The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness: Merleau-Ponty and the Tasks of Thinking 9781350003972, 9781350003996, 9781350003965

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The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness

Also available from Bloomsbury Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression, Donald A. Landes Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy, Bryan A. Smyth Merleau-Ponty and Theology, Christopher Ben Simpson Art, Language and Figure in Merleau-Ponty, Rajiv Kaushik The Merleau-Ponty Dictionary, Donald A. Landes

The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness Merleau-Ponty and the Tasks of Thinking Keith Whitmoyer

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition first published 2019 © Keith Whitmoyer, 2017 Keith Whitmoyer has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0397-2 PB: 978-1-3501-0570-6 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0396-5 ePub: 978-1-3500-0398-9 Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

vi vii

Introduction 1 Part 1  Cruel Thought 1 Philosophical Interrogation and Perceptual Faith

9

2 The Real and the Outside

29

3 A Consciousness without Fissures

51

Part 2  The Deflagration of Sense 4 Le sentir du sens

81

5 Temporality disparue

99

6 Freedom and Lateness to Being

121

Part 3  The Philosophy of Lateness, the Lateness of Philosophy 7 Eulogy for Philosophy

139

8 At the Point of Departure

153

Conclusion: What Can We Have?

165

Notes References Glossary Index of Names Thematic Index

169 201 208 211 213

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Ann Murphy for her generous help in revising and commenting on the manuscript for this work. I would also like to thank Tom MacCary for his help and support, especially with Ancient Greek. Finally I would especially like to thank Leonard Lawlor for his support and assistance over the years and in my study of Merleau-Ponty. Any errors are those of the author.

List of Abbreviations Works by Merleau-Ponty1 PHP

Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945; Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 2006.

HT

Humanisme et terreur. Paris: Gallimard, 1947; Humanism and Terror. Translated by John O’Neill. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

SNS

Sens et non-sens. Paris: Les Editions Nagel, 1948; Sense and Non-sense. Translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

C

Causeries 1948. Paris : Seuil, 2002; The World of Perception. Translated by Oliver Davis. London: Routledge, 2004.

EP

Éloge de la philosophie et autres essais. Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard, 1953; In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by John Wild and James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Inaugural address at the Collège de France.

MSME Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression. Geneva: Metis Presses, 2011. IP

L’institution La passivité: Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954–1955). Paris: Belin, 2003; Institution and Passivity: Notes from the Collège de France. Translated by Leonard Lawlor. Evanston : Northwestern University Press, 2010.

RC

Résumés de cours, Collège de France 1952–1960. Paris: Gallimard, 1968; In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. Edited by James Edie and John O’Neill John Wilde. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963.

NC

Notes des Cours au Collège de France: 1958–1959 et 1960–1961. Edited by Stéphanie Ménasé. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.

S

Signes. Paris: Gallimard, 1960; Signs. Translated by Richard McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

OE

L’Œil et l’Esprit. Paris: Gallimard, 1960; “Eye and Mind.” In The MerleauPonty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, by Galen Johnson, 121–49. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993.

VI

Le visible et l’invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Paris: Gallimard, 1964; The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

viii

List of Abbreviations

Works by other authors ZB

Husserl, Edmund. Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins. Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1928; On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Translated by John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.

SZ

Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tubingen: Neomarius Verlag, 1927; Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.

EN

Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’être et le néant. Paris: Gallimard, 1943; Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1952.

Introduction

Philosophy finds its source in a certain kind of anxiety. Plato, for example, seems to have been worried about the apparent irreconcilability of the permanence and transience of being. No two couches are absolutely identical. They come into being and pass away, and yet nonetheless partake in some manner of subsistence since they remain, nonetheless, couches. On a certain reading, Plato appears fixated on this concern, borrowed from Parmenides, about the exclusion of becoming from being. To put this worry to rest, Plato establishes a system in which that which is never identical with itself but always on the way to its other is regulated by that which is always what it is and never otherwise—being as such, the εἶδος. How we interpret a philosopher often stems from how we perceive the anxiety often standing silently at the center of his or her thought. The anxiety that seems to have motivated Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy—at least from Phenomenology of Perception onward1—is a concern with the need to be everything, uneasiness with those who wish to arrive at the absolute source, discomfort with those who want to put an end to reflection by accomplishing it completely. MerleauPonty was skeptical of the philosopher’s need to “penetrate into a life,” as Proust said, to exhaust its possibilities so that this life, this other, conceals nothing, leaving no trace of shadow or ambiguity.2 In a word, I think the anxiety that motivates MerleauPonty’s thinking is a concern with “knowledge” in the sense that this term has come to bear since Descartes: the unassailable certainty that I am sane and in possession of my faculties and not mistaking myself for a pumpkin or believing that my body is made of glass, that I am awake and not dreaming, or that there is not an evil demon tricking me into believing there is something when there is really nothing.3 Since Descartes, philosophers have tended to take the possibility of knowledge in this sense as their vindication, and this need—to provide assurances and guarantees against madness and error—seems to have dominated Western thinking until only recently.4 For Merleau-Ponty, the word “ambiguity” is set in opposition to this Cartesian need for absoluteness and security. The problem with knowledge in this sense—the reason it seems to have disturbed Merleau-Ponty and perhaps should also disturb us—is that epistemology’s place as first philosophy and everything entailed therein stems from fear rather than love.5 In Descartes—or at least a certain reading of the philosophy of Descartes—the anxiety that motivates his thought also arguably consumes it.6 There is a point at which Descartes seems to have had some intolerance for human finitude, embodiment, mortality, history, contingency, and ambiguity. He had difficulty accepting that we are thrown into a world not of our making, a world that, in spite of our best efforts to see

2

The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness

it with mathematical precision, when we look with our eyes, recedes into the opacity of an infinite distance. Because the world gives itself to us in this elusive manner, we doubt and then seek out that Archimedean point, that place of unassailable security. We philosophize because we want the apparent chaos of experience to be resolved in the ἀποκάλυψις: the final pulling back of the veil, the revelation of the benevolent λόγος, the word, the reason itself. But this desire for absoluteness, for security, which in Descartes expressed itself as a desire for that which is beyond doubt, as we know all too well, comes at a cost. MerleauPonty calls this wish “cruel thought,” and his description of this style of thinking gives us some indications of what he thought that cost was and why we should be concerned about it.7 By giving itself over to this perhaps distinctively Cartesian fear—the fear of error—philosophy enters into a specific relation to being: it becomes an inquisition, to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, and ceases to be φιλία, friendship or love.8 One is reminded of Proust’s narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu, who feels that he can love the elusive Albertine only when she sleeps because, in sleep, she seems to conceal nothing. Proust’s hero slinks into her chamber, sits and stares, watching her sleep.9 The narrator succumbs to this Cartesian desire: to be beyond doubt. He wishes to find Albertine right where she is, to discover the Archimedean point that would unlock her absolute source, her essence. In this way, he desires a kind of punctuality, to be on time, for as it is, when he arrives on the scene, it is as if she has already fled, concealed within her impossessable consciousness. Wherever and whenever he finds Albertine, he always seems to be late, and her apparently constitutive withdraw is what leads him toward the jealousy and inquisitorial domination that drive her away. This scene from the Recherche could be taken as a metaphor for the kind of thinking that worries Merleau-Ponty. In its search for an unassailable certainty, cruel thought seeks to arrive on time to being, to find it right when and where it is in its incontestable finality and presence. From Phenomenology of Perception to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical work was oriented toward articulating another mode and style for philosophizing that overcomes this cruel, Cartesian fear. I call this style of thought a philosophy of ontological lateness.10 Just as Albertine perpetually eluded Proust’s narrator, the Archimedean point, the absolute source, the essence that cruel thought seeks is out of reflection’s reach. The possibility of arriving at the center, of disclosing the core is foreclosed to philosophy precisely to the extent that it is subject to an irrecoverable weakness, precisely to the extent that it “limps.”11 Like Proust’s narrator, arriving at the advent of being remains perpetually beyond reflection’s reach for it arrives on the scene too late. There are two senses of lateness at play here, both of which operate within the designation “philosophical interrogation,” which Merleau-Ponty worked to define and mobilize against this cruel, inquisitorial thought. First is the former just described— the lateness of reflection to the presence of being. This is not an incidental weakness that could be overcome by placing being under a clearer light or at a better angle. Nor can it be overcome through reflection’s reinvention. This weakness, rather, is a function of a second, more fundamental sense of lateness: the lateness of becoming to being. When philosophical reflection arrives on the scene, already too late, it does not find what it expected. If we follow a truly rigorous method—that of

Introduction

3

phenomenology—what we discover is not what cruel thought wished for, the incontestable transparency of being, but rather a process of flight, of escape, an expressive, temporal éclatement, an explosion of sense that cannot resolve itself. In other words, phenomenological method does not disclose the final λόγος, the word or reason, of being—there is no ἀποκάλυψις, no final unveiling and harmony—but only κάλυψις, the veiling and withdraw of being, not the word but the “permanent dissonance” of an inarticulate scream.12 Phenomenology, in this way, discloses—not “being”—but a process of “becoming,” a “dehiscence,” a splitting open and flux in a process of egress and departure. Reflection recognizes itself to be inscribed within this process, in the grip of the temporal deflagration on which it attempted to seize, and this is why Merleau-Ponty famously remarks in Phenomenology of Perception that the phenomenological reduction cannot be completed.13 In contrast to the cruel thought that seeks its own dissolution in the fullness of being, phenomenology, understood as a philosophy of ontological lateness, discloses the impossibility of completeness and therefore the impossibility of its dissolution. Phenomenology, in this way, as Husserl said and Merleau-Ponty liked to repeat, is a process of perpetual beginning, of renewal, and this precisely in virtue of its lateness.14 By articulating this thought, Merleau-Ponty wishes to overcome the fear, jealousy, and paranoia that motivate cruel thought and to re-think the sense of φιλία at stake in φιλοσοφία. Like Proust’s narrator, cruel thought begins with the fear of not knowing for sure: not knowing whether I am mad, that I am dreaming, that there is not an evil demon, that Albertine is who she says and that she loves me. In both cases what is lacking is φιλία based in πίστις, trust or faith. One who loves does not seek to surveil, possess, and coincide with being but allows for its withdraw, allows for its self-concealing, depth, and shadows, even its “promiscuity.”15 It is a love present at the point of departure. It means not only loving what escapes because of and in its withdraw but loving the escape itself. What is required for this love is not “knowledge” in the sense outlined above—not clarity, distinctness, and apodicticity—but πίστις, the kind that Proust’s narrator lacked, the faith we demonstrate when we no longer take “knowing” as our project, when we let the other—Albertine, being—withdraw, when we allow for the κάλυψις, the veiling, of the λόγος: when we let the other die. The reading of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy I offer here strives to be holistic and avoid the temptation of periodization. The philosophy of ontological lateness, I think, begins with Merleau-Ponty’s initiation into phenomenology, which took place early in 1939, some months before his trip to the Husserl archive in May of that year.16 The philosophical work that his introduction to Husserl’s manuscripts set forth would occupy his thinking from that time until his death. Phenomenology of Perception, therefore, was the first expression of a project that he would spend the rest of his life developing, and the fragment of The Visible and the Invisible, along with his lectures at the Collège de France, represent its most mature development. My strategy is to bring these later texts into dialogue with close readings of several key chapters from the Phenomenology, particularly Le sentir, La temporalité, and La liberté. This shows Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to be a sustained meditation on a consistent anxiety and that, while his later works evince a more mature conceptual vocabulary, the arch of

4

The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness

his thought is marked by the more or less continuous development of a philosophy of ontological lateness.17 Merleau-Ponty’s most important complete work, Phenomenology of Perception, has been received with a certain degree of apprehension by philosophers beginning almost immediately after its publication in 1945. What has worried readers and commentators is the text’s apparent commitment to a certain understanding of consciousness and, consequently, to a certain style of idealism. The specter of idealism worried readers at the time in the wake of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and still does today in light of movements in continental philosophy such as deconstruction and the new realisms. Jean Beaufret, for example, raised this concern in the discussion that followed Merleau-Ponty’s 1946 address at the Société française de philosophie, where he attempted to defend and clarify the text’s thesis of the primacy of perception. Beaufret remarks that Merleau-Ponty, in 1945, failed to abandon “subjectivity and the vocabulary of subjective idealism as, beginning with Husserl, Heidegger has done.”18 Beaufret’s concern has been echoed by more recent commentators, who worry that “guided by the presupposition of consciousness, Phenomenology of Perception remains profoundly dependent on the intellectualism it denounces.”19 This idealist reading of the text, following the impact of Barbaras, has now become a standard approach to Phenomenology of Perception, especially among those scholars those who tend to focus more on the later works, and, to a certain extent, has become a standard approach to existential phenomenology in general.20 Merleau-Ponty, however, was neither ignorant of nor insensitive to this worry, and already in the pages of Phenomenology of Perception we find a sustained critical engagement with the “ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism”21 that invites us to rethink the sense of transcendentality at stake in phenomenology. The transcendental, for Merleau-Ponty, cannot be identified with the ipseity or privilege of a constituting origin, i.e., subjectivity, but must be understood as a field of Einströmen, of “influx,” that in virtue of its temporalization is already on the point of departure. In light of concerns about the specter of idealism, there has also been some discussion about whether Merleau-Ponty’s thought is more closely allied with Husserl or Heidegger. Beaufret, again, complains that Merleau-Ponty remained a Husserlian phenomenologist who had yet to make the transition to Heidegger, anticipating Heidegger’s own assessment of Merleau-Ponty in a letter to Hannah Arendt. Arendt, having read The Visible and the Invisible, enthusiastically asks if Heidegger had read Merleau-Ponty, noting that she thinks him much better than Sartre.22 Heidegger responds saying that he had read some Merleau-Ponty and that he “comes somewhere between Husserl and Heidegger.”23 While such remarks may seem incidental, the reception of Merleau-Ponty’s work, particularly of Phenomenology of Perception, has generally been situated in the context of its proximity and distance to Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. Most scholars follow Beaufret and Heidegger insofar as Phenomenology of Perception is most often read in terms of the quite explicit influence of Husserl,24 and Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Heidegger at this time, particularly Sein und Zeit, remains largely ignored in spite of frequent and prominent references.25 In reading Merleau-Ponty’s work, however, we do not have to choose between Husserl and Heidegger. Merleau-Ponty certainly never made such a choice.

Introduction

5

The strategy I have adopted here is to try to follow the path through phenomenology laid out by Merleau-Ponty, a path that is neither strictly Husserlian nor Heideggerian but is marked along the way with signals from both. This path, I think, takes us into a territory that at various points belongs to Husserl and Heidegger as well as to MerleauPonty and yet, as he says, “opens out on something else.”26 Readers familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s writings may worry that references to lateness and delay are scattered at best and that to organize an interpretation around ontological lateness is somehow unfaithful to the letter of his thought. I hope to show that this worry is not only textually unfounded—there is a wealth of textual evidence across his oeuvre—but I think this anxiety is also contrary to the spirit of MerleauPonty’s philosophical effort. After all, he himself says that “To think is not to possess the objects of thought; it is to use them to mark out a realm to think about which we therefore are not yet thinking about” and that There is no dilemma of objective interpretation or arbitrariness with respect to these articulations, since [the works and thought of a philosopher] 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 again.27

The reading offered here I hope is consistent with these views on what it means to read and interpret a thinker, and my aim is to think again with Merleau-Ponty and to signal something that can be found across his works and that seems to have been a driving force throughout his career: giving voice to the philosophy of ontological lateness.

Part One

Cruel Thought

1

Philosophical Interrogation and Perceptual Faith

In this chapter, I will try to clarify several key concepts in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. The first, l’interrogation philosophique, philosophical interrogation, is the name MerleauPonty gives to the vision of thought he wished to articulate and its tasks toward the end of his career. Interrogation first and foremost refers to questioning. To interrogate is to question. When one imagines interrogation, we think of stark, Spartan rooms illuminated by harsh lights, the faces of the interrogators hidden in shadow. We think of beads of sweat rolling down the witness’s face and sodium pentothal-induced deliriums. We think of restraints and beatings. When we think of interrogation, we imagine a certain image or persona of questioning, most strikingly that of the police, who question in order to elicit facts—truths—about what is the case. This image of interrogation—the police—is what Deleuze famously calls an “image of thought,” an image of thinking and its tasks that remains parasitic on “un-interrogated” presuppositions that it innocently denies in the name of their obviousness or universality.1 Interestingly, even strangely, Merleau-Ponty does not invoke the language of interrogation in the name of the image of questioning called forth by the police but in order to challenge it, even to destroy it. This image brings us to the second concept, what Merleau-Ponty designates as “cruel thought.” Cruel thought, like its counterpart in law enforcement, acts in the name of the “facts,” in the name of what is the case, the “truth.” As we shall see, what we mean when we speak of truth becomes contested in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. The interrogation itself and whatever violence that transpires in its course are justified by their end: penetrating the veil of lies and uncertainty that stand between the hand of justice and the matters themselves. After all, police are there precisely in order to “keep the peace,” maintain the rule of law, and ensure an orderly society where each individual is found in their own proper place, and this is accomplished only if the police are in possession of the truth of things. Cruel thought asks because it wishes to access the purity that lays concealed behind illusion, to have an unfettered view onto the things themselves, to render all in absolute transparency such that nothing remains hidden or concealed. To this extent, like its equivalent in the national security state, cruel thought is preoccupied with surveillance, what Merleau-Ponty calls pensée en survol, thought that hovers above being so that nothing is concealed. When Merleau-Ponty describes his vision of thought as “philosophical interrogation,” which, as we shall see, is too unstable to be called an “image” in Deleuze’s

10

The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness

sense, he has in mind a posture that is different from this cruelty. In contrast to cruel thought and the image of the police who, in questioning, seek the arrest and detention of the matters themselves, philosophical interrogation is a questioning that releases, that acts in the name of the liberation of what is asked. Philosophical interrogation allows for the distance and spacing between what asks and what is asked, and its questioning takes place across this distance, which it does not attempt to eliminate. In contrast to the cruel thought that seeks the transparency and pure visibility of the things themselves, philosophical interrogation allows for depth, shadow, and ambiguity; it allows for the withdraw of that which is interrogated and even allows for its own interrogation, for itself to be questioned by the things it sees. In allowing for the withdraw of what we ask, we give up on the possibility of absolute certainty: we even give up on a certain image of truth as that which is unassailably the case. This brings us to the third concept under consideration. In recognizing the impossibility of certainty, Merleau-Ponty calls for what he calls foi perceptive, perceptual faith. On the one hand, this is the faith demonstrated when I believe that what appears before my eyes are the things themselves in their unconcealment and that there is no epistemic veil drawn between my eyes and the world. On the other hand, however, it names the faith demonstrated by my vision insofar as it allows for—even requires—the intervention of distance, the depth of the things I see but cannot touch. This is the faith demonstrated by Mary Magdalene, who at the appearance of the λόγος, does not reach out her hand to grasp and detain; she does not lay hold of her beloved in an effort to keep him but lets him withdraw. In this way, Mary demonstrates a posture for thinking that no longer seeks for the absolute diapason of all things, that no longer attempts to achieve this harmony in fusion and coincidence. It is this other posture, philosophical interrogation, that Merleau-Ponty attempted to elaborate at the end of his life. Section 1 of the chapter turns to cruel thought in the context of some of MerleauPonty’s later writings, including his final, unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible, an earlier draft of one the chapters from this work, and one of his later lectures at the Collège de France called “Philosophy Today.” I will also turn to some others works by Merleau-Ponty as well as to some by other philosophers such as Aristotle, Heidegger, and Proust. Part 2 takes up a more detailed elaboration of what Merleau-Ponty means when he speaks of philosophical interrogation and how it departs from cruel thought. This is accomplished largely in the context of a discussion of The Visible and the Invisible along with the same lecture from the Collège de France. The chapter closes by turning to the third concept under consideration, perceptual faith, in the context The Visible and the Invisible.

1. Cruel thought To begin, we must understand what anxieties motivate Merleau-Ponty’s project to articulate a new posture for the tasks of thought. From a certain point of view, for a philosopher to call into question the task of acquiring and articulating knowledge, the task of establishing truth in opposition to populist belief in mythology, ideology, or



Philosophical Interrogation and Perceptual Faith

11

mere “opinion” seems to be the height of hubris and audacity. If not in the name of truth and knowledge, then in what name does a so-called philosophy of lateness speak? Can such an inquiry, if one can really call it that, still bear the name “philosophy”? As Merleau-Ponty himself notes at the close of his final published writing, L’Œil et l’Esprit, “Eye and Mind”: What, says the understanding, like [Stendhal’s] Lamiel, is that all there is to it? Is this the highest point of reason, to note that slippage [glissement] of the soil under our feet, to pompously name “interrogation” a state of continued stupor, “research” [recherche] a circular path, to call “Being” that which never fully is?2

It seems that in calling for a new modality for thought, Merleau-Ponty wants to undermine the most sacred tenets of philosophical inquiry, which has always acted in the name of reason, truth, justice, beauty, and the good. Since at least Plato, philosophy has dedicated itself to this pursuit in opposition to the interests of the οἱ πολλοί, “the many,” who are content with the wisdom of common sense, the “obvious,” which more often than not is presided over by the powerful.3 Philosophy, in this way, has traditionally sought the things themselves which lay occluded behind the mere appearances or semblances of truth and the inherently conservative, dogmatic faith in the obvious that is supposed to be the defining feature of the masses and their uneducated appetites for all-you-can-eat buffets, pornography, and senseless violence. Philosophy searches for the truth concealed by popular (or populist) opinion, more durable than fad or fashion, a truth obscured by everyday life and its irrationalist tendencies, habits, and needs. And yet does not this image of thought and its assigned tasks—to philosophize is to seek out truth and knowledge behind the veil of lies—already invite us to call it into question and confront it with its own perhaps unrecognized dogmatism? What is the justification for conceptualizing the tasks of philosophy in terms of the search for truth other than tradition and the shadow of Platonism? What possibilities does this image of thought conceal from us? Is it not possible that this image of thought is just that—an image, an appearance that occludes another stance for thinking that itself asks for other tasks? Perhaps we were hoping for something more, the revelation and unveiling of the final order of things, and we feel as if we have been let down by this idea of a philosophy that cannot arrive at the source, that cannot arrive on time. But perhaps we should reflect on what we asked for when set this expectation for thought and what we presuppose. Perhaps thinking is less of a science and more of an art.4 As Merleau-Ponty goes on to note in L’Œil et l’Esprit, comparing the tasks of thought to those of the painter: But this disappointment is that of false imaginary, which claims a positivity which fills in [comble] exactly its emptiness. It is the regret of not being everything. Regret which is not even entirely justified. For if, neither in painting nor even elsewhere, we cannot establish a hierarchy of civilizations nor speak of progress, it is not because some destiny turns us back, it is, rather, because the very first painting in some sense went all the way into the depths of the future. If no painting completes painting, if no work is itself ever absolutely completed, each

12

The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness creation changes, alters, clarifies, deepens, confirms, exalts, re-creates, or creates in advance all the others. If creations are not an acquisition, it is not just that, like all things, they pass: it is also that they have almost their entire lives before them.5

This passage touches on a number of themes essential to Merleau-Ponty’s thought that will have to be developed over the course of these reflections. For now, let us note how what he says here sheds some light on the posture of thought that was his concern, namely, that philosophy which seeks to make up “for its own emptiness” by coinciding with being in its positivity, purity, and self-identity, the philosophy that, upon reflection, betrays itself as nothing other than a regret of not being everything— bitterness because philosophy turned out to be a concern for mere mortals, because it has taken place here on Earth, and because the magical sage promised in the figure of the philosopher turned out to be, after all, just another human being. This posture for philosophy—the desire to be at the center, the desire to see being itself, to have and see all things in their own proper place—worried Merleau-Ponty. He seems to have changed his mind about what designation to use for this agenda for thinking, often approaching indirectly, through ellipses rather than confronting it directly.6 For the purposes of simplicity and because it brings together a number of motifs and threads that run throughout his texts, both his published works as well as the notes to his courses, I will borrow one such designation: cruel thought. In this section, before turning to the posture for thinking Merleau-Ponty attempted to articulate at the end of his life in opposition to cruel thought, “philosophical interrogation,” I will try to elaborate in detail what the designation “cruel thought” means and why he believed that another posture for thinking was necessary. To do so, I will turn to the text where he uses this designation, a brouillon d’une rédaction, a draft of a revision for one of the chapters published as The Visible and the Invisible, in concert with the published version of that work. When Merleau-Ponty calls this thought “cruel,” as we shall see, it recalls the love affair between the narrator and the fugitive Albertine in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, and I will turn to this text in addition to some of Merleau-Ponty’s own reflections on it as they appear in the 1954 lecture, “Institution in Personal and Public History.” But first, in order to frame what I will say in the context of Merleau-Ponty, I would like to return to one of the oldest and in a sense most formative statements of the tasks of thinking: Aristotle’s Metaphysics A. The text famously begins by saying: πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει.7

“All human beings reach out to know in accordance with nature.” There is a great deal to say about this statement,8 but we will restrict ourselves to the word ὀρέγω. This is usually translated as “desire,”9 but it’s important to note that Aristotle does not say ἐπιθυμία, which means desire in the sense of a passion or an appetite. Human beings may possess such an appetite for knowledge, but this is not what Aristotle means to say here. Knowing, in the verbal sense, is something we reach out for, something we wish to take in hand, to grasp, in the sense of the German word for concept, Begriff, which is what we conceive insofar as it lies within our grasp. By nature human beings



