters. In order to describe this complex relation, Merleau-Ponty begins to use a language explicitly punctuated by concepts essential to the logic of expression. “Our responses,” he writes, “vary with the state of the muscles which the responses are going to bring into play” (SB, 23). In other words, even reflexes respond to the paradoxical ideal weight of that which will exist in the future, responding to a situation that does not yet exist. Thus, the “central nervous system [is] the place in which a total ‘image’ of the organism is elaborated and in which the local state of each part is expressed” (SB, 23, emphasis added). By orienting itself around a functional set of current positions and potential movements, the body is a moving expression of its past and its present toward a future that is present as metastable. The adaptation of our responses does not imply an intervening intellectualism, a calculation, or a mind in nature. “In fact,” explains Merleau-Ponty, “I possess the conclusions without the premises being given anywhere. I execute the proposed task without knowing what I am doing, just as habits acquired by one group of muscles can be transferred immediately to another” (SB, 30). There is an intelligence in bodily action, an expressive creativity of playing forward into a new situation something that comes from an alternately configured one that shares nether its content nor its material form, but rather its sense. As if confirming the role of expression in his understanding, Merleau-Ponty invokes the structures of improvisation to clarify his position. In amputation experiments with insects, the organism is not rendered incapable of action. Rather, its behavior is improvised to substitute for the missing limb, employing “a new mode of locomotion, a solution to the unexpected problem posed by the amputation” (SB, 39). Such improvisation, however, only occurs when a “vital interest is at stake” (SB, 40). Artificially produced obstacles do not engage the expressive or creative body, they remain detached and fail to create a real urgency or tension in the field of action. These scientific observations “bring to light a directed activity between blind mechanism and intelligent behavior which is not accounted for by classical mechanism and intellectualism” (SB, 40, emphasis added). Merleau-Ponty thus describes even the most elementary forms of behavior in terms of an action between pure repetition and pure creation. Such action can only occur in a network of relations, since “every organic reaction supposes a global elaboration of the excitations which confers properties on each one of them that it would not have singly” (SB, 44). Indeed, in concluding this critique of reflex theories, Merleau-Ponty suggests that we rethink the central nervous system as “a field of forces which express concurrently the intraorganic state and the influence of external agents”

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(SB, 46), that is, as a metastable field. Thus, from the very opening of this exploration of foundational concepts in the physiology and psychology of reflex behavior, Merleau-Ponty is already working out the implications of a notion of action that can be characterized as creatively playing forward the weight of the past in negotiation with the milieu toward a future.

The implicit logic of expression in higher-level behavior In the second major subdivision of The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty shifts from his focus on simple reflex behavior to more complex behavioral structures, and in particular to the process of acquiring behaviors. In a critique of the classical assumptions underlying Pavlov’s experiments and conclusions, Merleau-Ponty attributes the insufficiency of this account to its failure to recognize the expressive or creative features of gestures. Taking up the work of writers in Gestalt theory and early neurophysiology, he introduces Schneider, Gelb and Goldstein’s war-wounded patient whose case shapes much of Part I of Phenomenology of Perception (see PhP, 105ff.). In Schneider, a single lesion has a large number of global effects, suggesting that the brain is more a network of functionality than a collection of relatively independent specialized regions (SB, 65). Consider Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the physiology of language. Denying the reductive account that would require language centers of the brain to be “storehouses of ready-made traces” (SB, 85), Merleau-Ponty reconceives of these centers as “command posts capable of executing the most different ensembles on a single keyboard of phonemes, just as an infinity of melodies can be played on a single piano” (SB, 85). What is at stake in recognizing or using a word, then, is not the association of a word with a particular verbal image or idea. Rather, learning a word involves catching on to its structure, an ensemble of intensities and distributions, and the order of their deployment. “The same notes, in two different melodies,” suggests Merleau-Ponty, “are not recognized as such. Inversely, the same melody can be played two times without the two versions having a single common element if it has be transposed” (SB, 87). Structure, then, is the “creation of a unity of meaning which is expressed in the juxtaposed parts, the creation of certain relations” (SB, 87), and speaking must be understood in terms of sense and expression. Rather than preexisting its accomplishment, “the physiological process which corresponds to the perceived color or position or to the signification of a word must be improvised, actively constituted at the very moment of perception” (SB, 88). The meaning of the gesture must exist only as metastable, and its expression will be the paradoxical response to the weight of its past, present, and future.

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The necessity of importing phenomenal structures, such as figure and ground, into physiological explanations shows more than a mere lack of conceptual resources for accounting for physiological functions. One cannot simply add the notion of form to classical theory because the necessity of this concept throws into question the very idea of a purely “physiological” phenomenon. Since the figure-ground structure is only meaningful in the perceived world, “a physiological analysis of perception would be purely and simply impossible” (SB, 92). The content of science itself solicits psychological or phenomenological explanation. If some physical marks on a page are to be understood in their phenomenal reality as meaningful traces, then the theory of language has to be broad enough to include the contribution of the perceiver and the weight of their past and their current bodily situation, broadly construed, and such a complex structural analysis is impossible on a reductive model of causal explanation. Even the most basic higher-level behaviors cannot be reduced to either pure repetition or pure creation. Merleau-Ponty thus understands an “act,” properly so-called, to be a creative gesture that responds to the situation by playing forward a past that is thereby paradoxically altered. Learning is not a mechanical modification of established pathways, but a “general alteration of behavior” manifested through a multitude of actions whose content varies but whose sense remains constant (SB, 96). This emphasis on generality entails that learning is not the capacity to reactivate the same gesture, but rather of “providing an adapted response to the situation by different means. Nor is the response acquired with regard to an individual situation. It is rather a question of a new aptitude for resolving a series of problems of the same form” (SB, 96). When a behavior is learned, it becomes a general ability to respond to situations that have the same sense, and so it is not a “real operation,” but has weight in the virtual or in the metastable (SB, 98–9). On this account, Merleau-Ponty identifies three interconnected levels of behavior. First, there are basic or syncretic forms of behavior in which behavior is a response to abstract configurations of the situation, but still tied into the organic or instinctual structure of the organism. Second, there are amovable forms of behavior in which signals not naturally appearing in the organic material are integrated into learned behavioral responses that are nonetheless tied tightly to the situation in which the behavior was learned. Third, there are symbolic forms of behavior in which the organism becomes capable of improvising behaviors. In this third level of behavior, the signal becomes “a proper theme of an activity which tends to express it” (SB, 120). Merleau-Ponty resists overly privileging linguistic behavior, for such an activity, he says, is “already found in the acquisition of certain motor habits

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such as the aptitude to play an instrument or to type” (SB, 120). The musical essence is the structure of a complex relation between the “character of the melody, the graphic configuration of the musical text and the unfolding of the gestures [that] participate in a single structure” (SB, 120) in negotiation with a particular milieu. Thus, the “relation between the expression and the expressed” is a question of “internal communication,” and the “expressive value of each of the three ensembles with respect to the two others is not an effect of their frequent association: it is a reason for it” (SB, 120). In short, the paradoxical logic of expression reaches down to the most basic levels of learned behaviors. Merleau-Ponty confirms this reading when he describes the paradoxical structure of a general aptitude in the language of the in-itself and the for-itself: “Behavior,” he suggests, “inasmuch as it has a structure, is not situated in either of these two orders” (SB, 125); that is, behavior is neither pure repetition (in-itself) nor pure creation (for-itself). As a result, behavior exists across rather than in space and time, and the paradoxical structures of expression become essential to the explanation of learning. As he writes: [. . .] a “now” stands out from the series of “nows,” acquires a particular value and summarizes the groupings which have preceded it as it engages and anticipates the future of the behavior; this ‘now’ transforms the singular situation of the experience into a typical situation and the effective reaction into an aptitude. From this moment on, behavior is detached from the order of the in-itself (en soi) and becomes the projection outside the organism of a possibility which is internal to it. The world, inasmuch as it harbors living beings, ceases to be a material plenum consisting of juxtaposed parts; it opens up at the place where behavior appears. (SB, 125)

A certain “now” takes on a weight in the future of an organism, and the organism, as the place of response to real and virtual weight, is an internally articulated metastable field of action; the world becomes meaningful through the movement of expressive action that opens it up as a place rather than a space for action, to echo Edward S. Casey’s important work.7 In other words, in the experience of behavior, in the act that is always between pure creation and pure repetition, “I effectively surpass the alternative of the for-itself and the in-itself ” (SB, 126). Behavior, then, is “neither a thing nor consciousness; and it is this which renders it opaque to the mind” (SB, 127). Behavior thus reveals the paradoxical logic of expression and suggests an ambiguous notion of “form” that remains opaque to classical philosophy.

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Structure and expression: Pensée naturée in the human order In the third major section of The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty turns to establish the “philosophical significance” of this ambiguous notion of form. The preceding analysis has demonstrated that the organism’s world cannot be reduced to the “geographical” environment; rather, the organism has a milieu or a lived environment or Umwelt (SB, 129). The world cannot be understood as a set of isolated stimuli or spatial relations; it solicits the organism and offers it a sense, while reciprocally the gestures of the organism create the world as a place. As such, “the reactions of an organism are not edifices constructed from elementary movements, but gestures gifted with internal unity [. . .] a kinetic melody gifted with a meaning [sens]” (SB, 130). Thus, the concept of form implies an entirely different ontology of internal connections and immanent intelligibility. Gestalt theory itself does not become explicitly aware of this implicit new ontology, tending either to reduce itself to psychology or to turn itself into a materialism of physical configurations. It fails to be sufficiently radical; although Gestalt theorists discover form, they fail to think “according to ‘form’” (SB, 137). Rather than following this reductive tendency, which leads to an indefinite shifting between materialism and mentalism, Merleau-Ponty attempts to establish that “form” is in fact the ultimate ground or the solution to the problem of the world, since it reveals the “synthesis of matter and idea” (SB, 137). Form must therefore be reconceptualized at all levels: physical, vital, and human, and at each level the structure of the paradoxical logic of expression guides Merleau-Ponty’s conclusions.

Physical structures The link between expression and ontology is already at issue at the level of physical structures. Beginning from the question of how it can be said that “form” exists “‘in’ the physical world” (SB, 137), this first section reevaluates the underlying realism of Gestalt theory. Offering descriptions that directly foreshadow Simondon’s philosophy, Merleau-Ponty suggests that form is the “momentary expression” of a system of internal relations resisting external influences—“the physical form is an individual” (SB, 137). As a whole that is more than the sum of the parts, form is an irreducible ensemble of forces in a state of equilibrium. The form is the establishing of an equilibrium, the redistribution of forces into a new expression of the dialectic between an immanent law and an external milieu. In short, form individuates a sense from within its dynamic situation and yet paradoxically establishes that situation. It does not ex-press a previously existing law; it accomplishes its law and its

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relations by establishing itself. Moreover, its parts do not have “absolute” or objective properties; their properties are a function of the form(s) in which they are participating. Although this understanding of form is extracted from Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the case of electrical field distributions, he suggests that it must be generalized. Even the most seemingly static and general laws presuppose a relatively stable system of other conditions: “the law of falling bodies expresses the constitution of a field of relatively stable forces in the neighborhood of the earth and will remain valid only as long as the cosmological structure on which it is founded endures” (SB, 138). The laws of physics, then, express not ultimate and universal principles, but the structure of relatively stable reactions given relatively stable conditions. These structures, when brought into a new situation or when subsumed to the influence of other forces, “could withdraw existence from structures which had become stable and bring about the appearance of other structures, the properties of which are not predictable” (SB, 139). Here Merleau-Ponty is recognizing, beginning from the content of the sciences, the need to understand and to generalize the primacy of metastable equilibriums in precisely the manner of Simondon. He even foreshadows a language of individuation when he writes: “since the law cannot be detached from concrete events where it intersects with other laws and receives a truth value along with them, one cannot speak of a linear causal action [. . .]; for in nature it is impossible to circumscribe the author, the one responsible as it were, of a given effect” (SB, 139, emphasis added). Finally, this notion of structure connects to the importance of phenomenological reflection. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “[i]t is from the universe of perceived things that Gestalt theory borrows its notion of form,” and form “is encountered in physics only to the extent that physics refers us back to perceived things, as to that which it is the function of science to express and determine” (SB, 144). The unity of the parts with the whole is not a “physical” reality, but rather a perceptual reality (VPT, 53–4). Thus, the physical form, far from being “the real foundation of the structure of behavior and in particular of its perceptual structure, it is itself conceivable only as an object of perception” (SB, 144). Gestalt theory must be reconceptualized to include the implicit presence of the one who takes up the meaning of the structures themselves, gearing into that which solicits them in order to be what it is becoming.

Vital structures At the level of “vital structures,” an organism is responsive to virtual structures and responsible for actively structuring their own milieu. Life is understood

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as any system or body that responds to the weight of the ideal in a milieu that is brought into being in the very movement of individuation, “when the structure, instead of procuring a release from the forces with which it is penetrated through the pressure of external ones, executes a work beyond its proper limits and constitutes a proper milieu for itself ” (SB, 145–6). The organism expresses a style, which is a set of optimal conditions for a given milieu that aid the organism in its projects and its “general attitude toward the world.” Thus, the “relations of the organic individual and its milieu are truly dialectical relations” (SB, 148). The actions of a living body are meaningful insofar as they are “addressed to a certain milieu, present or virtual: the act of taking a bait, of walking toward a goal, of running away from danger” (SB, 151). As Merleau-Ponty concludes, “the structure of the body in man is the expression of character” (SB, 155). For Merleau-Ponty, we do not observe an event as “behavior” through an analogy between material configurations and our own internal experience. Rather, a behaving organism “suggests” a unity to us that cannot be reduced to a mere “resemblance.” A behavior somehow expresses the sense of its own past and future, its situation, and its virtual structures and relations. As Merleau-Ponty explains, “from the beginning the phenomenal body must be a center of actions which radiate over a ‘milieu’” (SB, 157). Gestures are meaningful; they are the “spatial and temporal unfolding of certain ideal unities. ‘Every organism,’ said [famous biologist and physiologist] Uexküll, ‘is a melody which sings itself ’” (SB, 159). Not that the organism has an internal representation of the melody that it expresses, but that its behavior is presented as a sense, as if destined for a consciousness. In short, life must be understood as expression.

The human order Continuing the description from the perspective of the “outside spectator,” Merleau-Ponty suggests that the third level of behavior involves new structures, namely, those of “consciousness.” This institutes an entirely new milieu and an entirely new being who inhabits it: a world of bodies subject to both real and ideal weight, a world of “work,” a world populated by “use-objects (Gebrauchobjekts)—clothing, tables, gardens—and ‘cultural objects’—books, musical instruments, language—which constitute the proper milieu of man and bring about the emergence of new cycles of behavior” (SB, 162). The milieu has become populated with the vestiges of behaviors and expressions. Thus, although consciousness is first approached as “naturized” (naturée), as a constituted consciousness observed from the outside, this points to constituting consciousness, a “naturing” or creative consciousness (conscience naturante).

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He establishes this point through an account of action. Classical theories of action presuppose an external relation between consciousness and action, whereas the study of behavior reveals a dialectical relation. Consider originary or infantile perception. Arguing against a reductive “myth of sensations” (SB, 165) as the primary data of perception, Merleau-Ponty suggests that “unities of signification” are originary. Human perception is inherently the perception of the human milieu, beginning first with the perception of the other. “Nascent perception,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “has the double characteristic of being directed towards human intentions rather than toward objects of nature or the pure qualities (hot, cold, white, black) of which they are the supports, and of grasping them as experiential realities rather than as true objects” (SB, 166). Infantile consciousness, then, is neither an epistemic endeavor nor a nascent science of the world, it is an expressive modulation with the structures of the milieu it is learning to inhabit. The infant becomes aware first of faces and gestures, particularly of the mother, which are not deduced from a certain assemblage of raw sense data through association. The perception of the face requires the presupposition of the material supports that can later be identified in an analysis, but perception does not collect these parts in order to construct a whole. Rather, it grasps a whole that need not ever be decomposed. “A face,” concludes Merleau-Ponty, “is a center of human expression, the transparent envelope of the attitudes and desires of others, the place of manifestation, the barely material support for a multitude of intentions” (SB, 167). The same is true of use-objects. Even if the child is unaware of the object’s explicit uses, he or she is also unaware of the object as a mere sum of objective properties; he or she sees the objects as vestiges of expressive gestures. The slightest initiation into the human milieu reshapes how nature itself appears, from then on becoming “that minimum of stage setting which is necessary for the performance of a human drama” (SB, 168). Consider Merleau-Ponty’s description of a soccer player’s experience. In the living and urgent situation of the game, the field “is not an ‘object,’” but is rather “pervaded with lines of force [. . .] and articulated in sectors [. . .] which call for a certain mode of action and which initiate and guide the action as if [the player] were unaware of it” (SB, 168). He moves fluidly and fluently through the space of the game, which radically changes the urgencies and possibilities of the space of the field and his body. He senses where his own goal is, he is drawn toward the opponent’s goal, and he knows just where and when to pass the ball without being able to give an explicit definition or reason. The articulations of the field become new planes of his experience and are present to him “just as immediately as the vertical and the horizontal planes of his own body” (SB, 168). This experience cannot be reduced to

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an interpretive distance, with consciousness on one side and the world on the other. As Merleau-Ponty concludes, “at this moment, consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action. Each maneuver undertaken establishes in it new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field” (SB, 169). This lived dialectic is less Hegelian than Simondonian, as the continuous and open process of individuation in a transductive movement. In fact, this is precisely analogous to the description of metaphor offered above. The body is in an expressive dialectic with the milieu and the virtual that transforms this space from a place for a picnic into a place for an all out battle for local glory. Each action of the player is both a repetition of his training and pervaded by the sedimented “soccer” and “competition” experiences that make up his habit body and style, and yet his act is also a creation in the face of an open and evolving situation. Each action shifts the meaning, encounters accidental configurations, and reconfigures the meaning of what came before. The player experiences “this soccer match” from within, just as we live “language” never as a complete possession, but as a sedimented and thus virtual weight that sketches out possible creative action or movement, and that is reconfigured retroactively by each fleeting utterance. Action is an enactment of precisely the paradoxical logic of expression: the body is subject to the weight of the ideal in playing forward a past that will be given meaning through the unpredictable future encounters it will have. Through a “reformulation of the notion of consciousness” (SB, 169), Merleau-Ponty argues that the dialectical relation between constituted and constituting consciousness suggests a resolution at a more fundamental level. The theorist who attempts to construct perception from raw sensation, or language from the repeated associations of sounds and ideas, fails to recognize that some predisposition is required for this process to take root in the phenomenal world. For a human child, there must be a natural disposition to culture, that is, the human body must be a naturally expressive body. “If language did not encounter some predisposition for the act of speech in the child who hears speaking, it would remain for him a sonorous phenomenon among others for a long time; it would have no power over the mosaic of sensations” (SB, 169). The mere statistical occurrence of human gestures or words around the child can exert no pull on the child, is literally no-thing for him or her, unless the child is “capable of discovering immediately in these acts and in these objects the intention of which they are the visible testimony. To use a human object is always more or less to embrace and assume for one’s self the meaning of the work which produced it” (SB, 170). This indicates a fundamental structure of “communication” that runs throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work, accomplished through the ability

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for an expressive body to gear into the traces of other expressive gestures in a re-performance of the gesture’s sense in a new medium. In the human world, perception and communication are ultimately akin to reading, and the expressive body is what ensures this possibility. For the expressive being, “from the beginning the sonorous phenomenon—whether I speak or another speaks—will be integrated into the structure: expression-expressed; the face—whether I touch my own or see that of another—will be integrated into the structure: alter-ego” (SB, 171). Nascent perception then is already exposed in the paradoxical place between expression and what is expressed, and our open structures as expressive bodies are the ground of our being in a world together sharing meaning through an ability to gear into the vestiges of expression by taking them up into our own lives. An important consequence of this study of consciousness “from the outside” perspective is that the categories of classical transcendental philosophy will need to be expanded to include several “ways for consciousness to intend its object” (SB, 172). Following Scheler, Merleau-Ponty argues that consciousness cannot be reduced to transcendental thought standing back from the world and observing it across an interpretive distance. For example, “a person can be ‘given’ to a child as the pole of his desires and fears before the long work of interpretation which would arrive at the person as a conclusion from a universe of representations” (SB, 172–3). Nascent consciousness is not representational, but rather “a network of significative intentions which are sometimes clear to themselves and sometimes, on the contrary, lived rather than known. Such a conception will permit us to link consciousness with action by enlarging our idea of action,” since action is nothing other than creative expression, a “directed melody” (SB, 173). Merleau-Ponty defines human being as the locus of expression: “What defines man,” he writes, “is not the capacity to create a second nature— economic, social or cultural—beyond biological nature; it is rather the capacity of going beyond created structures in order to create others. And this movement is already visible in each of the particular products of human work” (SB, 175). There is for humans a natural shift to understanding things as visible or useful for anyone whoever, the general user of the tool, and this is precisely the type of seeing that is required for writing and reading. Merleau-Ponty defines this ability in terms of expression, as the “capacity of orienting oneself in relation to the possible, to the mediate, and not in relation to a limited milieu,” and thus the “human dialectic is ambiguous” insofar as it is incessantly transcending itself toward the virtual in a dialectical movement (SB, 176). The paradoxical logic of expression is again present as Merleau-Ponty shifts his focus from the creative component of action to the question of a “pure repetition” that haunts a certain Freudian account of the neurotic

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act. In the neurotic condition, each new experience pretends to be nothing but a pure repetition, but for Merleau-Ponty such a pure repetition would not be, properly speaking, a human act. Of course, each neurotic repetition certainly helps to sediment the structure of behavior into more and more probable future repetitions by adding to the metastable “similarities” the new conditions of each new situation. Yet for Merleau-Ponty, the complex is not a “thing which would subsist deep within us and produce its effects on the surface from time to time”; “it is,” following Goldstein, “present only in the way in which the knowledge of a language is present when we are not speaking it” (SB, 178). That is, the complex is a virtual or potential action of our body in the metastable set of potentials that we carry with us as the weight of our past, a potential that could express itself in an action toward a future that is unknown and whose meaning could therefore be dramatically altered in its next expression. The past is precarious. The complex is the extreme expression of what Merleau-Ponty here calls a “certain adhesiveness,” a “certain inertia,” or “certain mental automatons” (SB, 178). True human actions are ones that integrate the past into their action (SB, 180), and indeed, even in the complex, the weight of the past is never a simple destiny. The relation between levels is what Simondon calls a transductive relation: “The advent of higher structures,” explains Merleau-Ponty, “to the extent that they are accomplished, eliminate the autonomy of the lower orders and give a new signification to the steps which constitute them” (SB, 180). And so man is not a rational animal. The structures identified account for “mind” as the transformation of the entire being into an expressive being, but this has not required any adjoining of a mental substance to human bodies. Man “is not a new sort of being,” but rather “a new form of unity” (SB, 181). With this insight into concrete consciousness, Merleau-Ponty turns to consider the role that remains for transcendental philosophy for coming to terms with experience.

“But our conclusion is not that of critical philosophy” In the end, asks Merleau-Ponty (anticipating the Brunschvicgian response), must not the outside spectator’s experience succumb to the reality of reflection? Do the above conclusions not presuppose the “universal milieu” of ideas? (SB, 184) It seems the analysis of structure does not invalidate the truth of idealism, and yet Merleau-Ponty is insistent that his position is not that of the critical tradition of Descartes and Kant. The final chapter explores the role of transcendental idealism in the Cartesian problematic of the union of the soul and the body. As Geraets notes, the question is “[h]ow to overcome

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this juxtaposition of a thought that still makes up part of nature and a thought before which nature is nothing but a signification” (VPT, 87). In short, how to describe the experience of the paradoxical logic of expression. The beginning of an answer can be seen in the perspectival nature of perception. Even when it seems that judgment provides the content of a perception—such as when I see just three sides of a cube but judge that it is a six-sided object—it appears that the categories of judgment are in fact drawn from lived experience. “Something of the empiricism which it surmounts always remains in intellectualism—something like a repressed empiricism” (SB, 187). The analysis of structure reveals that my body mediates all of my experience, offering both the vehicle for expressive action and a weight that might irremediably block the intentions of the mind. To solve the problem, intellectualism concludes that the body is an intermediary between two separate poles: “the real world” and “perception, which are henceforth disassociated from each other,” and “[t]he body proper [le corps propre] has become a material mass” (SB, 190). Merleau-Ponty recognizes here a shared adoption of a causal or external explanation of perception, whereas an internal explanation leads to a theory of phenomena, or phenomenology. Kant is unable to pursue phenomenology because he privileges a solely rational form of consciousness, and is forced to place the body into the world of objects and the soul into the realm of judgment. Not even Brunschvicg’s careful attention to sensible presentation could move beyond the problematic foundation of causal thought. Merleau-Ponty concedes that his analyses also lead to a “transcendental attitude, that is, to a philosophy which treats all conceivable reality as an object of consciousness” (SB, 201). Yet given his emphasis on “structure” as between nature and idea, and on dialectical relations between levels of structures, this transcendental attitude is not forced into the classical antinomies of intellectualism. In clarifying his difference from intellectualism, Merleau-Ponty again invokes the language of expression. Consider the example of El Greco and his astigmatism, where the art historian claims that the elongated bodies of El Greco’s portraits are caused by his physiological condition. From within lived experience, the body’s particularities “cease to have the dignity of a cause,” since their sense is determined by their integration into an entire life (SB, 203). The body’s physical realities certainly weigh upon its expressions, but as motivations, not as destinies. Taking up just this body in just this place is nothing less than exploring a possibility of human experience in general. For an expressive body, its parts are “integrated” or “conquered,” they become part of its manner of being or style. El Greco assimilates the accidents of his life and body and structures them in expressive action, thereby giving them, his milieu, and the human condition itself a new metastable structure.

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Merleau-Ponty insists that his position is not intellectualist. Dialectical relations cannot be understood through the intellectualist’s notion of “signification,” since the interpretive distance implied by signification cannot comprehend the expressive integration of orders. For instance, “the integration of the optic or auditive regions in a functional whole” (SB, 207) is an embodied and expressive relationship, established in lived experience. In short, Merleau-Ponty adopts the transcendental attitude while rejecting the transcendental subject’s pensée de survol. “For life, as for the mind, there is no past which is absolutely past; ‘the moments which the mind seems to have behind it are also borne in its present depths’” (SB, 207–8).8 Even if the structures which constitute a higher-level behavior seem invisible, they nonetheless make up part of the “constitutive history” essential to the system, and as with Simondon, they remain part of the associated pre-individual metastable reservoir for future individuations. The notion of a transcendental subject, then, must give way to the phenomenological description of the trajectory of expressive performance. Memory is not an act performed by an autonomous consciousness, but rather the fact of a weight of the past that may (or may not) crystallize again in the present because it persists in the metastable potential of this body. Consciousness can never escape a body and a history, and is thus never truly hovering above its objects from the perspective of eternity. To clarify his position and its difference from the critical tradition, Merleau-Ponty turns again to the paradoxical logic of expression. He writes: When we were describing the structures of behavior it was indeed to show that they are irreducible to the dialectic of physical stimulus and muscular contraction and that in this sense behavior, far from being a thing which exists in-itself (en soi), is a whole significative for a consciousness which considers it; but it was at the same time and reciprocally to make manifest in “expressive conduct” the spectacle of a consciousness before our eyes, to show a mind which comes into the world. (SB, 209, translation modified)

The description of behavior from the external perspective reveals that expressive activity is a meaningful unity in the world. The relation between the soul and the body is not to be understood as the same relation as that between the word and the concept, at least insofar as this suggests a classical understanding of language. On the classical model, the word and the idea exist separately, as two externally related terms (SB, 209). Merleau-Ponty is willing to admit here that occasionally the soul finds no means of expression through the body, and that occasionally the body acts in a purely biological

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way. However, these are derivative moments of disintegration that occur only as secondary to the originary unity of soul and body. They reveal a permanent possibility of dualism that governs our experience but that is never in fact achieved. A soul that never found its expression would cease to be a soul, and a body that loses its sense becomes a mere physico-chemical mass. As Merleau-Ponty explains: The two terms can never be distinguished without ceasing to be; thus their empirical connection is based on the original operation which establishes a meaning in a fragment of matter and makes it live, appear and be in it. In returning to this structure as the fundamental reality, we are rendering comprehensible both the distinction and the union of the soul and the body. (SB, 209)

As Merleau-Ponty writes, “[t]he body in general is an ensemble of paths already traced, of powers already constituted; the body is the acquired dialectical soil upon which a higher ‘formation’ is accomplished, and the soul is the meaning which is then established” (SB, 210). Merleau-Ponty thus concedes that if we consider the relation between the word and the concept in the living accomplishment of expression, then indeed the relation between the body and soul matches the one between word and concept. The union of the soul and the body is lived as the paradoxical logic of expression in the manner of speaking speech, and coming to terms with this new structure, now from within, will be a central goal of Phenomenology of Perception.

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Expression and Phenomenology of Perception

It is by being what I am at present, without any restrictions and without holding anything back, that I have a chance at progressing; it is by living my time that I can understand other times; it is by plunging into the present and into the world, by resolutely taking up what I am by chance, by willing what I will, and by doing what I do, that I can go farther. (PhP, 482–3) In his central text, Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty is rightly famous for his insistence on the role of the lived body in our experience and for his careful descriptions leading toward a reformulation of philosophy itself. Moreover, this book includes his first extended discussion of the phenomenon of expression in his study of speech (PhP, 179–207). And yet, the paradoxical logic of expression is both implicit and explicit throughout the diverse investigations of this long and complex treatise. Moreover, at a key moment, Merleau-Ponty draws together embodiment and expression with his claim that: “The body cannot be compared to the physical object, but rather to the work of art” (PhP, 152). Such an analogy requires that we already have an insight into the two objects being related, since “the body” is only comparable to a work of art insofar as we understand the body as Merleau-Ponty reveals it in this book (i.e. the body that we live as our own), and “the work of art” is only comparable to the body insofar as we accept the latent theory of expression that undergirds Merleau-Ponty’s reflections here and elsewhere. Rather than being the result of his analysis, this analogy structures the investigation itself by invoking the meaningful horizon or set of possibilities shared by these two objects. Whether one looks to his analysis of classical psychology, his discussions of the appearing of the world given the embodied nature of the perceiver, or his attempts to rethink the cogito, temporality, and freedom in the final chapters of the book, Merleau-Ponty returns again and again to the mysterious place that bridges and sustains the tension of the in-itself and the for-itself. In short, the logic of expression can be seen as the very structure of embodied experience that guides and

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motivates this text and, as I will argue, it is the thread that ties together the far-ranging analyses of Merleau-Ponty’s major thesis and central contribution to the history of philosophy. In this chapter, I offer a reading of Phenomenology of Perception that establishes the centrality of the logic of expression throughout this classic text. Moreover, by demonstrating that the logic of expression is the very structure of embodiment for Merleau-Ponty, we can begin to appreciate his “turn” to study politics and aesthetics, and the ontological implications of these practices. Rather than extracting the concept of expression from this important work, I will thus show the emergence of the logic of expression as it appears in the movement of the text itself in order to grasp how it guides both his critical work and his positive contribution to the study of embodied perception and speech. As such, rather than reading this text as his discovery of the lived body, Phenomenology of Perception is here read as an important moment in the metastable trajectory of his evolving philosophy and as a vestige that exscribes an entire philosophy of expression.

The logic of expression against classical theories of perception Rethinking “Sensation” “In beginning the study of perception,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “we find in language the seemingly clear and straightforward notion of sensation” (PhP, 3). Yet a return to perception reveals how classical understandings of sensation, which take it to be a building block of perceptual experience, fail to adequately explain that experience. At first glance, perception seems to give us access to a world that exists in itself, partes extra partes, and the structures of empiricism and intellectualism attempt to establish this conclusion through the introduction of “auxiliary” hypotheses “concocted to preserve” this unquestioned belief in the objective world (PhP, 7). Even at the outset of his critical stance toward classical accounts of perception, Merleau-Ponty invokes the logic of expression: “We must recognize the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon. Quality appears within this atmosphere. The sense that it contains is an equivocal sense, and more a question of an expressive value than a logical signification” (PhP, 7). Following the critique of simple linear accounts of reflex discussed in The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty insists that the most basic perceptions are “already tied to an ensemble and already endowed with a sense, which is only different in degree from more complex perceptions” (PhP, 9). A classical or “technical” account of perception is impossible because perception is expression.

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Association and the projection of memories Turing his attention to some of the auxiliary hypotheses in question, Merleau-Ponty again raises the logic of expression. He argues that the introduction of the notions of “association” or the “projection of memories” fails to recognize the “field” structure of perception and the meaningful relations implied even at the most basic levels of experience. In short, perception involves taking part of the field as figure and part as ground. For this to be possible the perceiving body must be subject to the weight of the past, and the present experience involves taking up the previous experiences in which I learned the unities or the use of the names now employed. The very possibility of “association” requires a nonclassical understanding of consciousness, since the act of perception itself arranges the perceived things into a world of meaningful relations, and relations are not part of the “objective world” prior to its perceptual reality. The unity of the thing is not a product of association, but the condition of it, and is based upon an operative intentionality already at work in our stance toward the thing. Yet this does not entail an active imposition of categories. Consider Merleau-Ponty’s striking example of walking along the beach toward a beached ship whose masts are indistinguishable from the bordering forest: [T]here will be a moment in which these details suddenly reunite with the boat and become welded to it. As I approached, I did not perceive the resemblances or the proximities that were, in the end, about to reunite with the superstructure of the ship in an unbroken picture. I merely felt that the appearance of the object was about to change, that something was imminent in this tension, as the storm is imminent in the clouds. The spectacle was suddenly reorganized, satisfying my vague expectation. (PhP, 17–18)

Lived experience does not require interpretation; it is already a response to a solicitation. The subject feels a certain “I see .  .  . I don’t know what I see,” just as the artist senses a certain need to express as a vague fever.1 The beach walker gears into the spectacle that she senses as the one about to snap into shape; something is looming up in the metastable tensions of the landscape. “The unity of the object,” Merleau-Ponty continues, “is established upon the presentiment of an imminent order that will, suddenly, respond to questions that are merely latent in the landscape. It will resolve a problem only posed in the form of a vague uneasiness” (PhP, 18). Perception, then, is a creative taking up of that which solicits, and thus perception is expression.

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Or again, consider classical discussions of the “projection of memories.” By “returning to phenomena, we find, as a fundamental layer, a whole already pregnant with a sense.” This whole is not a result of raw sensations filled out by memories, “but rather the physiognomy—the structure of the landscape or of the world—spontaneously in accordance with our present intentions and with our previous experience” (PhP, 23). Our previous experience, argues Merleau-Ponty, is present to us “in the form of an horizon” that can either be opened up or left “on the margins” (PhP, 23). In short, to perceive is essentially to be subject to the weight of the past in an active–passive engagement with the present, and thus perception is again recognized as an expressive engagement with real and ideal weight. There is no interpretive distance, but rather a fundamental sensible expressivity, a sense of things that is sustained insofar as I gear into them and take them up. The “human world” is not just the natural world with a layer of judgments spread across this raw data. The human world is no metaphor, it is objective spirit, and thus the logic of expression is the key to Merleau-Ponty’s critique of empiricism. The doctrine is not wrong for emphasizing the material aspects of weight, for our “perception senses the near presence of the canvas beneath the painting, the crumbling cement beneath the monument, or the tiring actor beneath the character” (PhP, 26). They err in taking this fundamental layer to be composed of meaningless raw data. The character is not an ideal object signified by the actor’s empirical gestures, the character is accomplished as the expressive body on the stage and subject to so many ideal weights (from material conditions to historical performances to audience expectations) that allow this character to come into existence through a creative expression.

