In the Shadow of Phenomenology: Writings After Merleau-Ponty I 9781472546906, 9781847061300, 9781441118844

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The history of thought . . . dismantles or embalms (désamorce ou embaume) certain doctrines, changing them into ‘messages’ or museum pieces. There are others, on the contrary, which it keeps active. These do not endure because there is some miraculous adequation or correspondence between them and an invariable ‘reality’—such an exact and fleshless truth is neither sufficient nor even necessary for the greatness of a doctrine—but because, as obligatory steps for those who want to go further, they remain utterances which exceed (parlants au-delà) statements and propositions. These doctrines are the classics. They are recognizable by the fact that no one takes them literally (à la letter), and yet new facts are never absolutely outside their competence, but call forth new echoes from them and real new lustres (reliefs) in them. (S: 10–11)

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Abbreviations

Works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty AD

Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). CAL Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). EO ‘The Experience of Others,’ trans. Fred Evans, Hugh J. Silverman, Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, Vol. XVIII, nos. 12 & 3, 1982–1983, pp. 33–63. EM ‘Eye and Mind’ trans. Carleton Dallery, The Primacy of Perception And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). HLP Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. Leonard Lawlor, Bettina Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002). IP L’Institution Passivité: Notes de Cours au Collège de France 1954–1955, ed. Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort, Stéphanie Ménasé (Paris: Belin, 2003). IPP In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild & James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963). N Nature: Course Notes From the Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003). NC Notes de cours au Collège de France 1958–1959 et 1960–1961, ed. Stéphanie Ménasé (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). PD Parcours deux 1951–1961, ed. Jacques Prinaire (Lagrasse: Editions Verdier). PoP Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (revised by Forrest Williams) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962). PNP ‘Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel,’ trans. Hugh J. Silverman, Telos No. 29, Fall 1976. PP The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).

Abbreviations PW S SB SNS TD TL VI WP

ix

The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fischer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Texts and Dialogues, ed. Hugh J. Silverman, James Barry Jr. (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1992). Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960, trans. John O’Niell (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). The World of Perception, trans. Oliver David (London: Routledge, 2004).

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Introduction: In the Shadow of Phenomenology

‘The incompleteness (l’incomplètitude) of the reduction . . . is not an obstacle to the reduction, it is the reduction itself, the recovery of vertical being.’ (VI: 178) ‘The polysemy (Vieldeutigkeit) is not a shadow to eliminate true light.’ (PNP: 70)

I. Phenomenology’s Inachèvement: On philosophy as ‘relearning to see’ Over the last half-century many attempts have been made to understand, and even to theoretically complete, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s final work. This work is variously described, depending upon how it is modeled; by recourse to more classical or scientific models, it is seen to be providing the final or founding reduction for the phenomenological project; by recourse to more aesthetic or humanist models, it is seen as ‘deepening’ his account, for example, transforming phenomenology into ontology.1 This terminology is Heideggerean, consistent with his focus on the work of Heidegger or Schelling in a number of his later lectures and writings. Neither model is without complication, however. It is not as if the classical phenomenological project lacked ontological implications; Heidegger repeatedly stated that his Seinsfrage depended on Husserl’s doctrine of the categorical intuition of Being. On the other hand, even Merleau-Ponty’s late emphasis of painting, taken by some to provide phenomenology’s final transcendental reduction, repeatedly referred to a ‘secret science’ (EM: 161). The very idea of completeness here could not be had without irony or “ambiguity,” to cite one of his favorite terms. In a number of contexts Merleau-Ponty offers suggestions that contest such views, just as he had contested the possibility of completing the phenomenological reduction from the outset (PoP: xiv). Still aligning his project with the ‘general effort of modern thought’ in the works of Balzac,

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Proust, Valéry, or Cézanne, he declared in the Phenomenology of Perception, ‘rationality is not a problem’; it is a matter of ‘witnessing (assister),’ of ‘relearning to see the world (rapprendre à voir le monde)’ (PoP: xx). He had perhaps not yet fully apprehended the complications attending “modern thought” and what he already called ‘phenomenology’s unfinished nature (inachèvement)’ (PoP: xxi). Merleau-Ponty later claims in the Phenomenology that Husserl, in his analysis of the lifeworld, tacitly breaking with the ‘philosophy of essence,’ already ‘makes a problem of rationality when he allows that significations are in the final analysis “fluid (flieszende),” ’ (PoP: 49, 365n).2 The analyses of the Lebenswelt would result less in an ultimately achieved clarity than a wealth to be ceaselessly mined. Husserl scholars would perhaps rightly deny such claims; Merleau-Ponty later admits that he was ‘not proposing a coherent interpretation of Husserl’s work and I have never done that’ (HLP: 15). It would be a matter of showing an other that remained unthought in the early works of Husserl, revealing how this inachèvement was essential to phenomenological rationality. In Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty states of painting itself, so privileged in his final work, ‘no work is ever absolutely completed and done with’ (EM: 190). He claims philosophy is claimed to be little different in this, his last, published work: the only ‘privilege’ it sustains is ‘to have rendered its support managable (maniable)’ (EM: 189). This is an odd characterization but one, as will become further evident, critical to grasping the theoretical status of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. We are reminded, as he once quoted Baudelaire, ‘a complete work was not necessarily finished, and a finished work not necessarily complete’ (S: 51). In Baudelaire’s recognition, beyond representation or the imitations of classical mimesis, ‘literature freed itself at the same time painting did from resemblance to things, and from the idea of a finished work of art’ (S: 233). In its most original task, philosophy’s relearning to see the world, the very idea of a final or complete expression similarly verges upon incoherence. Or as Merleau-Ponty further glossed it: ‘What is proper to expression is never to be more than approximate’ (S: 233). Merleau-Ponty stated in late lectures that Baudelaire, like Mallarmé or Rimbaud, is a ‘cultural symptom’ that ‘attests to the peril and the possibility of the renaissance of philosophy’ (NC: 46). Such invocations, as will become evident, clearly link Merleau-Ponty’s project to the experiments of literary modernism. Merleau-Ponty emphasized painting in his later work, even claiming that philosophy is a kind of painting that figurally ‘paints without colors in black and white’ (S: 21). Yet he claimed literature, too, has an equally ‘irreplaceable function for philosophy itself,’ in their mutual exploration of ‘the history of Being’ (S: 22; NC: 204). The significance of these suggestions for grasping phenomenology’s transition beyond the

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models of grand theory or systematic foundationalism (Wissenschaftslehre) in Merleau-Ponty’s work is broad in scope. Like all conceptual moves, this one does not take place in isolation. In the fi rst place it still links him to Sartre’s early writing. Sartre had written on literature in the middle forties and published a book on Baudelaire in 1947. 3 Claude Lefort relates that Merleau-Ponty intended to reply to Sartre’s work that had stressed the semantic and philosophical failure of Baudelaire’s works (PW: xvi). Clearly the above statements affi rm such a retort; against Sartre’s condemnation of Baudelaire’s stoic dissatisfaction, Merleau-Ponty’s explorations of the expressive potential of literature distances him from the protocols and engagements of its usual “existentialist” setting.4 It links him, thereby, not only to Sartre’s opponents close to him, for example, Maurice Blanchot, but to theoretical constellations exceeding standard interpretations of his work. 5 If such conceptual moves link him to experiments in form in literary modernism, their momentum further impels him, as it did others, for example, Walter Benjamin, to the theoretical account of the fragment in post-Kantian thought with its similarly complicated implications for the relations concerning reflection and language.6 Both Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin, for example, stressed with Mallarmé that ‘the imperfection of languages consists in their plurality: the supreme one is lacking.’7 Prior to Baudelaire and Mallarmé, the problem of modernity’s fragmented textuality had been the focus of the post-Kantian Romantic theorists. As Friedrich Schlegel put it, while many of the works of the ancients have become fragments, ‘many modern works are fragments as soon as they are written.’8 As early as 1948, in a discussion of Blanchot (who in turn stressed the importance of Schlegel and Novalis), Merleau-Ponty claimed that this unfi nished and ambiguous nature was characteristic of ‘modern thought’ in general (WP: 101, 105). From the outset the signs of Merleau-Ponty’s own proximity to this postKantian archive were evident, if still tentative. In Phenomenology of Perception he claimed that Husserl ‘takes up again the Critique of Judgment when he talks about the teleology of consciousness’ (PoP: xvii).9 This is not, as it might initially seem, simply a progressive account of concept formation. Later he explicitly denies that Husserl had discovered the notion of intentionality. Instead, Descartes and Kant are to be ‘credited with this distinction’ (PoP: 121n). Husserl’s originality lies in the discovery ‘beneath the intentionality of representation, of a deeper intentionality, which others have called existence’ (ibid.). These ‘others’ are oblique, but the Preface’s list would include not only Heidegger, whose account of existence seems to be obviously echoed here. Risking what he called its inachevèment, Merleau-Ponty

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claims, phenomenology has emerged ‘as a manner or style of thinking (mannière ou comme style), that it existed as a movement before arriving at complete awareness of itself (une entière conscience philosophique)’ (PoP: viii). Its adherents have discovered it ‘in every quarter, certainly in Hegel and Kierkegaard, but equally in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud’ (PoP: viii). With an emphasis that reveals the influence of Eugen Fink, MerleauPonty claimed that Husserl’s discovery is not the foundational science of consciousness typically attributed to him but rather the explication of the ‘operative intentionality (fugierende Intentionalität)’ that underlies it (PoP: xviii, 418n).10 Indeed the attempt to derive the latter from the acts of consciousness is precisely what is criticized as Husserl’s lingering commitment to ‘analytic reflection.’ The latter, too, is Kantian, albeit in the sense of the first Critique’s intentionality of act and judgment (PoP: xviii). This is especially true of the ‘Kantian’ text of Ideas I (PoP: 276n).11 Merleau-Ponty takes Husserl’s elaboration of the intentionality at stake in the third Critique as a corrective to the limitations of the ‘classical conception’ of reflection and act intentionality (PoP: 243). What are the effects of this correction on the account of constitutive reflection at work in both Kant’s and Husserl’s deployment? Within a few years, confronting the problem of expression and language, Merleau-Ponty declared, ‘we must form a new idea of reason’ (SNS: 3). As will become evident, he would do so, inter alia, after having embarked on an exhaustive investigation of Saussurian linguistics. Merleau-Ponty’s later lectures, however, also reveal the extent to which he sought further clarification of his account in post-Kantian thought, especially in Schelling, but also in Fichte and the early Hegel, as he sought to grasp both existence and rationality beyond the founding reflection of classical phenomenology. He had also given up its foundational models. Rather than a reduction to first principles, to use Schlegel’s term for the exposition of the fragment, phenomenology would begin by articulating experience ‘in media res’.12 Recent scholars, such as Manfred Frank, have revealed the influence of Schlegel’s account of the fragment and its ironic transformation of Fichte’s account of the “oscillations” of interpretative imagination in Schleiermacher’s founding of modern hermeneutics.13 Others, such as Jean-Luc Nancy or Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, have argued for understanding Merleau-Ponty’s predecessors (e.g. Heidegger) or contemporaries (e.g. Blanchot) similarly in this light.14 Despite recent attempts to distance MerleauPonty’s thought from “dialectical” accounts, a similar emphasis on the oscillating “double reference” (or écart) of reading accompanies Merleau-Ponty’s account of the fragmentary intelligibility of language in his later works.

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Commentators have emphasized the heuristic importance of MerleauPonty’s Working Notes for understanding his late works, and have characterized, to use Renaud Barbaras’ terms, these “fragments” as ‘magnificent traces of intuition in its pure state.’15 They shed light not only upon the content but the form of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. In such fragments Merleau-Ponty demures from the aporetics of pure intuition and theoretical subsumption in classical phenomenology in order to acknowledge the ‘hieroglyphics’ of its internal historicity. Even prior to the work of Fink in phenomenology, this word was first invoked in the context of transcendental logic by Novalis (invoking the problem of its sign or expression); Merleau-Ponty similarly used it to describe the pathways (passages) of writing (NC: 203).16 With the passage from an egological or descriptive phenomenology to a historical or institutional account of reflection (Stiftung), Merleau-Ponty reclaims this itinerary. Indeed he found it internal to the passage of Husserl’s own account. Beyond the ‘ambition to see everything that animates the phenomenological reduction,’ Merleau-Ponty claimed, as Husserl’s work advanced, ‘he brought to light fragments of being which disconcerted his frame of reference’: the body, inner time, the other, and history, ‘my life in others and the life of others in me.’17 Perhaps however it was intrinsic to the phenomenological project, ironically divided between intuition and concept. Referring to Husserl’s Crisis as a fragment, Walter Biemal once wondered ‘whether “fragmentariness” is not an essential feature of Husserl’s thought insofar as it constantly appears with systematic claims but finds that its true passion is directed toward analysis through phenomenological intuition, so that it is torn away from the former.’18 Merleau-Ponty stated that the irony in Paul Klee’s paintings and writings reveals expression’s detachment from its own contingency and historicity. As such, he claimed, Klee’s move was philosophical. This was also true of philosophy itself; philosophy is no more in possession of Being than art (NC: 58). Throughout the last decade he articulated this same irony with respect to philosophy. Already in his inaugural lecture, In Praise of Philosophy, Merleau-Ponty linked the task of philosophy to the ‘limping’ of irony in relation to the history that had rendered it ‘manageable’: again, Eye and Mind’s odd characterization. It is the limping of phenomenological reason itself: It is proper to intuition to call forth a development, to become what it is, because it contains a double reference to the mute being which it interrogates and to tractable meaning (maniable signification) which is derived from it. It is the experience of their concordance; it is, as Bergson happily

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In the Shadow of Phenomenology said, a reading (lecture), the art of grasping meaning in a style before it has been put into concepts. And finally the thing itself is the virtual point of the convergent formulations. (IPP: 20)

The reversibility or ‘caesura’ Merleau-Ponty was addressing here was fundamental to his thought (EM: 166). Here it conjoined an embodied phenomenology of perception and the problem of its own historicity and expressive articulation at the heart of vision. It is a reminder, to use Jankélévitich’s pun, that intuition or ‘in-tellection’ or ‘inner-reading,’ is always ‘intus-leger’19 The result of such a convergence is a sketch or ‘outline’ (dessin) that emerges between two fluidities, two series of aspects or, to use Husserl’s term, ‘shadowing-forth (Ab-schattung)’: between things and their historical articulation (S: 179; PW: 37n).20 The resulting intertwining impacts the foundationalism of classical phenomenology and complicated, in turn, its attempts at ‘relearning to see’. When the Phenomenology’s Preface first linked Husserl to the third Critique, it did so invoking Husserl’s prelinguistic stratum: ‘furnishing the text which our knowledge tries to translate into precise language’ (PoP: xviii). Granted Husserl’s foundationalism (and his reductionism) there could be no such translation problem; all meaning derives from the constitutive bestowals (Sinngebung) of consciousness. Later we discover that the model is ascribed to Werthheimer (PoP: 12). Merleau-Ponty would come to rethink or rapprendre this and it would impact both his understanding of language and his commitments to Wertheimer (VI: 192). Ultimately, he claimed, we must ‘rid our minds of the idea that our language is the translation or cipher of an original text’ (S: 43). Indeed ‘the idea of a complete expression is nonsensical’ (S: 43). It assumes an algorithm that is always lacking (VI: 17). The project now involves less a return to a constitutive, prelinguistic stratum than a convergence upon the things themselves with their ‘ambiguity’ and ‘irony’, their historicity, intact (S: 68). At first glance, however, Merleau-Ponty seemed to side with Hegel (and hence with Absolute Idealism) in condemning the leveling indifference of Romantic irony (IPP: 39). As with other matters having to do with Hegel, he sided with him here only ironically. At the same time he appealed to Hegel, Merleau-Ponty denied that there is absolute knowledge, at least knowledge of the sort that could be articulated univocally, systematically, or accommodated to the Idea (IPP: 39). Instead of Absolute Idealism, Merleau-Ponty remained more proximate to its post-Kantian or Romantic predecessors, where, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have put it, ‘romanticism constitutively involves a certain

Introduction

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impossibility of exactly accommodating the vision of the Idea.’21 Early on he had claimed that existentialism ‘was the opposite of system,’ an opposition and perhaps naïveté that later floundered before the logic of structure and institution (SNS: 94). But if in his final lecture he was returning to Hegel’s historicism to account for a ‘philosophy of structure,’ he stressed Hegel’s own emphasis on many-sidedness (Vielseitigkeit) (PNP: 70, 81). “Ambiguity” here involves the plurality out of which we approach the transcendence of things; it involves their polysemy (Vieldeutigkeit) or the plurality of reliefs or profiles (Aspekten). The differences involved then are not to be eliminated. ‘The true cannot be defined by coincidence and outside of all difference (ècart) in relation to the true’ (PNP: 70). It is in this sense that it involves a philosophy of the event or structure. To use another of Kant’s terms Merleau-Ponty invokes, the event functions as a ‘monogram’ (a term that emerges again in relation to Blanchot) capable of sustaining or provoking a plurality of interpretations (EM: 179; WP: 101). The historicity involved resisted reduction to the analysis of problems or solutions as much as it resisted ‘a flattening of history into “my” philosophy’ (VI: 198). How, after all, ‘can one claim to go to the things themselves while refusing this right to others’ (VI: 186)? Instead ‘it is necessary to account for their view and for oneself,’ to admit a ‘philosophy of several entries’ (VI: 186, 174). ‘It implies the use of language, the use of the history operative in us’ (VI: 198). If Husserl’s operative intentionality is still at work here, it is devoid of the attempt to get behind our history. He tells us again and again that this shadow is not to be eliminated, reduced, or made aufgehoben. Having just invoked Schelling’s nature as our barbarous source, he said to Husserl: ‘The philosopher must bear his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of future light’ (S: 178). He invoked Kierkegaard’s ‘I am no longer what I say I am,’ in responding to Hegel’s attempt to present the Absolute in its self-same purity: ‘The “polysemy” (Vieldeutigkeit) is not a shadow to eliminate true light’ (PNP: 70).22 The shadow out of which phenomenology emerges was precisely the condition of possibility and responsible for its inachèvement, the event of its opening upon the world. Our rational tradition emerges out of this interplay of unity and discontinuity. There are in fact two corresponding historicities. ‘One is ironic or even derisory, and made of misinterpretations, for each age struggles against the others’ (S: 60). This is ‘the history of forgetfulness rather than memory,’ to use the Nietzschean term (S: 60). The other is cumulative, if only by the renewal that contestation and ‘continuous exchange’ implies and without which it would not be possible (ibid.). Here we are reminded

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that ‘(t)here are denials that affirm.’ Where it is not simply habitual, ‘(t)he meaning is beyond the letter, the meaning is always ironic (le sens est toujours ironique)’ (PW: 30). The irony becomes even more pointed, and with a certain Nietzschean edge when, risking misinterpretation himself, MerleauPonty combines the two accounts of historicity in claiming that for Husserl, tradition is ‘the power to forget origins’ (S: 59, 159).23 Husserl’s problem of forgetfulness (Sinnenleerung), construed always as a danger to the iteration of origins, is transformed; Merleau-Ponty denied both the possibility of reactivation of our epistemic origins and denied its tragic connotations. As Nietzsche had put it, granted the ‘fluidity’ of interpretation, ‘only that which has no history is definable.’24 Indeed, Merleau-Ponty, too, claims that the model of the in itself has to be suppressed to be replaced by an account of the real that emerges only between the plurality of aspects (VI: 126).25 Such forgetfulness, or “overcoming,” as Merleau-Ponty puts it, becomes the occasion for the renewal, the fruitfulness, and transformation of tradition, albeit by still linking it to the rationality of phenomenological motivation and implication (HLP: 30, 20). His gloss on Husserl’s account of constitution itself echoes this in claiming that it escapes the alternative of the continuous and the discontinuous: Since constitution is neither just the development of a future which is implied in its beginning, nor just the effect which an external ordering has in us, it escapes the alternative of continuous or discontinuous. It is discontinuous, since each layer is made from forgetting the preceding one. It is continuous from one end to the other because this forgetting is not simply absence (as if the beginning had not existed) but a forgetting what the beginning literally was to the profit of what it has subsequently become – internalization in the Hegelian sense, Errinerung. (S: 176) This reading of Husserl (and Hegel and Nietzsche) is another example of our relation to what Merleau-Ponty called the ‘classics.’ The classics are recognizable (no less ironically) ‘by the fact that no one takes them literally’ and yet they remain (still two historicities) ‘obligatory steps for those who want to go further’ (S: 10–11). This defines the expressive plurality of operant history: what is characteristic of the classics is that ‘new facts are never absolutely outside their province but call forth new echoes from them and reveals new lustres (reliefs) in them’ (S: 11). An almost identical passage from Eye and Mind adds concerning such works, ‘the interminable reinterpretations to which it is legitimately susceptible change it only in itself’ (EM: 179). For Merleau-Ponty, the question of legitimation emerges

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only out of the plurality at stake in this operative history, without attempting to derive a final appropriation. Just as the perceived world endures only through the reflections, shadows, levels and horizons between things (which are not things and are not nothing, but on the contrary mark out by themselves the fields of possible variation in the same things and the same world), so the works and thought of a philosopher are also made of certain articulations between things said. There is no dilemma of objective interpretation or arbitrariness with respect to these articulations, since they are not objects of thought, since (like shadow and reflection) they would be destroyed by being subjected to analytic observation or taken out of context, and since we can be faithful to and find them only by thinking them again. (S: 160) This may not be as paradoxical as it appears. The claim is that neither analysis nor justification involves an out of time (or out of body) experience; each emerges from the very plurality that constitutes its context or constellation. This genesis belies the simple oppositions of “confirmation” and “disconfirmation” as much as it does reduction. To use MerleauPonty’s terms, ‘to speak of verification of disconfirmation is barbarous’ (S: 10). Questions of justification or norm cannot be disconnected from sequence, the density and the multiplicity of historical genesis that opens up both their possibility and the necessity that solicits legitimate response (VI: 187). This two-fold history made it possible for Merleau-Ponty both to recognize the insufficiency of his early account of the tacit or lived Cogito (because I form the Cogito only with words) and to say that St. Augustine ‘did not invent the Cogito as a central thought’ but yet ‘encountered it’ (S: 60). No moment of this history becomes privileged; even Descartes himself ‘cannot make a gesture without entering the labyrinth of Cartesian interpretation and waiting for others to meet him there’ (PW: 96). The experience is dependent on ‘the family relationship which all of its moments bear on one another’ because each potentially ‘modifies the situation of the undertaking and requires precisely that those come after it be different from it’ (S: 69). Hence the Cogito can be both an experience and a cultural acquisition, a thought underway whose advent depends upon the zigzag or contingency (and family resemblances) of a specific history. As is evident from the archive provisionally assembled here, a great deal of post-Kantian philosophy can be understood to have been struggling to articulate this operative rationality. This struggle is reflected in

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Merleau-Ponty’s own itinerary and various ‘dialectical’ accounts of reflection without strict identity. It is present from the Phenomenology’s attempt to grasp thought’s dependence upon unreflective life in ‘radical reflection’ to the final writings account of a ‘hyper-dialectic,’ articulating, beyond the ‘reign of the ineffable,’ an oneiric event of our flesh, ‘an operative imaginary, which is part of our institution, and which is indispensable for the definition of the Being itself’ (PoP: xiv, 241; VI: 95, 85). Such ‘dialectics’ inevitably problematized the interrelation between phenomenological experience, history and expression, an Ineinander ‘disclosing, rectifying each by the other’ (VI: 110). But he was by no means alone here, nor, arguably, was his the only phenomenology to encounter this problematic. One might rediscover the lineaments of the Romantic’s account of the Wechsel of imagination in his phenomenological predecessor’s accounts, for example, in the ‘double intentionality’ at work in Husserl’s ‘zig-zag’ between intuition and concept or Heidegger’s account of the hermeneutic circle.26 Indeed in the latter case, arguably, it had accompanied Heidegger’s thought from the beginning. The motto for the conclusion of Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift had been taken from Novalis’s Fragments: ‘We seek the unconditioned [Unbedingte] everywhere and only ever find conditioned things [Dinge].’27 And, his late meditations concerning ‘The Way to Language’ would take their point of departure from Novalis’s claim that ‘the peculiar property of language (is that) language is concerned exclusively with itself.’28

II. The fecundity of the fragment and the tolerance of the incomplete Writing about the same time as his inaugural lecture, and speaking of Klee and Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty stated, ‘there are two possible interpretations of that tolerance of the incomplete shown by those moderns who present sketches as paintings . . . and whose every canvas, as the signature of a moment of life, demands to be seen on “show” as in a series of successive canvases’ (S: 51). It may be that they have given up the idea of “the work” in order to present the immediate. Or else, ‘completion in the sense of a presentation that is objective’ may no longer apply here.29 In MerleauPonty’s own case both transformations concerning what can be shown and what can be strictly (or workably) said are involved. As Blanchot stated with respect to Schlegel, the classical work was always a matter of “totality, perfection, achievement.”30 Instead, Merleau-Ponty, realized, a work, finished or not, remains an opening tentatively achieved—or alternately,

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an event whose completeness remains always underway and never fully achieved. Merleau-Ponty wagered that language expresses as much by what is between the words as the words themselves, as much ‘by what it does not “say” as by the words themselves’ (S: 45). This was true even of the development of philosophy itself. Hence, their connection: ‘Modern painting, like modern thought generally, obliges us to admit a truth which does not resemble things, which is without any external model and without any predestined instruments of expression, and which is nevertheless truth’ (S: 57). The Phenomenology already declared that ‘Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being’ (PoP: xx). Eye and Mind would similarly declare that ‘in paintings themselves we could seek a figured philosophy’ (EM: 168). Again invoking Kant’s account of aesthetic idea or ‘monogram,’ Merleau-Ponty claimed, ‘a philosophy, like a work of art, is an object that can arouse more thoughts than those that are “contained” in it . . .’ (VI: 199). Perhaps Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible will need to be regarded less as complete or incomplete theoretical treatises or works open to objective presentation—thus less as presentations of a simple phenomenology or a new ontology. Given the ‘polymorphism’ at stake, they may articulate more a series of themes and variations, expression and modulation, arguments and rejoinders (VI: 253). To speak Kantian, beyond the oppositions of particularism and universalism, they would respond, strictly speaking, neither to ‘manner’ nor to ‘method.’31 While the Preface invoked this distinction in tracing phenomenology’s passage from ‘manner or style of thinking’ to complete awareness or determinacy, it would remain “long underway.” The Phenomenology’s discovery (in Husserl) of the ‘fluid’ expressivity internal to phenomenological typic transformed its rationality. It would be more a historically recombinant “stylistics,” a word Merleau-Ponty invoked both from Bergson and Husserl to articulate the passage between intuition and concept.32 The Working Notes would eventually claim: ‘every concept is first a horizonal generality, a generality of style’ (VI: 237). No conceptual matrix overcomes this indeterminacy. He invoked this term even in refusing such overcoming to physics, concluding that ‘no ontology is exactly required by the thought proper to physics at work’ (VI: 17). Husserl himself referred to phenomenology as ‘an essentially new and strictly scientific style of philosophy.’33 MerleauPonty came to see, as the “passage” or the rapprendre à voir of his own work demonstrates, that what the Phenomenology’s Preface referred to as complete philosophical awareness (entière conscience philosophique), granted phenomenology’s inherent inachèvement, was always a horizonal matter, always

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subject to refinement, new models, and refiguration. Its synthesis remains always fluid and transitional. Hence, in the strict sense: ‘Now the very idea of a complete statement (énoncé complet) is inconsistent’ (S: 17). The failure of such apodicticity does not entail the simple failure of adequacy or sufficiency in our operative language. Instead, granted the fluidity and the rationality of the event, each statement awaits, in turn, its reader’s or listener’s understanding and transformation. Thus Merleau-Ponty’s work continuously circulated around the topic and experience of phenomenological embodiment and the task of its rational articulation and what the Preface already called the task ‘of taking our own history upon ourselves’ (PoP: xx). By 1948, Merleau-Ponty had affirmed Blanchot’s extension of the rhythmics of poetry to the novel and beyond (WP: 101). Husserl himself had already referred to the task of our overcoming hidden equivocity as a matter of sorting our ‘symbolic rhythms,’ claiming all the while that ‘not a shadow (nict ein Schatten)’ of its sense ‘remains excluded from my effective intentionality.’34 Marc Richir reminds us in this regard that the problem of phenomenological schematism was everywhere a matter of such rhythm and its imaginative variations, the explication of identity and difference.35 From that time forward, the problem of this rational articulation becomes more explicitly an on-going theme of Merleau-Ponty’s, often omitted in standard accounts of his thought. The account of phenomenological expression—and philosophy’s ensuing need for a ‘complete reconstruction’—became both deepened and transformed in his later writings, perhaps even challenging his previous foundational commitments to the “primacy” of perception (VI: 193). If thought never fully frees itself from the sensuous and what it is as embodiment (even if language itself is in the first place ‘sensible speech’) there is ‘no one master key to the visible’ (S: 18; EM: 181). Language and perception, like vision and tonality, are different, albeit mutually implicated (and “intertwined”) dimensions of its exploration. All this was controversial. Some thought that, in attending to the expressive articulation of phenomenological expression, Merleau-Ponty in the end simply aestheticized it. Alternately, others concluded though that Merleau-Ponty’s account was a fulfillment of the inherent logic of Husserl’s own failures. First seen by Jean Cavaillès, these failures arose out of the antinomies between phenomenology and formal logic, where Husserl’s explorations in transcendental aesthetic or sensibility (habitus) were never sufficiently linked to his claims concerning formal analytics.36 It can be argued, however, that Merleau-Ponty became, along with Cavaillès, one of the first phenomenologists to realize its formal implications (S: 78).

Introduction

13

All ontology itself will be ‘figured’ or ‘indirect’ (VI: 179). He acknowledged these terms reflected the proximity of negative theology or ‘the oneiric world of analogy’ (EM: 171). They need also to be understood in terms of a complicated constellation of issues that includes the ‘ruins’ of dialectic, for example, following Lukács’ critique of dialectic as ‘direct thought’ (NC: 351). Equally significant, they also emerge through the post-Hegelian account of rationality in contingency that he had discovered through Saussure (CAL: 101–2). Perhaps more than any of his phenomenological predecessors, MerleauPonty realized that the idea that ‘there is a golden age of language in which words once adhered to the objects themselves,’ would have to be foregone (PW: 6). This would separate his interest in literary modernism even from Benjamin, who, following Hamann, had invoked such an origin. This denial applies even to his master concept in the final writings, the flesh (le chair) that unites the flesh of my body and that of world. Emerging from his investigation into the history and concept of Nature, this new “concept,” which ‘has no name in philosophy,’ underlies the very Wechsel or écart of the visible and the invisible and ‘makes even reading possible’ (VI: 147). He is often criticized, perhaps aptly, for masking its metaphysical and even theological history.37 The terminology of the flesh however can be grasped only in Merleau-Ponty’s passage beyond the theoretics of simple description.38 The “name” of the flesh by no means emerges from a semantic primitivism. Merleau-Ponty knew full well that everywhere ‘ “primitivism” is only the counterpart to scientism, and is still scientism’ (VI: 182). If the “flesh” seemed provisionally to be simply a phenomenological extension of Husserl’s account of embodiment in Ideas II, along with its theoretical framework, both were being radically reworked. Instead of “disentangling” body and world, self and other, being and language, Merleau-Ponty would now articulate precisely their ‘intertwining’ or their reciprocal ‘simultaneity’ (VI: 268).39 The reversibility of seeing and the visible would be analogized from the ‘model’ of touching and the touched, my right hand touching my left (VI: 204). Just as in touching my left hand my right hand feels its ‘other side,’ its Ineinander, so consciousness would encounter in the visible its other side, a prolongation of its own embodiment, its own flesh, the flesh of one Being in which it participates and which renders it in-telligible. Many (themselves arguing by analogy) found in this a new (and dogmatic) immanence, if not substantialism. Indeed Merleau-Ponty himself claimed that reversibility is absolute or ‘ultimate truth’ (VI: 155). The Phenomenology’s appeals to the absolute had been related to and been limited by ‘the point where the individual

14

In the Shadow of Phenomenology

life begins to reflect on itself’ (PoP: 62). He still retained the premises of classical Idealism: ‘reflection is truly reflection only if it is not carried outside itself’ (PoP: 62). But the Phenomenology had also outlined how the event of sensation (le sentir) itself would belie it: ‘in the opacity of sensation’ the perceiving subject must ‘reach out towards things to which he has, in advance, no key, and for which he nevertheless carries within himself the project, and open himself to an absolute other, which he is making in the depths of his being’ (PoP: 326). He came further to see that reflection is always parasitic upon the depths, this flesh ‘beneath this skin, unto the depths of being’ upon which it relies (VI: 149). But if this is not a renewal of substance metaphysics or ontotheology, what is it?

III. On philosophy as operant history, the polymorphism of Being and ‘the flesh’ If Merleau-Ponty has not neglected the descriptive task of classical phenomenology, it is not the simple assertion of description that justifies the account. Here, too, what gives the account ‘ justification (droit)’ is ‘taking our own history upon ourselves’: again our ‘operative history’ as he later called it (PoP: xx). It is by no means a question of recovering an ‘ineffable,’ but the encounter of an event before which one does not yet ‘know how to speak’ (VI: 252). Like all speech, however, it is not without a history; there is no question then that we might ‘reduce history to the visible’ (VI: 266). Here, too, Merleau-Ponty articulates the reversibility of the flesh both out of our conceptual past and to the figurative possibility of imaginative refiguration. Crucially, he relates such reversibility, for example, to real opposition in Kant, where, beyond mere conceptual identification, the event of sensibility itself intervenes to differentiate conceptually indiscernible differences (VI: 261).40 This link between the concept of the flesh and that of real opposition reveals a conceptual history at a critical moment: the point at which Kant himself preoutlines dialectic and in the moment that he acknowledges the “derealization” or “reversibility” that articulates the real (TL: 61n). In one sense, to use Nietzsche’s terms, he overcomes philosophy’s (or at least rationalism’s) ‘horror of the senses.’41 Sensibility interrupts the attempt to identify concepts and things in themselves, providing a content the former lacks. As Kant points out, the concept of a cubic foot is the same whenever I think it, but, as concretely determined in space, cubic feet are different and these differences do not belong to the concepts: ‘but entirely to sensibility.’42

Introduction

15

Rather than starting with the conceptual distinction between body and spirit—‘for then it would be the union of contradictories’—Merleau-Ponty begins his own account of the flesh’s reversibility out of the event of their differentiation (écart) (VI: 147). Only then, he argues, will we be able to gauge the extent to which ‘these idealizations find their relative justification and are gone beyond’ (S: 165). Indeed at one point Merleau-Ponty suggests, ‘there is no intelligible world, there is the sensible world (il y a du monde sensible)’ (VI: 214). As this il y a indicates, it is a question of realizing that sensoriality involves transcendence, a transcendence that must be understood within the intertwining of the visible and the invisible at stake in the écart of the flesh itself (VI: 219). Strikingly, Kant himself had initially linked the problem of indiscernible difference precisely to reflection upon the difference, the “incongruence” between the left and right hands that precludes their simple conceptual identification.43 Linking this account to his notion of écart, the Working Notes state, ‘Kant’s reasoning is valid here’ (VI: 216). For Merleau-Ponty, the reversibility at work in the flesh, however absolute, remains similarly ironic: ‘always immanent and never realized in fact’ (VI: 147). The rationality of phenomenology arises through the emergent transformation between sequence and event, history and experience, the visible and the invisible. Concomitant with this reliance upon the transformation of conceptual tradition, we can gauge the impact of literary modernism. The later lectures reveal Merleau-Ponty’s reliance on literary figures for these inventions, invoking for example, Claude Simon’s figure for his concept of ‘the flesh of the world’ (NC: 204–6). This reliance was by no means a simple metaphorical “transfer.” Nor does it involve ‘a concession of mind to nature; for although meaning is everywhere figurative, it is meaning which is at issue everywhere’ (S: 181). He knew that the flesh of the world and the flesh of my body were not equivalent. Even if he claimed that it is ‘by the flesh of the world that in the last analysis one can understand the lived body,’ he knew them at least to be conceptually distinct: ‘the flesh of the world is not self sensing (se sentir) as is my flesh’ (VI: 250). Such conceptual distinctions force the recognition that the ‘cosmology of the visible’ is not a metaphysically grounded naturalism (a cosmotheology, as Kant called it) but an ontology that becomes intelligible in terms of the operant conceptual history he was outlining (VI: 265). Admittedly, the Phenomenology’s Finkian commitments to ‘the absolute certainty of the world in general,’ glossed in terms of “omnitudo realitatis” flirted with such a cosmotheology (PoP: 295, 398n). But Merleau-Ponty’s concentration upon philosophy as a historical “architecture of signs” precluded such precritical identifications

16

In the Shadow of Phenomenology

concerning the Urdoxa (IPP: 57). Indeed, precisely a figure and not a name or an indexical, the identity of the flesh is always lacking. As Kant realized about real opposition, such identification is transcendentally illusory.44 The flesh is not a first or a founding principle by which we might ‘gain intellectual possession of the world’ (S: 20). Rather it is what continuously escapes that status: even Husserl worried about the hubris that might be involved in submitting it to ultimate reduction.45 Against such rational foundationalism, it is less the origin of sense than it is the incarnate setting, but also the rational mis en scène out of which we attempt to render our “sense-history” intelligible. To cite again terms of Schelling that MerleauPonty invokes, the flesh is our ‘barbarous principle’ and, as such, it became in his reconstruction of philosophy the figure or trace of our milieu, our abode, a still Husserlian term. Yet the account of reflection that results is as decidedly non-Husserlian as it is non-Kantian. Arguably, it is more postKantian. Always a prolongation of the body’s reserve: ‘. . . reflection is not identification with oneself (thought of seeing or of feeling) but non-difference with self=silent or blind identification. And when the reflection wishes to be done with this horizonal openness, when it wishes to apprehend itself no longer across a horizon and in virtue of an institution of nature, but directly and without anything left over, then all it can do is to sublimate itself in verbalization, give itself a body that would not be natural only, makes a language germinate, a “transparent” apparatus that gives the illusion of a pure or empty presence to oneself, and which nonetheless attests only a determined void, empty of this or that. . . .’ (VI: 204) How proximate is this to Novalis’s insistence that even the “I” in ‘I think’ is a schema: again, a hieroglyph?46 The Cogito depends upon language and betrays the illusion of empty self-presence, ‘the presentation of the unpresentable.’47 We have not, however, fully left Kant behind; ‘the Cogito’ always only figures itself as an appearance in time, an indeterminate quasiempirical proposition that ‘belongs to sensibility.’48 Hence: ‘The mind’s eye too has its blind spot’ (VI: 33). This blind spot also is not to be eliminated or reduced. The ‘I—my shadow relation’ is constituted by the fact that ‘what it does not see is what makes it see’ (VI: 248, 255). This shadow of phenomenology is essential to it. Consciousness is always ‘indirect,’ always dependent upon the nature and history that transcend it, rendering the attempt to reflectively possess them, to reduce them to a nunc stans or the clairvoyance or self-presence of vision, illusory (VI: 248).

Introduction

17

‘Direct contact with the thing itself is a dream (rêve)’ (AD: 179). Again: ‘Husserl always presents the ‘return to absolute consciousness’ as a title for multitude of operations which are learned (s’apprennant), gradually effected, and never completed (jamais achevée)’ (S: 179). Returning to the passage of writing, he notes that ‘constituting consciousness’ or the ‘I think’ is simply an ‘artifact’ (Husserl’s term) or an outline or ‘sketch’ (dessin) of this history of ‘convergent but discontinuous intentions’: once again, its hieroglyph (S: 180). This “hieroglyph,” moreover, marks the moment in which the form of reflection and its fragmented forms of expression differentiate one another, delineating their ‘inachèvement,’ their venture. Their rationality is no longer simply understood as a mystery but a passage or coherence, a rapprendre always underway.49 The above account also illuminates the impact of other difficult models that complicate interpretations of Merleau-Ponty. The same historical interrogation we have just undertaken with respect to Kant may need to be undertaken, for example, for the account of consciousness as the Stiftung of nature (Schelling) or “the exchange of consciousness” as the narcissism of vision in the flesh (Hegel). None of these cases would result in Absolute Idealism. For MerleauPonty, ‘there is an absolute, a philosophy which is immanent in the history of philosophy’ but without, as both Schelling and Hegel had wagered, the ‘reabsorption of philosophy into one sole philosophy’ (VI: 188). Such a philosophy, or ‘monstrosity,’ as Merleau-Ponty described Hegel’s account, would be the philosophy of the museum (S: 65, 82). It would be lacking in finitude, leaving out its ‘shadow zone (zone d’ombre)’: that zone by which things are never given to mortals immanently, all at once, but temporally, one-sidedly, through aspects (PW: 108). Against this, Hegel’s museum would be ‘the historicity of death,’ ending philosophy in the same way that Hegel had ended or sublated art (S: 63). Here as Heidegger put it, Hegel alone apparently succeeded in jumping over this shadow, but only in such a way that he eliminated the shadow, i.e. the finiteness of man, and jumped into the sun itself. Hegel skipped over (überspringen) the shadow, but he did not, because of that, surpass the shadow (über den Schatten).50 Heidegger thought that ‘every philosopher must want to do this,’ to surpass the shadow of finite rationality.51 It is precisely here that MerleauPonty insisted, instead, the shadow was not to be eliminated. In his search

18

In the Shadow of Phenomenology

for a ‘direct expression’ of being beyond the ontic, Heidegger himself has refused ‘all the mirrors of Being’ (TL: 111–2). Such shadowing-forth is the ‘condition’ or ‘style’ of Being, whether it be in perception or in idea or even Proust’s musical ‘petit phrase’; in all these cases, as he quoted the latter, it is essential that ‘they be “veiled with shadows” ’ (VI: 152). In reraising the question of expressibility, the same issues apply to the account of logos or conceptualization as they do to nature or Being. One might, in accord with such an illusion, be tempted to think that, like his reliance on Schelling for understanding the ‘barbarous source’ of lived experience, Merleau-Ponty might have followed Schelling’s account of expression in which language brings the absolute to expression out of a pretheoretical, mythically univocal chaos. Language would provide the Darstellung of the Absolute, its symbol uniting universal and particular, to use Schelling’s Goethean terms. Accordingly, language, for Schelling, is ‘the highest symbol of chaos (das hochte Symbol des Chaos).’52 Such an account would (and does explicitly in Schelling and probably Novalis before him) insure the connection between language and myth, Being and Logos.53 Merleau-Ponty would at this point depart from both. Now, the ‘occult trading of the metaphor’ remains, as Merleau-Ponty had learned from Saussure, an ‘envelopment of language by language,’ ‘saving rationality (sauver le rationalité)’ by providing us with the capacity to transform prior conventions and providing the requisite distance for adjudication and reinvention (PW: 24). The result however by no means emerges as an Identitätsphilosophie or a hermeneutic of symbolization of Being. Merleau-Ponty’s “readings” diverge, for example, from Gadamer’s, which explicitly appeals to Goethe’s Idealist doctrine of the symbol at this point.54 Such claims would raise concerns about illicit or precritical appeals to a transcendental Signified. For Merleau-Ponty, however, meaning emerges only by the transformation or coherent deformation, ‘constituting’ in accord with his account of situated freedom ‘either a confirmatory or transformatory decision’ (PoP: 438). Here, as everywhere, being is not chaos but the phenomena; the flesh is not chaos but “texture” (VI: 133, 146).55 Everywhere ‘being’ becomes a phenomenon only by historical or cultural divergence, through its polymorphism (VI: 252–3). If Merleau-Ponty could affirm Heidegger’s account of thinking speech, recapturing his own account of a speaking language (parole parlant) that exceeds by transforming prior usage—and hence endorse the inexorable importance of the function of “literature” for philosophy—he could not simply endorse its Schellingian overtone. His postSaussurian account does not depend upon a tacit link between ‘chaos’ and the absolute where all languages are one (another version of the night

Introduction

19

in which all cows are black) but precisely an understanding of the logic of contingency, of historicity, convention, and their transformation.56 This occurs through the inventive capacity of language, a certain ‘oversignification’ (‘sur-signification’ (PW: 144). Hence, the importance of literary invention reemerges. As this term indicates, like Blanchot or Bataille (and in all three cases, against Sartre), Merleau-Ponty even stresses a certain sur-realism at points, which, he claimed, ‘constitutes one of the constants of our time’ (S: 234). Such a ‘variation of convention always vorgegeben’ is neither without ‘coherent motivation,’ nor, by implication, argument—that is, precisely the argument (and the wager) articulated through the itinerary of the later writings (NC: 127). Moreover, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the flesh also seemed to invoke ‘the silence of the absolute language’ he found in Mallarmé (VI: 176; S: 44). As Blanchot cited Mallarmé, it seemed ‘to evoke in a purposeful shadow (une ombre exprès), the silenced object by allusive words, reducing themselves to equal silence.’57 But as MerleauPonty also saw: ‘Mallarmé himself was well aware that nothing would fall from his pen if he remained absolutely faithful to his vow to say everything’ (S: 82). Here, too, we need to ‘read between lines’ in order to grasp what is revealed, articulating the rationality of its operative history.58 Simply put, in all this Merleau-Ponty realized that phenomenology could no longer avail itself of a pure or transcendentally neutral language. No language ever ‘wastes away to make the things themselves appear’ (S: 78). Critically then: ‘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). After three decades of outlining the issue of rapprendre à voir he came to see that it would be inseparable from learning ‘what is meant by that little verb “to see” (“ce petit mot: voir”)’ (EM: 186). It would not mean simply presence to self, but ‘also the means given me for being absent from self’ (EM: 186). Our readings and models would similarly intervene. It is also true theoretically that ‘there is no vision without the screen.’ In neither case is the rational simply a question of the history of our errors (VI: 125). Such “errancy” is precisely our fecundity: the fecundity of tradition is the potential of its reinvention (HLP: 32). Hence the operative potential of Husserl’s model of touching hands Ineinander, of Kant’s account of real opposition at the basis of “finite sensoriality,” or Heidegger’s ontological difference for understanding the depths and the écart of being. None of this takes place out of the attempt to overcome, but to continually interrogate the site (and the transcendence) of phenomenology’s inachèvement. Merleau-Ponty recognized that such dependence neither brought the phenomenological research project to its demise nor simply transformed

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In the Shadow of Phenomenology

its realism into nominalism. It acknowledges that, far from originating in a reflective baptism or a creation ex nihilo, phenomenology is not simply the function of a reflective act. Rather its experience or “readings” emerge in the midst of a constellation as a “coherent deformation,” metamorphosis or structuration of a historical context and its symbolic matrix. From the outset, the Working Notes to The Visible and the Invisible alert us that the history of philosophy or the history of literature is not simply a history of thought reducible to problems and solutions but the operative history of Being (VI: 186–9. cf. NC: 204). Such a history is not simply the history of propositions, but of their context or structure, experience, and interpretation (HLP: 27). It neither threatens to turn history into a history of regress or decline from origins (Heidegger) nor of progress and ultimate teleology (Husserl): strictly taken it neither presupposes nor proposes arche or telos. Such strategies emerge only by means of substituting for our operant or ‘savage’ history what the final lines of Eye and Mind refer to as ‘a false imaginary (faux imaginaire)’ (EM: 190). Our histoire sauvage, on the other hand, ‘is neither just the development of a future which is implied in its beginning, nor just the effect which as external ordering has in us.’ Again, ‘it escapes the alternative of continuous or discontinuous’ (S: 176). Similarly, phenomenology is no longer a ‘science of infinite tasks,’ any more than it is ‘only a persistent state of stupor . . . trudging in a circle’ (EM: 190). While it is, in truth, an infinite task, it is not science: ‘Philosophy is not science, because science believes it can soar over its object and holds the correlation of knowledge with being as established’ (VI: 27). Reason instead always answers to a lesser reason, to the infinite task of relearning to see. But here too we can witness the extension such relearning had undergone: ‘The philosophical return is as much a departure and to speak truly, philosophy is neither one nor the other, neither retrospection nor prospection alone. It is the invitation to re-see the visible, to re-speak speech, and to rethink thinking’ (NC: 375).59

Chapter 1

Pretexts: Language, Perception, and the Cogito

‘Show that there is no eidetic variation without speech; show this starting from the imaginary as support of the eidetic variation, and speech as support of the imaginary.’ (VI: 236)

I The Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception renders an account of language and perception in which the subject enjoys an immediate grasp of the presence of the given. Language is not a screen impervious to thought in its relation to the perceived world, but the treasure reflecting an engagement with the things themselves. Referring to Jean Wahl’s characterization of the distinction between essence and existence in the works of Husserl, he states: Husserl’s essences are destined to bring back all the living relationships of experience, as the fisherman’s net draws up from the depths of the ocean quivering fish and seaweed. Jean Wahl is therefore wrong in saying that ‘Husserl separates essence from existence.’ The separated essences are those of language. It is the function (fonction) of language to cause essences to exist in a state of separation which is in fact merely apparent since through language they still rest upon the pre-predicative life of consciousness. In the silence of originary consciousness (conscience originaire), one sees appearing not only that which words mean but likewise that which things mean: the core of primary signification (signification) around which acts of denomination and expression are organized. (PoP: xv) Language is the mirror image, the apparent state, of a silent core—or to use Sartre’s term, an ‘infrasilence’—that is more primordial than it.1

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In the Shadow of Phenomenology

It is the re-presentation of this silence in a form of abstraction, of separation. It contains a meaning received and imparted from another domain, a domain ‘furnishing the text which our knowledge tries to translate into precise language’ (PoP: xviii). In short, the world is what we perceive, and what we perceive gets translated into words. There is a strict relation between our knowledge and the original or “pre-text” of the perceived world. As a result of this relation the sign is granted a status that remains always derivative. Merleau-Ponty explicates this standpoint with regard to the ‘essence of consciousness’: Whatever the subtle changes of sense (sens) which have ultimately brought us, as a linguistic acquisition, the word and concept of consciousness, we enjoy direct access to what it designates. For we have the experience of ourselves, of that consciousness which we are, and it is on the basis of this experience that all linguistic significations (significations) are assessed, and precisely it that makes (fait que) language mean (veut dire) something for us. (PoP: xv) Here I come upon an actual presence to self beneath the level of the universe of things said. Moreover, it is precisely here, at this Archimedean point, where, as he famously put it, ‘I am the absolute source,’ that language not only undergoes assessment, but becomes meaningful (PoP: ix). In the return to the things themselves that this Preface reinstates, then, the elements of knowledge are cleanly separated on the basis of this direct means of access. There is, on the one hand, ‘the world which precedes knowledge, and of which knowledge always speaks (parle)’ and, on the other, the “speaking” which remains ‘significative (signative) and dependent’ regarding it (PoP: ix). The secondary status significative practices received in the Preface is consistent with the Cartesian leanings of classical phenomenology. One can witness it, for example in § 124 of Ideen I where Husserl states: The stratum of expression—and this constitutes its peculiarity—apart from the fact that it lends expression to all other intentionalities is not productive. Or if one prefers, its productivity, its noematic service exhausts itself in expressing . . .2 The sign is understood as the sheer reflection of the pre-linguistic stratum of sense (Sinn). In itself it remains void of significance and adds no

Language, Perception, and the Cogito

23

substantial content to the one it re-presents. For Husserl it becomes meaningful only through the constitutive expressive acts underlying it. Even closer to Merleau-Ponty, a similar standpoint can be witnessed in the early works of Sartre. In a polemic against Brice Parain, who had argued for the priority of the sign over the “immediate,”3 Sartre responds: . . . the word has no privileged stature. For I must also make (fasse) the table and the tree and the white worm exist as permanent syntheses of relatively stable properties. It is not by naming them that I endow them with objectivity. But I can name them only if I have constituted them as independent wholes, that is, if I objectify the thing and the word that names it in one and the same synthetic act.4 The subject constitutes the things and words mutually as objects. How could a sign intervene in this primordial relationship in which objects can arise as designated in the first place? How could there be an intervention without the intervened designatum being always already prior to its sign? Sign and signified are conjoined under the objectification of a reflective gaze. This again finds confirmation in the considerations on intersubjective communication in Being and Nothingness. As Dominick LaCapra noted in his book, A Preface to Sartre, Sartre seldom faced the problem of language head on.5 In a rare text concerning language intersubjectivity, and knowledge of the lived body, however, Sartre states: Nevertheless, it is necessary to realize that it is not on the unreflective plane that language with its meanings can slip in between my body and my consciousness which exists it . . . In order that any knowledge which the Other has of my body and which he communicates to me by language may give to my body-for-me a structure of a particular type, it is necessary that this knowledge be applied to an object and that my body already be an object for me.6 The sign again remains dependent, to use Merleau-Ponty’s category, with respect to the signified. It remains derivative in relation to the immediate presence of subject to object, a presence on the basis of which alone it can then be made meaningful. Subject and object, sign and signified, the layer of silence intrinsically meaningful and its contrary, all must be rigorously distinguished and a strict logical and ontological order established among their elements. All these classical phenomenologies were in agreement: language and perception are similarly and rigorously distinguished.