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reach out to take hold of the truth, to tighten our fingers around it and keep it. When it succeeds and we have the truth firmly under our control, we call this reaching out and grasping “knowing.” So much of Western metaphysics before and since Aristotle has been concerned with this possession: with reaching out to touch the essence itself in its purity, unencumbered, with no intervening distance, with no degree of alterity, and with no écart, no fissure or gap separating this reach from that toward which it extends its hand.10 To this extent, this gesture, this reach and grasping, signifies a desire for fusion and indifferentiation; this extended hand wants to arrive at the scene of being, right where and when it is. Understanding this posture in terms of reaching toward and grasping—as touch, contact, and fusion—highlights something about the object toward which we extend our hand: οἶδα, “knowing.” In the Metaphysics, Aristotle defines this as having access to the αἰτία, the “why” of things, usually translated as “cause.”11 To have an αἰτία is to have an antecedent reason for being, an excuse, if you will, for why one is thus and not otherwise. In this way, knowledge becomes about laying hands on being in its culpability and compelling it to confess its “why” to us. In this regard, philosophy, as the pursuit of truth and knowledge, becomes about compelling the objects of its inquiry to reveal their secrets: one could say “interrogation” here, but as we shall see, Merleau-Ponty uses this term in quite a different sense. In lieu of this name, we will use “inquisition” to refer to this other manner of questioning and its perhaps cruel desire to have truth in hand as well as the tasks this desire assigns to philosophy. It is possible, however, to offer a different understanding of Aristotle’s extended hand: hospitality, an open, welcoming hand that reaches out and offers a gift rather than reaching out to lay hold of and detain. For Merleau-Ponty, it is in modernity, with Descartes specifically, that this extended hand becomes a truly paranoid desire to possess, for there knowledge is equated with certainty: it is not enough that being confess its why; we must also be assured that this confession is without error, that there are no deceptions, and that this confession is secured absolutely beyond any possible doubt. Doubt is in a way the primary theme of the Meditations, for this work begins with doubt in the form of a certain fear and anxiety about error—that he is not mad and mistaking himself for a pumpkin or in thinking that his body is made of glass12—and ends with the method of radical doubt. The remaining meditations are the demonstration of the method’s success. Descartes’s methodical doubts—that he is dreaming, that there is evil demon tricking him—are motivated by an original despair in the face of madness and uncertainty and its corresponding desire: to be free from the possibility of error, to enter the world in such a way that it would conceal nothing, where every contingency could be accounted for and indexed, every variable controlled, each outcome predicted with mathematical and geometrical precision such that we would become, as he says in the Discourse, “the lords and masters of nature.”13 We truly would have it in hand with no hope of its escape. In this way, Descartes wishes, as Proust says, to “penetrate into another’s life,”14 and to see the world from the absolute perspective of a pensée en survol, a thought that flies over in survey, a “thought in surveillance,” a God’s eye perspective perched absolutely above being, seeing everything in its pure frontality, leaving nothing concealed. Just as God knows neither “before” nor “after,” likewise there is no “behind” nor “depth” for a gaze

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from which nothing may hide. There are only exposed surfaces to the eye of God. The coincidence afforded in the touch and grasp of this extended hand is, for Descartes, understood in terms of absoluteness, total transparency, a diaphanous being that has surrendered all shadow, depth, and ambiguity. It is this desire, which animates so much philosophy, that Merleau-Ponty names “cruel thought.” In a draft of a chapter from the text now published as The Visible and the Invisible, simply called Brouillon d’une rédaction, he describes this desire and its attendant vision of the tasks of philosophy as “closed thought,” “proximal thought.”15 We mean by that a thought which is haunted by the ideal of an absolute proximity, be it that of ideal significations pierced to all the way to their ground [fond] by the mind, or that of existent things we see at the very point and at the very instant where they are. This thought which wants to be closest to things, which believes neither in distance nor in appearance, cruel thought, which subtracts [retranche] and denudes, fear of error rather than love truth, it is she who shuts us into our significations, in the garden of things said and in accordance with language, sensible things [sensées]. When she seeks the outside, the world itself, she only conceives it as an opaque Being with which we would have to coincide [confrondre].16

The cruelty of thought does not result from a methodology, though many methodologies act in the name of this cruelty; nor does it result from any specific philosophical content, though much philosophical content is organized around it. Rather, thought becomes cruel at the point where it makes a certain demand, at the point where it takes up a certain attitude with respect to truth and being. Thought becomes cruel at the point where its own αἰτία, its own why, is a certain kind of compulsion: not desire per se, but a need, a fictive, delusional longing motivated by what it experiences as a lack and absence. It is a kind of obsessiveness that passes itself off as desire, for it is not love that drives this thought forward but fear: of error, of deception, a fear brought forth by the vicissitudes of finite life, anxiety and terror in the face of not being everything. There is the great weight of this finitude behind this fear and its longing: that we have mortal bodies, history, that there are others who pierce us with their gazes and who we will never truly understand, with whom communication will fail, and who will forever remain a mystery on the hither side of un-traversable distances. We grow old and sick; our friends and loved ones pass on (in one way or another); the minute and yet sublime details of life pass into oblivion; we live and die in time, and in this way, “getting a grip” on our existence passes beyond our reach. Our projects remain unfinished and we too pass into oblivion. Thought becomes cruel in its intolerance for this passage, for it wishes to reach out and hold the thing, to sustain it in its haecceity, its “here-ness,”17 and to insure that there is at least something that will not pass away even if everything that inhabits the visible is destined to fade and die. St. Augustine notes this so eloquently in the Confessions: nam quoquoversum se verterit anima hominis, ad dolores figitur alibi praeterquam in te, tametsi figitur in pulchris extra te et extra se. quae tamen nulla essent, nisi



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essent abs te. quae oriuntur et occidunt, et oriendo quasi esse incipiunt, et crescunt, ut perficiantur, et perfecta senescunt et intereunt: et non omnia senescunt et omnia intereunt. ergo cum oriuntur et tendunt esse, quo magis celeriter crescunt, ut sint, eo magis festinant, ut non sint. sic est modus eorum. Wherever the soul of man turns, unless toward you, it cleaves to sorrow, even though the things outside you and outside itself to which it cleaves may be things of beauty. For these lovely things would be nothing at all unless they were from you. They rise and set: in their rising they begin to be, and they grow towards perfection, and once come to perfection they grow old, and they die: not all grow old but all die. Therefore when they rise and tend toward being, the more haste they make toward fullness of being, the more haste they make toward ceasing to be. That is their law.18

St. Augustine finds solace in the divine, the eternal outside that lies beyond the temporal passage that defines created existence, and we need only open our eyes and see to know that everything that dwells within the visible comes into being and passes away. It is this becoming and passing that fills the philosopher with dread. After all, how can there be truth as such if everything is destined to pass into something else, if all we see is the infinite ῥέω, the flux? In response to this fear, cruel thought wishes to find something outside of this passage, outside of time, and in so doing to tame the caprice of being, its brutality and savagery, to domesticate, integrate, and nativize its strange, foreign ways, civilize its barbarity, to make safe and recognizable what is perhaps most strange. For Merleau-Ponty, this cruel desire has haunted the history of Western metaphysics—one may even argue that it is the essence of Western metaphysics and that philosophy since Plato has been the sublimation of this obsession and its attendant anxieties.19 In The Visible and the Invisible, he remarks that “metaphysics remains coincidence.”20 The metaphysics of realism and idealism, the monstrous offspring born of the dismemberment of Cartesian thought,21 whose tedious debate has occupied so much of Western philosophy since this mutilation, are not so different, in MerleauPonty’s view, insofar as they are but two paths toward seizing upon and capturing being. “They are two positivisms,” he says, where philosophy is flattened to the sole plane of ideality or to the sole plane of existence. On both sides one wants something—internal adequation of the idea or selfidentity of the thing—to come stop up the look, and one excludes or subordinates the thought of distances [lointains], horizonal thought.22

When Merleau-Ponty engages realism and idealism, it is frequently with an aim to show their dialectical kinship and instability as one collapses into the other under serious scrutiny. It is their shared desire for adequacy—the desire to be sufficient— that unites these poles and, ultimately, renders them into figures of cruelty. Such a desire is perhaps what defines all forms of positivism: the desire to possess, to exhaust, to illuminate completely, a desire for transparency and clarity, the desire to eliminate the distance between thought and its object. As Merleau-Ponty notes, also in The Visible and the Invisible, the philosopher, at the point where he has indulged in

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this desire, has taken as his task “the search for an original integrity, for a secret lost and to be rediscovered, which would nullify our questions and even reprehend our language.”23 In seeking to rid being of all its shadows, depth, latency and ambiguity, the philosopher identifies himself with the one, as Leonard Lawlor puts it, that “asks for ‘titles and definitions’ (NC, 377) so as to enclose the other in a spectacle,” and to this extent “we can say that the persona of the philosopher who understands (entend) is the jailor.”24 Or, alternatively, we could suggest that he identifies himself with the inquisitor, the one whose question, whose inquirere, seeks to resolve itself in an absolute judgment of truth and falsity that establishes the difference categorically, unequivocally, between those included within the zone of doctrine and those on the outside, beyond the border. Only the paranoia and jealousy of cruel thought wishes to fix this difference, and it is precisely its need for such purity, its romantic longing after lost integrity, its call for authenticity, the need to fix, designate and index, that makes thought cruel. The cruelty at play in this kind of inquisition is dramatized perhaps most clearly in a scene from Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. In a way, this is no coincidence since Proust was consistently present on the horizon of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. At the same time, Proust is an obvious inspiration since so much of the drama in the Recherche revolves around the distance between subjectivities and the desire to traverse and thus eliminate it, to make oneself commensurate with and fuse with the other. This desire is illustrated in vivid and striking clarity in the narrator’s affair with Albertine, “daughter of the mists and the outside.”25 It is not enough for the narrator to share her company, for while awake, she remains elusive, distant, concealing her essence in bodily movement, speech, and in her glance as it escapes toward invisible thoughts and desires. It is only when she is asleep, when she seems still and lifeless, that he feels that he can love her—precisely insofar as she ceases to conceal herself in the wakeful impenetrability of her gestures, in the thoughtful gleam of her eyes and smile: only when she ceases be a consciousness. The following episode famously illustrates the narrator’s desire: In this way her sleep did to a certain extent make love possible. When she was present, I spoke to her, but I was too far absent from myself to be able to think. When she was asleep, I no longer needed to talk to her, I knew that she was no longer looking at me, I had no longer any need to live upon my own outer surface. By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human characters with which she had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance. She was animated now only by the unconscious life of vegetation, of trees, a life more different from my own, more alien, and yet one that belonged more to me. Her personality did not escape at every moment, as when we were talking, by the channels of her unacknowledged thoughts and of her gaze. She had called back into herself everything of her that lay outside, had taken refuge, enclosed, reabsorbed, in her body. In keeping her before my eyes, in my hands, I had that impression of possessing her altogether, which I never had when she was awake. Her life was submitted to me, exhaled towards me its gentle breath.26



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Proust’s narrator is attracted to Albertine at the point where she ceases to elude him: when she puts to rest the uncertain intentions concealed behind her eyes and closes off her possibilities, when she becomes vegetative, inanimate, more like a thing—like an automaton.27 In sleep, Albertine no longer escapes the narrator as she did when she was awake, speaking in conversation. The demonic, cruel, imaginary Albertine slips away, and he no longer need worry about her secret desires, whether she is a lesbian or enjoys orgies in the company of cyclists. She becomes a surface without depth, pure visibility that has no invisible, no dimensionality. In sleep, Albertine casts no shadows. There is nothing ambiguous or yet indeterminate in her manner of being. Therefore, it is only in sleep that the narrator feels that he can “love her”—that is to say, it is only when she sleeps that he feels that he can possess her, that he feels that his reaching hand may finally hold her decisively in its grip. In sleep, Albertine becomes geometrical, mathematical, and the narrator is able to indulge in a certain kind of apodicticity as he sits, staring at her while she sleeps. The narrator’s jealousy, his desire to possess Albertine, is akin, if not identical, to the need that characterizes cruel thought.28 As Merleau-Ponty notes in his remarks on Proust in his 1954 lecture, “Institution in Personal and Public History,” it would be a mistake to confuse this compulsion with φιλία, with love, for this kind of longing “is founded on analysis rather than self-esteem, doubt about oneself ”; it is a lonely need locked away in its study, gazing out at the people crossing the square, wishing they were automatons, “for there are people for whom there is no such thing as shared love.”29 At the foundation of the narrator’s ambivalence toward Albertine and everything entailed by it—“domination, unpleasantness, inquisition, jealousy, alternating with tenderness,” indeed, cruelty—is the secret that he utterly lacks in φιλία toward her, and this is why he believes that Albertine must also lack such regard toward him, harboring another life which she conceals out of deceit and malice. Even in death Albertine remains elusive to the narrator as well as the reader, quite purposively on the part of the author, for the point seems to be that the narrator’s (and perhaps the reader’s) mistake was in trying to decipher this mystery. We fail at love when our concern becomes “truth.” Love, φιλία, remains impossible for Proust’s narrator, like the philosophy that wishes to coincide and fuse with being, because what he wants from her is something like an answer given over to correctness and incorrectness. He imagines that Albertine is a problem to be solved, and in this way his relationship to her remains fundamentally epistemological, and this, like for Descartes, is the source of his fear. He cannot love because he experiences only dread in the face of her distance and inexhaustibility, which he finds intolerable. He fears, as MerleauPonty says, because of “the intermittences of the heart, because of generality, the contingency of love.”30 He fears in the face of her absence and the distance between them, and we understand that this is fear and not love at the point where his hand reaches out to possess Albertine, to wrap his fingers around her and enclose her totally within his grasp. As perhaps Descartes understood better than any other, it is because we have bodies, the past, because of the distancing and spacing between our desires and the world that we worry about our sanity, worry if we are dreaming, and whether we are here at all. Corporeality, temporality, history, finitude, the presence of others, the rising and setting of all things, give us cause for doubt. In the face of our

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finitude and temporality we doubt and seek to traverse the depth of being to mollify our anxieties in the other or in philosophy. We want our longing to be satisfied, our efforts to complete being, to ensure that there are no demons and that we will wake up in the morning. It was not enough for Descartes to take things on faith—philosophy requires a rigorous method capable of dispelling our nightmares and providing an assurance and certainty that could arrest being and coerce it to display itself in naked transparency, concealing nothing. Is this kind of appetite what is meant when we speak of φιλία in regard to σοφία? Is this cruelty what there really is for philosophy? As Merleau-Ponty rightly points out, such an epistemological desire is not love at all, for the love that seeks certainty is a love that is merely “known” rather than a love that is lived.31 No one but a philosopher would recognize the longing that afflicts Proust’s narrator as love—it is cruelty that ends in the beloved’s flight, her fuga, and the narrator wakes to find that she has gone, disparue. It is because of its cruelty, its desire for possession and fear of not being everything, that, for Merleau-Ponty, philosophy remains in a state of crisis and requires rehabilitation. From at least Phenomenology of Perception forward he was concerned with articulating a philosophy of openness that dispenses with this need to incarcerate, limit and resolve.32 As he says in his 1958–9 course, “Philosophy Today,” the task of thinking, following Husserl, is like the phoenix that rises up from the ashes of this crisis, outlining itself as “either stammering, near silence or [which] expressly presents itself as non-philosophy.”33 There is another posture, gesture, and modality for love of wisdom that distains the romanticism of cruel thought—a territory beyond the domain of the “decadence of express, official philosophy” that as of yet barely manages to articulate itself but nonetheless is opening itself up as a possibility: a non-philosophy, as he says, that challenges philosophy’s cruelty.34 As he notes in the Brouillon text: the two failures are avoidable if the demand for an absolute proximity of being is a prejudice, if the internal adequation of the idea as well as the self-identity of the thing is a myth, if it is essential to the idea as to the thing to present itself in a distance which is not an impediment for knowledge.35

For Merleau-Ponty, cruel thought must not be identified with φιλοσοφία as such, for its desire is not motivated by esteem: not by φιλία but by “fear of errors” rather than a “love of truth,”36 the kind of fear that motivated Descartes’s desire for certainty and the surreal, paranoid, and disquieting philosophy that followed and which still haunts us.37 What is at stake for Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the meaning and possibility of philosophical interrogation, then, is to think philosophical desire again, beyond its misidentification with the fear of not being everything and beyond the need for guarantees that accompanies this fear.

2. Philosophical interrogation and perceptual faith Already in Phenomenology of Perception and throughout the development of his late, incomplete ontology,38 Merleau-Ponty was trying to give voice to a different posture for philosophizing, a posture he names “interrogation.” At first blush, interrogation



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calls to mind the kind of cruelty outlined in the previous section: the police who demand papers, documents, proper names and designations, who place being under the harsh light of reason and by threats and force, sometimes through violence, get the truth from the suspect one way or another. At the end, a document is signed and the truth is formalized; it becomes “official.” Interestingly, even strangely, this is not what Merleau-Ponty means when he chooses this word as the representative of a new ontology. In this section, we will explore the concept of l’interrogation philosophique. Even in a cursory reading of The Visible and the Invisible one sees this language appear virtually everywhere, so much so that the published portions of the text are easily legible as a rumination on this theme. And yet what, exactly, does Merleau-Ponty mean by this, and more importantly, how is this idea to be distinguished from what we have called cruel thought? Interrogation, as we will see, is the name of MerleauPonty’s attempt to maintain the openness of the tasks of thinking and philosophy against the desire for closure and possession. Merleau-Ponty describes this openness in terms of the astonishment that defines the philosophical—and painterly—gaze, the ability to look at the world across its distances, to allow for those distances, and, in a way, to make those distances themselves visible without also attempting to bring them into proximity. The interrogative posture of philosophy, for Merleau-Ponty, is what is at stake in what he calls foi perceptive, the perceptual faith that he speaks about in his later work. Philosophical interrogation is the posture of philosophy when it understands itself as a kind of vision, which takes place only in virtue of distance, which looks across at things and does not seek their approximation. For it is impossible to see the things we hold too closely, so near that their bodies touch ours completely. In its interrogative mood, the task of thinking is concerned with keeping open this questioning posture and gesture that makes space for the occlusion and occultation of being. I want to explicate the concept of philosophical interrogation by turning to Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Heidegger, specifically in his 1958–9 course, “Philosophy Today.” Then I will turn to passages from The Visible and the Invisible in reference to the foi perceptive. Readers of Heidegger will recognize the particular importance of the concept of interrogation, Befragen, has for his work, especially in light of the Seinsfrage, the question of the meaning of being, and the interrogation of Dasein staged in Sein und Zeit. In that text, Dasein is the name Heidegger uses for that being for whom being is an issue, the being who asks about what we mean when we speak of being and who shows concern with this question. Interrogation is used by Heidegger in a specific sense to be distinguished from “investigation,” Untersuchung, as in Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, the Logical Investigations. In investigation, Heidegger notes, “one lays bare that which the question is about and ascertains its character.”39 The object of inquiry is conceptually fixed and designated. Interrogation, by contrast, seeks to open the question and maintain it in its openness. Dasein is the being questioned because it is the one who wonders, who is able to stand before being in an interrogative, questioning posture. Already in Heidegger, then, we see the reciprocity between the being who questions and what it questions, a reciprocity that Merleau-Ponty will take up and develop. As Merleau-Ponty notes in the précis to the “Philosophy Today”

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course, the aim of Sein und Zeit was “not to describe existence, Being-there [Être-là] … as a fundamental and autonomous sphere—but, through Da-sein, to get to Being, the analysis of certain human attitudes being undertaken only because man is the interrogation of Being.”40 As he puts it in the notes from this lecture: [The] Preface [of Sein und Zeit] presents the analytic of Dasein as access to the question of Sein—Dasein is only considered insofar as it is interrogation of Being, that being who has a privileged relationship to Being (S.u.Z., p. 8) being itself the Fragen, being the being who is in question in its being (S.u.Z., p. 15).41

The important methodological place that Dasein occupies in the way Heidegger frames and structures the Seinsfrage is not primarily a function of an incipient anthropocentrism, according to Merleau-Ponty. The importance of Dasein is a function of its structure: Dasein must be interrogated because this being is already a question, already an interrogation under way. Dasein stages this interrogation, this questioning, in the operative understanding of being expressed in its comportments, the postures it takes up with respect to its world. These postures, gestures, at the point where they are disclosive, at the point where they indicate and reveal, also call what they reveal into question. In this way, Dasein is already a questioning of the being of being. But Dasein itself is a being, and thus its interrogative posture toward being is also a questioning it addresses to itself. It seems to be this Heideggerian sense of interrogation that inspires Merleau-Ponty, who appropriates it as a starting point he wishes to radicalize and take further. For Merleau-Ponty, interrogation is employed as a means to signal a posture for thought that departs from its traditional confinement to the indicative mood where it limits itself to making mere énoncés, mere statements about beings. The interrogative does not simply state but opens itself in an astonished regard; it looks at things in their shining forth, predicating nothing. The indicative, on the contrary, designates and specifies, and in so doing, narrows and limits possibilities. The indicative closes, and it accomplishes this closure in the proposition: S is P, where the copula serves to delimit and encapsulate, defining categorical limitations and boundaries. Traditionally, the tasks of philosophy have been understood in terms of the issuance of judgment in the name of truth. The function of the copula in a categorial act is to fix the relationship between concepts, categories for which clear boundaries must already be drawn and demarcated. According to this traditional way of thinking, philosophy becomes the work of establishing such boundaries, i.e., defining concepts, and then fixing the necessary predications that obtain between concepts in statements that can be assessed in terms of their correctness or incorrectness. Such limitations and boundaries are the logical units of predication and are expressed in our ordinary, sedimented language that takes itself for granted. Traditionally, philosophy has presupposed that such an austere language, reduced to its function of expressing propositions, was the only or at least the preferable medium for thought, and in this way the tasks of philosophy are assigned in terms of generating propositions that can be assessed in terms of their “truth” or “falsity,” at the point where they are adequate or inadequate to a state of affairs.42 We see now, of course, the manner in which the understanding of the tasks of philosophy, as well as its posture and modality, are linked with how we understand truth. As Merleau-Ponty notes in “Philosophy Today” a propos of Heidegger:



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Language in its wesen [presence] (verbal) is not stated [énoncé] (Richtigkeit [correctness]). It is interrogation—interrogation and not “question”—“proposition … ” There are no statements, representations of being, [which] is not to say: being is unspeakable in the sense of a transcendent (which in itself would be adequation)—[it] means to say: the statement, the representation, are in principle unable to speak of Being, being productions of Being, particularizations of Being. Being dwells in [habite] bewohnen [inhabits] language, it is its motor, and it is because it is not attained by language as object, language [which] is gewöhnlich [ordinary].43

As interrogation, the tasks of philosophy are no longer to be understood in terms of making statements, no longer limited to the expression of propositions. The proposition, for Merleau-Ponty, is no longer the basic unit of thought, for language in its indicative mood is not sufficient for the manifestation of being. This is because, as Heidegger said and Merleau-Ponty liked to quote: it is not we who speak language but language who speaks us.44 Our statements are already the issuance of being, already its articulations as it makes itself known through us. An objectified, sedimented language is not sufficient to turn back upon being and disclose it, for this language necessarily presupposes and is even parasitic upon being itself, which it forgets in its work of designating and circumscribing—another posture, another mood for thought is necessary. Only a language that opens itself is capable of giving voice to being, one that does not seek closure in the correctness of the proposition but one that allows for the distancing of its object, a language that no longer attempts to close around what it seeks but that allows for its depth and withdraw. In its indicative, propositional posture, thought becomes organized around the line: the line that circumscribes the concept and establishes the border of inclusion and exclusion in accordance with the genus and differo of its definition; the line that fixes and determines the predicative relations between these territories, another border that establishes the propriety of such relationships and fixes the difference between truth and falsity. Logic is the name of the discipline that concerns itself with these lines and territories, a game, if you will, derived from the accretion and concretization of sense in language. Merleau-Ponty goes on to elaborate: “Logic” as variant of speech and not the inverse. Transformation, by Greek philosophy, of φύσις in ἰδέα (visibility), of λόγος as “gathering” [rassemblement] (necessarily identical to the Dingen [thingness] of the thing) in λόγος as “Rede” [discourse], “narrative” [récit], “statement” [énoncé], therefore the reduction of the truth of opening [ouverture] to the truth of Richtigkeit [correctness]—categories as modes of Gesagtsein [being-said] – The possible defined by a pure formal property of non-ἀντίφασις [contradiction].45

The play of categories, concepts, and their predications that is for the most part the concern of logic is founded upon the birth of sense in its openness, in its uncertainty. This openness, however, already in Greek thought is transmuted into the closure of the proposition. Nature, φύσις, is transformed into the ἰδέα that is always self-identical and does not change; the λόγος that makes visible in its gathering becomes the λόγος