Attention and judgment Intellectualism also introduces auxiliary concepts to safeguard the unquestioned belief in the world, and Merleau-Ponty examines two: “attention” and “judgment.” Recognizing that empiricism is restricted to including merely external relations, intellectualism argues that to gain an understanding of the experience of a meaningful world requires shifting the focus to the activity of consciousness. “Attention” is a carefully directed mode of consciousness aimed at the truth of objects, and since the activity here is one of constitution, attention will not reveal anything that consciousness did not itself import into the object. Consciousness, properly speaking, learns nothing, and for Merleau-Ponty this suggests that intellectualism has swung too far in the opposite direction. If empiricism is missing “an internal connection between the object and the act,” intellectualism is missing “the contingency of the opportunities for thought” (PhP, 30). Falling to either side of the paradox of learning identified by Plato in the Meno: “Empiricism

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does not see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we could not go looking for it; intellectualism does not see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or again we would not go looking for it” (PhP, 30).2 Without a return to experience, both fail to recognize the circumscribed ignorance and the creative or expressive structure of perception. Attention, properly understood, is not a more careful look at a preexisting data; it is a creative act, a “new articulation by taking them as figures” (PhP, 32). Alluding to the paradoxical logic of expression, Merleau-Ponty writes that “attention is the active constitution of a new object that develops and thematizes what was until then only offered as an indeterminate horizon” (PhP, 33). Attention is forever an abortive attempt for consciousness to gear into its own metastable unreflective life, to awaken and to take up “its own, forgotten, history” (PhP, 34). Perhaps intellectualism can be saved through the introduction of “judgment” into experience. Since there is no single permanent property in our experience of a “piece of wax,” its perceptual presence must involve some conscious act of judgment or interpretation. Yet this interpretive distance again fails to recognize the “primordial operation that impregnates the sensible with a sense” (PhP, 35) and erases the undeniable distinction between perceiving and judging. We may “judge” that a visual puzzle has two aspects, but we must await its intuitive realization in order to see the rabbit appear. Judgment, as an explicit act, is merely an “optional expression” of the signification inherent in the phenomena. We live this meaning that “flashes across the visual field and secretly ties its parts together” (PhP, 37). As such, the sense of any object involves its context; to follow Simondon, the phenomenal field implies the reality of relations accomplished in perceptual activity through a transductive or expressive logic. As Merleau-Ponty writes: [Intellectualism would] say that the mind glances over the isolated impressions and gradually discovers the sense of the whole, like the scientist who determines the unknowns according to the givens of the problem. But here the givens of the problem do not exist prior to its solution, and perception is precisely this act that creates, all at once, out of the constellation of givens, the sense that ties them together. (PhP, 38)

As such, intellectualism privileges consciousness and fails to account for finitude; in “actual perception, taken in its nascent state and prior to all speech, the sensible sign and its signification are not even ideally separable” (PhP, 40–1). Reflection, then, always arrives too late, since “[b]etween myself, who is analyzing perception, and the self who is actually perceiving, there is always a distance” (PhP, 45). Reflection must be understood through the paradoxical logic of expression, as a “creative event, that is, a reconstitution of

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the past thought that was not pre-formed in that thought and that nevertheless legitimately determines that thought” (PhP, 46). Rejecting both empiricism and intellectualism, and invoking a “lived” or “unspoken” logic of experience, Merleau-Ponty introduces the rich notion of “motivation” as a corrective to the classical understanding of “cause.” Gestalt theory recognizes the “tensions that steal across the visual field and the system ‘one’s own body—world’ like lines of force” (PhP, 50), but they risk repeating the mistakes of objective thought by failing to introduce the new and paradoxical categories required to address this structure. The concept of “motivation,” which harmonizes with the paradoxical logic of expression, is “one of those ‘fluid’ concepts that must be formulated if we want to return to phenomena” (PhP, 51).

The phenomenal field as a field of expression In the final chapter of the introduction to Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty offers a rich account of the domain of our experience, overlooked by classical approaches, which he calls “the phenomenal field.” The field of experience is not a collection of raw sense data: “A wooden wheel lying on the ground is not, for vision, the same as a wheel bearing a weight” (PhP, 52). Perception is neither purely passive nor purely active, and vision “is already inhabited by a sense” (PhP, 52). There are “strange relations” between my body and the world that amount to a “living communication” (PhP, 52–3). The phenomenal field, then, is nothing less than “this reciprocal relation of expression, which reveals the human body as the outward manifestation of a certain manner of being in the world” (PhP, 55). As the immediate place of the experience of taking up the world, the phenomenal field solicits my gaze and is haunted by my past. Phenomenology must be understood as a “creative operation that itself participates in the facticity of the unreflected” (PhP, 62), and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is not a return to the structures of the transcendental subject, but rather to those of the transcendental field of the paradoxical logic of expression. Intellectualism and empiricism fail to ask “who is meditating” (PhP, 63)? A phenomenological investigation that takes up the paradoxical logic of expression not only asks this question, but answers it with the concrete subject who paradoxically brings about and takes up the field of expression.

The body as expression The body cannot be compared to the physical object, but rather to the work of art. [. . .] It is a knot of living significations. (PhP, 152, 153)

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Part I of Phenomenology of Perception is named “The Body,” and it amounts to a rich and complex statement of the fundamental experience of embodiment through an interrogation of the experience of “one’s own body” (le corps propre). As the epigraph above suggests, the body is reconceived on the model of expression and thus, as I will here argue, this entire section of Merleau-Ponty’s central text illustrates precisely the thesis of this book.

One’s own body as expression The first chapter examines theories that understand the body as a mechanical object, partes extra partes. The analysis of animal behavior and the phenomenon of the phantom limb indicate that Merleau-Ponty has something like the notion of metastable equilibrium in mind. Behavior is presented as a negotiation between the milieu and the bodily bearing of the organism, which introduces norms and projects into the world. The animal does not interpret the world, it inhabits the world, and finds itself within a situation that Merleau-Ponty describes in the language of expression: “It is lived as an ‘open’ situation and it calls for the animal’s movements—just as the first notes of the melody call for a certain mode of resolution—without thereby being known for itself ” (PhP, 81). Even the most habitual of animal behaviors involve a certain creative gearing into the situation that solicits them, and such a transductive relation requires more than a mechanical understanding of causality. The nonthetic “bodily recognition” that responds to the situation is an expressive taking up of the situation under the weight of the past. Merleau-Ponty writes: “This is the paradox of all being in the world. By carrying myself toward a world, I throw my perceptual intentions and my practical intentions against objects that appear to me, in the end, as anterior and exterior to these intentions” (PhP, 84). The case of the phantom limb results from a disharmony between the habitual bodily bearing and the objective body, a response to a situation that solicits a hand that is no longer there objectively, but that nonetheless lingers as a specific weight in the subject’s intentional metastable structure. Thus, although the body can certainly be viewed as a mere physical object, human being involves habits and history, a creative taking up of bodily being into an historical and expressive structure of individuation as a trajectory of metastable equilibriums. “History, then, is neither a perpetual novelty nor a perpetual repetition, but rather a unique movement that both creates stable forms and shatters them” (PhP, 90). The same movement holds for human being: “Taken concretely, man is not a psyche joined to an organism, but rather this back-and-forth of existence that sometimes allows itself to exist as a body and sometimes carries itself into personal acts” (PhP, 90).

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Bodily being, then, is expressive existence, between pure creation and pure repetition, neither physical nor psychical, but rather the “imperceptible shift” between the two as the body subject to the weight of the ideal. The union of the soul and the body is “accomplished at each moment in the movement of existence” (PhP, 91). Turing his attention to classical introspective psychology’s understanding of “my body,” Merleau-Ponty again invokes the paradoxical structures of experience. The body cannot be simply a representation or an object of the mind, because the structure of experience is accomplished in behavior through ultimately expressive though nonthetic gestures.

Movement as expression The third chapter takes up the experience of spatiality and movement, and here Merleau-Ponty introduces a key component of the paradoxical logic of expression: “sedimentation.” Our experience is saturated with implicit knowledge that is never thematized, such that “each gesture and each perception is immediately situated in relation to a thousand virtual coordinates” (PhP, 131). Our situation is sensed according to implicit intentional threads which run out toward and sustain that which weighs upon us, and our familiarity with a particular setting sediments into the possible movements of our hands and legs. The same is true on the linguistic landscape: “my acquired thoughts are not an absolute acquisition; they feed off my present thought at each moment; they offer me a sense, but this is a sense that I reflect back to them” (PhP, 132). The past is present insofar as I take it up, it lives on as what is exscribed in my present, yet it is itself reshaped with every expressive gesture insofar as the structure of the “world” is the result of the “double moment of sedimentation and spontaneity,” or the paradoxical place between pure repetition and pure creation. In contrast to Gelb and Goldstein’s patient Schneider, then, lived gestures generally involve no interpretive distance. There is an immediate relation of sense between the body and its world. Being in the world is accomplished as the interplay between spontaneity and sedimentation, and thus expressive embodiment is the deeper truth that classical philosophies have failed to recognize. What Schneider lacks, according to Merleau-Ponty, is a certain “concrete freedom,” the “general power of placing oneself in a situation” (PhP, 137), which paradoxically is the freedom expressed by making oneself subject to the weight of the past or the weight of the ideal. Merleau-Ponty describes the experience of being within the metastable equilibrium as our body sustaining a world thanks to an “intentional arc” that “projects around us our past, our future, our human milieu, our physical situation, our ideological situation, and our moral situation, or rather, that ensures that we are situated within

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all of these relationships” (PhP, 137). Every gesture reshapes the intensities of this situatedness, which Merleau-Ponty explores through habit and the body schema. The body schema—which for Merleau-Ponty is the nonthetic awareness of one’s own body as a power for one’s world—is a felt reality, and every new habit brings about a new metastable equilibrium as the “reworking and renewal of the body schema” (PhP, 143). To gain a habit is to gain a new power and to enter a new world that may (or may not) solicit that power; it is the taking on of a weight that is the paradoxical possibility for freedom. The body, then, is the place of the metastable and transductive trajectory of our experience. “Habit expresses the power we have of dilating our being in the world, or of altering our existence through incorporating new instruments” (PhP, 145). As such, the body inhabits the world as its expressive place for action. The deftness of the pianist’s hands is what transforms the keyboard into something to be played, revealing it as a place for expression, and the playing of this keyboard modulates and reshapes the pianist’s general power for playing. The piece she plays, learned through solitary practice, means something different in the context of this performance; the piece is never a pure repetition and its meaning is altered and sustained by this performance as one phase of its complex trajectory. The body, then, must be recognized as essentially an “expressive space”; the body is “the very movement of expression” (PhP, 147). In short, the study of motricity leads to the discovery of a “new sense of the word ‘sense’” (PhP, 148). Sense does not come from a constituting consciousness, it results from the body as “the knotting together of essence and existence” (PhP, 148).

The body as a work of art The body as an expressive space, discovered as such in the analysis of movement and spatiality, shapes the rest of Part I as Merleau-Ponty turns to consider the expressive structures of sexuality and speech. As a transition, he offers a brief yet profound chapter entitled “The Synthesis of One’s Own Body.” The body, he suggests, accomplishes its own unity through its fluent and harmonious gestures. The result, however, is that the body—one’s own body—cannot be understood as an object I “possess.” Following Marcel, Merleau-Ponty writes: “I am not in front of my body, I am in my body, or rather I am my body” (PhP, 151). Even the seemingly most unreflective gestures and postures express my “style,” the “particular fashion in which my body moves” (PhP, 151), the way that it bears its weight and its past into its every gesture, even if only as metastable possibilities. The body is not a mere weight; it is a weight that gathers itself together and surges toward a future; it is an expressive body. Thus, as the living trace of expressive gestures that bear

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forward, sustain, and reshape the weight of the past and the ideal, one’s own body “cannot be compared to the physical object, but rather to the work of art” (PhP, 152). Just like artworks (which are also traces of expressions), my being is never “independent of all material support,” and the meaning of a poem would be “irremediably lost if its text was not perfectly preserved” (PhP, 152). The sense of the text is locked to this fragile page and emerges in the spaces between these marks; the sense of the body is tied to just this bearing of a real weight and emerges as that which overflows these gestures. In short, the poem and the person are “individuals” (PhP, 153), or to follow Simondon, “individuations,” insofar as both are “beings in which the expression cannot be distinguished from the expressed, whose sense is only accessible through direct contact, and who send forth their signification without ever leaving their temporal and spatial place” (PhP, 153). The body, then, is a living negotiation of impersonal forces that accomplishes itself through a creative operation and, just like the work of art, is a “knot of living significations” (PhP, 153). Its locus is a particular body, but it is always a body as a metastable structure, overflowing itself in a realism of relations and in taking up the past toward the future. In short, the habit body is the place of a metastable equilibrium, and just as the acquisition of the metaphor provides a new set of potentials for speaking, the acquisition of a habit is the “extension of existence” in “a new use of one’s own body: it is to enrich and to reorganize the body schema” (PhP, 154–5). Offering what might be a definition of the transductive logic of individuation and of the role of metastable equilibriums implied in the paradoxical logic of expression, Merleau-Ponty writes: As a system of motor powers or perceptual powers, our body is [.  .  .] a totality of lived significations that moves toward its equilibrium. Occasionally a new knot of signification is formed: our previous movements are integrated into a new sensorial entity, and our natural powers suddenly merge with a richer signification that was, up until that point, merely implied in our perceptual or practical field or that was merely anticipated in our experience through a certain lack, and whose advent suddenly reorganizes our equilibrium and fulfills our blind expectation. (PhP, 155)

The body in its sexed being Shifting his focus to the existential structure of sexuality, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that affective intentionality is neither a result of physical causality or pleasure, nor of psychical decision or attachment.3 Rather,

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affectivity is “an originary mode of consciousness,” and thus sexuality is a manner of being in the world through an intentional arc that sketches out sexual possibilities, a manner of being sexually situated. For Merleau-Ponty, then, the lasting significance of psychoanalysis is that it reintegrates sexuality into human existence, and this existential interpretation naturally finds its expression in his adoption of Freud’s claim that “every human act ‘has a sense’” (PhP, 160). This structure between the material and the psychical is described by Merleau-Ponty as a “reciprocal relation of expression” (PhP, 162). As revealed in “bodily experience,” sexuality expresses existence by accomplishing it (PhP, 163). The body does not signify a mode of existence, it brings sense into existence by becoming that sense, just as a sleeper only expresses sleep by becoming that which she was imitating, calling forth the visitation of sleep in an active passivity. In short, the transition in question is an existential step, not an accumulation of individual components, and the “role of the body is to ensure this metamorphosis” by taking up the situation required for that which is coming into being to be what it is becoming (PhP, 167). Merleau-Ponty writes: “If we therefore say that the body continuously expresses existence, then this is intended in the sense that speech expresses thought,” for to understand this latter relation one must recognize that in the originary mode of expression, “the expressed does not exist apart from the expression” (PhP, 169). Merleau-Ponty continues: “The body expresses total existence in this way, not that it is an external accompaniment of it, but because existence accomplishes itself in the body. This embodied sense is the central phenomenon of which body and mind, or sign and signification are abstract moments” (PhP, 169, emphasis added). The excursion through expression leads Merleau-Ponty to conclude that “existence is indeterminate in itself because of its fundamental structure: insofar as existence is the very operation by which something that had no sense takes on sense” (PhP, 173). As an existential structure, sexuality is present for humans “as an atmosphere,” as a metastable equilibrium sensed from within; sexuality is that “individual haze through which we perceive the world” (PhP, 172, 173). Expression, then, is transcendence from within, as that concrete act by which “existence takes up for itself and transforms a de facto situation” (PhP, 173). Such a mode of description already implies an expressive ontology: Existence [. . .] never definitively leaves anything behind, for then the tension that defines it would disappear. [. . .] Existence has no fortuitous attributes and no content that does not contribute to giving it its form, it does not admit any pure facts in themselves, because it is the movement by which facts are taken up. (PhP, 173)

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This generalizes the paradoxical logic of expression from language to existence in general. Expression emerges as the central phenomenon of embodiment, which explains why the transition between “The Body” (Part I) and “The Perceived World” (Part II) of Phenomenology of Perception is accomplished precisely through the paradoxical logic of expression, illustrated most clearly in the experience of speaking, to which we now turn.

The body as expression, and speech This analysis suggests that chapter 6 of Part I is the pivotal chapter in Phenomenology of Perception. As I have argued, Merleau-Ponty’s deepening discussion of perception leads directly to the emergence of the paradoxical logic of expression through the notion of embodied sense, and this important chapter must be read not just as a contribution to the philosophy of language or speech, but as making explicit the logic that enables his profound study of embodiment. Although some of this chapter has been discussed above in the introduction to this book, it is important here to explore Merleau-Ponty’s first explicit account of the logic of expression and its implications for communication and intersubjectivity—insights, I will argue, that shape all of his subsequent work. As discussed above, classical empiricist and intellectualist explanations of speech fail because they embrace the problematic presupposition that “the word does not bear its sense” (PhP, 182). Empiricism takes the word as a physical or perceptual phenomenon, and thereby explains speech through a mechanical or causal chain. Intellectualism reserves “sense” for thought, taking the word to be simply the empty envelope for thought, an “external accompaniment of thought” (PhP, 182). Merleau-Ponty points out several phenomenological disruptions to this account, such as how thought “tends toward” speech, how “language accomplishes thought,” and how I can think “according to others” beyond what I can think on my own. Making the phenomenon of speech central reveals that, prior to any conceptual signification, there is a “gestural signification, which itself is immanent in speech” (PhP, 184). Because expression accomplishes the expressed, I can think according to others or read a text. To know a word is to have within the metastable possibilities of one’s own body the possibility of saying it or reading it; to be an expressive body is to be able to engage with these congealed vestiges of gestures gone by, to lend them life again by taking them up into one’s own trajectory. In speech, this metastable is felt—it weighs upon me—as the “near presence of the words that I know. They are behind me, like objects behind my back or like the horizon of the village surrounding my house; I reckon with them or I count upon them” (PhP, 186). To learn a word is to

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catch on to its style, not such that it would be triggered by a given situation, but such that I can creatively take it up again according to its sense. To learn a style, to catch on to a sense, is to carry forward the possibility for creative repetition, and so the body “is the means of our communication with both time and space” (PhP, 187). In short, all of this gesturing and communication is possible because “the body is a natural power of expression” (PhP, 187). These remarks lead Merleau-Ponty to invoke something like a logic of vestige.4 He writes, “speech is not the ‘sign’ of thought, if by this we understand a phenomenon that announces another as smoke announces fire. [.  .  .] [T]hey are enveloped in each other; sense is caught in speech, and speech is the external existence of sense” (PhP, 187). As the trace of an expressive gesture, the vestige is not simply a sign; it embodies sense as a solicitation to other expressive bodies to take it up. The words themselves have a signifying power as the presence of sense in the world, as the embodiment of a style, or as an existential signification that “inhabits them and is inseparable from them” (PhP, 188). This is why Merleau-Ponty can claim, in a passage that again foreshadows a Simondonian logic, that: The operation of expression, when successful, does not simply leave to the reader or the writer himself a reminder; it makes the signification exist as a thing at the very heart of the text, it brings it to life in an organism of words, it installs this signification in the writer or the reader like a new sense organ, and it opens a new field or a new dimension to our experience. (PhP, 188)

The structure of the vestige that bears the sense is clarified as Merleau-Ponty again invokes the connection between speech and artistic expression. Whether we take the musical notes, the canvas and the paint, or the actor’s body, the expression is inhabited by sense. “Aesthetic expression,” he writes, “confers an existence in itself upon what it expresses, installs it in nature as a perceived thing accessible to everyone” (PhP, 188). For Merleau-Ponty, expression is a making public, but a paradoxical one, since the expressive operation “actualizes or accomplishes the signification and is not merely a matter of translating it” (PhP, 188). There can be no “pure thought” governing speech, since the supposed silence of inner life is derivative upon speech and is incessantly “buzzing with words” (PhP, 189). Moreover, communication does not for Merleau-Ponty proceed primarily through common meanings or instituted “spoken” speech. Reducing communication to the coding and de-coding of signs and acquired significations fails to allow for the creative side to expression and fails to allow for “what is contingent in expression and communication” (PhP, 189).

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Thus, expression and communication are an effort to respond to a “primordial silence beneath the noise of words,” and the structure of communication is one of expressive gesturing: “Speech is a gesture, and its signification a world” (PhP, 190). Since the gesture is expressive, and not signifying, the sense of the gesture can be read in the gesture itself. “The gesture does not make me think of anger,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “it is the anger itself ” (PhP, 190). But the sense of a gesture is not “perceived like, for example, the color of the rug”; rather, it is grasped insofar as it speaks to the powers of my body: “The sense of the gestures is not given but rather understood, which is to say taken up by an act of the spectator” (PhP, 190). Communication is not about knowledge, but about an expressive body gearing into expressive gestures (or traces of expressive gestures) such as to bring about a “reciprocity” between intentions. “Everything happens,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body, or as if my intentions inhabited his body” (PhP, 191). My intention gears into the other’s gesture by taking up the world that that gesture sketches out, insofar as this is possible given the differences between our bodies, our histories, and the modes of expression (her speaking and my listening; or his writing and my reading). The “powers of my body adjust to and fit over” the gesture or the trace. I do not repeat the physical gesture, I take up its sense in a new gesture, gearing into the trajectory of the many performances of its trace by adding my own re-performance to its evolving weight. This analysis of gestures raises a difficult question. If expression is always between pure creation and pure repetition, taking up and reshaping the acquired significations, then how does this operation ever get off of the ground? Wouldn’t such an account have to posit either a natural gestural meaning upon which language is built or a first pure constitution of meaning, at least one “pure creation”? Either way, the thesis that expression is always between pure repetition and pure creation appears to be at risk. This is why, despite Husserl’s evasion of the question, Merleau-Ponty still believes it necessary to ask about the “origin of language” (PhP, 192).5 His answer is based upon the structure of gesture itself, since the “linguistic gesture, like all others, sketches out its own sense” (PhP, 192). It may seem perfectly reasonable, once the acquired significations or shared meanings are present, that “speech can signify like a gesture against the shared mental background,” but does not the existence of several languages indicate that the link between the word and its signification is “purely accidental” (PhP, 192–3)? Yet Merleau-Ponty rejects the presupposition that emotional expressions are “natural signs” and linguistic signs are “conventional signs.” In fact, when placed back into the current of lived communication, even the most disinterested uses of language involve some emotional sense. Words are not simply message bearers, but

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are expressions of a certain style of singing the world; different languages are not simply different means for expressing the same ideas, but are different ways of being in the world. Languages, then, are not perfectly transposable because they are expressions of different ways of being in the world (and hence of different worlds). Language claims the goal of reaching a truth through more and more adequate expression, but this “universal thought” that is the implicit goal of language is not something that exists in advance and that is obscured by language itself. Thus, “we must seek the first hints of language in the emotional gestures by which man superimposes upon the given world the world according to man” (PhP, 194). Emotional and gestural expression, which are already communicated as discussed above, are manners of taking up the world that solicits all expressive bodies close enough in structure and history. This does not reduce language to a “natural” system of emotional expressions at its origin; it opens the possibility for understanding the origin of language because the dichotomy between “natural signs” and “artificial signs” is a false one. Every gesture is already the taking up of the weight of the past toward a future in a material gesture that (as a public act or as the issuing of a vestige) is already communication. Language is possible because there “are neither any natural signs nor any purely conventional signs” for human beings (PhP, 193). The body is not a fixed set of mechanical possibilities relating certain emotional or gestural responses to specific stimuli. Rather, it is a metastable structure of possibilities; as Merleau-Ponty writes, the “psycho-physical equipment leaves so many possibilities open, and [.  .  .] there is no human nature given once and for all” (PhP, 195). All of the uses, even the ones that seem most “inscribed in the human body” are in fact conventional, contingent ways of taking up this body toward a meaningful world (PhP, 195). The paradoxical structure between pure repetition and pure creation, or between the natural and the cultural, is the ultimate truth of human experience: For man, everything is constructed and everything is natural, in the sense that there is no single word or behavior that does not owe something to mere biological being—and, at the same time, there is no word or behavior that does not break free from animal life, that does not deflect vital behaviors from their direction [sens] through a sort of escape and a genius for ambiguity that might well serve to define man. (PhP, 195)

In other words, Merleau-Ponty identifies the paradoxical logic of expression as the very definition of man and the solution to the problem of the origin of language. The presence of the human body in the world is transcendent

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because it restructures that world according to orientations, projects, and meaningful possibilities that are not decided by any rational activity. This “irrational power” “creates and communicates significations” and “speech is merely a particular case of it” (PhP, 195). There is nothing at the origin of language other than a metastable possibility for expressive being in the world; language is possible because the “body is a natural power of expression” (PhP, 187).6 And yet, even if language must be understood along the spectrum of gestural being in the world, there is nonetheless something of a “special place” to be accorded to language. Speech may not have a metaphysical priority, but it has a philosophical one, because unlike emotional gestures, language can sediment and constitute an “intersubjective acquisition” (PhP, 196). Moreover, speech “installs in us the idea of truth as the presumptive limit of its effort” and, forgetting its own contingency, points us away from itself toward the “thoughts” or “ideas” that are nonetheless only brought into existence in speech itself (PhP, 196). Speech may never in fact be able to erase itself, yet its iterative structure, its virtual repetition through writing, offers Reason a privileged role in philosophy for understanding human being. This privileged object of study must be carefully placed “back among the phenomena of expression” in order to avoid the errors of classical philosophy. As such, it must be emphasized that language does not express “thoughts”; expression is the ambiguous gesture of taking up one’s position in a world, every acquisition offering the friction for further “authentic acts of expression” (PhP, 203), and the fundamental fact of expressive being in the world entails an “ever-recreated opening in the fullness of being” such that “[o]bscurity spreads to the perceived world in its entirety” (PhP, 203, 205). In short, every expression is an inscription that exscribes Being itself.

Expression and the perceived world The paradoxical logic of expression thus emerges organically in the movement of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, and it continues to shape his analyses and conclusions as he moves to “The Perceived World” (Part II) and “Being-for-Itself and Being-in-the-World” (Part III). Given that the implicit emergence and the explicit account of expression have been established above, and at the risk of leaving far too much to the side, I will limit this final section of this chapter to highlighting how the logic of expression governs Merleau-Ponty’s insights into the wide-ranging analyses of the final two parts of this text.

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“Sensing” and “Space” If Part I demonstrates that the subject is embodied and caught up in the complex structures of the paradoxical logic of expression, from the most simple movements to the furthest flights of language, then chapter 1 of Part II (“Sensing”) aims at establishing that the world taken up by this expressive body is itself not simply a passive or neutral thing in itself. The structure of perceiving is, for Merleau-Ponty, creative expression in the mode of reading. The world is not a neutral object demanding an epistemic examination; rather, it solicits my gaze and speaks to the powers of my body: “Blue is what solicits a certain way of looking from me [. . .]. It is a certain field or a certain atmosphere offered to the power of my eyes and of my entire body” (PhP, 218). As a solicitation, this blue calls for a certain “blue” response from me that it itself motivates: [.  .  .] a sensible that is about to be sensed poses to my body a sort of confused problem. I must find the attitude that will provide it with the means to become determinate and to become blue; I must find the response to a poorly formulated question. And yet, I only do this in response to its solicitation. (PhP, 222)

I must take up the perceived world in order to allow it to become what it will be. The object or field is not “blue,” properly speaking, prior to my taking up of its call. Perception, even at the level of sensing, is neither a passive reception nor an intellectual act. It is a paradoxical response, and how I take up the call of the perceived world and the past that weighs upon my perception influences what I see. The “matter” of knowledge—sensation—has thus been reformulated in a wholly nonclassical way as part of a complex structure of sensing. In the second chapter of Part II, Merleau-Ponty considers whether one might preserve “classical” thought by following Kant backward from the “matter” to the necessary “forms” of knowledge. The detailed studies of this chapter on the forms of spatial perception in terms of orientation, depth, and movement can be read as three extended arguments against a Kantian-styled “synthesis” that would have to be accomplished by a transcendental subject. The experience of space, argues Merleau-Ponty, is not an interpretation of relations as if perceived from a third person perspective. Rather, our body gears into the world according to space, taking up a metastable equilibrium that he calls the “spatial level,” and this has nothing to do with an active decision. There is a fundamental spatiality to all experience, and thus Being is “oriented” (PhP, 264).7 This requires embracing a form of “synthesis” that Husserl calls

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passive or transition synthesis. The lived structures of passive synthesis are expressive, since this synthesis “does not link discrete perspectives, but [. . .] accomplishes the ‘passage’ from one to the other” (PhP, 277).

“Things” and “Others” If the passive activity of sensing and the active passivity of spatial experience structure the first half of Part II, the second half considers the most common elements of our experience of the perceived world: things (or the natural world) and others (or the cultural world). Classical approaches understand the “thing” as that which resists all other things. And yet, given the structures of sensing, Merleau-Ponty argues that a thing is not simply a sum of properties, but rather is an inter-sensory entity that exists as a solicitation to the complex and intertwining powers of my body as a metastable structure. “I perceive a thing,” he writes, “because I have a field of existence and because each phenomenon that appears polarizes my entire body, as a system of perceptual powers, toward it” (PhP, 332). The thing embodies its sense as a solicitation to my body’s powers for taking it up as a meaningful unity. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “we understand a thing as we understand a new behavior, that is, not through an intellectual operation of subsumption, but rather by taking up for ourselves the mode of existence that the observable signs sketch out before us” (PhP, 333, emphasis added). Making the expressive structure explicit, he continues, “the thing accomplishes this miracle of expression: an interior that is revealed on the outside, a signification that descends into the world and begins to exist there and that can only be fully understood by attempting to see it there, in its place” (PhP, 333–4, emphasis added). The thing is a solicitation and yet is shaped by the weight of my perception upon its very structures, and “nature must be our interlocutor in a sort of dialogue” (PhP, 334). Perception is not a naïve science of the world, rather, “every perception is a communication [. . .] a coupling of our body with the things” (PhP, 334). In terms of “others” and the cultural world, Merleau-Ponty begins by describing “historicity” as expression. The past cannot exist as an inert weight, since its sense is determined by the manner in which I take it up. Given that my hold on the past is thereby “precarious,” the final account of my past is “deferred until the moment when I fully understand myself, but that moment can never arrive since it would again be a moment, bordered by the horizon of a future, and would in turn require further developments in order to be understood” (PhP, 362). As I argued above in terms of “metaphor,” then, history is a trajectory of sense, forever a “work in progress”

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as the constant interplay between natural and cultural time, forever escaping and yet incessantly folding back upon itself (PhP, 362). The meaning of the past is sustained and altered by the many performances of its trace, and these performances, “descend into nature and are deposited there in the form of a cultural world” (PhP, 363). The cultural world, then, is the living collection of expressive gestures and their vestiges: I have around me roads, plantations, villages, streets, churches, a bell, utensils, a spoon, a pipe. Each of these objects bears as an imprint the mark of the human action it serves. Each one emits an atmosphere of humanity that might be only vaguely determined (when it is a matter of some footprints in the sand), or rather highly determined (if I explore a recently evacuated house from top to bottom). (PhP, 363)

The cultural world surrounds us as a network of material supports for expressive gestures, each grasped in an impersonal sense: someone drives down this road; someone smokes this pipe. To understand another’s world or another culture, then, is to gear into that world by taking up the projects sedimented into its vestiges, and this is precisely the structure of communication open to expressive bodies. Just as the traces or vestiges of expression are eloquent insofar as they speak to the expressive powers of my own body, the other’s gestures too are paradoxically perceived insofar as I gear (through intention) into his or her eloquent gestures of being in the world, “seen from the outside” (PhP, 364). This is possible because perception is already communication, and being in the world is already expression. To see even a simple thing is to respond to its solicitation and to gear into the world implied by its expressive unity. “My gaze falls upon a living body performing an action,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “and the objects that surround it immediately receive a new layer of signification” (PhP, 369). The world is transformed into our world, invested with the metastable intentions of multiple expressive bodies, filled with objects we share, and this is immediately accomplished because the body is a natural power for expression that allows the child to see the other’s gestures as immediately resonating with her own body. This fundamental communication provides the basis for being in the world together and for the origin of language itself. We enter into dialogue, we express more than either of us could have ourselves imagined on our own. And yet, we ultimately fall back into our own trajectories. The fleeting body of the dialogue cannot be sustained, and we both eventually recede into our own bodies as the locus of our personal metastable structures. The meaning of the dialogue is only

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safe in its actual coming into being. As soon as we break communication, the conversation settles into our respective pasts, and how we understand its significance or how it sediments such as to influence our potential future actions or speech acts will be different. We immediately begin to accumulate different experiences, which can reshape the sense of the dialogue for each of us in dramatically different ways. The contingency of expression cannot be removed, the task is never completed, and so the responsible thing to do would be to embrace expression and communication as the constant task with no end at the open source of human existence in the shared world. Thus, this phenomenology remains tied to our separate lives, even if they intertwine and gear together without any interpretive distance in our shared world. As Merleau-Ponty writes: “The difficulties of perceiving others are not all the result of objective thought, and they do not all cease with the discovery of behavior, [.  .  .] the conflict between me and others does not begin only when we attempt to think others, nor does it disappear if thought is reintegrated into non-thetic consciousness and unreflective life” (PhP, 373). There is a certain mineness to the trajectory of my life that is, nevertheless, the transductive project of our shared performances of the traces of the cultural world. The fundamental truth, then, is not so much a vicious solipsism, but rather a constant interplay between “solitude and communication” which are but “two sides of the same phenomenon” (PhP, 376). Solitude is never pure, but neither is communication ever complete, they are the two sides of our expressive being in the world.

Time and freedom as expression In the final part of Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty takes up the consequences of his analysis of the lived body and the perceived world for three central philosophical problems: the cogito, temporality, and freedom. In all three cases the paradoxical logic of expression shapes his analysis.