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In the Shadow of Phenomenology

II Merleau-Ponty’s texts considered thus far have all been taken from the Preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, a writing added to the book at the suggestion of Brunschvicg. There is a sense then in which these statements might be taken as the author’s final word on the subject at the time of its composition. This claim could go unchallenged, however, only if it were consistent with or explained the position in other relevant passages in the Phenomenology. First, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis in the chapter on the body as expression and speech provisionally makes this assertion problematic. The chapter opens by specifying the importance of the analyses that are to follow. ‘In trying to describe the phenomenon of speech and the specific act of signification (signification), we shall have the opportunity to leave behind us, once and for all, the traditional subject-object dichotomy’ (PoP: 174). As becomes evident, however, the exposition of this chapter does not seem to verify the Preface’s clear-cut dichotomy between pre-expressive silence and dependent sign. Having stated that the analysis finally surpasses the paradigm of classical epistemology, the subject-object dichotomy, MerleauPonty states, ‘The recognition of speech (parole) as an original region (region originale) comes naturally late’ (PoP: 174). Intellectualism and empiricism are both held to be refuted here in the recognition that ‘the word has a meaning’ reducible neither to a chain of external attachments or referents nor to the constitutive intentions of a thought already in possession of itself. In this sense the sign’s ‘dependence’ has seemingly been revoked. What is originary is not all indebted to the purely nonlinguistic. Expression does not just represent an order complete in itself. The process of expression, when it is successful, does not merely leave for the reader and the writer a kind of reminder, it brings the signification into existence at the very heart of the text, it brings it to life in an organism of words, establishing it in the writer or the reader as a new sense organ, opening a field or a new dimension to our experience. (PoP: 182) The act of linguistic expression is not therefore the reappearance in a new guise of an already existent or “founded” meaning. Rather, a new dimension surpassing both the creative intention of its author and the expectation of the reader emerges. The process of expression ‘confers on what it expresses an existence in itself (en soi),’ one whose modality cannot be readily subsumed

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under the category of dependence that underwrites the Preface (PoP: 183). Indeed, as Merleau-Ponty had acknowledged earlier in the analysis of the incarnate subject, repeating and at the same time altering the formula of the Preface, ‘The relation of expression to thing expressed or of sign to meaning is not a one-way relation (un rapport à sens unique) like that which exists between original text and translation’ (PoP: 166). As a corollary to this recognition of the “originary” dimension of expression, Merleau-Ponty invokes a certain “deconstruction” of the classical model of the subject as conferring an inner meaning on an external sign, that is, “translating” the original, silent, prelinguistic stratum into a conventional system of signs, its representation. Thought is no “internal” thing and does not exist independently of the world and words. What misleads us in this connection and causes us to believe in a thought which exists for itself prior to expression, is thought already constituted and expressed, which we can silently recall to ourselves, and through which we acquire the illusion of an inner life. But in reality this supposed silence is alive with words, this inner life is an inner language. (PoP: 183) In this perspective it can be seen that an inner content or thought does not stand ‘behind’ the sign. Rather, ‘thought and expression are simultaneously constituted’ within the institution of speech. The attributes comprising the classical notion of the subject, the inner versus the outer, the active versus the passive, etc. are seen to fail. Language certainly has an interior, but this is not self-subsistent and selfconscious thought. What does language express if it does not express thoughts? It presents or rather it is the subject’s taking up of a position in the world of his significations. (PoP: 193) If ‘expression’ (a term Merleau-Ponty never disregards) is not a matter of a one-way conferral between two parallel strata, if the linguistic dimension is not just a repetition of a more original domain, then thought cannot be “inside” creating the sign. Rather speech and thought are enveloped in one another and thought tends toward the sign as toward its completion. In the discursive event neither term, neither thought nor its sign, can be strictly classified as active and made wholly responsible for the resulting content. Even creative intentions arise only on the basis of a certain passivity: ‘the new significative intention knows itself only in

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recovering itself from already available significations, the result of prior acts of expression’ (PoP: 183). The analysis of the speech act therefore anticipates the “centrifugal/centripetal” dialectic or Wechsel that emerges in the closing chapter on freedom.7 Just as the analysis of “situated freedom” displaces the classical notions of will, subjectivity, and Sinngebung, so the classical subject has become a speaking subject and no longer arrives at the sign with a text ready to translate into knowledge. Claude Lefort notes that in the article, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,’ Merleau-Ponty’s first break with classical metaphysics and the philosophy of consciousness occurs.8 At first glance this remains unclear. Perhaps the full effect of the analyses of the body as expression and speech also begins to occur there: Expressive speech does not simply choose a sign for an already defined signification, as one goes to look for a hammer in order to drive a nail or for a claw to pull it out. It gropes around a significative intention which is not guided by any text, and which is precisely in the process of writing the text. (S: 46) To grasp the full significance of this recognition and the revision it will force, however, it will be necessary to return to the other side of the Phenomenology’s account of language and the transformation that awaits it.

III The question of language is further taken up in detail in the Phenomenology in its chapter on the Cogito. Here the thematic returns to the considerations and perspective that the Preface rewrites. The Cogito is either this thought which took shape three centuries ago in the mind of Descartes, or the meaning (sens) of the books he has left for us, or else an eternal truth which emerges from them, but in any case is a cultural being of which it is true to say that my thought strains towards it rather than that it embraces it, as my body, in familiar surroundings finds its orientation and makes its way among objects without my needing to have them expressly in mind. (PoP: 369) But how is the Cogito a cultural being? How is the lived experience (Erlebnis) of this ‘thought’ connected to its historical and systematic development

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(Erfahrung)? And, how is it connected with language, that entity by means of which, as he notes, consciousness is engaged in history (PoP: 399)? In this chapter Merleau-Ponty argues that behind all our particular thoughts, words, or percepts, there must remain ‘a retreat (reduit) of nonbeing, a self’ (PoP: 400). In reading Descartes’ Meditations one comes across an empirical and statistical meaning of the words “sum” and “Cogito.” These signs would be without any sense, however, not even an inauthentic one, were I not, before the emergence of the discursive event, already in contact with an anterior realm of significance at the level of the lived. Words at the empirical and statistical level can be meaningful only if there is an originary dimension which gives rise to them. This dimension must be in the strictest sense, speechless. One must distinguish then a Cogito that is arrived at by reading Descartes, that is, one grasped ‘only through the medium of language.’ This spoken Cogito (Cogito parlé) is first described in more literal terms in the Phenomenology as a ‘Cogito over (sur) language,’ albeit one that remains trapped in the expressive medium (PoP: 400). Such an analysis remains stuck in the idea, rather than actually practicing the Cogito. One is involved with “immortalizing” a truth that constantly escapes, ‘fi xing our life in conceptual forms’ (PoP: 402). This is, again, the point from which he interpreted the abstracted essences of Husserl that belong, as the Preface notes in responding to Jean Wahl, only to the derivations of linguistic forms. The Cogito that appears through the medium of language does not, however, have ‘existence in itself,’ to use his earlier term. It remains ‘dependent.’ Even this qualifier however does not go far enough as a characterization of signs. I should find them not so much derivative and inauthentic as meaningless, and I should be unable to even read Descartes’ book, were I not, before any speech can begin in contact with my own life and thought, and if the spoken Cogito did not encounter within me a tacit Cogito (Cogito tacite). (PoP: 402) If the “higher” Cogito were first characterized as a ‘Cogito over language’ this more original level and its flux is to be seen as the ‘silent Cogito (Cogito silencieux) . . . the one Descartes sought when writing his Meditations,’ and as ‘the condition of the read Cogito (Cogito lu)’ (PoP: 402). Moreover just as the search for the Cogito in the Second Meditation admonishes us to elevate ‘ourselves above the dubitable forms of locution that the vulgar invent’ (ex formis loquendi quas vulgus dubitationem quaesivisse), so here too we are

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displaced beyond the false confines of language; this time to the primordial silence standing behind it.9 This level both funds and incites the expressive act. ‘Descartes would not even have tried to put these expressive operations into operation had he not in the first place caught a glimpse (un vue) of his existence’ (PoP: 402). The relation that makes language possible then is a relation of grounds, of fundierung, of a conditio sine qua non. Merleau-Ponty’s argument once more invokes the necessity of an original “text” to which all signs refer, the necessity of a “pre-text” that would account for all meaning and would be itself unconditioned. In this regard the Phenomenology remains a “dualist” work that might be easily aligned with the position of Sartre at the time: It doesn’t matter what Descartes says of the Cogito. What counts is that when I understand a word, I must evidently be conscious of understanding it. . . . But when I am conscious of understanding a word, no word is interpolated between me and myself. The word, the single word in question, is there before (devant) me, as that which is understood.10 Nonetheless, despite the classical and Cartesian leanings of the Phenomenology, it would be falsifying not to recognize its attempt to broaden this foundational approach to the interface between language and the perceived world. Precisely against the previously noted view of Sartre (against Parain), which grounded the sign in the objectivating syntheses of identification and the regard of consciousness, Merleau-Ponty argues that the word does not just exist before consciousness. Sartre had said that what makes the word “sleet,” for example, identical and meaningful throughout its various instantiations was the foundation that consciousness alone can provide. This in turn rests upon the specificity of the silent presence to self that such a consciousness implies: I know what I want to express, because I know it ‘without intermediary.’11 It is then to consciousness that Sartre turns in answering the following question: ‘I now ask Parain where is the word “sleet” (gresil), that non-temporal and non-extended reality that is both on the page of the book, in the vibration in the air, in that moist mouthful I swallow and that does not let itself be absorbed by any of these particular phenomena?’12 In taking up a position on these polemics, Merleau-Ponty shows he can side comfortably with neither side: Am I to say that the word “sleet” is the unified idea of these manifestations, and that it exists only for my consciousness and through a synthesis

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of identification? To do so would be to forget what psychology has taught us about language. To speak, as we have seen, is not to call up verbal images and articulate words in accordance with the imagined model. By undertaking a critical examination of the verbal image, and showing that the speaking subject plunges into speech without imagining the words he is about to utter, modern psychology eliminates the word as representation or as an object for consciousness and reveals a motor presence of the word which is not the knowledge of the word. The word “sleet,” when it is known to me is not an object which I recognize through any identificatory synthesis, but a certain use made of my phonatory equipment, a certain modulation of my body as a being in the world. Its generality is not that of an idea but that of a behavioral style. (PoP: 403) The analysis of the incarnate subject undertaken in the Phenomenology already involves its author in the attempt to transcend what it had called ‘philosophies of consciousness’ (PoP: 168). Further, one can see that Merleau-Ponty’s “expectation” that Sartre should ‘elaborate a theory of passivity’ in an article published the same year as the Phenomenology, was already itself a criticism, involving a thought devoid of history, institution, and expressive past, an ‘incarnate synthesis’ (SNS: 77). This implies, Merleau-Ponty holds, that the sign’s meaning is not constituted by the inner conferring acts of self-conscious thought. It emerges by the sign’s being ‘seized and assumed’ within the phonemic-producing powers of the subject and the particular expressive possibilities that the system of signs offers. In both cases the founding project of consciousness is decentered. Moreover while Merleau-Ponty’s reliance upon psychology and linguistics may look—as it did to many classical phenomenologists—like simple “psychologism,” this misses the theoretical fertility at stake in transforming the former’s articulative models, enabling a more ‘originary’ expressivity to emerge in the relation between subjectivity and institution. Still, while, as will be seen, Merleau-Ponty increasingly moves toward the view of language as an irreducible originary element, and less and less the contrary of a primordial silence that it is to represent, Sartre retained the Cartesian grids of the earlier position that grounded the sign in an objectifying gaze, that is, in its standing before consciousness. In an interview published in 1965 and reprinted in Situations IX, he states: (F)or me the signified is the object. I will define my language which is not necessarily that of the linguists. This chair is the object, it is therefore the signified. Then there is the signification, the logical totality

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which will be constituted by words, the signification of a sentence. If I say, ‘This table is in front of the window,’ I intend a signified, which is the table, with the significations, which is the sentential totality (l’ensemble des phrases) that is constituted. And I consider myself as the signifier (significant). The signification is the noema, the correlate of the totality of vocal elements pronounced.13 The discursive event would then still be explained again along classical lines. ‘The articulation of the signifers gives (donne) the signification which in its turn intends the signified . . .’14 Hence, as Being and Nothingness had already concluded, ‘Freedom is the only possible foundation of the laws of language.’15 Nonetheless, Sartre was aware that this donation, this Sinngebung, is never more than partial. Indeed it is in a sense perpetually undone, since ‘I utilize words which have themselves a history and a relation to the totality of language.’16 But in this caveat toward finitude, toward ‘partiality’ the conceptual tension in the dualist account only reemerges. The content of the sign could be reducible to the purity of a conscious regard only if the sign did not have its own history, only if it did not have its own role and value within the play of signs. It could be reducible only if, in short, to use Sartre’s own words, linguistic creativity, the creative transformations of the subject, were in fact truly creative, and not ‘always a secondary fact’ dependent upon the specific make-up of a linguistic practice for its intelligibility.

IV Merleau-Ponty’s Cartesanism, even in the Phenomenology, was a modified one. As the gesture account brought to light, acknowledging the speech act’s emergence in the institution of signs, in effect, we are to look beneath the sign and beneath consciousness to its belonging—to the lived body and its Being-in-the-world. But the extent to which this position still remains a “philosophy of consciousness” can be measured in the conclusion MerleauPonty draws from his considerations on the Cogito and the issues that provoked Sartre’s reply to Parain. Having emphasized the role of the body in this discussion, he concludes: Thus language presupposes nothing less than a consciousness of language, a silence of consciousness which envelops the speaking world (monde parlant) and where words first receive configuration and sense

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(sens). That is why consciousness is never subordinated to any empirical language, why languages can be translated and learned, and finally, why language is not an attribute of external origin, in the sociologist’s sense. Behind the spoken Cogito, the one that is converted into discourse and into essential truth, there lies a tacit Cogito, a proof (epreuve) of self by self. (PoP: 403) The first thing to notice here is that, despite the decentering afforded by the analysis of the body, this conclusion is proffered in terms of the necessities and the order of consciousness, ‘the presence of self to self’ which is, he states, ‘existence itself’ (PoP: 404). That is, the silence the sign presupposes is not posited in terms of a silence of the body, but one of consciousness. Secondly, the conclusion still holds that whatever it is that is transcendental about language must be grasped outside it, or more properly, ‘beneath it.’ Empirical languages are not to be explained away in some form of transcendental language, a langage sauvage that would itself account for the question of origins. In this regard, the texte originale of the Preface remains metaphorical; it is again more precisely the “pretext.” It is only silence that explains Sartre’s ‘vibration of the air’ and this silence is the latter’s opposite. Finally, as a corollary to this, the thrust of these analyses, for reasons that have already become clear, cannot but call into question the analyses in the chapter on expression where the sign’s existence en soi was disclosed. Nonetheless, if this foundation and its priority is established, the silence of consciousness has not thereby been proven to be independent of its expression, a matter that adds an element of ambiguity to the order established with the tacit Cogito. Ironically, articulating the disclosure of the incompleteness of thought prior to language in the chapter on expression and speech, Merleau-Ponty adds that the tacit Cogito remains incomplete apart from language. The consciousness which conditions language is merely a comprehensive and inarticulate grasp upon the world, like that of the infant at its first breath or of the man who is about to drown and is thrown (se rue) toward life, and if it is true that any particular knowledge is founded (fondé) on this primary view (vue), it is also true that it awaits to be reconquered, fixed, and explicated by perceptual exploration and speech. (PoP: 404) Language is conditioned by consciousness. But this consciousness is a particular kind: not reflective but perceptual consciousness. The inarticulate

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grasp that founds language is a primordial view that awaits explication and further clarification. That is, ‘this original text is perception itself’ (PoP: 21). It is this that lies beneath language, rendering it meaningful. At the same time, however, the founding term here is incomplete: it itself only becomes realized in the founded, in expression. ‘The tacit Cogito is a Cogito only when it has found expression for itself’—only when it has become that derivative and dependent Cogito it was invoked to explain and which remained meaningless without it (PoP: 404). It is the ambiguity of this “belonging-together,” the circling back of founding and founded terms in the relation between language and perception that forms the limits of the account in the Phenomenology.

V As is well known, the working notes to The Visible and the Invisible reopen the question of this belonging-together of language and perception within the framework of a renewed call for an Ursprungsklärung—and explicitly an ‘unworking’ of his previous account. This Ursprungsklärung involves a radicalization of the standpoint of the Phenomenology of Perception, moving beyond the ‘consciousness/object’ distinction that centers it (VI: 200). This radicalization is not without its effect on the position on the status of language relative to perception developed in the earlier work. The criticism of the Phenomenology’s account of language and the Cogito is evident as early as the opening published notes from early 1959. In a note from February of that year entitled ‘Tacit Cogito and Speaking Subject’ Merleau-Ponty delineates the tension in the Phenomenology that has been traced here. Engaged in the task of discovering an intersubjectivity that is not perspectival (i.e. based on a gaze), but ‘vertical,’ he states: The tacit Cogito does not, of course, solve these problems. In disclosing it as I did in PhP. I did not arrive at a solution (my chapter on the Cogito is not connected with the chapter on speech): on the contrary I posed a problem. The tacit Cogito should make understood how language is not impossible, but cannot make understood how it is possible. (VI: 175–6) What does this enigmatic statement involve? Well, first of all it cannot mean, as has been seen, that the chapter on the Cogito had nothing to say about speech—that considerations on the Cogito had not touched the thematics of speech. Indeed, if anything, it is precisely its preoccupation

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with speech that led to the explicit reasoning and formulation that resulted in the doctrine of the tacit Cogito. In another note to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty recounts this reasoning, explicating its concern with signification and expression. Likewise, it should be noted, the connection with Sartre is not left silent. He states: The Cogito of Descartes (reflection) is an operation over (sur) significations, a statement of relations between them (and the significations themselves sedimented in acts of expression). It therefore presupposes a prereflective contact of self with self (the non-thetic consciousness [of] self Sartre) or a tacit Cogito (being close by oneself)—this is how I reasoned in PhP. (VI: 170–1) The fact that the two chapters within the Phenomenology are unconnected must be explained on other than thematic grounds. Rather, what needs to be explained is all that the considerations on the Cogito left unthought concerning the originary and expression—and consequently what does not fall within the order that the tacit Cogito founds. In presenting an argument for a conditio sine qua non here, a ‘ground of which one could not say anything’ (VI: 175), but from which everything might be said, the doctrine of the tacit Cogito may have satisfied the “positivistic” demand that requires reassurance that speech (la parole) is not impossible, but it did not tell us anything about how it is possible. Rather, it simply tells how consciousness remains ‘indeclinable.’ This means, to return to Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of the doctrine, that ‘there remains the problem of the passage from the perceptual meaning (sens) to the language meaning, from behavior to thematization’ (VI: 176). That is, the specificity of their relation, one described here as a ‘passage,’ remains still to be grasped. But that is not all that is problematic about the doctrine. For this argument to reach a positive foundation in the silence of consciousness, a certain abstraction, perhaps even a transcendental illusion must be involved. Referring to the reasoning behind the tacit Cogito outlined above, he states: Is this correct? What I call the tacit Cogito is impossible. To have the idea of “thinking” (in the sense of the “thought of seeing and of feeling”), to make the reduction, to return to immanence and to the consciousness of . . . it is necessary to have words. It is by combination of words (with their charge of sedimented significations, which are in principle capable of entering into other relations than the relations that have served to

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form them) that I form the transcendental attitude, that I constitute the constitutive consciousness. The words do not refer to positive significations and finally to the flux of the Erlebnisse as Selbstgegeben. Mythology of a self-consciousness to which the word “consciousness” would refer— There are only differences between significations. (VI: 171) The argument for the tacit Cogito invokes a mythology and, like all myths, the truth of the “Cogito” requires that we ‘read between the lines’ (VI: 188). Words do not refer to individual significations and finally to a foundation in the presence to self of the lived. The hierarchical structure that facilitated the myth of silent self-consciousness must then be displaced. The immanence of the silent Cogito, this direct contact of self by self, is not untouched by the historical medium and its charge of sedimented significations that, by itself (i.e. as a Cogito parlé), was taken to be meaningless. The distinction, the separation between language and the silent or nonlinguistic stratum, cannot be absolute. Likewise, then, he will have to give up the ideal of a transparent medium that would simply reduplicate the realm of silence, if there were no means of direct access to the latter. In a note discussing the return to what he calls the originary or ‘savage Being,’ he states: But I will then have to disclose a non-explicated horizon: that of the language I am using to describe all that —And which codetermines its final meaning. Therefore, very important, from the introduction on to introduce the problem of the tacit Cogito and the language Cogito. Naiveté of Descartes who does not see a tacit Cogito under the language of Wesen, of significations—But naiveté also of a silent consciousness, whereas its very description of silence rests entirely on the virtues of language. (VI: 178–9) These texts might seem to point, however, to a certain skepticism or entrapment of the speaker in the linguistic system. If language is always already a horizon behind the grasp of the signified, how will the ‘return to the things themselves,’ which prompts phenomenology, ever be accomplished? Would not the result be, to use a phrase of Foucault’s “langage à l’infini?” Yet this is not the point of Merleau-Ponty’s recognition—not that he is unaware of the difficulty involved: If we dream of finding again the natural world or time through coincidence, of being identical to the O-point which we see yonder, or to the

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pure memory which from the depths of ourselves governs our acts of recall, then language is a power for error, since it cuts the continuous tissue that joins us vitally to the things and to the past and is installed between ourselves and that tissue like a screen. (VI: 125) So long as one holds that language remains only the translation of an original text, and that this translation can be readily had through a fusion between consciousness and the perceived world, then these considerations are not a problem. But if, on the contrary, it is recognized that there is no immediate access to the given and if, therefore, we cannot claim that thought univocally conditions language—but that it itself does not go unconditioned—then language ceases to appear as the mirror-image and the self-effacing re-presentation of the given and the “translation” seemingly involved takes on conditionality, incompleteness, and underdeterminability. As a result, the sign could not be reducible (transcendentally or otherwise) without remainder: its “shadow” ineluctable. Having recognized this irreducibility, however, Merleau-Ponty does not simply foreclose the realist’s ‘return to the things themselves.’ Here we encounter the site of the difficult ontology of The Visible and the Invisible. Intended as a radical overhaul of his own project and its account of finite sensoriality, nature, and the “flesh” of the world, it also inaugurated a complicated (and deliberately methodological) dialogue with the history, ‘the historico-intentional and ontological implications’ of modern thought, including Leibniz, Schelling, Bergson, and Heidegger (VI: 177). First and foremost however, granted his still lingering phenomenological commitments, this required, and perhaps depended upon, a different account of ideality, experience, and reason’s involvement with history. Elsewhere, it forced equally explicit considerations on history, politics, and ethics into the forefront. Here however “transcendental” questions concerning historicity had resolved themselves on the issue of language. And, this is fully evident from the working notes to his final project. Recognizing what he has called the “mythology” behind the tacit Cogito and its direct contacts with self and the world, he states in the note on the tacit Cogito from January, 1959: ‘Yet there is a world of silence, the perceived world at least is an order where there are non-language significations— yes non-language significations, but they are not accordingly positive’ (VI: 171). The return to this original “silence” cannot be based on a grid (or text) of positive terms; it is not the return to a tabula rasa, to a primitive semantic code (or pretext). There are no positivities apart from our grasp and the horizon of its occurrence, but instead, to cite terms of Jacques

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Taminiaux, the ‘inscription’ of ‘insurmountable differentiation.’17 In this sense the things of the perceived world arise diacritically within a network of divergences. That is, the terms of the perceived world are to be understood just as speech is in terms of the differentiation of a field, a conception Merleau-Ponty had articulated through the examination of Saussure. The Saussurian analysis of the relations between signifiers and the relations from signifier to signified and between the significations (as differences between significations) confirms and rediscovers the idea of perception as divergence (écart) by relation to a level, that is, the idea of the primordial Being, of the Convention of conventions, of the speech before speech. (VI: 201) This however dictates a new understanding of the Ineinander character of language and perception: . . . for this is no hierarchy of orders or layers or planes (always founded on the individual-essence distinction), there is dimensionality of every fact and facticity of every dimension—This in virtue of the “ontological difference”. (VI: 270) As has been seen, however, it is precisely this individual/essence paradigm, with its accompanying hierarchy of orders and planes—implying an opposition between language and silence, sign and signified, object and subject (and the dependency of the first of these couplets on the second)—that has structured the doctrine of the Cogito tacite. In invoking Heidegger’s ‘ontological difference’ here Merleau-Ponty attempted to surmount the failures of his earlier account and the metaphysical order that structured it. Clearly as this work, like others of this time indicate, Merleau-Ponty was again drawing close to Heidegger. But how should this be understood?

VI In The Origin of the Work of Art, among other places, Heidegger himself takes up the question of the specificity of the belonging-together of perception and language, asking whether the latter enframes our ‘conception’ of things or vice versa. In the case at hand, he concerns himself with asking

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in particular whether the medieval conception of thingness as substance with its accidents is derived from theory of the predicative judgment: Is the structure of a simple propositional statement (the combination of subject and predicate) the mirror image of the structure of the thing (of the union of substance and accidents)? Or could it be that even the structure of the thing as thus envisaged is a projection of the framework of the sentence? What could be more obvious than that man transposes his propositional way of understanding things into the structure of the thing itself? Yet this view, seemingly critical yet actually rash and ill-considered, would have to explain how such a transposition of propositional structure is supposed to be possible without the thing having already become visible.18 The first question lies at the center of the problematic concerning the tacit Cogito and its “overcoming” in The Visible and the Invisible: the question of the specificity of the belonging-together of language and perception. The second, that we transpose our propositional structures or linguistic grids to the thing is the stance of several schools in twentieth-century thought: it has been raised here in Parain’s name, the position that Sartre and the early Merleau-Ponty are posited against. Finally, the answer to this second question, that it must explain the possibility of such a transposition or imposition of the sign on the thing without the first becoming visible, is the answer of classical phenomenology—and has been seen to stand behind Sartre’s view as well as the argument for the Cogito tacite in the Phenomenology. Heidegger himself, however, was satisfied with neither thesis: rather, it is precisely this classically founded investigation that fails to provide us with an easy answer: The question that comes first and functions as the standard, proposition structure or thing-structure remains to this hour undecided. It remains even doubtful whether in this form the question is at all decidable.19 Invoking Merleau-Ponty’s similar considerations on the tacit Cogito, it can be added, how in fact could it be decidable in this form? Could Sartre ever convince us that this infrasilence he describes—for which he posts a sign—is with regard to language “unconditioned?” On the other hand, how could it be the case that Being could be reducible to a sign—that instead of the sign’s dependence on the signified there might be an inversion making

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Being dependent upon the sign—since inherent to the very structure of the sign is its being a “sign of”?20 How could the signified be simply reducible to a sign? Heidegger’s own adjudication over this antinomy had been the following: Actually, the sentence structure does not provide the standard for the pattern of the thing-structure, nor is the latter simply mirrored in the former. Both sentence and thing structure derive, in their typical form and their possible mutual relationship from a common, and more original source.21 In this sense there could be no question of priority between sign and signified, ground and grounded, designatum and description. If as MerleauPonty’s lecture notes put it, ‘the discovery of operative intentionality has never led Husserl to abandon the Ø (“philosophy”) of Bewusstsein, of constitution, of intentional analytic—nor has he ever disavowed the distinction Tatsache-Eidos (“fact-essence”),’ in Heidegger ‘the fact-essence distinction is overcome toward fundamental “Sein” ’ and ‘language stops being founded (fondé)’ (HLP: 53). If he still thought that Husserl and Heidegger needed to be thought together—inter alia—to avoid Heidegger’s “mysticism of language,” it is clear, too, that the event at stake needed to be thought anew, a “simultaneity” beyond the founding-founded distinction. The manner in which words and things belong-together would no longer be thinkable in terms of simple opposition, but rather would need to be grasped in terms of their mutual implication in the appropriation of the significative event itself, in the difference and chiasm which marks the emergence of each. Hence, Merleau-Ponty similarly states in a note on “the world” from December, 1959, and drawing closer to Saussure to explicate it: Replace the notions of concept, idea, mind, representation with the notions of dimensions, articulation, level, hinges, pivots, configuration— The point of departure=the critique of the usual conception of the thing and its properties—critique of the logical notion of the subject, and of logical inherence—critique of the positive signification (differences between significations), signification as a separation (écart), theory of predication—founded on this diacritical conception. (VI: 224) The significative event had been turned fully “diacritical,” inter-relational— albeit by an expressivity never fully determinate, never fully exhausted, but always the interrogation of a silence in its midst. His late lectures also reveal here the “synthesis” of Husserl and Heidegger, seeing in this intentional

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event and its history the interrogation of the Seinsfrage itself. ‘The Fragen is an event of speech i.e. of an open thought, i.e. of thought linked to diacritical systems and which is always separation (écart), excentric, and not es selbst . . .’ (NC: 130).

VII As has been seen, the task of exploring an originary “silence” is not done away with in The Visible and the Invisible. It does, however, undergo a certain shift and here the distance between it and the classical leanings of the earlier work becomes definitive. First, it has become evident that this “silence” of the transcendental domain is no longer available as an immediate or positive term, as the doctrine of the Cogito necessitated. Nor can the distinction between the linguistic, the ‘sounded,’ and the ‘silent,’ the ‘transcendental field’ of the perceived world, as he once called it, be simply a matter of opposition (PoP: 61). Rather, it would be necessary to recognize the involvement of language in the ‘constitution’ of that field. If the question of the ‘transcendental’ or the ‘originary’ is still to be thought of in terms of ‘silence’ it would be necessary to see how the latter overdetermines language as well, a move Merleau-Ponty undertakes in asserting that ‘there would be needed a silence that envelops speech anew . . . (and) this silence will not be the contrary of language’ (VI: 179). What sort of chiasm does this imply, though? In one of the final notes to this work (Nov., 1960) Merleau-Ponty relates what he has in mind. Silence of perception=the object made of wires of which I could not say what it is, nor how many sides it has, etc. and which nonetheless is there. There is an analogous silence of language i.e. a language that no more involves acts of reactivated signification than does this perception—and which nonetheless functions and inventively it is it that is involved in the fabrication of a book. (VI: 268—my emphasis) Notwithstanding the informal and even poetic status of this note, the effect is clear. As early as 1948, following an analysis of Blanchot, Merleau-Ponty had discussed the extension of poetry into the novel. Blanchot had spoken of a language, beyond conventional forms, that would encounter a silence in which ‘words are broken open’ breaking free of images to reveal the absolute. ‘In truth, there is no good reason why only the poet should have access to the extreme perfection of work exemplified by Mallermé.’22 As has

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been seen, Merleau-Ponty’s own references to ‘the silence of the absolute language’ still echoes this (VI: 176). Cleary he had extended this capacity for invention into the language of philosophy, connecting it to the rationality of its operative history. Beyond the classical oppositions, such a language would be seen to have a certain originary status, a “silence” as well, an inventive capacity to see and say the world anew. Especially this is true of the inventive language ‘involved in the fabrication of a book’ like that of The Visible and the Invisible (VI: 268). The sign would not simply involve an event of reactivated signification. No more than the transcendence of the perceived object could its Being be exhausted in a constitutive act or Sinngebung; it could not be reduced to what Sartre had called its standing before consciousness. It would be, in other words, itself originary. But this is to say just what Merleau-Ponty had held in the chapter on expression and speech and which was excluded from the doctrine of the Cogito in the Phenomenology. In fact, for reasons that have become clear now, the doctrine of the tacit Cogito had to make this exclusion, based as it was on what he called the individual/essence distinction and a model of significative ‘layers.’ But if the sign itself has ‘an analogous silence’ to it comparable to that of the originality of the perceptual field—if, that is, the perceptual field has become fully “analogical” in this sense—it must be irreducible to the significative reactivation of a content that is to be found on an existential level more primordially elsewhere. In this sense the separation that Merleau-Ponty refers to in his criticism of the Cogito tacite divides the Phenomenology of Perception against itself. The full recognition of the contradiction would only come after a prolonged investigation that placed language and expression at its center. Still, one can note again the extent to which the elements for the surpassing it implicated are already gathered in the 1952 article, whose decisive status Lefort has pointed out: Now if we rid our minds of the idea that our language is the translation or cipher of an original text, we shall see that the idea of a complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive—that it is, if you wish, silence. (S: 43)

VIII What Merleau-Ponty had discovered about the sign would not fit then into the classical framework by which he and his phenomenological progenitors

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had understood the Cogito. That is: ‘it would be naive to seek solidity in a heaven of ideas or in a ground of meaning (fond du sens)’ (VI: 116). But if the “content” of the sign itself involved here is originary, is not reducible to a ground beneath it, then the problematic of Ursprungsklärung with respect to it has been transformed. As he put it elsewhere in the text of The Visible and the Invisible: The “originating” (originaire) is not of one sole type, it is not all behind us; the restoration of the true past, of the pre-existence is not all of philosophy; the lived experience is not flat, without depth, without dimension, it is not an opaque stratum with which we have to merge. The appeal to the originary goes in several directions: the originary breaks up (éclate), and philosophy must accompany this break-up, this non-coincidence, this differentiation. (VI: 124) With the recognition of this ‘break-up’ of the originary and the attempt to arrive at, to “merge” with an absolute ground or “stratum” to which all things might be referred, the sign can no longer be thought significant due to what stands behind or beneath it. It cannot be held to be the mere re-presentation of a stratum from which, on the contrary, it marks a divergence, un écart. Conversely, the visible cannot be a realm complete in itself, the original that all “ideality” would only attempt to capture, as had been required in the classical reading of the earlier work. Claims that Merleau-Ponty’s later work involves an “agonizing reappraisal” of the Phenomenology of Perception and classical phenomenology in general are perhaps overblown.23 Nonetheless the foundation awarded perception as the “infrastructure” over (sur) which the superstructures constructed by intelligence are “established” has been dispersed (PoP: 53). In fact, as Geraets noticed, the transformation undertaken by MerleauPonty’s later work concentrates now on an overdetermined notion of “la foi perceptive.”24 As the latter states: For us, the “perceptual faith” includes everything that is given to the natural man in the original in an experience source, with the force of what is inaugural and present in person, according to a view that for him is ultimate and could not conceivably be more perfect or closer—whether we are considering things perceived in the ordinary sense of the word, or his initiation into the past, the imaginary, language, the predicative truth of science, works of art, the others, or history. (VI: 158)

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Again, however, it is not the case that this recognition was absent from the Phenomenology. There, too, Merleau-Ponty spoke of a narrow sense of ‘perception’ and a wider sense, one that involves ‘connaissance des existences’ (PoP: 40). In contradistinction to the later work, however, the Phenomenology could not just speak of perception as a simple model or “archetype” (VI: 158). It was framed in the metaphysical categories that have been followed out here in relation to language. In this framework perception is not only an “archetype” it is a foundation and ultimate layer of significance, one by which all others become significant. Seen in this light it becomes apparent that a specific metaphysics and its models separates the Phenomenology of Perception from the direction taken by The Visible and the Invisible, not simply a move from phenomenology to ontology as is sometimes claimed. In fact, as is evident, the earlier work was equally “ontological.” Rather, this move is one from a metaphysical model (or perhaps “Metaphysics” itself, some would say) to its other, from what Merleau-Ponty refers to in his later works as a horizontal to a vertical model, or perhaps from Being to what Marc Richir has called its ‘ruins.’25 If, after all, Being has been diacritically (or classically put, “analogically”) articulated, it is deprived of all “externalist” foundation or stability; it is devoid of initial baptism or fixed reference. In the fracture of this horizontal conception, encased in the categories of complete presence and dependence, ground and grounded, essence and existence, a new conception emerges, this time at the limits of The Visible and the Invisible. It might be said that it involves the heart of the task Merleau-Ponty had set out for himself immediately after the Phenomenology’s publication, tracing the passage of perceptual faith into explicit truth.26 In the final paragraph of the The Visible and the Invisible’s prepared text, returning to this issue, MerleauPonty states: We shall have to follow more closely this transition from the mute world to the speaking world. For the moment we want to suggest that one can speak neither of destruction nor of a construction of silence (and still less of a destruction that conserves or of a radicalization that destroys— which is not to solve but to pose the problem). When the silent vision falls into speech, and when the speech in turn, opening up the field of the nameable and the sayable, inscribes itself in that field, in its place, according to its truth—in short when it metamorphoses the structures of the visible world and makes itself a gaze of the mind, intuitus mentis—this is always in virtue of the same fundamental phenomenon of reversibility which sustains both the mute perception and the speech and which

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manifests itself by an almost carnal existence of the idea, as well as by a sublimation of the flesh. (VI: 154–5) This ‘fundamental phenomenon’ of reversibility, this chiasm that leaves neither element unchanged, is precisely what forced the recognition that language could no longer be understood as a feature merely added on to perception. Perception could no longer be seen simply as the text that provides the lexicon for all others. In fact there never was such a text—no visible which could be isolated from its “invisible”: no signified that could appear apart from its inscription. Language could not, consequently, as the Phenomenology held, be simply established on a perceptual infrastructure. Rather, as he was to say of thought, which in turn belongs itself of language, ‘it must be brought to appear (faire apparâitre) directly in (dans) the infrastructure of vision’ (VI: 145). Merleau-Ponty chooses his words carefully at this point, fully cognizant of the overthrow that has been carried out. He states immediately, ‘brought to appear, we say, and not brought to birth (faire nâitre).’ As will become evident later, this ‘faire apparâitre’ will resonate with ‘Eye and Mind’’s reading of Paul Klee’s account of art’s attempt to ‘make visible (macht sichbar)’ the invisible. For now we can gage its impact on the phenomenology of perception. In a discussion in ‘Eye and Mind’ that returns, as had The Structure of Behavior over two decades before it to a consideration of Descartes’ Dioptrique, Merleau-Ponty states: Now perhaps we have a better sense of what is meant by that little verb “to see.” Vision is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me for being absent from myself, for being present at the fission of Being, from inside—the fission at whose termination, and not before, I come back to myself. (PP: 186) Without succumbing to any of the “isms” that had been assiduously avoided in the Phenomenology of Perception, consciousness remained inadequately conceived there as the (stoic) ‘retreat (reduit) of non-being’ (PoP: 400). As will also become further evident, it is perhaps less that this stoicism is unwarranted, than still poorly formulated. It was, after all, the means, the openness (Offenheit), given to us to articulate the play of difference itself, and thereby still what The Visible and the Invisible would call a ‘militant finitude’ (VI: 251). The Cartesian formulation of stoicism, formulated precisely by means of reduction and foundation, was surely not the only alternative rejoinder to this issue or its conceptual past. In the event of

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the openness itself, in which, as he put it, I remain ‘absent from myself’ precisely in being in the world—and beyond the alternatives of universal self-consciousness or empirical facticity—I remain, still, a life self-related, un vis pres de soi (VI: 19). Indeed to the extent that he remained against such reductionism, he said this is still ‘why I am for metaphysics’ (VI: 251). Surely he was against such a metaphysics as construed by humanism or naturalism or theology (VI: 274). Just as Merleau-Ponty could cite Schelling’s Naturphilosophie for a precedent for the problem of ontology, though without simply reinstating it, he could have cited Schelling’s (or Heidegger’s) critique of Descartes and Cartesianism. With the formulations of classical transcendentalism in mind, Schelling himself had already declared that even in the Ergo Sum, ‘I am absolutely’ cannot be contained, only: ‘I am in one way or another.’27 Perhaps, however, it was not a question of needing to cite such figures since they were in a sense already at work in his text, a matter of what he called implicit history; ‘It is born of intermediaries (“the first-second person” singular) [TD: 141].’ All these figures were perhaps proximate within a certain theoretical “sense history”—even perhaps Husserl himself, in whose shadow all of this took place. Having abandoned his strong views regarding transcendental (veridical) presence and the Cogito, Husserl, too, had been led to a primordial, “sedimented” historicity at its heart. First and foremost, as he once acknowledged concerning the self-givenness of the present: ‘the indubitable, the indefeasible validity is clear. But what good is it, since its validity is only momentary?’28 Only against the backdrop of a (retentionalprotentional) history does such validity gain sense. Moreover, granted the parameters of transcendental logic, tossed between the unity of time and its concrete determination, Husserl himself often thought that grasping the ‘flux’ of such a history requires a new language and new models for its expression, since we often run up against not only the walls of our past, but equally against the wall of language and transcendental logic itself. As the all important analysis of inner time put it, having encountered the ultimate unity or flux of time (or shall we say “timing”), since such a “flow” cannot be confused with the temporal predicates that are distinguished through it, ‘for all of this we have no names.’ Even ‘absolute subjectivity’ would be “designated” here, he thought, only in transcendence or analogy, that is, ‘metaphorically.’29 This is another of those texts, like that of the Ineinander of the touching and the touched upon which reversibility had been modeled, that remained prominently in Merleau-Ponty’s thought for over two decades;

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again and again he found therein instances that eluded the simple selfpossession or complete constitution of classical models. But this would not mean that all modeling would be eschewed for the sake of simple description. Rather than the simple descriptive clairvoyance attending the models of Cartesian intuitions, phenomenology would indeed be a ‘figured philosophy’ dependent upon the imaginary texture of its own inscription and models (EM: 168). Moreover, as becomes further evident in the case of Saussure, Merleau-Ponty’s use of such models was not restricted to the phenomenological tradition, nor could it leave its protocols of direct access to the given intact. Like the painter’s “science” that was occasionally its analogue, here too it would be true of the relation between things and signs, or theoretical models: ‘It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than that I see it’ (EM: 164). Once more, he knew that to articulate the things themselves phenomenology would need to privilege again the very language of invention (and trope) classical representationalism eschewed. Granted the horizons of dependencies (and conventions or institution) at stake, it would entail an ekstasis of certainty that escaped the Jetzpunkt of “archimedian” versions of Cartesianism. Instead the Cogito would emerge as a complex and ironical (or “dialectical”) invention or performative in the intertwining between language and being, signifier and signified, presence and absence. As a result, lingering claims concerning apodicticity necessarily grew oblique—a result, which, as will become more and more evident, led Merleau-Ponty to extend his account into various domains (linguistic, literary, and historical) in order to fully grasp the transformation at stake. For now it is enough to say that the Phenomenology of Perception had already begun to confront the irony at work in the “pre-texts” of the Cogito itself. Again with the later Husserl’s genetic account before him Merleau-Ponty stated: . . . (A)s Descartes maintained, it is true both that certain ideas are presented to me as irresistibly evident de facto, and that this fact is never valid de jure, and that it never does away with the possibility of doubt arising as soon as we are no longer in the presence of the idea. It is no accident that self-evidence itself may be called into question, because certainty is doubt, being the carrying forward (reprise) of a tradition of thought which cannot be condensed into an evident “truth” without my giving up all attempts to make it explicit. It is for the same reasons that a self-evident truth is irresistible in fact, yet always questionable (récusable), which amounts to two ways of saying the same thing: namely, that it is

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irresistible because I take for granted a certain acquisition of experience, a certain field of thought, and precisely for this reason it appears to me as self-evident for a certain thinking nature, the one I enjoy and perpetuate, but which remains contingent and given to itself (donnée à elle même). (PoP: 396)

Chapter 2

Merleau-Ponty/Saussure

‘[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) ‘A language which exists is in effect a tradition, but a tradition is an appeal for the renewal of expression for recommencing the initial creative task (travail).’ (PD: 345) ‘I have always been struck by the fact that, as soon as he touched on the body, Husserl no longer speaks the same language.’ (PD: 303)

I Merleau-Ponty’s involvement with Saussure provides a linchpin, not only for understanding the development of his own thought, but equally for examining the complicated theoretical research combining issues in philosophy of language, linguistics, semiotics, literature, and aesthetics for much of French thought thereafter. In the early 1960s, this area became identified under the catch words of ‘structuralism’ and then ‘poststructuralism.’ Thinkers in these movements always retained an ambiguous status vis à vis their phenomenological predecessors, including Merleau-Ponty. Proponents of poststructuralist thought couched their relation to the work of their phenomenological predecessors in the discourse of rupture, discontinuity, and epistemic break. Still, the confluence of issues at stake was not without obvious echoes even in Husserl’s contemporaries—who, after all, had both, not only influenced more classical forms of structuralism in linguistics, but also themselves, in turn, been influenced by it. Prior to Merleau-Ponty himself one might, for example, mention the important literary studies of Ingarden in classical phenomenology or of Jakobson in early accounts of structural linguistics.