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of discourse, of the proposition; truth as openness, ἀλήθεια or unconcealment, is converted into truth as correctness, and the open field of possibility is reined in by the principle of non-contradiction. The birth of the world, the φύω, the bloom and coming into presence of everything named φύσις by the Ancient Greeks, is recast as a system of correctness and incorrectness established by the border wall drawn between what is and what is not, propriety and impropriety, Q and ~Q. At the point where philosophy becomes identified with the line, with the border, it also becomes about enclosure, establishing differentials of inclusion and exclusion, interior and exterior, yes and no. The tasks of thinking are assigned in terms of the wall and the fence and philosophers become identified with the persona of border agents who police what can be invoked in the name of truth and what cannot. Merleau-Ponty eventually calls his thinking philosophical interrogation precisely in order to call the sovereignty of this indicative, propositional model into question and to consider the possibility of another modality. After all, the initiating gesture of philosophy is not the assertion: I know x but the question: what do I know? Philosophy does not begin with the line, the border, fixation and determination, inclusion and exclusion, but begins in the interrogative—a questioning regard addressed to this φύω, this efflorescence of things that also returns this question to the gaze that stands before it in astonishment. One of the primary tasks at play in Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy is to return to this beginning, philosophy’s initiating gesture. As he notes in The Visible and the Invisible, “What do I know?” is not only “what is knowing?” and not only “who am I?” but finally: “what is there? and even: “what is the there is?” These questions call not for the exhibiting of something said which would put an end to them, but for the disclosure of a Being that is not posited because it has no need to be, because it is silently behind all our affirmations, negations, and even behind all formulated questions, not that it is a matter of forgetting them in its silence, not that it is a matter of imprisoning it in our chatter, but because philosophy is the reconversion of silence and speech into one another: “It is the experience … still mute which we are concerned with leading to the pure expression of its own meaning.”46

The fixation of meaning in the definition and the proposition seeks to put an end to questioning: an end called a solution or answer that encloses being in the “chatter” of its truth-functionality. Philosophical interrogation is not merely the inversion or reversal of differing indicative forms but the reorganization of philosophical expression in terms of the primacy of the interrogative, as he says, a question-savoir.47 To interrogate, to question in this sense, is not to elicit assertions or propositions from a witness or perpetrator, for this kind of questioning still remains discursive, within the indicative, what we have called “inquisition”: it is concerned only with answers, and it is the need for answers and statements, for knowledge, that motivates its desire to fix lines and establish zones of affirmation and negation. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, then, “interrogation” is not concerned with eliciting information as such. It is in some way the opposite of interrogation in the mundane sense. It is not, as MerleauPonty notes in the section of The Visible and the Invisible called “Perceptual Faith and Interrogation,” concerned with knowledge [connaissance], nor is it concerned with



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realization [prise de conscience];48 the primary concern of philosophical interrogation is ouverture: opening, and maintaining this opening against the all too ubiquitous forces of cruelty that seek its closure.49 What philosophical interrogation aims at, as Merleau-Ponty goes on to elaborate in these pages, is not an approximation of discourse and being—in which we must hear “proximity,” the “proximal” thought that wishes to be closest to things and coincide with them—but being “at a distance, by way of horizon, latent or dissimulated.”50 We are mistaken in understanding knowledge as the aim or end of philosophy as long as this entails a termination of thought in the adequacy of the proposition to a state of affairs, a fulfillment, a solution or answer, because philosophy, understood as interrogation, is nothing other than the openness of the question and maintaining the questioning posture in its openness, to see and to look precisely across the distances that stand between being and our reaching hand. Merleau-Ponty says, “here the lacuna will never be filled in [comblée], the unknown transformed into the known; the ‘object’ of philosophy will never come to fill in [remplir] the philosophical question, since this obduration would take from it the depth and distance that are essential to it.”51 Sustaining the interrogative posture as interrogative means guarding against the desire to be filled in, to be satisfied, that has characterized most of Western metaphysics. To stand in the openness of questioning means to withhold one’s touch, that the hand that reaches does not seek to close but endeavors to remain open, to maintain the experience of wonder and astonishment in face of the φύω of all possibilities. For Merleau-Ponty, the model of this astonishment has always been found in the gaze of the painter, whose task is to look at the world with the naiveté of the child who sees something for the very first time, to make visible the strangeness and newness of the world otherwise concealed by its familiarity. What the painter and the child have in common is the ability to look and see without the need to also hold what they see in their grasp, to find fascination in what otherwise appears as domestic and ordinary. This painterly and childlike posture requires a certain kind of generosity, the ability to make way and to let be, what Heidegger called Gelassenheit.52 Merleau-Ponty clarifies this point in a passage from the same section of The Visible and the Invisible: The effective, present, ultimate and primary being, the thing itself, are in principle apprehended in transparency through their perspectives, offer themselves only to someone who wishes not to have them but to see them, not to hold them with forceps under the objective of a microscope, but to let them be and to assist [assister] their continued being—to someone who therefore limits himself to giving them the hollow, the free space they ask for in return, the resonance they require, who follows their own movement, who is therefore not a nothingness the full being would come to stop up, but a question consonant with the porous being which it questions and from which it obtains not an answer, but a confirmation of its astonishment. It is necessary to comprehend perception as this interrogative thought which lets the perceived world be rather than posits it, before which the things form and undo themselves in a sort of slippage [glissement], beneath the yes and the no.53

As interrogation, philosophy stands in astonishment before the world—an astonishment whose hand remains open and does not attempt to grasp that to which it

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bears witness. It is a question that maintains its openness as a question and does not seek its own resolution in an answer. It actually forbids us to speak of solutions, as Merleau-Ponty says, and sustains itself as an “approach to the distant as distant,” and to this extent, “is also a question put to what does not speak.”54 This is why MerleauPonty tends to privilege vision over touch or other senses.55 When I look at the world with my eyes, what manifests itself does so, necessarily, at a distance and may only show itself within the clearing and space of that distance. It is because the things before my eyes withdraw and recede that they become visible, because they stretch out into an expanse that no touch could ever traverse. I see only when I allow between myself and the world the intervention of a distance that allows the world to come to presence before open eyes, the “‘inarticulate scream,’ as Hermes Tresmigestus said, which seemed the voice of light.’”56 The gaze, in this manner, does not seek answers or solutions—it bears witness only to the luminosity of being as it rises up and makes itself known. It does not grasp and hold close but it allows the world to depart; vision sends the visible away into the distance, for as things come to pass beneath it, so they recede into the unfathomable depth. In witnessing the flux of this coming tide of the world across this distance, the philosopher finds herself astonished and perplexed, and asks that “inexhaustible question turning from us to the world”: Where am I? What time is it?57 In other words, questions about space, time, the appearing of what appears, its texture, nuance, rhythm and style. The gaze itself is already this questioning, but a questioning that responds to an interrogation already posed and asked by the world itself, for “the existing world exists in the interrogative mode.”58 As the gaze questions the visible things, so does the visible question the gaze, for it is not just that vision opens forth on the distancing of the visible but the visible too takes up a perspective on vision. Not only do I look at things and occupy a perspective but things too occupy this perspectival depth and have a point of view on me as well as on the other things I see. The vase here on the table of the cafe is situated with respect to the wall, with respect to the counter, the windows, the entrance, the bench, and myself, and all of these things stand in their own referential posture with respect to the vase. If they could see, the surrounding world would manifest itself in terms of this posture and its references. The world is not spread out in transparency for any of these perspectives because all of us occlude the lines of sight pointing from one thing to the next. In this way, not only am I the seat or site of vision, which comes forth through and thanks to my body, its structure and organization, but I too am visible, am seen, as this is already called forth by the possibility of vision. To see is already to be seen. This thought is captured most eloquently in an expression attributed to Paul Klee favored by Merleau-Ponty: “In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me.”59 For Merleau-Ponty, it is no coincidence that painters should understand better than others that the questioning gaze of vision is referred back to them by the visible, that they not only question the world with their gaze but are also questioned by what is seen. What becomes visible on the surface of the canvas is not primarily the figure or the line, perhaps not even color, but this interrogation staged between the eyes of the painter and the opening of the visible. In this sense, the questioning posture of philosophical interrogation does not proceed



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in a single direction from the spectator to the world but is already of the world as the things look at me from their equally astonished point of view. It is a questioning that takes place between, in the interstices, the gaps or écarts that issue throughout the flesh of being, in the space and distancing that makes everything visible in its fissuring, its explosion, its splitting open and dehiscence. Philosophy, for Merleau-Ponty, is the task of occupying, insofar as it is possible, this interstice, this reflexive questioning, this interrogation: “the perceptual faith questioning itself about itself.”60 Perceptual faith, foi perceptive, is one of the important ideas articulated in The Visible and the Invisible, and it will be worth spending some time looking at it in the context of philosophical interrogation. First, perceptual faith refers to the belief, inscribed in the eruption of perceptual experience itself, that it is the things themselves that we see and that there is no epistemic veil between what we see and what there is. In other words, when I see the world, things present themselves in a manner unclouded by doubt or uncertainty. These only come later when I undertake a certain kind of reflection or meditation. Pre-reflectively, pre-philosophically, I inhabit a world that shows itself to my eyes with all the fullness and presence of its haecciety. It is only when I attempt to articulate in words what “seeing” means, “who” sees, or “what is seen” that difficulties emerge. As Merleau-Ponty says at the beginning of the The Visible and the Invisible, We see the things themselves, the world is what we see: formulae of this kind express a faith common to the natural man and to the philosopher—the moment he opens his eyes; they refer to a deep-seated set of mute “opinions” implicated in our lives. But what is strange about this faith is that if we seek to articulate it into theses or statements, if we ask ourselves what is this we, what seeing is, what thing or world is, we enter into a labyrinth of difficulties and contradictions.61

We can say of our perceptual experience, as Merleau-Ponty goes on to note, what St. Augustine says about time: “quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio”; “What is therefore time? If no one asks me, I know; if someone asks me to explain, I do not know.”62 Like time, our perceptual experience and the world we perceive are “perfectly familiar to each, but … none of us can explain [them] to others.”63 When I look at the stool here in the café, my perceptual experience insists that it is the stool itself that appears and that there is no intervening epistemological dissonance. It is round, with a long stem and four legs, painted gray. The paint is old, scratched, and chipping off, revealing the dull metal beneath in places. I am sure that if I were to move over and take another seat, it would be still be there, that if I were to touch it, it would return my touch. It is this faith in the perceived that Descartes both acknowledges and casts into doubt in the Meditations. By casting this faith into doubt, he ushers the epistemological dissonance between what I see and what there is into modernity and exacerbates centuries of debate and controversy about how this dissonance must be resolved. By bringing us back to our faith in the perceived, Merleau-Ponty wants to restore a certain relationship to the world of perception that has been put in jeopardy by philosophers since at least Plato and show that the problem rearticulated by Descartes is an abstraction, a philosophical excess and artifice.

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But perhaps more importantly is the foi, the faith, of perceptual faith. In place of the fear that corresponds with the desire for certainty and which characterizes cruel thought, Merleau-Ponty wishes to articulate a relationship to the world that has been obscured by this anxiety: πίστις—trust or faith—which as Plato understood, is how we stand with respect to the perceived in the absence of the cruel need for certainty. When I say that I do not know, that I am not certain, that my hand is open, I assume a posture of trust; I have faith in what presents itself before my eyes. We should be careful not to confuse this faith with a kind of fanaticism, a militant belief in the absolute λόγος of being, in its completeness and totality, a totality that could banish the demons to secure and guarantee certainty beyond any possible doubt. This latter faith is not faith at all insofar as one presupposes that they are already in possession of the final diapason of being. This would be a faith confused by absolute certainty. Precisely at the point where this faith no longer demands security, it dispenses with this desire for the λόγος as well: rather than faith in the final harmony of being, it is the acceptance of its “permanent dissonance,”64 not faith in the word but acceptance of the cri, the inarticulate scream.65 It is a kind of faith that invites and accepts the occultation and withdrawal of being as the very means of its openness. As Merleau-Ponty says later in The Visible and the Invisible a propos of perceptual faith: If philosophy is to appropriate to itself and to understand this initial openness to the world which does not exclude possible occultation, it cannot be content with describing it; it must tell us how there is openness without the occultation of the world being excluded, how the occultation remains at each instant possible even though we be naturally endowed with light. The philosopher must understand how it is that these two possibilities, which the perceptual faith keeps side by side within itself, do not nullify one another.66

It is in this sense that philosophical interrogation calls for faith rather than certainty— to love wisdom means to be open to being precisely in its occlusion, in its chaos. To philosophize is not to issue subpoenas and seek the arrest of being, to lay it bare in its full transparency, but to maintain the disclosive, illuminating movement of astonished questioning side by side with the recognition that doubts and shadows will remain, that the beloved that we seek will always be both real and imaginary at the same time and that the movement of philosophy does not end in stillness, in the resolution and consonance of contact of self with self, but is an invitation to maintain this openness even through its difficulty, even in the face of the nonchalance, the sanctimoniousness, even the violence of those who too easily speak the words “I know.” When one has faith, one’s hand is open; when one has faith, one does not touch but looks with the open eyes of the painter or the child. Merleau-Ponty speaks of perceptual faith for this reason: because what shows itself to my eyes is not a transparency, not a certainty. What I see before my eyes manifests itself across this ineluctable distance and is therefore open to the possibility of being otherwise, open to the possibility of doubt. It was this possibility, this distance, that was apparently intolerable to the philosophies that wished to secure being from this spacing, this écart, and who, therefore, wished to overcome and escape the visible for access to that which is never otherwise than what it is, that which does not recede



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and escape. As Merleau-Ponty says, “It is a faith because it is the possibility of doubt, and this indefatigable ranging over the things, which is our life, is also a continuous interrogation. It is not only philosophy, it is first the look that questions things.”67 To philosophize, for Merleau-Ponty, is to allow for this continuous interrogation, the maintenance of our possibilities as possibilities, the texture of our lives in their openness. When Plato writes that “practicing philosophy in the right way, in fact, [is] training to die easily,”68 it is with a view to casting aside the visible, that is to say corporeal, contaminants that impede the soul’s ascent to the purely intelligible, to the invisible. This invisible, precisely at the point where it cannot be seen, has no shadows cast over it and has no depth, but as a pure, uncontaminated access to the things themselves, this invisible closes possibility at the point where there is both literally and metaphorically “nothing else to see”: nothing to see because the visible has now been left behind and nothing to see because there are no further possibilities on the horizon beyond the εἴδη. As Heidegger notes in Sein und Zeit, death is the possibility of the end of all possibilities, the final closure and “end” of one’s existence in this sense.69 In death, nothing else is possible and thus there are no further questions, and it is in this sense that it can be said to be a “solution.” Merleau-Ponty’s aim is to overturn this Platonic legacy: to philosophize is to return to the perceived in all its elusiveness and ambiguity, in all its openness, and precisely not to seek the resolution of possibility in the clarity of the purely invisible εἴδη but to live in the open interrogation philosophers have always recognized the visible to be; not to scrape off the incrustations of corporeality in order to slip easily into death, but to live with them and their contingency, their withdraw and distance. Dwelling within the visible in this manner requires faith, foi perceptive in the sense described. *** In this chapter I have endeavored to elaborate what Merleau-Ponty means when he describes the vision for philosophical inquiry he was elaborating at the end of his life as “interrogation” against the backdrop of its foil, what I have called, following Merleau-Ponty himself, “cruel thought.” Cruel thought describes a certain posture for philosophy, a certain gesture or stance, characterized by reaching out toward being in order to possess it, in order to exhaust it, to render it in transparency and index its possibilities. This need, this compulsion, which may not warrant the name “desire,” is motivated by “fear of error,” by an intolerance for the finitude, passage, and temporalization of mortal life—and in this way, this obsession with taking being into possession in its entirety is a need to step out of the mortal coil, to leave it behind and become, in a sense, God. For longing to see to being in total transparency is a longing to see it from point of view of God—that is to say, a longing to see from nowhere, to be nowhere. As Merleau-Ponty will suggest elsewhere, such a longing is nothing other than desire for death.70 Traditionally, the accomplishment of this possession has been identified with the assertion, and the tasks of philosophy have been assigned in terms of generating propositions, where truth is understood in terms of correctness or incorrectness. In

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this way, thought becomes about establishing the line and border between fact and myth, enclosing the true within the walls of reason and sanity at the exclusion of their opposites. Merleau-Ponty borrows the word “interrogation” from Heidegger in order to challenge this image: thinking is no longer understood to be organized around the primacy of the assertion, the proposition and its correctness or incorrectness but is to be understood in the interrogative mood: as a questioning glace that allows for distance and spacing between thought and being, that no longer seeks to resolve itself in coincidence and fusion. In contrast to the cruel thought that only seeks to dominate being, philosophical interrogation is able to allow being to recede into its depth, mystery, and enigma with the astonished gaze of the child or painter. The properly philosophical gesture is not the hand that reaches out in order to take and grasp but an open hand that lets the other depart. The ability to allow for the departure of being in its spacing and distance is what is expressed when Merleau-Ponty speaks of a foi perceptive, the perceptual faith that, precisely as faith, does not seek resolution in certainty. Faith means that we no longer need to know, that we are willing to open our hands to what eludes us and accept the occlusion and occultation of being, to accept its depth and ambiguity. Merleau-Ponty’s thought is often discussed in terms of the critical stance he takes up with respect to realism and idealism, and we hear that a phenomenology of perception or an ontology of the flesh are offered as a better alternative to these.71 Or, similarly, we hear that Merleau-Ponty’s thought stands in opposition to Cartesianism, and that a new ontology is the necessary remedy for this error. But one wonders then why the designations of “realism,” “idealism” or even “Cartesianism” are so intolerable? What is it that these designations represent that is unsatisfactory to the point where we would need the rehabilitation of our ontology, to the point where philosophy finds itself in a state of crisis? I think that the answer to these questions is to be found in cruel thought: realism and idealism, which for Merleau-Ponty are already strands of Cartesian thinking, are unacceptable because they are figures of this cruelty, two ways of expressing the same fundamental compulsion to possess being that reach for it from different directions, realism from the integrity of the thing itself and idealism from the primacy of constituting consciousness. Now that we have some idea of what cruel thought means, why it is a problem for Merleau-Ponty, and how it stands with respect to his own thinking, the next chapters will turn to further investigations of these figures of cruelty. What we see is that while we hear familiar arguments against both figures, a quasi-Kantian critique of realism and a quasi-realist critique of idealism, they share a fundamental error. Both realism and idealism are committed to the project of coincidence, both seek to end thinking in consummation, the final ἀποκάλυψις of the λόγος itself. Realism and idealism are figures of cruel thought because both act in the name of finality. The following chapters take up this line of thinking in order to show more clearly the point at which realism and idealism evince this need and this cruelty.

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The Real and the Outside

Realism is cruel at the point where it seeks to end thought in coincidence with the thing in its absolute exteriority, at the point where it seeks to extricate itself from the distance and spacing that defines the visible and fuse with the thing beyond the distortions of perspective. This cruelty is tied to a certain claustrophobic anxiety—the fear of being confined and enclosed within the immanence of constituting consciousness. This fear is correlated with a desire for the open spaces of the transcendent, the real in its indifference to experience, purified of value and significance. Realist metaphysics, for Merleau-Ponty, is a wish to escape and to make contact with the absolute outside, the absolutely transcendent, and thus to gaze upon being itself in total transparency— cleansed of color, depth, shadow, and the distance of things as they appear in vision. Phenomenology, from the point of view of realism, is seen to be an incarceratory philosophy that limits thought to what appears, that closes it in the immanence of sense. Part 1, “Phenomenology and Incarceration,” considers this incarceratory anxiety and its correlated longing for the great outdoors from the point of view of a recent critique of transcendental philosophy, speculative materialism, as articulated by Quentin Meillassoux. The realist philosophy articulated in his book, After Finitude, is explicitly framed in terms of a desire for the “great outdoors” beyond what has sense and meaning, the absolute exterior of sense achieved in the real. Realist worries about incarceration and the great outdoors, however, are premised upon a certain, arguably Platonic understanding of the meaning of immanence, transcendence, and appearance. Part 2, “Appearance, Immanence, and Transcendence,” turns to Heidegger’s account of the meaning of “phenomenon,” appearance, in Sein und Zeit in order to clarify and respond to these claustrophobic anxieties. Contrary to the realist worry about being enclosed in mere appearances, we misunderstand the phenomenological sense of immanence if we suppose that the manifestation of things conceals a transcendent reality outside, beyond that manifestation. For phenomenology, the φαινόμενον is not an εἰκόν that both conceals and announces the essence, the εἶδος, which lies in the great beyond. The phenomenological account of the φαινόμενον rather poses a challenge to the opposition between inside and outside, immanence and transcendence presupposed by realism, and it does so by reversing the traditional relationship between being and time. For phenomenology, there is no being, no εἶδος outside of the φύω, the becoming of what shows itself in time. Time, rather, is the measure of what there is as it shines forth in vision.

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The temporalization of things in their appearance is taken up in detail by MerleauPonty in Phenomenology of Perception. Part 3, “Ek-stasis and the Temporalization of the Phenomena,” turns to this account in order to illustrate more clearly how things appear—both in the haecceity of their indifference and solidity and at the same time in their distance, incompleteness, and ambiguity. The co-belonging of these poles, transcendent thinghood and immanence to sense, is accounted for by the phenomenological structure of time. What we understand in the phenomenological account of things, however, is that their transcendence, their ek-stasis, their alterity and difference, are ineluctably inscribed in their immanence, in the meaningfulness of their appearance. There is no absolute outside of sense, as the realist thinks—rather what shows itself in vision is never a self-enclosed kernel of being but is already transcendent, already on its way elsewhere, already in the process of its departure. There is no opposition, no exteriority between immanence and transcendence: rather, phenomenology provides what we can call, with Jean-Luc Nancy, a philosophy of “transimmanence.”

1. Phenomenology and incarceration To begin, I will consider a realist critique of phenomenology in order to establish some context and frame the discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological critique of realism that will follow. Most generally, the realist worry about phenomenology is that it compromises “objectivity,” an impersonal standard of rational adjudication, in favor of a merely “subjective” view on things and the world. I put these terms in quotation marks because their meaning is highly contestable, and as we shall see, we misunderstand phenomenology in general and Merleau-Ponty’s thought in particular if we fail to take into account how these are addressed in his work. The realist worry seems to be that the solidity, durability, independence, and externality of things, their “transcendence” with respect to my consciousness of them, is reduced to or even confined to a merely subjective standpoint, just a perspective on things and the world, and that the objectivity of the object, the thing’s thingness, the resistance it poses to the subject, are lost in phenomenology.1 From the realist point of view, phenomenology is a philosophy of subjectivity in the most pejorative sense because everything—all possible beings—become imprisoned in a first-personal perspective. This confinement, the interiority of sense to the subject, is called “immanence.” If nothing is possible without the intervention of a gaze, without taking place within a point of view, then it seems that all possibility is limited, even incarcerated, within the borders of the subject who brings forth and constitutes the manners of appearance of things through their gesture and look. Such anxieties about limitation and incarceration come about in part because phenomenology is, for better or worse, a moment in the history of transcendental philosophy, which in Kant was originally and quite explicitly concerned with establishing and designating limits.2 The Critique of Pure Reason is full of premonitory notes and remonstrations, a book of etiquette concerning the propriety of the faculties



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and which admonishes thought to stay at home and not cross into the wilderness of speculation, full of dangers like God, the immortality of the soul, freedom, and so forth. In a telling passage, invoking seafaring imagery, Kant says: We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything its rightful place. This domain is an island, enclosed by nature within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth—enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion.3

For Kant, transcendental philosophy—in its opposition to the excesses of speculative metaphysics—restricts itself to the domain of what can have sense. What can have sense, for him, is determined, generated, and regulated by the machinations of the faculties, and if we employ them in accordance with their proper function, we will remain safe, clean, and sane. For Kant, like Husserl and other phenomenologists, the outside of what is constituted through the activity of the faculties and their proper employment, the outside of sense, is non-sense, the meaningless, that which is unintelligible, unimaginable, that of which we cannot speak. Speculative metaphysics is in error because it longs to speak of that for which we have no language, to see and describe the thing itself outside of perspective, something that by definition would be invisible. As Jean-Luc Nancy points out, the longing for such an outside is the legacy of Platonic-Christian ontotheology, where the origin and principle of the world’s sense lies radically beyond in the ἀγαθόν that makes being possible by being outside of being.4 For Kant, such an outside is impossible precisely because it is the outside of and the beyond of all possibility: it is the im-possible, that which is outside of the possible by being before it, and it secures the possibility of the possible in virtue of its exteriority to sense, in virtue of its ex-possibility, so to speak. Kant both acknowledges the desire for the ex-possible and forewarns against it—forewarning, here, in the context of his imagery, in the name of safety and in the name of responsibility, for there is a duty to maintain the propriety of the faculties. Venturing beyond the possible and into the wilds of the open sea will only bring us to ruin, wreck, and catastrophe.5 We ought to stay at home and not concern ourselves with such adventures. There is no shortage of anxiety concerning phenomenology on this matter, especially in light of Husserl’s insistence on the necessity of positing some version of transcendental subjectivity as the referent sin qua non for the possibility of sense and thus for the possibility of anything whatsoever.6 Husserl, of course, takes up this Kantian note of caution, especially in the transcendental turn staged in and around the publication of his Ideen and after. Immanence, for Husserl, means to be the noematic correlate of a noetic act of Sinngebung or “constitution.” At the center of Husserl’s account of Sinngebung is a purified, transcendental subjectivity that is the pole of all such constitutive acts. While Husserl’s understanding of transcendental subjectivity evolves over the course of his career, from a more Cartesian and Kantian Cogito in

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texts like the Ideen and Cartesian Meditations to a more historical and inter-subjective account in the Crisis and texts of around the same period, to have sense, to appear, means to be immanent to the constitutive activity of transcendental consciousness. For Husserl, that which appears as transcendent, outside, beyond, does so only at the point where it nonetheless remains within the field of sense. For Husserl, all transcendence, all the exteriority and durability of the thing, its resistance, is transcendence in the immanence of the constituting subject. In the Cartesian Meditations, for example, Husserl says: That the being of the world “transcends” consciousness in this fashion (even with respect to the evidence in which the world presents itself), and that it necessarily remains transcendent, in no wise alters the fact that it is conscious life alone, wherein everything transcendent becomes constituted, as something inseparable from consciousness, and which specifically, as world-consciousness, bears within itself inseparably the sense: world—and indeed: “this actually existing” world.7

It is remarks like these that cause philosophers to wonder if phenomenology allows for an outside at all, a beyond of sense, a territory that cannot be referred to and thus touched by consciousness, a center that would touch everything while simul­taneously remaining untouched at an infinite distance.8 It seems that phenomenology, at a point, represents a philosophy in which all being is organized and oriented around the centrality and sovereignty of a subject to whom everything is referred as its “correlate,” without which nothing would be possible, nothing would appear.9 This picture of phenomenology is perhaps not uncommon among critics and yet bears further scrutiny.10 The central question seems to be this: Does sense, that which is meaningful, what manifests itself, have no exteriority other than the impossible, i.e., non-sense? This question itself, however, evinces the kind of metaphysical wanderlust Kant warned against, a desire for peregrination, a philosophical exoticism: to escape the familiar, banal confines of sensicality, to flee the tedium of what shows itself and venture into unknown lands, to become a foreigner, a stranger, and walk an utterly unfamiliar path.11 Such longing, as well as a correlated frustration with phenomenology, is expressed quite clearly by a recent realist critic of phenomenology, Quentin Meillassoux: For it could be that contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not; that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory—of being entirely elsewhere.12

Meillassoux is engaged with transcendental philosophy precisely at the point of the latter’s apparent agoraphobia. Moreover, the attraction to pre-Critical thought in his book After Finitude, the allure of methodological speculation, even the draw of realism, are all motivated by this longing for the outside and by boredom with the humdrum shining forth and appearance of sense. One, apparently, becomes sick of the possible and longs for what lies beyond it.