A “Silent” Cogito As argued in chapter 1 above, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical questions originate in the Cartesian problem of the union of the soul and the body, and his solution involves a careful return to perception. In a dramatic staging of his own position, he begins Part III by writing: “I am thinking of the Cartesian Cogito, wanting to finish this work, sensing the coolness of the paper under my hand, and perceiving the trees of the boulevard through the window” (PhP, 387). He thus names several important themes for this chapter: the

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cogito, affectivity, and perception, all of which are reconceptualized through expression. For Merleau-Ponty: It is neither true that my existence possesses itself, nor that it is foreign to itself, because it is an act or a doing, and because an act, by definition, is the violent passage from what I have to what I aim at, or from what I am to what I have the intention of being. (PhP, 401)

There is no “inner perception” of doubting that can remove the doubt, “because I am not an object that one could perceive, because I make my reality and I only meet up with myself in the act” (PhP, 402). Lived affectivity itself overcomes Cartesian doubt in the very act of taking up something as doubtful. Just as perception is never fully in possession of its object, neither is the act that can be accomplished by inner perception, and hence the open nature of expression is implied in the very structure of the cogito. But what about more objective forms of thinking, such as geometrical ideas? Merleau-Ponty rejects attempts that take the idea of a triangle to be its “formal essence,” since the expression of the essence is always insufficient to capture the fecundity of the vision or experience of the shape. Even “objective” essences are tied to our metastable motor possibilities. Our movements generate space and the relations that analysis will later discover, and thus the world is an “open ensemble of things” as defined above (PhP, 407). This structures Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of an “idea,” which is not a self-contained thing, but rather a field that solicits and orients through a certain sense. Consider his description of the idea of “the cogito” itself: It has an horizon of sense made up of so many thoughts that occurred to me while reading Descartes, but that are not currently present, and of other thoughts that I vaguely sense in advance, thoughts that I could have but that I have never developed. But if it is enough that these three syllables are uttered in my presence for me to be immediately oriented toward a certain order of ideas, this is because in some sense all possible developments are at once present to me. (PhP, 389)

Thus, an idea is a metastable structure, and the only viable account of the cogito will be one that accounts for subjectivity as the experience of being the locus of a metastable trajectory, as the body that feels itself drawn by the weight of the past as it navigates the expressive vestiges on the page. When Merleau-Ponty’s eyes follow the lines of Descartes’s Meditations, he senses as tacitly present all of his previous readings, all of his conversations about the cogito, all of the nascent lectures he may offer, and all of his desires and responsibilities that

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drew his eyes to just this text at just this moment. His expressive reading is of course guided by Descartes’s text, leading to the “I think, I am,” and yet this expressive reading will result in neither Descartes’s “original” intention nor in simply Merleau-Ponty’s subjective contribution. What the cogito means here, in this creative repetition, is a negotiation of the weight of the past, present, and ideal, an intertwining of metastable trajectories—a function of time and freedom under the weight of the past and the world. As a reading body, Merleau-Ponty can take up the “second-hand” cogito of the Meditations by lending his body to these traces, but Descartes’s “spoken” cogito ultimately fails because, by introducing between existence and knowledge “the entire thickness of cultural acquisitions,” it cannot connect with the openness of the silent cogito “that animates and directs all of the expressive operations” (PhP, 424) that Merleau-Ponty has ingeniously alluded to in the very experience of reading the Meditations. It is the silent experience of the world that, as a vague fever, leads to expression, and the “tacit Cogito is only a Cogito when it has expressed itself ” (PhP, 426), destroying the very richness of the silence it was to capture.8 This suggests the need to develop a form of reflection that remains open to the richness of the silent cogito by describing the experience from within a metastable equilibrium. Beginning just such a reflection, Merleau-Ponty writes: I am a field, I am an experience. One day, and indeed once and for all, something was set in motion that, even during sleep, can no longer cease seeing or not seeing, sensing or not sensing, suffering or being happy, thinking or resting, in a word, that can no longer cease “having it out” with the world. What began [. . .] was a new possibility of situations. The event of my birth has not passed away, it has not fallen into nothingness in the manner of an event in the objective world; rather, it engaged a future, not as a cause determines its effect, but like a situation that, from the moment it takes shape, inevitably leads to some resolution. (PhP, 429)

In other words, my birth is the arrival of a silent cogito as a new metastable trajectory, a new trajectory of individuation that will take up and sustain itself in the complex interaction with, and shaping of, its milieu and other trajectories through the transductive logic of expression.9

Temporality and situated freedom In the final two chapters, Merleau-Ponty explores freedom and temporality. As a trajectory of situations taking up the weight of the past and the nontemporal ideal into the present toward a future—thus, the silent cogito

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is a metastable equilibrium in the constant movement of expression as temporalization. Time is neither actively constituted nor passively suffered, it is accomplished or deployed through an operative intentionality. Subjectivity, as the shattering of the “plenitude of being in itself,” brings the past and the future into existence, they “spring forth when I reach out toward them” (PhP, 444). Thus, time is not an object for a subject, time is a subject and the subject is time. The “parts” of time are not its components, they “each express a single rupture or a single thrust that is subjectivity itself ” (PhP, 445). As such, “[s]ubjectivity is not in time because it takes up or lives time and merges with the cohesion of a life” (PhP, 446). Temporality, then, is precisely the logic of expression and trajectory that has been examined above, and is characterized here by Merleau-Ponty in terms of “passive synthesis”: A “passive synthesis” would be contradictory if synthesis means composition, and if passivity consists in receiving a multiplicity rather than composing it. We meant, in speaking of a passive synthesis, that the multiple is penetrated by us, and that, nevertheless, we are not the ones who perform the synthesis. But temporalization, by its very nature, satisfied these two conditions: indeed, it is clear that I am not the author of time, any more than I am the author of my own heartbeats [. . .] And yet, this springing forth of time is not a mere fact that I undergo. (PhP, 451)

Human being is a paradox from the event of its birth, which establishes a paradoxical structure of activity and passivity, of individuality and generality. This is a metastable equilibrium that Merleau-Ponty calls the “internal weakness that forever prevents us from achieving the density of an absolute individual.” As the locus of the upsurge of time, as the place of the unending paradoxical logic of expression, we “are entirely active and entirely passive” (PhP, 452). Time, as weakness or incessant openness, is what motivates the absurd effort of expression to close the gap between what we live and what we say, between what we inscribe and what is exscribed. If time is more to the passive side, then freedom is more to the active side of our being. And yet freedom too is never pure; as a spontaneous taking up of that which solicits or of that which weighs, freedom is inherently between pure spontaneity and pure determinism. In fact, freedom and time intertwine: “If freedom has to do with doing,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “then what it does must not immediately be undone by a new freedom. Thus, each instant must not be a closed world; [. . .] once the decision has been made and the action has begun, I must have some acquisition available to me” (PhP, 462). Freedom must be constrained to the creative taking up of the sedimentation of my life and my previous expressions. My past and the habits through

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which it expresses itself have a “specific weight” in my field of possibilities and fixations. The thickness of time is thus a weight that structures my possibilities and provides the friction against which my freedom may attempt to move, yet such a structure ensures the impossibility of either an inescapable weight of the past or an absolutely unburdened gesture. Again, this is the result of our having been born as paradoxically expressive bodies: To be born is to be simultaneously born of the world and to be born into the world. The world is always already constituted, but also never completely constituted. In the first relation we are solicited, in the second we are open to an infinity of possibilities. Yet this analysis remains abstract, for we exist in both ways simultaneously. Thus, there is never determinism and never an absolute choice; I am never a mere thing and never a bare consciousness. (PhP, 480)

Only by adopting the paradoxical logic of expression can one grasp our experience from within this metastable structure, between mind and body, freedom and determinism, speaking and spoken, creating and repeating. This metastable structure is a network of relations, and it is only “by being what I am at present, without any restrictions and without holding anything back, that I have a chance at progressing” and it is only by “resolutely taking up what I am by chance [.  .  .] that I can go farther” (PhP, 482–3). I cannot, then, leave my past or my culture behind, I must take them up responsibly, for in my expression I lend them not only my voice, but the weight of my entire life. Merleau-Ponty thus unveils the fundamental expressive structures of human existence as always already in communication, teaching us to see things and historical situations anew, and leading to an urgent opening upon the paradoxes of expression in the context of coexistence that shape his emerging political reflections, to which I now turn.

4

The Politics of Expression

We did not think there were Jews and Germans but only men, or even consciousnesses. It seemed to us that at every moment each of us chose to be and to do what he wished with an ever-new freedom. We had not understood that, just as an actor slips into a role which envelops him and which alters the meaning of all of his gestures, just as he carries this great phantom with him, animating it and yet controlled by it, so, in coexistence, each of us is presented to others against a historical background which we did not choose.1 Despite the fact that a significant set of Merleau-Ponty’s published works are explicitly engaged in either political theory or political intervention, his political philosophy remains less well known than those offered by  his existentialist contemporaries. His political writings are shaped by his position as the political editor for Les Temps modernes, his break with Sartre, and his eventual personal and philosophical distancing from Marxism.2 And yet, Merleau-Ponty’s thought is less about breaks than about deepening reflections where commitments are taken up anew in light of the paradoxical realities of experience. Marxism is to Merleau-Ponty’s politics what phenomenology was to his philosophy, and the paradoxical logic of expression is again at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s continuing political interrogation into the experience of being the locus of a metastable trajectory within history, this time marked by the violence of coexistence, as can be seen in the epigraph above. Given the “complexity and ambiguity of history,”3 Merleau-Ponty recognizes that “it is the philosopher’s responsibility to plunge into the labyrinth of coexistence in order to interpret its emergent significance.”4 In this chapter, I will illustrate the emergence of Merleau-Ponty’s politics by following its development from his first political reflections on Marxist humanism to his mature call for a “new” liberalism. His politics is one that emerges from within the metastable structures of historical and political action, a politics of expression.

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“The War Has Taken Place” The Cartesian [political theorist] would doubtless reply that if we hold ourselves responsible for the most distant consequence of our thoughts and actions, the only thing left for us to do is refuse all compromise as does the hero. And, he would add, how many heroes are there among the men who today take pride in their having resisted [the Occupation]? [. . .] This line of reasoning is hard, but it leads in the direction we want to go. (WTP, 45–6)

Merleau-Ponty’s first overtly political essay appeared in 1945 on the heels of Phenomenology of Perception as a reflection upon his concrete experience of the war and the Nazi occupation. For this essay—which is perhaps his most personal text—even the title is striking: “The War Has Taken Place.” There is no getting around this concrete fact, the war has happened. Speaking in the first person plural, he provides an indictment of any form of political pensée de survol, identifies a fundamental truth of Marxism without thereby endorsing communism, and offers his first presentation of a nonpure morality. In the course of his reflections, what becomes clear is that Merleau-Ponty is less interested in defending a particular political doctrine than in carefully describing the paradoxical structures of political experience and action. The essay begins with an exploration of the Cartesian flavor of the French experience of the world prior to the war. Merleau-Ponty’s generation, he argues, had been weaned on an “optimistic philosophy, which reduced human society to a sum of consciousnesses always ready for peace and happiness” (WTP, 139). Empirical events of war or misery could be explained away as misunderstandings or accidents, and one was encouraged to look below superficial facts for the deeper reality of human fraternity. “From our birth,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “we had been used to handling freedom and to living an individual life” (WTP, 140). The individualism of classical philosophy seemed less a hard won privilege than a perennial right. Yet history would reveal that this was a metastable equilibrium dependent upon external forces and a particular “world situation” naively presumed to be an eternally stable equilibrium. In a world governed by such a “mystification,” wars may occur but they do not really take place, and if they do, they do not reach to the depths of human nature and morality. And yet, the war has taken place. The concrete events of individuation and expression are not inconsequential accidents; they play into the very essence of any individual stage of a metastable trajectory. The war does not become a set of neutral memory images held like photographs in storage; the lived events of the war alter the word’s sense and the possibilities for action. Just as a metaphor opens a new field of nascent possibilities for speaking, the events of

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our lives or of history become dimensions or weights in our field, altering its sense and structure. As Saint Aubert writes, “The War Has Taken Place” is not Merleau-Ponty’s simple “[r]eflection on the past,” but rather “a self-reflection and a disguised confiding to us of a secret: the war has taken place, we are no longer the same, I [Merleau-Ponty] am no longer the same” (ESA1, 35). The possibility of living in a landscape, caught up in one’s projects or games, is forever altered when it suddenly becomes a territory to defend, a hill to capture, or the stronghold of an occupying force. In its diverse expressions, the war is everywhere and yet nowhere, and is sustained as each person takes these expressions up into their personal metastable history. Whether to endorse them or to reject them, one must still respond: “So it is that history attracts and seduces individuals” (WTP, 141). The world itself takes on a new and this time frightening layer of sense. War reveals the illusions of transcendental subjectivity because it renders clear how everyone is essentially caught up in the historical moment together, and everyone’s expressions and actions help to shape the reality and the possibilities for everyone else—that is, our fundamental situation is coexistence and our essence is a trajectory of which not one of us is the sole author. Others are not pure minds, but rather separate though intertwining trajectories of embodied performances. The possibility for peaceful coexistence is predicated upon a more fundamental reality of empiétement, or encroachment, as the violent structure of an expressive and situated humanism. People are dramatically reshaped by events, and history reveals that “we find culprits nowhere, but accomplices everywhere; so it is that we all played a part in the events of 1939” (WTP, 141). In other words, we are all on contingent and open trajectories together, and we are all implicated in this situation that we sustain through our expressive acts and gestures. Confirming the reality of relations and the process of individuation at the heart of his political reflections, Merleau-Ponty concludes that classical philosophy failed to recognize history and community as that “general milieu” “where each consciousness communicates with every other” (WTP, 142). Merleau-Ponty proposes an understanding of human nature as historically situated expression. On the one hand, the events of World War II cannot be explained away as accidents of history, as contingent and isolated facts given meaning through judgment; the meaning of an event involves how it is taken up. On the other hand, history does not proceed in some guaranteed progression, whether such a progression ends in the Hegelian State, a classless society, or the victory of liberal democracy. As Merleau-Ponty later writes: There is no history where the course of events is a series of episodes without unity, or where it is a struggle already decided in the heaven

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of ideas. History is there where there is a logic within contingence, a reason within unreason, where there is a historical perception which, like perception in general, leaves in the background what cannot enter the foreground but seizes the lines of force as they are generated and actively leads their traces to a conclusion [. . .] in order to do so they need to be taken up into human initiative. (IPP, 97–8).

This “logic within contingence” is already foreshadowed in Merleau-Ponty’s earliest political reflections through what he calls the “new idea of reason.”5 Consider the horrific example of the Nazi camps. Since history is always open and contingent, they can be explained neither as the necessary conclusion to some historical process, nor as the sole responsibility of some evil individuals. “Anti-Semitism,” argues Merleau-Ponty, “is not a war machine set up by a few Machiavellis and serviced by the obedience of others. It is not created by a few people any more than language is, or music. It was conceived in the depths of history” (WTP, 143, modified). The war machine that caused such unspeakable real suffering was first a metastable potential of a concrete historical people. That it crystallized was motivated by a layering and accumulation of historical forces and influences, and yet this is precisely why it could have been otherwise. The decisions and manipulations of one man would not have been able to create this horror out of nothing because no one person is powerful enough to create ex nihilo. Individual actions, like all actions, are a negotiation with the situation and the traditions that prepared the way for the event, and thus “no one fully commands and no one fully obeys” (WTP, 143, modified). We are responsible for how we take up a situation and for the unforgivable directions we give to history, that is, for the real violence we cause. But for Merleau-Ponty, this responsibility is not thereby a “pure” responsibility, no more than we could accord a “pure” non-responsibility to all the members of the community that sustained these possibilities through their subtle and barely conscious gestures, that is, to those who carried forward the potential violence that was made so heartbreakingly real. The intersubjective reality of human situations raises the question of responsibility to a level of urgency for Merleau-Ponty and opens up toward an ethical responsibility for the potential or metastable violence whose possibility our gestures sustain and carry forward. This insight suggests to Merleau-Ponty the need to rethink the notion of responsibility for historically situated action between freedom and determinism. Since such acts are motivated, rather than caused, by the past and the present situation, they can be located on a scale of responsibility—even if we cannot identify a pure or rational decision behind each act. When viewed from the position of the accomplished act, the decision appears to have been a necessity, but

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from within the actual metastable and unfolding situation, many ways of proceeding remained open. Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of expression leads him to enrich the notion of responsibility and to adopt the idea that history certainly has a sense, not as a river has a direction (sens), but as an expression has a meaning (sens). Merleau-Ponty’s initial political directions thus emerge from his characterization of human experience as a genius for ambiguity through our body’s natural power for expression. The anti-Semite could not commit acts of torture against these real persons if he “truly saw them” (WTP, 143). That is, if he saw them as human, as expressive bodies taking up possibilities shaped by the weight of the past. This is not an epistemological problem, but a phenomenological one. As Sonia Kruks writes, Merleau-Ponty understands human existence as a fundamental “capacity for transcendence,” and “we create meanings only to continually pass beyond them” (PH, 73). For Merleau-Ponty, the anti-Semite must be “mystified” by the myth of “the Jew,” and anti-Semitism is a mystified expression—expression itself is not inherently good. The anti-Semite “struggles with dream figures,” and through the concrete bodies that are obscured by these mystifications, his or her “blows strike living faces” (WTP, 143). The illusion does not begin from individual decisions, nor does the action aim at individuals. Without a politics of expression, “the life of society will remain a dialogue and a battle between phantoms—in which real tears and real blood suddenly start to flow” (WTP, 144). A genuine community works to remove the mystifications that block expressive coexistence. One of the most pervasive mystifications, then, is the one that takes for granted the pure and separable ideal subject and the pure morality that it embraces. Merleau-Ponty characterizes this view as a Cartesian politics, a political pensée de survol. Such a politics is blind to the logic of expression as the creative taking up of the past toward the future as an intersubjective reality (WTP, 146). My words accomplish my interlocutor’s thoughts, my gestures reshape his or her real and ideal landscape, and the mere presence of my body dramatically alters the very possibilities of his or her actions. Human being, then, is essentially empiétement, and this introduces a paradoxical responsibility from within history: “We have been led to take upon ourselves and consider as our own not only our intentions—what our actions mean for us—but also the external consequences of these actions, what they mean in a historical context” (WTP, 145). Responsibility for an action is as precarious as its meaning. The Cartesian, Merleau-Ponty admits, would dismiss such an account of responsibility as only fit for heroes and suggest that “historical responsibility” would lead one to “renounce every transaction” (WTP, 146). This morality

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imposes exacting, and perhaps impossible standards. Yet for Merleau-Ponty, this demonstrates the failure of pure moralities to recognize our concrete experience. The adoption of a political pensée de survol is itself an historically situated (and politically charged) act. By staying in Paris during the Occupation, “one is compromised,” because one then has to negotiate between passive collaboration and active resistance in every action. By fleeing the country “one is also compromised,” even if not directly, by conceding the ground and thus having a responsibility for the “ravages of the Occupation”—in short, “no one’s hands are clean” (WTP, 146–7). Reconceptualizing his ontology as one of expressive bodies via the images of transgression, intrusion, encroachment, and violence, he writes: “We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it” (WTP, 147). My freedom and my expressions are bound up with the freedoms and the responses of others, and thus: “Freedom exists in contact with the world, not outside it” (WTP, 148). This, suggests Merleau-Ponty, is to “rediscover one of the truths of Marxism. But even Marxism had to be taken up anew” (WTP, 148). Rather than offering a defense of Marxist doctrine, Merleau-Ponty presents Marxism as a paradoxical humanism or politics of expression. Such a humanism locates the contingency of history at its core, and accounts for a responsibility in the complex intertwining of political and ethical existence without any reference to a pure realm of meaning or rationality (WTP, 152). Economic factors are not a pure causality, but, as Kruks argues, they “offer the ‘historical anchorage’ to other phenomena” (PH, 79); they impose a weight that demands to be creatively taken up in every gesture. “By action,” writes Merleau-Ponty elsewhere, “I make myself responsible for everything; I accept the aid of external accidents just as I accept their betrayals” (IL, 109). The war has taken place. Merleau-Ponty is no longer the same and yet he is not different. In the face of the contingent nature of history, no one’s hands are clean, and what is needed is a politics of expression and an ethics of lesser violence.

Humanism and contingency Only children imagine that their lives are separable from the lives of others, that their responsibility is limited to what they themselves have done, and that there is a boundary between good and evil. [. . .] In a world of struggle no one can flatter himself that he has clean hands.6

Merleau-Ponty’s 1947 collection of essays, Humanism and Terror, takes Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon as its explicit subject matter, and amounts to a critique of Koestler’s understanding of Nicolai Bukharin’s

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actions in the Moscow Trials (via the character Rubashov) and of Marxism generally.7 Darkness at Noon depicts Rubashov caught between two ethical perspectives: a subjective ethics and a collective (or objective) ethics. Having pursued a life for the collective, Rubashov discovers an individualism while in prison, and yet eventually falsely confesses to charges of treason. The reception of the novel was strikingly ambiguous—as Kerry Whiteside writes, “curious ambiguity: [. . .] depending on which morality its readers found most persuasive, the morality of individual worth or the morality of social utility, Darkness at Noon could be understood as an apology for the revolution or a blistering indictment of it” (FEP, 170). And yet, as Taylor Carman notes, even Merleau-Ponty’s title is meant to indicate that there can be no rigid distinction between humanism and violence.8 Merleau-Ponty champions the book not because it solves the dilemma, but because (despite Koestler’s intentions) it expresses an irresolvable ambiguity in political experience. As Whiteside writes, Merleau-Ponty’s interest in the novel was “from the start not polemical, but genuinely philosophical” (FEP, 169). Bukharin’s situation raises the question of the paradoxical and metastable structures of political action, and the logic of expression shapes Merleau-Ponty’s defense of Marxist humanism. For Merleau-Ponty, there is an honesty to Marxist materialism that opens up possibilities for a new humanism, whereas liberalism, despite the “purity” of its ideals, uses these ideals as a mystification in order to justify or tolerate institutionalized violence. A political regime, he insists, cannot be judged on its professed ideals, but rather on the manner in which it structures the material “relations between men” (HT, xiv), and any study of a society must be a concrete one. That liberal states fail to recognize the violence of unemployment, colonialism, and alienated labor is, for Merleau-Ponty, a significant argument against classical liberalism; Marxism acknowledges its violence and thereby has the potential to bring about a “more genuine humanity” (HT, xv). The benchmark of any politics is its ability to “establish among men relations that are human” (HT, xv). This is why Merleau-Ponty proposes to return to the question of communist violence raised by Koestler’s novel, neither to defend Bukharin, nor to condemn him, but rather to bring to light the ambiguity of political expression: “[Bukharin] recognizes in his political conduct, however justified it may once have been, an inevitable ambiguity through which it risks condemnation” (HT, xvi). As Claude Lefort writes, for Merleau-Ponty, any chosen action “burdens itself with the weight of its consequences.”9 It appeared to Merleau-Ponty, however, that communist violence failed to take up the humanism of Marxism, which leads to an “inextricable situation”: “It is impossible to be an anti-Communist and it is not possible to be a

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Communist” (HT, xxi). Sustaining such a paradox is precisely Merleau-Ponty’s style, and he attributes the misreadings of his own position to a failure to understand his subtle position: “We argue that an action can  produce something else than it envisioned, but nevertheless political man assumes its consequences. Our critics want no such harsh conditions. They need a black and white line between the guilty and the innocent” (HT, xxxvi). Those who attack Merleau-Ponty as an apologist for communist violence have failed to read his works and have closed their eyes to the fundamental “problem” that has “troubled Europe since the Greeks, namely, that the human condition may be such that it has no happy solution” (HT, xxxviii). Invoking the paradoxical logic of expression, Merleau-Ponty asks: Is not every act a move in a “game which we cannot entirely control,” and “does not each freedom encroach upon the freedom of others” (HT, xxxviii)?

The accidental traitor Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Koestler’s novel identifies the paradoxical logic of expression in political action and the need for a deeper understanding of Marxism. Koestler represents Rubashov as having a simplistic materialism: actions are the result of impersonal historical and economic forces, and any “psychological” causality is merely illusory. On this strict worldview, an action must be “evaluated not according to its subjective meaning but its objective sense” (HT, 7). Regardless of his intentions, Rubashov becomes a traitor retroactively. Such an interpretation indicates for Merleau-Ponty that there is “very little Marxism in Darkness at Noon” (HT, 14). Rubashov’s position amounts to a “sociological scientism rather than anything in Marx” (HT, 15), and Rubashov’s working theory of history loses all “sense of the individual and becomes the sheer force of fact” (HT, 16). Merleau-Ponty sees history as the trajectory of human actions and relations where no individual has perfect knowledge or full control. Each person is historically situated, within the individuating metastable structures, and no one surveys from above the unfolding of history. Political action, then, is akin to expression: “[Rubashov] does not understand the art of the great Marxists of 1917 who deciphered history while it was taking place and projected its trends through decisions that avoided equally any subjective folly or amor fati” (HT, 18). Political action is an art, or as Diana Coole notes, there is a “particular virtuosity that is the vocation of the political actor” (Pol, 83). Bukharin, too much of an intellectual, fails to finds a fluency of action on the political landscape and cannot immediately perceive, as the political actor should, “the real significance and pattern in a given situation” (HT, 63). “But who said that history is a clockwork and the individual a wheel?”

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asks Merleau-Ponty. “It was not Marx; it was Koestler” (HT, 23). And yet, identifying Koestler as a “mediocre Marxist” does not bring Merleau-Ponty’s study to an end. Merleau-Ponty takes from Koestler the following question: “Is it true that we have to choose between being a Commissar—working for men from the outside, treating them as instruments—or being a Yogi—that is, calling men to a completely inward reform” (HT, 24)? Classical thought demands that one choose; the paradoxical logic of expression allows one to sustain the alternatives in a fundamental metastable structure of experience.

The ambiguity of history Merleau-Ponty’s second chapter focuses on Bukharin’s contradictory confession. Lacking any concerted presentation of evidence, motives, or events, Bukharin’s trial was hardly a classical or liberal one. It adopted a “form and style that belong to the Revolution,” in which justice requires historical interpretation of facts “which consequently are not yet univocal” (HT, 27). Nevertheless, it was presented as an ordinary criminal proceedings rather than an indictment for crimes against history. Thus, the Moscow Trials are problematic even on Marxist terms, for they claimed the power to make a judgment in the name of History, while the existential logic of history itself demands that the “final” judgment be forever deferred (HT, 31). And yet, their basic structure is important for understanding a fundamental paradox of action: “every action unfolds and we are responsible for its consequences” (HT, 33). As Merleau-Ponty writes: [History] solicits men, tempts them so that they believe they are moving in its direction, and then suddenly it unmasks, and events change and prove that there was another possibility. The men whom history abandons in this way [. . .] suddenly find themselves the instigators of a crime to which history has inspired them. And they are unable to look for excuses or to excuse themselves from even a part of the responsibility. For at the very moment they were following the apparent curve of history, others were deciding to back off and to commit their lives along another road to the future. (HT, 40)

Merleau-Ponty does not simply applaud those who foresee the winds of history. Political action is the art of a paradoxical response, allowing “reasons to speak to them that only came afterward” (HT, 40–1). History is both contingent and rational. Just as an emerging expression solicits my voice, history calls to those with ears to hear, and yet, history is not simply played out, it is made. This leads to a “harsh notion of responsibility,” “based not on what men intend but what they find they have achieved in the light of the event” (HT, 42). Historical responsibility is the result of the paradoxical action within metastable

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equilibriums: it “transcends the categories of liberal thought—intention and act, circumstances and will, objective and subjective” (HT, 43). Thus, Bukharin can “at once declare himself responsible for acts of treason and yet reject the name of traitor” (HT, 46). As Lefort writes, the political actor must respond in a way that is “initially improvised, in confrontation or in struggle, in the absence of any objective guarantee, under threat of error, and moreover in response to so many varied contingencies that what was truly at stake was not even obvious” (TP, 362). For Merleau-Ponty, a Marxist sees action as an attempt to gear into the trajectories of history from within a metastable equilibrium, and each act takes up and reshapes the very possibilities of the field of history. In short, in the struggle of history, “no one can flatter himself that he has clean hands” (HT, 60). Despite his intentions, Bukharin’s actions have become those of a traitor. The opportunity for action that he sensed and attempted to take up closed over and slipped through his fingers, leaving his “best intentions” as his only defense against the normative title of “traitor.” Bukharin, then, is not wholly captured in the character Rubashov, who is depicted oscillating between the Yogi and the Commissar: By contrast, the true nature of tragedy appears once the same man has understood both that he cannot disavow the objective pattern of his actions, that he is what he is for others in the context of history, and yet that the motive of his actions constitutes a man’s worth as he experiences himself. In this case we no longer have a series of alternations between the inward and the external, subjectivity and objectivity, or judgment and its means but a dialectical relation, [. . .] the same man tries to realize himself on two levels. (HT, 63)

Merleau-Ponty finds in the trials a dramatization of “the most general structure of human action” (HT, 64), which is the paradoxical structure of expression. At the heart of all human action is a paradoxical structure of responsibility. As Saint Aubert argues, “Merleau-Ponty’s anthropological approach to violence, disguised behind the desire to ‘understand Marxist violence,’ is thus largely independent of the circumstances that serve as the pretext for Humanism and Terror” (ESA1, 44).

The quasi-rationality of history In chapter 3, Merleau-Ponty deepens his account of the ambiguity of history. The question facing Bukharin—to join the Party line or to dispute it—is not one that can be resolved from a certain “rationalism” of the kind Trotsky at times supported. Political action is historically situated, and requires an account of history in the making (HT, 93). From within the metastable

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structures of the situation one must recognize an operative knowledge of the moving reality of the situation, that is, a transductive logic: History is Terror because we have to move into it not by any straight line that is always easy to trace, but by taking our bearings at every moment in a general situation which is changing, like a traveler who moves into a changing countryside continuously altered by his own advance. [.  . .] Perhaps some other line would have appeared equally possible had someone chosen it and followed it through. Thus it appears that history does not so much pose problems as enigmas. (HT, 94)

Emphasizing this Marcellian point, Lefort writes: “We cannot think history without thinking ourselves situated in history, and without preserving a memory of the mystery of our situation” (TP, 376). Yet even if history is not rational, neither is it irrational. From “within the ambiguity of history,” the “future is only probable but it is not any empty zone in which we can construct gratuitous projects; it is sketched out before us like the beginning of the day’s end” (HT, 95). This boils down to historical perception: a perceived object is “probable” insofar as we do not have a complete grasp of it; yet the object is not merely subject to the whims and fancy of the perceiver. Similarly, Marxism does not offer a science of history; rather, “it deciphers events, discovers in them a common meaning and thereby grasps a leading thread which, without dispensing us from fresh analysis at every stage, allows us to orient ourselves toward events” (HT, 98). On Merleau-Ponty’s reading, Marxism does not offer a final judgment on Bukharin or on any other event or action; it offers the trajectory within which judgments, adjustments, and new directions are to be taken up in a paradoxical and contingent logic. “It seeks,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “to offer men a perception of history which would continuously clarify the lines of force and vectors of the present” (HT, 98).

Toward a new humanism In the second part of Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty explores Marxist humanism and evaluates the regimes that claim to speak in its name. For Merleau-Ponty, Marxism involves two essential components: “the inductive analysis of the economic process” and “a certain intuition of man and the relations between men” (HT, 101). The two are essentially related, even in Hegel, in that every economic system involves a system of relations between human beings, such that “their social relations become imprinted upon their relations to nature, and these in turn imprint upon their social relations” (HT, 101). Marxism begins from the fact of human struggle that results from human activity as productive appropriation of nature.

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“What Marxism undertakes,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “is a radical solution to the problem of human coexistence beyond the oppression of absolute subjectivity and absolute objectivity, and beyond the pseudo-solution of liberalism” (HT, 103). Society is not made up of autonomous individuals, but rather of situated beings “characterized by a certain type of relation to men and to the world” (HT, 108). As such, violence necessarily takes place. As Kruks argues, “individuals who pursue moral ends—be they liberal ideals of justice and freedom, or the Marxian goal of a non-exploitative society—cannot avoid violent consequences stemming from their actions.”10 Every human act “engages not only himself, but also others whom he makes use of, so that as soon as we begin to live, we lose the alibi of good intentions” (HT, 109). This interpretation of violence owes its structure to the paradoxical logic of expression. As Coole suggests, Merleau-Ponty has a “broad conception” of violence such that “perceptual and textual interpretation [count] as acts of violence in the sense that violence might involve carving a new layer of significance out of existence or reconfiguring some accepted meaning or habit.”11 Between pure creation and pure repetition, the gesture takes up a past by gearing into a trajectory in its metastable field, and in its essential institution of expressive traces that solicit communication, it encroaches upon all others, whether directly or potentially. “We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence,” writes Merleau-Ponty; insofar “as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot” (HT, 109). Coexistence is a certain empiétement, a necessary violence, and what matters is not so much violence in itself, “but its sense or its future” (HT, 109).12 Rather than answering the problem of coexistence by valorizing pure individuals (as does liberalism) or the inevitable movement of history or World Spirit (Koestler’s “Marx,” or Hegel), Merleau-Ponty’s Marx attempts to gear into the logic of expression and discovers a privileged historical formation, the proletariat, as the embodiment of coexistence. For Merleau-Ponty, the “theory of the proletariat as the vehicle of history’s meaning [sens] is the humanist face of Marxism” (HT, 118). As Lefort writes, “[w]hat Merleau-Ponty sought in Marxism was the idea of a logic composed of contingency, the principle of a determinate indeterminacy that he believed could be found in the proletariat, the inscription within history of a fertile ambiguity” (TP, 372). For Merleau-Ponty, “history has a sense” (PhP, 474; HT, 129), and now he can affirm that the sense of history is oriented toward the “power of the proletariat” (HT, 129). This orientation foreshadows Simondon’s transductive logic of metastable equilibriums: In modern language, [being a Marxist] is to believe that history has a Gestalt, in the sense German writers give to the word, a holistic system

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moving toward a state of equilibrium, the classless society which cannot be achieved without individual effort and action, but which is outlined in the present crisis as their solution—the power of man over nature and the mutual reconciliation of men. In music a given note on the strings requires a note of the same pitch from the wind and brass; in an organism a given state of the respiratory system requires a given state of the cardiovascular or sympathetic nervous system [. . .]. In the same way, history, according to Marxist politics, is a system which proceeds by ups and downs toward proletarian power. (HT, 130)

So long as it submits all empirical institutions to critique in terms of real relations and an open future, Marxism is “the philosophy of history and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history. After that there remain only dreams or adventures” (HT, 153). The deep truth of historical materialism is that it grasps the open and paradoxical structures at the heart of the trajectory of history itself. In his later essays after Darkness at Noon, Koestler begins to approach this insight, writing that: “The basic paradox of man’s condition, the conflict between freedom and determinism, ethics and logics, or in whatever symbols we like to express it, can only be resolved if, while thinking and acting on the horizontal plane of our existence, we yet remain constantly aware of the vertical dimension” (cited by Merleau-Ponty, HT, 163). Yet Merleau-Ponty argues that Koestler inclines toward the Yogi: “[w]e have had enough of ambiguities, he thinks, enough of problems and puzzles. Let us get back to absolute values and clear ideas” (HT, 167). Koestler fails to see that the paradox is to be understood rather than resolved (HT, 166). For Merleau-Ponty, Marxism is the attempt to sustain the idea that history is at once “audacity, the élan of the future and the will to create humanity” and also “prudence, the weight of the past, the spirit of conservation and respect for the ‘eternal laws’ of society” (HT, 178). If the task of the intellectual is to clarify ideological structures and to reveal the “true terms of the human problem” (HT, 179), this involves laying bare the paradoxical structures of human experience between creation and repetition, or between audacity and prudence. The attempt to establish human coexistence is contingent and violent, and every gesture is a taking up of the past toward a future that will transductively determine the attempt’s meaning. As Merleau-Ponty writes: The human world is an open and unfinished system and the same radical contingency which threatens it with discord also rescues it from the inevitability of disorder [. . .] providing only that one remembers its various machineries are actually men and tries to maintain and expand man’s relation to man. (HT, 188)

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Merleau-Ponty’s politics is a return to the concrete level of expressive embodiment, and since every moment of the trajectory is more than a “simple repetition” of human essence, the task is demanding. This is why it is both a “curse” and “the art of the possible” (HT, xxxv).

Encroachment and expression The attacks on Humanism and Terror were swift, wide-ranging, and (according to Merleau-Ponty) disingenuous. He was called an immoralist, a Machiavellian, and an apologist for communist violence, and he felt deeply frustrated at the failure of his readers to appreciate the subtlety of his arguments. Beyond the preface to Humanism and Terror (which responds to some of the initial criticisms), Merleau-Ponty did not offer a direct and explicit response to his critics. In 1949, however, Merleau-Ponty presented what might be considered two indirect responses to these criticisms, restating his fundamental reading of Marxist humanism and specifically emphasizing the paradoxical logic of expression in his understanding of history. These two implicit responses, “Note on Machiavelli”13 and the unpublished “Mexico Lectures” offer an important glimpse at his deepening politics of expression.