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The 1960s debates over the nature of meaning or the relevance of artistic practices involved highly tensed arguments concerning the status of the subject or “man” or the role of speakers’ agency, severely complicating attempts at their adjudication. Thinkers lined up on one side or the other of the “phenomenologists” or “structuralists” to mutually affirm or deny any relation between the two camps. Thinkers in Merleau-Ponty’s wake followed suit by one of two divided (and somewhat flawed) strategies. Either, in order to fight the threat of structuralists’ functionalist arguments to their intentional descriptions, they argued against semiological “reductions” of intentional analysis, disregarding classical phenomenology’s complicities with transcendental “reductionism.” Or, they attempted to subsume natural languages beneath a purified transcendental one, hoping to avoid the problem of a “transcendental” language that had been recognized by Fink and others from the outset of Husserl’s program. Merleau-Ponty himself had denied the possibility of a complete reductive analysis (and the possibility of complete transcendental reduction) and he had followed Fink’s lead in moving language to the center of transcendental discussions (and difficulties). Poststructuralists, on the other hand, hoped, by “dissolving” or “decentering” the subject, to avoid contact with phenomenology’s “strong” program and its defense of veridical epistemic self-presence, and attempted to shift ground to other investigative domains. Again, Merleau-Ponty’s relation to the claims of the structuralists was complicated. Foucault, for example, had attempted to separate his own work from the phenomenologists and existentialists, placing issues of philosophy of science and epistemology, and theories of rationality at the forefront. He followed instead, he argued, the lineage of Cavaillès, Bachelard, and Canguilhem. Still, in retrospect it is clear that this separation, like most claims about the radical breaks at stake, was largely ideological. Merleau-Ponty’s work shows traces of both Cavaillès and Bachelard—and very early on, almost two decades prior to Foucault’s programmatic account. There is much still to analyze in these debates and their history. While the status of Saussure’s work stood at the center of these debates (theoretically, historically, and even politically), we may need to revise then current accounts of the incursion of structuralism upon phenomenology. This much is true at the outset: Merleau-Ponty was instrumental both in bringing Saussure’s work to prominence and in outlining and prefiguring, by means of a passage beyond classical phenomenology, much of the work that followed in his wake. Already the set of issues outlined above and the broad spectrum of disciplines they affected had emerged in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. In all this, it might be argued, French thought merely followed his

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lead in the late forties and early fi fties—if not without challenging it as it proceeded. Clearly, attempts to finally adjudicate this history or its conceptual issues—not to speak of Merleau-Ponty’s involvement and his own position—will need to confront the itinerary of Saussure’s presence in his work, one which, in transforming his own position Merleau-Ponty transformed the itinerary of French thought itself.

II Merleau-Ponty’s work with Saussure began as early as a decade before the high tide of these contemporary trends. As Roland Barthes noted in his 1964 book, Elements of Semiology, his work represents ‘probably one of the first French philosophers to become interested in Saussure.’1 The recognition of Saussure’s importance can be traced to divergent sources during this period, to such areas as anthropology and the work of Claude Lèvi-Strauss or to psychoanalysis and the work of Jacques Lacan. In philosophy, however, Merleau-Ponty presents us with the first work in which Saussure’s position is seen to be of fundamental and general theoretical significance. This recognition was not one that stood constantly at the center of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical concerns. Indeed no explicit reference is made to Saussure or his work prior to 1947. Prior to this time the more prominent references on the theory of language to be noted in his work include the Gelb-Goldstein research into pathology in psycholinguistics, or Cassirer’s 1934 article, ‘Le langage et la constitution du monde des objets’ (influential also for the early work of Lèvi-Strauss), his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and the work of Piaget.2 Yet by no means is Saussure totally absent during this period. Evidence of contact occurs, for instance, in Gurwitsch’s reference to the Saussurian distinction between speech (la parole) and language (la langue) in a 1935 article on the psychology of language on which Merleau-Ponty assisted.3 Further, Merleau-Ponty himself probably makes reference to this distinction in passing in his analysis in chapter 6, ‘The Body as Expression, and Speech,’ of Phenomenology of Perception: It might be said, restating a celebrated distinction, that languages (langages) or constituted systems of vocabulary and syntax, empirically existing ‘means of expression,’ are both the repository and residue of acts of speech (parole) in which unformulated significance not only finds the means of being conveyed outwardly, but moreover acquires significance for itself, and is genuinely created as significance. (PoP: 196)

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Nonetheless, outside of this somewhat oblique reference, which is itself explicated in terms of the parole parlant/parole parlée distinction developed in this chapter, Saussure remains absent. Especially, it should be emphasized, the ‘diacritical theory of linguistic value,’ which arises in part II of the Course and which will later be taken to be almost synonymous with the Saussurian contribution, is by no means present.

III The first published discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s work with Saussure occurs in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in 1947, in an article that appeared in Sense and Non-Sense as ‘The Metaphysical in Man.’ The form of this article itself, as shall be seen, is not unimportant for grasping the nature of the transition that Merleau-Ponty’s work was undergoing at the time. It opens by mentioning the revolution wrought by Gestalt psychology in the human sciences. This revolution, it is claimed, is one that manifests a new metaphysical conception of man, one that emerges from a methodological basis that will be described a few years later as the ‘reciprocal envelopment of philosophy and science’ (PP: 73). In a discussion of Koehler’s work in animal psychology, Merleau-Ponty holds that what Gestalt theory demonstrated is that we are excluded from the paradoxical attempt to ‘reject wholesale our human experience’ and separate ‘the radical subjectivity of all our experience from its truth value’ (SNS: 84, 93). Behavioral processes are to be understood in terms of their internal organization instead of trying to find in them the results of an external combination of simple and universal processes. By so doing we are led, it is claimed, beyond the classical dichotomies of subject and object, existence as thing and existence as consciousness, and invited to conceive knowledge in a new way: no longer as a way to break down these typical ensembles but rather as ‘an effort to embrace them and to understand them by reliving them’ (SNS: 86). Nonetheless, as Merleau-Ponty proceeds to make clear, the advances in the human sciences, in his opinion, do not return us to the conceptual stronghold defended by classical rationalism. For example, regarding what is central to this domain, knowledge of ‘man by man,’ he states: The sciences of man—not to mention the others—have made it evident that all knowledge of man by man, far from being pure contemplation is the taking up by each . . . [and] appropriating a structure . . . of which he forms no concept. Here we no longer have the positing of an object, the

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universality of knowledge is no longer guaranteed in each by that stronghold of absolute consciousness in which the Kantian “I think” was assured of being identical to every other possible “I think.” (SNS: 93) What appears here is not a thought that finds itself “soaring” over its objects in acts of pure constitution, but one that arises only insofar as it is always already “in the world”—within the limitations of a personal and historical facticity. The advances in the human sciences, then, return us to the ‘originary’ realm of lived experience. They make possible a ‘descriptive science’ based on this realm. They do so, however, only at the cost of giving up classical models. What can be said about the role that linguistics, and Saussure’s work in particular, plays in the revolution that has been discovered in Gestalt theory? Saussure is cited specifically for recognizing that the sort of being that language has is not susceptible to a causal analysis that would ‘link each fact with a previous fact and thus spread language before the linguist like a natural object’ (SNS: 87). Such a viewpoint would make language largely external, a mosaic of absolutely unmotivated facts. Rather, the precepts of objectivism and mechanism must be abandoned. Language has an organismic character, surrounding the speaking subject with an instrument having ‘its own inertia,’ its own demands, constraints, and internal logic. This “logic” is one that each speaker is compelled to use but which remains to some extent open to his initiative. To this extent Merleau-Ponty states, ‘Saussure’s linguistics legitimates the perspective of the speaking subject who lives in his language (and who may in some cases change it)’ (SNS: 87). Nonetheless, it should be noted that this 1947 document, despite its overt reference to and affirmation of Saussure, makes little more use of the specificity of his paradigm than did the implicit statements of Phenomenology of Perception. The general significance of Saussure’s diacritical theory of linguistic value, for example, for metaphysics itself—in this article focusing on this subject—is not an issue. Nor is the relationship between la langue and la parole seen to be applicable beyond the confines of linguistics. Rather, Saussure’s work is seen as an example of the new developments in the human sciences, one whose importance receives secondary status in this domain, that of reinforcing results gleaned more primordially elsewhere, in Gestalt theory. It serves here, therefore, as a sort of principle of verification. Hence its introduction in the article: It goes without saying that the example of one school and a school about which there is still disagreement can prove nothing by itself. However,

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the work of the school would become significant if one could show that in general each of the sciences of man is oriented in its own way toward the revision of the subject-object relation. Now that is just what we note in linguistics. (SNS: 86)

IV These extensions, finding a certain generality to the Saussurian account, await later events. The initial moves extending the paradigm to fields beyond linguistics can be traced in the writings of the late forties and early fi fties. Initially, it can be noted that Saussure took on a role of increased importance in Merleau-Ponty’s course work, first in his 1947–1948 course at Lyon entitled ‘Language and Communication,’ then in a 1948–1949 course presented at the École Normale Supérieure, entitled simply ‘Saussure.’ Although we lack Merleau-Ponty’s course notes for these lectures, authenticated notes for the 1949–1950 lectures presented at the Sorbonne, ‘Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language,’ are available and are indicative of the altered and more prominent role given to Saussure in his thought. Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language presents us for the first time with an analysis of the Saussurian paradigm in its specificity. Language is essentially understood as a diacritical phenomenon; words are not to be taken as finite units of signification, the offspring of some sort of naming process or nomenclature (CAL: 96). The archetypal linguistic act is not that of a pure baptismal denotation in which pure thoughts are paired off with their objects. The power of language, as he was to put it shortly afterward, ‘does not reside in the tête à tête it conducts between our minds and things’ (PW: 41). This attempt to plug thought directly into things longs, as he will put it, for ‘a golden age of language in which words once adhered to the objects themselves’ (PW: 6). Language here would be absolutely clear since thought is not left trailing behind a signification that transcends it. It would be the “double” of being; thought, the internal word, would be the standard for the external word. There would be nothing in language that the speaker did not put into it. Thought would escape the contingency, the mediation, and the risk of the system of signs. It would be, therefore, a language more created than learned; the result would be a system whose economics was rigorously delimited by its intentions and referents. Easily coupled with this view, Merleau-Ponty claims, are that of language as algorithm and

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the project of a universal language—transforming natural languages into homogeneous objects for thought. Here again, ‘in the purity of the algorithm, signification is disengaged from all interference with the unfolding of signs which it rules and legitimates’ (PW: 121). Such a stance involves a revolt against the confusion and heterogeneity of everyday language, and hence against finitude. If Saussure invoked the model of a mathematical function for the sign (specifically the phoneme) he did not make this mistake, and this perhaps is precisely his theoretical fertility for MerleauPonty; the formal, functional or “synchronic” implications of Saussure’s model still retains its links with the historical transformations of concrete usage. As the 1949–1950 course acknowledges, words do not carry meaning as much as they separate themselves out from one another. ‘Each linguistic phenomenon is a differentiation of a global movement of communication’ (CAL: 96). To know how to speak is not to have a number of pure signs and significations at one’s disposal. The speech act is not merely a purely expressive act imbuing signs with meanings; nor is it an act ‘replacing a perception with a conventional sign’ (PW: 3). It involves ‘taking up’ a position in the play of difference that constitutes language as a domain of articulation and makes possible moves within it. Meaning is always the function of this mediation; as Saussure put it, ‘it is only a value determined by its relation with other similar values, and without them the signification would not exist.’4 Signification, in short, is a function of a total system of values. The speech act becomes, then, much more complex than the classical theory dreamt. Among other things, as Merleau-Ponty says in a marginal note, ‘we must get rid of (défaire) the illusion of possession through saying’ (PW: 69n). Because of the speech act’s involvement in this ‘global movement,’ Merleau-Ponty states, following Saussure, ‘language is not the function of the speaking subject’ (CAL: 97).5 The speaking subject is not the proprietor of language, being dependent on an institution that always antedates our participation in it. The speech act emerges at the intersection of la langue and la parole, between the extensional and the intentional, the conventional and the expressive features of language. This means that, as a result of this exchange or Wechsel, again following Saussure, language is always only ‘relatively motivated.’6 Nonetheless, if language is not the function of the speaking subject it also ‘is not a transcendent reality with respect to all speaking subjects’ (CAL: 97). While it is out of the question to found linguistic practices on the basis of any empirically specifiable speaker, it would be no less mistaken

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to create a sort of linguistic Platonism holding them to be distinct from the usage of the community. As Saussure had realized, language is not a separate reality. Behind language there is not some sort of reified transcendent thought or Geist. This means, moreover, that language is not just a principle of classification that speakers would reproduce. Rather the relationship between speech and language inherently holds an ‘original conception of the relationship between mind and object’ (CAL: 99). While it is noted that for Saussure ‘everything in language is psychological,’ Merleau-Ponty adds, ‘what is mental is not individual’ (CAL: 98).7 Individual idiolects do not present phenomena sufficient in themselves to exhaust the function of language. ‘In language the consciousness of signification is not exhaustive’ (CAL: 96). The subject is instituted in phenomena that transcend it and can be founded only on the global will to communicate. It is this intersubjective motivation that sustains linguistic coherence and intelligibility, ultimately outlining the constellation of its rationality. ‘Order and system are reestablished by the thrust of speaking subjects who want to understand and to be understood’ (CAL: 101). This intertwining between system and individual in the speech act demonstrates the integral relation between language and thought. Their separation, as has been intimated, was a necessary condition for the classical model and the attempt to provide the latter an absolute foundation in pure thought. But such a separation is, at best, an abstraction. Rather, quoting Saussure, Merleau-Ponty states, ‘There is “neither a materialization of thought, nor a spiritualization of language”; language and thought are only two moments of one and the same reality’ (CAL: 99).8 Drawing on an insight that had been gathered as early as The Structure of Behavior, this mediation might be explicated by stating that the speech act (act de parole) involves both ‘a principle of slavery’ and ‘a principle of liberty’ (SB: 245n). On the one hand, we are tied to the “grids” of language, the rules of that which can be said or that which can be meaningful. For example, even if Chomsky were right to point out that most sentences uttered are novel sentences, they must still count as sentences.9 If “grammaticality” is an ambiguous notion, that there are limits between meaningful and nonmeaningful sentences at work in specific contexts, however obscure, is unchallengeable.10 On the other hand, despite these constraints (or in a sense just because of them, since they function as a necessary condition of linguistic intelligibility), nothing forbids the transformation of what has been said. Utterances in ordinary language are free to be novel, even if in an ambiguous sense they are condemned to be meaningful. Because of this play in usage language involves an open

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“situation,” ‘constituting a background to either a confirmatory or transformatory decision’ (PoP: 438). Saussure himself wrote of the synchronic laws of usage that they were ‘general, but not imperative’ and that ‘speaking is characterized by freedom of combinations.’11 This conception of the relationship between mind and object as mediated through the structures of language thus forces us to revamp our notion of rationality. Already in the Preface to Sense and Non-Sense Merleau-Ponty had written, ‘We are born into reason as into language’ (SNS: 3). In the Sorbonne lectures Saussure is seen as providing the key to an understanding of how this takes place. ‘What Saussure saw is precisely this masking of chance and order, this return to the rational, the fortuitous’ (CAL: 101). Merleau-Ponty found in Saussure a sort of “living rationality” that could assist in accounting for the nature of concrete practices. Here, as Saussure realized, ‘one must consider everything that deflects reason in actual contact between individuals.’12 Individuals, on the one hand, are not endowed with the freedom to enact intentions that arise ex nihilo. Instead these acts are made possible by the structures from which they emerge. Nor, on the other hand, can it be said that individuals are the mere effect of these structures, their acts being the result of external constraints. What has been revealed is an exchange or Wechsel between system and event, language and expression, historical practice and discrete intention, denying the separation of reason and fact. Merleau-Ponty describes it as introducing ‘the idea of a kind of blundering (trébuchant) logic in which the development is not guaranteed’ (CAL: 101). In the closing paragraphs of Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, Merleau-Ponty’s concerns with the Saussurian model move beyond the confines of philosophy of language and linguistics proper. The analysis of language will now be taken as a key for the elucidation of major problems throughout the domain of the social, including initially those of history. In his analysis of the speaker’s involvement in the usage of the community Merleau-Ponty had already seen that ‘Saussure elucidates the enigmatic relationship linking the individual to history by his analysis of language’ (CAL: 97). On a broader scale now it is asserted that ‘the Saussurian conception, if generalized’ could find ‘application to the Philosophy of History’ (CAL: 101). Under the auspices of this move we would be able to escape both the position that history is the sum of independent chance events and that history is providential. Neither in fact is the case, for, in a sense, history is both—both accidental and rational. There is no system that does not originate in some particular accident, and no accident becomes historical

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except insofar as it is capable of cohering to a system. ‘That which we call the logic of history is a process of elimination by which only the systems which are capable of taking the situation into account subsist’ (CAL: 102). The fortuitous and the rational then do not constitute two different historical orders. Nor does the systematic aspect of history, its “logos,” stand outside change: The principle of historical rationality does not eliminate chance. It turns chance or uses chance. As Saussure might say, it converts the accidental into systems; it surrounds the pure event without eliminating it. (CAL: 102)

V It is evident that the Saussurian paradigm, and philosophy of language in general, had ceased to be merely ‘regional problems’ and had taken on a position of wider significance in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Further evidence of this generalized affirmation would be shortly forthcoming. The paper presented at the Brussels colloquium in 1951 on contemporary problems in phenomenology, ‘On the Phenomenology of Language,’ presents a clear statement regarding the priority of language as a philosophical problem and can be viewed, retrospectively, as an expression of a turning point in French thought. The opening paragraph of this paper explicates a program for contemporary philosophical thought (one, rightly or wrongly, Merleau-Ponty attributes to Husserl). Against the philosophical tradition in which language does not pertain to ‘First Philosophy,’ Merleau-Ponty claims that in Husserl we find it moved to a central position. Further, because of its priority, it is claimed that this problem provides us with our best basis for ‘questioning phenomenology and recommencing Husserl’s efforts’ (S: 84). It soon becomes evident, however, the philosophy of language holds importance not just for its methodological importance vis à vis Husserl. In considering the consequences of his descriptions for phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty is in fact quite clear. Having explained that phenomenology is not just an adjunct to philosophy, he states: This is particularly clear in the case of the phenomenology of language. More clearly than any other, this problem requires us to make a decision concerning the relationships between phenomenology and philosophy

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or metaphysics. For more clearly than any other it takes the form of both a special problem and a problem which contains all others, including the problem of philosophy. (S: 93) The problem of the nature of language, then, moves to the forefront in philosophy. But why? The reasons explicit in 1951 appear to differ little from the 1947 article that first manifested his interest in Saussure: it is key in the attempt to ‘reflect upon the object’s mode of presence to the subject’ (S: 92–3). But, as becomes evident, in contradistinction to the earlier work, the question of language no longer merely verifies what had been established in another domain. Now more clearly than any other it takes the form of a special problem that contains all others. The precise sense in which this is the case, however, will not fully emerge until the final writings. In the 1951 paper Merleau-Ponty also presented what became a controversial characterization of Saussure’s speech/language distinction, claiming that the distinction is one between ‘a synchronic linguistics of speech and a diachronic linguistics of language’ (S: 86). As is noted often enough, this characterization appears, prima facie, to contradict the definitions of chapter 3 of the introduction to the Course in which it is claimed that the object of linguistics excludes la parole.13 Linguistics has for its object, rather, the homogeneous, systematic artifact of concrete usage—versus the discrete multi-faceted character of la parole.

VI If Merleau-Ponty has in fact simply confused or misunderstood this issue, then (in addition to a major blunder in understanding Saussure) he would be open to his critics’ charge that he never really accounted for the discursive constraints exercised by language (i.e. la langue) on speakers. This is a criticism, moreover, that was formulated both by later phenomenologists such as Ricoeur as well as by writers more strongly influenced by structuralism, for example, Lyotard.14 Again, in retrospect, we should proceed cautiously; Merleau-Ponty may, after all, have avoided in advance the extremes that divided authors like Lyotard and Ricoeur. In The Prose of the World Merleau-Ponty states that ‘We need to learn to reflect on consciousness in the hazards of language and as quite impossible without its opposite’ (PW: 17). This implies, as has been seen, a general “deconstruction” of the position that has been overriding in classical thought, both with regard to the subservience and effacement of the sign

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before consciousness (and indeed consciousness itself, since ‘to be conscious is to constitute’) and in relation to the supposed primal connection the sign has with “the world” (S: 93). It would be mistaken to hold that Saussure was not a catalyst in this reappraisal. At the same time, however, it would be equally remiss to claim that the resulting account does not challenge what Barthes called the “Durkheimian” reading of the Course, which take la langue and la parole to be radically distinct and la parole to be a mere efflux of the former.15 It might also be said that in this he antedates Barthes’ later move from ‘a semiotics of the message’ to a ‘semiotics of the interlocutor.’16 A parallel text from The Prose of the World explicates what Merleau-Ponty has in mind. Alongside the linguistics of language (la langue), which gives the impression, in the extreme, that language is a series of chaotic events, Saussure has inaugurated a linguistics of speech (la parole) which would reveal in it at each moment an order, a system, a totality without which communication and the linguistic community would be impossible. (PW: 23) To mark off the speech/language distinction in effect is immediately to set off a dialectic between the two perspectives. If there is a criticism on Merleau-Ponty’s part here it involves the necessity of recognizing that ‘since synchrony is only a cross section of diachrony, the system realized in it never exists wholly in act but always involves latent or incubating changes’ (S: 87). In a sense, this demands of Saussure only that he make good what amounts to a promissory note. In discussing the mutability of the sign, Saussure states: The causes of continuity are a priori within the scope of the observer, but the causes of change in time are not. It is better not to give an exact account at this point, but to restrict discussion to the shifting of relationships in general.17 The point never comes when the Course puts forward ‘an exact account’ of this process. In the conclusion to his discussion of the distinction between static and evolutionary linguistics Saussure does say, somewhat parenthetically, that . . . once in possession of this double principle of classification, we can add that everything diachronic in language is diachronic only by virtue of speaking. It is in speaking that the germ of all change is found.18

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But, the Course never really completes these indications. Saussure’s attempt to rule out bad theories about the nature of language, which doubtless surrounded him at the time, almost seems to have kept his own from being complete. What Merleau-Ponty demanded, without denying the strength of Saussure’s account, is that, rationally, change must be accounted for and that an account of the speech act in its specificity be provided. The sole exception to this lacuna perhaps emerges, pointedly, in Saussure’s discussion of the pivotal role of analogy. If synchronic system always has priority over diachronic evolution—if the latter is parasitic on the former—it is true too, he states, that ‘language never stops interpreting and decomposing its units.’19 And, granted both the play of interpretation and synchronic constraint on intelligibility, ‘(c)hanges in interpretation, no matter how they start, always become apparent through the existence of analogical forms.’20 Moreover, here it is admitted, that, while ‘meaning plays no part in phonetic change,’ the paradigm of Saussurian linguistics, ‘it must intervene in analogy.’21 The question of meaning openly erupts in the question of analogy. Moreover, since the ancient question of analogy is the question of being itself, the event in which being becomes understood ‘in many ways,’ this general expressivity that accompanies the system of signs would raise precisely the Heideggerean problem of the Sinn vom Sein and the exploration of what exceeds ‘ontic’ or conventional meaning. And, implicitly or explicitly, Merleau-Ponty’s reading of the Course saw as much. There is a danger to such attempts, and Saussure is quite right in this regard. The danger is to revert back to a point at which language once again becomes nothing more than a naming process, and the system becomes swallowed up in intentions, expressions, and pure significations, returning the workings of language back to the “universal stronghold” of a constituting consciousness. The positive effect of Saussure’s contribution in this regard has been, as has been seen, to recognize the “derivative” character of these entities and their facticity, their dependency on the ‘speaking’ of language itself (PW: 102).22 If, as Saussure granted, ‘there is no language in which nothing is motivated,’ it is always a matter of ‘relative’ or conditional motivation: ‘at any rate even in the most favorable cases motivation is never absolute.’23 The universality that the classical account sought, then, could not be found in a point prior to the diversity of existing languages, but can emerge only in the laterality of value to value, Merleau-Ponty holds. The symbolic matrix itself articulates this universality. But instead of subjecting the heterogeneity of existing practices to a reduction to pure linguistic forms, or

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a pure grammar (as Husserl had done in the Fourth Investigation) here the analysis of usage remains at the level of the concrete.24 Merleau-Ponty thought that it is just the concern for the specificity of concrete usage that manifests an explicit affinity between these two projects. It is precisely this affinity that leads him to claim of (and doubtless to ‘over claim’ or over-interpret) Saussure’s approach, in the manner perhaps in which he had of his own, that it ‘emphasizes the necessity of a phenomenology of speech.’25 Perhaps, in so doing, he saw himself to be again fulfilling Fink’s “phenomenology of phenomenology,” proceeding beyond static analysis to reveal its genesis.26 In any case, he again had Husserl’s genetic account of motivation in mind. The question was whether it could be integrated into an institutional context. Granted what Merleau-Ponty termed its fluidity, he obviously thought it could. From the “phenomenological” approach that results, Merleau-Ponty describes the speech act’s radical inscription in its symbolic context. Usage is, he says, ‘recommended’ by its morphological, syntactical, and lexical archive. These patterns jointly comprise what von Humboldt referred to as the Innere Sprachform in which the archive contributes a perspective or mode of access to the world (S: 88). Devoid of von Humboldt’s organicism or naturalism, Merleau-Ponty’s post-Saussurian account of its logic in contingency still acknowledges that organized signs have both a meaning and a potential in this structure that I do not constitute nor need to represent to myself in order to use them. This phenomenon, described as a ‘languagely (langagière) meaning of language, effects the mediation between my as yet unspeaking intention and words, and in such a way that my spoken words surprise me myself and teach me my thought’ (S: 88). In this sense operative speech or expression does not (or perhaps not simply) apply or subsume a determinate concept; it explicates, exhibits, or explores and explicitly ‘becomes aware of’ the possibilities of an expressive history. The classical view in which complete “inner” thoughts get translated into “external” signs (or “mentaleze” gets translated into signs) will not suffice. The picture we have of thought encoding and decoding signs (on which, for example, any semiology of “messages” or “codes” is based) breaks down. It falls along with the classical foundation according to which thought reigns over language. If thought only arises in the midst of the play of the symbolic context, then ‘the reason why thematization of the signified does not precede speech is that it is the result of it’ (S: 90). The subject, then, no longer stands outside the play of language. In this heterogeneity selfexpression and self-transcendence are no longer radically distinct. The speaker becomes a “speaking subject” or a sujet en proces.27

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Previously, in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty had analyzed the notion of meaning immanent in the significative system at another level with regard to the ‘lived body’ as the ‘gestural meaning’ of the sign. Here again the ability of signs to delineate their own meaning, to catch up and organize my intentions, this ‘action at a distance,’ as he puts it following Sartre, remains understood as ‘an eminent case of corporeal intentionality’ (S: 89).28 Just as I have an awareness of my body that allows me to maintain my relationships with the world without thematically representing to myself the objects of my dealings, so likewise, he reasons, the spoken word is “pregnant” with a meaning that can be read off in the texture of the linguistic gesture, provoking in turn, further exploration of linguistic possibility in others. As naïve as this view remained (Merleau-Ponty lacked a full-blown account of institutions), the speaker’s mode of access to the intersubjective field and the symbolic context is not based on pure thought. Rather the lived body, like the sign itself, is always already constituted in an intersubjective field. Indeed the speech act is itself a mode of behavior demonstrative of the body-subject’s inherence in an intersubjective field. Nonetheless, even this foundation for language in the lived-body, or “carnal generality,” is not without a certain instability, as a note to The Prose of the World indicates: ‘This foundation does not prevent language from coming back dialectically over what preceded it and transforming the purely carnal and vital coexistence with the world and bodies into a coexistence of language (coexistence langagière)’ (PW: 20n). Nonetheless, the “interinvolvement” or “intertwining” at stake still remained unclear.

VII In his inaugural lecture at the Collège du France, Merleau-Ponty again enlarges the parameters of his considerations on Saussure. This discussion, accordingly, occurs at the end of the section on history in which it is stated that Saussure’s model ‘could have sketched a new philosophy of history,’ surpassing even that of Marx and Hegel in its ability to account for historical meaning (IPP: 54–5). More to the point, it enabled MerleauPonty to surpass the antinomies between “existential” consciousness (with its indeterminate, intersubjective “common situation”) and the determinate sens of universal history he found in Hegel (or Kojève) and Marx (or Lukács). As will become further apparent the latter also occurred in conjunction with a shift in his political views.29 Here however it suffices to note that Merleau-Ponty begins to integrate the account of historical meaning

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into a general “symbolic space.” The various “systems or symbols” for which the Saussurian position can be seen to be exemplary have now begun to be integrated into one general conception. Regarding these various matrices, he states: We were asking ourselves where they are. They are in a social, cultural, or symbolic space which is no less real (réel) than physical space and is, moreover, supported by it. For meaning lies latent not only in language, in political and religious institutions, but in modes of kinship, in machines, in the landscape, in production, and, in general, in all the modes of human commerce. An interconnection among all these phenomena is possible since they are all symbolisms, and perhaps even the translation of one symbolism into another is possible. (IPP: 56) Moreover, the symbolic structure within this space is all-pervasive. This means that the event in which it is disclosed must likewise be placed within it. Each philosophy is also an architecture of signs. It constitutes itself (se constitue) in close relation with the other modes of exchange which make up our historical and social life. (IPP: 57) Nonetheless, the discursive practice that constitutes philosophy still receives a distinction in this explication since, ‘for the tacit symbolism of life it substitutes, in principle, a conscious symbolism; for a latent meaning, one that is manifest’ (IPP: 57). In disclosing this involvement it remains possible for the theoretician to enter into this play and explicitly transform it. The inaugural lecture thus attempts to explicate a polymorphic space where the symbolic matrices to which the Saussurian model remains applicable can be mapped out. What remains outstanding here, however, is the recognition that this space itself—in a sense logos and being—may be mutually (or “simultaneously”) explicated in terms of the same sort of diacritical paradigm. We can find perhaps just such an attempt at work in the final writings of Merleau-Ponty’s career.

VIII The introduction written for Signs in 1960 precisely mirrors the developments that have been traced out here. Having introduced the account of

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language that has been traced above he states, reemphasizing the role of such modeling in phenomenological explication: ‘We ought to think of the historical world according to this model’ (S: 20). As it had in the inaugural lecture, the question of the site for this model and its instances arises. However much there may be a truth to nominalism (‘nominalism is right, the significations are only defined separations’), an endless play of signs will not suffice (VI: 238). Again, it must be questioned where the site that this model structures is located. Here with regard to history we are given a more complete reply: It is asked, Where is history made? . . . It is of the same order as the movement of Thought and Speech, and in short, of the perceptible world’s explosion within us. (S: 20) But if this is the case, if it is the same order that is in question, then this model might be claimed to hold not only for history and social institutions in general, but likewise for the opening of the “space” of the perceived world itself. In all cases it could be said that the entities in question have a sort of “languagely (langagière)” existence. This discovery, Merleau-Ponty states, amounts to ‘a dimension in which ideas obtain their true solidity,’ one in which the play of differences—which the notion of the laterality of value announced, ‘the swarming of words behind words thoughts behind thoughts, this universal substitution’—is thought to constitute a sort of ontological stability (S: 20). In a working note to The Visible and the Invisible, written about a month earlier than the initial work on the introduction to Signs, Merleau-Ponty speaks of what underlies this stability in terms of ‘my being set up (mon montage) on a universal diacritical system’ (VI: 233). In such a system he has already found a new perspective on rationality, on history, and culture in general—one that recognizes a “flesh” to them, a living field for which Saussure’s model provides one of the keys. But the final move generalizes this concept of universal substitution even further. He asks, ‘But are the visible things of the visible world constructed any differently?’ (VI: 126). Here the sensible landscape itself becomes understood as a manifestation of the universal matrix that had been found in language; and it too involves the disavowal of the sign-signification positively that resulted. What is proper to the sensible (as to language) is to be representative of the whole, not by a sign-signification relation, or by the immanence of the parts in one another and in the whole, but because each part is torn

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up from the whole, comes with its roots, encroaches upon the whole, transgresses the frontiers of the others. (VI: 218) Visible things are always behind what I see of them; ‘no thing, no side of a thing, shows itself except by actively hiding the others, denouncing them in the act of concealing them’ (S: 20). The result is a diacritics of (internal and external) horizons, where, once again, we can see the later Husserl’s genetic account refigured beyond the ‘impartial spectator’s’ specular gaze (PoP: xx).30 It can be said, then, of the sensible landscape, just as he would in a Lacanian fashion of “vision itself” and “thought itself,” that it, too, is ‘structured like a language, articulation before the letter’ (VI: 126). The textual path that has been traced here is affirmed to lead not only to logos, but also to being—and, more precisely, to the recognition of their intertwining. All of this, openly trading upon the ancient question of Being, calls up the reaffirmation of the central position of language in philosophy. The close of the chapter entitled “Reflection and Intuition” in The Visible and the Invisible reexplicates that affirmation, perhaps now more fully aware than ever of what it involves. Language receives a double privilege in this explication. In the first place this involves its role as the medium of philosophy (i.e. as was noted earlier in the inaugural lecture, philosophy is an architecture of signs). The philosopher’s act is a linguistic act; specifically an act of writing, a task that a text from the same period describes: [The] writer’s work is a work of language rather than “thought.” His task is to produce a system of signs whose internal articulation reproduces the contours of experience; the reliefs and sweeping lines of these contours in turn generate a syntax in depth, a mode of composition and recital which breaks the mold of the world and everyday language and refashions it. (TL: 25) Philosophy is a move in this symbolic space, an operative language, and he who makes this move must believe that ‘language is not the contrary of truth or coincidence’ (VI: 125). It is true moreover that ‘like all praxis, language presupposes a selbstverständlich, an instituted, which is Stiftung preparing an Entstiftung.’ Still, ‘the problem is to grasp what, across the successive and simultaneous community of speaking subjects, wishes, speaks, and finally thinks’ (VI: 176). And, the problem is grasping what kind of language it is from which such thought “erupts.” Through his work with the philosophy of language, Saussure in particular—and, as has been seen, in

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conjuction with literary modernism—Merleau-Ponty had gleaned a great deal of what this language would need to be like: It 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, through the occult trading or the metaphor—where what counts is no longer the manifest meaning of each word and each image, but the lateral relations, the kinships that are implicated in their transfers and their exchanges. (VI: 125) It would therefore be ‘more like a sort of being than a means’ (S: 43). And, as such, its importance became almost archetypal, as he likewise said of perception (VI: 158). In this second sense, in the case of living language, for which, as has been seen, the Saussurian model had acquired a significance that was ‘primordial,’ it can be said that it provides us with a theme that is ‘universal.’ Indeed, he states that ‘it is the theme of philosophy,’ again raising it above the status of a merely ‘regional problem’ (VI: 126). It is precisely because of this double privilege that, in a move echoing Husserl and his own Preface to Phenomenology of Perception (one demonstrative of the distance he had put between himself and both) Merleau-Ponty states: ‘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). As has become clear, language will form neither the simple representation nor the simple Darstellung of Being. Nor will it be simply a “screen,” to use his Freudian term, that would block or repress the “analogics” of silence and being—‘the Convention of conventions’ as he puts it (VI: 201). If Merleau-Ponty had reinstituted a certain general expressivity that seemed to accompany the conventional we can gauge, thereby, his departure from his phenomenological predecessors. If he insisted on understanding such expressivity as inextricable to the conventional and even the opening of the silence of the “preconventional,” his emphasis upon language likewise acknowledged its connection with the conventional. That is, if language will always be more than conventional it will likewise be conventional, qua historical through and through—‘a variation of “conventions” always vorgegeben’ (NC: 127). The transcendental will thereby not be unconditional, ahistorical, or immanently universal, but like, the diacritical itself, a universal whose symbolic rhythmics remains always “lateral,” always underway. We see how far Merleau-Ponty had surpassed his phenomenological predecessors. Husserl’s account of transcendental language had presupposed

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such expressivity. But he never sufficiently grasped its conventional backdrop. Heideggerean poetics assumed the “analogics” of being in the “speaking” of language. Such poiesis for Merleau-Ponty remained a philosophical task that erupts within an intersubjective, historical field, in its “simultaneity” (HLP: 53). (VI: 4). Only Merleau-Ponty of this trio of late “transcendentalists,” realized the full implications of the claim that ‘philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with “word-meanings” it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said’ (VI: 4) The language of experience could be reduced neither to ex-pression nor to “listening”; such antinomies themselves were part of the problem. Instead, such a language would need to be arduously invented within the “intermonde” of a rational, historical, symbolic matrix—a ‘curvature in the system of signs’ as he put it. As The Visible and the Invisible began its own re-invention: ‘[ceaselessly the philosopher sees 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). If both Husserl and Heidegger had made this account possible, neither of them adequately grasped it. At the same time, all this must seem far removed from the strict requisites that came to be associated with the philosophy of language. At least since Heidegger’s Being and Time, where it is already explicit, there has been a railing against the constraints of the ‘philosophy of language’ (Sprachphilosphie). Sometimes, as in Heidegger’s case, this occurred for the sake of what philosophy of language had excluded about the past (e.g. rhetoric), sometimes for what it excluded from the present (i.e. nonliteral forms of discourse), and sometimes for the expressivity of what was still to be said.31 The domain of philosophy of language, based as it is—almost of necessity—on the inventory of things “said,” rather the “saying” of things sayable, could only downplay such potentials. Disambiguating such “counter discourse,” or the potentials of language, of the language still to be ‘invented,’ cannot proceed under the assumption of the truths of the already said. Accordingly, against the limitation of the philosophy of language in, say, Donald Davidson or Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor for example, rightly argued for the lingering importance of romantic and expressivist accounts.32 As in other matters here Taylor had simply followed (openly in fact) Merleau-Ponty’s lead.33 Rorty, having abandoned the “given,” claimed that thereby we gave up the hermeneutic: to claim that language was interpretive was simply to acknowledge the general interpretivity, the “expressivity,” of language devoid of immediate links to the given. Consequently, if everything were

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hermeneutic there would be nothing particularly distinctive about a discourse that was “hermeneutic.”34 What Merleau-Ponty saw (and probably saw through Saussure’s own account of interpretation, as has been seen) was that such expressivity was mistakenly conceptualized as simply underlying or founding the conventional. To do so would be to conceptualize the hermeneutic exactly as the classical, literal accounts always founded discourse: namely, “beyond it,” in the “given.” Here Rorty and the poststructuralists, to whom he was sometimes attracted, were simply in agreement: insofar as interpretation is internal to a linguistic practice it is functionally dependent upon the latter for its meaning and determinability. Thus conceived, hermeneutic or expressivist accounts could simply be dissolved by claiming that “the said” is always interpreted, and hence that interpretation itself is never an exceptional event, it being always already conventionally encoded in what has been said—even when novel. What Merleau-Ponty (and those after him, e.g. Levinas or Taylor) claimed was that this expressivity, these noncanonical or exceptional forms of “saying,” are irreducible to the “said.” It risks the adventure (and the dialectic) of expressivity itself. We arrive at the things themselves, if ever, not by a retreat to the ‘beginning of language but at the end of language’s effort’ (PW: 110). Instead of founding, upholding, or replacing the said, such exceptional forms of “saying” rupture precisely from within it. Said “otherwise,” hermeneutics was not a founding discourse, but to invoke Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Claude Simon, a discourse of ‘interruption’ (TD: 141). The laws of the said, as Saussure realized, are ‘general but not imperative’; linguistic practice is ceaselessly a matter of interpretation and reinterpretation. Such expressivity remained an intelligible and irreducible capacity (or a set of practices or strategies) for exceeding the already said, for seeing it otherwise, or for integrating other forms within it. From those like Rorty’s (Davidsonian) standpoint all this could not be distinguished from babble, insofar as meaning is always dependent upon the weight of past usage for coherence and warrant.35 But that presumes that past discourse, the ‘already said’ might somehow be the coefficient of things both sayable and true. And yet how could that claim itself be justified? Here again we meet the Heideggerean question of Being or, again, the question of the “analogics” in the (never fully determinate) relations between meaning, being, and truth. It acknowledges, as Derrida would soon put it in his studies on Husserl and Saussure, pointing out their curious proximity to Plotinus, ‘language never escapes analogy . . . it is indeed analogy through and through.’36 To turn pragmatic, to dodge the question of Being (or its meaning) that is, to make meaning strictly

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parasitic upon use, convention and the already “said,” would risk turning it precritical. The model here, like the philosophy of language against which Heidegger already railed, surely is too impoverished. It is true that poetry cannot be the model of language (nor truth, nor politics), but neither can physics nor logic, narrowly construed. This is just what Merleau-Ponty (prior to Taylor) had seen in appealing to von Humboldt, who realized that ‘poems and songs, prayers, proverbs, and stories’ are also the ‘foundation of literature’—and language in general in its transition from universal and form to individual, or from convention and practice to their transformations, or from la langue to la parole.37 Such considerations surely hold true of other domains in which the Saussurian itinerary had opened up a way beyond the antimonies of classical transcendental accounts and their simple denials. In tracing the exceptional status of expressivity in Heidegger, or Proust, or Baudelaire or von Humboldt (as it would be traced by Taylor to Herder), Merleau-Ponty articulated it according to aesthetic models. But it could not be restricted (nor other forms of discourse reduced) to the aesthetic for it was not an aestheticization of the rational at stake. No one need deny here the constraints of normativity, convention, or la langue, even in detailing the possibility for their expressive transformation, or by claiming that direct discourse is always a ‘secondary power of language’ (PW: 144).38 In the end, after all, if Merleau-Ponty imported such apparently “aesthetic” issues into the heart of phenomenological accounts (and their classical failures) it was because he saw that what was at stake in the inventions of such expressivity was essential to the rational in general—and, in the case of the lived body, internal to its own accounts. This doubtless explains Merleau-Ponty’s claim that he was always struck by the fact that ‘as soon as he touched on the body, Husserl no longer speaks the same language.’39 At stake was—internally—a transformation and refiguration of classical transcendental accounts, beyond the egological antinomies of classical Cartesianism. It is just because of this that Merleau-Ponty could claim that, while not the whole of the rational, such “speaking” or expressability is still essential to the rational; only a saying that exceeds the conventional, after all, can still hazard the latter’s justification (or denial). This was precisely the irony expressed (and doubtless presupposed) in his own transformation of Husserl’s claim that ‘establishing a tradition means forgetting its origins’ (S: 158).