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This desire for the outside, in Meillassoux, is correlated with two other motifs that characterize his anxiety about incarceration in immanence that it will be worth considering briefly: contingency and the mathematically absolute. The question that motivates consideration of the former seems to be whether philosophy has ever properly been able to think contingency itself. Let us take an example to clarify this worry. I see the glass on the table. It is a large pint glass, transparent with etched horizontal stripes. It is empty, but it had water in it. It presents itself to my vision at a certain angle, showing its sides to me in accordance with the perspective I have on it. This perspective changes slightly as I move my head and eyes. Phenomenology states that the presentation of glass, its givenness, and ultimately its very being, is a function of its possible perspectival variations—it is nothing other than its manners of appearance, and these manners of appearance are made possible by my bodily relation to the thing, which constitute it and make it possible. I cannot see the glass otherwise than within the context of my gaze, across the distance that separates my vision from its visibility. In this way, it could not appear otherwise than it does in relation to my body; it could not appear otherwise than within a certain perspective, within a certain point of view. The realist worry is that all the possibilities for this glass are limited to these manners of givenness, limited to the sense and meaning the glass takes on as it appears in my vision. The realist worries that, because the glass is limited in this fashion, what is possible for it is determined in advance by its conditions of appearance and that therefore contingency itself is effectively eliminated. There is nothing for this glass other than what is given through its manners of appearance, nothing that can happen to it other than that which is confined and limited to the possible, limited to what can have sense and meaning. Phenomenology thus also effectively eliminates the possibility of chaos in advance, since everything that appears must be “worked over” in accordance with the transcendental conditions of possibility of sense. Thus, phenomenology allegedly eliminates the possibility of surprise, the possibility of the event.13 As Meillassoux says, the term “contingency” refers back to the Latin contigere, meaning “to touch, to befall,” which is to say, that which happens, but which happens enough to happen to us. The contingent, in a word, is something that finally happens—something other, something which, in its irreducibility to all pre-registered possibilities, puts an end to the vanity of a game wherein everything, even the improbable, is predictable. When something happens to us, when novelty grabs us by the throat, then no more calculation and no more play—it is time to be serious.14

It is fairly clear how the desire for the outside is correlated with the desire for the contingent and the event. The contingent event, that which is utterly unforeseen, the ex-possible, ruptures the border between immanence and transcendence; it is what takes us to the absolute exterior of sense, that which is utterly beyond any possible point of view. The glass breaking would not be a contingent event, for example, for this remains within the realm of the possible, within the rules of the game established by sense-giving transcendental subjectivity. The contingent event would be that which, for us, with our vision and point of view, would be utterly unforeseeable—not only unpredictable but completely impossible to envision. It would be a rupture, a

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void, if you will, in what could possibly be whatsoever. In a way, if it were to appear it would appear as nothing since it would be precisely that which is outside of all possibility. For Meillassoux, the outside of sense named in the contingent event is the absolute. That is to say, absolute in the sense of non-relative, where we understand everything that appears within a perspective to be relative to a spectator to whom it shows itself. For phenomenology, the appearance of the world is relative at the point where it appears to a vision. By being non-relative, that is, non-relational, the absolute is indifferent—to vision, to perspective, indifferent to whether it appears or not. The absolute names a visible, though this word is hardly appropriate, that does not call to be seen, something that adheres and persists in that zone outside of the merely possible. Such a zone, accordingly, can be described using the language of mathematics. For Meillassoux, absoluteness means that It is meaningful to think (even if only in a hypothetical register) that all those aspects of the given that are mathematically describable can continue to exist regardless of whether or not we are there to convert the latter into something that is given-to or manifested-for.15

He is quick to point out that we should not confuse this position with mathematical idealism. Rather, what he seems to have in mind is the idea that mathematics itself is a language, a framework, a point of access or conduit from the finite perspectivity of human affairs to the great outdoors, to that which is utterly beyond the visible, that which is “contingent while simultaneously being absolute.” The mathematically absolute, he continues, is conceivable if it is construed as absolutely indifferent to the thought that envisages it … Whatever is mathematizable can be posited hypothetically as an ontologically perishable fact existing independently of us … What is mathematizable cannot be reduced to a correlate of thought.16

In some ways unsurprising, Meillassoux makes an explicit appeal to Descartes, who had already called for the absolutization of mathematics as the measure of nature and as the standard for what is thinkable.17 Meillassoux seems to want a calculus for the thinkable, in which everything could be graphed, reigned in, and circumscribed within a speculative system where truth no longer matters (since this is a calculus of the thinkable rather than what is the case), and indeed, indifferent to whether such possibilities appear or not (since again, it is a speculative calculus for the possibly thinkable). According to such a calculus, thought is no longer confined to the consideration of beings, Being, and their manners of appearance; thought is no longer confined to its habitation in the human form, its two eyes, its perspective, but is free to fly across the bounds of the thinkable and gaze upon the absolute itself, uninhibited by the gravity and burden of what shows itself. Thought would no longer be a prisoner in immanence but would be free to traverse the great frontiers. Is this really a fair assessment of phenomenology? Is it really incarcertory in the sense elaborated? Does it necessarily confine and limit thought to the territory inside the limits of sense in the manner described? If the answer is no, it is because



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phenomenology does not merely claim that everything is immanent to sense but says that there is already transcendence in immanence. This means that objects appear as transcendent, as exterior, in virtue of the sense-bestowing processes that allow for their manifestation. But it also means that the possible, what is internal to sense, is always projected beyond itself. In other words, the genesis and becoming of sense is not identical with the Platonic being that would always be identical with itself and never otherwise but, rather, is an ecstasis: it is always projected toward, on its way to manifestation, and thus always on its way elsewhere, on the way to becoming what it is not yet, to the outside, in excess of itself. Phenomenology thus does not concern itself so much with the interiority of sense, with the merely possible, but rather dwells within the gap, the differential between the possible and impossible, sense and non-sense, the inside and outside.

2. Appearance, immanence, and transcendence Claustrophobic anxieties about being enclosed in immanence are one element of the realist critique leveled against phenomenology. This anxiety, however, is arguably motivated by a certain desire for truth and by presupposed tasks assigned to thinking: what we have described in the previous chapter as cruel thought. Realism succumbs to this desire at the point where it wishes to close and end thought in the thing itself— especially at the point where touching the real is equated with arriving at the absolute. Before proceeding to Merleau-Ponty’s assessment of realism and the question of immanence and transcendence in more detail, it will do to consider the point at which realism is haunted by the specter of cruel thought. The drama that seems to have given rise to the debate between realism and transcendental thought is very old, presumably going back to at least Plato, since it is a drama about how an incontestable and unassailable absolute somehow remains concealed behind the manifestation of a world. For Plato, of course, the hidden gem of thinking was identified with the εἴδη, behind which nothing could be hidden, since these are always what they are and never otherwise.18 But the debate between phenomenology and realism is more recent. It is effectively between the Kantian idea of a transcendental turn and a pre-Kantian belief in absoluteness of the real. What seems intolerable to realism seems to be the language of phenomena. To speak a language of appearances is to lock us in the dark basement of immanence: what we know or perceive are appearances only. We can speculate about some hard kernel of reality behind those appearances, but whatever it may be will never make contact with our experience—it will never appear. Thus, from the realist perspective, phenomenology traps us in phenomenalism: all we perceive, all of our experience, is mere appearances, phantoms of the real, correlated with some subject who bears witness to them. What is at issue in the language of “appearance,” then, is that it easily slides into a confused and derelict state, and it does so, probably, because we almost cannot help but hear it in its Platonic register: the φαινόμενον is only an εἰκών of the εἶδος, an image, a shadow, a reflection, beyond which there is the thing itself, hiding nothing in the great and luminous “outside,” the absolute itself, which

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designates the outermost limit to the thinkable and beyond which there would be nothing else. Realism becomes cruel at the point where it identifies such an outside with a certain demand for truth and a presupposed vision of what that truth should be: the absolute, the incontestable, what is beyond the distortion, perspectivity, blurriness, and the uncertainty of what appears and gives to all appearance its reason, its form, coherence, and legitimacy. By reaching out and touching the thing itself, in reaching this luminous outside, one is finally able to look back and understand the difference between a mere appearance and a thing itself as well as that which those appearances were signaling and to which they were referring themselves. One sees what the appearance “meant,” sees the reason for it all, and is now able to offer explanations for the appearances’ “why.”19 In having made such a journey beyond the threshold, in having stepped into the great outdoors and understood its wisdom, there is nothing left to do but journey back into the darkness of the world. As soon as one has gazed upon the thing itself, the absolute, in its unconditioned purity, once one has fused with it, the tasks of thought are finished and done. One only need bear the light of the outside into the darkness to demonstrate, once and for all, that the εἰκόνες are “merely” images and that the truth lies elsewhere. The absolute thing itself, the outside of mere phenomena, is apocalyptic: ἀποκάλυψις, finally and at last, ἀπο, pulling away the κάλυψις, the veil or covering, the epistemic shroud that stands between us and the absolute. Coinciding with the absolute is the revelatory act that ends thought, and it is this need to finalize, to terminate, to place the period, that makes realism cruel. As we shall see later, it is along these lines that Merleau-Ponty claims that realism is a desire for death. But one does not have to read very deeply into the canon to see that phenomenology remains and has always been a means of escape from this Platonic drama—but it accomplishes this escape only insofar as it is able to overcome the traces of cruelty that have haunted it. The desire not to be closed in immanence, to release oneself into the outside beyond appearances, tends to misunderstand what phenomenon and appearance mean. For if our need is to gain access to the outside of the phenomena, then it presupposes that there is an outside, i.e., that the phenomena are either copies of the real, εἰκόνες, representations, or emanations of things themselves mysteriously hidden behind them. No phenomenologist has ever subscribed to such an understanding of what phenomenon and appearance mean. To see this more clearly, it will be useful to turn to the Introduction to Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, where he goes to great pains to clarify what φαινόμενον means for phenomenology. What Heidegger shows is that the realist understanding of phenomenon—“mere appearances” that stand in front of and thus hide the real—is already Kantian insofar as it requires an outside that is, according to its own terms, constitutively inaccessible. In other words, for the version of Kant described by Heidegger, the phenomena become “emanations” of an absolute, noumenal entity that by definition cannot show itself, and thus this outside, pure transcendence, is established only as the lining or the reverse of what appears. The phenomena point back toward an outside that itself does not appear in their appearing. In other words, as “mere appearances,” the phenomena,



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precisely in their appearing, refer to a non-appearance, an outside that they are not insofar as they are there, manifest. As Heidegger says, That which does the announcing—that which, in its showing-itself, indicates something non-manifest—may be taken as that which emerges in what is itself non-manifest, and which emanates [ausstrahlt] from it in such a way indeed that the non-manifest gets thought of as something that is essentially never manifest.20

The things themselves stand behind the phenomena, which emanate forth from them. The thing as it is outside of its appearance is referenced by the appearances: I know that there is a real house there, behind my perceptions. I know this because, on one hand, none of my individual perceptions are identical with the house itself. After all, they are in a state of flux as I walk around its perimeter, as my body moves, shifting and distorting the frame within which the thing appears. At the same time, however, each of these individual perceptions are woven together into a continuous whole, the unity of which is said to lie in the thing itself. My perceptions are not the thing itself— they are only perceptions—and yet the thing itself must be there, outside of them and yet weaving them together in the fabric of my experience. The house itself, as the outside of my experience, is never manifest, and yet it is somehow still the source of my experiences. In this way, according to Heidegger, When that which does the announcing is taken this way, “appearance” is tantamount to a “bringing forth” or “something brought forth,” but something which does not make up the real being of what brings it forth: here we have appearance in the sense of “mere appearance.”21

My perceptions of the house as “mere appearances” announce the real house but precisely in making this announcement, simultaneously announce that the real house is not present—for only mere perceptions appear. The perceptions “represent” and are brought forth by the real concealed behind them but, precisely because it is represented, the real itself does not appear. It is the real, concealed behind perceptions, that brings them forth, but in so doing, it refuses to appear. Here Heidegger is describing the mechanism through which the real comes to establish itself as outside: its outsidedness is a function of its non-manifestation; the real is outside because it is announced and at the same time non-present. We hear it called upon and yet we fail to see it in person—thus it must be elsewhere. As Heidegger continues, “That which does the announcing and is brought forth does, of course, show itself, and in such a way that, as an emanation of what it announces, it keeps this very thing constantly veiled in itself.”22 Phenomena appear—and phenomena only—but as “mere appearances” they do so in manner where they announce, point to something that is constitutively non-manifest: for the realist, it is the real; Kant, of course, calls this “noumenon,” but it would of course be a mistake to conflate that with the thing itself in the realist sense. The shadows of the εἰκόνες are not εἰκόνες—they are shadows. And yet the shadow, as shadow, already indicates this non-presence in its non-presence, that there is an εἰκόν somewhere, as of yet invisible. Likewise the εἰκόνες are not the things themselves, they are only copies, and yet they too announce that the thing itself is not present because it lies elsewhere, outside.

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Heidegger’s intention here is to clarify that this Platonic sense of phenomenon as “mere appearance” is not its proper phenomenological sense. It is important that when Heidegger invokes the Greek sense of φαινόμενον, he intends us to hear it as the middle-passive voice of φαίνω, to bring to light or make appear. The middle-passive voice is an interesting possibility in Greek grammar: it is neither strictly active nor passive but somehow both. The appearance of the phenomena is not strictly active insofar as “appearing” is not being done to something—it has no object (grammatically speaking and otherwise). The φαινόμενον does not make appear in the sense that I throw the ball. Importantly, it is also not strictly passive insofar as appearance is not something the phenomena undergo. The φαινόμενον is not made to appear like the ball is thrown, and in this sense, it is impossible for it to be an emanation of a concealed force acting upon it. A phenomenon is not something that appears by victimizing another in its thrall, nor is it something that appears because it is brought forth by its master. The phenomenon appears, rather, as das Sich-an-ihm-selbst-zeigen, that which shows itself in and of itself, by virtue of its own power and not another, in its own interest, and only thus “signifies a distinctive way in which something can be encountered.”23 The phenomenon is therefore not a “mere” appearance indicating an outside that is not present, concealed and yet to be known, and in this way there is nothing outside of the phenomenon, no hidden secret, locked away, that it would be task of thought to discover and display. When phenomenology speaks of immanence, it does not refer to an inside that as inside refers to an outside. Nor does transcendence mean that which lies concealed behind the veil. Immanence means “immanent to sense,” that what appears does so within a fabric, a texture of significance. For phenomenology, to be means that an entity appears within an open horizon of possible significations and that what is, therefore, is always more than a transcendent, self-enclosed kernel of being, an external reality indifferent to its manner and style of appearance. As Merleau-Ponty argues, to be indifferent to, to be outside of sense is to have no contact with experience and life.24 For Kant, Husserl, and all thinkers part of the transcendental tradition, such an outside would be equivalent to a territory that lies beyond any possible experience, beyond the temporal horizon and vicissitudes of life. It would be meaningless in the most profound sense—it would have no contour, no articulation, not even the most basic sense of positivity or negativity. It would be a nothingness beyond absence, destruction, negativity, or even the zero. As Merleau-Ponty tries to show, even mathematical objects show themselves within the horizon of possible experience; even they are born from this tissue of meaning and significance and become articulated within the horizon of human life and dwelling on Earth.25 Even to be nothing, to be negative, is to manifest. The kind of transcendence that realists dream about would be more absent than nothingness since even nothingness shows itself within the flesh of being.26 Transcendence, for phenomenology, does not refer to the beyond and its indifference to sense, the absolute outside of the real. That kind of transcendence is the legacy of the Platonic ἀγαθόν, the good that lies concealed behind the forms, illuminating them but not itself becoming present, the invisible sun casting its light on a visible that can only be seen by the mind and not by the eyes. Of course such an invisible



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is equivalent to the God who is the cause and source of all created things and yet himself remains hidden and concealed, who remains invisible and incomprehensible to mortals. In place of this onto-theological sense of transcendence, phenomenology understands transcendence as ek-stasis, as standing outside of oneself: that what appears within the tissue of sense shows itself not as a self-enclosed atom or monad of meaning but as already displaced, stretched, and underway in a process of becoming and differentiation. What shows itself, the phenomenon, is in this way already outside. When phenomenologists speak of transcendence in immanence then, what is meant is that everything manifests itself within this horizon of sense, this texture and flesh of significance (immanence), but in so doing, in becoming manifest, what there is never becomes fully present but shows itself only in its departure, becomes visible only because it is already occluded, because it is not quite itself, because it is already outside itself (transcendence). Claustrophobic anxiety about incarceration and confinement seems to be premised on a misunderstanding of what transcendence and immanence mean for phenomenology, and it will be worth trying to clarify these with the help of Merleau-Ponty. In order to clarify the phenomenological sense of immanence and transcendence at stake, however, we must turn to the vehicle of manifestation, temporality. In order to open this account of immanence and transcendence further in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, I will turn to the account of the real staged in the chapter of Phenomenology of Perception called “The Thing and the Natural World,” the third chapter of Part II of that book. This text provides one of the clearest and most compelling responses to realism as well as its attendant anxieties and desires offered by Merleau-Ponty. It also provides some important insights into how his thought specifically, but also how phenomenology in general, navigate the question of transcendence in immanence and the ek-stasis of sense as it takes us to the outside.

3. Ek-stasis and the temporalization of the phenomena The apparent transcendence of things in perceptual experience confronts us with a striking tension: on one hand, what appears stands at the thither end of processes of sense-genesis that render and frame the manners of appearance and that allow for the object to be, and, on the other hand, this immanence of the thing within the fabric of sense nonetheless does not subvert its apparent positivity, constancy, and exteriority. I see the glass here on the desk. It shows itself to me through the perspectival distortions of its angle, the light coming in from the nearby window, which is slightly faint since it is a cloudy afternoon. There are the vague reflections of the surrounding world, shining back as vertical stripes due to the curve of its cylindrical shape. The mouth, though from one angle looks circular, appears as ovular from where I sit. It casts a refracted shadow since the light is shining through it at more than one angle. When I look at it, I am reminded of the possibility of another glass of water, or perhaps a beer since it is a pint glass. As it sits there, empty, it calls for being filled with something. I could fill it with gravel, blood, or even feces, but something about this proposal strikes me as strange since that is not what this thing here is for. Glasses are for “drinking beverages” and gravel, blood, and feces are not (usually) considered beverages. But

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when I say that “glasses like this are for beverages” and not for those other things, I have already admitted that its appearance as what it is, a glass and not a wheelbarrow, blood bag, or toilet, is a function of certain styles of sense. Filling any of these other items with sparkling water would be almost as absurd as filling my glass with the things for which those other containers were intended. And yet we see that “container” is in some way essential to the kind of being that the glass as well as any one of those other things is. It is not just “some thing,” empty of significance; it is only the thing it is—only a thing at all—in virtue of its sense, its meaningfulness, and the reference it makes to its surrounding environment of significance. It only becomes a glass as such, it only takes on this meaning, at the point where it occupies this referential, meaningful horizon, what phenomenologists call “a world.” At the same time, it is clear to me that when I leave the glass on the desk and go to another room, the manner of being that it has is not strictly dependent on my presence there or on my vision. I understand that it will not vanish if I am not looking at it and that it does not need to be seen in order to be. It gives itself within this horizon of sense and meaningfulness, a horizon that at certain points is structured by my bodily opening onto it, and yet even so it nonetheless also gives itself in all the exteriority that makes it an object. As Heidegger famously notes in Sein und Zeit, one encounters this naked objecthood of things only when their link to the nexus of significations of the world is broken, when they take on some ulterior meaning, when, for example, they are broken, are taken out of context, or used for something else.27 The glass is a container, but when the cat knocks it off the desk and it shatters, it no longer appears as a container—it no longer calls to be filled, no longer calls forth beverages and drinking. At that point, it becomes just a thing, only a pile of broken shards that I now have to carefully clean up. Its significance is reduced to something like “garbage” only because it no longer points toward other possibilities, other futures for itself. Its possibilities are closed. It is dead, and only in its deadness do I really encounter it in its “objectivity,” the indifference to myself and to the world that indicate its externality. As a glass, in its calling forth of beverages and drinking, in the reference it makes to any number of possibilities, it matters; it means something insofar as it indicates and gestures toward these—even the strange possibility of being filled with something inappropriate. Broken, however, it ceases to matter, and it only calls for disposal. It ceases to be significant and to link up with the tissue of possibilities that are the world.28 This is at least in part why it is painful when a treasured item breaks, for the death of the object reveals the passage and, in a sense, loss of meaning and the world encountered in time. The thing breaks, and we are reminded that the past is indeed past and that with the severing of our connection to it signified by the thing, we stand at a greater distance to it and that it recedes more into oblivion. The question that Merleau-Ponty will take up in his account of the objectivity of the object is how these two poles of its presentation function together: the object’s sense and meaningfulness, on one hand, and its externality and neutrality on the other. Objects are strange because they emerge within a point of view to which they also show cold indifference. How can the real be both here before my eyes in its irrefutable haecceity and yet at the same time be the function of a temporal sense-genesis that constitutes its meaningfulness and which, as Merleau-Ponty claims, also remains



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incomplete? As he says, “How can any thing ever present itself to us for good, since its synthesis is never completed, and since I can always expect to see it break down and pass into a mere illusion? Yet there is something and not nothing.”29 Merleau-Ponty elaborates this thought as follows: Belief in the thing and the world can only signify 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 refers indefinitely, by its horizons, to other perspectives.30

It is easy to misunderstand the phenomenological account of the real at stake here. What is important about the sense of transcendence outlined is that the real, insofar as it shows itself as an exteriority, is never an absolute exteriority; its indifference is never an absolute indifference. Rather, the real always shows itself in terms of the “coherent deformations” of a perspective: the contours, angles, light, shadow, and ambiguity that ineluctably accompany the appearance of things.31 The real always shows itself as sense, and things appear insofar as they call forth possibilities of meaningfulness. What is essential to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the real—and perhaps what is essential to phenomenology in general—is this primacy of perspective: that what is, insofar as it is, shines forth from a certain angle, with the luminosity and complexity of color, the refraction of light, in accordance with the imperceptible movement of the eyes, within or out of reach, in short, within the perspectival horizon of the possible that we call “the world.” It is this deformation of perspective that at some point seems intolerable to Meillassoux and other realists—intolerable precisely because it precludes the possibility of the absolute—and the new realism wishes to break out of it, to transcend the ambiguities and distortions of sense in order to seize the real right where it is, to leave the “broken crock”32 of the human figure behind, and gaze at being from everywhere simultaneously, from the point of view of an absolute outside, a perspective beyond all possible perspectives. Realism, in order to construct this absolute outside, posits an ontology of what Husserl calls blosse Sachen, bare or naked things, the thing simply as a thing, “stripped of every action-predicate and every value-predicate.”33 It seeks the thing behind its sense and meaningfulness—it wants the thing at the point where it no longer signifies, where it no longer opens itself onto possibility, the thing in its deadness. This ontology claims to speak in the name of pure objectivity, an externality cleansed of all perspectival color and distortion. But as Merleau-Ponty argues via Husserl, on closer scrutiny this ontology is just a mask for an attitude that is of the most perniciously theoretical kind, for blosse Sachen presuppose the absolute gaze of a pure spectator, an eye that could see these things in their nakedness, to whom they would display all of their sides at the same time as their interiors and would do so with a mute neutrality that no longer refers to the world of sense. Such an eye, however, is a speculative and philosophical fiction that realism attempts to conceal in the purity of the absolute, whether this is considered a thing qua thing or a mathematimatized factiality. In other words, realism attempts to keep concealed that it has always been the most highly artificial and theoretical attitude toward the world that nonetheless passes itself off as the most natural approximation to things. As Merleau-Ponty notes,