Machiavellian humanism The “Note on Machiavelli” does not mention the Moscow Trials, nor does it analyze specific communist policies or institutions. Merleau-Ponty offers instead an implicit defense of his concrete morality in Humanism and Terror through a creative reading of Machiavelli’s notion of political virtù. As Saint Aubert writes, this essay is “a self-portrait disguised by lending to Machiavelli his own face” (ESA1, 45). And indeed, given the reading I have just offered of Humanism and Terror, it might be assumed that the following passage is about Merleau-Ponty rather than Machiavelli: How could he have been understood? He writes against good feelings in politics, but he is also against violence. Since he has the nerve to speak of virtue at the very moment he is sorely wounding ordinary morality, he disconcerts the believers in Law as he does those who believe that the State is the Law. For he describes that knot of collective life in which pure morality can be cruel and pure politics requires something like a morality. We would put up with a cynic who denies values or an innocent who sacrifices action. We do not like this difficult thinker without idols. (Note, 211)

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Since human relations are essentially struggle and violence, Merleau-Ponty hopes to sketch out a “serious humanism” between political moralism and political opportunism (Note, 223). Rather than unilaterally justifying political violence, he conceives of the art of politics as an expressive activity. As Bernard Dauenhauer writes: “genuine politics [for Merleau-Ponty] requires not merely the acknowledgement of the weight of the determinate political situation, the language in which one finds oneself located, but also the risky endeavor to transform that situation, to revivify it by the exercise of virtù, the uttering of a new speech.”14 Machiavelli reveals that power is not about birth right, moral superiority, or even force, but rather about technique as the art of expression. Since we “are in the field of history as we are in the field of language or existence” (Préface, 20), the political actor must possess an expressive art of governing that negotiates a complex trajectory of metastable structures.15 Merleau-Ponty thus discovers his own notion of historical responsibility in Machiavelli’s claim that “in historical action, goodness is sometimes catastrophic and cruelty less cruel” (Note, 216). Expressive political action takes up the past and the present toward the open future, negotiating the virtues (which sometimes means leaving them aside) in the concrete situation. Merleau-Ponty’s Machiavelli, then, does not simply promote governance through “lies, terror, and trickery.” Rather, “he tries to define a political virtue, which for the prince is to speak to these mute spectators gathered around him and caught up in the dizziness of communal life” (Note, 217, emphasis added). The prince must express himself and the community such that his actions and policies are taken up by the community as their own; his goal is to create a community that will be the expression of a future he vaguely senses and that, through his expressive gestures, the community creates. Such a morality and politics would combine both the “contingency and irrationality in the world with a taste for the consciousness or freedom in man” (Note, 218); in short, it would embrace human being as the paradoxical place of expression, between freedom and determinism. And so, asks Merleau-Ponty, “[w]hat humanism is more radical than this one?” (Note, 219). Machiavelli is reproached for his idea that “history is a struggle and politics a relationship to men rather than to principles. And yet is anything more certain?” (Note, 218). For this concrete morality, politics is the difficult task of expressing these values such that they take root in our community. In Humanism and Terror, we were to understand an entire moral and political philosophy of expression from within coexistence. Indeed, returning to the autobiographical tone, Merleau-Ponty concludes that “the repudiation of Machiavelli which is so common today takes on a disturbing significance: it is the decision not to know the tasks of a true humanism” (Note, 223).

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The Mexico lectures Although I have focused thus far on Merleau-Ponty’s published materials, it is worth exploring here the recently discussed notes from an unpublished lecture of this period in order to establish the emerging centrality of the paradoxical logic of expression even in his political reflection. Indeed, after Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty pursues a broader focus on the question of expression, specifically in the fields of painting, literature, and linguistics, and the above political reflection leads him to enrich this structure—already nascent in his earliest works—by recognizing the violence of coexistence. His optimistic understanding of communication and expression thus, as Saint Aubert has demonstrated, “directly benefited from the questions raised by the experience of the war and the Occupation, and the analyses of violence—empiétement or enjambement—as the fundamental expressivity of human being” (ESA1, 53). In 1949, Merleau-Ponty boarded the Queen Elisabeth for Mexico to give a lecture he named: “Autrui” (The Other, or Others), which demonstrates a significant convergence between political action and expression. Although these notes remain unpublished, a description of their content and a few passages have been recently published by Saint Aubert. In the surviving notes, the problem of “Others” is approached both on the epistemic level and on the moral level. Merleau-Ponty writes: [H]ow is my freedom reconcilable with that of the other? Is there not here a mastery and slavery? For if I decide to respect the freedom of the other, to never exert an influence upon him, by the same decision I do not respect him: I refuse a certain union, which is very well what he may want, I deeply influence his life, I force him in turn to remain available and alone. I am always an example or a model. From the moment I exist, I act, I seduce, I encroach upon the freedom of the other. (ESA1, 64, emphasis added by Saint Aubert)

From the moment I exist, I encroach upon the other; as an example, as a model, or as a refusal, my existence is a weight in the expressive field; I exist as communication. In short, existence does not precede encroachment, and our essence is expressive communication. As Saint Aubert concludes from these passages, “encroachment is not an accidental determination of my freedom that could be corrected [. . .] it is existential” (ESA1, 64). Although this may appear to be a pessimistic understanding of violence, this violence is the “essential ingredient of the construction of a living community with the other” (ESA1, 65). According to Saint Aubert, the simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic conclusions are established in the Mexico notes based upon the notions of depth, affective intentionality, and, most importantly, expression.

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Emphasizing what might be called after Derrida the “pharmacological” aspect of empiétement, Merleau-Ponty argues that the phenomenon of expression reveals the fundamental structures that make perception and affectivity possible, namely, the institution of the “coexistence of incompossible elements” (ESA1, 66). As Merleau-Ponty writes: Expression is even the solution to the problem [of the other] that we are studying, since it is transcendence, passage of myself into the other. There is no alternative between myself and the other when we take up common projects and a common situation [. . . and] expression is pre-eminently constitutive of such common situations. (ESA1, 66)

Saint Aubert suggests that this is the “first time that Merleau-Ponty gives such an importance” to the theme of expression (ESA1, 66). As the above chapters have established, if this is the first explicit statement of an emerging ontology of expression, it has been en route from the very beginning.

The adventures of an expressive dialectic [Politics] is not pure morality, nor is it a chapter in a universal history which has already been written. Rather it is an action in the process of self-invention.16

In his 1955 The Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty solidifies his critiques of Sartre and of dogmatic Marxist positions, and thus his late political thought is often read as a significant break from his earlier contributions, adopting a “new liberalism” (AD, 225).17 And yet, just as the underlying trajectory of his philosophical interrogation leads him to adopt phenomenology only to subsequently rework it to account for the ambiguous experience from within expressive embodiment, in politics his adoption of Marxism is also reworked rather than rejected in his attempt to account for the ambiguous experience of coexistence within history. One must consider the movement of Merleau-Ponty’s mature political reflections, rather than merely their conclusions. His support for parliamentary liberalism is the attempt to sketch out a political philosophy capable of responding to the paradoxical logic of political expression from within the ambiguity of history.

Toward a new liberalism In order to fully address the complex issues of political philosophy and its appearance in empirical history, begins Merleau-Ponty, one would need

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a completed “philosophy of both history and spirit” (AD, 3). And yet, historical perspective denies the philosopher any political pensée de survol. Echoing his earlier political reflections, he writes: in “the crucible of events we become aware of what is not acceptable to us, and it is this experience as interpreted that becomes both thesis and philosophy” (AD, 3). Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy, then, involves “samplings, probings, philosophical anecdotes, the beginnings of analyses, in short, the continual rumination which goes on in course of reading, personal meetings, and current events” (AD, 3). What ties this together will be Merleau-Ponty’s style, his practice of political reflection as expression. Beginning with Alain, Merleau-Ponty identifies two classical positions: on the one hand, a “politics of reason” offers a view of history as a rational unfolding of a “future that is already written in the present and where all problems will be solved” (AD, 3); on the other hand, a “politics of understanding” takes history as a piecemeal sum of isolated events, each “problem” being solved “one at a time” (AD, 4). The piecemeal politics of the understanding leaves values and facts as forever external to each other; the revolutionary politics of reason proclaims the collapsing of fact and value in a complete “purification of history” through the institution of an “inertialess regime without chance or risk” (AD, 5). Merleau-Ponty argues that politics is in fact neither rational nor irrational, neither Hegelian nor liberal; rather, politics is expression. True revolutionaries, such as Marx, recognize that “universal history is not to be contemplated but to be made” (AD, 5) and they possess and practice the art by which they respond to this call. In collective situations, there is no single privileged pathway known in advance by the true revolutionary; her options are not deduced from her situation, they are sensed from within the metastable intensities of the present situation, and history remains open and thus forever to be accomplished. Consider Merleau-Ponty’s example of Bukharin, Lenin, and Trotsky: “[t]heir agreement on the ultimate ends left aside the question of the path to follow, and the way this path was traced by each of them expressed the total relation of each to the world” (AD, 6). Each took up the trajectory in their own style, in response to the weight of the past and from their perspective on the urgencies of the situation—both personal and collective. From a limited perspective, each is burdened with an historical responsibility for both the intentions and the consequences of their action. A “dogmatic” Marxism, then, is a contradiction, since history is to be made by historical actors. The open “adventures” of Marxism are its strength, so long as it resists closing off the trajectory of its expression. As Merleau-Ponty writes: “We now know that subject and object, conscience and history, present and future, judgment and discipline, all these opposites, decay without one another, that the attempt at a

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revolutionary resolution destroys one of the two series, and that we must look for something else” (AD, 6). The “something else” will be a new liberalism that adopts the insights of Marxism without the dogma of historical determinism, that is, a politics of expression.

Dialectical adventures The adventurers of the dialectic are many, but it is worth focusing here on two: Max Weber and Georg Lukács. Merleau-Ponty begins with Weber, in whom “liberalism stops believing in eternal harmony, legitimizes its adversaries, and conceives itself as a task” (AD, 7). Weber’s liberalism embraces ambiguity and recognizes history as a violent struggle. He attempts to bring about liberalism “through a history in which it is not predestined” (AD, 9). Although one “cannot avoid the invasion of the historian into history,” one can “critique” (in the Kantian sense) the structures of historical knowledge in order to “assure an intersubjective value to its representations of the past” (AD, 10). One thus identifies “ideal types” that give meaning to history, but the past itself remains the inexhaustible political noumena that is, unlike the present, not us. Yet for Weber, present knowledge also remains incomplete because it has the structure of practice rather than knowledge; it remains “partial, and not subject to justification” (AD, 10). Thus, Merleau-Ponty identifies in Weber an unbridgeable dualism of historical knowledge. How, asks Merleau-Ponty, can this dualism between knowledge and action, past and present, account for our experience? Every past that is contemplated was previously lived, and thus the “order of knowledge” is not “closed in upon itself ”; “the whole of history is still action, and action is already history”; since history is lived, it must be “action in the realm of the imaginary” (AD, 11). As expressive activities, both action and history are present as dimensions of our fundamental experience, and so: “[k]nowledge and action are two poles of a single existence” (AD, 11). Rejecting a political pensée de survol, Merleau-Ponty stresses that one can only interpret history by gearing into the actions and world of others through one’s own situated trajectory. Responding to the experience of politics, Weber’s liberalism is correct insofar as it denies the “formal” harmony of traditional liberalism; his liberalism, insofar as it is “militant, even suffering, heroic,” is on the right trajectory (AD, 26). Thus, Merleau-Ponty takes Weber’s “most certain conclusion” to be the following: If history does not have a direction, like a river, but has a meaning [sens], if it teaches us, not a truth, but errors to avoid, if its practice is not deduced from a dogmatic philosophy of history, then it is not superficial to base a politics on the analysis of the political man. (AD, 28)

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The art of politics then involves the capacity to “live history” by taking up the past toward a better future, and to invent “what will later appear to have been required” (AD, 29). Sharing the reading structure of perception and communication, history is a “novel” to be read; the historian’s task is to offer an expressive reading or a creative repetition toward a more open future. In dualism, Weber’s liberalism reaches a certain equilibrium, but the dialectic’s adventures do not stop there. Mired in a Kantian worldview, Weber remains “dominated by the idea of a truth without condition and without point of view” (AD, 31), leaving a gap between our representation of history through ideal types and lived history. The dialectic must shift to a more radical critique: “the unrestricted recognition of history as the unique milieu of our errors and our verifications” as expressed in the work of Lukács (AD, 31). For Lukács, Marxism reveals the truth of philosophy as the formalization of history, culminating in a kinship between subject and object in the historical formulation of the proletariat as the historical class that “transforms the particular into the universal” (AD, 57). Merleau-Ponty describes this dialectical movement in terms of expression: The dialectic is [. . .] a history which makes itself and which nevertheless is to be made, a meaning which is never invalid but is always to be rectified, to be taken up again, to be maintained in the face of danger, a knowledge limited by no positive irrationality but a knowledge which does not contain the totality of accomplished and still to be accomplished reality and whose ability to be exhaustive is yet to be factually proven. (AD, 57)

Marxism’s focus on the proletariat does not bring the dialectic to a close, but intensifies its questioning because the focus on the proletariat is a focus on the struggle of coexistence and there are thus many ways of reading the story of history. For Merleau-Ponty, communist politics fails to practice the dialectic, eliminating it through the institution of the Party that claims the right to read the story of history to the proletariat. Thus, despite Lukács’ theoretical synthesis, the history of communism cannot sustain the synthesis of theory and practice. When the Party attempts to institute the spirit of 1917, it attempts to freeze the transductive trajectory of the dialectic, and the subject and object “fall away from one another” (AD, 73). For Merleau-Ponty, one must seek a logic of action that does not attempt to remove the ambiguity or movement of history. If Lenin’s attempt to make the dialectic theoretical fails, so too does Trotsky’s attempt to make it wholly praxis. According to Merleau-Ponty, despite a certain historical naturalism, Trotsky imagines universal history to be “not a divinity which guides history from outside,” but rather like “natural

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selection,” “the immanent play of given conditions which render impossible and eliminate organisms incapable of adequate response” (AD, 77). Historical progress is understood in terms of historical selection, an immanent logic in the hazards of metastable structures, and such that the future is not written in advance, but is written within human relations. The Party, then, ought to express the humanism emerging from history, but only as a “mirror where the proletarian forces scattered throughout the world are concentrated” (AD, 78). But what happens to this theory when the Party fails to express the dialectic? Trotsky’s implicit response is, according to Merleau-Ponty, that “the course of things would perhaps call into question the Marxist thesis of the proletariat as ruling class and of socialism as heir to capitalism” (AD, 95), and that perhaps “something else” (AD, 6) needs to be found that leaves expression open and the movement of history free to continue its adventure.

From ultrabolshevism toward a politics of expression The longest and most complex chapter of The Adventures focuses on Sartre’s Marxism in The Communists and Peace.18 Attempting to “analyze communist practice without the mediation of ideology” (AD, 96), Sartre focuses on “communist action precisely by refusing any productivity to history and by making history, insofar as it is intelligible, the immediate result of our volitions” (AD, 98). Thus, Sartre’s Marxism is in fact an “extreme subjectivism,” in contrast to the “extreme objectivism” of communist orthodoxy. For Merleau-Ponty, in both cases, politics involves a “second nature” and is not itself existential: communists take the political actor to be a technician of pure repetition; Sartre sees the political actor pursuing “pure creation” (AD, 98). On either account, the Party or the individual may act freely of the moving trajectories that Merleau-Ponty calls “the criteria of meaning [sens]” (AD, 98)—that is, the weight of the past—and the inevitable result is terror or violence. Sartre’s position is at once a critique of communist interpretations of communist practice and an apology for communist practice in its empirical reality, and thus for Sartre the dialectic is nothing but an effect of the will to create history. For Merleau-Ponty, this “communism” negates the very possibility of Marxism, which is nothing other than the dialectic as expression in coexistence. Sartre’s communism is an “ultrabolshevism,” or “a denunciation of the dialectic and the philosophy of history and substitutes for them a philosophy of absolute creation” (AD, 101). Sartre thereby props up communist practice by the absolute negation of its reasons, and as such he undermines the possibility of a noncommunist Left that might lend new life to a dialectic exhausted in the purity of the object (for communism) or the purity of the subject (for Sartre). Having based his position on a negative

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cogito, the presence of this legislating consciousness is precisely what “gives to violence its Sartrean nuance” (AD, 159).19 As Whiteside notes, Sartre’s error is the error of a vision that forgets itself: “Ultimately, Merleau-Ponty charges, Sartre’s idea of direct engagement is based on the same sort of epistemological fallacy that misleads traditional liberals and neocommunists—the myth of the ‘spectatorial consciousness’” (FEP, 237; AD, 259). The long adventures of the dialectic, then, have not yet broken free of a political pensée de survol. For Merleau-Ponty, “[a] meaning, if it is posited by a consciousness whose whole essence is to know what it does, is necessarily closed” (AD, 198). The dialectic must, then, not reject the throes of history in favor of the pure decision of the political actor; it must return to the perspectival nature of consciousness and the emergence of expressive political action from within the metastable reality of history itself. In perception and in the ideal, there are no “closed meanings,” but rather creative repetitions of the past toward the future, and the expressive subject is neither a pure presence to its object, nor a pure presence to itself. Consider the paradoxical logic of expression that permeates Merleau-Ponty’s description: A perceived thing is rather a certain variation in relation to a norm or to a spatial, temporal, or colored level, it is a certain distortion, a certain “coherent deformation” of the permanent links which unite us to sensorial fields and to a world. And in the same way an idea is a certain excess in our view in regard to the available and closed meanings whose depository is language and their reordination around a virtual focus toward which they point but which they do not circumscribe [but rather exscribe?]. (AD, 198–9)

The cogito, whether it be Descartes’s positive presence to self or Sartre’s wholly negative presence to the object, can capture our political experience no better than our perceptual experience. I am present to the world or myself through the “thickness of a field of existence” (AD, 199). “There is perception,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “only because I am part of this world through my body, and I give a meaning to history only because I occupy a certain vantage point in it” (AD, 199). He continues: “Already in the thickness of the sensible and historical fabric [consciousness] feels other presences moving” (AD, 200) in, we can now say, the metastable yet real horizons of experience. An exhausted dialectic, then, finds new life in the “interworld, which we call history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made” (AD, 200), that is, in the possibilities for expression. In the interworld, no gesture is purely responsible for the entire world, and yet every action is symbolic and counts “as much upon the effect they will have” (AD, 200). By understanding action as between historical

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determinism and Sartrean freedom, “perhaps it is then that one has the best chance of changing the world” (AD, 200–1). In the experience of the shared world of human relations, one finds the dialectic “at the junction of a subject, of being, and of other subjects” (AD, 203), not viewed from above by a solitary spectator, but lived from within this moving and metastable intertwining. For Merleau-Ponty: [The dialectic] provides the global and primordial cohesion of a field of experience wherein each element opens onto the others. [. . .] It is a thought which does not constitute the whole but which is situated in it. It has a past and a future which are not its own simple negation; it is incomplete so long as it does not pass into other perspectives and into the perspectives of others. (AD, 204)

The true dialectic is not governed by History, not interpreted by the Party, and not created ex nihilo in each action by the pure subject. It is the trajectory of a metastable structure with “several centers and several points of entry,” and “it needs time to explore them all” (AD, 204). What is overcome at the end of the dialectic’s adventures is not history itself, nor its transductive movement, but rather “the pretension of terminating it in an end of history” (AD, 206). In short, the dialectic eventually reveals the need for a practical structure to mediate a politics of expression, and expression is now fully understood as the paradoxical action that creates and sustains that which nonetheless transcends it and to which it retroactively responds. That is, a structure to respond to the perpetual adventure of the concrete relations among men.

A “new” liberalism Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s “new” liberalism both incorporates Marxism’s recognition of class struggle and the ambiguity of history and, thanks to the paradoxical logic of expression, moves beyond Weber’s dualism. The liberal noncommunist Left requires, for Merleau-Ponty, a form of politics that can progress while remaining open to its opposition, with which it is already in essential communication. Communist politics rejects any negotiation with its opponents, reifying a single perspective (the proletariat, or the Party) and thereby claims the right to view history from above. For Merleau-Ponty, “a noncommunist left is this double position, posing social problems in terms of struggle and refusing the dictatorship of the proletariat” (AD, 226). Parliamentary democracy, which (ideally) promotes open debate, is the political structure that most resembles the fundamental empiétement of human existence. And yet, this new liberalism is not a “solution” to the

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problems of history. History remains an adventure and the less violent future a task to be accomplished. This new liberalism is merely the “resolution to keep a hand on both ends of the chain, on the social problem and on freedom” (AD, 227). Thus, this is less a complete rejection of the “wait-and-see Marxism” of Humanism and Terror as it is a new interpretation that puts Marxism back into the interworld of expression between freedom and that which weighs upon it.20 As Whiteside notes, Merleau-Ponty’s break with Marxism is caused by its lack of complexity in the face of real geopolitical problems (FEP, 246). His “new” liberalism is not a grandiose theory; to the problems of modern society it proposes that “[n]ot a formula, or a party, or a class, but the creative responses of trained minds will solve the problems of a mass society” (FEP, 248). In short, Merleau-Ponty’s new liberalism moves toward an open society of expressive bodies, one that takes up his deepening understanding of expression through his engagement with Saussurean linguistics.21 Demonstrating the deep connection between politics, history, and the logic of expression, Merleau-Ponty writes: The meaning of a system in its beginnings is like the pictorial meaning of a painting, which not so much directs the painter’s movements but is the result of them and progresses with them. Or again, it can be compared to the meaning of a spoken language which is not transmitted in conceptual terms in the minds of those who speak, or in some ideal model of language, but which is, rather, the focal point of a series of verbal operations which converge almost by chance. [. . . History] is, in fact, the advent of meaning. (AD, 17)

History, then, must be understood as a metastable trajectory between pure creation and pure repetition. The trajectory of history does not end with the ruin of Marxism, nor does it necessitate a violent and pure new foundation; rather, it calls for others “who are younger” to take up the weight of the past in a creative new expression “precisely because they no longer seek their bearings where we took our” (Préface, 23).22 In fact, setting the stage for Adventures of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty discovered in Hegel a logic of advent, alluded to in the passage above, in one of his key texts on painting and language published in 1952: “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (IL, 106). As I will now argue, the parallel development of Merleau-Ponty’s politics and philosophy of expression culminates in the insight that indeed the dialectic is nothing other than expression.

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The Threads of Silence: Painting, Speaking, Writing

Cézanne is an example of how precariously expression and communication are achieved. Expression is like a step taken in the fog—no one can say where, if anywhere, it will lead. (SNS, 3) At the same time that Merleau-Ponty was pursuing his political work along the lines of the paradoxical logic of expression, he was also devoting himself to a parallel study of expression itself. Whereas an affinity for Marxism leads Merleau-Ponty to make room for the active role of the political actor in taking up the sense of history, his turn to painting leads him to emphasize the remaining passivities that haunt every creative expression. This balance between pure repetition and pure creation is precisely the lesson to be taken from his first explicit essay on aesthetics, “Cézanne’s Doubt.” This period also marks a deepening engagement with the structural linguistics of Saussure, which leads Merleau-Ponty to explore the complex relationships between speaking and language, and speaking and silence. As he explores the status of linguistic structure in the experience of speaking, he discovers that language exists as metastable, as a moving equilibrium that is sustained, carried forward, and reshaped by each expressive speech, and yet that transcends them all and is, paradoxically, that to which they all respond. As I will demonstrate below, with this new characterization of the paradoxical logic of expression, Merleau-Ponty is able to draw together painting, speaking, and writing with his understanding of politics and history because he is able to establish that perception itself is expression. As he concludes from this deepening engagement, “[a]ll perception, all action which presupposes it, and in short, every human use of the body is already primordial expression” (IL, 104).

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“Cézanne’s Doubt” and expressing what exists Just as “The War Has Taken Place” appeared immediately following Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty’s first explicit essay on aesthetics, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” also appeared in 1945. In the essay, Merleau-Ponty attempts to resist two main ways of interpreting the artistic gesture. In the character of Cézanne, he aims to show how despite the weight of Cézanne’s past or of his personality, his paintings cannot be reduced to “pure repetition”; in the character of Leonardo da Vinci, Merleau-Ponty aims (following Freud’s interpretation) to resist the opposite understanding of expression as the “pure creation” of the artistic genius. In the course of the essay, Merleau-Ponty establishes that there is something about Cézanne’s practice that is revelatory for the project of developing a “new idea of reason,” that is, for articulating a way of approaching phenomena that remains open to the paradoxical logic of expression.

Cézanne’s phenomenology For Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne’s life as a painter is not the result of various external causes or factors (such as his past or his personality); rather, painting was his vocation, “his world and his mode of existence” (CD, 59). If one attempts (as had been done) to deduce the meaning of his paintings from his life—described according to his “basically anxious” nature, his retreat from “human contact,” or his “flight into established habits”—then one fails to grasp “the positive side of his work” (CD, 61). The external causes of an expressive gesture only appear with the weight of necessity from the perspective of the completed expression and an interpretive distance. In the lived expression, Cézanne gathers up all that he is in order to respond to the task that solicits him to becoming what he will be. Expression is existential. Cézanne’s style is not reducible to his past, his techniques, his own explicit intentions, or his role in the trajectory of the history of painting; his style is how he takes up all of these intensities toward the future he is bringing about, and the sense of his painting is a metastable trajectory. In Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty recognizes a certain “phenomenological” commitment to painting from nature. Rather than breaking colors up into punctual impressions, he is intent on representing objects by bringing out how colors are perceived. He “wants to represent the object, to find it again behind the atmosphere,” and the result is an “impression of solidity and material substance” (CD, 62). Thus, the influence of the impressionists’ commitment to nature does not explain Cézanne’s work, it motivates his work; the sense of his canvases is to be found in how he responds to their commitment to

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nature. To understand Cézanne, one must return to the experience of nature, and give up the intellectual or pictorial structures that had been added onto our natural perception, such as “outline, composition, and distribution of light” (CD, 62). As Merleau-Ponty notes, Émile Bernard calls this “Cézanne’s suicide: aiming at reality while denying himself the means to attain it” (CD, 63). Merleau-Ponty sees this as Cézanne’s phenomenological reduction, not performed in order to reach the “essence” of the object, but in order to take up the task of expressing the things themselves. Nevertheless, Cézanne was no philosopher; rather than providing arguments for this understanding of painting, he “preferred to paint instead” (CD, 63). As Merleau-Ponty writes, perhaps identifying the reception of his own work with Cézanne’s initial reception: “Rather than apply to his work dichotomies more appropriate to those who sustain traditions than to those— philosophers or painters—who found them, we would do better to sensitize ourselves to his painting’s own, specific meaning, which is to challenge those dichotomies” (CD, 63). Cézanne sensed a place between “feeling and thought,” the ambiguous or shifting structure of perception and experience, the primordial world, and his ability to paint this “lived perspective” was his “genius” for ambiguity (CD, 64): [W]hen the overall composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes. (CD, 64–5)

Cézanne expresses the object in its milieu, and the pictorial elements of classical representation belong not to lived experience but to geometry (CD, 65). The object is not a “thing” in the classical sense; the perceived object is an “inexhaustible reality full of reserves” (CD, 65), a metastable structure soliciting his painter’s gaze. Cézanne’s paintings thus illustrate the embodied phenomenology Merleau-Ponty had been describing in Phenomenology of Perception, including the analysis of the gestural unity of the senses in lived experience. “It is,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “only as a result of a science of the human body that we finally learn to distinguish between our senses” (CD, 65). Color does not signify a certain texture, rather it presents the world in its density and configuration such that “[w]e see the depth, the smoothness, the softness, the hardness of objects; Cézanne even claimed that we see their odor” (CD, 65). The painter does not signify the world, the painter catches its sense, and thus “the arrangement of his colors must bear within this indivisible

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whole [. . . and] each brushstroke must satisfy an infinite number of conditions” (CD, 65). Each stroke must respond to the weight of every stroke already completed, it must anticipate every subsequent stroke, and it must perform the emerging sense that it itself is bringing into existence. The “physiognomy of objects and faces” emerges from the configuration of color, and “[o]ne’s personality is seen and grasped in one’s glance” (CD, 66). Sense happens right at the sensible surface, or as Merleau-Ponty will later say, sense is the visible’s invisible lining. Since sense is of the world and not held by a transcendent mind, “[e]xpressing what exists is an endless task” (CD, 66).

Art as expression This “phenomenological” approach to painting in Cézanne leads Merleau-Ponty to an account of art as expression, but he is careful to avoid any simplistic notion of the translation into paint of an idea or feeling already complete in the head of the artist. Each gesture transcends the artist’s intentions because it “takes up culture from its inception and founds it anew” (CD, 69). This is precisely the logic of trajectory discussed above. And yet, without the artist’s genius, this moment of the world would have simply slipped by, remaining in the metastable and thus not having any individual existence. The work of art is a painstaking gesture, and the “artist is the one who arrests the spectacle” (CD, 69) in order to capture in paint a moment of the world that is going by, leaving a vestige with which future expressive bodies will communicate. And thus the work is not to be “decoded,” it solicits every human gaze by providing the materials needed for a new expressive body to take it up and to catch on to its sense. The vestige waits to be taken up by others, and its nature as vestige has “a claim on every possible mind” (CD, 70). There is, then, no “idea” at the outset of the expression, but rather a “vague fever, and only the work itself, completed and understood, will prove there was something rather than nothing to be found there” (CD, 69). The artist, like the political actor, initiates an expression neither having full possession of its sense nor full control over its subsequent meanings, and the same expressive logic of the origin of language and of all political action is present here in every artistic gesture: The artist launches his work just as a man once launched the first word, not knowing whether it will be anything more than a shout, whether it can detach itself from the flow of individual life in which it was born and give the independent existence of an identifiable meaning to the future of that same individual life, or to the monads coexisting with it, or the open community of future monads. (CD, 69)

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The artist is not the master of the meaning of her canvases. She takes up the materials and the tradition in order to respond to the present and to the emerging sense of the future, not by discovering or uncovering it, but by accomplishing that paradoxical movement itself. For Cézanne, “[h]eredity may well have given him rich sensations, strong emotions, and a vague feeling of anguish or mystery which upset the life he might have wished for himself; but these qualities cannot create a work of art without the expressive act” (CD, 69). The expressive gesture is essential, just as history drew upon the art of political action in order to become what it was becoming. Just as Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin felt “what” was required—to further the Revolutionary movement—but disagreed on how this should be accomplished, the external forces of Cézanne’s life only presented him with “what he had to live, leaving how to live it undetermined” (CD, 70). This is no absolute freedom, but rather the freedom to respond to that which was soliciting his painter’s gaze, a taking up of an open trajectory toward a future that was at best sensed vaguely in his style and genius in the “single adventure of his life and work” (CD, 71). Thus, Cézanne’s physical condition, for instance, “ceases being an absurd fact and destiny to become a general possibility of human existence confronting, in a consistent, principled way, one of its paradoxes—the phenomenon of expression” (CD, 71). Cézanne responds to all that weighs upon him in a paradoxical act between pure repetition and pure creation. As Merleau-Ponty writes: [I]t is therefore impossible to name a single gesture which is merely hereditary or innate, a single gesture which is not spontaneous—but also impossible to name a single gesture which is not absolutely new in regard to that way of being in the world which, from the very beginning, is myself. (CD, 71)

The weight of the past Perhaps sensing that his account of art as expression may seem to privilege artistic creation, Merleau-Ponty considers the inescapable weight of the past upon every expressive gesture through Valéry’s and Freud’s opposite readings of Leonardo da Vinci. For Merleau-Ponty, “freedom dawns in us without breaking our bonds with the world” (CD, 72), and these bonds continue to weigh upon us even when they are not explicitly sensed by the artist and the audience, just as the constraints of English grammar weigh upon every word of a conversation without ever being explicitly posited. Cézanne’s life and the structures of his technique are “present in each stroke of his brush as the rules of the game underlie each stroke of a tennis match” (CD, 67). For Valéry,

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Leonardo da Vinci is a “monster of pure freedom,” the embodiment of a pure intellect wholly transparent to itself. He stands in awe of nothing, preferring to dissect each mystery to the point of understanding its workings by reducing it to its component parts. Merleau-Ponty, following Freud, insists that one must look closer, recalling that in Saint Anne, the Virgin, and Child, “the Virgin’s cloak suggests a vulture where it touches the face of the Child.” With such a strange allusion, it becomes clear that “even [Leonardo’s] transparent consciousness has its enigma” (CD, 73). The myth of the great intellect is not sustained by experience, since every consciousness takes up a past and is caught in a “forest of symbols” (CD, 73). “Becoming a pure consciousness,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “is just another way of taking a stand in relation to the world and other people” (CD, 74). Merleau-Ponty does not, however, naively adopt the conclusions of psychoanalysis. Freud’s reduction of the meaning of Leonardo’s work to his life is not correct, but his psychoanalytic intuition is undeniable. “How can we deny,” asks Merleau-Ponty, “that psychoanalysis has taught us to notice echoes, allusions, repetitions from one moment of life to another?” (CD, 74) Leonardo’s past is not a destiny, but “an ambiguous symbol which applies in advance to several possible chains of events” (CD, 75). The past weighs on us because it is a basic dimension of our experience that does not “impose any particular act but which can be found in all” (CD, 75). Psychoanalysis is, like Marxism, correct in its trajectory rather than in its explicit phases. As a result, it is easy to “defeat” Freud on paper by demanding inductive rigor as the basis for all valuable knowledge and then demonstrating its absence in psychoanalytic practice, just as it is easy to defeat Marxism in the newspapers, by showing the failure of each communist regime or policy in terms of living up to the values of 1917 or of the 1844 manuscripts. And yet, the “psychoanalyst’s hermeneutic musing, which multiplies the communications between us and ourselves [.  .  . is] better suited than rigorous induction to the circular movements of our lives” (CD, 75). Despite the emphasis on creative expression, Merleau-Ponty is careful to demand a form of reflection that recognizes the weight of the past and of external factors, a structure that foreshadows the role of metastable systems that he will embrace in his encounter with the work of Saussure.