Chapter 3

The De-Aestheticization of the Work of Art: On Painting as a ‘Secret Science’

I Merleau-Ponty’s final reflection on art characterized painting as a ‘secret science,’ a stipulation that confounded many of his readers (EM: 161). To many interpreters, this characterization seemed all too much to reinforce the ambivalence in Merleau-Ponty’s attitude toward both philosophy and science. On the one hand, tinged with existentialist pathos, he accused science of understanding, but not living in the world (EM: 159). On the other hand, his account of painting seemed to some to be an attempt to finally and ultimately return to the perceived world that Husserl’s own science had sought. It would thus bestow upon painting an access to Being that he may not have granted other artistic forms, let alone philosophy.1 Now it is not clear that this was Merleau-Ponty’s final word on science, secret, or otherwise. In a number of writings he sought to merge phenomenology with psychology, sociology or ethnology, ‘clarifying the one by the other’ and criticized Husserl for restricting the eidetic variation, in this regard, to ‘the solitary imagination and vision of the philosopher’ (VI: 110). Like the Heidegger of Being and Time, Merleau-Ponty at times hoped to integrate even the theoretical crises of Einsteinian physics into a ‘living reason’ (S: 197; VI: 185). In his final works however, ironically, painting and not physics or mathematics might seem to provide the model for phenomenological “eidetics.” This, too, is an example of philosophy’s transformation in the received system of signs and a symptom of a somewhat conflicted appropriation; while Merleau-Ponty continually mined Husserl’s work, by a kind of repetition that was itself almost unconscious, he might then have reinstated the foundational trajectory of Husserl’s thought. Greatly influenced by texts like Ideas II that had stressed the body as the founding or originating kinesthetic ‘sensorium,’ perhaps only later did Merleau-Ponty fully recognize

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the tensions of Husserl’s “historical turn” in the Crisis period and its claim that everywhere the problems are historical.2 He came increasingly to think both nature and logos as part of a generalized and historical symbolic or expressive matrix. This was true even of the ‘secret science’ Merleau-Ponty sought to articulate, a characterization that emerged once more with the Crisis explicitly in mind. As has become evident, in Merleau-Ponty’s final reflections he had not only acknowledged that philosophy involves a transformation in the received architectonics or system of signs, but that the return to the perceptual faith he proposed was, not only already historical, but could be clarified only by historical elucidation (VI: 183). Even this reference to a secret science of the visible invokes a certain history; this is true both within Merleau-Ponty’s thought and within modern thought in general, a history in which science and painting became intertwined. MerleauPonty’s reference to painting as a secret science, that is, depends upon a certain (post-Husserlian) historical meditation on the evolution and “crisis” of painting within the general dispersion of rational modernity—and doubtless its “secret” is similarly overdetermined by the role of “hermetics” or “onierics” within modernist theoretical deployments (and reductions). In so doing the analysis exemplifies precisely how it is that thought remains not only ‘at work within being,’ but historical, that is, how it ‘take(s) on the form of a history which has its sense, even if it turns in circles and marches in zigzags’ (VI: 91). If now everywhere the problems are historical, everywhere that ‘zigzag’—the term is still Husserl’s—is at work. Beginning with the Logical Investigations, Husserl realized that this zigzag between concept and intuition structured the analysis of intentional experience and the close “interdependence” between Erlebnisse and Erfahrung, where ‘our various epistemological concepts lead us back again and again to our original analysis where the new confirms the old, and the old the new.’3 Only later did he realize the historicity at stake in the contrast between ‘the old’ and ‘the new,’ recognizing explicitly, that is, that this zigzag is precisely a matter of historical elucidation and critique. This historical turn surely impacts the phenomenology of the aesthetic as well.4 After all, the experience of the work of art, like experience in general, divided between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, is similarly divided, between aisthesis and the (modern) “science” of “aesthetics.” Not without irony, however, here the very idea of a science at all for such a divided event amounts, and amounted historically as will be seen, to an essential de-aestheticization.5 Within this history, Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting, explicitly cited in Eye and Mind, is the first or, at least, the most prominent text to defend the “scientificity”

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of painting. It holds not only a particularly prominent place in MerleauPonty’s final analysis but contains a recurrent role in his historical turn, furnishing for the aesthetic what Husserl’s Galileo analysis had done for the problem of modern science’s relation to the Lebenswelt. Discussion of this work, in particular, accompanies Merleau-Ponty’s meditations on history and culture, beginning with the early fifties, when these topics eclipsed psychology in prominence in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. Precisely paired with the question of intersubjectivity, where Leonardo’s treatise is taken as a paradigm of ‘cultural objects,’ such objects had by that time, for reasons already clear, ‘acquired a place of extreme importance today’—both for the account of perception and more generally (EO: 37–40). Still codified as a domain ‘anterior to the zone of language’, it is already clear by that time that painting would again hold a critical role in Merleau-Ponty’s historical considerations (EO: 37). Merleau-Ponty’s final writings, from Eye and Mind to a number of his lectures at the Collège de France, would once again return to Leonardo’s text. It would now, however, be explicitly connected to the question of modernity, the construction and creation of an absolute (theoretical) object—and the problem of the relation between philosophy and painting in its wake (NC: 175). It is against this demand for purity that Merleau-Ponty’s own account of painting as a “secret science” opens, overdetermined that is, in the history in which “science” and “aesthetics” itself became deployed. Hence, in returning to this document both this history and the status of Merleau-Ponty’s attempted step beyond it become further evident.

II In the first place Leonardo’s text appears to acknowledge that painting could not be simply an art of imitation, could not simply involve techne. In fact, it is specific; no painting can be reproduced or duplicated: each is unique.6 There could be no simple relation of imitation between canvas and world that could result in a rule-like iterability. Or, even to the degree that there were, it could not involve a simple repetition of the eye’s attraction before the visible. It is true that Leonardo also said: ‘The painter’s eye should be like a mirror which transforms itself into the color of the thing.’7 But no more than the philosophies of reflection that were to succeed him could this reflection and its mirror image live up to its name. Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting outlines in fact the trajectory of the eye’s deflections. It does so from the

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reverse side of the mirror: a transformation from the “vertical” dimensionality of the visible to the planar, two-dimensionality of the canvas. The clues are there, postulates to the same tropes that characterize the philosophy of reflection of theoretical modernism. The canvas is an object for a theoretical gaze, a theoros, presenting in its reduction what exists by nature elsewhere. That is, the canvas re-presents. The corollaries are there also. Just as Descartes looks at the ghosts of the visible through open windows in the second Meditation, so here, too, the visible is engendered by means of the portal organ, that is, the ‘window of the soul,’ before which the many ‘likenesses’ that stand over against it as objects are displayed. Nonetheless, if the language is consistently modern, the ambiguity it underwrites is, along with the question of mimesis to which it appeals, ancient, indeed Platonic. Plato himself, in fact, represents it as a conflict between poetry (poiesis) and philosophy that is archaic or ‘ancient’: it perhaps belongs to the arche of both.8 Still, when it came to the philosopher’s task of classifying these poets, Plato could not decide—not in the Phaedrus, in any case. The poet, attractive and repulsive at the same time to the philosopher, is divinely inspired, possessing a unique “knowledge” exceeding the philosopher’s grasp. Consequently, the poet is assigned to the highest degree of soul in the Phaedrus. On the other hand, poets must be placed among the artists of mimesis, imitators of imitators, and must be placed well down the hierarchy of souls, since they deal not with the presentations of things themselves.9 In Plato, as the historian of aesthetics, Tatarkiewicz once noted, ‘there is poetry and there is poetry.’10 One finds a poetics, on the one hand, subsumable before the concept, and, on the other hand, one that exceeds and betrays in its appearance the limitations of the concept. Nor is this initial hierarchialization and its denunciation unanimous among philosophers. At that moment in Western thought in which the history of the arts would explicitly begin to recover its origins, Schelling, for example, faced again with this dilemma would not hesitate to choose against Plato. The 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism culminates in a certain reversal: in the moment of their final perfection philosophy and the sciences are ‘to flow back like so many individual streams into the ocean of poetry.’11 This work, not without effect on Merleau-Ponty, as will be seen, perhaps still awaits interpretation.12 Leonardo, himself, if not cognizant of this history, then cognizant of the privilege it grants to science, did not hesitate to reaffirm Plato’s choice. In a sense it is just this that animates Leonardo’s declaration: ‘Painting is philosophy.’ Still, to accomplish the miracle of depiction, to adequately mirror nature, to institute the unity of the concept, the painter must not

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only understand the ways of nature, but the ways of depiction. Fortuitously, the two speak a common language: that of modern mathesis, mathematics. Practices apart, unlike Plato and the poets, Galileo and Leonardo speak the same idiom, one to which Koyré’s or Husserl’s comments on the former can be equally applied.13 Neither in physics nor in painting can it be said that there is ever simply a return to the empirical facts, to the things themselves. Both construct—and call the construct essential to the “visible.” In both cases, and for the same reason, the result is called scientific. Leonardo specifies it vis à vis his “art.” No human investigation can be termed science if it is not capable of mathematical demonstration. . . . Painting is proved to be philosophy because it treats of the motion of bodies and the rapidity of their actions and philosophy also includes motion. Painting is therefore philosophy because philosophy treats of the increase and decrease of motions, as shown in a preceding proposition, and we shall now state the converse of that proposition, and say: a thing seen by the eye acquires more size, distinctness, and color, as the space laying between it and the eye decreases.14 There can be little question of the historical, that is, modern, investments in Leonardo’s concept of “scientificity.” Leonardo stipulates here an algorithm for adjudication over the visible. Granted the algorithm, one has the universal lexicon to translate between the visible and its depiction. Painting becomes just recursive mechanics, it seems, projecting upon its tablua rasa an essence that remains only indistinct within the externality of the visible. Hegel is not far from correct in terming this transformation a ‘compression’ or concentration (Konzentration), the ‘first negation of space’ that involves the restoration of the spatial totality to the inward life of spirit.15 Indeed, he claimed that this inwardization is the telos of the painterly.16 Strangely enough, this final reduction is exactly what Leonardo denied, perhaps already acknowledging what Merleau-Ponty’s “secret” science implied. Having delineated the code of the visible, having, that is, reduced depiction to mathematics, he still refuses to call the painter’s practice simply applied mathematics. While the painter depends upon the theory of the geometer to fulfill his task, once done, his object communicates directly; it relies still upon the originality of vision. Painting makes its end result communicable to all the generations of the world, because it depends on the visual faculty; not reaching the

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Painting communicates directly, not without the mediation of discursive practices, but its result remains, despite the mediation, direct, that is, visible. For all the universality of the extended concept, paintings remain overdetermined by that with which they are in direct communication: the visible. Their relation cannot in the end be mirror-like. It is in fact nonreflexive. The painting transcends the visible only to return to it, playing, as Sartre would say, the game of loser wins. It no longer iterates as does the code that informs it. In this regard, as Leonardo puts it, it does not ‘have an infinity of progeny as does the printing of books,’ but rather is ‘precious and unique,’ its rarity unencompassable.18 Sartre is apt here too: the aesthetic involves in this regard ‘an intuition refused,’ a sense that refuses to be elevated to a sign.19

III The work of art is not a sign. Not that it is not, as writers as diverse as Nelson Goodman and Louis Marin claimed, capable of being “read,” and being “seen as” (the hermeneutic “as,” Heidegger would say) having a certain syntactical and semantic structure.20 The problem is that such “reading” always underdetermines its sense. Or rather, overdetermines it once more, since the work of art never quite makes a reference. This “failure” occurs because the work fails to refer or even simply pretends to refer, as Plotinus realized in refuting the Platonic notion of mimesis. In reference to the works of artists, The Enneads state, ‘much of their work is all their own.’21 Rather, the work’s “referring,” apparently so implicit to its content, in this regard is equally extrinsic to it—the regulative idea of a gaze that would seek its concept. While, as Kant put it, taken in this sense the work of art ‘prompts’ or ‘provokes’ thought, the sensibility that constitutes its content remains a different ‘frame of reference’ from the conceptual.22 It is then, from the logical standpoint, strictly taken, to use another Kantian term, ‘inexponible,’ its content again understood in the strictest and most literal sense (i.e. logical—Heidegger’s ‘apophantical as’) just ‘ineffable.’23

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The attempt to read a concept in the work of art, to read it as a text more or less adequate to a signified content, that is, to allegorize the visible, dooms itself—indeed dooms itself to a certain irrevocable mourning, as Benjamin realized. Doubtless this mourning always accompanies the dehiscence and the historicity of the visible. This is not to say, on the other hand, that such dehiscence can be overcome by claiming that the canvas is a simple, ineffable index to the real, an aesthetical proper name. The notion of the allegorization of the visible is a description usually used in reference to Medieval aesthetics, in contradistinction to the realism that preceded it in classical art and of art succeeding it in the Renaissance.24 Still, the tag of realism, as always in aesthetic matters, is a misnomer. As Levinas has aptly said of classical sculpture, in particular, the “realism” of the Greek nude, this realism is already idealized. Indeed the lingering hegemony of the Doric form, such “realism” is never “real”; ‘the statues of antiquity are never really naked.’25 While Levinas’s point was circumscribed by the subject matter—the Other never appears as such—on the question of the medium (sculpture) the point was Hegelian. And, while Hegel had claimed that Greek sculpture was a privileged form of Spirit’s external presentation, indeed the classical summit of aesthetics in general, it ultimately succumbed, like all aesthetic matters before the grip (Begriff ) of philosophy, which expressed Spirit directly and not in external forms.26 But what is the nature of this splitting that seemingly divides the eye and the mind? Leonardo is without doubt one of the first to give an account of painting that raises it above “mere” art, the artes vulgares, as the scholastics called them. For Leonardo, the painter, the astronomer, the mathematician all explore the visible on dissimilar but equal grounds. Painting is no longer an ars vulgar; but it is not simply an art either. Leonardo, in fact, states of painting without science just what Kant will say of intuitions without concepts: that the result remains blind. Both, too, were certain of their schemata, posting it might be said, with modernism, the reign of mathesis as mathematical theory over figure: Practice ought always to be built on sound theory; perspective is the guide and path to this theory, and without it nothing is done well in painting.27 Still, there remains something in the practice, something in this reiterated visible that escapes the theory; it disrupts the simplicity of the concept’s extension, and refuses the mirror’s reflection, refusing, thereby, the hierarchy that Leonardo (and all that proceeds from him) hoped to instill.

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The canvas cannot be simply another visible among the visibles, not simply an object present to hand, not the pure image of a referent. It shares the inexhaustible wealth of the visible without being able to duplicate it. Conformed or subjected to a logic of the double, it is the victim of an illusion that is transcendental, an essential “deaestheticization.” From the side of the visible, the canvas stands as negation, not-visible, the function only of a concept, a gaze: from the standpoint of the gaze itself, unfaithful. An aesthetics based simply on the ontology of this ontos as visible presence or its image must fail. The object, the canvas, is just as much absence as presence, as much “invisible” as visible. That which makes absent here is that which exceeds: by the world, the gaze: by the gaze, its world. In Leonardo’s text two vanishing points construct the Euclidean screen over the visible: that of the scientific gaze before it and that of the mathematical point “behind” it. The simple appearance of both is equally impossible, depicted only in absence by means of refraction: frames structuring the visual space of the painterly from within. This is an old story now, grasped as early as Panofsky’s work, as Merleau-Ponty reminds us in Eye and Mind. But he did not hesitate to apply his own “existentialist” discourse in characterizing the idealizations involved: a matter of “bad faith,” he believed. ‘There is no vision without thought. But it is not enough to think in order to see’. (EM: 175) For Merleau-Ponty, this involved a truth too trivial to be forgotten. The artificial perspective, relating apparent size not to distance, but to the angle from which the object is seen, forsakes the visible for its construct, its double, the mathematical model. It believes there can be an adequate relation between vision and concept, the sensible and the intelligible: a simple and total adequation. The whole problem, to use his terms, of capturing painting as ‘interrogation,’ would be capturing it in its complexity.

IV Like the modernist dream generally, modern painting ultimately felt the shock of this discrepancy. This ‘ultimately’ is perhaps not entirely all that recent, however. Piero della Francesca is said to have given up the limitations of the canvas, once having discovered the miracle of geometrical perspective (and written the discourse on its method in painting), to study

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the glories of mathematics. If the conceptual artist, Joseph Kosuth in the 1960s pronounced the death of painting, the conditions for the rules of formation, to speak with Foucault, and the split that underlies it were not essentially dissimilar.28 Kosuth’s work is still telling here. In pronouncing painting dead, he overtly once more separated himself from the limitations of the canvas, the failure of a tradition, and the need to embellish. While modernism’s leading critics like Clement Greenberg linked modernism in painting to internal critique (explicitly to Kant), to ‘the mastery of purity,’ and the emancipation of functions other than the painterly, Kosuth had demanded more.29 In a text entitled significantly enough, ‘Art after Philosophy,’ Kosuth claimed that the artist must now question the nature of art itself. Abandoning the sensible means precisely to engage in an art that is conceptual, an ‘inquiry into the foundation of the concept, “art,” in terms of what it has come to mean.’30 The result is an art that is without ties with the sensible, strictly conceptual, and the paradigm used for its explanation is again modern mathesis. Kosuth invokes A. J. Ayer for arguing for the kinship between mathematics and art: both must be comprised of analytic propositions, tautology.31 In this sense painting is to be forsaken for the concept, a conclusion strangely Hegelian for a text entitled ‘Art after Philosophy’—truly liberated from the sensible in order to become art in and for itself. It is a curious proposition and one whose own intelligibility can come only at the end of that history often described as ‘modernism.’ Kosuth articulates, from within the strategy of modernism itself, modernism’s own demise. Painting is the paradigm of modern art. In this renunciation, Kosuth finishes off what leading theoreticians of modernist painting had seen as its objective: a practice of internal self-criticism. Still, the other side of this coin, the other pole in this dialectic, art that attempted to remain “painterly” but simply gave up the problem of the visible, for example, abstract expressionism, often seemingly fared little better. At the extreme, in both cases there is a destruction of the “painterly concept.” Indeed this semantic combination, a contradiction in terms, belies itself. It involves a certain dissolution of the gaze, the visible forsaken for the invisible, as though there were simple options here. Painting is neither the deduction of an action or its effect from a concept, nor is it simply imaginative figuration, pure feigning, that is, fiction. It is true that painters never paint what they see in any straightforward sense. The canvas never mirrors the retinal irradiations. Any figuration immediately figures and involves the effect, the ‘free-play,’ to use Kant’s term, of imagination. The painter practices only by excess, but without ever surpassing the visible.

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To say otherwise is to substitute the logic of ideas for figuration, for images, the mind for the eye, in the belief again that there may be simple options in the exchange between the sensible and the intelligible. It would be in the end to purchase a meta-narrative from philosophy that the logic of painting defies, as perhaps Kant was first to admit. Regarding these imaginative Vorstellungen he states: ‘no [determinate] concept can be adequate to them.’32 Indeed there is no simple “concept” to extract here and no “art” that is strictly conceptual. Yet, if the painter must abandon the philosopher, or at least the philosopher of scientific cognition, the one that Leonardo sought to become and the Enlightenment thinkers thought they already were, it is perhaps not so true that the philosopher should abandon the painter—or so increasingly contemporary thought came to believe. Having abandoned the Enlightenment’s story about ultimately founded knowledge, it likewise increasingly abandoned what had been done to painting in relegating it to the realm of taste. Indeed, one might be led to wonder whether Leonardo’s inflation of the concept before the practice of art might have been motivated precisely by the horror of the latter’s potential trivialization vis à vis a transformation that had shifted the cultural standard of rational justification from the sacred to the scientific. Dissenting voices, albeit rare, were nonetheless there from the beginning. In this regard Tatarkiewicz was apt in closing his still monumental work on modern aesthetics in reiterating Vico as the incongruent counterpart to Leonardo.33 The first line of the Scienza nuova’s appeals to a ‘metaphysics sensed and built up by the imagination.’34 Reversing as it does the whole paradigm of rationality that surrounded it, inaugurating thereby a logos which would not answer to the simple unity and clarity of a concept, it likewise in a sense reverses Leonardo: philosophy is painting. Yet in one sense it still reiterates, not without a certain difference, a trace that is archaic, marking a history and a metaphysics that is more than complex. Plutarch cites Simonides of Cleos as having said two thousand years earlier ‘painting is silent poetry and poetry articulate painting . . .’35

V But how is this figuration, this denial of the pure gaze to be understood? How is a concept to be provided for what is the essential failure of the conceptual and the attempt to grasp artistic practices on the model of the conceptual? Michel Foucault’s writings in this area might be taken as an

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explication of this failure, making manifest, at the same time, an account of an alternate aesthetic practice (and an alternate to Merleau-Ponty’s account) and one that escapes the classical position and the reduction and idealization upon which it rests. While Foucault’s early writings were explicitly linked to a turn away from Merleau-Ponty and his predecessors’ work in the phenomenology of perception, here their contrast becomes mutually enlightening—not only concerning the account of artistic practice they “describe,” but also the conceptual accounts that inform those descriptions. One can look first in this regard at Foucault’s rendering of Velazquez’ Las Meninas and its account of the classical order of representational constructs.36 In it the painter attempted to adequately portray the scene that he was painting as it was painted, a “reflectional” totality. This was accomplished, inter alia, by Velazquez painting himself into the painting, but moreover by placing a mirror on the painted wall opposite the spectator of the theme depicted in which are painted the images of the painter’s patrons. Consequently, where we should see ourselves looking at the painting in the mirror, we see the constructed image of those patrons Velazquez imaginative figured—as they should see him. We see that image that the painter had to construct from a vantage point different from his own, even while he painted himself into the tableau. But it is just this attempt to encompass the unencompassable, to reduce the excess of vision to a totalized tableau, the delirium by which the painter includes everything in the object, that constituted the failure of classicism. The incommensurability in the exchange between Velazquez’ regard, our regard, and those of the principals he paints, all point to the instability of this classicism, its abandonment of the vision it incorporates. The final contradiction occurs when we come upon our own vision en face in the “looking glass” provided for the patrons. For, no more than they actually ever saw themselves, save by deflection through this excess, or Velazquez ever saw himself “seeing” in this depiction, do we see ourselves there now. All attempts to insist upon the auto-reference of pictorial space aside (e.g. John Searle’s claim in this regard, made precisely in response to Foucault’s interpretation of Velazquez), we do not in any straightforward sense meet ourselves in this canvas.37 Neither did Velazquez, confronting his own image. As Sartre had already emphasized, I never see my own face.38 All the jumps made between the regard of the painter and his construction of it before him on the canvas, between that regard and those he depicts on the opposite wall, and between ours now have been dissipated.

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Foucault further emphasized this theme in discussion of a painting of Magritte’s, in which this instability has become explicit, an interrogation of the picture as pictogram. Magritte’s painting is a depiction of a smoking pipe that includes at its base the text, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (‘This is not a pipe’). It is the same as before, a mysterious or equivocal circulation of negations or deferrals. The painted image of the pipe is not “really” a pipe and the demonstrative “Ceci” in ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ emphasizes now its syntacticsemantic failure. Similitude, that of the image to its object, and affirmation, that of the link between image and thing, in the end can be referred only to themselves (image or thing?). There can be no simple homoiois between image, between painting and “being.” Letters, those of ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ become calligrams, figurative. Figures, those of the pipe as depicted become a text, rising ‘endlessly in a less and less spatialized ether where they refer to nothing but themselves,’ almost assuring that ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ has indeed become Ceci n’est pas une pipe.39 In short, Foucault concludes, painting as disclosure or representation simply has ceased to exist. As Kosuth declared, “painting” refers only to itself, an analytic proposition, a tautology. It is just this recognition that constitutes Foucault’s characterization of modernism. Art in general acquires an autonomous existence in forming a sort of unconditioned counter discourse. As he said similarly of literature: It breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of language which has no other law than that of affirming . . . its own precipitous existence.40 Foucault’s analysis of Velazquez demonstrates the force of the painterly modernist conclusion, the prosyllogism of Magritte’s break: a ‘perpetual return upon itself.’ This is, again, a strangely Hegelian conclusion for a thought that refused all simplicity in its reference, and which, instead of affirming the totalization of its object, now affirms the unresolvability of its break, an affirmation of its own “precipitousness.” If, in his later texts, as some commentators have alleged, Foucault finally pronounced this inflation of the linguistic sign as the swan song of the avant-garde movement, it is perhaps less because he thought its logic was wrong, than he found it simply ineffective (i.e. within the contemporary political and cultural context). No escape possible, Foucault’s later work becomes, rather than an account of an artistic or linguistic practice, the documentation of the chains of its constraints, constraints always in need of, but always lacking, generative principles for transformation.

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VI Against such a backdrop, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of painting seems, to use a word he himself invested with a certain irony, strangely “classical.” While acknowledging the breach between concept and painting, indeed between concept and vision, Merleau-Ponty seemed to give the painter a task that throughout classical thought had been reserved to the savant. This privilege is summed up in Eye and Mind’s “proposition” that: ‘(o)nly the painter is entitled to look at everything without being obliged to apprise what he sees.’ Despite all of Merleau-Ponty’s apparent rejection of science (especially in his later work), he still seemingly attributes to the painter a ‘secret science’ that restores us to original Being (EM: 161). This relationship with the fabric of “brute meaning” is one that ‘art and only art’ draws upon ‘in full innocence.’ Moreover, in this text, he reserved this privilege to the visual arts: ‘Music, at the other extreme, is too far beyond the world and the designatable to depict anything but certain outlines of Being.’ As has been seen, perhaps nothing has been as contentious as the privilege granted to painting, especially perhaps granted Merleau-Ponty’s own detailed interest in linguistics and literature. Even music, however, would not always be thus downgraded. Nonetheless, if the painter’s accomplishment is to be accessible it must be detached from the failure of classical thought. For Merleau-Ponty, the failure involved here is not a failure regarding the painterly, not a failure of artistic practice, nor even the failure of a sign. Rather it is the failure of a particular reading, a reading that perhaps underlies “modernism” generally, the failure involved in reading the work of art as an adequation between a concept and a sign, between an eye and its representation: The point is that the aim is no longer to construct an “objective” emblem of the spectacle or to communicate with whoever looks at the drawing by providing him with the key to the numerical relations true for any and all perceptions of the object. The aim is to leave on paper a trace of our contact with this object and this spectacle, insofar as they made our gaze and virtually our touch, our ears, our feeling of risk or of destiny or of feeling vibrate. It is a question of leaving a testimony and not any more of providing information. The drawing is no longer to be read (se lire) the way it was until recently. It is no longer to be dominated by the look. (PW: 150) This text is an earlier one, The Prose of the World, and its conclusion, like the text itself, is preliminary. It marks a transition to a site that will be the

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object of Merleau-Ponty’s final published work and the renewed (and fragile) privilege it was to impart to the painter. This account emerges at about the same time that the task of reading, ‘the art of grasping a meaning in a style before it has been put into concepts,’ had begun to preoccupy him (IPP: 19). As much as this sounds like the Kantian aesthetic judgment, or even more obliquely, the Husserlian zigzag, both of which may be involved, its original spur was Bergson’s use of the term, “lire” to characterize our attempt to grasp the line of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. It is almost as if, Bergson stated, that this line ‘gathered into a single word, the secret we shall never have finished reading, phrase by phrase, in the enigmatic physiognomy.’41 It is not the clairvoyance of the eye that links us transparently with the visible. The painter produces neither an adequate reflection, nor a true representation of the visible, but rather an “icon,” an artifact of the eye’s encounter. Vision is not an adequatio, since the eye always runs behind all that withdraws in the incompleteness of its present; nor is it a simple inadequacy, or “cancellation,” since the incompleteness of this present never fully slips into the imaginary, whatever its dependence upon it might be. In a sense, every Schein has its Erscheinung, and every Erscheinung its Schein (VI: 41). The deferral of both is always (or “always already,” to engage the transcendental perfect) this splitting that answers neither to the eye nor the mind, the sensible or the intelligible, but the hinge in which both delineate the fragilité du reel. Such fragility in the end must destroy the readings of metaphysical opposition: both “idealism,” or “naturalism,” “abstractionism” or “realism.” Yet grasping the character of the eye’s participation in the visible, this splitting between the visible and its Other proved especially troublesome. Time and again Merleau-Ponty was forced to retrace his tentative steps in accounting for it, overcoming the conceptual framework of the classical archive that provided access to it by the default of its failure— perhaps even in privileging the visual or the painterly, or the look. This “participation” is first and foremost a sensible participation and Merleau-Ponty’s initial inclinations had been to account for subject and object here in terms of a transcendental arche that would be carried out corporally, a “body-synthesis” by means of which objects might arise before consciousness. Yet the “splitting” in question seemed no more indebted to the activity of the body, which seemed, rather, to presuppose it, than the activity of reflection. It seemed instead to indicate a more originary bond in which both consciousness and its embodiment, and the world “arise.” The search for an Ursprung here could rest neither on the subject, the inside, nor the outside, since what were in question were rather the disarticulation of their bond and the nature of their participation in one another.

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Accordingly, in Merleau-Ponty’s later works, even the Phenomenology of Perception’s attempt to return this bond back to a “body-schema” that would found the conjunction of consciousness and its world, the last vestige of Merleau-Ponty’s own version of Fundamentalontologie, would be increasingly abandoned. In fact, in Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty had already had problems with accounting for this with the notion of “synthesis” (PoP: 276n). At stake was an event, which, rather than being overseen by a constituting subject, marks instead our involvement and (synoptic) incarnation and articulation within a visual field whose objects, always incomplete, withdraw from our grasp—a phenomenon that Kant had prefigured in the first Critique’s introduction of the “concept” of the horizon of experience. This introduction posts a preliminary sign for what remains always excessive in relation to it. That is, it introduces a concept for what cannot be reduced to conceptual unity, for what, in short, cannot be conceptually comprehended, or encompassed. Just as the visible can never be fully reconstituted, re-presented on the two-dimensionality of the canvas, so too, it cannot be made present to be reconstituted on the more inward ‘plane’ of thought. Rather, the introduction of this horizon is itself the rupture of any ‘enclosing surface.’ As Kant had already seen: The sum of all the possible objects of our knowledge appears to us to be a plane, with an apparent horizon—namely, that which in its sweep comprehends it all, and which has been entitled by us the idea of unconditioned totality. To reach this concept empirically is impossible, and all attempts to determine it a priori in accordance with an assured principle have proven vain.42 This introduction of the concept of horizon within the Kantian text marks the dehiscence of the real, its inevitable deferral within the irreal, the focus imaginarius, of which Kant states, ‘I cannot know how far it extends.’ This extension is distributed between the “shadowy image” (Schattenbild) of the sensibly imaginary and the empty content of the pure image (Urbild) of complete determination.43 Incapable of attaining this “impossible” intelligibility (or idea) it marks, again, the reinstitution of the bond of the intelligible, of thought, and the vision of thought, with the sensible. The latter, in turn, becomes the “screen” between the phenomenal and the noumenal. While Husserl had denied the latter distinction, he had also acknowledged that the totality in question (beyond the horizon) would be at most a regulative idea. Unlike Kant, for Husserl, such regulative status did not threaten the phenomenological system’s constitutive potentials,

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but only opened up the plenum of phenomenological clarification of the “in itself.” In the interrogation of vision, Merleau-Ponty held, the eye would trace the specificity of its own inherence within the sensible. Instead of presenting the Cartesian optics of a pure gaze, projecting an ideal vanishing point, in the interplay of horizons vision articulates an opening with a field of excesses and the “shadow” of sensibility itself, in which ‘thoughts . . . feel behind themselves the weight of the space, the time, the very being they think . . .’ (VI: 115). In this “excess” however, the overdetermination of thought upon the sensible, is only matched once more by the withdrawal and the caesura of the sensible, a mirror-play of the visible and the invisible which is the nature of its adherence (EM: 166). This adherence presents only what is again the fundamental (and original) “enigma” of the sensible itself: that, my body, far from overseeing or constituting the visible, simultaneously sees and is seen, a visible that finds itself within the site of the hinge of the visible within the invisible, the site of an “exchange” between the sentient and the sensed, the constituting and constituted, natura naturata and natura naturans. Seen reflectively, there is no constitution in this “intervolvement” of the Same and the Other. The enigma, rather, is that what looks at all things can also, in looking at itself, recognize the other side of its power of looking, “see” itself in its being beyond itself, ‘through inherence of the one who sees in that which he sees’ (EM: 163). This “other,” then is not a simple ob-ject, grounded in the Sinn-gebung of consciousness or an anterior synthesis, but is rather the “abyss” and the ekstasis of the sensible and of sensuousness itself.

VII In both Eye and Mind and The Visible and the Invisible the enigma characterized here is described even more pointedly, and even more controversially, as one of narcissism: an event in which the seer sees not simply an object in the visible’s presence, but in its difference, recognizes as well that the seeing belongs to it, that the seer is “of it.” As he put it in The Visible and the Invisible, explicitly relating his account once again to painting: Thus since the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus, for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself looked at by the things, my

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activity is equally passivity—which is the second and more profound sense of narcissism: not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. It is this Visibility, this generality of the Sensible in itself, this anonymity innate to Myself that we have previously called flesh, and one knows there is no name in traditional philosophy to designate it. (VI: 139) On the basis of what he found in this event always already “narcissized,” vision (and the painter’s interrogation that traces it) becomes itself an explication of (chiasmatic) difference. The notion of perception, as perceptio itself, becomes put into question in exchange for an opening that defrays its presence in delineating it. Once again, as Husserl saw, the thing emerges only within the adumbrative explication (and the sequence of differentiations) between its internal and external horizons. Merleau-Ponty claimed, however, that what was at stake could be captured neither by an identifying synthesis—nor pace the Phenomenology, synopsis—but only through the “segregation” of differences within its adherence. Rather than the “step back” ordered by transcendental reflection, it becomes the adumbrative exploration of a world in which it finds itself “thrown.” Merleau-Ponty was thereby forced to confront the founding aporiae of modern thought with which phenomenology remained complicitous. This transformation impacted, not only the modern aesthesis, but also its “aesthetics.” Rather than an identifying synthesis or a representation, a duplication of the object of the eye’s concern, the artist’s “trace” presents an original eruption within the world: ‘it is the painter to whom the things of the world give birth by a sort of concentration or coming to itself of the visible’ (EM: 181). It is the “originary” character of this exchange that is claimed to be the painter’s privilege. But this “concentration” of the visible and the invisible (that recall the word’s Hegelian antecedents) is distinctly unHegelian. It involves not a concentration, an inwardization of the sensible in its surpassing to the intelligible, Spirit’s coming to itself, but rather the dispersal of the inner in its participation in what exceeds. This “excess” is the very meaning of its narcissism. This figuration is not, then, an expressive identification (let alone “projection”) of thought within the invisible, a sensible “trope” through which it returns to itself. Rather, it is the event of the painter’s exploration of the visible itself: ‘this internal animation, this radiation

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of the visible is what the painter seeks under the name of depth, of space, of color’ (EM: 182). “Rayonnement” is an old word; the signal of a withdrawal of the sensible to its true essence, its intelligibility, that is, to the metaphysic of the beautiful—again, the de-aestheticization of the appearance. It also echoes Husserl’s’ account of the sensible flux as a ‘ray’ and shadowing-forth (Abschattung) of (transcendental) experience. Yet here it indicates precisely ‘the impossibility of a total surpassing’ (VI: 95). It invokes the surpassing of the visible, its il y a, which is precisely the specificity of the things themselves: the withdrawal of a certain quale that delineates its own ‘generativity.’ Moreover, precisely, in this ‘generativity’, MerleauPonty (again following Bergson), claimed we rejoin Leonardo—or at least all that Leonardo refuses to subsume beneath the concept, the rarity of the work of art, its specificity or secret, ‘serpentine line’ or ‘generating axis,’ and the tracing that the artist must generate vis à vis its withdrawal. It is not without reason, then, that Merleau-Ponty in the end turns back to cite Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting, a retrieval that involves no simple repetition: The secret of the art of drawing is to discover in each object the particular way in which a certain flexuous line, which is, so to speak, its generating axis, is directed through its whole extent.44 For Merleau-Ponty, Leonardo’s “serpentine line” exceeds the science he defends. The secret science of painting would not be the equivalent of (mathematical) eidetics; painting and physics would not be modes of a simple substance. The affirmation of such a “secret science” ruptures its text—both Leonardo’s and Merleau-Ponty’s perhaps—if science and painting are thought to be equivalent modes of knowledge. The 1960 lectures on Ontology had been precise about this view (a view of Valéry’s) that painting and calculating are ‘equally possible enterprises’ deriving from a central attitude and thus equally possible sciences (NC: 174). If ‘Eye and Mind’ began by affirming Valéry’s point that the painter ‘take his body with him,’ in these lectures Valéry’s equation of sciences and painting, must, Merleau-Ponty claimed, be ‘rectified.’ Leonardo’s text ruptures this equivalence: we will need to seek elsewhere for the fertility of its “secret science.” The figuration at stake was the expression of an event that ruptured the demonstrative requisites in which it had been enframed. As Merleau-Ponty put it, Leonardo’s attempt to ‘construct the beautiful’ was ‘an illusion’ (EO: 39).

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VIII The difference between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault on the nature of this “disarticulation” that the painter traces becomes further apparent here. For Merleau-Ponty, this disarticulation remains always an interrogation of Being, of the visibility of the mute and originary world. ‘In whatever civilization it is born, from whatever beliefs, motives or thoughts, no matter what ceremonies surround it—and even when it appears devoted so something else—from Lascaux to our time, figurative or not, painting celebrates no other engima but that of visibility’ (EM: 165–6). Now it is just such an apparent “positivity” that Foucault has denied. In claiming that painting ceases to affirm beyond itself, Foucault has denied that there are such positive affirmations or transcendence to which we can make such a homogenous return. Since Manet, he believed, art had broken with the rules that had been in effect since the Quattrocento in order to explore its own material elements.45 Any attempt to retain a “secret science” of the visible here would invoke a necessity (that of perspectival geometry) and a set of (representational) rules art had abandoned. Art had abandoned the guise of such “transcendental” attempts to duplicate the perceived image or explore visibility in general, precisely in order to explore its own “originality.” He claimed elsewhere of Merleau-Ponty, aligning him with transcendentalism in general, that thought, even mute thought, could not have the role of revealing the transcendental moment that ‘the meanings of the perceived world’ have been claimed to retain ‘since Merleau-Ponty.’46 The analysis of Magritte manifests implicitly the same thing: the system of figurations is another example of the dispersions Foucault, in at least the early part of his career, laid before us, their schemata revealing disturbing variations of Borgesian heterotopia.47 This “return” to the visible can no more be had in painting than it can in any other domain of human practice. In a sense, the criticism that is advanced is that Merleau-Ponty’s mute world of expression makes all expression too homogeneous, too commensurable, and too meaningful: in short, too easy. And, in fact, in a letter to Alphonse De Waelhens, this is precisely what Magritte himself thought of the later Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of painting: I think Merleau-Ponty’s essay would be more illuminating if it were limited to the “question” of the visible world and man. Painting is not inseparable from this “question” of course, but it is not interesting unless it is conceived as an evocation of mystery. The only kind of painting MerleauPonty deals with is a variety of serious but futile divertissement, of interest

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only to well-intentioned humbugs. The only painting worth looking at has the same raison d’être as the raison d’être of the world—mystery.48 What is claimed to be lacking in Merleau-Ponty’s position? In the first place, for post-phenomenological thinkers like Foucault or Jean-François Lyotard, this lack could be simply stated: it was Merleau-Ponty’s supposed lingering attachment to a classical metaphysics.49 Merleau-Ponty’s account still sought to eradicate heterogeneity, to reduce artistic “interrogation” to a fundamental stratum. This time art would be reduced to the mute world of expression, the perceived world, the originary being, putting once again, it might be said the visible to rest, devoid of ‘mystery,’ to use Magritte’s term. In relation to art, Lyotard himself presented proper names; Merleau-Ponty chooses Cézanne or Giacommetti, and leaves mute other experimentations, those of Marey, the cubists, or Duchamp.50 This other side of contemporary art, post-modern art, Lyotard argued, is absent from Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics. Still what do these absent proper names signify? For Lyotard, it signified the problem of alterity. Rather than an exploration of the positivity of the visible, ‘today’s art consists in the exploration of undecidables and invisibles.’51 The charge in one sense seems true enough. One will search in vain for many references in Merleau-Ponty’s work to that movement in “modern” art which descends from Dadaism, for example, to experiments that refuse to identify with what classical art had attempted—versus, say, the painterly Cézanne. The aleatory or the anti-art, for example, seem to be missing from the aesthetics that Merleau-Ponty writes from the forties down to the last years of his life, all of which makes it seem to retain the need to reduce the heterogeneity of artistic possibility to a fundamental stratum of the perceived world. Here too the phenomenological reduction would thus suffer from a transcendental illusion: it would mistake the phantasm for Being, possibility for necessity. But did it? Certainly the classical account of phenomenological reduction retained, if reluctantly, and perhaps despite itself, the Enlightenment’s story about ultimate foundations and justification. A good deal of Husserl’s work (on Merleau-Ponty’s reading) can be cashed out in terms of the struggle to contain what he had discovered within the constraints of the BolzanoFregean notion of science to which he had initially aspired. Moreover, as has been intimated, Merleau-Ponty’s need to find a “secret science” seemed still to bow to this need, as did the lead Heidegger provided in the attempt to establish a Fundamentalontologie. But, neither classical Wissenschaft nor the new order that was introduced to fulfill its demands could be carried

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out here with the same seriousness. As has become evident, and as MerleauPonty’s itinerary demonstrates, he too was not unaware of this failure, recognizing, as early as 1945, the impossibility of an immanent “return” to the things themselves by means of a transcendental reduction (PoP: xiv). The Visible and the Invisible’s denial is equally strong, if now more explicit: [T]he movement of recovery, of recuperation, of return to self, the progression toward internal adequation, the very effort to coincide with a naturans which is already ourselves and which is supposed to unfold the things and the world before itself—precisely inasmuch as they are a return or a reconquest, these operations of reconstitution or of re- establishment (restauration) which come second cannot by principle be the mirror image of its internal constitution and its establishment . . . (T)he reflection recuperates everything except itself as an effort of recuperation, it clarifies everything except its own role. The mind’s eye too has its blind spot. . . . (VI: 33) The problem with such re-constitution then is evident: ‘. . . the reflective thought is an anticipation of the whole; it performs all its operations under the guarantee of the totality that it claims to engender’ (VI: 33n). But to what extent does this aesthetics, this philosophy that seems to bow to the painter, itself remain the effort of a recuperation? To what extent does it remain “metaphysical” in the “totalitarian” sense: an attempt to account, as Heidegger puts it, for all beings, as such, as a whole, in terms of what is most general and what is timelessly, indifferently valued everywhere, irrespective of the differences that haunts their being as well as our accounts?52 What does the “return” to the realm of the visible and the invisible announce? Does the invisible simply form that Same’s other? Does Merleau-Ponty cast aside the Cartesian balcony for the black cow of Schelling’s aesthetic night, a simple inversion of the philosopher’s text for the painter’s poetic Wissenschaft (cf. N: 45–51)? Is the philosophy of the “flesh” and the painter’s trace a demand for a return to the Same without threat of interruption, alterity, and difference—as Lyotard, for example, charged in Discours/Figure?53 Seemingly, Merleau-Ponty’s texts provide no simple answers here, betraying, instead, their margins again and again. This overdetermination is evident in Eye and Mind as well. The painter must affirm, Merleau-Ponty states, that: [V]ision is a mirror or concentration of the universe . . . [T]he idios kosmos opens by virtue of vision upon a koinos kosmos; in short that the same

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thing is both out there in the world and here in the heart of vision—the same, or if one prefers, a similar thing, but according to an efficacious similarity which is the parent, the genesis, the metamorphosis of Being in his vision. (EM: 166) In one sense, the eye and its painterly trace seems simply to follow out this matrix of identities, following out the vectors of the visible as the source of its own metamorphosis. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s metaphorics for this “flesh,” which emerges only in difference, écart, caesura, and chiasmus, as the flesh of our maternal bond, could at best be regarded as a “mixed” metaphorics. All this remains irreducible to a classical logic and its logos, let alone a science of “aesthetics.” This opening occurs, recall, only through a series of “paradoxes,” as he calls them: that this body that vision haunts and is the site of the metamorphosis of Being simultaneously sees and is seen, that it is a thing among others and yet holds things in a world around it at its center (EM: 162–3). These themes, most of which are remnants of Husserlian analyses, are allowed the full weight of their paradox by Merleau-Ponty; the event of self-presence is simultaneously decentered through the structure of desire, history, the Other and ultimately by Being itself. If it is the “wonder” of the body that it both sees and is seen, or touches and touches itself touching insofar as the left and the right hand are “grasped,” it is still a seeing/seen, touching/touched only in divergence—only, to invoke the history of transcendentalism, insofar as the “differential” in question occurs between what Kant called ‘incongruent counterparts.’54 If such reversibility were absolute it would be only by the absolute of irony: ‘It is time to emphasize that it is a reversibility always immanent and never realized in fact’ (VI: 147). Indeed, time and again he tell us regarding these paradoxes that there is a dehiscence to this source, a nonimmanence, and as has been seen, a blind spot: not a certain mode of thought or presence to self, but, as well, an ekstasis and ‘the means for being absent from myself’ (EM: 186). If the static polarities of egological correlation had provided certain “clues” here, they would ultimately need to be abandoned in order to grasp what “essentially” takes place in the ekstasis of a field of being. The result discloses, ‘there can always be a supplement of being in being’ (VI: 94). The idios kosmos, then, never gives rise to a kosmotheoros but remains—mysteriously, to cite Magritte’s term—bound to time and place. But am I kosmotheoros? More exactly, is being kosmotheoros my ultimate reality? Am I primitively the power to contemplate, a pure look which fixes the things in their temporal and local place and the essences in an

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invisible heaven; am I this ray of knowing that would have to arise from nowhere? But even while I am installing myself at this zero point of Being, I know very well that it has a mysterious tie with locality and temporality. . . . (VI: 113) Still, it will be objected, if nothing else, Merleau-Ponty seems to deny Foucault’s analysis of the reflective failure of the canvas as mirror: The mirror itself is the instrument of a universal magic that changes things into a spectacle, spectacles into things, myself into another, and another into myself. Artists have often mused upon mirrors because beneath this “mechanical trick,” they recognized, just as they did in the case of perspective, the metamorphosis of seeing and seen which defines both our flesh and the painter’s vocation. This explains why they have so often liked to draw themselves in the act of painting (they still do—witness Matisse’s drawing), adding to what they saw then, what things saw of them. It is as if they were claiming that there is a total or absolute vision outside of which there is nothing and which closes itself over them. (EM: 168–9) But as close as this might seem to Foucault’s inversion (close enough, certainly, that it may well have provoked it), it is not. Both Foucault and Lyotard “read” Merleau-Ponty (and especially the later Merleau-Ponty) through Husserlian blinders. Merleau-Ponty is surely not claiming that such ‘narcissism’ amounts either to a Kosmotheoros or an absolute vision (regard). Nor is the ‘prose of the world’, as analyzed by Merleau-Ponty, simply the equivalent to Foucault’s (hermetic, early Renaissance) account, as analyzed in The Order of Things. While the reference to Merleau-Ponty may remain indirect (Foucault initially wanted to title the book, The Prose of the World), its allusion to ‘the oneiric world of analogy’ the painter still articulates cannot seem to be far off.55 Foucault’s gloss on the Renaissance’s prosaic world analyzed it as a “hermeneutics” of resemblance, interreferentiality, and analogy that formed a self-enclosed totality—an event oddly analyzed by Foucault into something precisely opposed to it: a formal, that is, algorithmic, code or totality, a world very much still like Leonardo’s illusory constructed play of mirrors.56 Still, all this remains distinct from Merleau-Ponty’s account. The “spectacle” in question in Merleau-Ponty’s account is neither a matrix of identity nor totality (i.e. “hyper-reflectivity”) but the “exhibitio” in their rupture: a spectacle that openly—and not just secretly—denies such totalization. Indeed the exhibitio emerges only through juxtaposition and difference. Again, it is our opening out onto

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another, where “identity” is less presupposed than provisionally achieved, only to be deferred again. In fact, originally, ‘the prose of the world’ were terms used by Hegel to characterize the play of everyday ethical life that lacks ‘the look of independent and total life and freedom which has at the root of the essence of beauty.’57 For Merleau-Ponty, however, this prose is neither analogically resolved nor reduced, let alone “alienated in analogy,” to use terms Foucault reserves for madness in the nineteenth century—and literature in the twentieth.58 While Merleau-Ponty increasingly himself depended on the literature of the avant-garde, the result was precisely philosophical, a language that ceaselessly invokes ‘new words’ in order to express the “enigma” of thing themselves (VI: 3–4). Indeed, while Merleau-Ponty seemed to grow increasingly closer to Schelling (against Hegel), on this issue he acknowledged Hegel’s disagreement with him. Philosophy is not poetry nor is it the grasping of the ineffable. Beyond the oppositions of “Logic and Gnosticism”, Schelling provides a clue for a ‘non-prosaic conception of consciousness,’ that is, one ‘that recognizes that it does not possess its object’ (N: 48–50). Appropriately, rather than reinstituting Hegel’s account of consciousness, glossed as consciousness’s simply ‘going outside itself’ the lectures on Hegel cites Goethe: ‘one never goes further than when he no longer knows where he is going’ (PNP: 63). The “narcissism” about which Merleau-Ponty speaks (and which Foucault, or Lyotard, or later, Deleuze would find so objectionable) contains its own undermining. It is the site of an “extirpation” and not a simple return into self: it is an opening that is, Merleau-Ponty states, equally the site of a “confusion” (EM: 163). This opening upon the world, for which the artist provides an artifact, does not provide then the restoration of the idealist’s Identitätsphilosophie. It is the site of no Deduktio by which the painter’s brush might resolve the separation between subject and object. Its “révelateurs” provide at best once more a trace or “document,” an exposition in the Kantian sense—and the results remain always an incomplete and inadequate preservation of its opening upon the world.59 Rather, as Blanchot aptly said of Narcissus, still invoking Merleau-Ponty’s (and Lyotard’s) terms: The water in which narcissus sees what he shouldn’t is not a mirror, capable of producing a distinct and definite image. What he sees is the invisible in the visible—in the picture the undepicted, the unstable unknown of a representation without presence, which reflects no model: he sees the nameless one whom only the name he does not have could hold at a distance.60

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There remains always then ‘a supplement of being in being,’ a ‘secret set of equivalences’ through which, far from being dominated by the look, ‘the self . . . is caught up in things,’ encountering the interplay of their transcendence (EM: 163). After all, ‘the visible does not admit of pure positivity any more than the invisible does’ (S: 21). The work of imagination is not simply the exhibitio or “making present” of an unobservable, but an oneirics of its latency (VI: 77). Its trace arises, that is, indeterminately in the play of the visible and the invisible, the visible and its imaginary “double,” articulating une réverie hermeneutique, and thereby an imaginary of the flesh.61 If this interplay of the visible and the invisible undercuts the work of art’s de-aestheticization—the attempt to remove the work of work from the aesthetic (aisthesis) or the experiencable—it likewise undercuts the attempt to provide painting with a final solution or theoretical Idea. (T)he idea of a universal painting, of a totalization of painting, of a fully and definitely achieved painting is an idea bereft of sense. (EM: 189) Against this classical metaphysics of the view, which would subsume all thought before the concept of vision, ‘the ambition to see everything,’ Merleau-Ponty slowly but inevitably transforms the metaphysics of consciousness.62 In doing so, as Lacan once suggested, he ‘moves forward here to a field different from that of perception.’63 But Merleau-Ponty also spoke of “metaphysics” in a second sense, one that transcends the simple givens, in tracing the rayonnement of the visible without ever simply surpassing it to the subsumption (or domination) of a concept. In this sense “metaphysics” ceaselessly follows the insertion, the interrogation, and the figuration of speaking and thinking, the painter’s brush, as well as the trace of the eye’s gaze through the play of differences in the visibilia they haunt. This inevitable and endless deciphering can be elevated to no science, or Wissenschaftslehre, can be ultimately encompassed or grounded, verified or justified by no theory, no idea, and no intention. We are all metaphysical in this sense, inescapably so—but not as collectors of concepts, surely not in the sense of “totalitarian theorists,” as Foucault put it. Rather, it involves an interrogation that forces us to revamp our notions of totalization and adequation, as well as the problem of relativization and contextualization: We are so fascinated by the classical idea of intellectual adequation that painting’s mute “thinking” sometimes leaves us with the impression of a vain swirl of significations, a paralyzed or miscarried utterance. Suppose, then, one answers that thought never detaches itself completely from a

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sustaining support, that the only privilege of speaking-thought is to have rendered its own support manageable (maniable); that the figurations of literature and philosophy are no more settled than those of painting and are no more capable of being accumulated into a stable treasure; . . . that, in the end, we are never in a position to take stock of everything objectively or to think of progress in itself; and that the whole of human history is, in a certain sense, stationary. (EM: 189–90) What is this other sort of “metaphysics”? Merleau-Ponty never stopped using the term, if to use another of his terms, his use of it involves a coherent deformation in the structure of classical thought. It is in this sense that Eye and Mind’s declaration is still to be taken: ‘Any theory of painting is a metaphysics’ (EM: 171). Indeed, so is any painting, and every blink of the eye, continuing in fact the radical but interminable interrogation ‘that questions the things with the first look’ binding the visible to the invisible. Beginning with the first mark in the “autofiguration” of the canvas, with the artist’s first “rebus,” this “other,” this primordial theoria prevents from the start the attempt to arrive at the things themselves in their simplicity— the delirium of classicism. Here, like the notion of the perceptual faith he equally had “extended,” the privilege of the painter and its secret science has been extended. The painter’s “secret,” thus, is perhaps better known than appears prima facia.