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The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness What is false in the ontology of the blosse Sachen is that it absolutizes a purely theoretical attitude (or one of idealization), neglecting or taking as given a relation with being, which founds the purely theoretical attitude and measures its value.34

Operating beneath the artificial perspective constructed by realism, the perspective before which the absolute unveils itself in its naked purity, there is the φύω of the visible, its distance and all its color and confusion, which the ontology of the blosse Sachen silently presupposes, which it disavows, and upon which it is parasitic. As Husserl emphasizes in the passages of the Ideen to which Merleau-Ponty is referring above, when the objects that inhabit and populate our experience show themselves, they do so always as more than mere things; they appear in their immediacy, first, with all the weight and density of use and value, goals and obstructions, as beautiful or ugly. Objects are purified of the weight of this value only later, after one has adopted a philosophical posture and made viewing them in their purified thingness the end of a process of philosophical reflection. In this way, the realist inhabits a highly stylized point of view, and, as Husserl notes, “in this ‘pure’ or purified theoretical attitude, we no longer experience houses, tables, streets, or works of art; instead, we experience merely material things.”35 The thing itself in the realist sense, that which lies concealed behind its manners of appearance, is unknown to a naïve relation to the world that is lived. A child, for example, does not look at the world as an array of mute and indifferent things but is open to first and foremost to their meaning. This is why the world appears magical to the child, because the child trusts in its sense and allows to the things their references and significance. The ontology of the blosse Sachen is an artifice that must be learned—it is for adults, who have undergone a certain reflective initiation into making the world manifest in this way. Husserl’s point is that we must not forget that this ontology is precisely that—a style of making the world appear and one that presupposes a certain reflective posture, one that is made possible only through the accomplishments of reflection. It is not just the object that is made and rendered in the ontology of the blosse Sachen, however. The realist, in stripping what appears in their experience of all its value-predications, in purifying it of its signification, also constitutes themselves as a certain manner of spectator. In so doing, rather than eliminating sense and value from the manifestation of the world, the realist simply privileges a specific set of values that they also disavow through their pretension of indifference. As Husserl notes, To be sure, [this attitude] is a subject that is indifferent to its Object, indifferent to the actuality constituted in appearances; that is, this subject does not value such being for its own sake and thus has no practical interest in the transformations such being might undergo and so no interest in fashioning them, etc.36

Realism wants to transcend—that is to say, escape—the weight of our corporeal point of view, to leave behind perspective, light, and color like so much molted skin, and they would have us believe that mere “subjectivity” has been discarded once and for all. What they attempt to keep concealed, however, is the secret that realist metaphysics



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is already a certain relationship to things, a certain perspective, and that in adopting this metaphysics, the realist succeeds in constituting themselves as a certain manner of subjectivity, a certain way of seeing things. When I pick up the coffee mug and feel the weight of its cold porcelain, the slosh of coffee and ice, hear the thud that it makes as I set it back on the table, and contemplate its indifference, all of this takes place within a field of significance that I temporarily suspend in my contemplation. In adopting a realist point of view on things, I perform a kind of epoché in which the more immediate and living manner in which things show themselves is put out of play in favor of this metaphysical, reflective, and indeed speculative way of looking. Even speculation, however, is a certain attitude, a certain posture on things, and in making a case for speculative metaphysics, I already constitute myself as a certain style of being. By opposing this metaphysics, by opposing realism, phenomenology seeks to unearth the φύω, the bloom and becoming of the visible as it appears in experience as it is lived beneath the artificial constructions of reflection, to return to the naïve and childlike perspective in which things become what they are through the sense references they make to the world, to the flesh of significance that is already manifest prior to philosophizing. It is this realist sense of transcendence, the desire for the outside and the absolute, which is the problem rather than the solution; for it longs to leave behind the situatedness of vision, its finitude, corporeality, and perspectivity, in order to look down on being from a place that is no place. Realism seeks the absolute outside because it wishes to coincide with being without distance, and it is at this point that it becomes a figure of cruelty. The escapism and philosophical adventurism evinced by realism lead down the path of what Merleau-Ponty calls the pensée en survol, thought that hovers above all perspectives and subjects being to its calculating, mathematizing surveillance. This thought, for Merleau-Ponty, is precisely utopian; it is the desire to be nowhere. After all, is longing for the outside of all sense, of all that appears, not simply a longing to coincide with nothing? Merleau-Ponty puts it this way: If my experience forms a closed system; if the thing and the world could be defined once and for all; if the spatio-temporal horizons could, even ideally, be explicated and the world thought without point of view, then nothing would exist; I would hover above [survolerais] the world beyond all places and times; far from becoming simultaneously real, they would cease to be because I should live in none of them and would be engaged nowhere. If I am always and everywhere, then I am never and nowhere.37

The realist error is to infer from the perspectivity of vision, that one sees from a point of view, to the claim that the one who sees is thereby imprisoned and confined (within subjectivity, with the body, etc.). When we examine what it means to see, what it means to have a point of view more closely, however, we understand that experience is not a cage from which we must escape. What most clearly defines our experience, rather, is its expansiveness, that it opens out onto an infinite horizon. In its desire for the absolute, however, realism wants to render this openness into a closed system in which the object would stand forth in its naked indifference and in which we would be able to touch that which always is and never otherwise. Such a closed

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system, however, would no longer be experience—things would no longer be the things that appear and that I see, and my perspective would cease to be embedded in the circumstances I confront here on Earth. It would cease to be vision, and a world that conceals nothing, that has no shadow or ambiguity, would simply be invisible—it would be nothing. Realism, because it is motivated by a desire to escape perspective, to exceed the boundaries of sense, is committed to a certain brand of Cartesianism. As Descartes understood, guaranteeing the absoluteness of what is, its geometric and mathematical elegance, requires a perspective that is no perspective: the disembodied all-seeing eye of God.38 Realism posits the ontology of the blosse Sachen because it wishes to overcome perspective and take up this divine point of view (which it simultaneously refuses to acknowledge as a point of view). But this is because perspective is considered to be a veil that occludes and obstructs access to the thing’s purity and nakedness, a wall that prohibits entry into the great outdoors. Realism desires the clarity and certainty of an unobstructed view, to find being in its own proper place and seize upon it. In this sense, realist metaphysics is organized around the primacy of being itself—it is a philosophy that wishes to arrive at the scene of that which is always identical with itself and never otherwise, that which, without ambiguity, could be said to be. Realism thus establishes an identity between being as such and the indifference and externality of the thing: the flux of the object, its perspectival distortion, its distance, and its uncertainty are merely functions of vision. It is because the world becomes visible from a point of view that the possibility of deception arises, that the world may be imaginary or a fiction. The ambiguity of the perceived, the possibility that I may be mistaken about what I see, has, since at least Plato, been linked to its temporality.39 What shows itself in vision is in a state of process, coming into being and passing away, on its way to being otherwise, and never closed in the self-identity of absolute being. Philosophers have concluded that the perceived must therefore be merely a veil that conceals the absolute. The truth must lie elsewhere, somewhere on the outside, beyond. To secure the absolute beyond the flux of the perceived, realism in this way desires to step outside of time and establish the truth of the perceived on the basis of a-temporal being. Realism presupposes the primacy of being over time. What is at issue, for Merleau-Ponty, is this desire to attain the absolute—for this desire is oriented toward that which always is and never otherwise, that which is immune to the φύω, the becoming of sense that appears in vision. As we have seen, this desire is the mark of thought’s cruelty, for philosophy constitutes itself as possession and surveillance in order to satisfy this desire. Phenomenology, by contrast, invites thought to turn aside from this fixation on being as such and realize that what shows itself does so in and thanks to time—and that as a result, what it seeks will remain at a distance and that what there is never resolves itself into self-identical, closed, and absolute being. The problem of immanence and transcendence, as it is posed by realist metaphysics, and the attendant desire for the outside are exacerbated, not solved, by defaulting to the absolute exteriority and integrity of the real. The opposition between immanence and transcendence, inside and outside, which agonizes the realists, operates, as Merleau-Ponty notes, only so long as we “remain within being.”40 What is required, then, is abandoning the absoluteness of what is as the measure for thought’s



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possibilities and to cease prioritizing the positivity of being over the open indefiniteness of time. Indeed, the entire problematic is transformed, Merleau-Ponty argues, once we “operate in time and understand time as the measure of being.”41 If we wish to make existence intelligible, rather than longing for the absolute outside and exteriority of sense, we must look at it through the temporality thanks to which the visible becomes visible, thanks to which what there is appears, the temporalization that renders the visible into insufficiency and that disintegrates this plenum into an open and indefinite region of possibility—the possibility located at the edge or interstice of impossibility. Merleau-Ponty thus shifts the framework for this question to an investigation of the temporal horizon within which things and the world appear. Rather than prioritizing being over time, we must understand how what there is announces itself within the temporal framework of process, passage, and becoming. Time, to which we shall return in detail later, is the principle of the world’s perspectivity. The real is perspectival because it is temporal—or to use Merleau-Ponty’s locution, because what there is “temporalizes itself.” The sense of the world, MerleauPonty says, “merges with the very movement whereby time passes,” and the horizons of what shows itself “form a single temporal wave, one of the world’s instants.”42 The meaningfulness of the visible, the multiplicity of its possible perspectives, comes to be and passes away in a manner analogous to the horizons of the landscape as seen from a moving train. The past recedes into the background, becoming dim, blurred, degenerating to the point where it passes into oblivion as in the case our earliest childhood memories. Things come to presence only as they occlude others, which move into the background and only as the inverse of their occlusion by others still to come. The thing’s determinacy, the solidity of the real, is founded upon the possibility of this occlusion which takes place through the passage of time. The presence of the glass here on the desk stands out against the backdrop of a past and before an open future. It has been here since yesterday and the slight traces of fingerprints and watermarks call for it to be cleaned. It is not merely a pure or naked thing, then, but becomes what it is—somewhat dirty—only because it is embedded within a temporal wave that bequeaths onto it the precise sense it has. There is a perspective on it thanks to its temporal horizonality. Not only is it in need of cleaning, but it is also a glass that I have had for some time over the course of various places and eras of life. I can remember it sitting on other tables, in the presence of others who are now absent. As it shows itself here and now, it carries with it the weight of that past. At the same time, it posits a horizon of possible futures for itself—that it gets broken, lost, or forgotten. Its presence here, now, would not be possible without these temporal horizons. In this way, because it is ineluctably temporal, the sense of what is here is not a totality circumscribed by a limit; there is not a closed system of presence, for a “sum of things or of presents makes nonsense”;43 a perspective that has no temporal depth and thus which sees everything simultaneously is not a perspective, and the thought that seeks to overcome the horizonality of time in the absolute outside seeks only death. Realism, in a sense, is suicidal: A present without a future, or an eternal present, is precisely the definition of death; the living present is torn between a past which it resumes [reprend] and a

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A glass that does not stand out against the backdrop of its past and project itself into the open possibilities of a future is not a glass—or at least not a real glass. To this extent, its temporal horizonality—that the world always takes up and resumes a past projected toward the future—is the ineluctable condition sin qua non for the real, for “there is nothing to see beyond our horizons but other landscapes and other horizons; nothing interior to the thing except other smaller things. The ideal of objective thought is both based upon and ruined by temporality.”45 The absolute outside of what shows itself within the temporal horizon of sense is merely the emptiness of the impossible, the meaningless. What is real, then, is not this outside but the infinite series of horizons initiated by the articulateness of temporality, an incomplete, that is to say infinite, enchaînement of discordant perspectives. Transcendence, then, is poorly understood as breaking out of perspective, as attaining to an outside of all outsides. Transcendence rather is the manifestation of sense and its horizonal incompleteness. The real is nothing other than this endless series of horizons which is always other, always beyond, incomplete, open, and this is what is most immanent, most “innermost” to it. The outside and the beyond are not the antitheses to immanence but what is closest and most intimate to it, and it seems to be this that is meant when we speak of “transcendence in immanence,”46 what Leonard Lawlor has described as “a thought from the outside that is about the outside.”47 We have a picture, then, that is very different from the incarceratory image constructed by the realist. Rather than a philosophy that closes thought within immanence, transcendence, escape, is already inscribed within the appearance of the world as such. The desire for the beyond and the great outdoors is already—and ineluctably—satisfied by temporality. To this extent, contrary to allegations otherwise, phenomenology is perhaps furthest from the philosophy that seeks to bind, limit, and incarcerate. Because it shines forth in and through time, the real, sense, already pushes the boundary and transgresses the limit. In pursuing this desire to approach the outermost limit, however, we must simultaneously give up on the absolute sufficiency of being in the name of time. Merleau-Ponty says: “Under these circumstances one may say, if one wishes, that nothing exists absolutely, and it would be, in effect, more exact to say that nothing exists and that everything temporalizes itself.”48 What is real is neither the thing in itself and its transcendent, self-enclosed haecceity nor the absolute mathematically ideal, for both of these are the children of pensée en survol and its desire to be everything simultaneously—which is to say, its desire to be nothing, its desire for death. What is real, rather, is the horizonal passage of the visible through time: the passing landscapes of sense, which, precisely as a function of their manifestation, always point to the beyond. What is real is the incomplete series of horizons that time brings into articulation but only as the inverse of its passage, and what is shows itself only by being carried toward these infinite horizons. In this way, we could say with Nancy that we are beyond the opposition of immanence and transcendence, an opposition presupposed by the claustrophobic



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anxiety of realism. Because it is carried forth in time, the outside of sense is already on the inside and vice versa.49 This is what Nancy means when he speaks of “transimmanence”: As soon as the appearance of a beyond of the world has been dissipated, the out-of-place instance of sense opens itself up within the world (to the extent that it would still make sense to speak of a “within”). Sense belongs to the structure of the world, hollows out therein what it would be necessary to name better than by calling the “transcendence” of its “immanence”—its transimmanence, or more simply and strongly, its existence and exposition.50

“Transimmanence” is the becoming outside of the inside, expeausition, as Nancy says elsewhere, both “intimacy and withdraw,” exposure, a desquamation of sense as it peels off its layers, slides outside of itself, and in so doing, gets under way in its departure.51 This departure, for Merleau-Ponty, is the principle in virtue of which the world appears, for to become present is to do so in and thanks to time, “nothing but a general flight out of the Itself [hors du Soi], the one law governing these centrifugal movements, or again, as Heidegger says, an ek-stase.”52 When we reverse the old, Platonic order that privileges being over time and think truth otherwise than in its identity with that which is always what it is and never otherwise, we allow for the departure of presence; we allow, if you will, for the visibility of the visible: its distance and spacing; we allow it to escape and to withdraw from our reach and from our glance. For Merleau-Ponty, to think and philosophize in accordance with the primacy of time; to think being through time and to understand temporalization as the means by which something becomes articulate, is precisely to give up on the desire to possess, to penetrate, and to fuse with being that characterizes cruel thought. As we shall see, such fusion is impossible precisely because time is an influx constitutively unable to catch up with itself. It is both the vehicle through which sense articulates itself and the means through it which it is torn apart, the principle of the world’s unity and at the same time the principle of its disintegration. It is this departure, the disintegration of the visible, that cruel thought cannot tolerate. Realism seeks to compensate this departure, to secure itself against this disintegration, in the indifference of the real and its absoluteness. It is in the name of this cruelty, the desire to seize and arrest, that realism begins with the primacy of being over time. The desire for the great outdoors, for the outside of sense, is the desire to escape from the fragmentation, the alteration of all things brought about in the flux and uncertainty of time and to take refuge in absolute being, in the eternal that knows no change nor loss. *** In this chapter, I have tried to address an important anxiety typically associated with phenomenology from the perspective of realist metaphysics: that it encloses thought in immanence and that it is, therefore, an inherently incarcertory philosophy. In addressing this anxiety, I have also tried to clarify some associated concepts, immanence and transcendence in particular, and to show that, inversely, realist

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metaphysics is driven by the cruel desire to enclose being in a spectacle, to extricate itself from time in order arrive at the scene of being with absolute punctuality. Realism seeks to secure this punctuality in the absolute exteriority of the real, that which lies beyond the confines of vision, perspective, the world of sense illuminated thanks to my bodily openness to it, the great outdoors. This absolute exteriority is what “transcendence” means according to realism. In this way, phenomenology is said to reduce all possibilities for thought to that which is correlated to the constituting subjectivity that functions as the sole referent for the world’s meaningfulness, and therefore thought becomes limited, confined to a subjective point of view. This absolute interiority is what “immanence” means according realist metaphysics. What is at issue is the opposition between this absolute exteriority (transcendence) and absolute interiority (immanence), and it is this, I have tried to show, that is challenged in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. The realist conception of transcendence is in error at the point where it desires that which, according to its own terms, cannot appear. The real is understood as the blosse Sachen, the thing as mere thing, purified of its value and reference to the meaningfulness of the world. Realism wishes to see the real in its absolute transparency, bereft of the horizonality of perceptual experience. It wishes to see being from the perspective of a pensée en survol, thought that soars and hovers above all things in order to keep them under surveillance. Realism, however, in its need to attain the thing in its absolute transparency, attempts to purify the real of its value by positing its exteriority as the sole and absolute value and at the same time constitutes itself as the pure spectator of that which is also said to be absolutely beyond the visible. This purified thing, for the realist, signifies the absolute outside of sense, that which makes no reference to vision, that which is absolutely beyond the possibility of sense. This absolute exteriority to sense, however, is equivalent to absolute non-sense, that which would be absolutely meaningless, absolutely invisible. As Merleau-Ponty argues, the desire for this kind of exteriority, this version of transcendence, is a desire to coincide with nothing: the desire for death. For the phenomenologist, by contrast, everything that appears does so as a certain manner of being, with a certain sense and style that renders it as the being it is and without which it would be unable to appear at all. All things, insofar as they are things, belong to this texture and flesh of significance. It is the sensicality, the meaningfulness of all that is, its style, line, and contour, that is meant by “immanence.” Realism’s desire for the absolute outside and the metaphysics it constructs in order to satisfy this desire, according to Merleau-Ponty, follow from the prioritization of being over time. In order to understand the world and the object as it appears to vision, we must reverse this prioritization and think time as the measure for being. In this way, we can make sense of the co-belonging of the object’s indifference and exteriority along with its perspectivity and horizonality. Objects appear from a certain point of view, appear both in their reference to vision and in their exteriority, thanks to the incomplete synthesis of their sense in time. Because vision is temporal, because everything we see shines forth in the wake of a temporal éclatement, an explosion of difference in continuity, the things that appear occlude one another, modulate through gradients of color, light and shadow, in a word, appear across the unpassable distance



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that is vision. Everything appears against the backdrop of the past in a manner similar to how a wave appears only within and against the backdrop of the flow and heave of the ocean; the thing is a crest of an entire mass of sense, projecting itself into the open indefiniteness of the future. What shows itself to my eyes is not the absolute transparency and exteriority longed for by realism but always points toward more than it is now, toward significations that open it out onto an expanse of possibilities. Because what appears to my vision does so in time, it is never an absolute, self-enclosed exteriority but an open system of sense references, and in this way, always points beyond itself. The visible, because it appears in time, is beyond itself, ek-static, otherwise than what it is. It is this ek-stasis of the visible, this differing, alteration, that constitutes its distance, what makes the visible seen, and what phenomenologists mean by “transcendence.” Whereas realist metaphysics construes immanence and transcendence in terms of interiority and exteriority, confinement and the great outdoors, phenomenology understands these terms in their intertwinement, in their mutual implication. To be immanent to sense is already to be involved in the ek-static transcendence of time; to be “inside” the sensible is already to be beyond. Likewise, to be “outside” is exactly what it means to appear, to be visible, as the haecceity, externality and indifference of objects is inscribed into their style of appearance, in the sense they have as the manner of beings that they are. As we shall see in more detail, the co-belonging of immanence and transcendence in the visibility of things, in the dehiscence of all things in time that constitutes the distance between the seer and the seen, is the principle of the lateness of becoming to being. The thing is not the solidity, the nakedness that gives itself transparently to my reach but the withdraw into the distance of the world that appears before my eyes—and only becomes what it is in this withdraw, in its occlusion. Likewise, as we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, the world is also not enclosed within the grasp of a pure, transcendental subject that brings the sense of the world into being through its constitutive activity. Phenomenology, as it was articulated by Merleau-Ponty, at the point where it confronts the desire of realism to fuse the thing in its absolute transparency, at the point where realism is a manifestation of thought’s cruelty, also opposes idealism in its desire to fuse with being in the absolute spectator of transcendental consciousness.

3

A Consciousness without Fissures1

Realism, in its attempt to make contact with the thing outside of all perspective, constitutes itself as the pure spectator of this object. There is a point at which, then, realism becomes a strange form of idealism in which the object is spread out before this spectator in absolute transparency. The alternative to realism, historically, has been some version of transcendental philosophy: crudely construed, a philosophy that does not concern itself with objects beyond perspective but that tries to understand the manner in which objects appear within perspective, their manners of givenness, how they appear as the beings that they are.2 Merleau-Ponty’s critical stance with respect to realism requires that we include him in the tradition of transcendental thought. We must do so, however, without misunderstanding his own relationship to this tradition, which, especially concerning Kant and Husserl, was fraught and complicated. Merleau-Ponty’s concern with what he calls the “ordinary perspective transcendental idealism” was the same as his concern with realism: while realism seeks the closure of reflection in the transparent possession of the thing purified of its perspectival distortion, idealism seeks the same closure on the side of the subject. Where realism seeks to finalize and complete the movement of reflection through coincidence with the thing itself, idealism seeks this finality in the absoluteness of transcendental subjectivity, in the a priority of the transcendental field that orders, orients, and gives law to the phenomena in advance of their appearance. In other words, idealism, like realism, is a figure of cruel thought. This chapter, similarly to the previous one, will elaborate Merleau-Ponty’s anxiety about cruel thought, now as it concerns idealism. Part 1, “Transcendental thought and the closure of philosophy,” turns to the critique of idealism staged in the section of the Introduction to Phenomenology of Perception, “Le champ phénoménal.” Phenomenology begins with the methodological precept of the phenomenological reduction, the suspension or epoché of our preconceived notions. This method, accordingly, returns to the “phenomenal field,” the world of perceptual experience that we occupy and live through. The disclosure of the perceived world, however, requires a further reduction to the “transcendental field,” the set of functions or processes that make the sense of the perceived possible. Merleau-Ponty’s worry with the typical manner of how this method is understood is that there is a tendency to think that what is disclosed in the transcendental field is a reason, a λόγος in advance of the phenomena that orients and organizes their givenness. Identifying the transcendental with such a pre-given λόγος

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would be a mistake, according to Merleau-Ponty, because it violates phenomenology’s precept to be faithful to the phenomena in their appearance. This was the error of the Gestalt psychologists, accordingly, who nonetheless claimed a certain allegiance with phenomenology. The problem is that positing this λόγος was only necessary insofar as transcendental idealism attempted to guarantee the adequacy of the reflecting and that which it reflects upon, insofar as it wanted to guarantee the completeness and closure of thought. Merleau-Ponty’s critique of idealism in Phenomenology of Perception is not completed until Le cogito in the context of his discussion of the French neo-Kantian philosopher, Pierre Lachièze-Rey. This discussion highlights the point at which idealism has tended to understand the transcendental field of sense-genesis as a point of origin exempt from the temporal unfolding of sense it is said to initiate: it understands the transcendental as éternitaire. The a-temporality of the transcendental, however, raises two important problems: the impossibility of passivity and the impossibility of others. Passivity, accordingly, becomes reduced to the activity of a constituting origin, and likewise, others are bereft of their alterity insofar as this transcendental origin can tolerate nothing outside of its absolute grasp. These problems, according to Merleau-Ponty, compel us to consider another account of the transcendental that restores its temporal thickness: that what the idealist took to be eternal is shown to be the result of temporal processes of sense-genesis and acquisition. In this way there is nothing outside of time, for Merleau-Ponty, and when we recognize the temporal extension of the transcendental field, we see that it cannot hope to accomplish the fusion of reflection and that upon which it reflects imagined by idealism. We must, rather, recognize the transcendental in its permanent dissonance. These worries with transcendental idealism are taken up in a different context and register eight years later in Merleau-Ponty’s first course at the Collège de France, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression. Part 3, “Survol absolu: Infinite proximity, infinite distance,” turns to this lecture to explore his critique of transcendental idealism more thoroughly. As the origin of the sense of the world, transcendental consciousness takes up a curious and insupportable stance: on one hand, because all sense refers to this origin, there is no sense that is not already in its grasp. There is no intervening distance between the origin and what it constitutes. On the other hand, however, as origin, transcendental consciousness also remains untouched by what it constitutes: it touches everything and yet is touched by nothing; it makes everything visible and yet it itself remains invisible. The absolute proximity of constituting consciousness is at the same time absolute distance. In other words, the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism generates a paradox that it cannot resolve. In place of constituting consciousness, Merleau-Ponty offers what he calls “perceptual consciousness.” Unlike its idealist counterpart, perceptual consciousness is not immune to or exempt from the sense of the world but is immersed in it, touched by it. Merleau-Ponty expresses this with the word empiètement: “encroachment” or “overlapping.” The constituting and constituted, while remaining distinct, nonetheless cross one another. They are, to use a term Merleau-Ponty borrows from Husserl, Ineinander: one is embedded inside the other. What we learn from Merleau-Ponty’s considerations of transcendental idealism is that, like its realist counterpart, it too is



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motivated by a desire to overcome the distance between reflection and what it reflects on, to grasp being itself in its pure transparency. This is accomplished in the purity of transcendental constituting consciousness—but as Merleau-Ponty tries to show, such purity is only a myth held and cherished by idealism. The philosophy offered by Merleau-Ponty, one of contamination, of empiètement, shows the impossibility of the coincidence and punctuality longed for by idealism: that the object of reflection will remain at a distance, across the indeterminacy and spacing of the visible as it effloresces and makes itself manifest. All of this, however, is to show that like realism, idealism is a figure of thought’s cruelty. Idealism insists upon the primacy of the constituting origin and generates the problems addressed by Merleau-Ponty because it wishes to end reflection in the absolute harmony of the reflecting and the reflected. Part 4, “Idealism and cruelty” takes an inventory of idealism’s cruelty and the point where it, like realism, seeks to arrive at the scene of being, right where and when it is. Merleau-Ponty’s thought, against this cruelty, offers a philosophy that attempts to make way for what he calls the “experience of chaos”: that what we seek in our reflections eludes our attempts to reach out and take it in hand, that when we arrive on the scene we find that what we were looking for has departed, that it is gone—disparue. The lateness of reflection to that upon which it reflects is not a defect that could be overcome, but is constitutive of the kind of movement reflection is. Realism and idealism, at the point where they imagine that they close in upon being and seize it, give themselves over to a fantasy in their refusal to recognize thought’s own delay. The delay of thought, as we shall see in more detail in Part 2, is a function of the very structure of sense-genesis itself and its temporal eruption. Philosophy arrives late because it is already immersed in the flux that it attempts to turn back around on to see: it is already carried away in the stream that it reaches out its hand for and therefore cannot hope to arrive at the source.