Saussure and the phenomenology of language In 1951, Merleau-Ponty presented a lecture entitled “On the Phenomenology of Language,” which was later published in his collection Signs. The essay

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brings together his reading of Husserl’s evolving philosophy of language and his own developing understanding of Saussure’s structural linguistics. Although Merleau-Ponty is intent to adopt insights from structuralism, he also remains committed to focusing on the lived experience of speech in which expression is lived from within a metastable structure. What structuralism demonstrates for Merleau-Ponty is how each expressive gesture sustains, carries forward, and reshapes the system that paradoxically transcends every act. Speech, in other words, exscribes language, and this is why Merleau-Ponty never abandons his emphasis on gestures and lived experience. By turning to this essay on Saussure, we can begin to see the deep continuity between the characterization of expression as between pure creation and pure repetition with the emerging chiasmatic structure of language as a moving and metastable equilibrium that is created as exscribed through the concrete expressions of a community of speakers. Merleau-Ponty begins the lecture by identifying two Husserlian accounts of language, an earlier one in the classical style of an “eidetics of language and a universal grammar” and a later one focused on language as an “original way of intending certain objects” (OPL, 84). For Merleau-Ponty, the two accounts are radically opposed, the first taking language as an external accompaniment of thought, the second catching sight of a thought accomplished in speech and preserved in the written for future performances of its sense.1 Merleau-Ponty takes this second position to be a return to the experience of speech, and the phenomenological subject, caught up at the heart of a metastable equilibrium, does not possess language as a “chaotic past of independent linguistic facts but a system all of whose elements cooperate in a single attempt to express which is turned toward the present or the future and thus governed by a present logic” (OPL, 85). And yet, returning to the speaking subject is not to inject the category of “experience” back into structural linguistics. For Merleau-Ponty, our “experience of speech” has an “ontological weight” (OPL, 86, modified), and the past of a language must be understood as a previous present taken up transductively through what he calls “an inner logic” (OPL, 86). A language is never “pure,” but always contains gaps and fissures as the potential for change, and the task is to account for “language as a moving equilibrium” (OPL, 87). The creation, repetition, and evolution of forms of expression respond to the intensities of the system in the process of responding to the world. As such, its movement is neither random nor deductive; it is transductive and propagative, and a “persistent logic runs through the effects of wear and tear upon the language” (OPL, 87). But this moving equilibrium is never itself “wholly in act” because each phase, as a cross-section of a diachronic system, “always involves latent or incubating changes” (OPL, 87). In short, language

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is surely a structure, but a metastable one. For Merleau-Ponty, psychology is wrong to assume a “pure” presence of language and linguistics is wrong to take language as a “pure” past. Rather, “the present diffuses into the past to the extent that the past has been present [. . .] and the contingency of the linguistic past invades even the synchronic system” (OPL, 87). To return to a key quote discussed in the introduction above, a phenomenology of speech leads to a “new conception of the being of language, which is now logic in contingency—an oriented system which nevertheless always elaborates random factors, taking what was fortuitous up again into a meaningful whole—incarnate logic” (OPL, 88). Thus, Merleau-Ponty weaves Saussure’s linguistics into the experience of speaking described in Phenomenology of Perception. The expressive value of speech is neither a sum of its meaningful elements nor the “idea” in the head of the speaker. “On the contrary,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “these elements form a system in synchrony in the sense that each of them signifies only its difference in respect to others” (OPL, 88). To learn to speak is to enter into a world where the “words and turns of phrase needed to bring my significative intention to expression recommend themselves to me [. . .] without my having to represent them to myself ” (OPL, 88). When I actually speak, I “ex-press” no preexisting thought; rather, “my spoken words surprise me myself and teach me my own thought” (OPL, 88). In the activity of expression, “[the speaker] does not express just for others, but also to know himself what he intends” (OPL, 90). Communication, then, is not the goal of speech, but its very structure, since expression happens in the weighty. I do not speak in order to accomplish the simple goal of infusing the other’s mind with my thoughts; rather, I speak as a response to the determinate gaps in the metastable field that solicit my voice. Because expression happens right at the sensible, the expressive traces (my words, my gestures, or their vestiges) remain behind as an invitation for other expressive bodies to reperform the sense I brought about. The meaning of another’s performance (whether hearing, reading, or repeating my words) will be shaped by the weight of the trajectories they carry with them. And yet, if his or her body and experience is “close enough,” he or she can read my text and gear into the sense of my gestures. The meaning becomes sedimented or acquired not when I get the idea in my head, but when its traces are sensed as available to be taken up again “through the same sort of expressive operation” (OPL, 90). To understand English is not to “possess” it in my mind in some mental lexicon. Rather, speaking English involves having English gestures ready-to-hand such that I can communicate with other speakers or grasp the coherent deformations I encounter. The other’s utterance is contained in English not through a real

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relation, but as a potential alteration, and thus languages are metastable trajectories of performances of sense. For Merleau-Ponty, this return to the speaking subject “requires us to make a decision concerning the relationship between phenomenology and philosophy or metaphysics,” because speech is both a “special problem” and “a problem that contains all the others, including the problem of philosophy” (OPL, 93). If a philosophy of speech is mistaken for psychology, then “thought’s radical autonomy would be restored” (OPL, 93), and one would quickly fall back into the trappings of classical positions, whereas the nascent ontology of embodied expression is clarified through our irrecusable experience of others. Phenomenology seems to have a problem: to be conscious is to constitute, but to be conscious of others (as genuine others) would be to constitute others as themselves constituting, which is impossible. For Merleau-Ponty, embodiment answers this problem. Since my body is at once touching and touched, it “experiences itself as constituted at the moment it functions as constituting” (OPL, 94). There is, as Merleau-Ponty writes, an “intentional transgression” by which my body takes up the behaviors it encounters by gearing into the expressive vestiges of other expressive bodies or the traces of their gestures. Even in the midst of incorporating Saussure, Merleau-Ponty recalls The Structure of Behavior in writing: “I see a form sketched out in space that arouses and convokes the possibilities of my own body as if it were a matter of my own gestures or behavior” (OPL, 94). The scene itself is an invitation to my body to gear into its nascent sense: “I am snapped up by a second myself outside of me; I perceive an other” (OPL, 94). And speech is a paradigmatic case of such behavior; it is an example of expressive bodies communicating through their gestures, vestiges, and performances of sense. Expression, then, involves not a patient summation, but a “leap” that is never fully in possession of itself, although always somehow oriented toward a truth that is never more than anticipated in a certain Vorhabe. Such is the necessity of the trajectory of performance: Our present expressive operations, instead of driving the preceding ones away—simply succeeding and annulling them—salvage, preserve, and (insofar as they contain some truth) take them up again, and the same phenomenon is produced in respect to others’ expressive operations, whether they be past or contemporary. (OPL, 95)

The expressive act takes up the past by preserving it into the present, and the same structure is already a communication with past and present others. Language is not a top-down structure; for Merleau-Ponty, it is a vast organic project of the performances of traces in which “we keep each others’

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promises” (OPL, 95). Every expressive gesture “contributes to fulfilling the vow to retrieve the world taken with the first appearance of a language, that is, with the first appearance of a finite system of signs” (OPL, 95). Expression is the continual process of taking up the origin of language itself and of continuing the absurd task of a complete expression by incessantly testing out acquired significations in new performances of their sense. “Truth” becomes the aspiration of the trajectory against which each moment is tested, just as humanism becomes the value against which the movement of history is to be evaluated and taken up anew. The paradox of speech is that the gesture responds to that which it itself is bringing into existence, and so must be understood as the transductive movement of expression. The ideal existence, however, does not then detach itself from materiality, but rather depends upon “the document,” or broadly, the “written” trace. Merleau-Ponty does not mean the document in the sense of a purely material object, or in terms of a recording of a certain word-toidea relationship. The “written” is in fact any configuration that demands to be read, of which behavior is certainly one: “ideal existence is based upon the document insofar as (still through an ‘intentional transgression’) the document solicits and brings together all knowing lives—and as such establishes and re-establishes a ‘Logos’ of the cultural world” (OPL, 97). The vestiges of expression—from gestures to spoken words to written texts— solicit my body to gear into the sense of their style, and each new performance, each new reading, re-establishes the trajectory of culture or language that was established through the first performance, with the necessary transductive addition of my own life and style to the new performance of the trace. To be an expressive body is to be a reading body, even when it comes to my own expressive gestures: “To the extent that what I say has meaning, I am a different ‘other’ for myself when I am speaking; and to the extent that I understand, I no longer know who is speaking and who is listening” (OPL, 97). For Merleau-Ponty, the experience of speaking is what leads us to develop a reflection capable of sustaining the paradoxes of expression.

Reading the vestiges of The Prose of the World Given his sense that the phenomenon of expression promised to reveal a “good ambiguity” (Inédit, 11) that would lead to metaphysics, Merleau-Ponty devoted himself to the explicit study of expression. It is, however, difficult to assign a final status to this project, The Prose of the World, which he abandoned in the early 1950s, and later published posthumously. Nevertheless, the importance Merleau-Ponty ascribed to establishing an understanding of

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expression is clear in his decision to extract, augment, and publish a long article from this abandoned manuscript in 1952 titled “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” This essay, which was the last one he published in Les Temps modernes prior to his break with Sartre and his resignation from the journal, would again be given primacy of place as the lead essay in his 1960 collection Signs. To set the stage for reading this important essay in the final section of this chapter, I will first discuss a few key moments in the abandoned materials that demonstrate the development of the paradoxical logic of expression. The Prose of the World begins with the common sense assumption that expression is “most complete” when it effaces itself completely by “sweeping us toward the object it designates” (PW, 3). Echoing his analysis from Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty suggests that this classical understanding longs for a “pure language” (like science) in which signs are linked unequivocally to their signification in order to deliver us from the messy reality and technical obstacles of empirical experience. This is, of course, nothing less than a “revolt against language in its existing state” (PW, 5), the worst form of a pensée de survol, and the futile attempt to establish what exists as metastable as existing as real. Again, the experience of speaking undermines these classical motivations. For Merleau-Ponty, the speaker does not know in advance what he or she will say. She is silent at first, “straining toward” what she is “going to say,” and then “suddenly a flood of words comes” (PW, 6). Expression is not a translation or a discovery, it accomplishes itself through the gesture. Language points away from this fundamental reality but, despite its efforts, the mystery of communication remains (PW, 6). From “the moment people begin to reflect upon language instead of living it, they cannot see how language can have such power” for teaching us more than we already know (PW, 8). In this context, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the experience of writing and reading. When reading a book, I am caught up in the story, and may not even be aware of turning the material pages, just as when perceiving I see a person at a distance without having any explicit awareness of his or her “apparent” size. Thus, even if the material vestiges in some sense “disappear,” [. . .] while we were reading, it is these words which spoke to us, suspended in the movement of our eyes and our feelings, [. . .] when they, thanks to us, and we, thanks to them became speech rather than language, and in the same instant became a voice and an echo. (PM, 10)

The act of reading gears into the expressive traces on the page, which in turn speak to us thanks to a creative repetition that is never a pure reproduction.

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Once the book has been read, it takes on a “unique and palpable” existence as a metastable weight that shapes my future repetitions, even if not one explicit memory is held in mind. The memory of what I read remains en bloc as a meaningful whole inviting further expression, rather than as a sum of individual meaningful phrases or ideas (PW, 9). It is as if I wrote the text. The book “catches fire” and “feeds off everything I have ever read” (PW, 11). The marks on the page neither impose a meaning upon the reader nor passively accept just any meaning projected by the reader across their surface. Rather, in reading: I am receiving and giving in the same gesture. I have given my knowledge of the language; I have brought along what I already know about the meaning of the words, the phrases, and the syntax. I have also contributed my whole experience of others and everyday events, with all the questions it left in me—the situations left open and unsettled, as well as those with whose ordinary resolution I am all too familiar. (PW, 11)

The book “makes use of everything I have contributed in order to carry me beyond it” (PW, 11), and is the source of my ability to take on this other style, to adopt the voice of an author, and thus to, in a sense, become Stendhal. Not that I gain Stendhal’s precise inner experience. Since I am forever a different metastable trajectory, the meaning of my reading will be the negotiation between the weight of my past and the gestures indicated on the page. The book transforms me into a new meaningful arrangement, a new metastable equilibrium, and I believe I could have written it only because the book itself has discovered in me a being capable of rewriting it through this creative repetition we call “reading.” As Silverman argues, in his first encounters with Saussure, Merleau-Ponty “ascribes to him the view that the speaking subject lives in his language” (MPIL, 154). This is precisely the insight that needs to be stressed here, since language is lived from within for Merleau-Ponty in the mode of a metastable structure. A language is not a set of words associated with meanings that have been established diachronically, for this would fail to embrace the power of expression. On Merleau-Ponty’s reading, Saussure insists upon a “linguistics of speech (parole)” to be placed alongside a linguistics of language (langage). History alone cannot determine meaning, rather, “[t]he accidents of history have been absorbed internally,” explains Merleau-Ponty, “by an intention to communicate which transforms them into a system of expression” (PW, 25). Language should thus be understood both synchronically and diachronically, and the description that Merleau-Ponty offers provides a clear picture

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of the transductive logic of expression, a structure that is perhaps more Simondonian than Saussurean: After all, each of the phases described by a longitudinal study has been a living moment of speech, stretched toward communication, and every past has been a present turned toward the future. Then, if the expressive exigencies of a synchronic moment and the equilibrium imposed by them could not be spread over a lapse of time, in order to define, at least for a phase of the diachronic movement, a certain sense of the probable transformations, or at least a provisory law of equilibrium, until that equilibrium, once attained, in turn would pose new problems that would tip the language over into a new cycle of development. (PW, 23)

Developing this image of a moving equilibrium, Merleau-Ponty compares Saussure’s description of structure to a system of gravitation. If, argues Saussure, “one of the planets gravitating around the sun were to change in dimension and weight: this isolated fact would generate general consequences and displace the equilibrium of the entire solar system” (PW, 34). This is precisely what happens when our expressions go out into the accidental encounters they will have. We cannot know the metastabilities of the systems or situations we interact with, and expression is always at risk and exposed, repeating the logic of historical responsibility. Authorial intention lacks the power to control the weight of its expression, and yet this only augments responsibility, which becomes, as Silverman would say, a responsibility between. Each expression causes the system to shift and to establish a new equilibrium, carrying forward and reshaping latent possibilities in ways that can never be fully predicted. “What sustains the invention of a new system of expression,” concludes Merleau-Ponty, “is the drive of speaking subjects who wish to be understood and who take over as a new mode of speaking the debris produced by another mode of expression” (PW, 35).2

“Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” The paradoxes of structuralism This “rich and turbulent” essay,3 which is Merleau-Ponty’s most explicit statement of the paradoxical logic of expression, begins with his deepening reading of Saussure.4 Signs, taken separately, cannot “signify” anything, since “each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between it and other signs” (IL, 76). And yet, such a structure seems

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fraught with paradox. If “term A and term B do not have any meaning at all, it is hard to see how there could be a difference of meaning between them” (IL, 76). Moreover, is not communication rendered impossible, since it would have to go from the “whole of the speaker’s language to the whole of the hearer’s language” (IL, 76)? And finally, how could one learn a language without already knowing it, since to learn a part of it involves learning its difference from every other part? Such paradoxes, however, emerge from a classical pensée de survol, and just as Zeno’s logical paradoxes are overcome in action, the paradoxes of speech are overcome “by the use of speech” (IL, 76). “And this sort of circle,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “according to which language, in the presence of those who are learning it, precedes itself, teaches itself, and suggests its own deciphering, is perhaps the marvel which defines language” (IL, 76). The “whole” of language, then, cannot be the system of positive ideas that are sketched out and codified by a pensée de survol, but rather “a unity of coexistence,” or as we can now say, a metastable equilibrium. Merleau-Ponty stresses how a unified whole such as a language must be unified in each of its phases, and development must be made by “the internal articulation of a function” (IL, 77). This understanding of the progress between synchronic phases implies the logic of transduction, in which each stage is a crystallization of the trajectory of the system, complete in itself and yet more than itself through the preservation of metastable potentials. Learning a language, then, requires not the previous possession of a system, but the “grasping” of a principle of differentiation, an oppositive or relative principle between phonemes or signs. Since the “phonemes are from the beginning variations of a unique speech apparatus,” the child is able to grasp, in the first phonemic oppositions, “the principle of a mutual differentiation of signs and at the same time to have acquired the meaning of the sign” (IL, 77). The body, with its vocal apparatus, is a natural power for expression that prepares the way for the child to be snapped up into a system of vocal intentionality. With “the first phonemic opposition,” the child takes up the lived body’s natural power for expression and the metastable possibilities of their body that result from its material configuration and external relations (e.g. its immersion in a linguistic milieu), and “thereafter he will only learn to apply the principle of speech in diverse ways” (IL, 77). The style of a certain language is present from these first oppositions, and the “whole of the spoken language surrounding the child snaps him up like a whirlwind, tempts him by its internal articulations, and bring him almost up to the moment when all this noise begins to mean something” (IL, 78). Language tempts the child not as a system of positive relations, but as a metastable or virtual reservoir that, by its style alone, solicits the child’s voice and, paradoxically, is exscribed in the moment that he or she first speaks.

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If the entire expressive life of the child is contained (as metastable) in the style of this first differentiation, this is only true in the manner that all future English literature is contained in English, as metastable possibilities that will require an expressive act to bring them into existence. The child does not come by language in isolation, but by gearing into some differentiation in the noise that surrounds him or her, and this requires that the language system “contain” as metastable more than itself. The transductive logic appears quite clearly in Merleau-Ponty’s following description: A language sometimes remains a long time pregnant with transformations which are to come; and the enumeration of the means of expression in a language does not have any meaning, since those which fall into disuse continue to lead a diminished life in the language and since the place of those which are to replace them is sometimes already marked out—even if only in the form of a gap, a need, or a tendency. (IL, 78–9)

Even in cases where a principle or meaning emerges that seems to exist “for itself,” such as geometrical concepts, their expression is contingent and is the result of “long incubation” in the form of an “operative meaning” (IL, 79). Since the genesis of sense is never complete, the presentation of “truth” or “knowledge” is forever the expression of a trajectory and an entire system of support rather than an ultimately detachable pure in itself; that is, truth is always historical and deferred. For Merleau-Ponty, foreshadowing Simondon, a sign is a “relational reality.” As he writes: Since the sign has meaning only in so far as it is profiled against other signs, its meaning is entirely involved in language. Speech always comes into play against a background of speech; it is always only a fold in the immense fabric of language. To understand it, we do not have to consult some inner lexicon which gives us the pure thoughts covered up by the words or forms we are perceiving, we have only to lend ourselves to its life, to its movement of differentiation and articulation, and to its eloquent gestures. (IL, 79)

Thus, even for structuralism, there is no set of ideas that the speaker translates into signs; rather, there is a moving equilibrium that reaches a relatively stable state through individual signs that mark a difference from all other signs. Yet this requires that signs be taken up, that an expressive body lends its life to these eloquent traces of gestures. Just as the political actor must act in the dizziness of history, there is an in principle “opaqueness of language”

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(IL, 79) for the speaker herself that comes about because speech must be pursued from within the metastable structure of experience, not from the transcendental perspective of an interpretive distance. The same holds for communication, since language is not so much a “means” for conveying messages than a “sort of being” as a meaningful trajectory that solicits us to its style. In dialogue, neither partner experiences communication as coding and decoding. The speaker follows the sensed solicitations of the situation and her speech satisfies the vague fever in reaching “an equilibrium whose conditions [the] speech itself defines” (IL, 80). Since this is expression and not translation, the expressive traces or gestures solicit the listener to the sense of the speech. The expressive vestige “bears the meaning of a thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body” (IL, 82), and my body—in seeing these traces as to-be-read—is already taking them up by creatively repeating their sense. Speech is not a presentation of significations, of “meanings,” rather, “meaning is the total movement of speech, our thought crawls along in language” (IL, 80). Since a “pure” language is thus impossible, “all language is indirect or allusive—that it is, if you wish, silence” (IL, 80). Language’s indirect nature, as Silverman stresses, is what “prepares the way for speaking, writing, painting, etc.,” and as a metastable structure, it “carries with it [. . .] the field of speech before it is spoken” (MPIL, 185). As is now clear, Saussure’s insights into structure are incorporated into the deepening philosophy of the paradoxes of expression, or as Silverman writes, the “dimension of philosophy is the dimension of experience in all its ambiguity” (MPIL, 168).

Writing and painting gestures This indirect nature of language, in contrast to a “pure” or direct language sought after by classical theories, leads Merleau-Ponty to examine the relation between language and painting, and as Silverman notes, “[l]anguage here is based on painting” (MPIL, 168). “If this account is true,” writes Merleau-Ponty, then “the writer’s act of expression is not very different from the painter’s” (IL, 82). Merleau-Ponty believed that Sartre’s What Is Literature? and André Malraux’s The Voices of Silence offered insufficient accounts of expression as a result of a failure to move beyond the traditional binaries such as mind and body, subject and object, or freedom and determinism. For Merleau-Ponty, the paradoxical logic of expression can embrace both structuralism and existentialism without falling prey to the trappings of classical theory. There is, of course, the natural assumption that painting is “silent” while linguistic expression is “speaking.” And yet, given the above considerations,

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language appears to express “as much by what is between words as by the words themselves” (IL, 82), and between words is silence. Consider the structures of speech in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s description of expression in painting. While painting, “Matisse, set within a human’s time and vision, looked at the still open whole of his work in progress and brought his brush toward the line which called for it in order that the painting might finally be that which it was in the process of becoming” (IL, 83). On the one hand, there is the almost nothing of the point of color on the canvas; on the other hand, there is the effect of the point on the whole which is coming into being. The stroke of color brings an anticipated equilibrium in the entire structure of the painting that is emerging, and the painting body expresses not a purely free choice or preexisting idea, but a lived negotiation of an implicit multitude of forces that weighed upon this gesture. Matisse’s hesitation allows for just enough spacing that the gesture is at once active and passive, a situated choice from within the open trajectory of the expression of “that particular painting which did not yet exist” (IL, 83). The “silence” of painting, then, is not the silence of pure colors devoid of sonorous qualities, it is the silence of the vague fever that is drawn toward a paradoxical accomplishment. “The case is no different,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “for the truly expressive word and thus for all language in the phase in which it is being established” (IL, 83). Each expressive gesture carries itself and the possibilities not chosen forward as the weight of the metastable, and thus “we must consider the word before it is spoken, the background of silence which does not cease to surround it and without which it would say nothing” (IL, 83). In short, Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of the paradoxical logic of expression reveal that speech itself is “intertwined” with “threads of silence,” and the distinction between language and painting is a false one, since there is a “tacit language” and “painting speaks” (IL, 84). Merleau-Ponty thus identifies a certain Cartesian strand in Malraux, who suggests that painting and writing are only comparable when seen in a subjectivist light as forms of “creative expression.” Malraux identifies an objectivist prejudice in pure language theories and in theories of painting as the representation of Nature, but he overemphasizes how modern art and literature challenge this prejudice and thereby swing too far toward a pure subjectivism. For Merleau-Ponty, since classical painters were indeed “painters,” their work cannot be reduced to their professed intentions of producing faithful representations of Nature. “At the very moment when, their eyes fixed upon the world,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “they thought they were asking it for the secret of a sufficient representation, they were unknowingly bringing about that metamorphosis of which painting later became aware” (IL, 85).5 Classical perspective is not a neutral copy of the

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world, it expresses and exscribes a particular way of taking up the world and of being human (IL, 86). As such, what the painter believes she is doing is less important than what she is actually doing, just as the political actor is to be judged not merely based upon his or her intentions, but in terms of the relations between humans brought about by their actions. Despite its pretentions to neutrality, “[p]erspective is much more than a secret technique for imitating a reality given as such to all humanity. It is the invention of a world” (IL, 87)—that is, even classical perspective is expression. Malraux is mistaken in dismissing modern art as subjective because, “if ‘objective’ painting is itself a creation, the fact that modern painting seeks to be a creation no longer provides any reasons for interpreting it as a movement toward the subjective and a ceremony glorifying the individual” (IL, 88). Malraux understands the loss of religion or beauty in modern painting to suggest that modern painting is nothing but self-portraiture pursued by insatiable egoists. Such a position falters, suggests Merleau-Ponty, if one looks at “modern” painters such as Klee and Cézanne. For these painters, there is not merely a turn to subjectivist expression, but rather a “tolerance for the incomplete” that Merleau-Ponty equates with the very structure of expression. A finished work for Cézanne is neither the one that glorifies himself in an absolute originality nor the one that definitively convinces the senses that they are viewing reality itself. Rather, the finished work is the one that has expressed the passing by of a world and has captured sense in a material vestige that solicits all bodies with eyes to see. As Merleau-Ponty writes: The accomplished work is thus not the work which exists in itself like a thing, but the work which reaches its viewer and invites him to take up the gesture which created it and, skipping the intermediaries, to rejoin, with out any guide other than the movement of the invented line (an almost incorporeal trace), the silent world of the painter, henceforth uttered and accessible. (IL, 88, emphasis added)

Painting is not silent; it expresses the silent world and thus invites the eyes and the voices of all expressive bodies that can take it up and take it further. In short, paintings are “eloquent.” The expressive body of the viewer gears into the trace, taking it up without the intermediary of an interpretive distance, and joins through its bodily intentionality with the now “spoken in paint” world of the painter, with the shifts and deflections that necessarily arise with the fact that the viewer is not the painter, not even if the painter herself views her work the moment after it has fallen into the world from the end of

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her brush. Since the genesis of sense is never completed, modern painting’s “tolerance for the incomplete” is nothing less than an authentic illustration of the paradoxical logic of expression. Consider Merleau-Ponty’s description of style as the carrying forward of the weight of the past, in which the paradoxical logic of expression receives one of its most explicit statements: The painter works and leaves his wake; and except when he or she indulges in examining his earlier works to try to recognize what he has become, he does not like very much to look at his work. He has something better in his own possession; the language of his maturity eminently contains the feeble accent of his first works. Without going back to them, and by the sole fact that they have fulfilled certain expressive operations, he finds himself endowed with new organs; and experiencing the excess of what is to be said over and beyond their already verified power, he is capable [. . .] of going “further” in the same direction. It is as if each step taken called for and made possible another step, [.  .  .] or founded an institution whose efficacy it will never stop testing anew. (IL, 89–90)

Thus, the painter’s style is diffused throughout her life and expressed in the ongoing and transductive process of expression. The wake of expressive traces solicits the audience, but the painter carries with her the weight of the past expressions in the very possibilities for creative repetition in the guise of new creative acts.

Expression as “coherent deformation,” and trajectory In short, if Malraux is correct and even “perception already stylizes,” then expression must go all the way down. For a painter whose style has seemingly solidified, “what is given to him with his style is not a manner, a certain number of procedures or tics that he can inventory, but a mode of formulation” (IL, 90). Merleau-Ponty thus criticizes Malraux for failing to understand the depth of the concept of style, since he interprets the role of style as a subjective meaning “lent to the world” and alongside maintains a faith in the “truth” of the world in itself. Guilty of a certain pensée de survol, Malraux examines style “from the outside” (IL, 90). For Merleau-Ponty, “the painter at work knows nothing of the antithesis of humanity and world, [. . .] of style and ‘representation’” (IL, 90–1). Caught up, rather, in expressing the world from within it, the painter is hardly aware of her own style; she lives it directly and it remains in her expressive traces without having been put there explicitly. Style emerges from “the hollows of the painter’s perception

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as a painter; style is an exigency that has issued from that perception” (IL, 91). Perception itself is a stylizing of the world, perception is expression. Style is “the universal index of the ‘coherent deformation’ by which [the painter or the seer] concentrates the still scattered meaning of his perception and makes it exist expressly” (IL, 91–2).6 Since perception is expression, it must be understood (as we will see more below) in the mode of reading. The paradoxical logic of expression, then, suggests to Merleau-Ponty a position between Malraux and the classical approaches to painting. With the gestures of modern painting, what “replaces the object is not the subject—it is the allusive logic of the perceived world” (IL, 94). Just as the political actor does not stand above history in order to survey and direct it, but attempts to gear into history in the making, the painter remains caught up in everyday life and each morning “finds in the shape of things the same questioning and the same call he never stops responding to” (IL, 95). His work continues, is never complete, and is artificially brought to a close when one day “the body falls, cut off ” (IL, 95). The work is a trajectory even if its “end” remains opaque, because the work is a life that takes up the past “without the painter ever being able to say what comes from things, what his new work adds to the previous ones, or what he has taken from others as opposed to what is his own” (IL, 95). Each expression remains on this side of an “absolute creation,” since it must be a “response to what the world, the past, and the painter’s own completed works demanded” (IL, 96). A “coherent deformation,” then, is a Stiftung, an institution that introduces an “unlimited fecundity” between pure creation and pure repetition and a fraternity between expressive bodies, since for Merleau-Ponty, now expression must be understood as both “accomplishment and brotherhood” (IL, 96), a shared metastable trajectory that only exists in the many performances of the traces of expression. Merleau-Ponty concludes that painting therefore must be conceived as a single task, and that from the first cave sketches through to both classical and modern painting, there is no question of absolute ruptures, but a trajectory of expressive performances. And yet, unlike the unity presented by the museum, which is a unity from the perspective of survol, the first expressive gestures open a trajectory of painting that contains as metastable all future responses to this call and the “metamorphoses” that result from each expressive taking up. For Malraux, the museum creates this unity of a trajectory, since paintings “oppose” each other, but this fails to recognize how each painting, each expression, weighs upon all others in the metastable field. The trajectory of painting is the one that takes place in the lived world between expressive bodies, and the museum in fact gives a sterilized account of art and offers the viewer a “thieves’ conscience” (IL, 99). The painter, as long as she does not artificially reject her “historical inscription,” exscribes the whole past and the

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whole future of painting with every stylized stroke (IL, 98). The historicity of painting, then, is its metastable structure as a paradoxical trajectory. As Merleau-Ponty writes: This is the historicity that lives in the painter at work when with a single gesture he links the tradition that he carries on and the tradition that he founds. It is the historicity which in one stroke welds him to all which has ever been painted in the world, without him having to leave his place, his time, or his blessed or accursed labor. The historicity of life reconciles paintings by virtue of the fact that each one expresses the whole of existence. (IL, 100)

The artist, through a genius for ambiguity that is neither pure repetition nor pure creation, succeeds in forging “a means of interpreting the world out of everything he lived” (IL, 101). When we return to the painter’s perspective, we can see she takes up her “physical density, personal odyssey, or historical circumstances” into her gesture, they crystallize in such a way that the work is never a “result,” but “always a response to these givens” (IL, 101). As expressive bodies, there is a little of the painter “in every human being” (IL, 101), and this is good, since expression is just what is needed to carry forward the metastable structures of culture. Style, then, is not a set of isolated mechanical movements, but rather a “general motor power of formulation capable of the transpositions” that allow for a shared sense across divergent performances or modalities. The trajectory and intertwining of style is possible thanks to what Merleau-Ponty earlier called habit and the natural power for expression of the body. Style does not belong to the objective world, it is our very way of being in the perceived world, and grasping a style involves taking up the body as a metastable structure of latent possibilities. The style of a work is present not as a set of data, but in its “invisible elements” by which the expressive gesture marks the passing by of a world, without there being any need for an explicit formulation of the “idea” or meaning of the work (IL, 102). Because the style is the invisible of the visible, my body, as an expressive body, is able to gear into the lines of force in this painting or in this book through a creative repetition that joins my personal trajectory to the trajectory of the work’s performances. This “miracle is natural to us, [. . .] it begins with our incarnate life,” and “there is no reason to look for its explanation” either in physical causes or in a “World Spirit which allegedly operates within us without our knowledge” (IL, 103). One need look no further, that is, than the paradoxical logic of embodied expression in just the manner presented throughout Phenomenology of Perception: “As the artist makes his style radiate into the

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very fibers of the material he is working on, I move my body without even knowing which muscles and nerve paths should intervene, nor where I must look for the instruments of that action” (IL, 103). I need draw nothing from my scientific understanding of the body: “I look at the goal, I am drawn by it, and the bodily apparatus does what must be done” (IL, 103). As such, the body is not a thing; it is what Merleau-Ponty calls the “system of systems” destined to gear into the world such that its actions disrupt the “flatness of being” in order to establish there a sense (IL, 103). The body, as the locus of a metastable set of situations, a style, is what defines human experience: “All perception, all action which presupposes it, and in short, every human use of the body is already primordial expression” (IL, 104). He writes: [I]t follows that every gesture is comparable to every other. They all arise from a single syntax. Each is both a beginning and a continuation which, insofar as it is not walled up in its singularity and finished once and for all like an event, points to a continuation or recommencements. Its value exceeds its simple presence, and in this respect it is allied or implicated in advance with all other efforts of expression. (IL, 105)

Merleau-Ponty identifies here the logic of “advent” as the “promise of events” (IL, 106), and this is not to posit a Spirit that holds them all together and directs their unfolding, but rather to identify the common bodily root that ties together all “efforts to express” into a single trajectory with many intertwining strands. As he writes, “it is the expressive operation of the body, begun by the least perception, that develops into painting and art. The field of pictorial meaning has been open since people appeared in the world. The first cave drawing founded a tradition only because it had received one— that of perception” (IL, 107). Thus, the origin of language and all culture is again the natural expressive powers of the body, beginning with perception as expression. From Saussure to Malraux, from silence to speech, Merleau-Ponty has come full circle now to see the paradoxical logic of expression as the very structure of perception itself and all human experience.

Expression and history In concluding “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Merleau-Ponty draws together the themes addressed in this and the previous chapter, and offers an important discussion of the manner in which expression paradoxically brings about and sustains structures that necessarily transcend it, which has become his mature position on the paradoxical logic of

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expression. His analysis in this essay, which emphasizes the trajectory of the history of painting, leads him to consider expression and history more generally, drawing explicit connections to his work on politics. He argues that “transcendence” is no longer the province of a God or a Spirit that hangs above the world as some absolute pensée de survol. Rather, humanity itself becomes the “bearer” of transcendence (IL, 108). In order to work out this understanding, he considers Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which “Hegel rejects judging action by its results alone as well as by its intention alone” since these are two opposite errors that pertain to “abstract understanding,” or as Merleau-Ponty would say, to pensée de survol (IL, 108). For a history that is more than the cumulative actions of transcendental subjects and more than the summation of external accidents, Hegel turns his attention to “the moment when the internal becomes external, that turning or veering by which we merge with others and the world as the world and others merge with us. In other words, action” (IL, 108–9). For Merleau-Ponty, action is expression, and thus his reading of Hegel emphasizes the paradoxical logic of expression by which history can be understood as an open trajectory of sense. Moreover, this analysis of expression establishes the ontological basis for Merleau-Ponty’s earlier phenomenological description of “historical responsibility.” “By action,” he writes, “I make myself responsible for everything; I accept the aid of external accidents just as I accept their betrayals” (IL, 109). Such is the weight of the past and of the milieu into which actions will go and from which they will receive their meaning, and this is why Bukharin, like Oedipus, is guilty in fact if not in intention. Given the ontological structure of human existence between pure repetition and pure creation, no one’s hands are clean. The role of expressive action is not to convey a meaning but to institute a work. The work is evaluated and judged neither by its intentions nor by its consequences, but rather by its genius for taking up the past and gearing into the future that solicits it, that is, by its power or “success in making values become facts” (IL, 109). It is striking here that the exigency of the responsibility that emerges from Merleau-Ponty’s paradoxical logic of expression reveals, again, that all action and expression must be understood as fundamentally communication in the mode of writing: [T]he meaning of the action does not exhaust itself in the situation which has occasioned it, or in some vague judgment of value; the action remains as an exemplary type and will survive in other situations in another form. It opens a field. Sometimes it even institutes a world. In any case, it outlines a future. (IL, 109)

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The traces of expressions go out into the world or into the metastable possibilities of the audience, and weigh upon the future that they make possible and they write a possible future in the metastable equilibriums of all expressive bodies. Hence, the impossible responsibility that we all share for the coexistence that we do not choose and yet that we take up and reshape with each gesture. In short, given the paradoxical logic of expression, all action is writing and all perception is reading. Returning to the theme of transcendence, then, Merleau-Ponty defines Hegelian dialectic as “a movement which itself creates its course and returns to itself, and thus a movement which has no other guide but its own initiative” (IL, 110). In short, the dialectic is precisely what Merleau-Ponty calls “by another name the phenomenon of expression” (IL, 110). The dialectical trajectory, then, is of the same type as the one to be found in the living and evolving history of “the arts and language” (IL, 110). The paradoxical logic of expression, through which each expression is connected to every other one, past and future, in the metastable and transductive movements of culture and gesture, that “brings about the junction of the individual and the universal” (IL, 110). In short, the paradoxical logic of expression is nothing short of metaphysics itself. Expression, as I have argued, happens in the weighty, although it is no simple making public, and this materiality is what makes expression always already communication in the mode of writing. The value of my gestures will be judged by others and by history, “because I painted in the realm of the visible and spoke for those who have ears,” not in order to transmit a message, but to express the world that was taking shape through my very gestures (IL, 110). And the same holds for language. The novelist takes up the spoken language and introduces a “coherent deformation” by rendering visible a human world as the other side of the expressive gesture (IL, 115). The difference between painting and language is not a difference in kind between silence and speech, since both are part of the trajectory of expression. Rather, the only difference is that the arts of language can go farther by offering us an open and endless metastable possibilities oriented toward “truth.” But even language fails, in principle, to accomplish a final institution of a complete truth; only Hegel believes in this “end” to the dialectic as the final stage that contains the truth of all the others (IL, 118). The paradoxical logic of expression reveals that Hegel “is the museum” of philosophy, not the living trajectory of philosophical expression. For Merleau-Ponty, “[t]he meaning of philosophy is the meaning of a genesis. Consequently, it could not possibly be summed up outside of time, and it is still expression” (IL, 119, emphasis added).