IX But the complications are now multiplying: not only for those who would save the privilege of perception (or painting as its immanently privileged fulfillment), but those who would save (or ultimately ground) the representations of philosophy itself. At one point the Working Notes point out that atonal music might be a model for this “abyssal” being in ‘indivision’ (VI: 218–9). If in painting we could find a figured philosophy, as Eye and Mind had proclaimed, the notion of a figured philosophy would be even more fully philosophically developed in his later re-reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (PNP: 51–72). While separating his account from the propositional, he likewise separated it from poetry (VI: 4). Gone, too, perhaps, is the privileged, reflexive status Merleau-Ponty once reserved for philosophical language, even if it still retains a privilege. If the only privilege of speaking thought is to have rendered its own support manageable, the provisionalness such “manageability” implies is not a strict a criterion; its coherence is

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deliberately fluid: one that always awaits transformation. One might even question whether it retains the strong criterion of critical reflexivity that seeks “what has always been true for everyone” by which he had described philosophy almost a decade previously (S: 80). As has become apparent, his contrasts between philosophy and the “exact forms of language” and painting or philosophy and literature have grown even weaker (S: 78). In response, the final paragraphs of Eye and Mind’s ardent denial of hierarchy and progress may sound ominously like the post-Nietzschean outcries that would soon follow in French philosophy—until they are read precisely as the latter’s “refutation.” A “false imaginary,” they rely upon the very criteria they claim have failed: namely, that, granted the “symbolic matrices” that “line” our thought, we are either with or simply without access to Being. What, to speak Nietzschean, Leonardo still “blinkingly” remembered and Descartes “actively” forgot, is that Being never fully is, and is surely never fully present to us: it is “abyssal,” as Merleau-Ponty, like Nietzsche (and Schelling), kept saying. That is why this stoicism (perhaps in all their cases) persists against the “disappointment” that would confuse interrogation with a persistent state of “stupor.” Such disappointment (or exhaustion) issues, he replied, from that ‘spurious fantasy which claims for itself a positivity capable of making up for its own emptiness.’ This too, after all, cette faux imaginaire, requires the oneiric. What, after all, Leonardo dimly remembered and Descartes sought to hide was precisely the oneiric: with the result that for Descartes ‘nothing is left of the oneiric world of analogy’ (EM: 170). Now Merleau-Ponty surely does not have, as do others, the nostalgic hope of returning to a premodern account: ‘the return to pre-science is not the goal’—nor is primitivism (VI: 182). To do so would be simply to reinvest the account in allegory; Eye and Mind clearly here “mourns” as much as Benjamin or Heidegger the Destruktion of the Cartesian (technological) reduction of “analogy.” Yet the oneiric work (and world) of the artist that opens up this new imaginary are articulated anew, even in modern (“abstract” or “absolute” to use Paul Klee’s terms) models. Merleau-Ponty’s famous analysis of linearity in Klee, for example, seems simply to attribute to it almost allegorical or cosmological status in “de-picting” the generativity of being. It thus reiterates the generativity he attributed to Leonardo’s “serpentine” line. Yet, as has been seen, precisely at this point he drew again upon the formal diacritics of the Saussurian model: [H]enceforth, as Klee said, the line no longer imitates the visible it “renders visible”; it is the blueprint of the genesis of things. Perhaps no one

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before Klee had ‘let a line muse.’ 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—all this according as it slants more or less, rapidly, more or less subtly. (EM: 183) Merleau-Ponty did not simply find in Klee an originary return to a primitive or preexpressive level. Indeed, at one point he claimed that drawing is poorly understood simply as producing something from nothing, that at stake is the adventure of expressivity in general, that ‘the drawing, the touch of the brush, and the visible work are but the trace of a total movement of Speech’ (VI: 211). His point had to do with the commonality between painting, drawing, and sculpture—even how they coincide in the same artist. We could say the same—and Klee is the perfect example, as Foucault himself saw—of the relation between painting or drawing and or “reading” as écriture, effacing thereby ‘the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization.’64 Here, Foucault claimed, we are closer to Klee than to Picasso, in the same way that we are closer to Nietzsche than to Husserl.65 Merleau-Ponty did not find therein the return of nostalgic Romanticism. For example, if the Saussurian diacritics that he invoked so often echo post-Kantian accounts of dialectics, it is also unintelligible apart from its mathematical model: this is what separates Saussure’s ‘rationality in contingency’ from von Humboldt’s Innersprachform. Merleau-Ponty’s use of Saussure is less a technical means of rendering Being calculable, than a means of searching for a model for its occurrence, its écart, beyond the optics of Idealism. Indeed, granted his interest in Klee, we might refer here to what Klee himself called the “cool romanticism” that knew the truth (and the figurations) of expressive “abstraction” and “refiguration.”66 Moreover, Klee himself argued in his pedagogical texts that lines and colors are ‘like the logic of a phonematic system . . . summed up in one sole tuft.’67 Still, there is no analogical “towards the one” (a pros hen), no Primum Analogatum, no simple or immediate intuition of the oneiric here. Like the modern “differential”—or “universal dimensionality” to use Merleau-Ponty’s term—that replaced it, there is, an expressive excess again articulated through historical imagination, segmentation, fragmentation, dehiscence, polymorphism, écart, differentiation, diacritics. ‘The language of painting is never “instituted by nature” ’—no more than any “means of expression, once mastered, resolves the problems of painting

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or transforms it into a technique” (EM: 175). Neither appeal to physis nor logos—nor their modern reductions to techne—would account for its advent or historicity. Klee (following Worringer) had explained abstraction historically: ‘the more horrible this world . . . the more abstract our art’; for Klee, abstraction became ‘my way out of my ruins.’68 While Merleau-Ponty spoke very little of the connection between artistic and other forms of praxis, at least at one point he attributed to abstract art ‘a negation or refusal of the world’ (S: 56). Thus, painting and language both would participate in the process of historical imagination he described a propos Weber’s analyses of capitalism. Indeed both formed “models” for its account of historical advent in general: Capitalist production pushes more and more in the direction of a development of technology and the applied sciences. At the start, however, it is not an all-powerful idea; it is a sort of historical imagination which sows here and there elements capable one day of being integrated. 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. Historians come to talk of “rationalization” or “capitalism” when the affinity of these products of the historical imagination becomes clear. (AD: 17) Concerning the question of imagination the contrast with Foucault seems clear. As Foucault put it: In order to deploy his plastic signs, Klee wove a new space. Magritte allows the old space of representation to rule, but only at the surface, no more than a polished stone, bearing words and shapes; beneath, nothing. It is a gravestone.69 Foucault still held, however, that in Klee’s work (unlike Magritte’s) there remains a preservation of an “external” space. At stake, on Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Klee, is less such a preservation than a transformation of historical imagination in which all depth—painterly or otherwise—is “rewoven” and “refigured”: in the interplay of the visible and the invisible, the abyssal event of the imagination traces the il y a of the sensible itself, revealing that

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‘depth is urstiftet’ (V1: 291). Yet to Foucault this seemed still like hermetics, again like “secret science.”

X But then what of all the talk of secret science? More to the point, in what way would phenomenology exhibit the secret of science in this event? Indeed, at one point in Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty straightforwardly asserts ‘the secret has been lost for good’ (EM: 177). One cannot help being reminded of Husserl’s claim that ‘philosophy as science, as serious, vigorous, indeed apodictically vigorous science—the dream is over.’70 Here, too, the necessities are as much historical as conceptual. This “secret science” is, after all, a concept struck from metonymy, itself a figurative or oneiric product: it is surely neither simply “secret” nor simply “scientific.” While Descartes and classical thought had established a ‘secret of equilibrium’ between metaphysics and philosophy through ontotheology, ‘deducing its invented models from the attributes of God,’ our science has rejected this justification (S: 192). If Einstein still made passing reference to preestablished harmony, he does not dare to base it ‘categorically upon a divine infrastructure of the world’ (S: 192). It seems we are indeed tossed between ‘philosophy and occultism’ (VI: 183). And yet Merleau-Ponty denied such antinomies in his search for models beyond the optics of classical thought. If we ever again find a balance between science and philosophy, between our models and the obscurity of the “il y a,” it must be of a new kind. (EM: 177) In Heidegger’s various formulation of the “il y a” or Es gibt (and Beings “withdrawal”) Merleau-Ponty again found this “secret” (Geheimnis) but denied that the result was simply occultism or mysticism—or even in fact, strictly taken, nonphenomenological (NC: 119). While Merleau-Ponty still held out hope for a science that might recognize that not all beings can be “constructed,” for now, ‘philosophy maintains itself against such thinking’ (EM: 177). Now ‘nothing is left for our philosophy but to set out towards the prospection of the actual world.’ As will become further evident, this “il y a” would thereby be linked to a rehabilitation of the sensible, where Klee’s painting will similarly play a role (VI: 210, 214). The task (travail) of the painter’s “secret science” also lies in such prospection (such “prospecting”) of the actual world. In this sense the painter is a philosopher—as

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both Merleau-Ponty’s lectures and Klee’s Notebooks declare. It is worth noting, further, that Klee himself, whose account of ‘the visible and the invisible’ had provoked Merleau-Ponty, had toyed with, but ultimately rejected any “secret science” (or theosophy) for its account.71 At stake, as Kandinsky had originally realized, however, was the question or the remnants of the “spiritual” in art.72 Still, this only again raises the question, in what consists the “secret” of philosophy in the lapse of equilibrium between science and metaphysics? Or, to put the question anew, if in painting we could find a figured philosophy, in what would the “secret” of a figured philosophy consist? For this we can recur once more to the writings and lectures contemporaneous to Eye and Mind. Indeed, like “the extended sense” of perception for which he argued in the Phenomenology, we find the “secret” at stake in the painters brush extended more generally in his final writings. Like the general movement of speech The Visible and the Invisible’s Working Notes “depict,” that text too refers to the philosopher’s task as the explication of a ‘secret knowledge’ that is ‘higher than the “facts,” lower than the essences, in the wild Being (L’ être sauvage)’ (VI: 121). What does this finally entail? In his 1960 Husserl lectures Merleau-Ponty once more elucidates this “secret” precisely in the adumbrations of phenomenology. Against the account of philosophy as strict science, Husserl’s final manuscripts are held, following Fink, to reveal an archaeological phenomenology where essence never escapes sedimentation and horizonality and can be encountered only as such: (T)he eidos is from now on the Auslegung of a horizon; eidetic variation seeks the invariant ‘als das im strömend lebedingen Horizont ständig implizierte Wesen’ (HUA 383) . Does philosophy explain this Wesen? Its theme is a verborgene Vernunft in der Geschichte (Fink), a universal Teleologie der Vernunft (HUA 386), but which can be grasped only in filigree, as a secret or hidden connection. (HLP: 67) The painter and the philosopher both explore this “secret” or depth at the heart of things, a depth that can be explored only by adumbration and écart. It can be explored only through our ‘operative history’ only, as the Phenomenology had implicitly seen, by ‘taking our own history upon ourselves’ (PoP: xx). At stake in both cases, as Merleau-Ponty’s reference to eidetic variation indicates, are the extensions of the imagination, where, as the final Working Notes to The Visible and the Invisible assert, the “imaginary” is to be

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understood not as negation but ‘as the true Stiftung of Being’ (VI: 262). It is perhaps just in this regard that he still followed Heidegger’s reading of the transcendental imagination as exploratory and not subsumptive.73 But is then the secret science of painting nothing other than the Wissenschaft of phenomenology? More to the point, is Merleau-Ponty not doing precisely that of which he is accused? Is he tacitly privileging the scientist in privileging the painter? Does the painter do anything more than “exemplify” and (even more to the point) simply confirm phenomenological theory? This would presuppose that the play of “reliefs” might ultimately find the light of day; it would presuppose that the essences at stake might escape the horizon of their interpretation, that the visible and the invisible might simply coincide, that their relations are not “decentered” or a matter of “caesurae” (VI: 138; PP: 166). It would presuppose, in short, that phenomenology might escape from the “shadows” that it explicates. Even in the investigation of nature, and in contesting the reductions of physics, Merleau-Ponty denies that his concern is ‘for a philosophy of Nature in the sense of a super-science, a secret science, a super sensible knowledge, in rivalry with another . . .’ (N: 204).74 Instead he chose to trace ‘the evolution of the concept of Nature’ in order to exhibit its ‘ontological mutation,’ a mutation graspable neither by appeal to a higher concept nor a secret intuition nor their identity. Indeed what is “secret” here belies such scientificity. If we return once more to Merleau-Ponty’s ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow,’ we can see the issue, in light of these texts, now writ large: How will that infrastructure, that secret of secrets this side of our thesis and our theory, be able in turn to rest upon the acts of a consciousness? Does the descent into the realm of our “archaeology” leave our analytical tools intact? (S: 165) Clearly Merleau-Ponty had denied that it could, that it relies upon intentional threads that exceed us and ‘lead us ever deeper (and) could not possibly reach completion in the intellectual possession of a noema’ (S: 165). In this Merleau-Ponty is clear: ‘Philosophy is not science, because science believes it can soar over its object and hold the correlation of knowledge with being as established, whereas philosophy is a set of questions wherein he who questions is himself implicated by the question’ (VI: 27). Such correlations remain always at most “clues,” to use Husserl’s term. But in all this, as we have seen, ‘the philosopher must bear his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of light’ (S: 178). And, this shadow, this

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figuration, this excess is what makes “luminosity” possible: the purity of science depends upon this “theoretical” shadow like consciousness depends upon its body, reflection, its temporal flux, speech, its language, vision, the imaginary, or my singular experience, that of others. Confronted with the analytical tasks that Merleau-Ponty has called into question, this “secret,” this exhibitio orginera to which the philosopher’s explications attest, has lost its “scientific” status—and this too is part of the ruins of Cartesianism. This is why Merleau-Ponty stated: ‘Our science and our philosophy are two faithful and unfaithful consequences of Cartesianism, two monsters born from its dismemberment’ (EM: 177). Nothing perhaps is more monstrous than the very idea of a “secret sciences”—unless one means by that the secret resemblances that make Cartesianism as science tenable, a secret, the open exhibition of painting, nondemonstrative, without foundation or ultimate telos, ironically denies. Such secret resemblance may also attests to a final complication in the confrontation with Foucault’s account. Just as Foucault did not deny objectivity in scientific rationality, nor did Magritte, who claimed, ‘Only thought resembles. It resembles by being what it sees.’75 While this might be an apt (but heuristic) conclusion for physics, one might question its extension or generalizability. With respect to art, after all, this too is a strangely Hegelian conclusion for a thought so explicitly anti-Hegelian in emphasis. Indeed it resounds with the overtones of what Merleau-Ponty called another ‘monstrosity’ by which Hegel had circumscribed the history of art (and thought) into determinacy (S: 65, 82). Foucault warned us about the attempt to escape Hegel, where ‘our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed at us.’76 But we should wonder even more about Foucault’s own conclusion in this regard: ‘A day will come when, by means of similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image itself, along with the name it bears will lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell.’77 Modernism would thus find completion, the fulfillment of resemblance, in inversion, beyond the fulfilled figures of rhetoric: the collapse of allegory into empty tautology or the collapse of transcendence into immanence.78 Still this “secret” ‘progressus ad Worhol’ now seems like so much mythic (or heroic) modernism, lacking the dispersion of its own historicity—and doubtless, in its attempts to step beyond the figures of rhetorics, the ruins of its own allegories. Like all mythology, as Schelling had pointed out, its attempt at immanence resides on the illusion of tautology. Both language and reason as Wittgenstein, who too had somewhat mythically relied on tautology in his Tractatus, came to see, are more heterogeneous. We should

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wonder, accordingly, about the strict oppositions between resemblance and similitude, sign and signified, the logical and the analogical. Such oppositions, like the tautological relations on which they depend, may involve a step backward, always dependent upon the very logic they hoped to surmount. It is in this sense then ‘the figurations of literature and philosophy are no more settled than those of painting and are no more capable of being accumulated into a stable treasure . . . that in the end, we are never in a position to take stock of everything objectively or to think progress in itself’ (EM: 189–90). It becomes evident, then, that the privilege Merleau-Ponty sought in painting is an unstable one, indeed as ‘unstable’ and as incapable ‘of being accumulated into a stable treasure’ as the figurations he articulated for philosophy and literature at the conclusion of Eye and Mind (EM: 189). The task of the philosopher, so long restricted to the task of judgment became now equally inventive, Dichtung, as Husserl once suggested about interpretation in the history of philosophy (NC: 85–91).79 But, as has been seen, if Merleau-Ponty affirms himself ‘the failure of objectivity’ here he denies that the result is relativism. If philosophy involves, as he said of Schelling, ‘a non-prosaic conception of consciousness,’ it has not simply become irrational (N: 50). Moreover ‘(p)hilosophy does not sublimate itself in art’ (N: 46). As close as he came to this Schellingian claim, it is ultimately denied: neither philosophy nor the sciences ‘it has guided toward perfection’ can be expected ‘upon completion to flow back like so many individual streams into the universal ocean of poetry from which they took their sources.’ This result (once more classicism’s inversion), too, belongs to the unfaithful consequences of Cartesianism. And philosophy, as has become evident, for Merleau-Ponty, still awaits its overcoming.

Chapter 4

Cancellations: Hegel, Husserl, and the Remains of the Dialectic

‘It is clear that we are faced with a dilemma: either the constitution makes the world transparent, in which case it is not obvious why reflection needs to pass through the world of experience, or else it retains something of this world, and never rids it of its opacity. Husserl’s thought moves increasingly in this second direction, despite many throwbacks to the logicist period—as when he makes a problem of rationality, when he allows significances which are in the last resort, “fluid” . . .’ (PoP: 365n) ‘There is therefore a dialectical absolute solely for the sake of maintaining the position and contours (reliefs) of the multiple and to oppose the absolutization of relations. It is “fluidified” (fluidifé). And it is immanent to experience.’ (TL: 57–8) ‘Direct contact with the thing itself is a dream.’ (AD: 179)

I In Le même et l’autre, his account of ‘Modern French Philosophy,’ as it was translated, Vincent Descombes presented an argument for ‘a double reading’ of Merleau-Ponty’s work. Written a decade and a half after MerleauPonty’s death, already this reading had become almost paradigmatic in the reception of his thought among French philosophers. Entrenched in mediating between Hegel and Husserl, Merleau-Ponty’s attempt (and perhaps the attempt of French thought in general) to surpass the ‘philosophy of consciousness’ could, Descombes argued, ‘as readily be found there [rather than] as an attempt to surpass this type of philosophy.’1 The problem involved the fact that: In Hegel as in Husserl, phenomenology relates to one thing only; this appearance of the absolute, which is the absolute subject. And MerleauPonty seems to place himself within this tradition when he writes, ‘I am the absolute source.’2

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Doubtless Merleau-Ponty’s “self-placement” within that tradition is overdetermined. Still, if the citation of Merleau-Ponty’s text as the last breath of transcendentalism may not be inaccurate, it must, as has begun to be evident, be equally paired with others by which it is overtaken in a certain dissonance. We will need, consequently, to trace the complexity of its account in further detail. Provisionally, we can be reminded that even the Phenomenology of Perception itself claimed that the “I” in question ‘can never say “I” absolutely’ (PoP: 208). In fact, Merleau-Ponty argued that the condition for the possibility of this utterance, an utterance by which the transcendental ‘Ich denke’ might be denoted simpliciter, would require precisely ‘the death of consciousness’ (PoP: 71). Rather than the final moment of transcendental narcissism, the text would then need to be seen to be undertaking a radical transformation with respect to it. Moreover, while in this regard it might appear instead as a first vestige of the Destruktion, and probably the deconstruction of transcendentalism, it can be argued that this reading, too, may be overly simple, missing in fact the specificity and perhaps the ultimate effect of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Like many who would follow him here, Descombes’ argument by tradition and its reading of an event that can relate ‘to one thing only’—already a kind of appeal to the concept, the speculative Begriff—would thus neither account for the complexity of the facts, nor the problems that incite them. The argument by the concept is perhaps Foucauldian here. It is Michel Foucault who initially wrote that he and his generation had chosen, to use terms of Jean Cavaillès, a philosophy of the concept over a philosophy of consciousness.3 Such a reading suggests that it might simply be a matter of decision and the choice of a research program—as if, then, notwithstanding all the overdeterminations involved, Merleau-Ponty might simply have made a choice, and as if, consequently, we, too, might simply be in a position to so “adjudicate,” even if the texts and the issues involved were, in Descombes’ words, ‘an ambiguous undertaking.’ Nonetheless, that the matters in question may not lend themselves to such easy scrutiny becomes evident as soon as one looks at the period in Merleau-Ponty’s thought in which Hegel and Husserl were initially placed into a certain chiasm.

II The Preface to Merleau-Ponty’s collection of essays, Sense and Non-Sense (1948), for example, is one of the most thought-provoking pieces of the middle period of his work, and one in which this ambiguity remains

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prominently intact. Eighty-three lines long, it provides, one could argue, the protocols not only for the collection of papers it prefaces, but a great deal more of what emerged in the years following the publication of Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and ending with the Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), roughly one might say, the Temps Modernes years—and their fallout. It emerges from a period following the publication of his two thèses and the beginning of what he must have conceived to be their application, fulfillment, enlargement, or development. This was a period of existentialism (or at least the period of Merleau-Ponty’s closest affiliation with existentialism) at its most heroic, and certainly its most optimistic, and shows the engaged intellectual of the period in an écriture that synthesizes philosophy, art, politics, ethics, etc. Merleau-Ponty’s synthesis seems almost the synthesis of system, a master-schema applied to metaphysica specialis. Indeed, elsewhere in the collection, in an essay from Les Temps Modernes on Hegel to which it will be necessary to return, he speaks precisely of being ‘dedicated to a new classicism’ (SNS: 63). We would need to find less a “weak thought” than a “lesser reason.” Yet this dedication, this classicism, this intellectual écriture that forces pure reason to turn practical, differs. Guided by the task of forming a new conception of reason, it was likewise bent upon showing how it is that ‘the highest form of reason borders on unreason’ (SNS: 4). One could just dismiss this as a kind of intellectual naïveté, with its accompanying Lebensphilosophie claims regarding ‘the revolt of life’s immediacy against “reason,” ’ a kind of romantic intuitionism come lately (SNS: 3). And, Claude Levi-Strauss did just that in charging existentialism with being ‘shop-girl’s philosophy’ in Tristes Tropiques (1955). ‘Phenomenology and existentialism did not abolish metaphysics: they introduced new ways of finding alibis for metaphysics.’4 Nonetheless, it was perhaps not so much a matter of revolt as the invocation of a hazard that was general. In fact, in a passage that may reveal the influence of Jean Cavaillès, whom Van Breda, for example, identified as a ‘leader’ in Parisian Phenomenology in the early forties at Merleau-Ponty’s side, the Preface states, ‘Even our mathematics no longer resembles a long chain of reasoning’ (SNS: 3–4).5 Even the mathematical and inferential procedures that were to invoke infinity itself, the permanence of Being and Logos, the paradigm of Western Episteme, do not look as solid as they once did within that tradition. Merleau-Ponty’s claim was not mere naïveté here. There is a sense in which the twentieth century had learned from Gödel among others, as Cavaillès’ text had attested, that there was reason to worry whether the highest form of reason does border on unreason.6

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III It would be naive to claim that simply recognizing a border between reason and unreason was anything especially new. The problem of integrating le même et l’autre, after all, is as ancient as philosophy itself. Augustine, for example, wrote ‘unreason is not mere lack of reason but something positive, so that both necessity and unreason are ordered to the universal.’7 Still, for much of Western thought that border, that demarcation principle, was unproblematic, the universal to which reason and unreason remained ordered excluded the positivity of the “irrational” in a way that reasserted the right of reason against its other. And so dicta like Augustine’s appear again and again throughout Western thought.8 Hegel, who has been said to be both the last and the most troubled of metaphysicians, differs here, opening up a hemorrhage within this tradition by which we are perhaps closer to him than he was himself even to Kant. The Hegelian system contains perhaps a first blinking recognition that not all rational matters would easily answer to classical options. The border between reason and unreason was not simply the site of reason’s altern, nor could all that we call “true” under a given interpretation simply exclude by a simple ordering all that it did not encompass as “false.” In a passage from his lesser Logic, once again returning to the exemplar of mathesis in the West and an ancient problem, that of the surds, Hegel states: Geometry works with the sensuous but abstract perception of space; and in space it experiences no difficulty in isolating and defining certain analytic modes. To geometry alone therefore belongs in its perfection the synthetic mode of cognition. In its course however (and this is the remarkable point), it finally stumbles upon what are termed irrational (Irrationalitaten) and incommensurable (Inkommensurabilitaten) quantities; and in their case any further attempt at further specification drives it beyond the principle of the understanding. This is only one of many instances in terminology, where the title rational (rational) is perversely applied to the province of understanding, while we stigmatize as irrational that which shows a beginning and a trace (Spur) of rationality.9 It is a passage whose content would be regarded by those like Lukács (who quotes it in this light) with modernist and metaphysical disdain as the sure mark of decline and ultimately misologism, the simple ‘destruction of reason’ as he calls it.10 Hegel himself perhaps works unconsciously (this

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irrationality is ultimately subsumed, after all) but prophetically in announcing what looms upon the horizon. Others, for example, Bachelard, twelve years prior to the Preface to Sense and Non Sense, had noted the proximity between Hegel’s “dialectizing” of metaphysical thought and Lobatchewski’s ‘dialectizing’ of the concept of the parallel: The completely internal dialectic that belongs to rational thought only appeared in the 19th century. It appeared at the same time in philosophy and science without there being any influence at all between the two movements: Lobatchewski, in dialecticizing geometrical thought, ignores Hegel. Hegel in dialecticizing metaphysical thought naturally ignores Lobatchewski. . . . The Hegelian dialectic places us in effect before an a priori dialectic. . . . More superior is the dialectic instituted at the level of particular notions, a posteriori, following the risk (hazard) by which history has carried with it a Notion that remains by itself alone, contingent. When Lobatchewski dialecticized the concept of the parallel, he invited the human spirit to dialectically complete fundamental concepts.11 What makes Hegel’s analysis here and elsewhere, to use his term, original or ‘remarkable,’ is precisely his persistence before the ‘spur’ of this ‘incommensurability’ and its extended account of the rational, even if in the end he bites the metaphysical bullet in finally denying it. As Bachelard saw, Hegel’s a priori dialectic remained staunch in its need to surpass the ‘risk’ and the ‘contingency’ of history and the experience of a dialectic not regulated in advance. The task of integrating such a dialectic and its internal ‘risk,’ while doubtless originating in Hegel’s own version of phenomenology, ultimately escaped it.

IV Now it is here that Merleau-Ponty claimed to have found the problem of ‘unreason’ that spurs his Sense and Non-sense Preface. As he stated explicitly in this regard in the Temps Modernes article cited previously, Hegel is the origin of contemporary thought: All the great philosophical ideas of the past century—the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, and psychoanalysis—had their beginnings in Hegel; it was he who started the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason (une raison elargie) which remains the task of our century. (SNS: 63)

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If Hegel is to provide the origins for the clarification of an ‘expanded’ or extended notion of reason and the task of contemporary thought, this expansion must be seen against another history that is outlined in the Preface of the Phenomenology of Perception, one that, as has been seen, contains similar proper names. Concerned there precisely about the ‘fashion of Husserl’s phenomenology,’ its inachèvement, and its inability to “define its scope,” as we have seen, Merleau-Ponty states in a passage that marks a mis en scène whose characters were soon to dominate French thought: Even if this were the case, there would still be a need to understand the prestige of the myth and the origin of the fashion and the opinion of the responsible philosopher must be that phenomenology can be practiced and identified as a manner or style of thinking, that it existed as a movement before arriving at complete awareness of itself as a philosophy. It has been long on the way and its adherents have discovered it in every quarter, certainly in Hegel and Kierkegaard, but equally in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. (PoP: viii) In this sense the problem of an expanded notion of reason has always belonged to phenomenology. In fact, the problem of the Erweiterung, as Husserl called it, of the idea of pure logic by which phenomenology provided the Urgrund of reason in the Logical Investigations, was already based upon ‘an extended notion of perception,’ one by which it could access pure Being.12 As is indicated from the opening page of the Phenomenology to his final lectures, when it came to issues of phenomenology and ontology MerleauPonty continually attempted to wind his way between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s differences; such differences in fact initiated the concern that the doctrine could not defi ne its scope (PoP: vii). When it came to the problem of its rationality (and hence of sorting these differences out), Merleau-Ponty’s history of phenomenology is Janus-headed: one with origins in Hegel, the other, its telos, its being long underway, through Husserl. Yet it would obviously be false to say simply that Husserl completes what Hegel began. It is at least as true to say that Hegel takes phenomenology into its own ‘substratum,’ as Merleau-Ponty would say of psychoanalysis, and that in this regard its origin is equally its undermining.13 Further, if it were true that its Rücksfrage became in this regard an Erinnerung of what escaped, and even, Merleau-Ponty admitted, an ‘archeology’ destined on correcting its naïveté, it would be equally naive to claim that there is some way in which Hegel simply cancels Husserl,

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when it is, after all, Husserl who is supposed to complete Hegel, who corrects Hegel.14 Still, granted the overdetermination involved, how could cancellation itself be a possibility in this alternative? How could speculative dialectics cancel the Evidenz of transcendental consciousness? How on the other hand could a transcendental ego safeguard itself against the risks of an ‘infinite movement’ that might take place ‘behind its back?’ How could, to put it otherwise, the intensions of transcendental consciousness succumb to the extensions of the calculus of Aufhebung? And, how could the latter’s syntax generate the former’s immovable semantic forms? How could, then, cancellation ever take place here, having tied reason to what is apparently a contradiction? Yet to call both transcendence and immanence “necessary” to consciousness precisely pivots philosophy around a contradiction. Moreover, it is a contradiction that the Phenomenology both acknowledges and entertains as fundamental, in a way that renders the question of cancellation and the process of consciousness itself both critical and problematic (PoP: 365).

V In one sense to make the issue turn on the problem of cancellation seems eminently unfair. Aufheben is identified with Hegel, not Husserl, who seems not to give any special significance to it, let alone build a theoretical heaven around it. It was Hegel who turned the concept’s polysemia determinate precisely in regulating it in advance. ‘Aufheben’ presents a ‘certain delight to speculative thought,’ Hegel claimed in a well-known passage; it furnishes the economics of speculative movement, a word that means both to cancel and preserve, a modus operand that affects all of its objects and, thus, a thread which winds its way through all things. ‘Something is sublated only insofar as it has entered into unity with its opposite; in this more particular signification as something reflected it may fittingly be called a moment.’15 The Science of Logic is precisely the exhibition of this speculative delight, an infinite series of negations that ultimately provides, as is evident from the above, a unity, a homoiosis and thus, truth. Nothing stands outside this science and nothing is free from the moment of Aufheben—not even “nothing” itself, which passes over into its opposite, “being,” in generating sublation.16 Husserl apparently did not concur and so the problem is usually left dormant. For example, the lectures on post-Kantian philosophy included

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in Erste Philosophie, dating from the middle teens, are riddled with criticism of systems that mask science with empirical constructions, under the delusion that a Wissenschaft could be deductively demonstrated, when in fact it is the description that arises out of experience, the transcendental experience of consciousness that constitutes science.17 Without acknowledging the debts of its own historical “zig zag” between concept and intuition, the Crisis repeats such concerns in referring to the ‘style of mythical concept construction’ in Fichte’s drafts of his Wissenschaftslehre or the Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology.18 We know further that Husserl’s own knowledge of Hegel was in fact shabby, most of it coming, as the Erste Philosophie also demonstrates, from the accounts of the time, for example, those of Hartmann or Tredenlenburg. There could be no direct antecedents in Hegel for Husserl’s science of consciousness, pace much of what the existentialists claimed. Still, it would be equally remiss to claim that there is no relation between these thinkers concerning the process of consciousness, nor ultimately the overdetermined character of the respective “cancellations” that spur it on, nor even, as Merleau-Ponty ultimately thought, to deny a relation between their positions that was in some equally overdetermined sense, perhaps “essential.”

VI Husserl’s use of the term simply is one that concerns the negation of intentional acts, that is, their nonfulfillment. Originally this negation is thought of as intentional “frustration,” the failure of an intention to fulfill itself. This involves a failure of that tendency that Husserl understands per analogia, as its being ‘as it were desirous’ or ‘like a goal seeking intention’ seeking out the object as meant.19 The frustration of epistemic desire, however, is not simply an empty or isolated act for Husserl. It is—and the problem of time is already embedded in its postulate—a process. An intention can only be frustrated in conflict insofar as it forms part of a wider intention whose completing part is fulfilled. We can therefore not talk of conflict in the case of simple, i.e., isolated acts.20 Frustration is a form of synthesis, the failure of unity, the failure of identification, a ‘sundering into conflict,’ but precisely a sundering of the intentional ‘desire.’21 And, in that sense it remains a fulfillment and ultimately an adequatio. The cancellation, that is, as evidence within the process of

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consciousness, is itself an evidence for fulfillment. It is, in short, a correction, part of a process of verification (Bewahrung) and refutation (Widerlegung).22 Nonetheless, only in Ideas (1913) does the process of “cancellation” become explicated in a way that began to reassume its idealist past: Just as negation, metaphorically speaking, strikes out (durchstricht), so affirmation “underscores” (“unterstricht”), it “confirms” a position by “assenting” instead of “annulling” (“aufzuheben”) it as in negation. This too yields a series of noematic modifications parallel to the cancellation modifications.23 The process of consciousness is inherently corrective. Thus both thinkers could seemingly affirm Hegel’s account of judgment as an apodictic ‘impregnation,’ a ‘fulfilled (efüllte) copula’—a term Husserl also invokes.24 Nonetheless, the process is not for Husserl the ontologic emergence of the infinite, as it had been for Hegel, its ordo essendi. Rather, as he had already put it in the Investigations, it remains overseen by a series of indefinite reconfirmations, the reconfirmation of a self-identity that admits of iteration in the strict sense. Logical concepts, as valid thought unities must have their origins in intuition: they must arise out of an ideational intuition founded on certain experiences and must admit of indefinite reconfirmation and of recognition of their self-identity, on the reperformance of such abstraction.25 This is, he says, a process of the infinite reconfirmation of entities that in the end are “self-identical” and involves what ‘cannot be suspended (was nicht aufgehoben kann) as long as the understanding and the acts defining it, are what they are . . .’26 Husserl’s science of consciousness was a Wissenschaft of ‘what makes science science’ and hence, of the ‘conditions of the possibility of theory in general.’27 Granted his strong commitments to what remained foundational here, to what cannot be negated without self- contradiction, to what Husserl thinks as ‘self-identical,’ it remained possible, consequently, once again to bifurcate reason into unequivocal species, to speak thereby of Being-in-itself, and corresponding truths-inthemselves, objective determination, and corresponding to these, ‘fixed unambiguous assertions.’28 Nonetheless, Husserl’s transcendental turn ultimately had portentous consequences lurking for his early Platonism. Phenomenology was, throughout, verificationist and suffered from all the foibles of

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verificationism. If indeed the validity of objective truth and ideality had been tied to a process of ‘indefi nite reconfi rmation,’ as the Investigations claimed, then they were not only dependent upon a “series” or historicity, but equally open to the possibility of disconfi rmation—subject, that is, to the contingencies of verification. Thus, the notion of a fi nal truth-in-itself became recognized in Formal and Transcendental Logic to be a ‘prejudice.’ Nothing, that is, could prevent an illusion to the claim of absolute self-identity within the possible differences inherent in experience: The possibility of deception is inherent in the evidence of experience and does not annual (aufhebt) either its fundamental character (Grundcharackter) or its effect; though becoming evidentially aware of (actual) deception ‘annuls’ (‘aufhebt’) the deceptive experience or evidence itself. The evidence of a new experience is what makes the previously uncontested experience undergo that modification of believing called ‘annulment’ or ‘cancellation’ (der Aufhebung, der Durchstreichung erleidet) and it alone can do so. The process therefore always presupposes evidence of experience. The conscious ‘dispelling’ (Auflösung) of a deception with the originality of ‘now I see that it is an illusion,’ is itself a species of evidence (Art der Evidenz) namely evidence of the nullity of something experienced, or correlatively, evidence of the ‘annulment’ (‘Aufhebung’) of the (previously modified) experiential evidence. This too holds for every “experience” in the extended sense (der erweiterten Sinn). Even an ostensibly apodictic evidence can become disclosed as deception and, in that event, presupposes a similar evidence by which it is “shattered.”29 If then affirmation and negation are inherently related within the process of reason, that relation could not in the end be conclusive, unequivocal, self-identical, final, or objective, in the sense of the classical program of the Investigations. It led rather to the possibility of a crisis in reason where claims concerning apodicticity might inevitably contest one another, reinvoking ‘the playground of endless quarrels’ by which Husserl had described metaphysics, the failure phenomenology was precisely supposed to overcome. As Husserl quite properly questioned then: What if each and every truth, whether it be the every day truth of practical life or the truth of even the most highly developed sciences conceivable, remains involved in relativities by virtue of its essence, and referable

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to “regulative ideas” as its norms? What if, even when we get down to the primitive phenomenological bases (Urgunden), problems of relative and absolute truth are still with us, and as problems of the highest dignity, problems of ideas and the evidence of ideas?30 The rhetoric here perhaps did not need interrogatives. In one sense the eventualities placed into question had to be admitted, granted a rupture between adequacy and apodicticity, granted that adequacy was at best an ideal and nothing precluded, consequently, the possibility of an unsurpassable agon of the phenomenological. Ultimate adequacy would have to be foregone in the phenomenological sphere, the requisite evidence being deferred and regulated in the posits (the ultimately impossible evidence) of ideas.

VII Better than anyone, perhaps, Merleau-Ponty grasped the inevitable implication of this admission. Phenomenological enquiry could proceed, he claimed, ‘only by removing apodictic certainty from perception and fullself-possession from perceptual consciousness’ (PoP: 343). It forced the necessity of thinking consciousness as extended beyond self-certainty, beyond the indubitability of the present, and within the risk of the glissement of time. Here is where Hegel and Husserl initially became paired in the Phenomenology: If we are to solve the problem which we have set—that of sensoriality, or finite subjectivity—it will be by thinking about time and showing how it exists only for a subjectivity, since without the latter, the past in itself being no longer and the future in itself being not yet, there would be no time—and how nevertheless this subject is time itself, and how we can say with Hegel that time is the existence of mind, or refer with Husserl to a self-constitution (autoconstitution) of time. (PoP: 240–1) Nonetheless, this subject which is time itself, this glissement from the past to the future in which the teleology of phenomenological evidence arises, is always dis-possessed, split between what is always already past, and what is not yet, barring the simplicity of the presence of the now, and dissolving the ultimate possibility of vindicating in its very Endstiftung. In this sense to say that the subject is time is nothing else than to say its synthesis is always

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at risk; incomplete and indemonstrable, and thus beyond “truth” in the classical sense: There is nothing to be seen beyond our horizons, but other landscapes and still other horizons, and nothing inside the thing but smaller things. The ideal of objective thought is both based upon and ruined by temporality. (PoP: 333) Thus understood, as has been seen, the Preface to the Phenomenology declared much too confidently that ‘rationality is not a problem’ (PoP: xx). It was, as he would recognize within five years, as has been seen, precisely the problem of contemporary thought—the need to come to grips with what the Phenomenology had itself already called the phénomene originaire: ‘a truth seen against a background of absurdity, and an absurdity which the teleology of consciousness presumes to be able to convert into truth’ (PoP: 296). But this problem, for Merleau-Ponty evolves precisely out of Husserl, as he indicates: Husserl in his last period concedes that all reflection should in the first place return to the description of the world of living experiences (Lebenswelt). . . . It is clear, however, that we are faced with a dilemma: either the constitution makes the world transparent, in which case it is not obvious why reflection needs to pass through the world of experience, or else it retains something of that world, and never rids it of its opacity. Husserl’s thought moves increasingly in this second direction, despite many throwbacks to the logicist period—as is seen when he makes a problem of rationality, when he allows significances which are in the last resort “fluid” (Erfahrung und Urteil, p. 428) when he bases knowledge on a basic doxa. (PoP: 365n) One will search Merleau-Ponty’s Experience and Judgment reference in vain for an adequate treatment of the account. Here, too, one might question his reading of Husserl: his reading, as he later admitted was not intent on a ‘coherent interpretation’ but of grasping its unthought, a matter of an active, or nonprosaic and ‘poetizing’ philosophy as history of philosophy (HLP: 15). It also involved, to use terms of Malraux, Merleau-Ponty often invoked, a “coherent deformation.” A footnote in Experience and Judgment distinguishes between the exact idealizations of mathematics with the ‘intuition of essences in other subjects, whose fluid types cannot be apprehended with exactitude.’31 The latter’s ideality would remain ‘bound’ to

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the world, historicity, opacity and their temporalized explication would emerge (only by analogy with the mathematical) through particularized aspects or reliefs. For now we will disregard the problem of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation, as well as the question of the mathematical, and finally the problem of analogy itself (doubtless reinvoking the difference between Husserl and Heidegger, since it is the site of the latter’s Seinsproblem). As will become evident, The Adventures of the Dialectic will later flesh out this account of a “reading” based upon ‘the ambiguity of historical facts, their Vielseitigkeit, the plurality of their aspects’ (AD: 18). Already in the Phenomenology Merleau-Ponty had concluded that, internal to its own inachèvement, the Evidenz of phenomenology remains always presumptive, never fully adequatable, never final. It is precisely in this sense that to re-move the present (and the presented) from the motivations of its horizon, and truth from the perspective by which it is granted, in the attempt to posit absolutely a single object and its truth (its objectivity), would involve precisely ‘the death of consciousness’ (PoP: 71). Thus it forced the admission of the risk, the underdeterminacy and the plurality of phenomenological experience and its rationality, precisely to the extent that its evidence had been made at best conditional, underwritten only by its inadequatable protentions, the regulative presumptions of the teleology of consciousness. The result was that ‘there is nothing but convergent but discontinuous intentions, moments of clarity’ (S: 180).