1. Transcendental thought and the closure of philosophy Transcendental philosophy, most generally, seeks to elaborate the conditions of possibility for the appearance of the world. In Kant, for example, this manifestation is accomplished in the operation of the faculties and the subsumption of sensible intuitions under the form of a concept. For Kant, the world appears thanks to these operations, which are accomplished by the transcendental unity of apperception.3 For Husserl, the sense of the world is not restricted to judgment forms but includes any manner of intentional relationship to the world’s sense: imaginative, interrogative, dreamed, visible, and so forth. The transcendental unity of apperception is replaced with Husserl’s perhaps elusive “transcendental subjectivity,” which is at times identified with intersubjectivity and at other times with temporality itself.4 The important feature of Husserl’s articulation of the transcendental project, however, is the phenomenological reduction, which we will have the opportunity to discuss in more detail later. The phenomenological reduction is a methodological regulation that stipulates that in order to understand how the world comes to have sense, we must not presuppose any given sense as foundational. For example, when I look at the pen here and say “it

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is a real, external object,” I mean that it has the sense of appearing as real, external, and that these concepts and their meaning constitute the possibility of its objectivity. In other words, realism, as we have seen, posits a certain sense of the world and then assumes that all beings must be understood within the framework of that sense. It does not question or interrogate how the objects come to appear as external, real, objective, and so forth. In the phenomenological reduction, the philosopher attempts to set aside any such preconceived prejudices and to look at the world with a vision purified of the ordinary sense of things we take for granted, to set aside, and even work against the authority of common sense. Therefore, if this method is to be radical, it must adhere to a strict operation in which it refuses the sense-accomplishments and theses which guide our typical and mundane orientation in the world, the “natural attitude” that we have when we wake up in the morning and go about our business, as opposed to the transcendental attitude, which the philosopher attempts to assume in the course of her reflections. The relation between the transcendental and natural attitude is a fundamental question for Merleau-Ponty. This question, however, is not taken up in Phenomenology of Perception until Part III, since adjudicating it requires the interrogation of the transcendental sense of temporality.5 We will return to this in Part 2 after turning to the question of sense-genesis in more detail. While he argues that the transcendental attitude is necessitated by the critique of realism, which he thinks is also necessitated by results of the Gestalt psychologists, most notably in their critique of the constancy hypothesis,6 Merleau-Ponty’s critique of transcendental philosophy is primarily directed at his neo-Cartesian and neo-Kantian contemporaries such as Brunschvicq, Alain, and Lachièze-Rey. While it would be far too onerous to go into a detailed account of his critical relationship with his contemporaries, and since the critical remarks directed at Kant and Husserl often seem quick and insufficiently charitable, my account will only focus on what he calls the “ordinary perspective” of transcendental philosophy. Ultimately his worry is not with the letter of Kant or Husserl so much as a tendency in their philosophies, as well as transcendental thought in general, toward cruelty. Merleau-Ponty’s proximity to idealism and what he calls the “philosophy of consciousness,” especially in Phenomenology of Perception, has become a subject of debate among scholars. Barbaras,7 for example, has argued that Merleau-Ponty fails to recognize the degree to which idealism haunts Phenomenology of Perception and, as a result, fails to conceive the originality of the perceptual field in a radical way. Merleau-Ponty himself was not ignorant of nor insensitive to this proximity, however, and much of his work in the years following its publication was intended to demonstrate his critical distance from the ordinary perspective of transcendental thought. Merleau-Ponty criticizes transcendental idealism on two points: first, transcendental philosophy comes under fire for its failure to be guided by the phenomena in their appearance.8 As he notes in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception, ordinary transcendental philosophy begins by making a distinction between the world as it appears in experience and the ideal, transcendental conditions of possibility for that appearance.9 By explaining what appears in experience according to such conditions, however, ordinary transcendental idealism tacitly assumes that there is a reason or



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λόγος that conditions the appearance of the phenomena in advance of them showing themselves, a transcendental rule or law that makes the visibility of the world possible without itself becoming visible. For Merleau-Ponty, ordinary transcendental idealism thus fails to be guided by the phenomena insofar as it understands the sense of the transcendental in accordance with a pre-established norm given in advance. Second, in taking up the transcendental attitude, ordinary transcendental thought understands the transcendental field as éternitaire.10 Indeed, it is only insofar as this perspective attunes itself to a pre-understanding of the phenomena rather than to the phenomena in their appearance that ordinary transcendental philosophy is entitled to identify the transcendental field with a form of a-temporal thinking consciousness, a cogito that constitutes by being unconstituted, that makes time possible by being a-temporal. It is this division and the purity of the transcendental that concern Merleau-Ponty. Together these points entitle ordinary transcendental philosophy to a claim to final contact and coincidence between the reflecting and the reflected. Transcendental philosophy’s promise to overcome the naïveté of the natural attitude by disclosing the transcendental field of sense is thus compromised by its commitment to the prejudices of cruel thought. Ordinary transcendental idealism makes a claim to arriving at the scene of being by presupposing the possibility of distinguishing between the appearance of things in experience and their ideal, a priori conditions of possibility, conditions designed to guarantee the unmediated contact between the act of reflection and that on which it reflects. The contact between the reflecting and the reflected, furthermore, is said to thereby secure an eternal and apodictic ground for philosophy, guaranteeing a final resolution and accord to inquiry. Ordinary transcendental idealism thus proposes to dissolve the perspectivism, deformations and incongruences, indeed, the “permanent dissonance”11 of being, into the total diapason and unity of a transcendental, constituting consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s thought is critically oriented toward this style of philosophizing, what we have called cruel thought, precisely in its attempt to articulate a more radical form of reflection, a modality of thinking that no longer begins with the demand for the adequacy of the reflecting to the reflected. Such a philosophy would be capable of recognizing its own constitutive lack of punctuality and timeliness as well as the structural inadequacy, non-coincidence and divergence, the écart, that ruptures the reflecting and the reflected and which defines the becoming of sense. As we shall try to show in the subsequent chapters, bringing such a philosophy into articulation, a philosophy of lateness, which begins in Phenomenology of Perception, is the concern of Merleau-Ponty’s thought in general. We may begin considering the first point, idealism’s refusal to be guided by the phenomena in their appearance, by turning to the section of the Introduction to Pheomenology of Perception entitled Le champ phénoménal and the critical engagement with the project of transcendental phenomenology that Merleau-Ponty stages there. In these pages, he addresses the position of phenomenological psychology, of which the Gestaltists were for him the most important representatives. To summarize this position very briefly, while Merleau-Ponty was quite aware of the philosophical and historical reasons for tracing a direct line between Husserl on one hand, and Köhler and Koffka on the other,12 his complaint against the Gestalt psychologists is that while

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their critique of the constancy hypothesis13 necessitates an investigation of perceptual experience from the point of view of the transcendental attitude, they failed to take it up with a sufficient degree of consistency and radicality. This complaint is not exclusively addressed to the Gestaltists, however, but circumscribes the failure of the ordinary perspective of transcendental philosophy in general, which, importantly, includes the program of a transcendental phenomenology.14 What defines this perspective is a certain understanding of the regressive movement that proceeds from what appears, the naturé, as Merleau-Ponty says, (or the naturata or “natured”), to the naturant, (the naturans or “naturing”),15 i.e., from the constituted to the constituting. In other words, the defining feature of the ordinary perspective of transcendental thought, for Merleau-Ponty, is that the disclosure of the transcendental field would amount to the coincidence, the self-possession of the naturant and the adequacy of the reflecting and the reflected.16 The demand for this adequacy is achieved, MerleauPonty argues, only at the expense of infidelity to the phenomena in their appearance and a naïve understanding of the structure of sense-genesis and the appearance of the world. Merleau-Ponty begins his critique in Le champ phénoménal by claiming that the Gestalt psychologists at least implicitly recognized the necessity of taking up the transcendental attitude in order to overcome the naïveté of the empirical psychologies of the time. In the discovery of the Gestalt, the form or figure, the phenomenological psychologist begins to overcome the “psychologism” implied by the concept of sensation insofar as the percept is understood as “a whole [ensemble] which develops a law of internal coherence” rather than as a concatenation of sensory atoms or qualia.17 The discovery of the Gestalt in many ways is essential: what shows itself in my perceptual experience are contours, textures, lines, trajectories, that stand out in the foreground of vision like the figure of a painting. When I focus on the pen on the desk, the white surface of the desk recedes; it takes up its position as background, allowing the pen to stand forth. Likewise, I can again shift my focus so the orange cap stands out against the backdrop of the gray shaft, the notebook it is laying on and other clutter, all of which fades and becomes more obscure as the pen comes into focus. In fact, my entire perceptual field is nothing other than a network of these shifting figures and grounds, and the objects that appear come into focus as what they are only as other things take up their position in the less differentiated, less precise background. What is necessary, from Merleau-Ponty’s point of view, and what the Gestalt psychologists failed to do, is account for the genesis of the sense and structure of the Gestalt as well as the field of perceptual experience in general. In other words, in taking the Gestalt as an original phenomenon, the Gestalt psychologists failed to show what makes this dynamic field possible and thus required an account of sense-genesis that they failed to offer. Once the problem of sense-genesis is recognized as fundamental, as it is for Merleau-Ponty, philosophical reflection is compelled to make this problem its explicit theme, and it is at this point that “a psychology is always presented with the problem of the constitution of the world”18 and is thus compelled to adopt the transcendental attitude. While the phenomenological psychology of the Gestaltists had made certain advances over the empirical psychologies it criticized by moving toward the transcendental attitude, the limitations of its positivism necessitated a



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more radical methodology, namely, that of a transcendental phenomenology, indeed, necessitated a phenomenology of perceptual experience. For phenomenology, taking up the transcendental attitude means that the commonplace postulates of our ordinary understanding of perception must be suspended. Like its realist correlate, sensation and its qualia, the concept of the Gestalt must also be taken out of play, and we are compelled to interrogate the possibilities by which the “structure,” “form,” and “sense” of the world come into being. Phenomenology thus begins by “recognizing the originality of the phenomenon with respect to the objective world”19 and by positing the originality of the transcendental field in which the processes that orient and provide the means for the articulation of sense give themselves. A preliminary reduction of objective relationships shows the manner in which sense becomes possible through the living and primordial modes of evidence that bring it into articulation—what Merleau-Ponty calls le monde vécu, the “lived world,” what Husserl calls the Lebenswelt, the “lifeworld.” The lifeworld, operating underneath beliefs that are the product of a reflective attitude, is the ground that an objective world of sense always presupposes. The curtain at the window here hangs down before my eyes and unfolds itself before me, neither as a system of experiential data nor as the correlate of a constituting mind but as “here, in the living room,” inhabiting the daily space of an existence. Its “hereness,” however, is accomplished only in the references it makes to this space—the window, the view from the window it occasionally occludes, the way the light comes through the window, which is not any possible light, but only this, here, with its peculiar color, the angle at which it strikes the window, occasionally illuminating the curtain’s burnt orange color; the reference the curtain makes to the desk, where I sit writing, the lamps on either side, and so forth. The unfolding of the curtain in this stream of references, indeed, the complex of sense that makes it the curtain it is—and not another one— are more primordial than the attitude I take up on it in philosophical reflection or scientific analysis, older than claims that it is an “object,” more immediate, in a sense, than whatever metaphysics issues from such reflections. In this way, the curtain has a “living evidence.” As Husserl insisted, however, the force of the world’s living evidence is relative to the experiencing subject.20 The curtain does not show up here arbitrarily, but in this case is only a curtain as it inhabits a point of view and vision, a perspective that is ineluctably “mine.” This point of view, however, the subjective one, is not primary. The reduction of objective relationships to this perspectival evidence necessitates a further reduction to that which makes any point of view possible whatsoever, a “transcendental field” beneath this “phenomenal field” of living experience, what Husserl called transcendental subjectivity.21 By making transcendental subjectivity the focus of its interest, phenomenological description, for Husserl at least, takes its place in the tradition of transcendental inquiry.22 In the disclosure of transcendental subjectivity, the living, intentional relations to the world and its evidence are suspended, and what appears as the remaining referent for the constitution of sense is an active, positional singularity that renders such openness possible. As Husserl says in an especially important text for Merleau-Ponty, the Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy:

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The Philosophy of Ontological Lateness At all events, however, we must—for the most profound philosophical reasons, which we cannot go into further, and which are not only methodical in character— do justice to the absolute singularity of the ego and its central position in all constitution … Accordingly, as against the first application of the epoch­ē, a second is required, or rather a conscious reshaping of the epochē through a reduction to the absolute ego as the ultimately unique center of function in all constitution.23

The phenomenological reduction is twofold: first there is the suspension of the natural attitude, which includes the hypotheses about my experience derived from philosophical reflection as well as the sciences. This discloses le monde vécu, the world of living evidence that dwells in experience. This world refers to my living point of view, and in this way, the experience I have of myself as a perceiving subject. But what constitutes this point of view? What constitutes the sense of this subjectivity? A second moment of reduction is required that suspends even my own point of view, this phenomenal field, in order to disclose a transcendental field, the birthplace of the processes that render the sense of the world in its vividness and color. Merleau-Ponty puts it this way: The explication [l’explicitation] which has laid bare le monde vécu beneath the objective world continues toward [se poursuit à l’égard] le monde vécu itself and exposes, beneath the phenomenal field, the transcendental field.24

It is at this point that transcendental phenomenology risks degenerating into a more ordinary form of transcendental thought by positing a demand for the adequacy of the reflecting to the reflected. For ordinary transcendental philosophy, the transcendental field disclosed in the reduction is identified with a form of constituting consciousness, a cogito, and all sense is understood to refer back to this consciousness as its point of origination, and to this extent, the project of transcendental phenomenology risks limiting the possibility of sense to the primacy of thinking being. The difference between the founding, eternal term of transcendental consciousness and the founded, temporal term of the world, things and others disclosed in the reduction, furthermore, is a strategy for ensuring the indubitability of what we may predicate to the transient and insecure realm of experience. That which is always self-identical and unchanging secures that which always changes and is never the same in experience, and the order and organization of experience is achieved thanks to the positing activity of an eternal res cogitans. As Merleau-Ponty will try to show, differentiating between the naturé and the naturant in this fashion cannot be maintained for, as he argues, it begins by presuming the intelligibility of the distinction between what appears in experience and the ideal, invisible conditions of possibility that would secure and guarantee its articulation and lawfulness that are allegedly disclosed in the reduction.25 What Merleau-Ponty objects to in the ordinary form of transcendental philosophy is a tendency toward a certain strand of Cartesianism, a strand, accordingly, that is precisely antithetical to the most fundamental gesture of phenomenology: to return to the phenomena as they present themselves through their own power and not as the consequents of a pre-conceived antecedent. Husserl himself, in fact, is named in this critique, as Merleau-Ponty notes in



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Le champ phénoménal. Insofar as Husserlian transcendental phenomenology proposes that the reduction “would enable me to take complete possession of my experience and realize the adequation of the reflecting to the reflected [réfléchissant au réfléchi],” it fails to attune itself to the phenomena and remains committed to the ordinary perspective of transcendental philosophy.26 This tension plays itself out in the first chapter of Part III of Husserl’s Ideen, “Preliminary Methodological Deliberations.” In these pages, we see Husserl quite explicitly considering the apparent tension between the demand for “perfect clarity,” a demand placed upon transcendental phenomenology insofar as it claims to be rigorously scientific, and the “residue of unclarity,” as he says, that remains insofar as transcendental consciousness is understood as “fluctuation in flowing away in various dimensions in such a manner that there can be no speaking of a conceptually exact fixing of any eidetic concreta or of any of their immediately constitutive moments.”27 As Merleau-Ponty argues, overcoming this residue of unclarity requires positing a law or model that conditions the appearance of the phenomena “according to which the phenomena of structure realize themselves,” and their appearance is thus understood as the “external unfolding of a pre-existing reason.”28 Merleau-Ponty’s complaint against ordinary transcendental philosophy is that it posits a λόγος in advance of the appearance of the phenomena that would function as their guide and law. The a priority of this λόγος, furthermore, is intended to secure the infallibility of its method: in order to guarantee the possibility of a reductive movement from the naturé to the naturant, transcendental philosophy must begin by assuming that the phenomena will show themselves only in obedience to a an internal logic. Insofar as the necessity of this λόγος is taken to be selfevident and assumed in advance of the manifestation of the phenomena in the reduction, Husserl’s method is guided by this understanding rather than by the appearance of the phenomena. To this extent, then, Husserl’s articulation of the project of transcendental phenomenology could be said to betray its own most fundamental gesture.29 It is this move on the part of ordinary transcendental idealism that MerleauPonty explicitly wishes to challenge when he claims that the distinguishing feature of phenomenology is that it is “a study of the appearance of being to consciousness, rather than presuming its possibility as given in advance.”30 To be radical, MerleauPonty insists that phenomenology must elucidate the manifestation of things in experience only in accordance with the reduction, in attending to the φύω of le monde vécu, and not according to a λόγος assumed in advance as the law of its intelligibility. Merleau-Ponty’s complaint against classical transcendental philosophies is that they precisely take the possibility of the appearance of the world for granted, and it is this assumption, accordingly, that leads Husserl, at least in certain instances, to inscribe the project of transcendental phenomenology within the framework of the ordinary perspective of transcendental thought. To think sense-genesis and constitution as the work of an active, constituting consciousness is to assume too much, for it posits a law in advance of the word’s shining forth. For Merleau-Ponty, this inscribes phenomenology within a traditional form of rationalism as it presupposes a certain set of parameters for the intelligibility of the phenomena—in this case, that sense-genesis is legible only as the rule-governed activity of thinking. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty claims that the appearance of the phenomena must be interpreted only within the strict methodological confines of the phenomenological

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reduction. As he says, disclosing the field in which the phenomena appear “is not the external unfolding of a pre-existing reason … it is the very appearance of the world and not the condition of its possibility; it is the birth of a norm and is not realized according to a norm.”31 A radical phenomenological method does not begin by assuming the harmony or lawfulness of the phenomena in advance of their appearance, but by suspending the requirement that it coincide with the object of its reflections, the phenomenological method constitutes itself as a problem and a question. If our reflections are guided by the phenomena themselves, the reduction cannot be assumed to be the illumination of a pre-existing consonance—it is not the pre-determination of the sense of unreflective experience—but, as Merleau-Ponty notes, the reduction is a “creative operation which itself participates in the facticity of the unreflective [l’irréfléchi].”32 In other words, the phenomenological reduction itself is immersed in the temporal éclatement or eruption of sense in its becoming, and “our reflections are carried out in the temporal flux on which we are trying to seize (since they sich einströmen, as Husserl says).”33 Realizing the radicality promised by transcendental philosophy in the disclosure of the transcendental field requires a new form of philosophizing: a “reflection on this reflection [réfléchir sur cette réflexion],” that we “not merely practice philosophy, but give an account of the transformation which it brings with it in the spectacle of the world and in our existence.”34 Phenomenology of Perception in this way means to initiate a meta-reflection, a “phenomenology of phenomenology,”35 a method that subjects itself to the same interrogation to which it subjects the self-evident sense of the natural attitude. What is required is a more rigorous method for the project of transcendental philosophy that anticipates what Merleau-Ponty will call in The Visible and the Invisible a surréflexion.36

2. The permanent dissonance of the transcendental The theory of the transcendental that Merleau-Ponty offers, which can also be considered an attempt to put into practice this surréflexion, is articulated in Part III of Phenomenology of Perception in the section of the Le cogito chapter entitled “Éternitaire interpretation of the cogito.”37 This account is staged in the context of a discussion of the neo-Kantian philosopher Pierre Lachièze-Rey.38 In taking up the transcendental attitude, transcendental idealism, of course, has the great advantage of having overcome the naïveté and duplicity of metaphysical realism, for which, as he says, there is no question of justification.39 Transcendental idealism, however, at least as it was manifest in the work of Lachièze-Rey, conceives the transcendental field as a set of conditions that dictate the genesis of sense but are not themselves subject to this genesis: transcendental consciousness constitutes but is not itself constituted; it is the pivot around which the sense of the world is organized but is not itself subject to the sense it articulates. It is exempted from the generative and articulating process it initiates and stands apart from the flux of becoming. In other words, Lachièze-Rey understands the transcendental field as éternitaire: it is the origin of time that is not itself subject to time, the a-temporal ground of temporal becoming. This particular articulation of the transcendental field, according to Merleau-Ponty, is possible only



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as a result of the idealist’s refusal to be guided by the phenomena in their appearance. Merleau-Ponty will argue here that the idealist’s account of the transcendental field is motivated the cruel desire for the adequation and contact between the reflecting and the reflected. Against this desire to be adequate and in place of a set of a-temporal conditions of possibility “without which” that generate the temporal unfolding of sense, Merleau-Ponty conceives the transcendental field as a temporal extension subject to its own genesis, as an eruption for which a final accord and resolution is constitutively impossible. In other words, in place of the desire for a diapason of being that characterizes ordinary transcendental idealism, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the transcendental field compels us to think being in its “permanent dissonance.” The discussion begins with a summary of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of Lachièze-Rey’s thought, particularly as it was articulated in his book L’idéalisme kantien.40 If we accept a set of claims basic to transcendental philosophy, that there is something wrong with realism, that the world is composed of phenomena, what appears does so to a point of view, and that there is an underlying field of reference for any possible point of view, a transcendental field, we seem to be left with two possibilities for understanding what this field is like: either the transcendental field is itself situated in a context of relations external to it, is a thing among things, an event among events, in which case it is no transcendental field at all, or it is the necessary a priori condition of possibility for events and temporality. If we refuse the former thesis, which seems to compromise its transcendentality, we are compelled to acknowledge that, as the condition of possibility for temporal relations, the transcendental field, identified by the idealist with a cogito, an “I think” that owes “nothing to time.”41 In its attempt to think the a priority of the transcendental field as transcendental consciousness, idealism identifies the transcendental with the a-temporal. In so doing, however, the idealist’s argument takes advantage of a certain presumed understanding of the sense of eternity and its contradistinction with respect to temporality. The result, MerleauPonty says, still following Lachièze-Rey, is that “eternity, understood as the power to embrace and anticipate temporal developments in a single intention, becomes the very definition of subjectivity”: experimur nos aeternos esse.42 Interrogating the promise of transcendental philosophy and the extent to which it can succeed in overturning the naïveté of metaphysical realism will therefore involve broaching the question of temporality. What is at stake in this interrogation, however, is whether idealism is justified in identifying the transcendental ground of sense-genesis with the a-temporal—specifically with an a-temporal, constituting consciousness, a point of origination that has the entire sense of the world in its grasp. What Lachièze-Rey takes for granted, according to Merleau-Ponty, is a certain understanding of the difference between the temporal and the a-temporal. What does it mean to speak of eternity? Since at least St. Augustine, the eternal has been thought in this way: as an order entirely otherwise, completely distinct and separated from the temporal, that which is not subject to temporal generation and decay. In Augustine, the distinction between the eternal and temporal is aligned with the difference between the mortal and the divine.43 Only created beings that live and die exist in time: the divine, as the origin of time and principle of creation, initiates temporal flow but is not subject to it. It is this Augustinian way of thinking about eternity that was