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“The Fundamental of All Culture”: Painting, Ontology, Reading

We touch here the most difficult point, that is, the bond between the flesh and the idea, between the visible and the interior armature which it manifests and which it conceals. (VI, 149) “Eye and Mind,” the final essay that Merleau-Ponty would publish in his lifetime, offers a perfect transition between his emerging theory of painting and expression, as discussed in the previous chapter, and the goal of this chapter, which is to demonstrate the ontological significance of the paradoxical logic of expression. As Galen A. Johnson notes, “element, Flesh, chiasm, reversibility, depth, transcendence, and vertical time” are all at stake in this essay (IMP, 35). For Merleau-Ponty, “any theory of painting is a metaphysics” (EM, 132), and with his ontology of painting in hand, we can then turn to his final expressive gestures, the unfinished ontological reflection in The Visible and the Invisible. Moreover, if no “painting completes painting, if no work is itself ever absolutely completed,” then philosophy too must develop an open reflection upon the metastable trajectories of sense exscribed in each gesture, yet exhausted by none, for “each creation changes, alters, clarifies, deepens, confirms, exalts, re-creates, or creates by anticipation all the others” (EM, 149). The painter expresses the world, makes the world exist as visible, and yet is part of the world and the visible paradoxically transcends the painter. Moreover, since even perception is a form of reading, a bodily “gearing into” that takes up the traces of sense in order to reperform them in a gesture between pure repetition and pure creation, this chapter demonstrates that the paradoxical logic of expression is the engine of Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology of the flesh.

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“Eye and Mind” Science and painting Merleau-Ponty begins “Eye and Mind” with a brief engagement with classical concepts. “Science,” he observes, “manipulates things and gives up living in them”; it extracts things from the lived world and sets up models that might serve as “objects-in-general” (EM, 121). To pursue science in this way is “to test out, to operate, to transform” (EM, 121), and the scientist believes he or she discovers the world in itself, even though the world they discover is an artifact of their techniques. Operational thinking drains human knowledge of everything ambiguous and mysterious, sterilizing our experience so as to be fit for the laboratory. Merleau-Ponty worries that the juggernaut of scientific thinking—which ultimately reduces humanity to cybernetic models in a hyper-mechanistic naturalism—is a “nightmare from which there is no awakening” because human beings become the “manipulandum” they think they are (EM, 122). Without an essence to protect humanity from this hostile takeover, the stakes could not be higher: the only hope for humanity is to return to concrete and lived experience, and thus to embrace the logic of expression that makes possible humanity, history, and the cultural world. In short, science, insofar as it becomes a hyper-technical ontology, is another form of pensée de survol, and to avoid its dangers philosophy must return to “the soil of the sensible and humanly modified world such as it is in our lives and for our bodies,” the “body I call mine, this sentinel standing quietly at the command of my words and my acts” (EM, 122). “Art, especially painting,” is what, for Merleau-Ponty, offers this return to “the fabric of brute meaning” (EM, 123), and it does so without any ulterior motive than to allow being itself to shine forth. If the writer’s pen is susceptible to politics, and if the composer’s phrases are limited to expressing the “ebb and flow” of being, the painter’s brush allows being to shine forth in its visibility. Painting is the enduring presentation of the union of expression and perception, of perception become expression and of the expression of perception, the inextricable intertwining of Merleau-Ponty’s two great themes. Thus, the paradoxical logic of expression is the “fundamental of painting, perhaps of all culture” (EM, 123).

Expression as “The Fundamental of All Culture” To approach expression as the fundamental of all culture, Merleau-Ponty examines what it means to exist within metastable structures that are created and sustained by expressive bodies and yet that transcend those bodies.

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His insight is presented through a fundamental structure of reversibility, most clearly articulated in this essay by the notion of visibility. Following Valéry, he emphasizes that painting is accomplished in a worldly gesture, that it is “by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings” (EM, 123). This suggests a first intertwining between vision and movement experienced by the lived body. I move through the world without any explicit calculations, I gear into it through my habitual gestures and modulate with its obstacles. And yet my body is itself visible; it “makes a difference in the visible world” (EM, 124). The expressive body is a part of the milieu that it takes up; it is related to the milieu not through external relations, but through internal motivations. As I move, my world itself evolves according to a transductive logic that takes up the past toward the future; there is thus an “extraordinary overlapping” between my body as a center of motor projects and the visible world. As Merleau-Ponty writes: “Immersed in the visible by his body, the see-er does not appropriate what he sees; he merely approaches it by looking, he opens onto the world” (EM, 124). As an expressive body, the lived body is both in the world and of the world: The enigma derives from the fact that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the “other side” of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself. It is a self [. . .] by confusion, narcissism, inherence [. . .] a self, then, that is caught up in the things, having a front and a back, a past and a future. (EM, 124)

Once the body, as seer and visible, is present in the world, the world itself becomes an expressive trace of a possible vision. Like a text, the world is that which solicits my gaze, or that which only exists as visible insofar as it is the possible other side of a gaze, and yet it transcends every actual look. Perception is expression because it reads the traces of vision in the world, gearing into them in a creative taking up into a new trajectory of visibility that is paradoxically reconfigured with each look in a transductive movement of expression. As Kwant writes, “[s]eeing and touching are really actualizations: the visual field and the field of tangible qualities would not exist without the one who sees and touches” (PhEx, 41). This is not a reading of the preexisting book of Nature, no more than speaking is a translation from a preexisting thought. Reading is a bodily gearing into that takes up the traces in order to reperform them in a gesture between repetition and creation in the open trajectory of sense.

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Continuing to confirm the importance of something like Simondon’s concepts for understanding this deepening logic of expression, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that the intertwining of visibility is a result of the reality of relations: [My body] is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted in its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body. (EM, 125)

As such, this reversibility at the heart of perception provides the ultimate definition of the “natural power for expression” (PhP, 187) that offers for Merleau-Ponty the “fundamental of all culture” (EM, 123) as the first layer of expression that contains, as metastable, all of human culture. Since it is on this side of the pure act of a transcendental mind and on this side of a purely passive empirical recording of sense data, vision is expressive and takes place “where something visible undertakes to see” (EM, 125). As Dufrenne writes, “[v]ision is not devouring, it is mobilizing.”1 Vision does not extract an image of the thing seen from the world, nor does it collapse the distance that allows for visibility itself; vision preserves the “undividedness of the sensing and the sensed” just as the “crystal” carries forward the “original solution” through a transductive logic into the new metastable equilibrium it establishes (EM, 125). Human being is thus irreducible to body or to mind. Rather, A human body is present when, between the see-er and the visible, between touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand a kind of cross-over occurs, when the spark of the sensing/sensible is lit, when the fire starts to burn that will not cease until some accident befalls the body, undoing what no accident would have sufficed to do . . . (EM, 125)

The human body itself, as a power of perception, exscribes the world as the expressive traces of visibility that solicit my gaze as an open set of metastable possibilities to be read in the rich sense of creative repetition.

Visibility and “All the Problems of Painting” “Once this strange system of exchanges is given,” argues Merleau-Ponty, “we find before us all the problems of painting” (EM, 125). The body is an enigma because it is an expressive center of varying trajectories of sense, and

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to capture this Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of “visibility.” Vision comes about in the things, and my body is made of the same “stuff ” as them. I can see because I can gear into the world because my body is part of the world. “Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our bodies and because our bodies welcome them” (EM, 125). This echo is the intentional and gestural structure of communication, and the presence of objects or qualities awakens in my body a “carnal formula of their presence” (EM, 126). Visibility, then, follows the structure of communication, it is found between of the seer and the seen, and this fundamental fact of embodiment is related to painting because “painting celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility” (EM, 127). Something thus comes to pass in the space between the expressing body and the trace of its expressive gesture: The animals painted on the walls of Lascaux are not there in the same way as are the fissures and limestone formations. Nor are they elsewhere. Pushed forward here, held back there, supported by the wall’s mass they use so adroitly, they radiate about the wall without ever breaking their elusive moorings. I would be hard pressed to say where the painting is I am looking at. For I do not look at it as one looks at a thing, fixing it in its place. My gaze wanders within it as in the halos of Being. Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it. (EM, 126)

In the painting, the “animals” are not strictly speaking there; I do not see them, I see according to them. This is precisely the structure of reading, a gearing into the expressive traces of another person’s gestures, thinking according to an other, which is the very structure of vision made explicit in painting because the object seen no longer demands an epistemic attitude from the seer. The “seen” is neither out there as an indifferent mass of materials, nor is it inside my mind as a representation. The animals are there when my real body gears into the weight of the expressive traces it discovers on the wall, not insofar as it discovers their “signification,” but insofar as it catches on to the style and sense of the gestures that passed by and the world that they sought to turn into painting. Visibility is possible because the world has become the “other side” of my power of looking, and painting is not about “images” insofar as this is understood as a copy or likeness, but rather about images as they offer to my gaze the bygone traces of another vision, “from the inside, in order that [my gaze] may espouse them” (EM, 126), gear into them in order to creatively take them up into my world and my trajectory, playing out a metastable possibility that I carried forward into this situation but that I paradoxically could not have brought about on my own without

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these traces to read. “[O]ur fleshly eyes are already much more than receptors for light rays, colors, and lines” (EM, 127), they are expressive organs that open to a world and creatively respond such that it can become visible. My eyes have “the gift of the visible,” not through some eternal gift giver, but because they have earned the visible “through exercise” and training, by carrying forward the weight of their past and their configuration into the expressive gesture of seeing as reading. The paradoxical logic of expression shows, then, that the fundamental structure of visibility is just that of communication as gearing into, as reading. Painting is privileged because it makes explicit the role of visibility. The painter’s gaze becomes a new organ of expression, now cultivating the gift of seeing the world and seeing “what it would need to be painting,” of seeing the colors on the palette as what is “awaited by the painting,” and of seeing the painting itself as what answers the solicitation of the task of making this moment of the world into painting. Such is the fundamental structure of all painting—painting is the expression of visibility. Painting reveals that, from within the metastable structures of all experience, everything is “complete though only partial,” since all that remains invisible must paradoxically “somehow become visible in order to enter into the work of art” (EM, 127). As Silverman writes, “[t]he unity of beings is the unity that philosophy seeks to know, but which it can know only by experiencing them in their spatiality and visibility.”2 The tactile, the cultural, the audience, and the past are all “visible” in the work as the invisible lining of its expressive structure; vision “opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye dwells in this texture as a man in a house” (EM, 127). All of this is accomplished by the “eyes,” not by a “mind,” and the visible is the other side of a concrete act of reading that we call “perception.” Cézanne interrogates Mont Saint Victoire with his gaze, but what “does he ask of it” (EM, 128)? The painter’s gaze seeks the means by which the mountain is a mountain and is this particular mountain; it gears into the structures of the visible that normally remain invisible so that this thing might appear, such as “[l]ight, lighting, shadows, reflections, color” (EM, 128). The “visible in the profane sense forgets its premises; it rests upon a total visibility” that the painter’s gaze gears into in order to discover the sense of the object, just as the gaze discovers in the object its own nascent actions that rise up toward it before the object is even thematized. This is, however, not an interrogation in the sense of a “schoolmaster’s question.” In vision, the one who interrogates does not possess the answers in advance. The seer and the seen are not two diametrical opposites; they intertwine on this side of the dichotomies of classical thought, they enter into a transductive dialogue

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or communication that will leave neither one the same. In seeing and in painting, activity and passivity are “so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between who sees and who is seen, who paints and what is painted” (EM, 129). Painting, then, does not explain or signify ontology, it paints or expresses ontology, and this can be seen through the role of the mirror in painting, and the mirror has a privileged role in revealing the structure of the visible/ invisible as painted. A mirror is a place of folding back, of intertwining, of chiasm. It thus “anticipates [. . .] the labor of vision” (EM, 129). Taking up a technical object involves an intertwining between passivity and activity, “illustrating and amplifying the metaphysical structure of our flesh” (EM, 129); the mirror is demonstrative of this intertwining, making explicit the folding back of the seeing body and the body seen. Thus, the “mirror” is the paradigm of the expressive intertwining that happens like a “universal magic” thanks to the open register of my life gearing into that which it sustains and yet which simultaneously transcends it, an “absolute vision” that only exists in the manner of a language, underpinning every expressive act yet fully contained in none of them. “Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible—painting scrambles all our categories, spreading out before us its oneiric universe of carnal essences, actualized resemblances, mute meanings” (EM, 130).

Reversibility versus the pensée de survol How crystal clear everything would be in our philosophy if only we could exorcise these specters, make illusions or objectless perceptions out of them, brush them to one side of an unequivocal world. (EM, 130)

By returning to Descartes’s Dioptrics at the center of “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty solidifies his critique of classical presuppositions with regard to expression, since Descartes refuses “to abide in the visible and so decides to reconstruct it” from above, and offers an illustration of the failure of a pensée de survol (EM, 130). Rather than explore the light we see in lived experience, vision becomes a “thinking that unequivocally decodes signs given within the body” (EM, 132). Descartes reveals less about vision than elucidates “the fact that every theory of painting is a metaphysics” (EM, 132). In contrast to Descartes’s privileging of the line as a means of representation, Merleau-Ponty suggests that the intertwining that occurs in vision between the aspects of the field (line, color, depth, quality) demonstrates that vision is a “deeper opening upon things” and that in vision there is a “broader ontological power” at work (EM, 133).3 “I see depth and yet it is not visible,

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since it is reckoned from our bodies to things,” but this is impossible without a new ontology of a “single dimensionality, a polymorphous Being, which justifies all [ontologies] without being fully expressed by any of them” (EM, 134). This polymorphous Being is the metastable pre-individual expressed and carried forward in each gesture, yet fully possessed by none, and requires ontology that makes room for “latency and depth,” for “real thickness” (EM, 135). Painters were correct to pursue perspective as expressing one manner of living the world, but they were wrong to erect it into the truth of Being itself, which contains an ambiguity to which “no technique of perspective is an exact solution” (EM, 135). “The language of painting is never ‘instituted by Nature’; rather, it must be made and remade” (EM, 135). Nature is not waiting in the shadows to be discovered, it is waiting as an expressive trace to be read.4

Ontology as the sense of painting Thus, the “entire history of painting,” writes Merleau-Ponty, has “a metaphysical significance.” But there can be no “demonstration” of this metaphysics because the “metaphysics we have in mind is not a separate body of ideas,” it is a metaphysics born in the “flesh of contingency” through the paradoxical logic of expression (EM, 139). An “event,” he argues, remains open to a persistent and evolving plurality of interpretations, and its sense is the trajectory that unites them all but which no one can fully exhaust. For instance, “everything that may have been said and will be said about the French Revolution has always been and will henceforth be within it, in that wave arising from a roil of discrete facts, with its froth of the past and its crest of the future” (EM, 139). As each moment or each interpretation arrives, the event transforms through a coherent deformation that alters it by taking it up in order that the event changes “only into itself ” (EM, 139). This logic of expression or of “advent” holds for works of art. Merleau-Ponty offers not “the history” of art or expression, but a history through contact that gears into the legitimate possibilities of painting insofar as they speak to the philosopher and suggest a nonclassical ontology through “the invisible dimensions that art sets to work in the visible” (EXR, 200) and which call for a reading of painting as the illustration of ontology. For instance, depth has remained an open question in painting. Despite the Renaissance techniques and the philosophy of Dioptrics, Cézanne and others can still seek depth. Vision shows but does not explain how “I see things, each one in its place” (EM, 140). Things are an intertwining of autonomy and dependence, and depth is lived as “the experience of the reversibility of dimensions”; painting illustrates that “we must seek space and its content

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together” (EM, 141), and thus depth becomes inextricably intertwined with all of the secondary qualities. Color weighs on vision as the “dimension which creates—from itself to itself—identities, differences, a texture, a materiality, a something” (EM, 141). Color is not an objective quality of being in itself, at least no more than is depth; rather, it offers “traces of vision” that will draw the gaze into the very sense of the object. Just like depth, color asks to be read, which initiates the paradoxical “coming-to-itself of the visible” (EM, 141). I do not see the things in spite of their fleeting qualities, I perceive by means of them: “If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were without that flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles [at the bottom of a pool], then I would cease to see it as it is and where it is” (EM, 142). Merleau-Ponty calls this the “inner animation” or “radiation” of the visible, which is a metastable structure that is more than a unity in the thickness of the world. Painting establishes, then, “a system of equivalences, a Logos of lines, of lighting, of colors, of reliefs, of masses—a nonconceptual presentation of universal Being” (EM, 142). In short, painting exscribes being as the pre-individual, the preexpressed expressivity, or the preuttered metaphoricity of the ontology of intertwining and expression. Expression responds to this Logos, and yet because expression is within this Logos, it can never present it more than through the invisible of the visible gesture; that is, Being is the silent presence of everything that weighs upon each spoken word or gesture. Expression is the absurd effort to speak a fundamental silence that demands a response that will, nevertheless, forever remain inadequate to its fullness. Or again, painting contests the prosaic understanding of the “line” as simply the outline of an object. Objects are not bounded by lines, lines are border regions that do not belong to either object; “they are indicated, implicated, and even very imperiously demanded by the things, but they themselves are not things” (EM, 143). And yet so long as painting does not take up “line” as if offering a truth of the object as viewed by a pensée de survol, the line can offer the gaze possibilities not for representing objects, but for generating them (such as for Klee or Matisse). The line, according to Merleau-Ponty, follows a transductive logic of expression: The beginning of the line’s path establishes or installs a certain level or mode of the linear, a certain manner for the line to be and to make itself a line, “to go line.” Relative to it, every subsequent inflection will have a diacritical value, will be another aspect of the line’s relationship to itself, will form an adventure, a history, a meaning of the line. (EM, 143)

The complexity of the metastable structures of an expressive body cannot be captured by a single line, but instead by a network of lines of force that

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run out to the milieu and back, as dimensions of “visibility.” Whether it appears in representational or nonrepresentational contexts, the line is “a certain disequilibrium contrived within the indifference of the white paper; it is a certain hollow opened up within the in-itself, a certain constitutive emptiness” (EM, 144), the expressive center of a network of eloquent though silent possibilities. This ontology of expression also suggests that movement cannot be reduced to simple displacement. In expression, movement is not given by the representation of several discrete instants, in a “Zenonian reverie,” but through an image that portrays the body in a gesture across space and time, introducing “fictive linkages” from which “transition and duration” spring forth from the canvas or bronze. This “paradoxical arrangement” captures a disequilibrium at work and allows a fixed presentation to express the sense of movement. Thus, even though the painting or sculpture shows a body in an position it never had, it is the photograph that “lies” because the photograph denies the fundamental fact that time never stops and that no instant is sealed off from the weight of the past or the orientation toward the future, that “[a]ll flesh, and even that of the world, radiates beyond itself ” (EM, 145). Merleau-Ponty concludes that this all comes down to a certain excess contained in “that little word ‘see’” (EM, 146). Alluding to a previous definition of “time,” he writes: “seeing is the means given me for being absent from myself, for being present from within at the fission of Being only at the end of which do I close up into myself ” (EM, 146). In short, it is the “eye,” not the mind, which accomplishes through the paradoxical logic of expression the opening up or the spacing through which the world and Being itself are exscribed. As Merleau-Ponty writes, Every visual something, as individual as it is, functions also as a dimension, because it is given as the result of a dehiscence of Being. What this ultimately means is that the hallmark of the visible is to have a lining of invisibility in the strict sense, which it makes present as a certain absence. (EM, 147)

“Through vision,” then, “the painter touches both extremities” (EM, 147), by which he means the weight of passivities and the freedom of activities, and thus the painter captures in paint the paradoxical logic of expression itself. There is “no break” in the circuit between the body and the world, and it “is impossible to say that here nature ends and the human being or expression begins” (EM, 147). What occurs, writes Merleau-Ponty, is that “silent Being [. . .] itself comes to show forth its own meaning” (EM, 147). Painting, then,

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does not give voice to a “silent” personal experience; it exscribes Being as the invisible at the heart of the visible.

Painting and historicity If the ontology of visibility contains “all the problems of painting” (EM, 125), then Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of painting reveals in turn that the “problems of painting”—“depth, color, form, line, movement, contour, physiognomy”—themselves intertwine in the metastable structure of visibility itself. Moreover, painting carries forward its past, and every painting gesture finds itself on a trajectory of sense. A painter may return to a texture or a technique that had merely been alluded to on a previous canvas, her own or another’s, offering at once a repetition and a transductive creation—this time “making it, of course, speak differently” (EM, 148). Every expression calls forth further adventures, and “expressing what exists is an endless task” (CD, 66). For painters, the world will always remain “yet to be painted” and, like the trajectory of a life, painting will only come to an end through some external accident. There is, then, a “hidden historicity” to the trajectory of painting, which advances “through the labyrinth by detours, transgression, slow encroachments and sudden drives” (EM, 148–9). Because we begin from within the metastable structures of experience, “we are never in a position to take stock of everything objectively or to think of progress in itself ” (EM, 149). To lament this failure, however, is to mourn nothing other than the death of an illusion of classical philosophy. Philosophy is faced with the task of coming to terms with the fact that “the soil beneath our feet is shifting,” of developing a form of reflection in the mode of “interrogation,” and of grasping how Being is precisely “that which never fully is” (EM, 149). These are the tasks that motivate Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished ontological reflection, The Visible and the Invisible.

Philosophical interrogation: Expressing The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty’s posthumously published project, The Visible and the Invisible, is a tragic text. Interrupted by his sudden death on May 3, 1961, it remains forever in a nascent state, a fragmentary trace of his final expressive gestures.5 The text that remains presents Merleau-Ponty’s approach to a new form of philosophical reflection, contrasted with the philosophies of reflection, dialectic, and intuition, as well as a sketch of the ontology of intertwining

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and flesh that continues the work of “Eye and Mind.” He was developing a philosophy up to the task of expressing an open and indirect ontology in the face of the inherent incompleteness of expression, a philosophy that attempts to state Being without closing down or fixing it, and without laying claim to the entire field of truth, that is, a philosophy that is nothing short of a performance of responsibility itself.

Perceptual faith and expression “We see the things themselves, the world is what we see” (VI, 3). With these words, Merleau-Ponty begins an interrogative reflection upon what he calls the “perceptual faith,” the commitment to the world we see as existing in itself. The perceptual faith is the deep expression of our being in the world, and yet the attempt to express it leads into a “labyrinth of difficulties and contradictions” (VI, 3). “Ceaselessly the philosopher finds himself obliged to reinspect and redefine the most well-grounded notions, to create new ones, with new words to designate them, to undertake a true reform of the understanding” (VI, 3). The philosopher must remain open to interrogation because his or her perspective is necessarily from within the metastable structures of existence, and no expression will exhaust this pre-individual fund that is nevertheless sustained and exscribed in every gesture. Standing before the world, the philosopher does not encounter simply a difficult “technical” problem of translating what is seen (in silence) into something said; he or she “does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see” (VI, 4). Philosophy does not signify the world, it expresses the world. Rather than a mute and personal experience, philosophy is the attempt to draw “the things themselves [. . .] from the depths of their silence” and into expression (VI, 4). The value of a philosophy is determined by its ability to gear into the open and metastable structures of Being without thereby making a claim to reveal Being itself, that is, according to its ability to always express so as to solicit more expression. Thus, philosophy, properly practiced, is an open and dynamic interrogation of the metastable Being exscribed in every inscription—philosophy, like perception and every expression, is a manner of reading. As Merleau-Ponty writes: [Interrogation] is for philosophy the only way to conform itself with the vision we have in fact, to correspond with what, in that vision, provides for thought, with the paradoxes of which that vision is made, the only way to adjust itself to those figured enigmas, the thing and the world, whose massive being and truth teem with incompossible details. (VI, 4)

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The enigma of the world is continuously renewed in the philosopher’s lived experience. Philosophical interrogation properly conceived gears into the teeming metastable field of Being through expression, and finds there nothing other than the worldly and ideal structures that paradoxically weigh upon our every experience and yet are sustained and shaped by our gestures.

Expression as “hyper-reflection” In the first chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty considers a classical mode of philosophizing represented, for the most part, in the work of Descartes and the Husserl of transcendental phenomenology. By positing a distinction between the world and the subjective representation of the world, the philosophies of “reflection” are haunted by the specter of skepticism. Rather than attempting to bridge this gap, Merleau-Ponty returns to lived experience, citing the example of seeing a binocular image which cannot be reduced to the sum of two monocular ones. The image is not the result of a “synthesis,” but rather of a “metamorphosis,” since prior to the appearance of the thing there are no isolated images that are subsequently added together, there are rather some “floating pre-things” (VI, 8)—that is, some metastable possibilities that may (or may not) crystallize into a single visual image. From the vague fever that sets the gaze to work, my eyes gear into the object by means of a transductive leap, resulting in the “miracle of a totality that surpasses its parts,” a bodily act that gathers them together in order to displace them with a new sense (VI, 8). As a result of this example, vision, which was the seemingly most secure evidence for the philosophy of reflection, appears as already contaminated by the paradoxical logic of embodied expression. Lived experience is the simultaneous “absolute proximity” and “irremediable distance” of perception, it holds on to both ends of the chain (VI, 8). Between the touching hand and the hand touched there is a gap or spacing, and “the moment I feel my left hand with my right hand, I correspondingly cease touching my right hand with my left hand” (VI, 8). And yet, despite its empirical impossibility, the touching of the touching remains a real weight in the field of experience, and this is precisely the structural failure in expression: the presentiment or “vague fever” that crystallizes in the expression fails to complete its task of expressing being. The unremitting demand for expression is the insatiable desire sparked the “moment I open my eyes” (VI, 3), that is, the moment there is the spacing out and sharing of empiétement. This structure of reversibility is found again in the relation with others, who “present us with but an amplification of the same paradox” (VI, 9). I have the presentiment of entering his or her world when I catch on to

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the sense of their gesture, or when I hear their response respond “too well” (VI, 11) to my query. Nevertheless, I rejoin this other life “only in its ends, through its exterior poles. It is in the world that we communicate” (VI, 11). In a world of expressive bodies, even the objects of nature become the traces of visions to be read, seen by a “generalized life” that subtends my own as my natural power for expressive perception. The presence of the other “does not resolve the internal paradox of my perception: it adds to it this other enigma: of the propagation of my own most secret life in another—another enigma, but yet the same one, since, from all the evidence, it is only through the world that I can leave myself ” (VI, 11). As a result, philosophy cannot ignore the perceptual world in favor of the “exigencies of the intrinsic analysis,” and must rather “put to itself the problem of the genesis of its own meaning” (VI, 12). The world itself is singular, and yet it sustains the community as its participating witnesses, a learned and reading audience:6 [I]t is the same world that contains our bodies and our minds, provided we understand by world not only the sum of things that fall or could fall under our eyes, but also the locus of their compossibility, the invariable style they observe, which connects our perspectives, permits transition from one to the other, [. . .] and makes us feel we are two witnesses. (VI, 13)

The visible is thus always subtended by a mass of invisibles, and yet reaching the invisible is not to leave behind the visible. As Silverman writes, “[s]tyle is visibility without either identity or difference” (MPIL, 171). Through the genius for the invisible, there is a community of humans in expressive communication in the process of finding some means of living together.7 In short, to follow Simondon, the shared world is accomplished through the metastable trajectories of individuation. As Merleau-Ponty writes: For after all each [human] has begun by being a fragile mass of living jelly, and it is already a great deal that they would have taken the same route of ontogenesis; it is still more of a wonder that all, from the bottom of their retreats, would have let themselves be caught up by the same social functioning and the same language; [. . . but when it comes to what they say], neither the type of species nor that of the society guarantees that they should come to compatible propositions. (VI, 14)

Given the genesis of sense in the trajectory of so many lives, gearing into the world and language together through expressive gestures, given this “mass of contingencies,” it would be impossible to conclude—as must the philosophy

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of reflection—that it will all lead to a “final” truth “without fissures and without incompossibles” (VI, 14). The philosophy of reflection, however, is “true in what it denies,” namely, “the exterior relation between a world in itself and myself, conceived as a process of the same type as those that unfold within the world” (VI, 32). It is false insofar as its positive account fails to think according to the “natal bond” between the perceiver and the world. The philosophy of reflection, then, has a problem expressing itself because it assumes the philosopher is outside of the movement of expression itself and speaking (at least ideally) an unequivocal language. For Merleau-Ponty, alluding again to Marcel, philosophy “is the set of questions wherein he who questions is himself implicated by the question” (VI, 27). Our “opening upon the world” is lost “the moment that the reflective effort tries to capture it” (VI, 35). For philosophy to be “interrogation,” there would have to be a sort of “hyper-reflection” that takes “itself and the changes it introduces into the spectacle into account” (VI, 39).8 Philosophy would have to “plunge into the world instead of surveying it, [. . .] it must make it say, finally, what in its silence it means to say . . .” (VI, 39). In other words, philosophical interrogation as expression is both responsive and creative, and “motivated by the intertwining of my life with the other lives, of my body with the visible thing” (VI, 49).

Expression as “hyper-dialectic” Sartre’s philosophy weighs heavily upon Merleau-Ponty’s late work. Merleau-Ponty’s implicit critique of Sartre in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” was aimed at his maintenance of the classical categories of subjective and objective in What is Literature?, and his critique of The Communists and Peace in Adventures of the Dialectic focused on Sartre’s failure to embrace the weight of history in action. His most sustained critique of Sartre’s existential logic in Being and Nothingness is found in the second chapter of The Visible and the Invisible. In this confrontation with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty offers his most striking development of his previous claim that Hegel’s dialectic is what he calls “by another name the phenomenon of expression” (IL, 110), and he introduces a concept of “hyper-dialectic” as a goal for genuine philosophical practice. Much of his chapter is in fact devoted to the importance of introducing “the negative” into philosophy. Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the philosophy of reflection amounts to a critique of the positivity of consciousness—the positing of a mind that is prior to the experience of perception, whereas in lived perception “the conclusion comes before the reasons” (VI, 50). The philosophy of reflection, locked up within the mind, fails to include the

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openness to the world that makes experience possible, and there must in fact be, prior to reflection itself, a “naïve frequenting of the world,” an alienated Self, an ek-static self, outside of its self in the world, for reflection to even be possible (VI, 51). If the world is simply whatever is, what remains whole in itself, “absolutely foreign to all interiority,” then the “pre-reflective zone of the openness upon Being” must itself be pure nothingness and radically empty (VI, 51). It was Sartre who saw that it was “necessary to empty the Being-subject of all the phantoms with which philosophy has encumbered it,” and he sets phenomenology the task of describing subjectivity as the absolutely empty “capacity for receiving the plenitude of the world” (VI, 52). And yet, beginning from the concept of negation rather than the experience of negativity, Sartre’s philosophy posits a radical break between Being and Nothingness. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “[f]rom the moment that I conceive of myself as negativity and the world as positivity, there is no longer any interaction [. . .] since it is Being and I am nothing” (VI, 52). There can be no “intuition” of the negative, so there must be a “negintuition of nothingness” that senses our essential nothingness without thereby turning it into a “thing.” Nothingness is the supplement of Being, “a fissure that deepens in the exact measure that it is filled” (VI, 53). Despite its philosophical value, such a philosophy of absolute negativity in relation to absolute positivity remains, for Merleau-Ponty, a disguised “philosophy of Being,” and as such is faced with “all the problems of classical philosophy” (VI, 54, 55). Merleau-Ponty suggests that a “truly negativist philosophy” would have to account for how the world I see is also the same world others see. The presence of another person disrupts the purity of the relation between my self as Nothingness and the world as Being. “The other’s gaze on the things is a second openness [. . . and] the possibility of a divergence” (VI, 59). The other, like my own Nothingness, appears through a negintuition that weighs upon me, as the “reverse of being” (VI, 59). For Merleau-Ponty, I am never a “pure” openness, because I am forever situated in the world, I am of the world to which I am open. My “negintuition” captures more than my own Nothingness; “my perception of the world feels it has an exterior; I feel at the surface of my visible being that my volubility dies away, that I become flesh” (VI, 61). Negintuition, as experience, reveals “private worlds without shutting us up in them,” and the philosophy of negation must offer an understanding of how there can be several points of entry to a world that no single perspective encompasses (VI, 62). As Merleau-Ponty writes, “[e]verything really does come down to a matter of thinking the negative rigorously” (VI, 63), for there is certainly negativity if not absolute negation. The contact with Being and Nothingness is lost when the philosophy of the negative is pursued abstractly,

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making itself the tacit acceptance of an “absolute positivism” while positing “lakes of non-being” (VI, 65). For Merleau-Ponty, the movements by which being invokes the negative and by which the negative invokes being are not coincident; rather, they “cross” in the thickness of the concrete and lived world of experience (VI, 66). Since this philosophy presents itself as a phenomenology of perception, Merleau-Ponty considers again the nature of vision in order to demonstrate his distance from Sartre. Perception is our “fundamental contact with Being,” and thus vision offers an illustration of the intertwining, rather than the opposition, of Being and Nothingness. Describing vision according to the paradoxical logic of expression, he emphasizes that vision takes me to the world itself, and yet “the parts of that world evidently do not coexist without me” (VI, 75). For Merleau-Ponty, the movement from vision to the world and back cannot be understood as “two distinct operations,” whereas the philosophy of negation takes the two movements as pure and distinct opposites. Vision is not a pure nothingness, it is an operative nothingness in the heart of the visible world, both a “ubiquitous presence to the world” and yet “irremediably distinct from what it sees” (VI, 76). As he writes, “the relation between what I see and I who see is not one of immediate or frontal contradiction; the things attract my look, my gaze caresses the things, it espouses their contours and their reliefs, between it and them we catch sight of a complicity” (VI, 76). And if I am not a pure negativity, Being can no longer be a pure positivity; rather, now following Simondon, we can say that Being is the metastable: “The negations, the perspective deformations, the possibilities, which I have learned to consider as extrinsic denominations, I must now integrate into Being” (VI, 77). Our openness to being must, for Merleau-Ponty, be understood in light of the fundamental structures of our access to the world, which include the opacity and the depth of embodied experience. To install philosophy in “pure vision,” then, is the Cartesian mistake of a pensée de survol. Our life does not take place between the reified structures of the In-Itself and the For-Itself, but rather “every relation between me and Being, even vision, even speech, is [.  .  .] a carnal relation, with the flesh of the world” (VI, 83–4). Being is present only on the horizons of experience, as the surplus of each word, action, and gesture, and also “between them all,” since being is that “cohesion which cannot be denied them since they are all differences, extreme divergences of one same something” (VI, 84). Thus, “the openness upon a natural and historical world is not an illusion and is not an a priori; it is our involvement in Being” (VI, 85). “Thought,” concludes Merleau-Ponty, “is too much closed in upon itself, but nothingness is too much outside of itself for one to be able to speak of openness upon being” (VI, 89).