VIII Still, it might be questioned whether the position thereby had been made untenable, whether phenomenology had inextricably turned phenomenalist, succumbing in fact to an inevitable transcendental illusion in grounding its evidence in what is in principle not given. Would it not be more consistent to abandon phenomenology’s commitment to its principle of principles, its self-certainty concerning the given, since it could not be strictly maintained and replace it with the economics of the accompanying ideality which became occasioned within it? That is, would it not be more consistent to turn from a philosophy of consciousness to a philosophy of the concept, as did Cavaillès and those after him? On its terms, consciousness would submit to the “apodicticity” of ideas that regulate it without hope of Archimedean points by which to found their derivations. As Cavaillès put it in a tract dating from the time of the Phenomenology, rather than a return to origins, the relation of Fundierung would then admit to a

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certain transformation facilitated by the abyss that the regulation of ideas had opened up: What comes after is more than what existed before, not because it contains it or even because it prolongs it but because it departs from it and carries in its content the mark of its superiority, unique every time, with more consciousness in it—and not the same consciousness. The term “consciousness” does not admit of univocity of application—no more than does the thing, as the unity that can be isolated. There is no consciousness which generates its products or is simply immanent to them. In each instance it dwells in the immediacy of the idea, lost in it and losing itself with it, binding itself to other consciousnesses.32 It is a pregnant passage, one that must be admitted to be not simply inconsistent with Husserl’s appeal to regulative ideas, and yet one that remains radically other. The regulation of ideas here forces the surpassing of consciousness, introducing a radical discontinuity within the transcendental ego ‘and the problem of rupture, threshold, limit, and series.’33 If Foucault heard it, as he stated, so did others of his generation. In a discussion of Cavaillès in his Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, Jacques Derrida stated: If we admit for just one instant, even were it an irreducible presumption, that there is in Husserl what perhaps there was not even in Plato (except in the literalness of his myths and pedagogy)—namely, a “Platonism” of the eidos or the Idea—then the whole phenomenological enterprise, especially when it concerns history, becomes a novel. The Idea is still less existent than the eidos, if that is possible; for the eidos is an object that is determinable and accessible to a finite intuition. The Idea is not.34 This Augenblick in the strict sense is inadmissible, irreducible, as Derrida stated, to a present itself still presumptive. Consequently, in the strict sense, it remains undecidable, a risk which occurs, to use the latter’s figure, in the blink of the phenomenological eye. If Derrida would not simply affirm Cavaillès’ route, neither would he deny it. He tracing instead how it is that the phenomenological project is ‘stretched between the finitizing consciousness of its principle and infinitizing consciousness of its final institution, the Endstiftung indefinitely deferred (differée) in its content but always evident in its regulative value.’35 It was, doubtless, the origin, if not itself the Endstiftung of Jacques Derrida’s own concern with differance. Just

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like Foucault’s radical purge of transcendental narcissism in the wake of Cavaillès’ challenge, it dissolved both the naïveté as well as the confidence that initially underwrote phenomenology as a strict science.

IX Granted this impossibility that haunts the demonstrability of a phenomenological Wissenschaft, granted that is, the inability to ultimately ground the Evidenz of phenomenology, in accord with its principled commitment to presence, it might then legitimately be questioned whether MerleauPonty’s solution in fact radically faced the facts concerning the fêlure of the classical research program. The responses here might seem to be not easily adjudicated. Still, in a long passage that bears citing, it is clear that the answer is by no means as simple as is sometimes thought: How can anything ever really and truly present itself to us, since its synthesis is never a completed process, and since I can always expect to see it break down and fall to the status of a mere illusion? Yet there is something and not nothing. There is a determinate reality, at least at a certain degree of relativity. Even if in the last resort I have no absolute knowledge of this stone, and even if my knowledge regarding it takes me step by step along an infinite road and cannot ever be complete, the fact remains that the perceived stone is there, that I recognize it, that I have named it, and that we agree on a certain number of statements about it. (PoP: 330) Merleau-Ponty admits that we have not fully escaped the dilemma—if we have exhibited at the same time the very facticity of the evidence at stake: Thus it seems that we are led to a contradiction: belief in the thing and the world must entail the presumption of a completed synthesis—and yet this completion is made impossible by the very nature of the perspectives which have to be inter-related, since each one of them, by virtue of its horizons, refers to other perspectives, and so on indefinitely. There is, indeed, a contradiction as long as we operate within being, but the contradiction disappears, or rather is generalized, being linked up with the ultimate conditions of our experience and becoming one with the possibility of living and thinking, if we operate in time, and if we manage to understand time as the measure of being. (PoP: 330)

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Merleau-Ponty was perhaps of more than one mind about this. At one point the Phenomenology claimed that we do have a kind of mythic, static experience, that I can experience one of the stones of the Tuileries wall, ‘entirely without history’ (PoP: 293). Throughout, however, he appealed to Husserl’s genetic account for its grasp but understood it to involve an event that transcended the intellectual possession of Cartesian cogito; often he appealed instead to the stoic interrogative uncertainty of Montaigne’s ‘What do I know?’ to grasp its ‘sedimented history’ (PoP: 398). While we do not have, thereby, the apodictic experience of certainty we at least have the idea of truth and the ability to articulate and discriminate the history operative in us (S: 206). He ultimately insisted that Montaigne’s Que sais-je? must also be related, not only to knowledge but to facticity, to ‘what is there (qu’y a-t-il)?’ and ‘what is the there is (qu’est-ce que le il y a)?’—and thus to Heidegger (VI: 129). We should note, however, the extent to which Merleau-Ponty’s text above is in fact intertextual, how close, that is, it is already to Heidegger, how the route between Husserl and Hegel found a certain protocol in the text of Sein und Zeit. Time is the measure (le mesure) of being, its meaning (Sinn), as Heidegger had proclaimed. So long as one simply asks the question of Being—apart from time—all assertion will remain inevitably contradictory, always already posited in a vicious circle between the conditions and the conditioned, between immanence and transcendence, the in-itself and the for-itself. He acknowledges, moreover, that ‘a philosophy cannot be centered around a contradiction’ (PoP: 365). Still, it is a contradiction that remains (albeit perhaps inextricable) only apparent once the presumptive horizon of temporality has been restored, and the phantasm, thereby, understood less as the adequate correlate of Being than the articulation of the ever aspectival event of its emergence, a “synthesis” never fully completed (or completable). Here, again, is his concern that Heidegger had lost ‘the mirrors of Being’ (TL: 112). It might be suggested that Merleau-Ponty insists on a certain “hermeneutics” of phenomenology. There are, after all, ‘several ways for the body to be a body, several ways for a consciousness to be consciousness’ (PoP: 124). Equally, he insisted, without blinking, on a phenomenology of such a “hermeneutics.” This hermeneutic perspective—or ‘perspectivism,’ in any case—remains always risked in ‘the unique structure which is presence’ (PoP: 70, 430). As has become evident, this is by no means an immanent epistemic event. Still, to the fundamental question of metaphysics, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ having fully admitted the abyss which haunts any simple assertion, any “positing” simpliciter, Merleau-Ponty

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insists, ‘Yet there is something rather than nothing’—even if regulative, presumptive, and deferred. It was equally, of course, his stoic response to Sartre (as well as Heidegger); we are “condemned to meaning,” as surely as the measure of being is time, and as surely, as he had gleaned from Hegel, that ‘time is the existence of the mind.’ This is true, too, if it is the latter’s self-transgression and ex-stasis, “its losing itself” in the inevitable presumptuousness of its teleology, as Cavaillès knew.36 This exstasis, moreover, would not allow recoupement. In an argument that antedates Derrida’s own deconstruction of Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit with respect to temporality, he claims: Heidegger’s historical time, which flows from the future and which, thanks to its resolute decision has its future in advance and rescues itself once and for all from disintegration, is impossible within the context of Heidegger’s thought itself: for if time is an ek-stase, if present and past are two results of this ek-stase, how could we ever cease to see time from the point of view of the present, and how could we finally escape from the inauthentic? (PoP: 427)37 The risk of disintegration, or to speak Hegelian, the risk of “dispersion,” remains insurmountable, an event that threatens all presence and risks “authenticity” only within the ironic structure of the present. Still, the wonder is that, despite the risk, Merleau-Ponty himself remained resolute. Having denied apodicticity and self-possession to consciousness, he states: But it must not be concluded from this that the percept is only possible or probable, and that it can be brought down, for instance, to a permanent possibility of perception. Possibility and probability presuppose the prior experience of error, and correspond to a state of doubt. The percept is and remains, despite all critical education, on the hither side of doubt and demonstration. . . . Each perception, though always capable of being “cancelled” (barrée) and relegated among illusions, disappears only to give place to another perception which rectifies it. . . . Each thing can, after the event, appear uncertain, but what is at least certain for us is that there are things, that is to say, a world. . . . The percept taken in its entirety, with the world horizon which announces both its possible disjunction and its possible replacement by another perception, certainly does not mislead us. There could not possibly be error where there is not yet truth (il n’y a pas encore vérité), but reality, and not yet necessity, but facticity.38 (PoP: 343–4)

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If the Urphanomenon of phenomenology announced an evidence that was in fact always already surpassed—and ultimately, that is, objectively, both indemonstrable and undecidable—it could not then be a question of rendering its evidence strictly (i.e. always and only) simply probable and marginally endorsable. Nor could it be the “annunciation” of an event that might underwrite the cancellation of its Evidenz—if it did involve, as Heidegger too would say of what he called Ereignis, an opening (and a work) that was both ‘more than and less than truth.’ Thereby what was at stake was a synthesis that was, to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, as much ‘disjunctive’ as identificatory, discontinuous as convergent. It is perhaps here that Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty still meet, both in the gathering and the gesture at stake, the remnant of a certain stoicism—and as Heidegger realized the “care” that attends it. At first glance, the final lectures seem only to reiterate all of this: against Husserl, there can be no ‘total reactivation’ of our sedimented history (HLP: 26); against Hegel there is no ‘definitive recovery’ to the dialectics of consciousness (PNP: 81). The absolute everywhere is “figured”: its evidence always “lateral,” diacritical, the articulation of reliefs (PNP: 62; HLP: 26). Still, if this event forced the acknowledgment that perception was by definition unfulfilled, noncoincidence—if, that is, strictly taken, per-ceptio never takes place—it remained the case that what was in question remained anterior to, overdetermining the question of doubt or certainty. What emerged was an Evidenz, in short, which, if always already surpassed, ‘is and re-mains’; it is never simply surpassable but remains, intertwined and exhibited in the relations between the visible and the invisible. The question of this “intertwining,” however, provides a “clue” for further confronting the issue of dialectics itself, never far off from all this in the later works. As has become evident, the speculative dialectic—like philosophy in general Merleau-Ponty acknowledged—now stands in ruins. Neither version, a phenomenology understood as the introduction to the Absolute (Hegel), nor phenomenology understood as the science of all sciences (Husserl) can be vindicated. Still, just as Merleau-Ponty had claimed that all reason answers to a lesser form of reason, beginning with The Adventures of the Dialectic, he sought explicitly to “unravel” in this intertwining something like a lesser dialectic inherent to the site of experience. This “site” is provisionally identified, in accord with his expanded stress on the operant history of the rational, as a type of being in which there is an abode or junction of a subject, Being, and of other subjects (AD: 204). We have previously seen how the “bound” and diacritical openings of language and painting had furnished models or examples of its advent (AD: 17).

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Now, more aware of the dialectics of conceptual institution (i.e. Stiftung as Nachstiftung), Merleau-Ponty claims that this site ‘is always conceived as the expression of a truth of an experience in which the commerce of subjects with one another with being was previously instituted’ (AD: 204). As such, the dialectic remains ‘incomplete so long as it does not pass into other perspectives and in the perspectives of others.’ Unlike speculative forms of dialectic or Wissenschaftslehre, the event at stake occurs precisely without speculative or rational guarantee, without preestablished harmony, without ‘any regulated passage from one perspective to another,’ lacking thereby both arche and telos. Instead it reveals a historical rationality that acknowledges (and in the end requires) our “difference” and ‘a plurality of levels or orders’ (AD: 204–5). Without resulting ‘in a system with an exact and definitive hierarchy and in the perspective or a true, homogeneous, ultimate society’ there remains, nonetheless, the possibility of a lesser rationality that acknowledge in these differences their intelligibility ‘at least as different episodes of a single life, where each one is an experience of that life and can pass into those who follow.’ Hence: ‘What then is obsolete is not the dialectic but the pretension of terminating it . . .’ (AD: 205–6). The “dialectic” thus becomes both an event and a work (travail), not just the interplay of concepts or figures (Gestalten) but equally a dialectic (and a history) internal to the simultaneity (‘= several ways in’) in our intertwining with others and the things themselves (HLP: 50). Indeed it is in just this way that he came to understand “the things themselves”—no longer as the correlate of consciousness, whether that be understood as scientifically phenomenological or speculatively dialectical: We have to pass from the thing (spatial or temporal) as identity, to the thing (spatial or temporal) as difference, i.e. as transcendence, i.e. as always “behind,” beyond, far off . . . the present itself is not an absolute coincidence, without transcendence, even the Urerlebnis involves not total coincidence, but a partial coincidence, because it has horizons and would not be without them . . . (VI: 195) We have reached the “diacritical present” again, this time from the dialectics, cancellations (and conceptual mutation) of “consciousness” itself. What has become evident is that in both cases, both in the case of “consciousness” and its “object,” this “intertwining” came to be understood, less as an iteration (or development) of atemporal identity than, as Jacques Taminiaux aptly put it, as a remnant of the most ancient sense of dialectic, as “dialegein,” as a welcoming of difference.39

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Again, the shadow of this difference (bound to the opening of institution and time) is wrongly conceived as eliminable. Such a desideratum might be retained only at the expense of truth itself. As Merleau-Ponty’s 1961 lecture notes stated: ‘The “polysemy” (Vieldeutigkeit) is not a shadow to eliminate true light. The true cannot be defined by coincide and outside all difference (écart) in relation to the true’ (PNP: 70). The visible and the invisible would not be founded but would be grasped as simultaneously intertwined, bound to one another, where to go one way is always to the other, where to explicate is equally to undergo reversibility or Umkehrung (PNP: 60). Doubtless he had learned some of this from Heidegger’s own reading of Hegel and his (more mature) doctrine of the ontological difference.40 But it was equally true that it could not be grasped (perhaps by either) without Hegel and Husserl. Indeed MerleauPonty’s 1956 course on dialectical philosophy culminates by invoking the same fluidity in dialectic that he had previously ascribed to Husserl’s notion of motivation: There is therefore a dialectical absolute solely for the sake of maintaining the position and contours (reliefs) of the multiple and to oppose absolutization of relations. It is “fluidified” in them and it is immanent to experience. This is a position which is unstable by definition and is always threatened either by positivist or negativist thought. (TL: 57–8) This fluidity of the multiple, like the “infinite” transition between the internal and external horizons and reliefs in things (indeed precisely articulated through them), is what amounts to the dialectical absolute in ruins, confronted with an evidence (like experience itself) that is no more thinkable without plurality than it is conceivable in terms of final resolution, adequation or Enstiftung. This too does not simply depart from his earlier concerns about the link between phenomenology and science, even thought he is now more fully removed from the founding pretension of its founder and his Lebenswelt: ‘Philosophers must find a way nicely between conceit and capitulation’ (TL: 85). As early as 1951 he had emphasized here the historical turn in Husserl’s Crisis, an emphasis largely lacking in this the Phenomenology’s treatment. He emphasizes now, not simply its temporality, but facticity. What he also stressed was precisely the debt of Husserl’s own tacit recovery of the idealist Wechselspiel as spectacle (Schauspiel) (PP: 93).41 The philosopher understands the history of philosophy by his own thoughts, and yet at the same time he understands the history of philosophy

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in relation to the history of philosophy to which he has access as a spectacle. In short he understands himself by the history of philosophy, and he understands this history by himself. ‘A relative clarification of the one side sheds some light on the other, which in its turn reflects back on the first, Husserl says in the last volume he prepared for publication’. (PP: 93) In this respect what brings Husserl and Hegel together is not simply temporality but historicity and facticity: ‘At this point phenomenology, in Husserl’s sense, rejoins phenomenology in the Hegelian sense, which consists in following man through his experiences without substituting oneself for him, but rather in such a way as to reveal their sense’ (PP: 92). Already he was insisting on subtracting transcendental eidetics from what the Visible and the Invisible will call the ‘solitary imagination and vision of the philosopher’ (VI: 110). Even there, however, he still insisted on phenomenology’s dialectic with history and the sciences, ‘clarifying the one by the other, criticizing one by the other, by organizing the Ineinander,’ which is the ‘support and the very locus of the opinio communis that we call science’(VI: 116). He likewise realized that the constellation of philosophy was also the operant history of such a opinio communis, less a matter of individual praxis (Sartre) than the lived ‘spectacle’ or ‘interrogative ensemble’ of factical institutions, even a ‘geography’ (HLP: 33; VI: 258, 187). Removed from such foundationalism, and equipped with thicker notions of simultaneity and the multiple, in light of the adventures of the dialectics we have traced, we can see him removing the opinio communis of phenomenology both from the dogmatism of its realist pretensions and its metaphysics of common sense. All now have become understood in terms of the explorations of the visible and the invisible. For example, in relation to relativity physics, he states: (T)he scientific critique of the forms of space and time in non-Euclidean geometry and relativity physics have taught us to break with the common notion of space and time without reference to the observer’s situation and enable us to give full ontological significance to certain descriptions of perceived space and time—to polymorphous space and time of which common sense and science retain only a few traces. Nor need the critique of absolute simultaneity in relativity physics necessarily lead to the paradoxes of the radical plurality of time—it might prepare the way for the recognition of a preobjective temporality which is universal in its own way. Perceived time, is of course, solidary with the observer’s point of view, but by this fact it constitutes the common dimension for all possible observers of one and the same nature. And this is so, not because we are constituted

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so as only to attribute to other observers an expanded or foreshortened time relative to our own—but rather the very contrary, in the sense that in its singularity our perceived time announces to us other singularities and other perceived time, with the same rights as our, and in principle grounds the philosophical simultaneity of a community of observers. (TL: 86–7) Gone however is the idea of time and experience understood in terms of the philosophy of consciousness, modeled upon continuity as an ‘essential phenomenon’ and an event in which ‘being and consciousness coincide’ (PoP: 420, 424). Both depend upon a transcendence and a divergence foreign to each and apart from which each would simply be falsely totalizing: a distortion that renders all perspectives incommensurable, as Hegel already worried. Such distortion is not the spur or surpassing to a higher rationality, however but a transcendental illusion. Such an absolute, either as “Spirit” or as “Consciousness,” would be falsely totalizing: artifacts of an operant history from which they emerge (S: 180). History would now involve the ‘ruins of the spirit’ (VI: 180). In the end he reserved the same criticism for both Hegel and Husserl— but also Einstein, as the above passage hints. Like them, Einstein remains a classical thinker, even the ‘extreme limit’ of the classical, ‘if we call “classical” a way of thinking which assumes that the world is rational,’ that being and thinking are correlates (S: 193). At one point he suggests that there remains something of the ruins of the dialectic at stake here, too. Speaking of the early Husserl, Merleau-Ponty states, ‘This senseless effort to submit everything to the properties of “consciousness” (to the limpid play of its attitudes, intentions, and impositions of meaning) was necessary—the picture of a well-behaved world left us by classical philosophy had to be pushed to the limits— in order to reveal all that was left over’ (S: 189). The apodicticity of analytic phenomenology, to use Fink’s terms was a necessary first stage of an enterprise that ultimately escaped it.42 Yet Merleau-Ponty claimed there was more to the classics than this: the classical tradition was not simply ‘exhausted’ (S: 195). In the hidden forgetting by which we are removed from the classics there remained a certain necessity: the classical is also characterized by the fact ‘no one takes them literally’ and yet they are ‘obligatory steps for those who want to go further’ (S: 11). As such they retain the status of secondary truths: this was true again of Husserl, Marx, or Hegel, but again, also Einstein, who perhaps provided Merleau-Ponty with his initial models here.43 Marx’s thesis (or Husserl’s) can remain true in this nonliteral sense, while still calling forth new echoes that enable us to find new lusters (reliefs)

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in them (S: 11). We reencounter in this sedimented history ‘possible variations (that) have not been utilized’ (PW: 100). Thereby however they reveal once more that strict or ahistorical “literality” is illusory: indeed that ‘the very idea of a complete statement is inconsistent’ (S: 17). This is no more a denial of meaning than it is a denial of the real and the transcendental illusions that haunt both. The transcendental illusion involved is not the forgetting that necessarily accompanies the transformation of tradition but the very forgetting of the transcendence, the time and the history, and the nature that makes its experience possible (VI: 185). ‘Direct contact with the thing itself is a dream’ (AD: 179). Beyond such forgetting lies the remembrance that this shadow and “the fluidity of the multiple” it entails is essential to phenomenology. Beyond the metaphysics of common sense and the critique of absolute simultaneity, the experience of time, albeit not simply discontinuous and foreclosed, remains always linked to the divergence (écart) in which both transcendence and singularity open.44

Chapter 5

The Possibility of a Figured Philosophy: On Rehabilitating the Sensible

‘Thought cannot ignore its apparent history. . . . It is in terms of its intrinsic meaning and structure that the sensible world is “older” than the universe of thought . . .’ (VI: 12) ‘Iteration of the Lebenswelt: we are making a philosophy of the Lebenswelt, our construction (in the mode of “logic”) makes us rediscover this world of silence. Rediscover in what sense? Was it already there? How can we say that it was there since nobody knew it before the philosopher said it? But it is true that it was there . . . [I]t is philosophy that discloses it.’ (VI: 170) ‘[L’être sauvage] is the image of a being that, like Klee’s touches of color, is at the same time older than everything and of the first day (Hegel).’ (VI: 210)

As is well known, in his later works, Merleau-Ponty was involved in a radical reevaluation of his position in articulating an archaic ‘ontology of the flesh.’ As has become evident, such a reevaluation is a complicated matter, not only a matter of description or “poetics”, but equally a matter of theoretical “architectonics.”1 Perhaps more than any other phenomenologist, what complicates his position is Merleau-Ponty’s claim that this l’histoire sauvage, in which the sensible world could not be ignored (or what the Phenomenology referred to as our “prehistory”), could not ignore its other history, its conceptual history (IP: 179). As a result, the task at hand could not simply involve, as had been the case in classical phenomenological project, a simple descriptive return to our silent origins. While this became increasingly evident, one can already see a very clear statement of its logic in his 1946 defense of the Phenomenology of Perception before the Société française de philosophie. Already he knew that one never returns to immediate experience simpliciter (PP: 30). At stake would be a matter of coincidence and noncoincidence, ‘partial

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coincidence,’ a matter that would concern, perhaps particularly concerned, Jacques Derrida after him. 2 It is a question of how (and whether) we are to understand it. Already in the 1946 defense he acknowledged the necessity for this “historical” detour toward “coincidence.” ‘Phenomenology could never have come about before all the other philosophical efforts of the rational tradition, nor prior to the construction of science. It measures the distance between our experience and science’ (PP: 29). Beyond what he rightly called later ‘the alleged silence of the psychological coincidence,’ it would be necessary to depend upon a ‘silence that would not be the contrary of language’ (VI: 179). Instead, precisely by means of the fluidity in our linguistic resources, the world might still be inventively gathered and revealed (and in some sense even argumentatively constructed) in our midst (VI: 179). Here, far from it being simply a matter of pure description, phenomenology, in accord with its own most internal genesis, would be explicitly a matter of ciphering history and tradition. This would eventually result in understanding philosophy itself by what he termed an ‘operative’ or ‘structural history.’ The opening pages of The Visible and the Invisible’s Working Notes describe the rationality of this history in more detail as a matter of ‘reading between the lines’ by means of the history, the ‘historical motivations’ that is operative in us. If such a phenomenology relies then upon a partial coincidence with our experience, its intelligibility remains also dependent upon the contingency of our conceptual inheritance, ‘which co-determines its final meaning’ (VI: 185–6, 179). Despite its fundamental status such conceptual history would not leave even the phenomenology of the sensible world itself unscathed—and would codetermine its account. As has been seen, first and foremost, MerleauPonty claimed, this extended phenomenology ‘results in an ontological rehabilitation of the sensible’ (S: 166–7). This is a strange “description.” It is in fact Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl’s Ideas II account of the Ineinander or transgressive synthesis of corporeal intersubjectivity in general, and my incarnation in particular, based upon the reversibility of the touching and the touched. This in turn prepares the way for general ontological considerations on the flesh of the world and the reversibility of the visible and the invisible. He states emphatically of this ontological rehabilitation of the sensible at work in Husserl’s text that ‘it is imperative that we recognize it as such’ (S: 166). But no less again than Jacques Derrida, rightly perhaps, refused this “imperative,” saying ‘Husserl would never have spoken of it in such terms, it seems to me, and this would not have interested him for a single second.’3

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What Derrida did not say is that Merleau-Ponty’s description sounds less like Husserl than it does like Heidegger. It is Heidegger who initially called for such a rehabilitation and he found it first of all in Kant (and perhaps especially Kant’s account of the schematism). Thus, Heidegger stated: ‘Kant for the first time attains a concept of sensibility which is ontological rather than sensualist.’4 But Heidegger found in Nietzsche’s abyss (Abgrund) its (nonmetaphysical) fulfillment, that is, an account of ‘sensuousness (Sinnlichkeit) that in rapture (Rausch) possesses the beyond in itself (hat in sich deses Ueber-sich-hinaus).’5 We shall need to return to it. For now it can be noted that it is little wonder that when Husserl read the beginnings of such a position in Heidegger’s Kantbuch he found all this problematic, not only questioning it, as his marginal notes reveal, but explicitly denying it. The denial took the form of a certain regress, as it often did in his text, to Hume. One need not, Husserl claimed, begin with the problem of ‘ontological synthesis,’ rather, ‘one can pose the question as Hume did before Kant.’ Moreover, ‘one does not need the problem of finitude either—Hume did not consider this at all.’6 Merleau-Ponty himself did not often cite Heidegger’s Kantbuch, neither in his late reading of Husserl nor in his early works (except where it arguably crucially joins in at the chorus in the Phenomenology’s chapter on temporality). Still, the problem of a body synthesis throughout accompanies what the Phenomenology describes as ‘the problem of finite sensoriality’ and it already linked both to the Kantian question of productive imagination (PoP: 192). Merleau-Ponty directly invokes the synthesis of the body-schema as an ‘art hidden in the depths of the human soul,’ adding that it is ‘one which, like any art is known only by its results’ (PoP: 26). Like Heidegger, he criticizes both the concept of analytic reflection that oversees such a synthesis in Kant as well as what he read to be ‘certain Kantian texts of Husserl’ (PoP: 276n). For such an intellectual synthesis, as has been seen, he substitutes a body synthesis that ‘broke with the philosophy of essences’ by means of a fluid (flieszende) typic, that was ‘exploratory’ (PoP: 49).7 Here I dominate diversity not by ‘freely positing multiplicity’ but I ‘dominate diversity only with the help of time’ (PoP: 276n). The latter again belongs to my body and here I no more initiate time than I do my heart beats (PoP: 413). In this sense ‘my life is made up rhythms which have their reason not in what I have chosen to be’ but in the humdrum incarnate setting which is mine (PoP: 83–4). It all seemed to hinge then on how to explicate such an incarnate synthesis. To begin with, and notwithstanding his proximity to Heidegger, such a commitment to an incarnate synthesis does not sound Heideggerean.

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Indeed Heidegger has been roundly criticized for its omission. At least once, however, in his Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger himself understands this event as one in which we don’t first encounter chaos in bodily states, ‘but living, our body bodies forth as a wave in the stream of chaos (sondern lebend leibt unser leib als welle in Strom des chaos).’8 Moreover, Heidegger again connects the latter to Kant’s account of receptivity as ‘a manifold of sensation.’9 Here ‘we do not “have” a body; rather we “are” bodily.’10 In such bodying forth into chaos, art emerges ‘with reference to the need for a schema and forming a horizon,’ albeit not, ‘as a wall that cuts man off’ (like Kant’s noumenon), but rather as a ‘translucent’ glimpse into the possible.11 ‘The horizon always stands within a perspective, a seeing through to something possible that can arise out of what becomes only out of it, hence out of chaos.’12 This striving or bodying-forth into chaos, dealing with the forces of chaos ‘according to their form and rhythm, in order to estimate them in relation to the possible,’ is precisely what amounts to (now) Nietzsche’s ‘new interpretation of sensuousness (Sinnlichkeit).’13 Such an account of the rapture of finite sensoriality was perhaps already evident in Merleau-Ponty’s own discussion of a ‘subject (that) was no longer to be understood as a synthetic activity, but as ek-stase’—to invoke his Heideggerean terms (PoP: 429). The only difference was that Merleau-Ponty criticized the emphasis on resoluteness that underscored Heidegger’s account of authenticity and its privileging of the future (PoP: 427). If in some respects the position sounds “Heideggerean,” the problem is that it does not sound “phenomenological.” It surely did not sound phenomenological to Husserl. Husserl (like Heidegger) had somewhat curiously described Kant’s project (indeed along with Hume) as one that was concerned with ‘the transcendental problem concerning Nature.’14 But, attacking the naïveté of Kant’s commitments to natural science, Husserl states, ‘only if the transcendental philosophy of Nature had been at hand in the first place . . . would that [Kantian] philosophy have been suited (after the idealities had been uncovered) to motivate the origination and development of a transcendental logic.’15 We should simply note the circle that awaits such transcendental clarification, divided between transcendental logic and a transcendental Naturphilosophie. This is a circle Husserl did not disavow on other matters and it was a circle Merleau-Ponty himself did not fail to emphasize. But he also noted that it did not bother Husserl very much and insisted, in turn, that our dependences here be understood in terms of an unavoidable forgetfulness, even unconsciousness, that is the (finite) condition of rationality (S: 176, 173). In any case, as we have seen, Husserl himself returned

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to Hume for the issue of sensuousness, jettisoning outright the issues of ‘finite sensoriality.’ Now one might quibble over what’s phenomenological and what’s not. Elsewhere I have argued, in tracing its origins in Kantian and pre-Kantian philosophy (especially Lambert) that phenomenology is a much more varied and historically complicated (and theoretically contested) phenomenon than its appeal to simple “seeing” might indicate.16 On such a reading, in their various attempts at learning and ‘relearning to see,’ Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty may not be contesting the ultimate or fundamental meaning of phenomenology so much as carving out different paths or fragments in a more indeterminate and theoretically plural “phenomenological” field. What seems especially contested in this problem of the rehabilitation of the sensible is not, to speak Kantian, the question of transcendental idealism but empirical or “experiential” realism. Even Husserl’s best commentators have pointed out that this issue involves a classical problem in phenomenological interpretation. As Robert Sokolowski dealt with the topic four decades ago, the phenomenological account of sensation gave rise to false solutions in Husserl’s account, in particular the early account of the “schematism” or the imposition of intentional form and matter.17 Indeed, for Sokolowski, the early Husserl had been undecided as to whether sensation were or were not intentional. The later “solution,” refuses to distinguish sensation and sensing, the inside and the outside, and genetically articulates the emergence of sensation in the teleology of the flux of consciousness with its retentional-protentional structure. Well, where was Merleau-Ponty in all of this, who, after all, sounds very close to this account? Sokolowski himself rejected Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of Husserl’s intellectualism: while true of the early Husserl, these criticisms failed to grasp, he claimed, the transition in Husserl’s works.18 Merleau-Ponty’s own descriptions, on the other hand, seemed to sound like Husserl’s genetic account—all the while rejecting Husserl’s analytical reflection.19 Having invoked the problem of phenomenology’s incomplètitude or inachèvement, we can leave this issue to its various hermeneutic advocates. What remains outstanding is the issue of where it left Merleau-Ponty himself. In the first place, Merleau-Ponty’s own position was obviously very close at hand. But in the second place, I want to suggest, it left him reliving the father’s conflicts. The Phenomenology in fact begins by affirming Husserl’s critique of empirical sensation. The initial claim (i.e. the Phenomenology’s perceptual realist claim) was that sensation was an abstractum, a claim that followed Husserl’s critique of representationalism. Accordingly, we

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never see sensations but concrete perceptual objects in an already meaningful perceptual field that constitutes ‘a silent language whereby perception communicates with us’ (PoP: 48). If against this, as he put it in the opening lines of the Phenomenology, ‘we find in language the notion of sensation’ it will need to be rejected: ‘there is no experience of sensation’ (PoP: 7). Indeed, at one point he claims there is only conceptual confusion here; ‘once introduced the notion of sensation distorts any analysis of perception’ (PoP: 13). The conceptual name of such a distortion is also noted: ‘sensation admits of no other philosophy than nominalism’ (PoP: 15). Merleau-Ponty’s commitments to imageless perception seemingly could not be stronger. Like much else in the Phenomenology, this realism would not be unambiguous, and would not survive the test of time. Indeed, appropriately enough for a philosopher who had invoked Kant’s productive imagination and bound it to the body-schema in time itself, perceptual objects would ultimately be bound to, and emerge through, a rhythm antecedent to the objects themselves. But it is perhaps not clear how this rapprochement between Husserl and Kant would occur.20 Despite his eliminative realism, Merleau-Ponty clearly came to see that objects emerge, not by making the concept of sensation Aufgehoben, but precisely through the rhythm of sensation itself, albeit one clearly articulated with the notion of passive intentional synthesis in mind. As he puts it later in the Phenomenology’s chapter on le sentir: Sensation (La Sensation) is intentional because I find in the sensible a certain rhythm of existence is put forward—abduction or adduction—and that, following up this hint, and stealing into the form of existence which is thus suggested to me, I am brought into relation with an external being, whether it be in order to open myself to it or to shut myself off from it. If the qualities radiate around them a certain mode of existence, if they have the power to cast a spell and what we called just now a sacramental value, this is because the sentient subject does not posit them as objects, but enters in to a sympathetic relation with them, makes them his own and find in them his momentary law (loi momentanée). (PoP: 213–4) Having founded his account of perceptual realism in the opening chapters, the chapter on le sentir enters subsequently into some of the most obscure, indeed mysterious (and, of late, as Derrida’s text indicates, controversial) descriptions of the Phenomenology—even while preoutlining certain themes of The Visible and the Invisible.21 The silent language of percepts

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has become expressive and symbolic, indeed almost ‘sacramental,’ to use his trope in the above text. In one sense it still seemed phenomenologically clear; after all, what was at stake, as in the case of passive synthesis, was simply the account of rational motivation, the experiential unfolding of one thing out of another. Indeed it was precisely the “fluidity” in this unfolding that made possible phenomenology’s ‘operant reason’ (PoP: 50). Yet, for Merleau-Ponty, this unfolding or ex-plicatio meaningfully occurred, not only by preceding, but also by soliciting from beyond (and thus exceeding) the reflective capacities of the “analytic” subject. This excess occurred precisely because of, and through, the dispersion of le sentir itself, the “beckoning withdrawal” in the rhythm of sensation. Le Sentir, thus, is already a kind of Seinsproblem with its corresponding Seinsfrage. It involves an event that emerges not so much by the object’s immediately clear “speaking” to me but instead precisely by provoking ‘the reply to a question which is obscurely expressed’ (PoP: 214).22 Perception thus must be able to penetrate the rhythm of sensation in articulating the transcendence of the thing. Through it there emerges neither simply a statically informed matter, nor even simply a wellformed gestalt, but, more generally (and ontologically), a ‘symbolism in the thing’ (PoP: 319). While in ‘Eye and Mind’ Merleau-Ponty would say of Cartesian modernity that, in it, ‘nothing is left of the oneiric world of analogy,’ here it seems already effective, as Merleau-Ponty’s constant references to Proust or Cézanne obviate. Still, behind them, the Phenomenology itself had appealed to the symbolics of sensation in Romantic usage (and Herder in particular), one, it already noted that now has been ‘emptied of all mystery’ (PoP: 52). Hence we might wonder whether, rather than simply a descriptive return to lived origins, the Phenomenology was not already tacitly engaged in the readings of its own operative history. Such appeals to the mysteries of the sensuous have always astounded Husserl’s own commentators—both in their symbolic excesses and in the limitations they imply concerning Husserl’s account of reflection for their grasp.23 Indeed Merleau-Ponty’s account of le sentir leans more toward the ‘modulation’ or ‘distortion’ of Cézanne’s motif (which it invokes as its model) than it does to the already informed perceptual noema of Aron Gurwitsch, with whom Merleau-Ponty’s thought is often associated (PoP: 260). Here indeed, giving himself over to the modulation of color instead of exact form, ‘(i)n giving up the outline Cézanne was abandoning himself to the chaos of sensation’ (SNS: 13).24 And the result, to use his master concept, was a play in the ambiguity or ‘mystery’ of the world (PoP: xx).

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Still, for reasons that have become evident, granted the paucity (and the crisis) of our accounts, the reason for the necessity of such ambiguities is not only perceptual but also historical, that is, theoretical. Here, too, ‘the experience of chaos, both on the speculative and the other level, prompts us to see rationalism in a historical perspective’ and ‘to seek a philosophy which enables us to comprehend the upsurge of reason in a world that it has not made’ (PoP: 56).25 If the object is said to naturally “speak” to us in its transcendence, and thus beyond reflective adequacy, we still need to theoretically articulate such “speech” (PoP: 131). As has been seen, the Phenomenology’s realism had initially simply understood this task as the task of the translator. Husserl’s lived or operative intentionality is seen as a profounder account of intentionality than that of the Kantian account, ‘furnishing the text which our knowledge tries to translate into words’ (PoP: xviii). The “speech” of perception is thus understood as ‘an original text which carries its meaning within itself,’ which, as he puts it following Werthheimer’s Gestalt theory, all interpretations are ‘all trying to translate’ (PoP: 21:12). In one sense everything still seems intact. Notwithstanding his misgivings on other counts, here the account still understands phenomenology classically in terms of the noiesis-noema polarity, still understands a strict distinction between the lived and the expressed as parallel stratae.26 Its theoretical protocols still enframe the pretext of the lived outside its own genetic explication, its own expressivity. Correspondingly, it has yet to grasp the depth or expressivity of sensation—or even, to use Husserl’s bare terms, the problem of the ‘the stimulus’ of sensation itself.27 But the obscurities and elucidations of le sentir (among other issues) had already laid the ground for doubting the translator’s model. As Walter Benjamin put it, ‘no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original.’28 Or, as Merleau-Ponty quoted Baudelaire elsewhere, ‘the imperfection of languages consists in their plurality, the supreme one is lacking’ (S: 51). Now this might seem simply to import foreign consideration into the task at hand. But The Visible and the Invisible directly confronts the difficulty of this ‘model’ for which ‘to understand is to translate into disposable (disponible) significations a meaning first held captive in the thing and the world itself’ (VI: 36). The failure of this model has now become evident: But this translation aims to convey the text; or rather the visible and the philosophical explicitation of the visible are not side-by-side as two sets

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of signs, as a text and its version in another tongue. If it were a text, it would be a strange text, which is directly given to us all, so that we are not restricted to the philosopher’s translation and can compare the two. And philosophy for its part is more and less than a translation: more, since it alone tells us what the text means; less, since it is useless if one does not have the text at one’s disposal. (VI: 36) If this last work had begun by claiming that thought could not ignore its apparent history, it is at this point that he explicitly invokes the account of an operant history, a reading between the lines of our conceptual inheritance. Such a history involves always a “coherent deformation,” of the past, to use his terms borrowed from Malraux. It also involves Merleau-Ponty’s own “deformation” of Husserl’s account of tradition and Stiftung, one that acknowledges, not only its necessities, but contingencies (S: 59).29 Speech, as part of our operant history, is thus less the translation of a preexpressive strata than the support of the imaginary, rendering the fragments of visible through the articulation of the possible. It emerges precisely as ‘history, that is, variation of a conventions always vorgegeben’ (NC: 127). As has become evident, these terms acknowledge, in echoing the variability of phenomenological possibility, both the fluidity and the structural constraints of linguistic possibility. To return to Husserl: if we never confront a pure sensation, precisely this ‘pure impurity’ entails that we never confront a pure object. This is perhaps the full meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘rehabilitation’ of Husserl’s transcendental aesthetic, in which, as ‘with all objectivities, we are led back from the categorial objectivities to the sensuous.’30 Here MerleauPonty declared, ‘Husserl rediscovers sensible being as the universal form of brute being,’ terms imported from Schelling (S: 172). But (like Schelling) its implications lead him to deny the axiomatics of analytic reflection. Husserl’s thought, to speak Fichtean, still hovers in a certain Weschselspiel. Husserl’s account remains as much attracted by the ‘the haecceity of Nature as by the vortex of absolute consciousness’ (S: 165). But as Merleau-Ponty puts it in the Working Notes, “sensoriality=transcendence” and “depth is urstiftit” (VI: 219). Yet if we abandon reflective identity or epistemic “analyticity” what resources remain to phenomenology? The simple answer is that this is the complicated, some would say contradictory, theoretical field that Merleau-Ponty left unfinished. Now we must see how far its famous ‘intertwining’ can be unraveled. In the first place in the just cited working note Merleau-Ponty appeals to color.