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inherited by idealists like Lachièze-Rey. But, Merleau-Ponty asks, what happens if we set this traditional understanding of eternity, taken for granted by the idealists, aside? For Merleau-Ponty, there is something odd in speaking of a being that creates the sense of the world and yet is not subject to this sense, something that sets time forth and yet can have nothing to do it. What Merleau-Ponty will undertake in his account of the transcendental field is to restore it to time and insist that if there is sense—if a phenomenon appears—it must do so within the horizon of the temporal flux, that what is, insofar as it is, comes forth from within the becoming, the φύω, of time. As we shall see in Part 2, this basic thesis cuts across Merleau-Ponty’s account of sensegenesis. To speak of some entity outside of time, whether this entity is named God or transcendental subjectivity, is to construct a fiction that remains parasitic on the unfolding of our lived experience in time. If we put our preconceived understanding of the difference between eternity and temporality aside and attend to the phenomena in their appearance, according to Merleau-Ponty, we see that what appeared as eternal to the idealist is in fact a function of the process of temporal acquisition, a process that is itself a function of the unfolding of temporality.44 Things present themselves to us as timeless not because they exist in some Platonic heaven that has extricated itself from the growth and decay of the visible but because of the heaviness, the density and weight of their sense, because this sense has been articulated and re-articulated within the world. Merleau-Ponty’s argument against Lachièze-Rey in Le cogito is a reductio that identifies two insupportable consequences for understanding the transcendental field as éternitaire: the impossibility of passivity and the impossibility of others. In briefly outlining these consequences, we will begin with the former, the force of which is actually established by the latter. Merleau-Ponty’s complaint against the first consequence lies in the extent to which idealism identifies its cogito with “a transcendental field with no folds [replis] and no outside.”45 If all sense refers to the cogito as its pivot and center of orientation, then anything lying beyond the scope of this center would only be non-sense. If this is the case, then how can the idealist account for the possibility of pathos, of passivity and affectivity? Does it not follow from this idealist construal of the transcendental that passivity and affectivity must be a function of the constituting activity of thinking being—that what overcomes us and has us in our grip is nonetheless a function of our constituting power?46 This is to suggest, however, that the mind would constitute itself as affected, and this effectively eliminates any robust account of passivity since all passivity becomes reduced to the activity of transcendental consciousness.47 This reduction, however, simply reaffirms the idea that the transcendental field is an absolute with no relative, and MerleauPonty’s complaint against this claim gains its force only in the context of the second objection: the impossibility of others. If transcendental consciousness is an absolute without relative, if it is indeed the referential center of all sense, then it is impossible to claim that there could be more than one, and we are left within the reaches of the problem of inter-subjectivity. While there is not space here to consider the problem of inter-subjectivity in the detail it deserves, it is necessary to make a few remarks about its significance in this context.48 Very generally, for Merleau-Ponty, the problem of inter-subjectivity



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involves at least two interrelated issues: first, how the other makes herself present as a consciousness, as an animate being whose movements cannot be reduced to causal or mechanistic relations; second, how certain aspects of her being remain hidden and unaccountable. For Merleau-Ponty, these two points always function in concert—I recognize another consciousness precisely as that being for whom I cannot fully account, whose actions and movements are motivated by a principle that remains perpetually invisible, and it is the other’s elusiveness that constitutes her alterity. If it is to overcome the problem of inter-subjectivity, transcendental philosophy must provide itself with the resources to account for both the appearance of the other, her sense, while simultaneously not reducing that sense to the aseity and ipseity of transcendental consciousness. The absolute consciousness of idealism fails on both counts, and the former because of the latter: on one hand, others are possible only within the matrix of sense that transcendental subjectivity establishes, and therefore are recognizable only insofar as they appear within the world. The others that appear, of course, unfold themselves within the visible world with their own distinct sense—sense that makes them precisely the beings that they are not otherwise: the idiosyncratic style others have, a way of walking, smiling, laughing, carrying and comporting themselves within this fabric of meaning. Others, like everything else, only appear within a point of view. If this is the case, however, others would be recognizable only in the reference they make to the ipseity of transcendental consciousness and thus only as constituted “exteriorities,” only as the visible surfaces made present within the order of sense, only other things among things. After all, what we see of others is only their surface, only the outer layer they display to the world—that inner principle of movement, their intentions, and desires, in a word, their “mind,” remains intractably invisible. Under such conditions, it remains impossible to say why this being is another consciousness and not simply an automaton—why the other is more than the appearance of “hats and coats.”49 This human-shaped being that I see here would precisely lack an interior reference to another consciousness, since, within this field of absolute visibility without folds, all constitutive analysis points back to transcendental consciousness as the site for the origination of sense. The other lacks interiority for transcendental consciousness precisely because there is nothing beyond transcendental consciousness; it has no exterior. Such an “impervious” [bien fermé] and secured being, for Merleau-Ponty, precisely lacks the openness to sense that transcends the constituting activity of a pure mind. For such a being, others as such amount only to non-sense. Restoring the otherness of the other, according to Merleau-Ponty, requires re-thinking the transcendental field otherwise than as a closed singularity with no outside. As he says, “unless I have an exterior others have no interior.”50 The alterity of the other is premised upon my own exposure, my own surface, that I am not an invisible consciousness holding the visible under my gaze but that I too am visible, that I take up my place in this fabric of sense, of folds and fissures, and am seen by other gazes, other points of view that I am able to recognize as points of view. Merleau-Ponty’s claim is that thinking through the problem of inter-subjectivity and restoring the other her alterity requires an account of the transcendental field that restores its temporal extension. Others can appear to me precisely as others, as

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elusive beings concealing their own intentions and desires, only if the condition of sense-genesis is not a singularity, an absolute and a-temporal point of reference to which all sense points back. Rather, transcendental phenomenology must be capable of thinking the transcendental field as a domain in which a multiplicity of referential structures are possible; in which sense comes into being through a kind of dehiscence or eruption51 rather than through a unidirectional movement of constitution. The transcendental condition of sense-genesis must be thought, not in accordance with the self-identity and a-temoporality of a point of origin but precisely in its temporal extension. Recasting the question of the transcendental field in terms of its temporal extendedness, however, introduces, as Merleau-Ponty says, “another philosophy which does not take us out of time.”52 Indeed, what this other philosophy, a phenomenology of perception, accomplishes is re-thinking the transcendental field in terms of what Merleau-Ponty describes as “the fundamental mode of the event and Geschichte.”53 In order to unpack the sense of the event of sense at stake in this account, we can now turn to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the temporal extension of the transcendental field in the context of Le cogito. He begins by first turning to a brief discussion of speech and expression. What this foray is intended to illustrate is the necessity of a temporal account of the transcendental field if we are to make sense of speech in its expressive function. In this account, Merleau-Ponty re-introduces an earlier distinction between what he calls parole parlante and parole parlée: the originating, speaking speech that expresses and the sedimented, spoken speech that is repeated in expression. As Merleau-Ponty says earlier in La corps comme expression et parole: [Speaking speech] is the one in which the significative intention is in a nascent state. Here existence is polarized into a certain “sense” which cannot be defined in terms of the natural object … But the act of expression constitutes a linguistic world and a cultural world, and allows that to fall back into the being which it was tending beyond. Hence spoken speech, which enjoys available significations like an acquired fortune.54

When I speak, I do not bring a static and eternal set of significations into being but carry forward a tradition that must be constantly repeated and renewed. Expression, as Merleau-Ponty says, “is at a stroke to incorporate the past into the present, and to weld that present to a future, to open a whole temporal cycle in which the ‘acquired’ thought will remain present as a dimension, without our needing henceforth to summon it up or reproduce it.”55 We know and understand the words of our language without having to explicitly recall each one. Language constitutes for us a field that envelops us, and it does so thanks to articulations that have condensed and hardened over the course of its history, through changes in nuance, usage, slang, and so forth. It is available to us precisely as this massive acquisition of sense and meaning, an acquisition that nonetheless must be sustained and nurtured through repetitions and reprisals in future expressions. As Merleau-Ponty notes, “alone of all expressive processes, speech is capable of sedimenting and constituting an inter-subjective acquisition.”56 What appeared to the idealist as eternal, a-temporal, the definition of a triangle, for example, is understood as a function of this expressive process of acquisition and, as Merleau-Ponty says, “the presumption of a completed synthesis in



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terms of which we have defined the thing.”57 In other words, the idealist’s vision of the a-temporal presupposes that the sense of the world has been articulated once and for all and that there is nothing further to say, no further tasks of expression set before us, and that its articulation has been completed and is over and done with. In short, the idealist thinks that sense and meaning are closed when Merleau-Ponty insists upon their openness. If what initially appeared as the eternal is really a function of temporal acquisition, then eternity is not an order distinct from time, but “the atmosphere of time”;58 eternity does not refer to an order independent or prior to that of temporality but refers more specifically to time’s own power of sense-accomplishment. What the idealist took to be the immutability of the transcendental field is thus possible only through expressive acquisition—indeed, “the non-temporal,” Merleau-Ponty says, “is the acquired.”59 Sense, accordingly, is not ensured by a transcendental field of a-temporal conditions of possibility but is the event of the temporal passage of expressive origination and sedimentation. What the idealist took to be eternal is the function of the sedimenting movement of expression, spoken speech, and the irreversibility of the past in time’s passage. Sedimentation is possible because each moment of time succeeds another and passes into the past, and what is accomplished and acquired in this passage attains its “inalienable place” as having been; it is in virtue of the phenomenon of acquisition, then, that the idealist was able to derive the idea of eternity,60 and consequently, affirm the necessary a-temporality of the transcendental field as transcendental consciousness. The idealist’s elision of the temporal structure of acquisition and the appeal to an a priori eternity is no accident, however. It is a desire for an immediate contact between the reflecting and the reflected that motivates the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism to insist on the éternitaire nature of the transcendental field. In the retrieval of an a-temporal, transcendental, constituting consciousness as the origin of all temporal relations and all sense, transcendental idealism seeks to arrest and overcome the dispersion of reflection in time. Idealism tries to account for time by passing it over in favor of conditions that are not subject to its erosion, passage and contingency, and thus secure for itself a necessary ground. The a-temporality of the transcendental field was intended to ensure the appearance of the world with apodictic evidence: as that which is always the same and never changes, the transcendental field is an absolute guarantee for the articulation and appearance of the world, a guarantee that, precisely because as the condition of temporality, is never subject to temporal dissolution or “disarticulation.”61 If it is faithful to the phenomena in their appearance, on the contrary, the phenomenological disclosure of the transcendental field of sense-genesis must not take this pre-understanding of the distinction between eternity and temporality for granted. Indeed, we can now see that the λόγος ordinary transcendental thought posited in advance of the appearance of the phenomena was that of an eternal cogito, and sense, likewise, was taken to be the external unfolding of this cogito. If we attend to the phenomena in their appearance, we no longer begin our analysis of the transcendental field with a certain presupposed sense of the eternal but recognize that the idealist’s understanding of eternity is a function of temporality itself and its power of acquisition.

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We are thus compelled to think through the manner in which the transcendental field itself has a certain temporal extension, and this is what Merleau-Ponty proposes when he remarks that he is “restoring to the cogito a temporal thickness.”62 The cogito, Merleau-Ponty says, is not an eternal or a-temporal constitutive singularity but rather designates a certain “advent” [avènement] or “transcendental event” [évènement transcendantal].63 The transcendental field is not a static absolute, not the eternal singularity of mind, but a temporal continuum in a process of dynamic passage—the transcendental field would be more accurately designated, for Merleau-Ponty, as the event of sense in its éclatement, désintégration and déhiscence.64 Following this thread, the transcendental field disclosed in the reduction is not a pure constituting activity—thinking being—but the field of the passage of sense in its temporal becoming. Because the transcendental field is a temporal field, furthermore, it cannot provide an accord or resolution for the reflections initiated by phenomenology. As Merleau-Ponty remarks in Le cogito, quoting Valéry: A thought does not exist which exterminates the power of thinking and concludes it—a certain position of the bolt which definitively closes the lock. No, there is no point of thought which is a resolution born of its own development and, as it were, the final resolution [accord] of this permanent dissonance.65

In contrast to the consonance of the reflecting and the reflected sought by the idealist in the a-temporal, the transcendental field, thought in its temporal extension, is the field in which being shows itself in its permanent dissonance. It is the field for the appearance of the dissonance entailed by the becoming of sense in its temporal passage, and the task of philosophy, if it is radical, is not to attempt a cadence that would bring it to resolution but to hearken itself to this temporal concatenation of being.

3. Survol absolu: Infinite proximity, infinite distance Before turning to Merleau-Ponty’s temporal account of the transcendental field and its irresolvability, it will be worth considering how the critique of transcendental idealism outlined in Le cogito is developed in the years following Phenomenology of Perception. We can do this by turning to his first course at the Collège de France, delivered in 1953, entitled Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression. Here, he makes the concept of consciousness that distinguishes idealism the focus of an extended critique in an effort to clarify the sense of the transcendental already articulated in Phenomenology of Perception. By considering this lecture, we get a clear indication of how Merleau-Ponty took up and elaborated the ideas put down earlier in the 1945 text. In this lecture, he argues that the kind of transcendental consciousness identified with the transcendental field by the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism is, as he says, “a consciousness without fissures,”66 what he calls a pensée en survol, “thought that soars over”: an individuated, intellectual consciousness, as he says in Phenomenology of Perception, “in full possession of itself,”67 a constituting unity that



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stands at the center of sense as its fountainhead and around which being is oriented and organized. For such a consciousness, nothing remains latent or hidden from its absolute gaze, and spread out before this consciousness in “absolute transparency,”68 being has no shadows, dimensionality or depth. As the pure source of the world’s meaning, this consciousness constitutes the sense of the world while simultaneously remaining uncontaminated by that which it articulates—it has the world absolutely in its grasp, on one hand, and yet retains an absolute distance from the sense it iterates. While there is perhaps nothing surprising in this critique to readers familiar with Merleau-Ponty, this lecture provides important insights into why this understanding of consciousness constitutes a philosophical problem that will occupy his reflections and writings until his death. Elaborating his critique first requires that we come to grips with the worries associated with such an understanding of consciousness and its identification with the transcendental field disclosed by the phenomenological reduction. In other words, beyond what could perhaps be described as an aesthetic objection to this understanding of consciousness—Merleau-Ponty’s taste for the ambiguous, the oblique, and the indirect—we must seek out the philosophical problems that the idealist understanding of the transcendental generates: why precisely must phenomenology abandon the concept of consciousness and become an ontology, for example, of the flesh? While of course this lecture does not go as far The Visible and the Invisible in treading this path, it nonetheless provides some clues for answering this question and, importantly, sheds light on the theory of sense-genesis at stake already in Phenomenology of Perception. In turning to this lecture, we will anticipate some of our reflections in Part 2, which takes up Merleau-Ponty’s theory of sense-genesis in more detail. As we have seen, Phenomenology of Perception problematizes the idealist equation of the transcendental field with a cogito, absolute consciousness, through the themes of finitude and inter-subjectivity. This lecture takes up an elaborates these anxieties in a new register. As Emmanuel de Saint-Aubert has suggested in his commentary on this lecture,69 this problem has to do with the possibility of the relationship between the constituting and the constituted: on one hand, sense requires some form of relationality, indeed, transcendence, as its condition of possibility; on the other hand, the idealist understanding of consciousness as survol absolu renders any proper relationality for consciousness impossible; insofar as it is the condition of possibility sin qua non for anything whatever, the transcendental condition of possibility for the sense of the world has no outside and therefore can only relate to itself. It becomes imprisoned in its own absoluteness. As Saint-Aubert says, such a consciousness would be Enjoying the “pure unfolding of an in-itself before a for-itself,” it is for it solely a matter of “having” consciousness, in the appearing, “before the obscurity of the subject,” of a being that is and is only for the latter, pure clarity for this pure darkness. The relation of this subject to this object is therefore not a genuine relation.70

Merleau-Ponty seeks to maintain the difference of the constituting and constituted: in order to constitute sense, consciousness must enter into a relation with something other than what it is—there must be a divergence or écart between the constituting and

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the constituted that differentiates them and sustains their irreducibility. For absolute consciousness, however, because it is the center of sense and being, any alterity can only be “absolute non-sense for it”71—only what it has constituted counts for it, and therefore it can, in a sense, only be significant for itself—it can have no relations as such, a stance toward an outside; for there is nothing that is not already part of this consciousness. The result is that the traditional understanding of consciousness is rent by an insuperable tension: for it to be consciousness, for it to count as constituting, it must be capable of a relationality that is impossible for it. In Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, Merleau-Ponty articulates this worry through a discussion of proximity and distance. The problem with the traditional, idealist understanding of consciousness as survol absolu is that it moves unidirectionally toward the world, and this unidirectionality generates a paradox that renders this understanding of consciousness insupportable. The first thesis of the idealist’s understanding of consciousness is that, as a transcendental condition of possibility for the appearance of being, there is nothing that does not reference this consciousness as its origin. As origin, constituting consciousness stands in an absolute proximity with respect to what it constitutes that eliminates all distance to being. Being, as a result, stands completely unveiled under its gaze, withholding nothing. As the origin of the world’s sense, this consciousness is “immediate presence” to its objects; it “reaches them without distance.”72 This thesis demarcates the status of consciousness as a transcendental condition of possibility for beings—as their condition of possibility, there are no beings that do not refer to this consciousness for their sense, and in its infinite proximity to things it holds them absolutely in its grasp. In this way, this sense of transcendental origin eliminates any distance between the réfléchissant and the réfléchi: they become fused under the law of the λόγος that establishes the absolute harmony of the sense of being. The second thesis of transcendental idealism is that, as the transcendental condition of possibility for the appearance of beings, as survol absolu, consciousness constructs sense unilaterally and is, therefore, simultaneously “cut off from being” since objects and the world stake no claim on it. It touches only; it is not touched. If the constituted could stake a claim on what constitutes it, consciousness would no longer be a pure transcendental condition of possibility: it would be part of the world, just another thing among things. As Merleau-Ponty notes in the lecture, “Nothing can affect it except by awakening within it one of the significations that it conceives. Receptivity is the death of this consciousness.” “Consciousness does everything or else is nothing.”73 Because it is the transcendental origin of the sense of the world, it constitutes sense without being subject to the genesis that it initiates; as the origin of sense, this consciousness stands wholly outside sense. The absolute proximity of consciousness to being is thus simultaneously absolute distance: it is both an absolute inside with no outside and at the same time an absolute outside with no inside. Constituting consciousness, for Merleau-Ponty, must sustain both this proximity and distance at the same time in order to maintain its place at the heart of being. Its proximity to being is absolute immediacy and imminence, but this immediacy establishes itself only as absolute distance since the being that this consciousness constitutes has no hold on it. As he says, “Proximity of what it intends: it is immediate presence to every being.



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Distance to what it intends: it is ‘absolute overview’ (Ruyer), it can never be ‘held’ by the object.”74 This sense of the transcendental fails to understand the relationality intrinsic to the transcendence of sense-genesis: the idealist imagines that the transcendental origin is a presence that makes visibility possible while remaining invisible, that touches everything while itself remaining untouchable. Constitution is understood as “the immediate presence of this consciousness to its objects: nothing separates it, it attains them without distance—and at the same time, it is with respect to them a survol absolu, and they cannot turn against it, it is entirely distant [éloignée].”75 Transcendental consciousness grasps all but is not grasped, both immediately present and infinitely remote; it is the origin of a world in which it remains uninvolved. When Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the theme of chiasm and reversibility in his later work, it is with an eye to reassess the logic of sense-genesis. What we must understand is that to be able to see, to participate in the visible through our eyes, presupposes that we are also able to be seen; to be able to touch the world or another means to be able to be touched, and we know that it is impossible to touch without at the same time being touched. It is this reversibility of the constituting and the constituted that the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism fails to recognize, what Merleau-Ponty will here, in this lecture, call empiètement, “encroachment,” “overlap,” the χ, the crossing of these terms. It is in this sense that, as indicated above, absolute proximity and absolute distance make the relationship between constituting and constituted unthinkable as a relationship and thus undermine constitution as such. As Saint-Aubert remarks: we have here a “[p]aradox of an abolished distance and a total distance, of a situation of fusion which is also an absolute separation: this consciousness is ambivalent.”76 Its relationship of absolute proximity and distance, because it is utterly ambivalent, is no relationship at all, and the result is that consciousness, understood as survol absolu, in principle eliminates what makes it what it is: that it relate to things and the world as their origin. Since it can have no relations, such a consciousness becomes a “prisoner” of its own unrivaled constituting power, and the survol absolu is like a hand that would be capable of touching without itself being capable of being touched. Such a hand, of course, is impossible. As Saint-Aubert comments, To open itself to nothing but what it constitutes in complete clarity, consciousness is imprisoned to it and to itself. Consciousness and its signification are absolutely two and absolutely one, radically shielded from the intrusion of an indetermination or a blurring, which alone however could give life to their relation.77

The transcendental, for the idealist, is rendered worldless—rendered meaningless in a sense, since it by definition cannot appear. It remains intractably beyond visibility, like an absent God, utterly incapable of having anything to do with the world it is said to bring into being. While Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression does not yet go so far as the ontology of la chair, the “flesh,” Merleau-Ponty nonetheless attempts to re-think the meaning of the transcendental in terms otherwise than the paradox of absolute proximity and distance. In opposition to the concept of consciousness as survol absolu, he posits the concept of what he here calls “perceptual consciousness,” which attempts

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to challenge the understanding of consciousness operative in the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism. While the survol absolu is undermined by the paradox of absolute proximity and absolute distance, perceptual consciousness eliminates this paradox by establishing an authentic understanding of the relationality between the constituting and constituted. Unlike its idealist counterpart, perceptual consciousness is not cut off from being but dwells within the constituted and is enveloped by it. This envelopment, however, nonetheless resists solipsism insofar as it maintains an irreducible divergence or écart between the constituting and constituted. The concept of perceptual consciousness is thus intended to make an authentic relationship between the constituting and constituted thinkable while simultaneously maintaining their mutual irreducibility—without relapsing into a form of metaphysical realism. As we shall see, this idea of the mutual envelopment of the constituting and the constituted is already anticipated in Phenomenology of Perception in the Sentir chapter where Merleau-Ponty suggests that we understand sense-genesis in terms of the reprendre, taking up again, of a sense already constituted. It is in the context of this discussion of perceptual consciousness and its difference from the survol absolu that Merleau-Ponty introduces the concept of empiètement here. While the survol absolu is completely removed from the being it constitutes in absolute distance, perceptual consciousness, on the contrary, “does not deal with values or significations but with existing beings, and is itself not absolutely cut off from the being that it presents to us, which encroaches [empiète] on it, surrounds it.”78 Rather than being immune to the sense it constitutes, and thus a prisoner of its own constituting power, perceptual consciousness “part of the world,” is “near things,” which “takes possession of my body in order to be perceived by it”; unlike its idealist counterpart, which remains untouchable, perceptual consciousness is “taken by things.”79 As a perceptual consciousness, I find that rather than being a stranger to the world which I soar over, things impinge upon me; I find myself subject to the force they exert on me, that I am in their grip; being and the world constitute for me a situation that was not of my design. It is virtue of this weight, because what is constituted flows back on the constituting movement, that the world appears with the density and exteriority of the real. Not because it is real in the realist sense, but because its sense is older than the explicit intentional relations I may take up with respect to it when I make a judgment. As we shall discuss in more detail later, the world carries this weight and density because the transcendental was never pure, never strictly demarcated from what it constitutes, but is contaminated, stained and marked by sense as it piles up and sediments through its passage. The empiètement of the constituted on perceptual consciousness institutes another model of proximity and distance that is not that of the survol absolu: “Proximity that is not impalpable like the one just discussed — And which also goes with a different distance, for the perceived only reveals itself like this through its vibration in me, it is thus always beyond.”80 The proximity between the world and perceptual consciousness is not the total proximity of the survol absolu, a direct line or fusion between the constituting and constituted, but a relative proximity established in the interstices of the relation between perceptual consciousness and the constituted sense that impinges upon it. Proximity, Merleau-Ponty says, “is not ideal presence (intentionality



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in the sense of referring to an εἶδος), absolute ubiquity. Consciousness is not cut off absolutely, being encroaches [empiète] upon it, goes around it.”81 Proximity is not the immanence of the thing in the consciousness that establishes its sense through an explicit l’intentionnalité d’acte but things articulate themselves through this consciousness precisely to the extent to which this consciousness articulates itself through them. Perceptual consciousness and the world it articulates are reversible, chiasmatic, Ineinander, as one only manifests itself through and thanks to the other. There is in this way an indirect expression of the sense of the world where things express themselves through consciousness, and in which we recognize that there is a consciousness there thanks to the manifestation and presentation of things. Expression is thus neither unilateral nor unidirectional—the visible is not merely the emanation or replication of a concealed reason, an εἶδοϛ, but the intertwining of what speaks and what is spoken. As Merleau-Ponty notes, “It is from within the world that I perceive, and neither outlines nor geometric forms would have any meaning otherwise.”82 It is a “Dizzying proximity, not impalpable, mixture, expressive relation.”83 In other words, the myth to which the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism remains enthralled is the myth of purity—that for the transcendental to be transcendental, it must be purified of the contaminants of the world. In place of this mythos of purity, Merleau-Ponty offers a theory of sense-genesis centered around mixture, contamination, and impurity. I do not soar over the visible spectacle; it does not extend out before me in absolute transparency, but I am amidst it—if it is before me, it is also behind me, surrounding me. If I am something like a consciousness, it is only because the world of sense precedes me; I am embedded in it, and it works its way out through my body; if I arrive at its scene, I do so not with the punctuality of one who would see all of it. Rather I catch but a glimpse as it recedes into the depth, the transcendence that is proper to its manifestation, in virtue of the absence that is proper to its presence. Distance, likewise, is not the total distance of a consciousness that soars over the world but is a function of the écart, the gap or fissure, that establishes itself between the constituting and constituted. Distance: used to come from the thing’s being of another order, unable to look back upon the consciousness that thinks it. Here, distance comes from the fact that the thing, precisely because it vibrates me bodily and reaches me from within, obsesses me, is always beyond this vibration that it communicates to me.84