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And yet, Merleau-Ponty suggests that dialectical thinking can embrace “reciprocal actions and interactions,” excess relations between terms, and “many points of view logically incompossible and yet really united within it” (VI, 89). This Simondonian dialectic, as a moving and metastable equilibrium, must not be surveyed from above; it must be perceived from within and thus accomplished as expression. As Merleau-Ponty writes: In this transition, the stages passed through are not simply passed, like the segment of the road I have traveled; they have called for or required the present stages and precisely what is new and disconcerting in them. The past stages continue therefore to be in the present stages—which also means that they are retroactively modified by them. Hence there is a question here not of a thought that follows a pre-established route but of a thought that itself traces its own course, that finds itself by advancing, that makes its own way, and thus proves that the way is practicable. (VI, 90)

Thus, properly understood—and precisely because it embraces the metastable structures of expression and the weight of the past and the trajectory of performances—the dialectic is just what Merleau-Ponty “has been looking for” (VI, 92). As he writes in a description that could equally apply to the metastable, “the dialectic is [. . .] essentially and by definition unstable, so that it has never been able to formulate itself into theses without denaturing itself, and because if one wishes to maintain its spirit it is perhaps necessary to not even name it” (VI, 92). Just as the metaphor is lost when it is spoken of rather than simply spoken or read, the dialectic screeches to a halt when one “speaks of it rather than practicing it” (VI, 93). This “bad dialectic” is the one that, “against its own principles, imposes an external law and framework upon the content” (VI, 94). The only “good dialectic” is a “hyper-dialectic,” a “dialectic without synthesis” (VI, 95). In short, the good dialectic is the one that takes up the endless task of expressing what exists without thereby establishing itself as a new positivity. Each stage is surely a “surpassing,” but in “thought and in history as in life the only surpassings we know are concrete, partial, encumbered with survivals, saddled with deficits; there is no surpassing in all regards” (VI, 95). As Merleau-Ponty writes: “the task was to describe strictly our relation to the world not as an openness of nothingness upon being, but simply as openness” (VI, 99). Philosophy thereby “remains a question, it interrogates the world and the thing, it revives, repeats, or imitates their crystallization before us. For this crystallization which is partly given to us ready-made is in other respects never terminated” (VI, 100). In short, philosophy must struggle to remain an open expression that embraces a transductive “logic in

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action” (VI, 100). The role of philosophy is to articulate a form of reflection that sustains the astonishment and wonder of a being in the world that interrogates that world as well as interrogates himself or herself. In short, “philosophy is the perceptual faith questioning itself about itself [. . .] in a continuous interrogation” (VI, 103).

Philosophy as expression As a “continuous interrogation,” philosophy does not raise its questions from a perspective of survol, nor are its questions the kind that, like in geometry, would step by step lead to a secure conclusion. “The questions,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “are within our life, within our history: they are born there, they die there, if they have found a response, more often than not they are transformed there; in any case, it is a past of experience and of knowledge that one day ends up at this open wondering” (VI, 105). Remaining committed, then, to Marcel’s distinction between problems and mysteries, Merleau-Ponty understands philosophy as a radical questioning that puts the context and the questioner into question. The history of philosophical questioning reveals a shift from a generalization of doubt about the existence of the object (an sit) to a questioning of what the world or the object are (quid sit), which leads inward toward the object’s meaningful presentation in thought and leaves aside the question of its existence in itself. Yet the question remains: “With the essence and the pure spectator who sees it, are we really at the source?” (VI, 109). The approach through essences is itself based upon a preknowledge of the world that the essences attempt to circumscribe. “This knowing is beneath the essence,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “it is the experience of which the essence is a part and which it does not envelop” (VI, 109). Thus, experience stretches out beneath essences, and the essences cannot be primary. Only in the world itself can a community of expressive bodies take up a certain style of Being or of experience in general, and this requires gearing into Being or the one sole world without thereby “possessing” it. In short, philosophy must follow our intercorporeal being by opening to the single world through its necessarily partial gestures of expression, and only through expression is this pre-Being and underlying experience exscribed. Prior to becoming the “pure spectator” of transcendental philosophy, I am first a metastable “field of experience” (VI, 110). Beginning from this experience, philosophy will never discover a set of pure essences, since every idea “is formed in a space of existence, under the guarantee of my duration” (VI, 111). For Merleau-Ponty, the attempt to think according to essences necessarily sustains the distinction between fact and essence, which is denied

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by our experience. Only the “pure gaze” of a pensée de survol could accept the distinction between fact and essence, and I am not this pure gaze, but rather a human gaze from within the world (VI, 113). He attempts to remove this distinction with his own form of ontological interrogation that does not freeze the enigmas and movement of experience. In lived experience, we accomplish the relation between inherence and transcendence: “[t]he visible can thus fill me and occupy me only because I who see it do not see it from the depths of nothingness, but from the midst of itself; I the seer am also visible” (VI, 113). The visible present, then, brings with it “this immense latent content of the past, the future, and the elsewhere, which it announces and which it conceals,” that is, which it exscribes (VI, 114). In this ontology of intertwining, fact and essence are not opposites: “the alleged facts, the spatio-temporal individuals, are from the first mounted on the axes, the pivots, the dimensions, the generality of my body, and the ideas are therefore already encrusted in its joints” (VI, 114). Ontology must begin with our placement within the metastable structures of experience that our expressive gestures sustain insofar as they exscribe. For Merleau-Ponty, there is no essence and no idea “that does not adhere to a domain of history and of geography,” and yet the sense of each one is not simply “confined” in these domains (VI, 115). The essences are never pure, nor are they ever beyond the facts in some separate realm: “thoughts that feel behind themselves the weight of the space, the time, the very Being they think [. . .] have about themselves a time and a space that exist by piling up, by proliferation, by encroachment, by promiscuity—a perpetual pregnancy” (VI, 115). This intertwining of fact and essence is the “fabric of our life,” and philosophy must explore the dehiscence of Being through the lived body. Invoking the structures of speech and language, Merleau-Ponty suggests that in speaking, the speaker “speaks with all he is, with his ‘ideas,’ but also with his obsessions, his secret history which others suddenly lay bare by formulating them as ideas. Life becomes ideas and the ideas return to life” (VI, 119). Ideas begin within the world as the “texture of experience, its style, first mute, then uttered” (VI, 119). The paradoxical logic of expression is the principle for an ontology because expression happens nowhere other than within the “thickness of being” and yet is not “contained” there; expression reveals the reversibility between the real and the ideal that is made possible through the expressive bodies that sustain the paradoxical chiasm between the two. Philosophical interrogation, then, cannot be a search for essences, since this would again presuppose the possibility of being the pure nothingness of a pure gaze, and this fails to reach the ground of “wild Being,” where fact and essence were and continue to be “undivided” (VI, 121). But if intuition ought

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not seek after essences, is it then (following Bergson) to pursue a “return to the immediate, to coincidence, the effective fusion with the existent, the search for an original integrity, for a secret lost and to be rediscovered?” (VI, 122) For Merleau-Ponty, the call to lived experience is not a return to this type of immediate coincidence, since to bring the self into fusion with the object is to negate the distance that makes experience itself possible. If consciousness becomes pure perception, a true coinciding of my gaze with the perceived in itself, then my perception is extinguished; if it becomes pure memory, a true becoming again of the preserved past, then memory is no longer an openness to the past. Following the logic of expression, the past must be inscribed as the invisible weight of the visible, and coincidence must only ever be “partial” (VI, 122). For Merleau-Ponty, the “immediate” is forever on the “horizon,” and implies at once a proximity and a distance. My gaze feels the weight of the immediacy of the thing, but it does not coincide with it; rather “because our flesh lines and even envelops all the visible and tangible things with which nevertheless it is surrounded, the world and I are within one another, [. . .] [f]or the weight of the natural world is already a weight of the past” (VI, 123). What is immediate is the sensed richness of reversibility, a flesh “pregnant with many other visions besides my own” (VI, 123), but this richness weighs upon the present as a metastable, not a real structure. In experience, writes Merleau-Ponty, [w]hat is given, then, is not the naked thing, the past itself such as it was in its own time, but rather the thing ready to be seen, pregnant—in principle as well as in fact—with all the visions one can have of it, the past such as it was one day plus an inexplicable alteration, a strange distance. (VI, 124)

The question of philosophical interrogation thus becomes, for Merleau-Ponty, a question of expression. As he writes: “It is by considering language that we would best see how we are to and how we are not to return to the things themselves” (VI, 125). If language is considered on the classical model, then philosophers would be advised to “coincide in silence,” and the work of philosophy is a hopelessly “absurd effort” (VI, 125). But there is a sense in which language is a way of taking up the metastable structures of experience rather than obscuring them, “a manner of making the things themselves speak” (VI, 125). The philosopher’s proper mode of speaking would be “a language of which he would not be the organizer, words he would not assemble, that would combine through him by virtue of a natural intertwining of their meaning” (VI, 125). And in fact, suggests Merleau-Ponty, language in the nascent state suffices, “with all its references, those behind it, which connect

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it to the mute things it interpellates, and those it sends before itself and which make up the world of things said” (VI, 125). Language is our life, he argues, not because our life is locked up in language, but because language is open and “lives only from silence” (VI, 126). Language does not possess everything in advance, it is not a “mask” that one can lay over Being; rather, language is the metastable trajectory that is exscribed with every inscription. If, argues Merleau-Ponty, “we consider the speaking word, [. . .] then this logos is an absolutely universal theme, it is the theme of philosophy. Philosophy itself is language” (VI, 126). Thus, if philosophy as interrogation is language, this is only in the mode of the paradoxical logic of expression. As Merleau-Ponty concludes, philosophy is “that language that can be known only from within, through its exercise, is open upon the things, called forth by the voices of silence, and continues an effort of articulation which is the Being of every being” (VI, 126–7).

Expressing the intertwining: The flesh as expression In the final chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” Merleau-Ponty offers a fascinating exploration of the ontology that was emerging in “Eye and Mind.” Taking up his new understanding of philosophical reflection as expressive interrogation, he opens with a call to begin philosophy anew from within experiences prior to the distinctions of classical thought: the experiences of “seeing, speaking, even thinking” (VI, 130), with thought being included on this list given the proviso that speaking and thought cannot be absolutely distinguished. For Merleau-Ponty, these experiences are lived as “irrecusable” and yet “enigmatic,” because they allude to regions of experience that cannot be signified, to a metastable silence that overflows every attempt to say what they are. As such, this chapter performs the intertwining between Merleau-Ponty’s new ontology of the flesh and his emerging form of philosophical reflection as interrogative expression.

Vision as inspired exegesis Vision, begins Merleau-Ponty, seems to be born “in the heart of the visible,” and yet what is seen has a certain “intimacy” without thereby passing wholly into the seer. Lived experience is unaware of any absolute distinction between the seer and the seen. Rather, the experience implies a relation much closer to touch, that the gaze “palpates” and “envelops” the things, and yet leaves them in their place (VI, 131). By introducing the language of touch, as M. C. Dillon has argued, Merleau-Ponty avoids the danger of thinking of

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vision as “possessing” an object at a distance (MPO, 157–60). The visible comes to be through the seer’s bodily gesture, and yet it transcends her or him, and thus vision must be a first paradox of expression. As Merleau-Ponty asks: “How does it happen that my look, enveloping them, does not hide them, and, finally, that, veiling them, it unveils them?” (VI, 131) In short, how is vision an expression and an exscription of the visible world? Consider Merleau-Ponty’s striking discussion of seeing a red object. The classical theory of perception follows the classical understanding of language, in that the experienced quale “red” is believed to act in the same way that a “word” enables communication, as “a message at the same time indecipherable and evident, which one has or has not received, but of which, if one has received it, one knows all there is to know” (VI, 131). Equating perceptual experience with the functioning of a pure language, classical thought misses both the experience of perception and the experience of language. Merleau-Ponty here recalls some phenomenological facts of the experience that disrupt this classical picture: to see a red at all involves a certain focusing, and thus a temporal thickness, rather than an immediate and punctual impression; the red’s precise form is not all there with the first quale, but invites my gaze to an open exploration of its texture and its place in the visual field; the character of this red is not sealed off from the other reds or other colors in the field which attract and repel its substance, and which solicit my gaze in evolving ways according to my intention and the transductive trajectory of the exploration itself; or again, this red is this red because of its place in a sprawling network of reds and other non-red though similar objects, all of which weigh upon the seeing of just this red, which is a “punctuation in the field of red things” and, for instance, a “punctuation in the field of red garments” (VI, 132). For Merleau-Ponty, the point is not that a self-same quale can take on several alternative layers of meaning thanks to an interpretive distance in the subject/object relation, but that a thing’s red color “literally is not the same as it appears in one constellation or in the other” (VI, 132). The full definition of this red, or any red, includes our transductive engagement with it and is thus a metastable equilibrium shaped by the weight of the past and of the ideal. In short, seeing this red is an expressive act: If we took all these participations into account, we would recognize that a naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null, but is rather a sort of straights between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, and ephemeral modulation of

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this world—less a color or a thing than [. . .] a momentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility. (VI, 132)

This description of the perceiving of a particular color embraces the structural insights that Merleau-Ponty had taken from Saussure, and emphasizes precisely the experience of being within the metastable and moving equilibriums that are sustained by our expressive activities, including, first and foremost, perception. This unique experience of seeing this red is shaped by the weight of the past reds I have seen and the other reds and colors in the visual field, and this experience reshapes in turn my past experience and the possibilities I have for how I will see future reds. The world of color is a trajectory that I join and sustain simply by seeing, and yet it transcends my gaze and offers the endless solicitation to see more, just as expression sustains language, reshapes it, and yet language (as a metastable whole) transcends every act of expression. The paradoxical logic of expression is precisely the logic of the visible and the invisible, the logic of taking up from within that which the act sustains and yet that which transcends any given act. Turning his attention from the seen color to the seer, Merleau-Ponty again stresses the intimacy of the relation and emphasizes the structures of the paradoxical logic of expression. The gaze does not initially encounter a chaos of data upon which it must cast an organizing judgment; rather, it finds things that it is called to gear into, to the extent that “one cannot say if it is the look or if it is the things that command” (VI, 133). The experience of seeing, thus proceeds as an interrogation guided by the things themselves, what Merleau-Ponty here calls “an inspired exegesis,” that is, an expressive taking up of that which solicits—seeing is a form of reading and the world is a text that solicits exegesis. This intimate relation is paradigmatic of touch, of which, “after all, the palpation of the eye is a remarkable variant” (VI, 133). The hand must gear into the texture that it is going to feel, and thus the very solicitation/gearing into structure of perception discussed Phenomenology of Perception is here repeated as the ontological structure of the lived body possessing an “initiation to and an opening upon a tactile world” (VI, 133). In this final project, Merleau-Ponty stresses that this gearing into as an inspired exegesis “can happen only if my hand [. . . is] itself tangible” (VI, 133), for only then is the lived body a moment in a tangible being of which it is part. There is an intertwining between the touching and the touched that establishes the system of tangibility. This intertwining is “no different for vision” and, to repeat, the simple “delimitation of the senses is crude” (VI, 133). There is an intertwining between touch and vision, for instance, that leaves neither of them self-identical, an intertwining then that is an

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event of expression—every vision sees something with a texture; every touch touches something visible. As Merleau-Ponty writes: We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out in the tangible, every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is encroachment [empiétement], infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible. (VI, 134)

The visible and the tangible weigh upon each other, and our experience already structures its metastable possibilities according to the intertwining that is sensed, though never explicitly thematized, from the fact that visibility and tangibility belong to the same world through my body as a single seeing/ seen and touching/touched expressive and open trajectory. Such is the power of Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of reversibility, for this fundamental structure is what places us within the metastable systems that our gestures bring about and sustain, but that nevertheless transcend us—and this reversibility is not purely passive, but is expressive. Moreover, this structure deepens Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of communication as accomplished by expressive bodies. Things are perceived as more than mere objects; they are rich beings that bring with them a latent content thanks to the thickness of our gaze. Thus, since the things seen are not pure, there is no need to empty out the seer—“the thickness of the flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication” (VI, 135). As a naturally expressive body, my eyes can take up the thing, which itself is “naturally destined to be seen by a body,” just as a text is taken up immediately as to be read (VI, 135). Taking the quale as the sole source of vision would be akin to taking the dictionary’s definition of a word as the sole source of meaning, without any regard for living communication. As Merleau-Ponty writes: What is indefinable in the quale, in the color, is nothing else than a brief, peremptory manner of giving in one sole something, in one sole tone of being, visions past, visions to come, by whole clusters. I who see have my own depth also, being backed up by this same visible which I see and which, I know very well, closes in behind me. (VI, 135)

The encroachments of the dimensions of being occur within the same trajectory, and are expressed in my body and its style as a manner of taking up a place in the flesh. In every taking up there is a massive invisible

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involved—past experiences, horizons of experience, future experiences— and all play into the character of this particular moment of visibility. The paradoxical structures of expression, then, are rediscovered in the very structures of vision and touching, and visibility is not a paradox of man, as in a paradox reducible to the epistemic realm, but “indeed a paradox of Being” (VI, 136). Communication takes place because the body is of the world, seeing and seen, touching and touched, and as such it expressively participates in the tangible and visible. The structure of a “universal flesh” of the world is, then, not a rejection of the gestural theory of meaning worked out in Phenomenology of Perception, it is the outcome of this thought carefully taken up through the deepening account of the paradoxical logic of expression and the experience of intercorporeality. The body as an object of the world, as visible and tangible, and the body as a subject, as seeing and touching, are not two separate layers externally juxtaposed “under the reflective gaze”; they are lived as “the obverse and the reverse” or as “two segments of a single circular” movement (VI, 138). Being in the world itself is forever between freedom and determinism, creation and repetition; in short, being in the world is expression, and hence the fundamental status of the paradoxical logic of expression. Moreover, the world is seen through a “flesh applied to flesh,” the gearing of flesh into the flesh of the world, of a gaze into something to be seen, just as I gear my expressive body into the expressive trace that waits to be read (VI, 138). Like the expressive act of reading, seeing is an “inspired exegesis” that takes up all that I am, past and future, and all that at present weighs upon my gaze, in order to gear into a meaning that is nowhere else than in the outcome of these intertwining trajectories. Perception has the structure of reading, and things are metaphors to be read.

“The emergence of the flesh as expression” From these considerations, Merleau-Ponty concludes that “Visibility” and “Tangibility” are what might be called expressive and metastable structures, since they “belong properly speaking neither to the body qua fact nor to the world qua fact” (VI, 139). As Silverman would say, they are structures of the between, brought about thanks to the spacing accomplished by expressive bodies. The seer is implicated in all that she sees, which Merleau-Ponty calls the “fundamental narcissism” of vision, and yet the seer is also visible for everything else. All vision, then, is self-portraiture, and accomplished from within the world in response to its inherent exposure. In short, the structure of experience is expression, the flesh of the world “is not matter, is not mind, is not substance,” but rather the element of the between itself, and everything

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happens as the invisible or metastable right at the flesh.9 Flesh signifies nothing, but expresses everything, and as such it exscribes Being while it simultaneously is the “element of Being” (VI, 139). Philosophical interrogation, understood as expression, thus gives access to this “strange domain” of the flesh (VI, 140). But this domain, hardly imposing upon philosophy a circumscribed region, is in fact “unlimited.” The flesh, as an ultimate notion of the open and expressive intertwining of trajectories of sense, relieves the philosopher of the repair work required from the presuppositions of Cartesian ontology. If visibility is the relation between the seer and the seen, which traverses the seer, is taken up by her, and yet is not constituted by her, then “this coiling over of the visible upon the visible, can traverse, animate other bodies as well as my own” (VI, 140). Even if each expressive body takes up its own trajectory, its borders are not rigid and it remains open to the encroachments of others; in short, the intertwining of the seer/seen in an expressive “coiling over” of flesh is the foundation for a rich and expressive intercorporeality of precisely the structure of communication already at work in Merleau-Ponty’s ontological reflection. Reversibility is a fundamental reality of relations and the metastable structures of expressive gearing into that permeate our experience, and if this is the case then “the handshake too is reversible” (VI, 142). We can share a landscape with others by engaging in projects that transcend our individual trajectories and thus by acting synergetically as one organism. A conversation or shared struggle takes us both farther than we could have gone on our own. Such is our genius for taking up and sustaining structures that transcend us and yet that only exist for us in the expressive action through which they are exscribed. “And henceforth,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “movement, touch, vision, applying themselves to the other and to themselves, return toward their source and, in the patient and silent labor of desire, begin the paradox of expression” (VI, 144). “Yet this flesh,” argues Merleau-Ponty, “that one sees and touches is not all there is to flesh, nor this massive corporeity all there is to the body” (VI, 144). The reversibility of the flesh “exists in other fields; it is even incomparably more agile there and capable of weaving relations between bodies that this time will not only enlarge, but will pass definitively beyond the circle of the visible” (VI, 144). There are bodily movements that, although they go nowhere, are nevertheless expressive: “facial movements, many gestures, and especially those strange movements of the throat and mouth that form the cry and the voice” (VI, 144). There is an active/passive relation between the body that speaks and the body that is heard, a reversibility that allows for the gestural communication between expressive bodies. As Merleau-Ponty notes, “[t]his new reversibility and the emergence of the flesh as expression

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are the point of insertion of speaking and thinking in the world of silence” (VI, 144–5, emphasis added). Others are present as the invisible exscribed in their visible gestures, or as the silence exscribed in their spoken words. Myself, others, and the intertwining of the trajectories of our lives, are exscribed in every “sonorous inscription” (VI, 144). All of this is possible, then, because of a “dehiscence or fission” in the very heart of the flesh of the world, the spacing between repetition and creation described as the paradoxical logic of expression. There is nothing “mystical” in this emergence of expressive bodies in the “flesh” of the world—it is the very reality of the concrete and observable processes of ontogenesis. The real material and visible body is prepared through a series of individuations, from the embryo onward in the trajectory of individuation, which is always already expressive being in the world. Foreshadowing the philosophy of Simondon, Merleau-Ponty writes: In spite of all of our substantialist ideas, the seer is being premeditated in counterpoint in the embryonic development; through a labor upon itself the visible body provides for the hollow whence a vision will come, inaugurates the long maturation at whose term suddenly it will see, that is, will be visible for itself, will institute the interminable gravitation, the indefatigable metamorphosis of the seeing and the visible whose principle is posed and which gets underway with the first vision. (VI, 147)

In short, expression and individuation share the logic of transduction, confirming the deepening reading I have offered throughout this book. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty here invokes the errors of substantialist thinking, and embraces the open trajectory that sets the stage for seeing as a metastable potential of an evolving system and the institution of vision as the open yet oriented structure of an expressive style. To avoid the pitfalls of substantial thinking, which might posit the body and the mind as separate substances, Merleau-Ponty has established that experience is possible because of a reversibility that is never actual, but always present as metastable. The space between touching and touched can never be crossed, since the anticipated coincidence “eclipses at the moment of realization” (VI, 147). The “incessant escaping” of reversibility is what opens up the space for experience, which is not “an ontological void, a non-being: it is spanned by the total being of my body, and by that of the world” (VI, 148). The ontology of the flesh, then, is an open or hyper-dialectic between my flesh and the flesh of the world, articulated by “clear zones, clearings, about which pivot their opaque zones” (VI, 148).

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Merleau-Ponty suggests that the notion of reversibility thus touches upon “the most difficult point, that is, the bond between the flesh and the idea, between the visible and the interior armature which it manifests and which it conceals” (VI, 149). This most difficult point, then, is the relation between the expression and the expressed, the inscription and what is exscribed. The idea, for Merleau-Ponty, must not be the contrary of the sensible, it must not be something else signified by the expression. It must, rather, inhabit the sensible, as “its lining and its depth” (VI, 149). The idea expressed requires its sensible expression, is inseparable from it, and cannot be given “except in a carnal experience” (VI, 150). This materiality is not a contingent fact that gives one the occasion to think of an essence, but rather is itself essential because the idea or the expressed is precisely the invisible lining of just this gesture, just this phrase, or just this sound, and yet it is neither reducible to it nor wholly contained therein. The “carnal texture” of an expressive gesture or trace “presents to us what is absent from all flesh” (VI, 150–1), what overflows presence, and the trace offers up the means for its repetition by a new expressive body: “it is a furrow that traces itself out magically under our eyes without a tracer, a certain hollow, a certain interior, a certain absence, a negativity that is not nothing” (VI, 151). Such is precisely the logic of communication for expressive bodies that are both in and of the world they share. Merleau-Ponty offers a description of human experience, now on the ontological register, which reinforces the account being offered in this book of what it is to be an expressive body as a trajectory of performances and as the locus of the metastable: With the first vision, the first contact, the first pleasure, there is an initiation, that is, not the positing of a content, but the opening of a dimension that can never again be closed, the establishment of a level in terms of which every other experience will henceforth be situated. (VI, 151)

The ideal or the invisible is the metastable of the flesh—it weighs upon the bodies that take it up and carry it forward, and yet it forever remains as the inexhaustible other side of all inscription. The paradoxical logic of expression governs this insight, and becomes operative from the plural “first” initiations that are never wholly left behind on the trajectory of the expressive life of the body. The metastable trajectory of expression is a “never-finished differentiation, that openness ever to be reopened between the sign and the sign, as the flesh is, we said, the dehiscence of the seeing into the visible and of the visible into the seeing” (VI, 153). I live within language as a meaningful

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body, just as I perceive from within the visible world as a visible body. “There is,” argues Merleau-Ponty, “a reversibility of the speech and what it signifies,” and the signification thus reshapes “its own means” and “antedates itself by a retrograde movement which is never completely” finished (VI, 154). With each spoken word, the speaker speaks to himself and simultaneously speaks himself—constituting himself—as an expression of his or her style. As such, “he offers every speech to a universal Speech” (VI, 154, modified) that his words bring about and sustain and yet that transcends his speech, just as every look exscribes an absolute visibility that sustains it and yet is never actual. Each expression, then, is the crystallization of the metastable pre-individual “Speech” that does not preexist the expression and that nevertheless is the silent trajectory of all speech. Silence is nether converted into speech nor destroyed by it, silence is the metastable pre-individual that every gesture takes up in the trajectory of performances that sustain it as exscribed. Hence the paradoxical logic of expression: “meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread [. . .]: it is the totality of what is said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear” (VI, 155). And moreover, following a transductive logic, the appearance of speech in the world changes the very structure of the visible world. Once we have ears to hear speech, the “whole landscape is overrun with words [. . . and] is henceforth but a variant of speech before our eyes” (VI, 155). And most fundamentally, both vision and speech are but a variant of expression. Hence the open and endless task of philosophical interrogation, whose role is not to translate mute experience into the blunt tool of language, but to discover a way of speaking and writing that can gear into the paradoxical logic of expression as a “power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning, an expression of experience by experience” (VI, 155).

Epilogue

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is not non-philosophy in the sense of a lost philosophy. Its presence is prolonged despite his absence. (Hugh J. Silverman, RRMP, 151) In 1960, Merleau-Ponty published a collection of essays titled Signs that spans the years 1949–60 and reflects the diversity of his contribution during this period, from aesthetics and philosophy of language, to political and social intervention. In his famous “Preface” to this text, he writes: “How different—how downright incongruous—the philosophical essays and the ad hoc, primarily political observations which make up this volume seem!” (Préface, 3). As he observed in Adventures of the Dialectic, “one must tie all this together, and that is the object of [a] preface” (AD, 3). I have attempted in this book to take up precisely this challenge of a Merleau-Pontian “preface,” to tie all of his “downright incongruous” themes together through the paradoxical logic of expression. Such was the aim of reading the sense and style of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical corpus in order to gear into and take up the trajectory of his thought as a metastable resource for going further—to follow Hugh J. Silverman†, then, in prolonging his philosophy despite his absence along the trajectory of his style. In the preface to Signs, Merleau-Ponty recognizes a certain nascent equilibrium appearing in his work and in culture more generally, from philosophy and aesthetics to history and politics: the tendency to reject a “certain idea of Being as object” in order to adopt “the idea of a coherent Being of many foci or dimensions” (Préface, 11–12). Such a tendency rings the death knell of the God-like pensée de survol and demands a mode of philosophical reflection that embraces “intermingling and promiscuity [. . . and] discloses exactly the Being we inhabit” (Préface, 13–14). Returning to the world of experience brings Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy into contact with sense in its nascent state, a metastable field of thinking populated with others and with “latent meaning” (Préface, 14), and the task of philosophy is to think this metastable field from within as the beings that bring it about and sustain it without thereby enveloping it. This reveals an

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ontology of weight in which “colors, sounds, and things—like Van Gogh’s stars—are the focal points and radiance of being” (Préface, 15). The spacing of experience is at once a distancing and a proximity, the exscription of a “glimmering of Being” that, like the perceptible world, can “haunt more than one body without budging from its place” (Préface, 15). The perceptible world provides the model of Being itself, as that metastable structure that only exists insofar as there are bodies that are both seeing and seen, and yet that overflows every vision with an “insurpassable richness” exscribed in every actual glance. This, as I have shown in this book, is precisely the paradoxical logic of expression. Language only exists as exscribed in our actual or possible speech acts, and yet overflows every inscription with the insurpassable richness of a metastable and evolving system that shapes and is reshaped by each word. This is why “[e]verything depends [. . .] upon the fact that our glances are [. . .] openings of our flesh which are immediately filled by the universal flesh of the world” (Préface, 16). As such, language is not something we possess, it is “our element” (Préface, 17). Just as we are openings of flesh from within flesh, we live from within language as a metastable structure from which our gestures will crystallize. Since language exists not in itself, but as exscribed by each word, “a complete statement is inconsistent” (Préface, 17). Our expressive operations, beyond what they explicitly inscribe, play forward a metastable richness that we live from within and that is exscribed in the between and the around of each inscription in the trajectories of the paradoxical performances of sense itself. This is nothing other than the paradoxical logic of expression. Expression thus takes up the weight of the past, of the present, and of the materials into which it arrives in order to paradoxically respond to a future that it itself is bringing about. In a weighty gesture, expression proceeds by “reorganizing things-said, affecting them with a new index of curvature, and bending them to a certain enhancement of meaning” (Préface, 19). This is not a making public, but a becoming public, since expression takes place in the intercorporeal world of expressive communication, and the vestiges of expression, responding to an emerging secret, “must become public and almost visible” in order to be at all (Préface, 19). This mode of becoming public yet only almost visible is the mode of the exscribed, of all that weighs upon the visible as invisible and upon the spoken as silent. The almost visible is the metastable, that which is sensed between and around as the felt possibilities that solicit expression and yet that always slip through our fingers—the weight of my past and my life, my culture and my language, my hopes and my fears. And through our “traces” which “mix and intermingle,” Being itself is made present, as exscribed in the cascading paradoxes of expression that make up a “single wake of ‘public duration’” (Préface, 19). This—the paradoxical logic

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of expression—is the structure that ties it all together: “Everywhere there are meanings, dimensions, and forms in excess of what each ‘consciousness’ could have produced; and yet it is men who speak and think and see. [. . .] The philosophy which lays bare this chiasma of the visible is the exact opposite of a philosophy of God-like survey [survol]” (Préface, 20–1). In this book I have offered a Merleau-Pontian reading of Merleau-Ponty’s inscriptions, and I have argued that we find there (as exscribed) an entire philosophy of expression in which all expressive actions come down to writing (as a creative repetition and leaving of traces) and reading (as the taking up of expressive vestiges in a new performance in a trajectory of sense). Although I have for the most part restricted the reading above to Merleau-Ponty’s published materials, the rich working notes and lecture notes that are emerging from Merleau-Ponty’s late thought offer the perfect opportunity for taking up Merleau-Ponty through his own practice of reading. As he once said of Husserl’s late fragments, these lectures are sometimes fraught with “repetitions, revisions, beginnings of investigations: hardly appropriate for textual explication” (HLP, 16). And yet, with a careful practice of reading that avoids the two extremes, the lectures can be approached as the vestiges of his expressive gestures, as the traces of a trajectory of thought that was artificially interrupted by his untimely death. The lecture notes do not contain the “secret” of Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts (no more than his published texts do), but as fragmentary notes, ideas, and incomplete sketches, they exscribe the metastable possibilities of his thought through the infusion of his style; they are the material supports for spoken words and fleeting worlds gone by soliciting our bodies and eyes to take them up again. What the lecture notes suggest, in light of the weight of the reading offered in this book, is a deep and turbulent engagement with the paradoxes of expression through expression itself. In his lectures, Merleau-Ponty pursues the paradoxical logic of expression in explicit and implicit ways, from his recognition that in a certain sense “perception is expression”1 to his discovery of the material vestiges of expression that weigh upon my body as a reading body through the shared trajectories of performances of these expressive traces: “A book is a series of institutions and makes obvious that every institution tends toward being a series. [. . .] What does the ‘total’ signification mean? It exists only at infinity as the sum of encounters of other minds with the work.”2 Nevertheless, the meaning of these lectures, even more so than his more decisive and complete texts, remains forever metastable and deferred, offering the place for a philosophical practice of reading that takes up the weight of the past and the weight of the expressive vestiges to be read from within the urgencies of the present that will reshape and reconfigure the past itself. No matter how “finished” or “polished,” the thought of a philosopher

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is never a “pure” system of ideas, and thus “we can be faithful to [.  .  . a philosopher’s thought] only by thinking again” (PSh, 159–60), that is, only by expressing these thoughts again in an expressive reading that “ties” them all together, like a preface or an epilogue, as the metastable structures exscribed in this expression. Such a philosophy would be nothing short of a practice of reading and “what Husserl called ‘a poetics of the history of philosophy,’ which is a participation in an operative thought” (HLP, 5).

Notes Introduction 1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 80. Henceforth cited as IL. 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), lxxvii. Henceforth cited as PhP. 3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 3. Henceforth cited as VI. 4 Although the question is explored here in a different way, this matches the intuition of Remy Kwant, who pursues in his reading of Merleau-Ponty a broad understanding of “expression” in order to capture the way in which “[h]uman existence is expression.” Remy C. Kwant, The Phenomenology of Expression, trans. Henry J. Koren (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 31. Henceforth cited as PhEx. 5 The term “metastable” is drawn from the work of Gilbert Simondon and refers to an equilibrium that is supersaturated with potentials, relations, and intensities that may or may not crystallize, and yet which are an essential part of its definition. As such, it indicates a “realism of relations” that I believe is essential in coming to terms with Merleau-Ponty’s paradoxical logic of expression. The term is defined in more detail below, in the section “Metaphor and the trajectory of sense” in this chapter. See Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Grenoble: Jérome Millon, 2005). Henceforth cited as ILFI; translations are my own. 6 I follow Hugh J. Silverman’s reading on this question. See Hugh J. Silverman, “Merleau-Ponty and the Interrogation of Language,” in Inscriptions: After Phenomenology and Structuralism, 2nd edn (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 152–71. Henceforth cited as MPIL. As Silverman writes in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s various new frameworks for his study of language, “[w]ithin each framework, he would retrace to a certain degree the terrain he had already traversed and each time he would reformulate his understanding of language. [. . .] Yet there are no radical epistemological breaks along his itinerary and there is no continuity of thought either” (MPIL, 151). In this book, I build upon Silverman’s important point, since the continuity revealed in the paradoxical logic of expression is not one “of thought,” but one of style, the style of a trajectory of sense. 7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Titres et travaux: Projet d’enseignement,” in Parcours deux: 1951–1961, ed. Jacques Prunair (Paris: Verdier, 2000), 11–12. Henceforth cited as TT; translations are my own.