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Each “sense” is a “world”. . . . Sensoriality: for example, a color, yellow; it surpasses itself of itself. . . . The alleged “contradiction” between the yellow as some thing and the yellow as the title of a world: this is not a contradiction for it is precisely within its particularity as yellow and through it that the yellow becomes a universe or element—That a color can become a level, a fact become a category . . . the veritable movement (marche) toward the universal. The universal is not above, it is beneath (Claudel). (VI: 217–8) Now how is this to be understood? From the beginning, Kant’s third Critique and its experience before which we are lacking a ready-made concept had furnished a model for perception as an originating knowledge (PoP: 43).31 It would continue to do so at the end. But first we should acknowledge the extent to which Kant’s third Critique was not on MerleauPonty’s side: it had denied the Phenomenology’s realist model in which the things immediately speak to us outright. Kant acknowledges a certain analogy between visual art and gesture in speech, an analogy in which painting ‘makes the thing itself speak, as it were, by mime.’ But what he next states is inevitably fatal to its cause, associating it not only with transcendental illusion but a certain animism: ‘This is a very common play of our fancy, whereby to lifeless things is attributed a spirit that corresponds to their form and speaks through them.’32 If Merleau-Ponty were to turn to expressivism here, if he were to defend a ‘figured philosophy’, he would need to abandon, and he did, as has been seen, the realist metaphysics of speaking things. In a number of settings Merleau-Ponty appeals to Kant’s aesthetic idea or (and thus again the productive imagination) as articulating the ‘monogram’ of nature (N: 42; cf. S: 165).33 But the relation at stake between sensibility and understanding would now lead back, not to an originary silent experiential level, but to a complicated intertwining in which intuition and concept, language and world, Being and Logos would be conjoined by a strange differential or écart. Thereby Merleau-Ponty began to outline an ‘operative imaginary which is part of our institution, and which is indispensible to the definition of being itself’ (VI: 85). The latter in turn is indispensable to our reckoning with the ‘barbarous source’ from which images and text, concepts and intuitions emerge. Hence then Merleau-Ponty’s almost inevitable path toward Schelling, toward Naturphilosophie—and still toward dogmatism many would claim. Indeed Derrida’s treatment of Merleau-Ponty’s claim to the coincidence of partial coincidence, to the intertwining of the visible and the invisible, reads like just such a charge. One might simply charge that Merleau-Ponty’s turn to Schelling (or Hegel) at the end of his career

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always invoked its speculative account of imagination, where, the imagination becomes ‘the speculative faculty par excellence,’ as art becomes the sensuous manifestation of the absolute, to use Hegel’s terms.34 His account of sensuousness as transcendence surely is closer to the post-Kantians than to Kant himself, who denied that sensation could be sublime, could marche beyond its particularity.35 Even here, however, we may find, as MerleauPonty said of the task of the historian, that in ‘the work, this monogram’ there emerges a ‘structure of the event’ that ‘does not prevent the plurality of interpretation but in fact (is) the deepest reason for this plurality’ (EM: 179). But how is this so?36 Almost inevitably, we are returned to the problem of reading itself. The meaning or ‘monograms’ revealed through operative intentionality are not simply produced by us but contain, as he puts it in his final publication on Husserl, ‘a distant meaning which is not yet legible (lisable) in them as the monogram or stamp of thetic consciousness’ (S: 165). But in what sense are they readable and what would such a reading be like? This is a complicated itinerary that unfolds in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Here we can again briefly recur to a text from Merleau-Ponty’s inaugural lecture, In Praise of Philosophy. It confirms the expressivist rhythm of le sentir itself but likewise articulates therein the lineaments (or stylistics) of our conceptual genesis prefigured in Husserl’s fliezende typic and its motivated unfolding or ex-plicatio. The thing itself results ‘as Bergson happily said’ in the experience of concordance, as a ‘reading, the art of grasping a meaning in a style’ (IPP: 19–20). The reading involves ‘a double reference to the mute being which it interrogates and to tractable meaning (maniable signification) which is derived from it’ (IPP: 19–20). It is in this sense the Cogito is an experience, but “in any case a cultural being” (PoP: 369). The appearance of the thing itself would thus emerge out of the convergence of two “fluidities”: that attending linguistic or significative and historical possibility and the plurality of the thing’s aspect. Hence emerges their intertwining as two forms of shadowing-forth (Ab-schattungen) (PW: 37n). The reference to Bergson, as has been noted, is one to which Merleau-Ponty returned several times in the ensuing years, Bergson’s analysis of Ravaisson’s discussion of Leonardo’s ‘serpentine’ line. The drawing of such a line would reveal the whole of the living being in question, albeit not by simply tracing (or reproducing) its visible outline. Rather, Bergson states, the painter reveals something beyond the canvas ‘where would be revealed all at once, gathered into a single word, the secret we shall never fi nish reading (lire), phrase by phrase, in the enigmatic physiognomy.’37

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Such a stylistics then might provide a clue for the rapprochement between Husserl and Kant alluded to above. This is not merely an aesthetic matter for Merleau-Ponty. It is equally crucial that, while Merleau-Ponty trades upon Bergson’s articulemes here, he immediately criticizes Bergson’s philosophy of consciousness for disconnecting intuition from language and for understanding it in terms of immediacy (IPP: 67).38 Even more is at hand in the inaugural lecture: he cites the readings at stake here as an alternative to Geuroult’s account of the history of philosophy. Geuroult was similarly stuck in a certain immediacy, understanding philosophy as merely a matter of analyzing problems and solutions, once again proceeding by the myth of uninterpreted analysis. This account is not simply transitory in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. As has become evident, when Merleau-Ponty outlines the project of The Visible and the Invisible and claims again that he will rely again on an operant or structural history over against Gueroult, there, too, it will be a matter of ‘reading between the lines’ of mere empirical or conventional history (VI: 187–8). Clearly we will need to take the figure of such reading as a development or ‘historical motivation’ of an ‘interrogative ensemble’ seriously if we are to grasp the rational status of Merleau-Ponty’s final thought. In some sense this means, to use another of his characterization from Bergson, that we will need to see his final account of the cosmology of the visible not simply as matter of description but as a historical reading, a ‘cosmological construction (construction cosmologique)’ (IPP: 16). The Phenomenology had already said of science in this regard that ‘prosaic, and particularly scientific utterance is a cultural entity which at the same time lays claim to translate (traduire) a truth relating to nature in itself. Now we know that this is not the case, for modern criticism of the sciences has clearly shown the constructive element in them (ce que’elles ont de constructif )’ (PoP: 390). Merleau-Ponty had not yet considered how such criticism affected his own model of translation and the constructions of phenomenology themselves, neither of which would be unresolved before he confronted the character of institution and what he called in his reading of Schelling, the idea of a ‘non-prosaic conception of consciousness’ (N: 50).39 It was Schelling, after all, who had proclaimed that Nature should be understood as ‘the Mind made visible, Mind the invisible Nature.’40 But immediately before it, he proclaimed, ‘Nature speaks (spricht) to us.’41 We can forego adjudicating either Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Schelling (often in turn mediated by readings of Jaspers and Lowith) or Derrida’s reading of Merleau-Ponty. I will simply point out that what has become

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clear is that such a reading concerns neither simply an intuition nor its translation but equally the development of a certain experiential path in Merleau-Ponty’s final work. Its “convergences” allow both for the stylistics of the thing itself to emerge as a construct (or “curvature” in the history of signs) and the opening of “experience” itself as an “explosive” concept (HLP: 42; VI: 265). The Phenomenology had concluded, in parsing the noncoincidence of perception, that ‘the perceiving subject must, without relinquishing his place and his point of view, and in the opacity of sensation (l’opacité de sentir), reach out towards things to which he has, in advance, no key, and for which he nevertheless carries within himself the project, and open himself to an absolute Other which he is making ready in the depth of his being’ (PoP: 325–6). The Phenomenology further articulates this through reference to Herder’s sensorium commune, a layer of experience with which we can coincide (PoP: 238).42 Understood still in terms of a body-subject, it remains not yet sufficiently parsed in terms of transcendence, excess, difference, and what will become the ubiquitousness and problematic “element” of the flesh. The idea of such a founding body-subject had still precluded Merleau-Ponty from recognizing the path through which such rehabilitation might be opened up. If The Visible and the Invisible came almost inexorably to the ‘Schellingian’ conclusion that ‘Nature is the mind made visible and mind the invisible nature,’ it never simply identified the two: ‘partial coincidence,’ too, remained inexplicable outside of the operative history from which it emerged. The philosophy of écart, in short, was never an Identitätsphilosophie. Nature instead was less the fulfilled gestalt of form and matter than the gestaltung, the opening and not the parousia of mind’s self-recuperation.43 The gestalt too ‘is already transcendence’: no longer an immediate meaning that provides the resolution to a problem but its institution or ‘pathway’, an ‘open register’ (VI: 195, 206). Yet, not without irony, this recuperation occurs still by a path that led through the expositions of Hegel—just as inevitably as Merleau-Ponty’s Nature lectures led on to lectures on Hegel.44 There he still acknowledged the necessity of the path of experience, of interrogation and intuition, that is, that ‘the only justification of the absolute is the conquest of this order of the phenomenon’ (PNP: 63). As has been seen, here historical signification and intuition converge upon the (stylistics) of truth, ‘disclosing, rectifying each by the other, by organizing the Ineinander’ (VI: 116). This Ineinander is again the very Ineinander of the touching and the touched upon which he modeled both reflection and the flesh, a cohesion always underway and ‘never realized in fact’ (VI: 147). At

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stake is a logic of écart, or to use Manfred Frank’s term for the Romantics, still perhaps a ‘differential’ theory of experience and judgment.45 The sensible here would not be surpassed by the intelligible, by Sinn, and hence we will not follow Hegel through to the end. Like “Aufhebung,” Hegel remarked, “Sinn” was another of those ‘wondrous words’ connecting two ‘opposite meanings’ that internally expressed an identity. ‘On the one hand it means the organ of immediate apprehension, but on the other hand the significance, the thought, the universal underlying this thing.’46 Looking at the same phenomenon of usage, Wittgenstein concluded to the contrary: ‘But how is it even possible for us to be tempted to think that we use a word to mean at one time the color known to everyone—and at another the “visual impression” which I am getting now.’47 Instead of being surpassed (or dissolved) Merleau-Ponty’s écart wagered that in the moment of reversibility the sensible would envelop us as our other side. Moreover the “intelligible” or the invisible would never simply transcend its sensuous embodiment. But equally it became evident that the sensible then can no longer be seen as a simple (or monistic) phenomenon, readily available for analysis—nor even without history. It is the event of the opening (or the interruption) of the Ineinander itself. As has been noted, the Phenomenology at one point pointed to the experience of a stone in the Tuilleries wall ‘entirely without history’: but this was a myth, both experientially and conceptually (PoP: 293). Indeed, MerleauPonty came to understand that the l’histoire sauvage that then emerged would leave neither experience nor concept unaffected. It required that we articulate their ‘intertwining’ anew in such a way that left neither term of their “chiasm” unaffected. Just as consciousness would not be adequately captured by a thought in full possession of itself, the thing itself could not be understood simply as a simple sensible presence: both in fact would be intertwined in a l’histoire sauvage (IPP: 174–5). Here the sensible could no longer be understood as a pure impression in which the things speak immediately to the understanding but would also contain the ‘pathways’ or ‘gougings’ through which it becomes instituted or rendered visible, outlined and sketched-out (dessin) [EM: 184; S: 172].48 Moreover, such terms are used by Merleau-Ponty to characterize the articulations of Husserl’s eidetic, whose “hieroglyphs” do not coincide with its object but only produces an “essence” that ‘re-produces the sketch (le dessin) of it’ (S: 179). All of this occurs, as has become evident, by the intertwining and the typic of two converging fluidities: that of the fluidity of linguistic possibility and the plurality of the world’s aspects. Hence: ‘Sensible being is not only things but also everything sketched-out there (s y’dessine), even virtually,

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everything which leaves its trace there, everything which figures there, even as divergence (d’écart) and a certain absence’ (S: 172). In this sense it is perhaps both Hegel, who had claimed that nature was there at the first day and Schelling, who claimed that at stake was the barbarous source that exceeds the immanences of such a reflective or conceptual grasp (N: 49). But it was still not disconnected from Husserl. At one point Merleau-Ponty states of color: ‘what is indefinable in the quale, in the color, is nothing else than a brief, preemptory manner of giving in one sole something, in one sole tone of being (ton de l être) visions past, visions to come, by whole clusters’ (VI: 135). Unlike Husserl’s melodic tone or “Nowpoint ( Jektspunkt),” here immanence is dispossessed; color, like sensibility in general is already transcendence (VI: 219, 231). It already emerges through a vorhabe, a Nicht Urpäsentierbar, a past that will never be immanently present—and a reflection that emerges only as ecstasis, its expressions always indirect: sketches or hieroglyphs (VI: 49, 249). Uncannily, granted his prominence in Merleau-Ponty’s late work, we can note in closing, that this combinatoire of Schelling and Hegel (or Husserl) may also include Paul Klee. Combining the very logic we have outlined, a fragment in the Working Notes states, L’ê∙ tre sauvage involves ‘the image of a being that, like Klee’s touches of color, is at the same time older than everything and of the first day (Hegel)’ (VI: 210–11). Granted the itinerary we have followed here, and Merleau-Ponty’s deliberative passage through Hegel and Schelling in his final writings, this fragment becomes a complicated syntagm that bears unraveling. The Nature lectures from just a few years previous, had said that, for Hegel, ‘Nature is there from the first day’ (Lucien Herr), whereas Schelling allows thinking of Nature as ‘having a life’ (N: 49). Klee’s patches of color contained both, both the paths or Gestaltungen of Hegel’s past and the genesis of Schelling’s present. That is because as the Working Notes state, ‘The sensible, Nature, transcend the past present distinction, realize from within a passage from one to another’ (VI: 267). It does so both belying the simple oppositions of intuition and concept: ‘Nature is at the first day’: it is there today. ‘This does not mean: myth of the original indivision and coincidence as return’ (VI: 267). In the syntagm we are tracing Merleau-Ponty further articulated a dialectic between these thinkers themselves. The Nature lectures concluded that Hegel is right against Schelling’s speculative constructions; but Schelling is right against the overly rationalized dialectic of consciousness. Hence their reciprocal dogmatisms of Logic and Gnosticism (N: 49). Here is where the Nature lecture also claims that Schelling is trying for a nonprosaic conception of consciousness, ‘a Reason that is non-prosaic, a poetry that is not

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irrational’ (N: 50). Not simply an architecture of noesis-noema, it involved, to use Klee’s terms, fusing the architectonic and the poetic to articulate the differentiation of the visible and the invisible (VI: 273).49 Eye and Mind, likewise explicating an event that transcends the pastpresent distinction, quotes Michaux’s statement that ‘sometimes Klee’s color seems to have been borne slowly upon the canvas, to have emanated from some primordial ground, exhaled at the right place like a patina or mold’ (EM: 181–2; cf. NC: 171). Like every case where transcendence is at stake, color remains a matter not readily explicated. The Phenomenology’s encounter with le sentir had already glimpsed this, implicitly denying Hegel’s metaphysical identities regarding Sinn. Color is neither a mere impressionist instant, a ‘Now point,’ nor an object of reflective regard. It emerges out of the beckoning withdrawal in the (temporal) rhythm and transcendence of le sentir. Husserl’s pointillist Jetzpunkt, the correlate of his realist philosophy of essence, remains in this respect, like his mathematized conventional diagram of temporal flow that provided its analogy, ‘a positivist projection of the vortex of temporal differentiation’ (VI: 231, 195). Color emerges instead from ‘the rhythm of the event of the world’ (VI: 196). But Merleau-Ponty immediately adds, tacitly still referring to Bergson’s reading of the ontological genesis of Leonardo’s serpentine line: the ‘winding (serpentement)’—and unwinding—of the world (VI: 196). Like transcendence, color remains everywhere uncanny in Klee. Notwithstanding Klee’s pervasive ironies, both were never far away—and yet never near enough.50 Both transcendence and time could be (rhythmically) preserved only by acknowledging the mystery of an unapproachable withdrawal. Fittingly, this was true of both cases, both the ‘abstractions’ and ‘ironies’ that accompanied transcendence as well as the concrete enigmatic or ‘primordial’ presence of color. Merleau-Ponty had claimed of Husserl’s ‘shadow’: ‘originally a project to gain intellectual possession of the world, constitution becomes increasingly, as Husserl’s thought matures, the means of unveiling a back side of things (un envers des choses) that we have not constituted’ (S: 180). Here we might also find Klee’s famous pronouncement that ‘Color possesses me (Die Farbe hat mich), I don’t pursue it,’ glossed by Merleau-Ponty as the Stiftung of painting by nature (NC: 55).51 While he insisted, perhaps more than anyone before him, on the temporal character of painting, Klee remained one of color’s strongest advocates in painterly modernism. Despite the virtue and brilliance of his graphic line, he continually attested that color caused him the most trouble. Perhaps because Klee, too, knew that ‘sensoriality=transcendence’ to, use Merleau-Ponty’s terms, or, to use Heidegger’s terms, returning to what he

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called Nietzsche’s new interpretation of the sensuous, that ‘sensuality contains its beyond in itself.’ The color yellow already portends the intelligible, the invisible—without ever becoming other than itself. The invisible is not ‘an other visible “possible” or “possible” visible for an other: that would be to destroy the inner framework that joins us to it.’ Instead: ‘The invisible is there without being an object’ (VI: 229). This was the “rehabilitation” of the sensible: it would no longer be dissolved, subsumed, or made aufgehoben within the intelligible, constructed on a model other than itself. Indeed this was why Merleau-Ponty claimed at one point, ‘There is no intelligible world, there is (il y a) the sensible world’ (VI: 214). There is only the sensible and its invisible or shadow.52 As Klee himself put it, in relation to the artistic subject, ‘the subject in itself is certainly dead’: instead ‘sensibility [die Emptfindung] comes first.’53 Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty had learned (and arguably at points they had learned it from Klee) that, granted what is at stake in the intertwining of color and line, it can no longer be a matter of simply coinciding, resembling, representing—let alone translating. Again, ‘modern painting like modern thought generally,’ Merleau-Ponty realized, ‘obliges us to admit a truth which does not resemble things, which is without any external model and without any predestined instruments of expression, and which is nevertheless truth’ (S: 57). Moreover, it was not simply a matter of delivering the appearances, but again a coherent deformation or disarticulation waged on behalf of the possible. It was precisely a matter of rendering the invisible visible. What Klee also realized (and MerleauPonty had come a long way in glimpsing it himself) was that it would require not only poetic or descriptive inspiration but the architectonic or constructive for its grasp: this too is part of the ontology of the sensuous. 54 This, too, is part of our Zwischenreich, to use a term Klee equally applied to color itself.55 This, too, is part of an ontology of the sensible and accompanies what Merleau-Ponty called at the outset ‘the problem of finite sensoriality’: we by no means simply intuit the reality of things; the things do not simply “speak” to us simpliciter so that we might translate them ‘according to the words of Descartes into the “thought of seeing and feeling’ ” (VI: 36). Instead we have left such literal or simple prosaic pretensions behind. This is why in painting we can find a figured philosophy. In this we recall that even Klee’s colors are by no means intuitionist or impressionist, that the constructive had taken him beyond such prosaic immanences, in relying upon the rhythmic (and abstract) articulations through which transcendence might still be rendered visible. 56 Similarly one of Merleau-Ponty’s Working Notes acknowledges that we discover the

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Lebenswelt, this experiential past that was always present, only by philosophical construction: Iteration of the Lebenswelt: we are making a philosophy of the Lebenswelt, our construction (in the mode of “logic”) makes us rediscover this world of silence. Rediscover in what sense? Was it already there? How can we say that it was there since nobody knew it before the philosopher said it?— But it is true that it was there. . . . [I]t is philosophy that discloses it. (VI: 170) But how? Eye and Mind returns to the issue of readability at the conclusion of its discussion of Descartes. He writes, having declared again that ‘vision reassumes its fundamental power of showing forth more than itself’, that ‘light must have its imaginaire’ (EM: 178). This means that ‘(l)ight’s transcendence is not delegated to a reading mind (un esprit lectuer) which deciphers the impacts of the light-thing upon the brain and which could do this quite as well if it never lived in a body.’ But what he says next is equally decisive for its grasp, denying that the things will now simply speak for themselves: ‘No more is it a question of speaking of space and light: the question is to make space and light which are there speak to us (mais de faire parler l’espace et la lumiere qui sont la)’ (EM: 178). We have seen that no more than this takes place by a simple (analytic) reading can this occur by a simple “speaking” or describing. It is, as he quite precisely states, a matter of ‘making the things speak.’ It is a question, to use Klee’s terms, of making visible (macht sichbar).57 Here, too, it seems, ‘philosophy . . . paints without colors in black and white’ (S: 22). Such “painting” is always a sketch (dessin) of things, as he said of Husserl’s essence. Or, as he once cited Cézanne, ‘as soon as you paint, you draw’ (WP: 51). Philosophy does so, however, neither without critique nor without invention. Indeed the figure of such a sketching-out (Aufzeichnung) belongs to a long standing itinerary in the history of transcendental imagination, from Kant and Fichte to Heidegger and onward.58 What does this mean for philosophy, and in particular the figured philosophy Merleau-Ponty had sought, reinvoking the figure of ‘making things speak’ that Kant eschewed? How are we to understand the readings that, instead of rendering the body unnecessary, would precisely emerge from thought’s incarnation? If we return to the Working Note on the transcendence of sensoriality, the ‘worlding’ of the color yellow, he states: What is proper to the sensible (as to language) is to be representative of the whole, not by a sign-signification relation, or by the immanence of

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the parts in one another and in the whole, but because each part is torn up from the whole, comes with its roots, encroaches upon the whole, transgresses the frontiers of the others. It is thus that the parts overlaps (transparency), that the present does not stop at the limits of the visible (behind my back). (VI: 218) Neither sensation nor language is overseen by the acts of a disembodied reflective act. In both cases, as he said of the visible-seer, there is ‘a perspective, or better: the world itself with a certain coherent deformation’ (VI: 262). In both cases it is a matter of interrogating and articulating a past through which the present shadows-forth as its Vorhabe. It is true in both cases, as Klee had said of color, that I am possessed as much as I am the possessor: in both cases the possibilities of meaning precede me, emerging through the ‘polymorphism’ of l’histoire sauvage. Throughout, the philosopher depends upon the possibilities of a past, ‘words he would not assemble.’ This includes, however, a nonempirical past that is not a present, its latent possibility—and the possibility of the past’s transformation by means of something like a ‘good error’ and the ‘occult trading of the metaphor’ (VI: 125). Nevertheless: ‘It is only the excess of what we live over what has already been said’ (S: 83). Hence in its ‘exchange’ or Wechsel the intertwining or reversibility of ‘activity-passivity’ reemerges. This is not to say that either of these terms has been made aufgehoben in the speculative proposition, but that language takes place within a historical, chiasmatic field: its operant reason is neither simply manner nor method, poetics nor architectonics, intuition nor inference. If one ventures that language is not deceptive, that it remains ‘a manner of making the things themselves speak (une maniere de faire parler les choses meme),’ it is also the case that ‘truth is not coincidence, nor mute’ (VI: 125). What Merleau-Ponty ventured in the expressive capacity of expression is that this ‘operative language’ and the ‘operative history’ it entails might still make possible—and justify— philosophy’s speaking not only of language or theory but ‘the pre-language (pre-language) and of the mute world which doubles them’ (V: 126).59

Notes

Introduction 1

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Invoking such models may seem itself to invoke the “model” of philosophy as construction (VI: 166). As will become evident, Merleau-Ponty’s increasing emphasis on language also led him to put increasing emphasis on the language of philosophy and the history of philosophy. Indeed it was part of our need for ‘a complete reconstruction of philosophy’ (VI: 193). As is evident from later working notes, part of such a reconstruction led him to questions of modeling in the history of philosophy (VI: 273) as well as the conceptual architecture that comprised it (e.g. VI: 261, 270). It is clear that the question of the theoretical architectonics of phenomenology acquired an urgency that it clearly lacked in the early work. Even the silence of the Lebenswelt is disclosed only through philosophy’s construction (VI: 170). As will become further evident, this attention to the relation between system and horizon of appearance continues certain themes taken over from Eugen Fink. Later, Merleau-Ponty will himself restate the problem: ‘Why does my life succeed in drawing itself together in order to project itself in words, intentions, and acts. This is the problem of rationality’ (PoP: 408). Strictly taken, such “drawing together” is the classical problem of transcendental synthesis. But Merleau-Ponty has denied the classical responses: ‘The reader is aware that, on the whole classical thought tries to explain the concordances in question in terms of a world in itself, or in terms of an absolute mind’ (PoP: 408). See Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Gloucester Mass.: Peter Smith, 1978). Baudelaire, trans. Martin Turnell (London: Horizon, 1949). For Sartre, the only responsible and authentic language of l’homme engagé was prosaic, clear, and demonstrable, which in turn remains transparent to intention; poets, on the other hand, explore the opacity of words, without achieving real reference. For further discussion of this issue see my “Of Sartre, Klee, Surrealism and Philosophy: Towards A ‘Non-Prosaic’ Conception of Consciousness,” in Issues in Interpretation Theory, ed. Pol Vandevelde (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006), pp. 37–71. Sartre subsequently wrote an extensive monograph on Mallarmé that was never published. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire, trans. Martin Turnell (London: Horizon, 1949), pp. 179–85. In volume two of this work, Phenomenology, Institution, and History, I shall provide an alternate reading of stoicism in Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of Montaigne and Descartes.

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See Maurice Blanchot’s reply to Sartre, ‘Baudelaire’s Failure,’ in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 132–61. See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,’ in Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 116–200. Benjamin had also privileged Baudelaire. See his Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1976). One might, for example, consider how proximate Benjamin’s account of the ‘schock’ of the image (111–20), an account with origins in Bergson, Proust, and Freud, is to Merleau-Ponty’s account of écart in the final writings. One might consider, that is, how Merleau-Ponty’s account is similarly related to these authors (as much as Husserl or Heidegger) and how it functions in what Merleau-Ponty called ‘historical imagination’ (AD: 17). See Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator,’ Selected Writings, p. 259. Friederich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 21 (Athenaum Fragment 321). See my ‘On the Rationality of the Fragment,’ Extensions: Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), ch. 10. See my ‘Beyond the Speaking of Things: Merleau-Ponty and the Models of Kant’s Third Critique,’ Philosophy Today, 2008, supplement. See Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of A Transcendental Theory of Method, trans. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). The Phenomenology’s Preface refers twice to this work, detaching the account of phenomenological rationality from an ‘uninterested spectator’ and ascribing it to ‘the task of taking our own history upon ourselves’ (PoP: xx). Fink, too, had emphasized that the reduction is not a simple epistemic technique, that ‘once established is finished and complete once and for all’; instead, it is an ‘unceasing and constant theme of phenomenological philosophy.’ See ‘The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism,’ in R. O. Elveton, The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), p. 127. Fink also claimed that the rationality of phenomenology could not be understood as a formal problem but had to be related to ‘the greatest mystery of all, the mystery of the being of the world’ (109). This too acknowledges (without perhaps fully developing) the problematic status of phenomenological rationality. This ‘Kantian’ or critical reading of the Ideas also follows Fink, see ibid., p. 88. Athenaeum Fragment 84. See Manfred Frank, Das Individuell Allgemeine: Textstrukturierung und Interpretation nach Schleiermacher (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977). Likewise see my Tradition(s): Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 19–20, and ch. 5. Among Merleau-Ponty’s interpreters, perhaps Marc Richir has most focused on this post-Kantian background of phenomenology. See, for example, Le rien et son apparence: fondements pour la phenomenologie (Fichte: Doctrine de la science 1794/95) (Brussels: Editions Ousia, 1979). Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard, Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), pp. 121–7. See Renaud Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, trans. Ted Toadvine, Leonard Lawlor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 148.

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See Novalis, Fichte Studies, ed. Jane Kneller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 7. John Sallis aptly questioned whether Merleau-Ponty’s move beyond the determinations of reflection as outlined in Fichte and Kant did not in the end threaten to collapse into dogmatic coincidence. I am suggesting that Merleau-Ponty’s later work involves a retracing of the Romantics’ move beyond Fichte, albeit without collapsing into aestheticism. See John Sallis, Phenomenology and the Return to Beginnings (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1973), p. 113. Finally on Fink’s concerns over transcendental language, see Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, pp. 84–100. For a reading that connects Fink and Merleau-Ponty that also stresses the archive of post-Kantian Idealism, see Bernard Waldenfels, ‘L’Auto-Référence De La Phénoménologie’ in Eugen Fink: Actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle 23–30 juillet 1994, ed. Natalie Depraz, Marc Richir (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 63–74. See Merleau-Ponty, ‘Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard’s L’Oeuvre de Freud,’ trans. Alden L. Fisher in The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty, ed. Alden L. Fisher (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), p. 84. Walter Biemel, ‘The Decisive Phases in the Development of Husserl’s Thought’ in The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Writings, p. 167. See Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 89. Here I follow J. N. Findlay’s apt translation for Husserl’s account of the adumbration of perceptual objects, in which, granted its perspectival givenness, ‘the object is not given wholly and entirely as that which it itself is.’ Instead it unfolds sequentially and partially, a ‘continuous flux of fulfillment or identification’ and precisely, thereby, as ‘a mixture of fulfilled and unfulfilled intentions,’ resulting in a ‘partial coincidence’ lacking in completeness and determinability. ‘On this hinges the possibility of indefinitely many percepts of the same object, all differing in content.’ See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. II, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), pp. 712–14. In a number of settings, Merleau-Ponty invokes this analogy for the unfolding of language. See for example, PW: 37. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 122. Merleau-Ponty’s concern with this shadow to conceptual articulation and the operative interrogation that accompanies it again echoes the thought of Eugen Fink. See Fink’s 1957 ‘Operative Concepts in Husserl’s Phenomenology,’ trans. William McKenna in Apriori and World: European Contributions to Husserlian Phenomenology, ed. W. McKenna, M. Harla, L. E. Winters (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), pp. 56–70. Fink’s account also understands this operative intentionality dialectically. He does not, however, stress, as does Merleau-Ponty, its operative conceptual historicity; he does not understand it as an écart between the internal and external horizons of the work, nor does he stress its Vieldeutigkeit or polymorphism, both of which had emerged, as will be seen, from MerleauPonty’s account of institutions (Stiftungen). The latter, as will be seen, will be essential to the later work’s account (and advance) concerning phenomenological justification. As has been seen, however, the theoretical trope of this operative “shadow,” albeit undeveloped, remained already explicit in MerleauPonty’s work.

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Merleau-Ponty’s final Husserl lectures are more direct concerning Husserl’s account: ‘Tradition is forgetfulness of origins as empirical origins in order to be an eternal origin’ (HLP: 29). But he was clearly questioning throughout whether reactivation or strict iterability in the Husserlian sense were possible (or even desirable). Moreover there is some indication that, rather than the Crisis’s commitments to the iterative truths of philosophia perennis, a different conception of the rationality of science had driven this account. ‘Even in the sciences, an outmoded theoretical framework can be integrated into the language of the one which replaced it; it remains significant, keeps its truth’ (S: 10). As will become evident in later discussions of the dialectic, one of the first places Merleau-Ponty found such surpassing of classical or secondary truth was the relation between classical and non-Euclidean geometry or classical and Einsteinian physics (PW: 100). This example will perdure in his later more complete account of the classics, which transforms Marx or Husserl into secondary truths, ‘obligatory steps for those who want to go further’ (S: 10). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 80. The only exception Merleau-Ponty allows here are sciences that merely classify or ‘catalogue (thèories catalogues)’ (HLP: 27). Here, too, he may have departed from Husserl, whose exception at this point relates to ‘so-called descriptive’ empirical sciences. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 363. He would in any case depart from Husserl’s ‘intemporal formulations like unbedingte Allgemeingültigkeit’ or ‘unconditioned general validity’ (HLP: 30). See Heidegger’s account of the “remarkable ‘relatedness backward or forward’ ” movement of the hermeneutic circle in Being and Time, trans. John Macquar’rie, Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 28. It first arose as part of his response to the Munchhausen problem concerning foundations in epistemology and emerged as early as the 1919 War Emergency Semester Lectures. See Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2000), pp. 12–14. On Husserl’s account of the zigzag between intuition and concept, see Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. I, trans. J. N. Findlay (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 261. Also see Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences, p. 58. Merleau-Ponty still invokes Husserl’s term. See VI: 91. I stress the double intentionality at stake here, alluding to the double intentionality between the object and the flux at work everywhere in internal time consciousness, for Husserl. See Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991) p. 390–4. See Martin Heidegger, Supplements: From the Earliest Essay to Being and Time and Beyond, ed. John van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), p. 62. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Way to Language,’ in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 111. For further discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of Klee, especially in relation to the concept of the fragment, see my ‘On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful: Adorno and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Paul Klee,’ Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought, Vol. 5, 2003, pp. 201–20 and ‘Cresent Moon Over the Rational’: Philosophical Interpretations of Paul Klee (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming).

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Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 60. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 187. Kant’s contrast is between manner (modus aestheticus) and method (modus logicus), the one, having ‘no standard other than feeling,’ while the other ‘follows in all of this determinate principles.’ See for example, Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James Spencer Churchill, Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 363. See Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), p. 249. Ibid., pp. 179, 234. See Marc Richir, Recherches phénoménologiques IV, V: Du schématism phénoménologique transcendental (Brussels: Editions Ousia, 1983), p. 192. See, for example, Claude Imbert, Phénoménologies et langues formulaires (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992). Also see my ‘Beyond the Theatrum Philosophicum: The Mixed Message of Modern Systematics’ in Tradition(s) II Hermeneutics, Ethics and the Dispensation of the Good (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 224–33. For a discussion of recent debates see Mauro Carbone, ‘Flesh: Towards the History of A Misunderstanding,’ trans. Andrea Zhok, Duane H. Davis, Leonard Lawlor, Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought, Vol. 4, 2002, pp. 49–64. Again in the 1919 War Emergency Semester Lectures, Heidegger is perhaps the first to link description to the pure theoretical model of transcendental phenomenology, recognizing as a result that, in the latter’s denial, ‘there always remains the problem of the formulatability of what is seen.’ See Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, p. 94. Unlike Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger would ultimately turn to poetry for its articulation. Husserl claimed that ‘Nature, the body, and also interwoven with the body, the soul are constituted all together in a reciprocal relationship with one another’ (S: 177n) Merleau-Ponty could reread Husserl’s text in the fashion that he does precisely because he was aware of the legacy of dialectic in Husserl’s account of the reciprocal character (Wechselbezogenheit) or reciprocal play (Wechselspiel) of these elements, which could not be captured by simple analysis. Hence against Ideen II’s attempt to disentangle what is entangled, ‘(t)he idea of chiasm and Ineinander is on the contrary the idea that every analysis that disentangles renders unintelligible’ (VI: 268). The idea of disentangling, the idea of analysis, is inherently a breaking down into parts and ever more fundamental levels. Again MerleauPonty left Husserl’s foundationalist account of analytic phenomenology behind. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan Press, 1973), p. 289 (A282-3/B337-8). Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 162. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 289 (A282-3/B337-8). See Immanuel Kant, ‘Concerning the Ultimate Foundation of the Differentiation of Regions in Space,’ in Selected Pre-Critical Correspondence, trans. G. B. Kerferd, D. E. Walford (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), p. 168. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 447–8 (A504-5/B532-3).

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See for example, Husserl’s ‘Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, the Earth, Does not Move,’ trans. Fred Kersten, revised by Leonard Lawlor in HLP 131. Compare Merleau-Ponty’s defense of this account, once removed from ‘the project to gain intellectual possession of the world’ (S: 180). Novalis, Fichte Studies, p. 7. Merleau-Ponty, like Novalis, uses such terms on a number of occasions. See, for example, VI: 228. More proximate to Merleau-Ponty is Fink, who speaks precisely in these terms in characterizing the move from reductive analysis to ‘constructive’ phenomenology in the text the Phenomenology cites on its first page (PoP: vii). Such a phenomenology moves from static or egological analysis to its conditions or transcendental life, ‘a matter of the basic problem of the “given” to the “non-given”.’ See Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, p. 64. Fink further understands this relation with reference to Kant’s account of transcendental dialectic and the regulative employment of reason, thus concurring with Merleau-Ponty’s alignment of operative intentionality with Kant’s third Critique noted above. What is seemingly missing from Fink’s account and is involved in the account of reflection such cited, and more and more prevalent in MerleauPonty’s discussion of psychoanalysis, is the problem of transcendental illusion. Still Fink’s discussion of the problem of the unconscious, included in the appendices to Husserl’s Crisis, speaks precisely in terms of ‘the illusion of everyday given immediacy.’ See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, p. 387. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 378n (B: 422n). Merleau-Ponty remains proximate to Novalis, for whom all search for a simple principle would be like trying to square the circle. Being is only grasped indirectly as part of the endless search for its articulation. See Novalis, Fichte Studies, p. 168. Here again he remains proximate to Merleau-Ponty’s ambiguity: ‘We think of the I—as one, and it is in fact two . . .’ that are reciprocally determined. See p. 147. Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing? Trans. W. B. Barton Jr. Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1967), pp. 150–1. Ibid., p. 51. See F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), and p. 101. Novalis similarly understands ‘mere being’ as chaos. See Fichte Studies, p. 6. Still, one might ask whether the sensible has acquired the status of place-holder for such chaos in Merleau-Ponty’s work: ‘The sensible is precisely that medium in which there can be being without its have to be posited . . . The sensible is that: this possibility to be evident in silence, to be understood implicitly’ (VI: 214). Yet ‘the sensible world itself in which we gravitate, and forms our bond with the other, which makes the other be for us, is not, precisely qua sensible, “given” except by allusion’ (VI: 214). Even so, as will become further evident, this claim, too, gains its justification out of our operative history. For further discussion of Gadamer’s reliance on Goethe see my ‘Gadamer, Aesthetic Modernism, and the Rehabilitation of Allegory: The Relevance of Paul Klee,’ Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 34, 2004, pp. 45–72.

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From the outset this account had provided Merleau-Ponty with a tempered response to skepticism. Our experience retains warrant within its (motivated) context, but not unrestrictedly: not, that is, as an apodictic claim about being (PoP: 330). It is against the latter claim that Merleau-Ponty invokes fallibilism (or finitude). Indeed it is in this sense that he claims, now using chaos in a nonmythic sense: ‘The experience of chaos, both on the speculative and the other level, prompts us to see rationalism in a historical perspective . . .’ (PoP: 56). For Schelling, in accord with his Identitätsphilosophie, such chaos presents ‘the inner essence of the absolute . . . identity of absolute form with formlessness.’ See Philosophy of Art, p. 88. Merleau-Ponty will claim similarly of Sartre’s account of the prereflective cogito that ‘the ambivalence of the words conveys the meaning of a thought that can either remain itself or negate itself in the night of the In Itself but cannot find any inertia in itself’ (VI: 69). Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Myth of Mallarmé,’ in The Work of Fire, p. 34. As early as his 1939 ‘Das Problem der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls,’ a work Merleau-Ponty cites, Fink had declared that Husserl’s texts reveal their problem ‘as much between the lines as in the lines.’ See ‘Das Problem der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls,’ Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 180. The account of operative history in the working notes appeals to the same model over against historians of philosophy’s (e.g. Gueroult) reduction of works to formal or conceptual problems (VI: 187–8). Compare a similar statement in the Introduction to Signs: ‘In a sense, the highest point of philosophy is perhaps no more than rediscovering these truisms: thought thinks, speech speaks, the glance glances. But each time between the two identical words there is the whole spread (tout l’écart) that one straddles in order to think, speak, and see’ (S: 21). For further discussion of the logic of this extension see my Extensions: Essay on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism, ch. VII.

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See Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Departure and Return’ in Literary and Philosophy Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Collier Books, 1962) p. 149. Sections of the present chapter appeared in Research in Phenomenology, Vol. X. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Humanities Press, 1931), pp. 348–9. See Brice Parain, Recherches sur la nature et les fonctions du langage (Paris: Gallimard, 1942). Sartre, op. cit., pp. 195/216. Dominick LaCapra, A Preface to Sartre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 26. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 354. See PoP, p. 439.

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Claude Lefort, ‘Qu’est-ce Que Voir?’ in Sur une colonne absente: écrits autour de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 153. René Descartes, Meditations De Prima Philosophia (Paris: Vrin, 1978), p. 32. Sartre, ‘Departure and Return,’ p. 171. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., p. 169. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘L’Ecrivain Et Sa Langue’ in Situations IX (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), pp. 47–48. For further discussion of this text, see Hugh J. Silverman, ‘Sartre and Structuralism,’ International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, p. 342. Ibid. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 663. Ibid. See Jacques Taminiaux, ‘Merleau-Ponty from Dialectic to Hyperdialectic,’ Dialectic and Difference (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1985), p. 172. On Merleau-Ponty’s notion of inscription, see VI: 206. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 24. Ibid. Cp. Jacques Derrida’s assertion that ‘(t)he signifier will never by rights precede the signified in which case it would no longer be a signifier and the “signifying” signifier would no longer have a possible signified.’ Of Grammaology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 324n. Heidegger, op. cit. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Mallarmé and the Art of the Novel (1943),’ trans. RolandFrancois Lack in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 46. See Gèrard Granel, Le sens du temps et de la perception chez E. Husserl (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), p. 103. See Theodore Geraets, ‘Le Retour À L’Expérience Perceptive Et Le Sens Du Primat De La Perception,’ Dialogue, Vol. XV, No. 4, Dec., 1976. See Marc Richir, “La Defenestration,” L’Arc, No. 46, 1971. In a footnote to an article dating from 1947 that projects The Origin of Truth, the title, among others, given the notes to The Visible and the Invisible prior to March, 1959, Merleau-Ponty states: It would obviously be in order to give a precise description of the passage of perceptual faith into explicit truth as we encounter it on the level of language. We intend to do so in a work devoted to ‘The Origin of Truth.’ (SNS: 94n)

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See F. W. J. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Blowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 47. Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), p. 155. See Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), p. 382.

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Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 24. Adhemar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein, Über Farbennamenamnesie, Psycholische Forschung (1925). Ernst Cassirer, ‘Le langage et la constitution du monde des objets,’ Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique ( January 1934); and Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1929). Jean Piaget, La représentation de monde chez l’enfant (Paris: Alcan, 1926). Aron Gurwitsch, ‘Psychologie de langage,’ Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger, Vol. LXX (1935), pp. 399–439. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw Hill Company, 1966), p. 117. Referred to hereafter as “Course.” Cf. Course, p. 14. Cf. Course, p. 131. I invoke the Fichtean term, ‘Wechsel,’ deliberately here. While Merleau-Ponty continually understood these matters in terms of dialectic, I recall that the Fichtean terms emerges from a mathematical model: ‘Whether I chose to count backward or forward steps as positive quantities is in itself a matter of complete indifference, and depends on whether I wish to establish the first or the second total as the final result. So too in the Science of Knowledge. Whatever is negation in the self is reality in the not-self and vice versa.’ See J. G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heaths and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 129. At the basis of such a Wechsel is nonetheless a creative imagination that forces Fichte to acknowledge a spirit that cannot be communicated literally (250). If Merleau-Ponty doesn’t make this link between Fichte (or Schlegel) and the origin of dialectic, a book that very much influenced him does. See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 83, 215. Cf. Course, p. 66. Jacques Derrida, who will later claim that Saussure’s work opens the field of a general grammatology, emphasizes with regard to this text that it is the acoustic image and not the material sound that is Saussure’s object, obtainable, Derrida argues, only by a phenomenological reduction. See, for example, Of Grammatology, p. 63. Course, p. 112. See Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957). See Noam Chomsky, ‘Some Methodological Remarks on Generative Grammar,’ Word, No. 17 (1961). For an opposing view, see Roman Jakobson, ‘Boas’ View of Grammatical Meaning,’ American Anthropologist, Vol. LXI (1959). Course, pp. 92, 124. Course, p. 78. Course, pp. 14–15. See Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Question of the Subject,’ trans. Kathleen McLaughlin, in The Conflicts of Interpretation, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). Regarding this analysis in Signs, Ricoeur states: ‘The fact that the notion of language as an autonomous system is not taken into consideration

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weighs heavily on this phenomenology of speech’ (p. 249). Also see Jean François Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1971): ‘Merleau-Ponty is able to think language as expression . . . but he is not able to think language as discursive’ (p. 93 n). Roland Barthes, “intervention” in Prétexte: Roland Barthes: Colloque de Cerisy (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1978), p. 408. Ibid., “intervention,” p. 30. This move is also reflected in Barthes’ Inaugural Lecture at the College du France, Leçons (Paris: du Seuil, 1978) (my translation). Course, p. 77. Course, p. 98. Course, p. 169. Ibid., p. 170. Ibid., p. 165. The notion of the “speaking of language” is Heideggerean in origin (‘Die Sprache spricht,’ Unterwegs zur Sprache: Pfullinge, Neske, 1958, p. 13). This is a text to which Merleau-Ponty returned several times in his later period (e.g. TL 121; VI 250). At the same time, however, Merleau-Ponty’s concerns still emphasized the attempt to formulate an account of the speaker within the perspective that this paper sets out in detail above. This is a necessity that Heidegger recognizes in the above work, but delays: ‘At the proper time it becomes unavoidable to think of how mortal speech and its utterance take place in the speaking of language as the peal of the stillness of the di-ference’ trans. Albert Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 208. Course, pp. 133, 132. See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. II. Investigation IV. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Merleau-Ponty à la Sorbonne, Bulletin de Psychologie, 236 Novembre, 1964, p. 150. This text does not appear in John Wild’s translation of Les science de l’homme et la phenomenologie (published in PP). Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, p. 8. See PoP: 365. This notion belongs to Julia Kristeva’s description of the speaker’s involvement in the ‘heterogeneity of significative practices.’ See her Polylogue (Paris: du Seuil, 1977). See Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: The Citadel Press, 1968), p. 350. See the second volume of this work, Phenomenology, Institution, and History, Writings After Merleau-Ponty II, chapter one. The Phenomenology footnotes these terms to Fink. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 209. See Charles Taylor, ‘The Importance of Herder,’ in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). See, for example, Charles Taylor, ‘Embodied Agency’ in Merleau-Ponty: Critical Essays, ed. Henry Pietersma (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1989), “Intentionality” in The Explanation of Behavior (New York: Humanities Press, 1964), The Sources of the Self (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 460–6, or ‘The Validity of Transcendental Arguments,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. LXXIX, 1978–1979, pp. 150–65. See Richard Rorty, ‘Inquiry as Recontextualization,’ Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 103.

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See ‘Hesse and Davidson on Metaphor,’ Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth, p. 172. Compare Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on the “polymorphism” of babble (CAL: 11). This is again less a claim about linguistic naturalism than it is about its inventive potential. ‘The same relationship exists between babbling and language as between scribbling and drawing’ (ibid.). See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 13. See Wilhelm von Humbolt, Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 128. This linguistic “wholism,” that is, the claim that discrete reference depends on languages an institutional space, while still maintaining its links with intentionality and expressivism, is not without links with other wholisms. Compare for example Quine: ‘It is a mistake to think of linguistic usage as literalistic in its main body and metaphorical in its trimming. Metaphor or something like it governs both the growth of language and our acquisition of it. What comes as a subsequent refinement is rather cognitive discourse itself, at its most dryly literal.’ W. V. O. Quine, ‘A Postscript on Metaphor,’ On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sack (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 201. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘La Philosophie et La Politique sont solidaire,’ Parcours deux, ed. Jacques Prunair (Paris: Verdier, 2000), p. 303.

Chapter 3 1

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Compare Barbaras’ claim: ‘The study of painting allows Merleau-Ponty to open up a point of access to the pretheoretical terrain to which Husserl could only point. It therefore serves as a genuine phenomenological reduction, one freed of its idealistic implications; that is, it allows for the restoration of the originary perceptual soil.’ Renaud Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, trans. Ted Toadvine, Leonard Lawlor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 148. Sections of the present chapter were originally published in Philosophy Today, Vol. 28. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 369. See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. I, p. 261. See Edumund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, p. 58. The notion of de-aestheticization is to be found in the criticism of Harold Rosenberg—See, for example, ‘De-Aestheticization’ in The De-definition of Art (New York: Horizon Press, 1972). Here this term is provided another sense (perhaps more “literal”) in an attempt to place it within the context of a certain history—which would force a rereading upon Rosenberg’s use, and perhaps even a certain reversal, since he posits the term more affirmatively. Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, trans. A. Phillips McMahon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 9. Ibid., p. 48. Plato’s Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1974), p. 251 (607b).

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Plato, ‘Phaedrus,’ trans. R. Hackforth in The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 494 (248cf.). Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), p. 98. F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), p. 232. See my ‘Aesthetics and the Foundations of Interpretation: Schelling and the ˝ berraschung of the Work of Art,’ Extensions, ch. II. U Regarding Husserl, it would not be inappropriate here to apply his characterization of Galileo to Leonardo and all that comes after him: With Galileo the idea in question appears for the first time, so to speak, as full-blown; thus I have linked all our considerations to his name, in a certain sense simplifying and idealizing the matter.

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See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, p. 57. As an index for a “hermeneutic” of the scientific revolution, ‘rather than a proper name,’ as Derrida puts it, Galileo becomes ‘the exemplification of an attitude’ that has become explicit—in the same way perhaps that Leonardo articulates a similar space for modern painting, an “idealization” of an idealization. See Jacques Derrida, Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, p. 35. The difference, as will become apparent, is that at one point Merleau-Ponty says of Leonoardo’s attempt ‘to construct the beautiful,’ that ‘it was an illusion’ (EO: 39). Leonard, pp. 3, 5. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. II, p. 801. Also see Hegel, Philosophy of Nature (Part II of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, 183), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 31. See Hegel, Aesthetics, op. cit., pp. 801–4. Leonardo, p. 9. Ibid., p. 10. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Le Peintre sans Privilèges’ in Situations, IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 371. See, for example, Nelson Goodman, ‘Routes of Reference,’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 1, Autumn, 1981; Louis Marin, ‘Element pour une Semiologie Picturale’ in Etudes semiologiques (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (Boston: The Medici Society, 1926), p. 74 (V.8.I). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 182. Ibid., p. 185. See, for example, Edgard De Bruyne, L’Esthétique du môyen age (Louvain: Editions de l’Institute Supérieur de Philsophie, 1947), p. 86. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), p. 40. See Hegel, Aesthetics, p. 787. Leonardo, op. cit. See Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 40–9.

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See Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ in The New Age: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973). See my ‘Criticism and the Closure of Modernism,’ Substance 42, 1983. Joseph Kosuth, ‘Art after Philosophy, Part II,’ Studio International, Vol. 178, No. 916, November, 1969, p. 160. Ibid., Part 1 No. 916, October, 1969, p. 136: Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context—as art—they provide no information what-so-ever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that the particular work of art is art, which means a definition of art . . . One begins to realize that art’s art condition is a conceptual state.

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And, consistently, Kosuth, appealing still to its simply analytic status, ignoring both Hegel and Quine, argues that art is not concerned with physical properties of the object. Consequently, the ‘aesthetic,’ dependent upon the withdrawal of the sensible, and the ‘artistic,’ are two different things. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, p. 182. See Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, Vol. III: Modern Aesthetics, ed. D. Petsch (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), p. 446. Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin, Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968). Plutarch, De gloria Atheniensium 3. Quoted in Tartarkiewicz, ibid., Vol. I., p. 40. See Jean-FranÇois Lyotard’s comments on this “assertion” in ‘A La Place De L’Homme, L’Expression,’ Esprit, No. 383, Juillet-Aout, 1969, p. 170: In saying it, in verbalizing the opposition between the word and the image, in inventing the image and inventing perhaps writing, he inaugurated historicity . . .

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42 43 44 45

See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970), pp. 3–16. See John Searle, ‘Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation,’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 6, No. 3, Spring, 1980, pp. 481–8. See Jean Paul Sartre, 'Faces,' in The Writings of Jean Paul Sartre, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 68. Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 47–9. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, op. cit., p. 300. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 273. For further discussion of this issue, see my ‘Reading the Barbarous Source: Merleau-Ponty’s Interpretation of Schelling,’ forthcoming. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, p. 606 (A759: B787). Ibid., (A570: B599; A578: B607). Quoted in EM, p. 183. See Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 190. Compare Foucault’s remarks on Manet in ‘Fantasia of the Library’ in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bonchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 92–3.