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  8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo, trans. John O’Neill and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 5. Henceforth cited as HLP.   9 In this book I follow Jean-Luc Nancy in understanding the relation between inscription and exscription to indicate the richness of every expressive gesture beyond its explicit signification. In the event of inscribing a meaning, an entire network of relations is exscribed, including the language of the inscription, the projects and desires of the inscribing body, the world and situations that gave rise to the inscription, the deflections of the meaning by the bodies and lives of the inscription’s audience, and so on. Every inscription, then, exscribes a massive network of relations, since every expression is the crystallization of a “metastable equilibrium,” a term I will explore just below in the work of Gilbert Simondon. For one of Nancy’s discussions of “exscription,” see: Jean-Luc Nancy, “Exscription,” in The Birth of Presence, trans. Katherine Lydon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 338–40. See also, Donald A. Landes, “Expressive Body, Exscriptive Corpus: The Tracing of the Body from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Jean-Luc Nancy,” Chiasmi International IX (2009), 249–72. Henceforth cited as EBEC. For Nancy’s use of the term “vestige,” which I also integrate into my reading of Merleau-Ponty, see: Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Vestige of Art,” in The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 81–100. Henceforth cited as VArt. 10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 4. Henceforth cited as CAL. 11 Throughout this book, I examine Merleau-Ponty’s repeated reflections upon the place between pure creation and pure repetition, a characterization I am drawing from Bernard Waldenfels. The difference between the position of this reading and Waldenfels’ reading will be explored in the section “The Weight of the metastable: Simondon and the paradoxical logic of expression” of this chapter. See further, Bernard Waldenfels, “The Paradox of Expression,” trans. Chris Nagel, in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 89–102. Henceforth cited as PEx. 12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “On the Phenomenology of Language,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 84. Henceforth cited as OPL. 13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 5. Henceforth cited as PW. 14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work,” trans. Arleen B. Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 11. Henceforth cited as Inédit. For an excellent discussion of the role of the perspective from “within” in Merleau-Ponty, see Françoise Dastur,

Notes

15

16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

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“Merleau-Ponty and Thinking from Within,” trans. Paul B. Milan, in Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Patrick Burke and Jan Van Der Veken (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 25–35. The French term sens can be translated as “meaning,” “direction,” or “sense,” and it is also related to the senses and sensation. Merleau-Ponty makes use of all of these subtle connotations in his writings. See further, PhP, xlviii, and CAL, lx. For an important discussion of parole parlante (speaking speech) and parole parlée (spoken speech), see Hugh J. Silverman’s discussion in MPIL, 154–5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” trans. Michael B. Smith, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 69. Henceforth cited as CD. For a helpful study of expression and gesture in Merleau-Ponty, see Thomas Langan, Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Reason (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 125–34. As Kwant writes: “Our speech does not have its sole source in ourselves: we actively take up the speaking that is going on all around us. In this way, our speech acquires a certain ‘weight’ from our social context, a weight which we do not fully fathom and which we are even unable to fully understand.” PhEx, 16. Kwant does not further thematize this notion of “weight.” In fact, Merleau-Ponty explicitly criticizes the theory of engrams (or memory-traces) (PhP, 201). The image of a “gearing into” (from the French verb engrener) is a key notion in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. See my translator’s discussion of this term in PhP, 496n47. For an excellent collection of articles on the influence of Husserl in Merleau-Ponty’s work, see Ted Toadvine and Lester Embree, eds, Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Husserl (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002). Given this discussion, one might wonder, despite its regular recurrence, just how much of a “guiding statement” this Husserlian motto is for Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the paradoxical logic of expression as the passage from mute experience to speech. Neither of the occurrences in Phenomenology of Perception take place in a discussion of speech, nor does the phrase regularly appear in his explicit discussions of expression. As I have just established, the phrase illustrates not the logic of expression, but the mystery of the experience of the world that the philosopher would like to describe. As Waldenfels himself notes, the phrase occurs a third time in Merleau-Ponty’s development of a new form of philosophical reflection called “interrogation,” which involves a “reconversion of silence and speech into one another” (VI, 129). This is a statement of the urgency for a new form of reflection that can respond to the intertwining structures of chiasmatic experience, while leaving its character of openness and richness. The guiding statement is more an indication of the mystery and demands of experience to which Merleau-Ponty’s reconfigured phenomenology attempts to provide a response.

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24 Suggesting how the universal is exscribed by the particular, Kwant writes: “[T]he man who expresses himself is a particular being, but from his particularity he extends himself to everything” (PhEx, 28). 25 Although he suggests that Merleau-Ponty gives expression a “universal range,” Waldenfels means that expression characterizes all linguistic phenomena, from the child’s first words to political discourse and scientific theories (PEx, 92). 26 Although Waldenfels recognizes the importance of the phenomenological description, he nonetheless proceeds to an eidetic analysis of this experience. He suggests that early Merleau-Ponty tends “to diminish the enigma of expression in favor of an anteriority of experience, in favor of a passivity of the event” (PEx, 94). But even Merleau-Ponty’s early accounts of expression recognize the paradoxical structure of originary experience and the impossibility of pure passivity. Waldenfels privileges Merleau-Ponty’s work from the 1950s on language, and equates his ontological insights with this shift. The comprehensive reading offered in the chapters of this book removes this privileging. 27 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. James M. Edie and John Wild (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 35. 28 Merleau-Ponty writes: “Language, not as ready-made (not as a linguistic system, as a given field of the nameable including everything, even my psyche), but rather language as being in the process of being made, in the process of striding, in the process” (HLP, 55). 29 Merleau-Ponty’s introduction of this “logic in action” in a discussion of crystallization is not irrelevant given that this is the guiding image in Simondon’s work on individuation, to be discussed later in this section. 30 Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Penser l’individuation: Simondon et la philosophie de la nature (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), 7. 31 Simondon amazingly only mentions Merleau-Ponty once in his course dedicated to the topic of perception: Gilbert Simondon, Cours sur la Perception (1964–1965) (Paris: Les Éditions de la Transparence, 2006), 96. Simondon’s course focuses more on the biological signification of perception than on its phenomenological structures. 32 See further, Xavier Guichet, “Merleau-Ponty, Simondon et le problème d’une ‘axiomatique des science humaines’,” Chiasmi International III (2001), 103–27. 33 Garelli’s article is found in ILFI, 9–19. 34 Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Simondon ou l’encyclopédisme génétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008), 15. Henceforth cited as SEG; translations are my own. 35 Both Barthélémy and Isabelle Stengers address the way that Simondon passes over the theories of Niels Bohr in favor of valorizing the “double solution” of Louis Broglie, a theory that helps him work out his own notion of potential energy. See SEG, 21–4, as well as Isabelle Stengers, “Pour une

Notes

36 37 38 39

40

41 42 43 44 45 46

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mise à l’aventure de la transduction,” in Simondon, ed. Pascal Chabot (Paris: J. Vrin, 2005), 141. I am using the term “between” in a substantive sense, drawing upon the insights of Hugh J. Silverman from conversation. For Garelli’s discussion, see ILFI, 16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Introduction,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 31. Henceforth cited as Préface. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, 1952–1960, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). For an excellent discussion of these lectures, see: Douglas Low, Merleau-Ponty’s Last Vision (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000). Henceforth cited as MPLV. Some alternative ways of approaching “metaphor” in Merleau-Ponty are worth noting here. Jerry Gill offers an inventory of specific metaphors in Merleau-Ponty’s writing, followed by an analysis of the results of these metaphors for Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of language. See Jerry H. Gill, Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991). The study offered here is closer to the two approaches that place Merleau-Ponty into the history of thought about metaphor in order to understand the ontological implications for his philosophy more generally. See particularly, Jenny Slatman, L’expression au-delà de la représentation: Sur l’aisthêsis et l’esthétique chez Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Peeters, 2003). Henceforth cited as EXR; translations are my own; and Renaud Barbaras, “Métaphore et ontologie,” in Le tournant de l’expérience: Recherches sur la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: J. Vrin, 1998). Henceforth cited as MO; translations are my own. Max Black, “Metaphor,” in Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), 25–47. Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 245–64. Henceforth cited as WMM. Richard Rorty, “Unfamiliar Noises: Hesse and Davidson on Metaphor,” in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 162–72. Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 4. This is drawn from the translation offered by Paul Ricœur in The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (New York: Routledge, 1977), 25. Henceforth cited as RM. As I will discuss below, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert has established the increasing centrality of the term “empiétement” (“encroachment” or “transgression”) for Merleau-Ponty’s thought. See Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Du lien des êtres aux éléments de l’être: Merleau-Ponty au tournant des années 1945–1951 (Paris: J. Vrin, 2004). Henceforth cited as ESA1; translations are my own.

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47 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought, trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1998), 79–80. 48 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 160. Henceforth cited as PSh. 49 As Mikel Dufrenne writes: “[The work] awaits a reading. [. . .] [F]or the book as such has as yet only an inert and opaque existence: words, signs on a white page, the significations remain in a potential state as long as a consciousness does not actualize them [. . .] The reading is a ‘concretization.’” See Mikel Dufrenne, “Literary Criticism and Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, ed. Dermot Moran and Lester Embree (New York: Routledge, 2004), 244. 50 For an alternative reading that focuses more on the teleological outcome of Merleau-Ponty’s trajectory toward ontological structures, see Renaud Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Ted Toadvine (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004). Henceforth cited as BPh.

Chapter 1   1 Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of “crisis” is arguably more historical than Husserl’s famous use of this term to describe the failure to return to the initiating acts of scientific intuition pervasive in the practice of empirical science. For Merleau-Ponty, the crisis is philosophical, not phenomenological. See Edmund Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).   2 For instance, see M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 2nd edn (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 268n1. Henceforth cited as MPO. Dillon himself, however, tends to move between the “stages” he nevertheless identifies. See MPO, 153–4.   3 To be consistent with Merleau-Ponty’s expressive style of reading (as discussed in the section “Metaphor and the trajectory of sense” in the Introduction chapter), I leave aside the question of the accuracy of Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Descartes. For an alternative approach through Descartes’s works, see Dillon, MPO, chapter 1.   4 Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Le scénario cartésien: Recherches sur la formation et la cohérence de l’intention philosophique de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: J. Vrin, 2005). Henceforth cited as ESA2; translations are my own.   5 One of the most striking concepts of Merleau-Ponty’s late text The Visible and the Invisible is the notion of a “hyper-dialectic” or a “good dialectic” that would not attempt to dissolve the tension between thesis and antithesis, but that would sustain them in a rich and open trajectory. See VI, 94.

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  6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “L’ontologie cartésienne et l’ontologie d’aujourd’hui,” in Notes de cours (1959–1961), ed. Stéphanie Ménasé (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 159–268.   7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. Michael B. Smith, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 121–49. Henceforth cited as EM.   8 Selection published in ESA2, 23.   9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1963), 198–9. Henceforth cited as SB. 10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul, trans. Paul B. Milan (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2001), 13. Henceforth cited as Union. 11 Théodore F. Geraets, Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendantale: La genèse de la philosophie de Maurice Merleau-Ponty jusqu’à la Phénoménologie de la perception (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 86. Henceforth cited as VPT; translations are my own. 12 See in particular VPT, 86; SB, 211–12. 13 Étienne Bimbenet, Nature et Humanité: Le problème anthropologique dans l’oeuvre de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: J. Vrin, 2004), 13. Henceforth cited as NH; translations are my own. 14 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Merleau-Ponty [Vivant],” trans. Benita Eisher, in Merleau-Ponty: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, ed. Ted Toadvine (London: Routledge, 2006), 102. 15 J. Messaut, La philosophie de Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: J. Vrin, 1938), 11, 14 (emphasis added). Henceforth cited as PLB; translations are my own. 16 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosophy of Existence,” trans. Allen S. Weiss, in Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry, Jr. (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1992), 130. Henceforth cited as EX. 17 The highly competitive examination required for a teaching post in philosophy in the French Lycée system, which Merleau-Ponty had passed a few years prior to this meeting. 18 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “L’agrégation de philosophie,” in Parcours 1935–1951, ed. Jacques Prunair (Paris: Verdier, 1997), 57–8. 19 Brunschvicg quoted by Saint Aubert, ESA2, 64. 20 See Jean Wahl, Vers le concret: Études d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine (Paris: J. Vrin, 1932). 21 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Christianity and ressentiment (1935),” trans. Gerald Wening, in Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry, Jr. (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1992), 100. Henceforth cited as CR. Translation modified. 22 Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. William W. Holdheim (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1994). Henceforth cited as R. 23 See ESA2, 19, 54; NH, 160ff. 24 Scheler, quoted by Merleau-Ponty (CR, 93).

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25 Max Scheler, Nature and Forms of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 239. Cited by Bimbenet (NH, 162). 26 Gabriel Marcel, Journal métaphysique (Paris: Gallimard, 1927), 323. Henceforth cited as JM; translations are my own. 27 ESA2, 77, 87. This reading goes against the earlier position of Remy Kwant, who claimed that, “‘right wing’ existentialism has had almost no influence on Merleau-Ponty.” Remy C. Kwant, The Phenomenological Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1963), 152. 28 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Being and Having (1936),” trans. Michael B. Smith, in Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry, Jr. (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1992), 101–7. Henceforth cited as BH2. See also: Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existential Diary, trans. Katherine Farrer (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1976). Henceforth cited as BH1. 29 See, for instance, Geraets’ discussion of “les années de formation,” in VPT, particularly 14–26. Geraets locates Merleau-Ponty’s definitive break with Christian existentialism in 1936. 30 I use “incarnation” and “embodiment” interchangeably in this study. The former is maintained in this section, however, to preserve any religious overtones that may well reflect its origin in Marcel’s work. 31 See JM, 309–29. Saint Aubert discusses this article and its influence on Merleau-Ponty in ESA2, 78–81. 32 See also JM, 236 and 252, also cited by Saint Aubert, where Marcel makes precisely this point: “We see immediately that my body is only mine insofar as it is sensed, as confusedly as this may be. [. . .] If I am my body, it is insofar as I am a sensing being” (JM, 236). 33 These claims are based upon the quotations and commentaries in: Simonne Plourde et al., Vocabulaire philosophique de Gabriel Marcel (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1985). Henceforth cited as VGM. 34 As Brunschvicg concludes, “[t]he true ‘conversion’ is [. . .] to become aware of self and of what one truly is: the characteristic of homo sapiens [. . .] that he is a consciousness; in him voluntary action follows immediately from the movement of rational reflection” (PLB, 34).

Chapter 2 1 For a detailed study of Gestalt theory in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s early work, see Dillon’s chapter 4 of MPO. 2 Merleau-Ponty uses “structure,” “form,” and even “system” or “order” more or less interchangeably, but he tends to use “structure” when speaking of higher-level behaviors or consciousness. See Pascal Dupond, Dictionnaire Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Ellipses, 2008), 199–204.

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3 Paul Guillaume’s important influence is discussed by Bimbenet in NH, 43. 4 As Kerry H. Whiteside notes, this approach shows Merleau-Ponty to be very much within the “Brunschvicgian” mandate, which encouraged students to apply philosophical idealism to a problem in the positive sciences. See Kerry H. Whiteside, Merleau-Ponty and the Foundation of an Existential Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 18. Henceforth cited as FEP. 5 Étienne Bimbenet, La structure du comportement, Chap. III, 3—“L’ordre humain” (Paris: Ellipses, 2000), 26. Translations are my own. 6 For an excellent discussion of the possibility of reading expression even at the level of vital processes, see Kym Maclaren, “Life is Inherently Expressive,” Chiasmi International VII (2005), 247–9. 7 See, for instance, Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993). 8 The quotation is of Hegel, and would seem to invoke the notion of the weight of the past I developed in the introduction above.

Chapter 3 1 As will be discussed below, the sense of artistic expression as responding to a “vague fever” is a central aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s paradoxical logic of expression (see, e.g. CD, 19). The sentence in quotations is meant to invoke some of the insights of R. G. Collingwood, who identifies the beginning of artistic expression in a certain vague sense: “I feel . . . I don’t know what I feel,” in his book Principles of Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 109. 2 This passage offers the point of departure for M. C. Dillon in working out Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. See MPO, 1. 3 For an excellent collection of Feminist reflections on Merleau-Ponty’s work on the sexed body, see Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss, eds, Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2006). 4 As discussed in the Introduction, this reading of Merleau-Ponty is influenced by Jean-Luc Nancy’s use of the term “vestige.” See VArt. 5 As Husserl writes in “Origin of Geometry,” a late text that deeply influenced Merleau-Ponty’s work: “Naturally, we shall not go into the general problem which also arises here of the origin of language.” See HLP, 97. For an excellent discussion of these issues, see: Françoise Dastur, Chair et Langage: Essai sur Merleau-Ponty (La Versanne, France: Encre Marine, 2001), 49–67; Lawrence Hass, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 146–70. 6 This reading of Phenomenology of Perception, in light of the insights of Simondon and Nancy, seems to suggest an answer to Merleau-Ponty’s later criticism of his own early position (which has been explicated by Barbaras in

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BPh, 46) by indeed showing how language is possible because, in the presence of expressive bodies, language is exscribed as metastable. As the following chapters will show, this insight is the thread that guides the trajectory of Merleau-Ponty’s later work. 7 For an excellent discussion of these points, see David Morris, The Sense of Space (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004), especially 129–58. 8 As is clear here, the “origin” question has already taken us well beyond the structural possibility of language to invoke the very acts of expression, that is, the origin of language is exscribed in every expression. 9 It is worth noting that this is a more charitable reading of Merleau-Ponty’s early work than Merleau-Ponty’s own self-critique (VI, 183, 200). For an excellent reading that follows Merleau-Ponty’s self-critique, see Renaud Barbaras, BPh, 17ff.

Chapter 4 1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The War Has Taken Place,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 144. Henceforth cited as WTP. 2 For a detailed study of Merleau-Ponty’s political interventions in light of their historical context and reception, the reader is referred to the intellectual history offered by: Barry Cooper, Merleau-Ponty and Marxism: From Terror to Reform (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). Henceforth cited as MPM. 3 Sonia Kruks, “Philosophy of History,” in Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, ed. Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2008), 71. Henceforth cited as PH. 4 Diana Coole, “Politics and the Political,” in Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, ed. Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2008), 91. Henceforth cited as Pol. 5 This phrase is from the Preface to the 1947 collection: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 3. Henceforth cited as SNS. 6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, trans. John O’Neill (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 59–60. Henceforth cited as HT. 7 Koestler was a member of the German Communist Party until 1938, when he became disillusioned due to these trials and the conflict in Spain. He took asylum in France, where he wrote this novel. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, trans. Daphne Hardy (London: Penguin, 1975). 8 Taylor Carman, Merleau-Ponty (New York: Routledge, 2008), 158. Henceforth cited as MP.

Notes

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9 Claude Lefort, “Thinking Politics,” trans. Taylor Carman and Mark B. Hansen, with Alexander Hickox, in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B. Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 361. Henceforth cited as TP. See also, Lydia Goehr, “Understanding the Engaged Philosopher: On Politics, Philosophy, and Art,” in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B. Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 330. Henceforth cited as UEP. 10 Sonia Kruks, The Political Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1981), 81. 11 Diana Coole, Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 142. 12 For an excellent discussion of this point, see ESA1, 41–3. 13 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Note on Machiavelli,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 211–23. Henceforth cited as Note. 14 Bernard Dauenhauer, “Merleau-Ponty’s Political Thought: Its Nature and Its Challenge,” in Merleau-Ponty: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, ed. Ted Toadvine (London: Routledge, 2006), 35. 15 As Coole notes, “the political virtuosity described by the Italian humanist resembles the phenomenological or dialectical art that [Merleau-Ponty] commends as an effective way of navigating the reversals and uncertainties of the political interworld” (Pol, 93). 16 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 4. Henceforth cited as AD. 17 For an excellent resource for the circumstances of Merleau-Ponty’s break with Sartre, see Jon Stewart, ed., The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998). 18 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Communists and Peace, with a Reply to Claude Lefort, trans. Martha H. Fletcher and Philip R. Berk (New York: Braziller, 1968). 19 As Cooper notes, the violence referred to here (between the pure cogito and the possibility of pure action) is also likely fuelling Sartre’s polemical stance in response to Lefort’s criticisms (MPM, 129). 20 This reading runs counter to the one offered by Taylor Carman, who writes that for Merleau-Ponty, “Marxist theory [cannot] be rescued from communist practice, for Soviet aggression confirms their de facto inseparability” (MP, 177). Such a reading assumes that the outcome of the adventure exists in isolation from its course. For Merleau-Ponty, the solution is not either Marxism or liberalism, but rather a new liberalism that responds to the weight of Marxism. As Whiteside writes: “This critique of Marxism does not necessitate a total rejection of it” (FEP, 245). 21 Saussure’s influence on Merleau-Ponty’s late politics is discussed at length by Whiteside (see particularly, FEP, 256–63). Whiteside, however, follows

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the tendency of reading a significant break between Merleau-Ponty’s early and late work on expression. 22 See further Lydia Goehr’s discussion, PH, 78–81.

Chapter 5 1 This second position is found in Husserl’s famous though fragmentary text “Origin of Geometry” mentioned above, see HLP. Merleau-Ponty first encountered this text upon its publication in a commemorative issue of Revue Internationale de philosophie in 1939, published shortly after Husserl’s death (VPT, 29). In relation to the themes Merleau-Ponty addresses here, the same issue included a paper by H. J. Pos titled “Phenomenology and Linguistics,” in which Pos defines a phenomenology of language as “a return to the speaking subject” (OPL, 85). 2 Indeed, as Silverman writes, “Merleau-Ponty opens up the field not only of the desire and the possibility to communicate, but also the appropriation of a language which is not direct, not fully explicitated, but which speaks and which is communication itself” (MPIL, 161). 3 Galen A. Johnson, “Introductions to Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Painting,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 17. Henceforth cited as IMP. 4 For an important reading of this development, see Hugh J. Silverman’s MPIL, 166ff. 5 This gesture of examining what is accomplished by the act of expression rather than the artist’s explicit intentions is taken up in important ways by Jean-Luc Nancy in VArt. See also my EBEC. 6 For an excellent reflection on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of style, see Hugh J. Silverman, MPIL, 170–1.

Chapter 6 1 Mikel Dufrenne, “Eye and Mind,” trans. Michael B. Smith, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 261. 2 Hugh J. Silverman, “Re-reading Merleau-Ponty,” in Inscriptions: After Phenomenology and Structuralism, 2nd edn (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 133. Henceforth cited as RRMP. 3 An excellent discussion of the role of “color” in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is to be found in Véronique M. Fóti, “The Dimension of Color,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 293–308.

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4 As Kwant writes, “[t]he world contains within itself the possibility to appear, and this possibility is actualized by the fact that a body begins to see and to touch” (PhEx, 41). 5 For an intriguing attempt to reconstruct this project from the fragments, notes, and lectures from 1952–1961, see Douglas Low, MPLV. 6 One here thinks, of course, of Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Anne O’Byrne and Robert D. Richardson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 7 As Kwant writes, language is “the means through which man appropriates the world, but [. . . also] something that belongs to the community and is creative of community” (PhEx, 110). 8 For a discussion of hyper-reflection as a radical repetition of the phenomenological gesture, see Ted Toadvine, “Phenomenology and ‘Hyper-Reflection’,” in Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts, ed. Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds (Stocksfield, UK: Acumen, 2008), especially, 28. 9 For an important discussion of the role of “self-portraiture” in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, see Hugh J. Silverman, “Cézanne’s Mirror Stage,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 262–77.

Epilogue 1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression: Cours au Collège de France (Notes, 1953) (Geneva: MetisPresses, 2011), 48. 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955), trans. Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 11. † It was with great sadness that I learned that Hugh J. Silverman had passed away during the final production stage of this book. Hugh was a friend and a mentor to me, and this project would never have been possible without his kind and generous support and guidance over the years. Hugh, as you once said of Merleau-Ponty, your presence will be prolonged despite your absence, and, as I would have said to you had I had the chance, your absence will weigh upon us all as we move forward into the open future. Adieu, my friend, on behalf of all of us who remain behind in the between.

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Index advent  126, 148, 158 Adventures of the Dialectic  119–26, 165, 181 Alain  120 ambiguity  7–9, 18, 24, 30–1, 56, 93, 103, 107, 109, 111–15, 119, 121–2, 125, 129, 136, 142, 147, 158 Aristotle  29–30 artwork/work of art  2, 79, 84, 87–8, 130–1, 156 Balzac, Honoré de  17 Barbaras, Renaud  30–3, 44 behavior  3, 6, 22, 59–77, 85–6, 93, 96, 98, 135–6 behaviorism  61 being  3, 9, 18, 20, 22, 24–6, 28, 32, 34–5, 39, 43, 52–8, 61, 74, 85, 88–9, 94–5, 98, 101, 143, 148, 152, 155–6, 158–63, 166–79, 181–2 being-in-the-world  37, 57–8, 84–9, 93–4, 97–8, 131, 162, 169, 176, 178 Bergson, Henri  39, 171 Black, Max  28 body/embodiment  2, 8, 11–12, 14–15, 23, 26, 34–9, 42–5, 50, 52–8, 59–60, 63–4, 70–7, 79–102, 114, 116, 119, 124, 127, 130, 132–6, 140–4, 147–8, 152–5, 159–60, 170, 174–80, 183, 192n. 30 body schema  87–8 Brunschvicg, Léon  47–8, 51–3, 58, 74–5 Bukharin, Nikolai  108–13, 120, 131, 149 Casey, Edward S.  67 Cézanne, Paul  17, 45, 127–31, 144, 156, 158 “Cézanne’s Doubt”  127–32, 161

chiasm  24–5, 133, 151, 157, 171, 172, 183 Claudel, Paul  13 cogito  43, 54, 79, 98–100, 124 communication  2, 4–8, 13–14, 18, 20, 35–9, 67, 72–3, 84, 90–3, 96–8, 102, 114, 118, 122, 125, 127, 132, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 142, 149–50, 155–7, 164, 173, 175–7, 179, 182 communism  104, 109–10, 116, 122–5, 132, 165 community  5, 37, 57, 105–7, 117, 133, 164, 169 cultural world  11, 96–8, 136, 152 Da Vinci, Leonardo  128, 131–2 Davidson, Donald  28–9 Descartes, René  42–5, 47–8, 50, 53, 74, 99–100, 124, 157, 163 dialectic  22, 68, 70–7, 112, 119, 121–6, 150 hyper-  3, 165, 168, 178, 190n. 5 eidetic description  3, 5, 7, 16–22, 42, 133 El Greco  75 embodiment  see body empiétement (encroachment)  32, 39, 43, 56, 58, 105, 107–8, 114, 116–9, 125, 161, 163, 170, 175, 177, 189n. 46 empiricism  8, 42, 46, 49–50, 60–1, 75, 80, 82, 84, 90 ethics  108–9, 115 existentialism  42, 52, 142 exscription  5, 9, 12, 14, 16, 18–20, 26–7, 29, 32, 34–6, 39–40, 80, 86, 94, 101, 124, 133, 140, 144, 146, 151, 154, 159, 160–2, 169, 170, 172–3, 177–80, 182–4 “Eye and Mind”  34, 43, 45, 151–61

208

Index

field  8, 11, 17, 20–1, 25–6, 29, 37, 39, 54–5, 64–5, 67, 69, 71–2, 81, 83–5, 88, 91, 95–6, 99–100, 102, 104–5, 114, 117–18, 124–5, 134, 142, 146, 148–9, 153, 157, 163, 169, 173–4, 181 phenomenal  8, 72, 83–4 flesh  151, 177 form  13–14, 24, 60–9, 89, 135, 161, 173–4, 192n. 2 freedom  39, 79, 86–7, 98, 100–2, 103–4, 106, 108, 110, 114–18, 125–6, 131–2, 142, 160, 176 Freud, Sigmund  73, 89, 128, 131–2 gearing into  14, 30, 36, 38, 69, 85, 92, 114, 121, 135, 141, 149, 151, 153, 155, 156–7, 164, 169, 174, 177, 187n. 21 Gelb, Adhemar  65, 86 Gestalt theory  3, 60–1, 65, 68–9, 84, 114 gestures  4, 8–17, 20–1, 26–8, 30, 34, 36–9, 45, 52, 55, 57–8, 65–8, 70–3, 82, 86–8, 90–4, 97, 105–8, 114–15, 128, 130–8, 141–51, 153, 155–64, 170, 173, 175, 178–80, 182–3 Goldstein, Kurt  63, 65, 74, 86 habit  8, 11, 21, 34, 64, 66, 72, 85, 87–8, 101, 114, 128, 147, 153, 175 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  43, 72, 105, 113–14, 120, 126, 149–50, 165 Heidegger, Martin  52 historical responsibility see responsibility historicity  39, 96, 147, 161 history  21–2, 56–7, 76, 85, 96, 103–26, 127, 131, 136, 138, 141, 146, 148–51, 159, 165, 169–70 of philosophy  37–9, 44, 184 horizons  19, 38, 79, 82–3, 90, 96, 99, 124, 167, 171, 173, 176

humanism  23, 48, 50, 103–26, 136 Humanism and Terror  108–16, 117, 126 Husserl, Edmund  3–4, 7, 16–18, 23, 38–40, 48, 52, 56, 60, 92, 95, 133, 163, 183–4 “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”  137, 139–50 individuation  22–7, 69, 70, 72, 76, 85, 88, 100, 104–5, 164, 178 intellectualism  6, 28, 30, 42, 47, 49–50, 60, 64, 75–6, 80, 82–4, 90 intentionality  48, 50–2, 81, 88, 101, 118, 140, 144 interpretive distance  2, 10, 16, 20, 28–9, 31, 39, 50, 53–4, 72–3, 76, 82–3, 86, 98, 128, 142, 144, 173 intersubjectivity  90, 94, 106–7, 121 intertwining  31–6, 42, 55–6, 96, 100, 105, 108, 125, 147–8, 152–9, 161, 165, 167, 170–8 Johnson, Mark  29 Kant, Immanuel  18, 47–8, 53, 74–5, 95, 121–2 Koestler, Arthur  108–11, 114–15 Lakoff, George  29 language  1–37, 65–6, 72, 74–6, 90–4, 97, 117, 126, 132–50, 164–5, 170–4, 179–80, 182 Lascaux  155 Lefort, Claude  109, 112–14 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich  120, 122, 131 Les temps modernes  103, 137 lived experience  6–7, 35, 42, 44, 46, 48–9, 75–6, 81, 129, 133, 152, 163, 170–2, 257 Logos  136, 159, 172 Lukács, Georg  121–2 Machiavelli, Niccolò  106, 116–17 Malraux, André  10, 142–6, 148

Index

209

Marcel, Gabriel  42, 48–9, 52–9, 87, 113, 165, 169 Marxism  4, 22, 103–4, 108–16, 119–26, 132 Matisse, Henri  143, 159 meaning  1–39, 50–3, 60–77, 80–3, 87–8, 91–7, 105, 107–8, 110, 114–15, 121–6, 129–50, 160, 164, 171, 173, 175–6, 180, 181–3 memory  5, 23, 35, 76, 104, 113, 138, 171 metaphor  5, 27–37, 72, 82, 88, 96, 104, 159, 168, 176 milieu  24, 26–7, 35, 63–75, 85–6, 100, 105, 122, 129, 140, 149, 153, 160 motor intentionality  66, 88, 99, 147, 153

perception  2, 9, 23, 32, 45, 45, 47, 49–52, 65–6, 71–5, 79–102, 106, 113, 122, 124, 127, 129, 145–8, 150, 151–2, 154, 156–7, 162–7, 171, 173–4, 176, 183 performance  5, 10–12, 15, 27–9, 35–40, 73, 76, 87, 92, 97–8, 105, 133–6, 146–7, 162, 168, 179–80, 182–3 phantom limb  85 Phenomenology of Perception  1, 6, 11, 18, 22, 31, 37, 43–4, 47, 53, 61, 65, 77, 79–102, 104, 118, 128, 129, 134, 137, 147, 174, 176 Plato  82 Proust, Marcel  17, 20 psychoanalysis  89, 132

new liberalism  4, 103, 119–21, 125–6 Nietzsche, Friedrich  48–51

reading  4–5, 8–11, 14, 20–1, 35–40, 73, 90, 92, 95, 99–100, 116, 122, 136–9, 146, 150, 151–6, 162, 164, 174, 176, 181–4 responsibility  34–5, 103, 106–8, 111–12, 117, 120, 139, 149–50, 162 ressentiment  48–50 Ricœur, Paul  29–32 Rubashov, Nicholas Salmanovich  109–12

one’s own body (le corps proper)  see body/embodiment ontology  9, 11, 23–4, 32, 34, 39, 42–3, 47, 56, 68, 89, 108, 119, 135, 151–2, 157–65, 170–80, 182 origin of language  92–4, 97, 130, 136, 148 others (autrui)  8, 11, 27, 43–4, 55–9, 61, 71, 90, 92, 96–8, 103, 105–8, 110, 112, 114, 118–19, 121, 125, 130, 134–5, 138, 146, 149–50, 163–6, 170, 173–4, 177–8, 181 painting  13, 26–8, 45, 82, 126, 127–50, 151–61 partes extra partes  43, 45, 53, 80, 85 passive/transition synthesis  95–6, 101 pensée de survol (high-altitude thinking)  17, 22, 46–8, 50, 53, 63, 76, 104, 107–8, 120–1, 124, 137, 140, 145, 149, 152, 157, 159, 167, 170, 181

Saint Aubert, Emanuel de  38, 42, 44, 47, 52–3, 56, 105, 112, 116, 118–19 Saint Augustine  1–2, 16 Sartre, Jean-Paul  46–8, 52, 55, 103, 119, 123–5, 137, 142, 165–7 Saussure, Ferdinand de  3, 126–7, 132–5, 138–9, 142, 148, 174 Scheler, Max  42, 46, 48–53, 58–9, 73 Schneider, Johann  65, 86 science  15, 25, 41–8, 59, 62, 66, 69, 71, 96, 113, 129, 137, 152 sedimentation  34, 86, 101 sensation/sensing  71–2, 80, 82, 95–6, 98, 100, 131, 154

210

Index

sexuality  87–90 Signs  132, 137, 181 silence  3, 8–9, 17–18, 91–2, 100, 142–3, 148, 150, 159, 162, 165, 171–2, 178, 180 Silverman, Hugh J.  4, 18, 21, 138–9, 142, 156, 164, 176, 181 Simondon, Gilbert  5, 22–6, 32, 34, 40, 60–1, 63, 68–9, 72, 74, 76, 83, 88, 91, 114, 139, 141, 154, 164, 167–8, 178 space/spatiality  28, 33, 45, 55–6, 67, 71–2, 78, 86–7, 91, 95–9, 135, 155–6, 158, 160, 170, 178 spacing  8–9, 18, 20, 28, 39, 143, 160, 163, 176, 176, 182 Spinoza, Baruch  48 structuralism  3, 133, 139–42 Structure of Behavior, The  22, 43–4, 59–77, 80, 135 time/temporality  1–3, 16, 19, 28, 33–4, 55, 67, 88, 91, 97–102, 124, 150, 151, 160, 170–1, 173 trace  10–13, 20, 28–9, 35–9, 87, 91–2, 97, 136, 144, 153, 155, 158, 161, 176, 179 transductive logic  5, 22, 26, 39, 72, 74, 83, 85, 87–8, 100, 113–14, 122,

125, 133, 136, 139, 141, 145, 150, 153–4, 159, 161, 163, 168, 173, 180 Trotsky, Leon  112, 120, 122–3, 131 truth  18, 38–9, 48, 50, 86, 93–4, 98, 121–2, 135–6, 141, 145, 150, 158–9, 162, 165 Umwelt  63, 68 unthought  4, 39–40 Valéry, Paul  17, 131, 153 vestiges  5, 11–12, 35–9, 70–1, 80, 90, 93, 97, 99, 130, 134–7, 142, 144, 182–3 violence  99, 103, 105–26 Visible and the Invisible, The  1, 22, 33, 151, 161–80 visibility  153–6, 160–1, 164, 174–80 Wahl, Jean  48–9 Waldenfels, Bernard  17–21 Weber, Max  121–2, 125 weight  8–16, 20–27, 33–6, 39–40, 44, 49, 55, 64–7, 70–6, 81–8, 92–3, 96, 99–102, 107–9, 115, 117, 123, 126, 128, 130–4, 138–9, 143, 145, 149, 150, 159–60, 163, 165, 168, 170–4, 181–4 writing  11, 36, 39, 73, 92, 94, 137–8, 149–50, 180, 183