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Michael Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, p. 203. Merleau-Ponty is seen as one of the last moments of the transcendental tradition in this text. My aim was to cleanse it (history) of all transcendental narcissism; it has to be freed from the circle of the lost origin, and rediscovered where it was imprisoned; it had to show that the history of thought could not have this role of revealing the transcendental moment that rational mechanics has not possessed since Kant, mathematical idealities since Husserl, and the meanings of the perceived world since Merleau-Ponty—despite the efforts that had been made to find it here.

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50 51 52

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55 56 57 58 59

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See Foucault, The Order of Things, p. xviii. René Magritte, Letter to Alphonse de Waelhens (April 28, 1962). Reprinted in Harry Torcyzyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1977), p. 55. Jean FranÇois Lyotard, ‘La Philosphie et la Peinture à une idée de la Postmodernité,’ Rivista di estetica 9, anno XXI, 1981, p. 10. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid. See Martin Heidegger, ‘The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,’ in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 58. Jean FranÇois Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970), p. 59. See Immanuel Kant ‘Concerning the Ultimate Foundation of the Differentiation of Regions in Space’ in Selected Precritical Writing, trans. G. B. Kerferd, D. E. Walford (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968). Beyond the Kantian point, namely that incongruent counterparts can be grasped only by means of an “internal difference” within a prior (absolute and whole original space), Merleau-Ponty is arguing that this whole itself is intelligible only through the ècart of the internal articulation. Moreover he is reading between the lines of Husserl’s account that the solipsistic body is incomplete apart from the others, that I grasp my body not as the center of the world but by divergence. See Ideas II, pp. 83–9. See Eribon, Michel Foucault, p. 155. See Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 29–30. G. W. F. Hegel Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1, p. 149. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 49. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, op. cit. p. 587 (A729: B757). On the notion of art as document, see N: 45. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 134. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Le Doute de Cézanne’ in Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1977), p. 43. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard’s L’Oeuvre de Freud,’ trans. Alden L. Fisher, The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty, p. 84. Jacques Lacan, ‘Merleau-Ponty: In Memoriam,’ trans. Wilfried Ver Eecke, Dirk de Schatter, Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, Vol. XVIII, 1982–1983. Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, pp. 33, 21.

Notes 65

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69 70 71 72

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See Foucault ‘Michel Foucault, C’était un nageur entre deux mots’ (Interview with Claude Bonnefoy), Arts loisirs 15 Octobre, 1966, p. 8. For further discussion of this issue see my ‘Cresent Moon Over the Rational:’ Philosophical Interpretations of Paul Klee, ch. 1. On the role of mathematics in Klee’s work, especially as it pertains to Heidegger, see ch. 4. See O. K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 248. Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), p. 313. Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, p. 41. Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, p. 389. See Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, p. 213. See Wassily Kandinski, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ in Complete Writing on Art, ed. K. Lindsay, P. Vergo (London, 1982). See Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 127. Cf. VI: 27: ‘Today we no longer believe nature to be a continuous system of this kind; a fortiori we are far removed from thinking that the islets of “psychism” that here and there float over it are secretly connected to one another through the continuous ground of nature.’ Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, p. 57. Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 235. Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. 21. See Edmund Husserl ‘Denial of Scientific Philosophy. Necessity of Reflection. The Reflection [Must Be] Historical. How is History Required?’ Appendix IX, The Crisis of European Science, p. 394.

Chapter 4 1

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Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 68. This is a translation of Le même et l’autre: quarante-cinq ans de philosophie francaise (1933–1978) (Paris: Minuit, 1979). Portions of the present chapter were previously published in Research in Phenomenology, Vol. XVII. Ibid., p. 67. See for example, Michel Foucault, ‘Introduction’ to George Canguilhem, On the Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978). Foucault argues that, following the introduction of phenomenology into France through Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations (1929), there is a line which divides French thought into two modalities: It is the line that separates a philosophy of experience, of sense, and of subject, and a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept. On the one hand, one network is that of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; and then another

160

Notes is that of Cavaillès, Bachelard and Canguilhem. In other words we are dealing with two modalities according to which phenomenology was taken up in France, when quite late—around 1930—it finally came to be if not known, at least recognized. (x)

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As will become evident, there is good reason to endorse Foucault’s reading of these modalities and some reason to deny the metaphor of the line through which they might be readily divorced or even simply opposed to one another. Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell (New York: Atheneum, 1972), p. 62. See Herman L. Van Breda, ‘The Husserl Archives at Louvain’ (TD: 155). See Jean Cavaillès, Méthode axiomatique et formalisme (Paris: Hermann, 1938) and La formation de la théorie abstraite des ensembles (Paris: Hermann, 1938). Cavaillès’ most important philosophical work, Sur la logique et la theórie de la science (Paris: Presses Univesitaires de France, 1946), has been translated and included in Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, ed. J. Kockelmans and T. Kisiel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). We have yet to integrate fully the significance of Cavaillès’ works and their importance in the wake of what Michel Serres has aptly called “l’échec” of Formal and Transcendental Logic. See Hermes ou la communication (Paris: Minuit, 1968), p. 67. That failure concerned its formal analytics, its deductive-nomological account of theoretization, as well as the failure of its verificationism as a result to provide strict foundations for transcendental phenomenology—as Cavaillès was perhaps the first to see, as did Jean Ladrière after him. See the latter’s phenomenological account in Les limitations internes des formalismes (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1957), p. 405. Saint Augustine, The City of God, Book 22 (London: Penguin, 1972). See for example, Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), pp. 87–8: Unreason (which is not mere lack of reason but something positive) is, like reason itself, a mere form into which objects can be fitted, so that both reason and unreason are ordered to the universal.

9

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G. W. F. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 369–70. See Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1981), p. 97. Lukács quotes the ending of this passage in affirmation of the ultimate dissolution of the incommensurable and difference. Compare Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of truth ‘as a process of indefinite verification’ that necessitates a ‘step into the unknown’ in relation to Lukács in Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 52–3. Hence the close proximity between Merleau-Ponty’s account of epistemology and his accounts of history and politics begin to become apparent. We will return to the issue in the second volume of this work. Similar issues (and differences with Lukács) arise in Merleau-Ponty’s later reading of Schelling. See N: 50. See Gaston Bachelard’s discussion of his notion of ‘le sur-rationalisme’ in an article under the same title (dating from 1936) in L’engagement rationaliste

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(Paris: Presses Universitaires des France, 1972), pp. 8–9. Equally, Bachelard’s account called for a broadening of our conceptions of rationality as a result of these eventualities. See The New Scientific Spirit (originally, 1934) trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 21: It was on the immutable architecture of geometry that Kant based his architectionics of reason. With the advent of non-Euclideanism, however, the only course open to Kantians was to argue that something in the nature of reason itself required the new geometry; in other words, the very principles of rationalism had to be extended and broadened. It is no doubt historically inaccurate to speak of a “Hegelian” philosophy of mathematics. Still, one cannot fail to be struck by the fact that dialectical tendencies appear at almost the same time in philosophy and in science. Human reason has a destiny of its own. 12

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See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. 1, p. 246; Vol. 2, pp. 784–7. Compare Merleau-Ponty’s limited affirmation of Husserl’s “extension” in speaking of perception ‘in the wide sense of knowledge of existences (au sens large de connaissance des existences)’ (PoP: 40). See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard’s L’Oeuvre de Freud’ in The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty, p. 85. Ibid., p. 86. Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press International, 1969), p. 107. Ibid., pp. 106–7. Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923–24) Erster Teil, ed. Rudolph Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), p. 411. See Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, p. 201. On the notion of zig zag, see p. 58. See, for example, Logical Investigations, Vol. 2, pp. 694, 726. Ibid., p. 702. Ibid., p. 701. Ibid., pp. 764–5. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, p. 254. Hegel’s Science of Logic, pp. 662–3. Logical Investigations, Vol. 1, pp. 251–2. Logical Investigations, Vol. 2, p. 828. Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 231. Ibid., p. 263. Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 156. Ibid., p. 278. For further discussion of this issue see my ‘On the Agon of the Phenomenological: Intentional Idioms and Justification,’ Extensions: Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism, ch. IV. See Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill, Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 353n. Cavaillès, ‘On Logic and the Theory of Science,’ in Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, p. 409.

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Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 21. Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, p. 144. Ibid., p. 138. The force of this ‘perdue en elle et se perdant avec elle’ (Cavaillès, ‘On Logic and the Theory of Science,’ p. 405) should not be missed. In an article dating from 1960, Jean Ladrière similarly discussed what he called the “broadening” of reason relative to Husserl and Hegel (‘Hegel, Husserl, and Reason Today,’ The Modern Schoolman, Vol. 27, March, 1960). While denying that the ego as constitutive subjectivity could be the basis for such a reason, and that a total reflection has been precluded, Ladrière seemed unconcerned about the paradox lurking for the rationality which resulted: ‘(W)e have to do only with relative truths’ (188), but ones which remain sustained in fact by ‘the immanent rationality of the lived world’ (185) and ‘the infi nite march towards an absolute apodicticity’ (189). This account perhaps remained overly confident concerning the underdetermination of phenomenological Evidenz and the possibility of the insurmountable agon that might result—the fact, as Cavaillès put it, that phenomenological justification suffers from a certain ‘indefi nite plasticity’ (409). The problem of the plastisch, it should be noted, and the indeterminacy which haunts the articulation of this event is not itself without Hegelian overtones. In this regard see Jean-Luc Nancy’s discussion of the opening sections of The Science of Logic in Le remarque speculative (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1973), pp. 22–31. Clearly Merleau-Ponty is challenging Heidegger’s “voluntarism” here. He admits, as did Heidegger that the present can ‘afford only a temporary reprieve from dispersion’ (PoP: 427). What he denies is that we could derive (authentic) time from decisive spontaneity. Similar ambiguity attends his use of Heidegger’s Seinsfrage, see PoP: 397. Hence Merleau-Ponty’s unease concerning the model of interpretation in which ‘perception is an interpretation of the primitive intuition’ (PoP: 33). The protodoxa of phenomen-ology ruled out this simple alternative—which is not to say that the latter made possible an overcoming of the ontological difference between thing and appearance, between Schein and Erscheinung. Thus he claimed: . . . there is no Schein without an Erscheinung, that every Schein is the counterpart of an Erscheinung, and that the meaning of the “real” is not reduced to that of the “probable,” but evokes a definitive experience of the “real” whose accomplishment is only deferred (differée). (VI: 41)

39

40

See Jacques Taminiaux, ‘Merleau-Ponty From Dialectic to Hyperdialectic’ in Dialectic and Difference, ed. Robert Crease, James T. Decker (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1985), pp. 155–72. See Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 95: ‘If we understand the ambiguity not as a lack of unequivocality, but as the mark of consciousness’ own essential unity, then consciousness shows in its ambiguousness that the two determinations, knowledge and truth, which at fi rst were represented as separate, belong together.’ The result, as Heidegger later

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puts it, is an account of experience (and the gathering of Spirit) as a ‘dialogue between ontic and ontological consciousness,’ p. 144 (cf. PNP: 73–80). These terms are still Husserlian. See The Crisis of the Europeans Sciences, p. 58: ‘Thus we have no other choice than to proceed forward and backward in a zigzag pattern; the one must help the other in an interplay (Weschselspiel). Relative clarification on one side brings some elucidation on the other, which in turn cast light back on the former.’ On the notion of Europeanization as spectacle (Schauspiel), see, p. 16. See Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation, pp. 48–54. One can find, for example, an early model of the transformations inherent to the classical in unpublished sections of The Prose of the World: The properties of the fraction do not falsify the whole number. The same is true of the relation between spatial geometry and plane geometry, nonEuclidean geometry and Euclidean, or Einstein’s concepts and those of classical physics. The new formulations makes the old ones specially simple cases in which certain possible variations have not been utilized and would be wrong only if one pretended to grasp being through them. . . . Thus the truth of ancient formulations is not an illusion. They are false in what they reject but true in what they affirm. (PW: 100)

44

Comparing Merleau-Ponty’s various treatments of phenomenology and nonEuclidean geometries, one can question whether the account was beginning to be transformed in the final writings. In accord with its account of perception as a fundamental stratum, the Phenomenology argues that perception is “amenable” to either Euclidean or non-Euclidean accounts (PoP: 391). In 1955 he defends Bergson’s account of lived time against Einstein’s rejection. This view emerges again in the Working Notes, albeit by noting, in accord with the account of the forgetting (and the shadow) that accompanies experience, that perception ‘masks itself to itself, makes itself Euclidean’ because ‘perception qua wild perception is of itself ignorance’ and realizes of itself ‘a repression of transcendence’ (VI: 213). Rather than affirming perception as an experience of continuity that would be the transcendental guarantor of simultaneity, such an account would acknowledge the discontinuity (and transcendence) of time, in accordance with the emerging account of their “thick” identity. Again: ‘From our own side there is nothing but convergent but discontinuous intentions, moments of clarity’ (S: 179–80). Hence ‘the world is a field, and as such is always open. Resolve similarly the problem of the unicity or plurality of times (Einstein): by return to the idea of a horizon’ (VI: 185).

Chapter 5 1

Here, I invoke Klee’s terms, who, as early as 1902, stated that his task and ‘highest goal’ would be ‘to bring architectonic and poetic painting into a fusion.’ See Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918, trans. R. Y. Zacher, Max Knight

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(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), p. 125 I will return to this project (and Merleau-Ponty’s proximity to it) in the conclusion. Jacques Derrida, On Touching–Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 144–5. Ibid., pp. 187–8. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 18. Heidegger was also able to see such an ontological account in Husserl’s account of categorial intuition. See Martin Heidegger, The History of the Concept of Times, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1985), p. 70: Sensuousness is therefore the title for the total constellation of entities which are given beforehand in their material content…This broad concept of sensuousness is really at the bottom of the distinction between sense and categorial intuition.

5

6

7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

As will become evident, Heidegger will further develop this account of sensuousness in relation to Nietzsche’s account of rapture. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 212. This fulfillment however was overdetermined. As Heidegger put it his 1938–1939 lectures, Nietzsche (and Hegel) institute the ‘completion of Occidental metaphysics like left and right,’ the one by ‘absolute reason’ the other ‘body,’ and between them ‘the rational animal.’ See Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad, Thomas Kalary (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 21–2. See Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931), ed. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), pp. 442, 445. Arguably here Husserl had lost sight of the strategy at stake in Kant’s stoic, transcendental reply to Hume’s skepticism (or did so by returning to a Cartesianism both thought failed). Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 127. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and Metaphysics, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 82. Ibid., pp. 78–82. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I, p. 99. Heidegger, Vol. III, p. 87. Here, again, we can see remnants of Husserl’s doctrine of categorial intuition that had influenced Heidegger’s articulation of the Seinsfrage from the beginning. Like Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger had further connected such an account to Kant’s third Critique and the prereflective and provocative experience of the beautiful. See Nietzsche, Vol. I, pp. 107–14. and PoP: xvii. Nietzsche, Vol. III, p. 87. Nietzsche, Vol. I, p. 212. Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 264. Ibid., p. 265. See the second volume of the present work, Phenomenology, Institution, History, ch. 2

Notes 17

18 19 20

21

22

23

24

25 26

27

28

29

30 31

165

Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl Concept of Constitution (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964), pp. 93–5. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 152n. One consideration that might be explored is that, while Merleau-Ponty had depended upon Erwin Struass’ notion of sensation as preobjective (a matter of the landscape versus geography, for example), Strauss himself understood perception in contrast to sensation as objectifying—whereas Merleau-Ponty wants to understand both together. See Erwin Strauss, The Primary World of Senses: A Vindication of Sensory Experience, trans. Jacob Needleman (New York: The Free Press, 1963), p. 316. Another consideration that might be offered here is that the order of reasons explicated in the Phenomenology follows the movement from Fink’s ‘static’ to ‘genetic’ or ‘constructive’ phenomenology that Merleau-Ponty mentions in the Preface (PoP: vii). This movement would be intrinsically selfcorrecting, overcoming the limitations of reductive analysis. One could cite other criticisms in Merleau-Ponty’s wake at this point, of course: for example Deleuze, Lyotard, Irigary all openly questioned its axiomatics. This will later be seen as provoking the very interrogation, the Befragung, of le foi perceptif but he had already appealed to it in the arguments against empiricist reductions of sensation and intellectualist abstractions in the Phenomenology (PoP: 17). The question is, on what basis such appeals might be made and what effect do they have on phenomenology itself? Contrast this, for example, with the perceptual realism of the pretheoretical lifeworld in Husserl’s Galileo analysis in the Crisis. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, pp. 23–59. Compare the Phenomenology’s discussion of the effects of the experience of chaos on philosophy (PoP: 56). Translation altered. Here, too, the Phenomenology suffers from certain inner tensions, between its descriptive theoretical task and certain expressivist linguistic theses only beginning to emerge in that work. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1986), p. 25. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator,’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 73. As has been seen, Merleau-Ponty’s transformation of Husserl’s account of tradition into a ‘noble form of memory’ that involves ‘the power to forget origins’ certainly captures the Wechsel at stake in the Crisis—but also most certainly transforms its renewed attempt to found a scientific tradition based on the truths of mathematics and geometry (S: 59; cf. HLP: 63). The Nietzschean resonance of such statements must still be understood with the Husserlian account of motivation in mind. Husserl, Ideas, Second Book, p. 26. In his later lectures Merleau-Ponty acknowledges that in his emphasis on the third Kritik of Kant he followed Goldstein again (N: 24). As has been previously noted, however, Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation had similarly understood

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Notes

the Husserlian account of genetic phenomenology in terms of Kant’s reflective judgment, thus making the passage between Heidegger and Husserl possible. See PoP: vii. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 193. See Kant’s description of the aesthetic idea in the first Critique that compares them with the (adequate) ideas of pure reason: ‘The products of the imagination are of an entirely different nature: no one can explain or give an intelligible concept of them; each is a kind of monogram, a mere set of particular qualities, determined by no assignable rule and forming rather a blurred sketch drawn from diverse experiences than a determinate image—a representation such as painters or physiognomists profess to carry in their heads, and which they treat as being an incommunicable shadowy image (Schattenbild) of their creations or even of their critical judgments,’ p. 487 (A570/B598). See G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. I, pp. 72–3. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 99. An early version of this account of interpretation does not simply affirm the conclusion of ‘Eye and Mind’’s denial of rational progress: There is no doubt that in a certain sense the least student of philosophy today thinks with fewer prejudices than Descartes. In this sense he is nearer to the truth. This claim could be made by anyone who tangles with thought after Descartes. Nevertheless, it is Descartes who thinks through his descendents, and what we say against him is still only the echo of his brief and determined speech. (PW: 109)

37

38

39

40

41 42

43

See Henri Bergson, The Life and Work of Ravaisson, in The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp. 272–3. In ‘Eye and Mind’ Merleau-Ponty will again cite this text, this time footnoting it (EM: 183). Already in the inaugural lecture he had claimed that Bergson remained stuck in the philosophy of consciousness in understanding painting as a ‘simple act projected on the canvas.’ Instead ‘like all those who struggle with a language, and even more those who create one, the painter does not understand himself as the organizing law of his acts’ (IPP: 67, Note III). Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of Bergson in this regard are both complicated and long standing. See, for example, his criticism in the Phenomenology (PoP: 58–63). For the implications of the latter see my ‘Of Sartre, Klee Surrealism and Philosophy: Towards a “Non-Prosaic” Conception of Consciousness,’ in Issues in Interpretation Theory, ed. Pol Vandevelde (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2007). F. W. J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris, Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 42. Ibid., p. 41. In a number of places Gilles Deleuze has criticized the limitations of MerleauPonty’s account of the phenomenological body as a sensorium commune. See, for example, Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 137, 320n. See F. Dastur, ‘World, Flesh, Vision,’ trans. Theodore A. Toadvine Jr. in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of the Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000). Dastur reads Merleau-Ponty as invoking a tradition of

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45

46 47

48

49

50

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the primacy of vision, one that even Husserl had contested. Still it is again an issue of noncoincidence, and articulation. What is involved is not simply the extension of vision to touching, but the articulation of what makes such a “reading” possible—and this “possible,” like all such phenomena is an imaginative variant or deformation of a certain conceptual history (VI: 190). The Notes de Cours’ treatment of aesthetics also concludes by appeal to Hegel’s notion of the truth of art, albeit to appeal to a truth that unfolds itself. (NC: 64). See Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millan-Zailber (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004). G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics, Vol. I, pp. 128–9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 96. Here too we find again the trace of Heidegger’s account of the schematism as a ‘sketching out’ (Aufzeichnen) of possibility. See Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 64–6. Moreover such an account is not unrelated to the moment of formal or “diacritical” articulation that Merleau-Ponty emphasized in Klee’s account of sketching out or drawing. See EM: 183. The late lectures will be even more explicit, albeit by appealing to a similar momentary law (noted above) that articulated the sensuous. Describing the generative principle of the line he asks, ‘In relation to what does it signify? A norm or a level. It is necessary that a line, like a trace of movement, be a rhythm, a law not only of an effective displacement in space, but a field of possibles, beyond the probable’ (NC: 51). In both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s cases we will need to think the rapprochement between Kant’s productive imagination and Husserl’s categorial intuition (and imaginative variation). For further discussion of Klee’s fusion of the poetic and the architectonic, see my ‘Crescent Moon Over the Rational: Philosophical Interpretations of Paul Klee’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), Introduction. Compare Klee’s ironical statement that became his epitaph that he lives ‘somewhat nearer to the heart of all creation than is usual. But still far from being near enough.’ See The Diaries of Paul Klee: 1898–1918, p. 419. Merleau-Ponty connects such irony to philosophy as well (NC: 58). Lest this simply be interpreted skeptically, it should be recalled that this is precisely the way modern ethical theory from Kant to Levinas articulated the phenomenon of respect. As radical as it might seem, one could make the same claim regarding dignitas or honestum, both having to do with the appearing of excellence (and the Good). In the same way, Beauty is not simply any phenomenon but one in which the (transcendent) radiance (Ekphanestaton) and grace (charis) of the Good is and appears. In all these cases we approach without possessing a transcendence that exceeds us. Does Merleau-Ponty say this? No, but Leonardo, via Ravaisson (‘steeped in Schelling,’ Merleau-Ponty claims) and Bergson, does. This occurs in Bergson precisely when he further articulates the serpentine line that for Merleau-Ponty furnished the ‘generative axis’ of being: ‘Thus, for him who contemplates the universe with the eye of an artist, it is grace that is apprehended through the veil of beauty, and beneath grace, it is goodness which shines through.’ See Bergson, The Creative Mind, 243. The uncanny (and unusual) references to the hidden god (versus the god of the ens realissium) that occurs both

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51 52

53 54

55

56

Notes

in the Working Notes’ discussion of Klee (V: 211) and the Note de Cours (NC: 173) should be noted. This, too, has Schellingian overtones. See the Nature lectures’ discussion of Kant’s Abgrund as Schelling’s definition of God as well as the Working Note on Klee’s discussion of ‘the unmotivated upsurge of brute Being’ (VI: 211; cf. NC: 57). I note, finally, the underdeterminacy of the account. The Note de Cours formulates its conjunction of Klee and Schelling with this difference: ‘absolute knowledge’ is a ‘principle older than God himself (Schelling), brute being—the indellible-indestructable (Michaux)’ (NC: 57). Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee: 1898–1918, p. 297. Jean-Luc Nancy attributes a similar position to Hegel at one point, referring to the Aesthetics’ ‘everything is in sensation.’ Still, the difference is manifest, the difference between the sensible presentation of the Idea (the beautiful) and its speculative, intelligible surpassing. See Jean Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness and of the Negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 49 and Hegel’s Aesthetics, p. 73. Ibid., p. 184. We are reminded that the task of articulating the logos was next up in the unfinished manuscript of The Visible and the Invisible. The 1959–1960 lecture course on The Concept of Nature forecast these developments: ‘These relations of the visible and the invisible, of the logos of the visible world and of the logos of ideality, will be studied (The Visible and the Invisible) only in the next years with language, with other systems of expression (painting, cinema), with history and its architectonic’ (N: 227). Such an architectonic is linked to the diacritical conception of language, through which meaning emerges ‘between the words like a savage mind’ (ibid.). But in fact he had already realized its effect: ‘The domain of the architectonic: Upon examination, we will see that it is not an inexplicable residue, or a certain number of reserved facts. The architectonic is everywhere: in genesis, in functioning, even in perception’ (N: 213). We no more directly experience the purity of color than we do anything else in Klee. If the rainbow, Klee argued, presents our most direct apprehension of pure color it too ultimately fails to reach such purity: the rainbow interrupts the color series at red instead of continuing into violet. See Paul Klee Notebooks Vol. I: The Thinking Eye (London: Lund Humphries Limited, 1961), p. 467. Compare Merleau-Ponty’s almost “Kleean” interpretation of the line: ‘Understand that the Gestalt is already transcendence: it makes me understand that a line is a vector, that a point is a center of forces—There are no absolute lines nor points nor colors in things’ (VI: 195). Notice that while this is again referred to Bergson’s discussion of Ravaisson’s reading of Leonoardo’s serpentine line, Bergson does not formalize it in these terms. Rather, Klee does (with whom it is explicitly associated elsewhere) (EM: 183; NC: 171). Moreover, as noted previously, Merleau-Ponty further associates it with the differential analyses of (formal) diacritics. Later, even the notion of Gestalt itself will be understood as ‘a diacritical, oppositional, relative system’ (VI: 206). In his first note Merleau-Ponty concludes by noting its cosmological implications, likewise close to Klee, in appealing to ‘the Rhythm of the event of the world’ (VI: 196). Finally it can be noted that ‘Eye and Mind’ declares that modern art involves ‘a contestation’ of the ‘prosaic conception of the line as a positive attribute and a

Notes

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59

169

property of the object in itself’ (182–3). Doubtless this involves Merleau- Ponty’s debate with Sartre on the distinction between the prosaic and the poetic, one that inevitably as well brought him to Schelling. ‘Schelling is trying for a nonprosaic conception of consciousness’ (N: 50). Klee, Notebooks, Vol. 1, p. 76. I have traced the itinerary of the transcendental schematism as a sketchingout (Auf-zeichnung) or a line-drawing (ein Leinienziehen) in my ‘Heidegger, Paul Klee, and the Origin of the Work of Art,’ The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 60 (December 2006), pp. 327–57. On the question of justification, see the following text from the Sorbonne lectures that portends the later, more wholistic, historical account: ‘I can never be sure that my vision of an essence is anything more that a prejudice rooted in language—if it does not enable me to hold together all the facts that are known and which may be brought into relation with it. Failing this, it may not be an essence at all but only a prejudice’ (PP: 75). For further discussion of this issue see my ‘Why Phenomenology? The Long Farewell to Subject Centered Rationality,’ in Phenomenology, Institution, and History: Writings After Merleau-Ponty II (London: Continuum, 2009).

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Index

absolute 6–7, 13–14, 17, 18, 120, 138 art as sensuous manifestation of 136 Absolute Idealism 17 absolute subject 103 abstraction 96, 97 adequation 81–2, 93 Adventures of the Dialectic (MerleauPonty) 105, 115, 120 aesthetic idea 11, 135, 166n. 33 aesthetics 68, 70–1, 75, 76, 88, 89, 90, 157n. 31, 167n. 44 rehabilitation of Husserl’s transcendental 134 ambiguity 6–7, 150n. 49, 163n. 40 analogy 59, 67, 91–2, 95, 115, 135 art abstract 97 abstract as sensuous manifestation of 136 Kosuth’s view of 77 see also painting ‘Art After Philosophy’ (Kosuth) 77 art, work of 74–5, 157n. 31 failure in reading 81–2 Augustine, St. 106 Ayer, A. J. 77 Bachelard, Gaston 48, 107, 160n. 3, 161n. 11 Balzac, Honoré de 1 Barthes, Roland 49 Bataille, Georges 19 Baudelaire, Charles 2, 68, 133 Sartre on 3 Being 1, 5, 81, 95, 118, 150n. 49 polymorphism of 17–18

sign and 37–8, 64 Being and Nothingness (Satre) 23 Being and Time (Heidegger) 66, 69 Benjamin, Walter 3, 13, 75, 95, 133, 146n. 6 Bergson, Henri 11, 35, 82, 86, 136, 137, 141, 146n. 6, 163n. 44, 167n. 50 Biemal, Walter 5 Blanchot, Maurice 3, 10, 12, 19, 39, 92 Brunschvicg, Léon 24 cancellation 82, 108, 109–11, 112 Canguilhem, Georges 48, 160n. 3, 160n. 6 canvas (painting) 71–2, 76–7, 79–80 reflective failure as mirror 91 Cassirer, Ernst 49, 141, 119, 160n. 3, 162n. 36 Cézanne, Paul 2, 88, 132, 143 chaos 18, 129, 150 n. 53, 151 n. 55–6 classics 8–9, 10, 124 Cogito 9, 16, 26–8, 45–6, 136, 151n. 56 tacit 27, 31–4, 35, 37, 40 coincidence 121, 126–7 color 96, 134–5, 140, 141–2, 144, 167n. 55 concept of the horizon 83 Husserl’s zigzag between intuition and 10, 11, 70 Kant’s idea of 14 Merleau-Ponty’s idea of 11 ‘painterly concept’ 77–9 poetics and 72 vision and 76, 81 in work of art 74–5

172

Index

consciousness 16–17, 43–4, 115–17, 121, 124, 163n. 40 essence of 22 language and 28–32, 57–8 process of 110–11 Schelling’s conception of 137, 140–1 ‘Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language’ (Merleau-Ponty) 52, 55 Constitution 8, 141 convention 1, 6, 18–19, 36, 39, 45, 53, 65, 68, 134, 137, 141 cosmotheology 15 Course in General Linguistics (Saussure) 50, 57, 58–9 Crisis of the European Sciences (Husserl) 5, 70, 110, 122, 148n. 23 Critique of Judgment (Kant) 3, 4, 7, 8, 135, 157n. 32, 166n. 32, 166n. 35 Davidson, Donald 66 de-aestheticization 70–1, 86, 93, 155n. 5 Derrida, Jacques 67, 116, 127–8, 131, 137, 153n. 7 Descartes, René 3, 9, 44, 72, 95, 98, 143, 166n. 36 Cogito of 26, 27–8, 33, 34 Descombes, Vincent 103 De Waelhens, Alphonse 87 dialectics 10, 13 Hegelian 107 mathematics and 106–8, 153n. 6 Merleau-Ponty’s 120–2 origins in Fichte and Schlegel 153n. 6 preoutlined in Kant 14 remnants in Husserl 10, 110, 122–3 Saussure and 53, 58 Duchamp, Marcel 88 Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: an Introduction (Derrida) 116 Einstein, Albert 98, 124, 163n. 44 embodiment 12, 13 enigma vision and 84 The Enneads (Plotinus) 74 essence 27, 169n. 59

of consciousness 22 existence and 21–3 fact-essence distinction 38 individual-essence distinction 36, 40 existence 3 essence and 21–3 existentialism 7 Levi-Strauss’s idea of 105 experience 4, 10, 117–18, 123–4 evidence of 112 Experience and Judgment (Husserl) 114 expression 40, 66–8 Husserl’s idea of 22 Merleau-Ponty’s idea of 6, 11, 12, 18, 144 process of 24–6 Eye and Mind (Merleau-Ponty) 2, 5, 11, 20, 43, 70, 76, 84, 86, 94, 98, 99, 102, 132, 143 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 4, 110, 153n. 6 figured philosophy 11, 94, 99, 143 painting and 142 Fink, Eugen 4, 5, 48, 60, 99, 145n. 1, 146n. 10, 147n. 22, 150n. 47 flesh polymorphism of 18–19 reversibility of 13, 14–16 forgetfulness 8, 129 Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl) 112 Foucault, Michel 48, 92, 101, 116 on imagination 97 on modalities of French philosophy 160n. 3 on painting 78–80, 87, 91, 96 on philosophy 104 fragment 3, 4–5 tolerance of incomplete 10–14 Fragments (Novalis) 10 Francesca, Piero della 76 Frank, Manfred 4, 139 French philosophy in mid-20th century 47–9 two modalities of 160n. 3 Freud, Sigmund 108, 146n. 6 frustration 110

Index Gadamer, Hans-Georg 18 Galileo Galilei 73, 156n. 13 Gestalt psychology 50–1 Geuroult, Martial 137 Giacommetti, Alberto 88 Gödel, Kurt 105 Goethe, Johann Wolfgan von 92 Goodman, Nelson 74 Greenberg, Clement 77 Gurwitsch, Aron 49, 132 Hardenberg, Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von see Novalis Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 4, 6, 7, 17, 61, 73, 75, 92, 101, 103, 111, 112, 120 on Nature 140 as origin of contemporary thought 107 on rationality 106–7 on sensibility 139 Heidegger, Martin 1, 3, 10, 19, 35, 36, 59, 65, 66, 68, 69, 95, 98, 118 on Being 17–18 on belonging-together of language and perception 36–7 on body synthesis 129 on Hegel 17 on historical time 119 on ontological rehabilitation of sensibility 128 “synthesis” of Husserl and 38–9 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 132, 138 hermeneutics 66–7, 118 historical imagination 97–8, 146n. 6 historical meaning 61–2 historical rationality 55–6, 121 history 10, 70 operative 8–9, 14–20, 99, 127, 134, 144, 151n. 58 of philosophy 20, 114, 122–3 horizon, concept of the 83 human sciences advances in 50–1 Hume, David 128, 130

173

Husserl, Edmund 10, 11, 12, 19, 27, 56, 60, 73, 102, 112, 116, 137 on consciousness 17, 111 on constitution 8, 141 on essence and existence in works of 21 on experience 112, 114 on expression 22, 144 failures of 12 fragmentariness of works of 5 on frustration 110 influence on Merleau-Ponty 69–70 on language 44, 65–6 Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of 2, 3, 4, 5, 68, 69, 99, 120, 124 operative intentionality of 4, 7, 38, 133 on phenomenology 11, 103 problem of forgetfulness 8 on science 98 on sensibility 127, 128, 129–30, 134 “synthesis” of Heidegger and 38–9 on vision 83–4 zigzag between intuition and concept 10, 11, 70 Ideas II (Husserl) 13, 69, 127, 149n. 39 Ideen I (Husserl) 22 imagination 93, 136, 153n. 6 as abyssal event 97 historical 97–8, 146n. 6 painter’s 77–8, 79 as the true Stiftung of Being 100 incomplete tolerance of 10–14 Ineinander 13, 44, 127, 138–9, 149n. 39 infrasilence 21–2, 37 Ingarden, Roman Witold 47 In Praise of Philosophy (MerleauPonty) 5, 136 institution (Stiftung) 6–7, 10, 16–17, 25, 29–30, 39, 53, 60–4, 100, 113, 116, 121–3, 135, 137–8, 141 intentionality discovery of 3 operative 4, 7, 38, 133

174

Index

intuition 138 Husserl’s zigzag between concept and 10, 11, 70 logical concepts and 111 irony 6, 7–8, 68, 167n. 50 in Klee’s works 5 Jakobson, Roman 47 Kandinsky, Wassily 99 Kant, Immanuel 3, 4, 11, 15, 16, 74, 75, 78, 90, 106, 128–9, 131, 135, 143 on concept 14 Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of 129 on real opposition (and écart) 14 on sensibility 14, 128, 135 on vision 83 Kierkegaard, Søren 7, 108 Klee, Paul 5, 43, 95–6, 98, 99, 140, 167n. 50 on abstraction 97 on color 96, 140, 141, 142, 144, 167n. 55 Koehler, Otto 50 Kojève, Alexandre 61 Kosuth, Joseph 77, 156n. 13 Koyré, Alexandre 73 Lacan, Jacques 49 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 4 language Cogito and 27–8 consciousness and 28–32 Davidsonian standpoint 66–7 as diacritical phenomenon 38–9, 50, 51, 52–3, 63 discursive constraints 57–8 fragmented intelligibility of 3, 4–5 function of 21 Husserl on 44, 65–6 inner 25 intersubjectivity of 23 Merleau-Ponty on 11, 12–13, 18, 29–35, 65–6, 144 Novalis on 10 originary element of 24–5, 27, 29, 39–41 perception and 21–2, 31–2, 35–6, 42–3 philosophy of 56–7, 64–5, 66

Sartre on 145n. 3 Saussarian distinction between speech and 49–50, 57–8 Saussurian model 51, 52, 54, 64–5 Schelling on 18 synchronic laws of usage of 54–5 Lefort, Claude 3, 26, 40 Leibniz, Gottfried 35 Leonardo da Vinci on painting 70, 71–4, 75, 78, 86, 156n. 13 on science 73 ‘serpentine line’ of 86, 95, 136, 141, 167n. 50 Levinas, Emmanuel 67, 75 Lèvi-Struass, Claude 49, 105 literary modernism 2–3, 13 impact of 15 literature classics 8–9, 10–11 fragmented textuality 3 interpretation 2–3 lived body 15, 23, 30, 61 Lobatchevski, Nikolai 107 Logical Investigations (Husserl) 70, 111, 112 logos 18, 62, 70, 78, 105, 135, 168n. 54 Lukács, Georg 13, 61, 106, 160n. 10 Lyotard, Jean-François 57, 88, 89, 91, 92 Magritte, René 80, 87, 97, 101 Mallarmé, Stéphane 3, 19, 39, 145n. 3 Malraux, André 134 Manet, Édouard 87 Marey, Étienne-Jules 88 Marin, Louis 74 Marx, Karl 61, 107, 108, 124 mathematics art and 73, 76–7 dialectics and 106–8, 153n. 6 Hegel on 106 meaning 5–6, 8, 18, 53 analogy and 59 art of grasping 82 gestural 61 historical 61–2 Meditations (Descartes) 27 Las Meninas (Velazquez) 79

Index Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 160n. 3 on art 2, 11, 69 criticism by Descombes 103 criticism of analysis of painting 87–9 criticism of Bergson 137 criticism of Descartes 34 criticism of Husserl 2, 3, 4, 5, 68, 69, 99, 120, 124 criticism of Kant 129 criticism of Sartre 28–9 criticism of Saussure 58–9 on dialectics 120–2 on expression 6, 11, 12, 18 on expressivity of language 67, 68 on flesh 13, 14–16, 18–19 on hermeneutics of phenomenology 118 on Klee 5, 95–6, 140–2 on language 11, 12–13, 18, 29–35, 57–8, 62–5 on language and perception 29–36 on metaphysics 44, 93–4 on painting 1, 2, 11, 69, 70–1, 76, 81–2, 86–8, 93–4, 102, 142 on perception 12, 14, 40–3, 119–20 on problem of body synthesis 128 reading of Husserl on experience 114–15, 118 on Saussurian model of history 61–2 on science 69, 70–1, 100–1, 137, 148n. 23, 148n. 25 on sensibility 130–2, 134–6, 139, 140, 143–4, 150n. 53 “synthesis” of Husserl and Heidegger 38–9 unfinished nature of phenomenology 1–10, 11–12 on vision 84, 89–90 on vision and narcissism 84–5 on Wahl’s distinction of essence and existence 21 Working Notes 5, 11, 15, 20, 94, 127, 134, 140, 142, 163n. 44 works on Saussure 49–50, 52 ‘The Metaphysical in Man’ (MerleauPonty) 50, 51 metaphysics 44 Merleau-Ponty’s 93–4, 118–19

175

phenomenology and 105 Michaux, Henri 141 mimesis 72, 74 mirror reflective failure of painting as 71–2, 79, 91 modernism 77, 101 Foucault’s characterization of 80 literary 2–3, 13, 15 Montaigne, Michel de 118 Nancy, Jean-Luc 4, 168n. 52 narcissism 158n. 46 vision and 84–5, 92 Nature 138, 140, 149n. 39 Kantian philosophy of 129 Merleau-Ponty on 100 Schelling on 137, 138 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8, 95, 96, 107, 108, 129, 142 Notebooks (Klee) 99 Novalis 5, 16, 150n. 49, 150n. 53 on language 10, 18 object 23, 29–30, 82–3, 147n. 20, 153n. 6 cultural 71 dichotomy of subject and 23, 24 ‘On the Phenomenology of Language’ (Merleau-Ponty) 56 ontotheology 98 operative history 8–9, 14–20, 123, 127, 134, 144, 151n. 58 operative intentionality 4, 7, 38, 133, 147n. 22, 150n. 47 operative rationality 9–10 The Order of Things (Foucault) 91 The Origin of the Work of Art (Heidegger) 36 painting criticism of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of 87–9 Leonardo on 70–4, 75, 78, 86, 156n. 13 Foucault on 78–80, 87, 91 Merleau-Ponty on 1, 2, 11, 69, 70–1, 81–2, 86–8, 93–4, 102 modern 76–7, 142, 156n. 13 Panofsky, Erwin 76

176

Index

Parain, Brice 23, 28, 37 perception 163n. 44 language and 21–2, 31–2, 35–7, 39 Merleau-Ponty on 12, 14, 40–3, 119–20, 138 sensation and 131–2 Phaedrus (Plato) 72 phenomenology 19–20, 103, 130 constructive 150n. 47 historicity 8–9, 10, 123 Husserl’s 11 Merleau-Ponty’s 1–10, 11–12, 118, 127 rationality and 107 Phenomenology (Hegel) 110 Phenomenology of Perception (MerleauPonty) 2, 3, 11, 13–14, 15, 21–2, 24, 26, 40, 43, 61, 83, 104, 113, 128, 138 Cartesian and classical leanings of 22–8 criticism of language and Cogito 32–3, 45 metaphysical framework of perception 42 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 94 philosophy Being and 5 of consciousness 26, 29, 30–1 language’s position in 56–7, 64–5 Leonardo on painting and 73 Merleau-Ponty on 2, 66, 11, 94–5, 100–1, 102, 145n. 1 as operant history 14–20 poetry and 72 post-Kantian philosophy and operative rationality 9–10 see also French philosophy Piaget, Jean 49 Picasso, Pablo 96 Plato 72, 73, 116 Plotinus 67, 74 Plutarch 78 poetics 68 philosophy and 72 poststructuralism vis à vis phenomenology 47–8

The Prose of the World (MerleauPonty) 57, 58, 61, 81, 163n. 43 Proust, Marcel 2, 68, 132, 146n. 6 rationality 2, 4, 8–9, 11–13, 17–20, 40, 54–6, 78, 96, 99, 101, 103, 106–8, 114–15, 121, 124, 127, 129 border between irrationality and 105–7 historical 55–6, 121 Merleau-Ponty on 113–15, 145n. 2 operative 9–10 phenomenology and 108 realism 75 real opposition 14, 19 reductionism 1, 16, 48, 88–9, 146n. 10, 155n. 1 content of sign 30, 35, 41 reflection 16–17 relativity physics 123 Richir, Marc 12, 42 Ricoeur, Paul 57 Rorty, Richard 66–7 Sartre, Jean-Paul 61, 74, 79, 119, 160n. 3 on Baudelaire 3 on consciousness and language 28–9, 40 on priority of sign 23, 28–30, 37 on problem of language 23, 145n. 3 Saussure, Ferdinand de 13, 18, 36, 153n. 6 on language 38, 51, 52, 54, 58–9, 64–5 Merleau-Ponty’s works on 49–50, 51, 57 model of history 61–2 on pivotal role of analogy 59 on rationality 55 on synchronic laws of usage of language 55 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 1, 4, 7, 16, 17, 18, 35, 44, 72, 92, 95, 101, 102, 134, 135, 137, 138 on chaos 151n. 56

Index on language 18 on Nature 140–1 Schlegel, Friedrich 3, 4, 153n. 6 Blanchot on 10 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst 4 science 20, 98 human sciences 50–1 Leonardo on 73 Merleau-Ponty on 69, 70–1, 137, 148n. 23, 148n. 25 painting and 86 philosophy and 100–1 sculpture, classical aesthetics of 75 Searle, John 79 ‘secret science’ 1, 69, 70, 71, 81, 86, 98–9, 101 sensation 14, 129–32, 133, 134, 144, 165n. 20, 165n. 52 sense-history 16, 44 Sense and Non-Sense (MerleauPonty) 55, 104–5, 107 sensibility 14–16, 76–8, 126, 167n. 52 Hegel on 139 Heidegger on 128–9 Husserl on 127, 128, 129–30, 134 Kant on 14, 128, 135 Merleau-Ponty on 83–6, 130–2, 134–6, 139, 140, 143–4, 150n. 53 ontological rehabilitation 127–8, 142 sign 22–3, 25–6, 27, 28–31, 37–8, 57–8, 60 meaning and 61 Merleau-ponty on 40–1, 63–4 signification 21–3, 26, 29–30, 33–4, 35–6, 53, 63–4, 138 Signs (Merleau-Ponty) 62 silence 19, 21–2, 24, 31, 34 Blanchot on 19 Mallarmé on 19 originary 39–40 Simon, Claude 15, 67 Simonides of Cleos 78 Sokolowski, Robert 130 space

177

symbolic structure 61–2 speaking subject 26, 29, 51, 53–4, 60 speech 18, 24, 25–6, 42–3, 134 act 53, 54, 60 Cogito and 32–3 Saussurian distinction between language and 49–50, 57–8 stoicism 43–4, 95 structuralism vis à vis phenomenology 47–8 The Structure of Behavior (MerleauPonty) 54 stylistics 11 subject 23, 25, 48, 82–3 absolute 103 speaking 26, 29, 51, 53–4, 60 subject-object dichotomy 23, 24 symbolism 61–2 System of Transcendental Idealism (Schelling) 72 tacit Cogito 27, 31–4, 35, 37, 40 Taminiaux, Jacques 35–6, 121 Tatarkiewicz, Wladyslaw 72, 78 Taylor, Charles 66, 68 thought language and 25, 54, 60 time 112, 119, 125 perceived 123–4 Tractatus (Wittgenstein) 101 transcendental language 31, 39, 48 Treatise on Painting (Leonardo da Vinci) 70–2, 86 Tristes Tropiques (Levi-Strauss) 105 unreason 160n. 8 border between reason and 105–7 Hegelian 107–8 Valery, Paul 2, 86 Van Breda, Herman L. 105 Velazquez, Diego 79 Vico, Giambattista 78 visible 42–3, 71–2, 73–8, 84, 92–3, 122, 167n. 54 eye’s participation in 82

178

Index

The Visible and the Invisible (MerleauPonty) 11, 20, 32, 35, 37, 40, 41–2, 63, 64, 84, 89, 99, 123, 127, 133, 137, 138, 167n. 54 visible things 63–4 vision 43, 73, 166n. 43 concept and 76, 81 concept of horizon and 83 enigma and 84 Merleau-Ponty on 84, 89–90

narcissism and 84–5 von Humboldt, Wilhelm von 60, 68 Wahl, Jean 21, 27 Weber, Max 97 Wertheimer, Max 6, 133 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 101, 139 works classics 8–9, 10–11 Worringer, Wilhelm 97