For perceptual consciousness, distance designates the mutual irreducibility of the thing and consciousness. On one hand, I experience myself as something that cannot arrive at the density and closure of the thing, and this is precisely because I am defined by an open field of possibilities that are not yet. Insofar as I remain open to a future, it is impossible for me to become a thing. Likewise, on the other hand, the thing establishes itself only in the distance it takes up from me: it is this distance that makes it a thing, because it eludes me, because it escapes my attempts to grasp it. And yet this distance is not absolute, for even in their distance, things nonetheless vibrate beneath my eyes, even within me insofar as they compose the very world in which I find myself. Even in their distance, things are inescapable as they encroach upon me and I upon them, and if they even go so far as to crawl into my insides,

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it is only because I am already inside them. In place of the absolute proximity and absolute distance required by the traditional, idealist understanding of consciousness, perceptual consciousness provides, as Saint-Aubert observes, a “new play of proximity and distance,” which “thus escapes from the ambivalence of the fusional relation maintained by monadic consciousness.”85 Proximity and distance are not absolute, as for the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism, but stand in ambiguous relation of play, of shifting levels, fluidity and dynamism, of “promiscuity,” to use a term favored by Saint-Aubert.86

4. Idealism and cruelty In spite of their important differences, what realism and idealism have in common, for Merleau-Ponty, is that both are motivated by a certain desire for the adequation or coincidence of the reflecting and the reflected. Realism betrays this desire by taking the sense of being established by perceptual experience for granted, the sense of the thing as a third-personal, consciousness-independent reality. If being is such an ensemble, partes extra partes, then philosophical inquiry can be dissolved in the absolute exteriority of the thing displayed before a pure spectator. To philosophize in this way, for Merleau-Ponty, is to forget the origin of the sense of being in perceptual experience—a forgetting that is a constitutive structure of perception itself. What is required is a transcendental philosophy that dispenses with the philosophical conveniences with which realism begins, and Merleau-Ponty’s thought opposes realism precisely insofar as it takes up the transcendental attitude. Adopting the transcendental attitude, while an advance over realism, does not in itself absolve thought of its cruelty. What makes the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism cruel is that it too is motivated by a certain desire for the adequation or coincidence of the reflecting and the reflected. I have tried to show how this desire functions within the space of Merleau-Ponty’s thought on three important points: 1) its understanding of the manifestation of the world as the unfolding of a pre-existing λόγος, a singular point of origination that gives law to the phenomena in their appearance; 2) its understanding of the transcendental field as éternitaire; and 3) the paradox of absolute proximity and distance. On the first point, ordinary transcendental philosophy fails to follow through on its promise to be faithful to the phenomena in their appearance insofar as it understands the appearance of the sense of the world in accordance with a reason established in advance of the shining forth of the world. On the second point, ordinary transcendental philosophy misconstrues the transcendental field by taking a certain understanding of the distinction between the eternal and the temporal for granted. On the third point, ordinary transcendental philosophy understands the transcendental field as being infinitely close to the world it constitutes by holding it within its grasp and at the same time completely removed insofar as it touches but is not touched. Together, what these points accomplish is an attempt to secure and guarantee the adequacy of the reflecting to the reflected, resolving reflection into the total and singular diapason and harmony of transcendental, constituting consciousness. In its critique of these points, therefore,



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Merleau-Ponty’s thought does not merely take up the transcendental attitude in its traditional sense but proposes a methodological radicalization—as we have seen, a surréflexion—which, instead of resolving itself into a finalized and exhaustive appropriation of being, attempts to hearken itself to the permanent dissonance of the temporal extension of the transcendental. Realism and idealism are not merely expedient or convenient standpoints from which to begin philosophizing, but have a deeper, rationalistic motivation, namely, the desire for a certain “transparent philosophy” at which we arrive by continuing the movement of knowledge inaugurated by perception.87 This philosophy of transparency or lucidity, from the beginning, seeks to disclose being in its fullness and provide a total and systematic explication: it seeks a universal thought in which all rational beings would confront one another on the plane of reasons and be reconciled; where scientific method would open nature to total and unified explanation; where the transcendental method would disclose a field that secures the apodictic grounds for the reflection it initiates; and where a society of reasonable minds would form the basis of a strictly rational and just world. Such are the dreams of a total contact and coincidence between the reflecting and the reflected, a contact in which philosophy reaches out and seizes its object, once and for all; where being, as Merleau-Ponty says, “spreads itself out in an absolute transparency”88 and by means of which reason could be guaranteed and certainty beyond all doubt secured. Such is a philosophy that begins from the standpoint of the timeliness of reflection with its object, a philosophy for which the task of coincidence and contact is, in principle, finalizable. It is of course such a philosophy that, in the Brouillon text, Merleau-Ponty names cruel thought: it constructs philosophy as a series of “problems” and sets the tasks of thinking as the generation of “solutions” that serve to close it. *** While at no point can Merleau-Ponty’s thought be identified with realism, as we have tried to show over the course of the previous chapter, it also cannot be strictly identified with idealism—at least not with the “ordinary perspective” of transcendental idealism that comes under criticism. Merleau-Ponty’s thought, like all phenomenology, is perhaps strangely situated with respect to the history of metaphysics as it aims to sustain a position irreducible to either realism or idealism. It is not realism because it rejects the absoluteness of things and any cogency they may have outside sense. It is in some sense, then, a kind of “transcendental” philosophy—but one that contests the meaning of the transcendental at play. While traditional iterations of transcendental idealism maintain some idea of transcendentality as a pure, constituting consciousness, it is precisely this idea of transcendentality—its absoluteness, its purity—that is called into question by Merleau-Ponty. The worries that motivate this critique are, first, that the concept of a pure transcendental origin, a transcendental subject that is not contaminated by the sense that it constitutes, betrays a certain infidelity to phenomenological method, to be faithful to the phenomenon and their manner of appearance. The ordinary perspective idealism assumes that the

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phenomena must obey the law of a λόγος given in advance of their appearance and that their manifestation is nothing other than fulfillment of this λόγος. Transcendental consciousness in this way secures its a priority and necessity, but it in so doing it closes the appearance of sense within the grasp of the consciousness that gives it law: its necessity closes the futurity of sense, its openness. This articulation of the tasks of transcendental thought is exemplified, for MerleauPonty, by the work of Pierre Lachièze-Rey. What Lachièze-Rey makes explicit is idealism’s identification of the transcendental with an origin that does not participate in what it brings forth, an éternitaire plane that is exempt from the temporal flux it is said to set forth. Idealism, in this way, attempts to extricate thinking from the temporal flux of the visible, and in so doing, secure the absolute coincidence of reflection with that upon which it reflects—to dissolve reflection in the absolute diapason and harmony of these poles. Merleau-Ponty outlines two anxieties associated with this conception of the transcendental: that it effectively renders passivity unthinkable and that it eliminates the possibility of alterity. It makes passivity impossible because all that appears results from the constituting agency of this transcendental origin— obstacles only appear in virtue of the intervention of this origin. Likewise, others can never appear as others for this constituting origin but only as things. For there to be others, this constituting agency must have an outside, an exteriority that it is not allowed by the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism. Overcoming these problems, for Merleau-Ponty, requires that we restore the transcendental to temporality, that we think it as embedded within the temporal eruption of sense it is said to set forth. We require a re-thinking of the transcendental, not as a movement that would end reflection in the perfect harmony of the transcendental but as the permanent dissonance of temporal flux and passage. As he elaborates in Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, the ordinary perspective of transcendental thought, with its transcendental, constituting consciousness, its survol absolu, limits its understanding of transcendentality to the paradox of absolute proximity and absolute distance. Sense stands in absolute proximity to constituting consciousness precisely at the point where there is nothing that does not refer to such consciousness as its transcendental condition of possibility: because it is the source of the world’s meaningfulness, its articulation, there is nothing beyond its grasp; everything is “inside” its constituting movement. At the same time however, because it is the condition of sense, because it is what makes sense possible, it must not be confused with what it constitutes. As the possibility of all things, consciousness itself is precisely not a thing: it holds everything in its grasp and yet is not itself part of the world it makes visible; it touches but remains untouched; it makes visible and yet remains invisible. At the same time that transcendental consciousness maintains an absolute proximity to sense, then, it also maintains an absolute distance. Against this image of the transcendental, Merleau-Ponty offers what he calls here “perceptual consciousness.” Perceptual consciousness, unlike its idealist counterpart, is involved, intermixed, in the world to which it gives sense—it is both touching and touched, seeing and seen. Rather than being immune to the sense it articulates, the sense of the world bleeds onto it, stains it in a refluxive movement of empiètement, “encroachment,” “overlapping.” Insofar as I perceive the world, it also has me in its



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grip; my surroundings envelop me, and only make themselves known under my gaze insofar as I too take my place as one of the visible things. This crossing of the constituting and constituted, this χ, this chiasm, announced in the concept of empiètement will of course become central in the years of The Visible and the Invisible, and we will take this up in more detail in Part 3. What we can take note of here is that Merleau-Ponty’s underlying worry with idealism is the extent to which its formulations—transcendental constituting consciousness, its a priority, necessity, and so forth—are all in the name of taking possession of being and of eliminating the uncertainty, the openness, that defines our perceptual experience. In short, we see the sense in which idealism, alongside its partner realism, is also a figure and expression of thought’s cruelty. Idealism posits the absoluteness of transcendental consciousness precisely in order to secure being itself in its absolute transparency, and we can see at this point that idealism and realism are not so different: for both establish and constitute being as a spectacle exposed beneath the gaze of an absolute spectator. Realism accomplishes this in the absoluteness of the thing that exposes all its sides simultaneously to such a spectator; idealism accomplishes this in the fullness of constituting consciousness, which keeps being firmly in its grasp. Either way, realism or idealism, we find this thought which needs to be closest, which needs to fuse with its objects, to liquefy itself and eliminate the difference, the distance, the écart that defines our experience, and for Merleau-Ponty, defines both philosophy and the becoming, the φύω, it investigates. The aim of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, initiated in his pivotal work, Phenomenology of Perception, is to show us that through a radicalized transcendental philosophy and the phenomenological method, such a transparent and timely philosophy begins to fall into ruin [se détruit] before our eyes.89 What is called into question is the very idea and possibility of such transparency, and the rationalist values and traditions that motivate cruel thought, accordingly, fall asunder in the face of what Merleau-Ponty calls “the experience of chaos.”90 This remark, of course, invokes the political chaos of the Second World War, which composed the historical backdrop of his visit to the Husserl archive in Leuven, Belgium in 1939 and the composition of Phenomenology of Perception in the years following. The experience of chaos, however, has not subsided with the end of that war, and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy should be understood as the attempt to confront chaos without attempting to artificially resolve it into the harmony we may perhaps desire. How do we confront chaos as chaos, on the plane of chaos, rather than reducing it to a state of coincidence, fusion, and harmony that we construct? MerleauPonty wants us to begin philosophizing from the point of view of our perceptual experience because it opens us out into uncertainty and precarity without closing us within the space of a predetermined consonance; the chaos of the perceived world never quite resolves itself into the perfection of a planimetric perspective but retains a trace of the fundamental disorder that, according to Merleau-Ponty, is the mark of time. Our situation in the world is ineluctably both ambiguous and precarious.91 As he says in a radio broadcast from 1948: “Reason does not lie behind us, nor is that where the meeting of minds takes place: rather, both stand before us waiting to be inherited. Yet we are no more able to reach them definitively than we are to give up on them.”92 This remark, in a way, captures the sense of lateness that appears to be a

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recurrent theme in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. He will make a similar remark in the notes to his first course at the Collège de France: “the thing itself is never captured [prise] by the philosopher: it is the concretion of an infinite experience, it is therefore not possessed. It is unquestionably before us, but as something we can’t lay our hands on without losing it.”93 If we attend to the becoming of the visible, as it flourishes and withers before our eyes, without positing a pre-established λόγος and law in advance of its manifestation and hearken our reflections to the dissonance of sense and of the perceived without attempting to resolve them into a total diapason, then we are compelled to articulate a philosophy that dispenses with the ideal of a completed and transparent world. In place of this punctual thought, which would render the world in its total lucidity and clarity, we must rather, as Merleau-Ponty says, “seek a philosophy which explains the upsurge of reason in a world not of its making and to prepare the substructure of living experience without which reason and liberty empty themselves and decompose.”94 We must relinquish our cruel desire to take possession of being, to reach out and grasp it, to keep and detain it, and allow for a modality of thinking that allows for the departure of sense, of the world, and of others. We must reconceive the tasks of thinking as a philosophy of lateness that acknowledges that it will never arrive at the scene of being and that the beloved it seeks will be gone, disparue. What we call the philosophy of lateness is not articulated as merely the negative of cruel thought. In fact, Merleau-Ponty’s claim is not that this vision of philosophy is an alternative to another philosophy that would arrive on time, but that philosophical inquiry is constitutively late. The metaphysics of cruel thought, realism and idealism, are, in a sense, mythical philosophies, fantasies inspired by the rationalist desire for certainty and finality that have not be able to recognize and admit to their own lateness. A radical philosophy, by contrast, is one that recognizes itself as subject to lateness—a philosophy that dispenses with the desire to seize upon and detain, one that recognizes its own finitude, incompleteness and contingency. Articulating such a philosophy is, as I hope to show in the following chapters, the consistent aim of Merleau-Ponty’s thought beginning with Phenomenology of Perception. There are three significant threads in Phenomenology of Perception that provide evidence for the constitutive lateness of philosophy, all of which result from MerleauPonty’s proposed radicalization of the transcendental project: 1) his account of sense-genesis; 2) his account of temporality; and 3) his account of freedom. Of course these themes are all intimately intertwined as they are developed over the course of the text. His claim is that, if we take up the transcendental attitude in a radical way, if we are faithful to the phenomena in their appearance, the result is an account of sensegenesis in which sense is always already constituted and yet never fully constituted and that all explicit or “thetic” acts of sense-bestowal always find themselves late to a world not of their making. Rather than a theory of constitution that is the hallmark of the philosophy of consciousness, Phenomenology of Perception offers an account of the dehiscence or becoming of sense, closer to what Merleau-Ponty proposes in the texts and lectures leading up to and including The Visible and the Invisible. This claim is borne out in the pages of Phenomenology of Perception if we attend to the extent to which the genesis of sense is understood precisely as a temporal structure. The theory of sense-genesis offered there thus becomes fully intelligible only in the



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context of Merleau-Ponty’s account of temporality, particularly in the manner in which this account addresses Husserl’s Zietbewußtsein. In contrast to an ontology that emphasizes the primacy of the present and presence in time’s passage, Merleau-Ponty attempts to articulate a theory of temporality that understands the becoming of time as the simultaneity of a dynamic écoulement, flow, and éclatement, eruption. As a result of this dual temporal structure, there is an important lag and non-coincidence that defines the very passage of time itself, the lateness of becoming to being.

Part Two

The Deflagration of Sense

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Le sentir du sens

While Part 1 focuses on clarifying what Merleau-Ponty meant by “cruel thought” and its difference from philosophical interrogation, on showing how this manifests itself in realism and idealism, and on giving some indication of what kind of response is required, Part 2, “The Deflagration of Sense,” shows how he begins formulating this response in the pages of Phenomenology of Perception, specifically in his theory of “sense-genesis,” otherwise known in phenomenology as the processes of “sense-giving,” Sinn-gebung, or “constitution.” Merleau-Ponty develops his theory of sense-genesis in Phenomenology of Perception in the chapters Le sentir, La temporalité, and La liberté, and anticipating motifs that would become more salient in the years of The Visible and the Invisible, I will try to show that he was already on the way to trying to understand sense-genesis in terms of empiètement, encroachment, what he will later call the “chiasm,” and that it is in the context of this discussion of sensegenesis that we understand the manner in which we can say that becoming is late to being: sense becomes articulate, not through “centrifugal” processes of construction, constitution, and synthesis, but through a process of temporal dehiscence, éclatement, explosion, and deflagration. Because this process is temporal, and because MerleauPonty understands temporality itself to be an influx of articulation and disarticulation, the emergence or expression of sense remains constitutively incomplete, a process of becoming that can never catch up to itself and arrive on time. In this chapter, I will turn to the chapter of Phenomenology of Perception, Le sentir, to show how, according to Merleau-Ponty, sense-genesis is not a function of the constituting operations of a transcendental origin but rather has an institutive, historical structure: sense comes to be, on one hand, through a process of reprendre, resumption, and, on the other hand, is the reprise, reprisal or repetition, of sense that is already under way. As Merleau-Ponty will argue almost ten years later in his 1954 lecture, “Institution in Personal and Public History,” it is for this reason that phenomenology must jettison the language of “constitution” for translating Husserl’s word Stiftung in favor of “institution” or later, in the years of The Visible and the Invisible, “initiation.”1 What phenomenology discovers in disclosing this historical reiteration of sense is that being does not have the structure of a determinate finality: indeed, there is no such thing as “being” as such but only a “becoming,” a continuous emergence of gathering and dispersal as the sense that is expressed is never fully expressed, never finalized. We see that the very principle of its articulateness is at the same time the

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principle of its disintegration. This principle, as we shall see, is temporality. It is in virtue of this logic that the becoming and unfolding of sense is late to being: sense emerges as the resumption of a tradition that it cannot fully inherent nor with which can it coincide. The coincidence and fusion desired by cruel thought, then, is not forbidden on the basis of some static principle in advance of the manifestation of the visible but impossible according to the manner in which what there is comes to presence. Cruel thought, in this way, is subject to a kind of illusion as its longing for a final contact, closure, and the wholeness of being is based on a fantasy. We have already had some occasion to see the extent to which Phenomenology of Perception is addressed to cruel thought. On one hand, cruel thought is figured in realism at the point where reflection ends in the absoluteness of the real, the outside of sense, beyond the reach of any constituting power. Realism wishes to end reflection in the haecceity and unassailability of the thing. Such an outside, however, is only non-sense: the meaningless, that which would remain invisible by being absolutely impossible. If we reject realism, and recognize that what appears does so with the line and contour of sense, then we must account for how that sense is expressed, how the meaningfulness of the texture of our experience is brought forth. On the other hand, cruel thought is figured in the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism, a philosophy that begins by making the adequacy of the réfléchissant to the réfléchi—of reflection to its object—its principle and condition of possibility. This manner of thinking subjects itself to this demand, first, insofar as it understands the manifestation of the world in terms of the articulateness of a preexisting λόγος, an a priori principle and reason around which meaning is organized and oriented, and second, insofar as it identifies this λόγος with a res cogitans, the unity and self-identity of an a-temporal, éternitaire transcendental consciousness. These characteristics of the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism function together to guarantee the apodicticity of its results as well as the completion and closure of the reflection it initiates. If we abandon realism as well as the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism, how then are we to account for the becoming of sense? The account of sense-genesis that Merleau-Ponty initiates in Le sentir follows through on the critique of cruel thought initiated in Le champ phénoménal and Le cogito to the extent that the ontological primacy of transcendental consciousness is challenged and in order to show how the world becomes meaningful without simultaneously becoming closed within the grasp of constituting consciousness. Contrary to standard interpretations that, following Merleau-Ponty himself, cite its commitment to a theory constitution as one of Phenomenology of Perception’s most significant shortcomings, I argue that by attending more closely to certain moments of the text’s development of a theory of sense-genesis, we see the concept of constitution appropriate to the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism undergo an important de-stabilization and revision.2 The result is that his account of the genesis of sense resists an appeal to a self-identical and a-temporal “constituting power”3 that would count as the mark of the ordinary idealist position so often attributed to Phenomenology of Perception. Anticipating a position that becomes more clearly articulated in the Brouillon text, Merleau-Ponty already remarks in Phenomenology of Perception that the genesis of the sens of sentir, the sense of sensing, should not



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be understood as the centrifugal activity of a constituting consciousness but as the “re-creation” and “re-constitution” of sense that has already been underway.4 As the reprisal and repetition of a historical fund of sense that already has been, MerleauPonty’s account of sense-genesis in Phenomenology of Perception is more accurately understood as offering a philosophy that accounts for the manner in which reflection is delayed with respect to the genesis of sense, on one hand, and which recognizes itself as subject to this delay on the other—a philosophy of lateness. The first part of the chapter returns to the Phenomenology and Le sentir in order to elucidate the manner and extent to which his theory of sense-genesis in 1945 already resists the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism and the philosophy of consciousness. While perhaps not unproblematic, we see Merleau-Ponty begin to move in a direction that will become more thematic in his first lecture and later writings insofar as he argues that the sense of perceptual experience is not the product of an active Sinngebung but emerges through the reprisal and repetition of a sense that is already under way. While this claim may at first seem to indicate a return to realism, turning to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of temporality in Le sentir, the second section shows that we must understand the reprisal of sense not as a return to an account that takes the articulation of sense for granted but as a temporalizing structure of genesis and dissolution. In these passages, Merleau-Ponty offers a theory of sense-genesis as a temporalizing differentiation characterized by non-coincidence and lateness. The lateness at stake in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, then, at least on one level, is not merely incidental—it is not a lateness that could be overcome—the lateness of a body, for example, in contrast to the punctuality of transcendental consciousness—but a lateness constitutive of the very appearance of sense itself, indeed lateness at the level of being: ontological lateness.

1. Le sentir and the genesis of sense There are numerous points of entry into Merleau-Ponty’s critique of idealism in Phenomenology of Perception, as each of the thematic analyses that make up the body of text follow a dialectical pattern of immanent critique.5 Merleau-Ponty will inhabit the realist and idealist accounts of the phenomena in order to locate their points of de-stabilization, and from these points, elaborate a phenomenological description that attempts to account for this de-stabilization. Beneath the dialectic of realism and idealism, according to this method, lies the phenomenal field of what is given to perception and which constitutes, as Merleau-Ponty says in Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, our mode of “access to being.”6 In order to explicate this field, we must not only cease to presuppose the world of ready-made sense required by realism but also abandon the traditional understanding of sense-genesis as constitution. We must seek to understand that while sense is never available independently of a system of sense-genesis, sense becomes or unfolds beneath the positional forms of ipseity and intellectual consciousness that circumscribe the classical, idealist accounts of constitution. The phenomenon of sentir, sensibility or feeling, which designates

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a certain capacity and openness to sens, openness to meaning, will offer a clue for understanding sense-genesis as becoming rather than constitution and in this way for overcoming the dialectic of realism and idealism, what Merleau-Ponty calls the dialectic of the in-itself and the for-itself.7 He broaches the question of sense-genesis in Phenomenology of Perception as early as the Preface. There, he provides an account of the meta-theoretical limits of phenomenology by addressing its major themes: phenomenological description, reduction, essence and intentionality. Looking at this part of the text, we see the author consistently attempt to distance phenomenology from the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism and its claim to be able to “trace back the course followed by a prior constituting act and arrive … at a constituting power which has always been identical with [an] inner self.”8 The idea of constitution at play here is that for there to be relations among things, for the meaning of the world to stand out in its articulation, there must be a corresponding act of relating, and the agent of this activity is a form of transcendental consciousness. This, of course, was the position of Lachièze-Rey, and in taking up the transcendental attitude, the discovery of constitution by idealist philosophies is to be acknowledged as an advance over realism. It is not until Le sentir, La temporalité and ultimately La liberté, however, that the question of sense-genesis is taken up directly. Le sentir, insofar as it connects the question of our capacity and openness to sens to temporality, functions as an introduction to the discussion of sense-genesis, elaborated in the context of the chapter on temporality and that culminates in the account of freedom at the end of the text. In order to begin addressing this question, then, it will be useful to turn to a relatively detailed account of sense-genesis as it is offered in Le sentir. The question of sense-genesis is raised in Le sentir in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s introductory discussion of the experience of quality in the section titled “Relation of sentir and behavior: quality as a concretion of a mode of existence.” Following a study by the Gestalt psychologists Goldstein and Rosenthal,9 Merleau-Ponty problematizes the traditional notion of the quale too often associated with discussions of sensing. The question is: when I attend closely to what appears in my perceptual experience, what do I see? The theory of the quale posits an atom or individual unit of sense data said to correspond with some representation formed in the mind. Does any such unit ever appear, however? Furthermore, can I account for the texture and structure of what appears in my perceptual experience on the basis of such a unit? Merleau-Ponty’s answer, in reference to this study, is no. Goldstein and Rosenthal’s study shows that there is a significant correlation between certain colors in the visual field and certain motor reactions or, in other words, that colors have a certain motor significance or “physiognomy.” Colors are not simply raw “data” but already appear in perception imbued with meaning and significance—color is part of the sensible, meaningful texture of what we see. In patients suffering from diseases of the cerebellum, according to the study, the color of the visual field has a significant and notable effect on their gestures, particularly in abductive and adductive arm movements. “Red and yellow,” for example, “are particularly productive of smooth movements, blue and green of jerky ones; red applied to the right eye, for example, favors a corresponding stretching of the arm outwards, green the bending of the arm back towards the body.”10 Even



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when presented with colors in such short duration or which are so weak that the subject is not explicitly aware of them, they can nonetheless be identified through the motor reaction invoked by attending to the body’s responses. This study, according to Merleau-Ponty, provides a further indication of what painters have always known: namely, that quality, in this case color, has a more complex sens than can be admitted by the realist metaphysics of traditional empirical epistemologies (and psychologies) insofar as such philosophies remain committed to explaining sensing in terms of atomistic qualia. A color, as it shows itself in experience, is always more than an objectively real qualitative atom or unit of experience and entails a certain “vital signification” that points beyond its presentation as an “objective spectacle.” Quality, according to Merleau-Ponty, “is inserted into a certain form of behavior [conduite].”11 As the painter Kandinsky said, green “makes no demands on us and does not enjoin us to do anything,” while blue, according to the poet Goethe, “seems to ‘yield to our gaze.”12 That color should signify in painting and in the world, as red signifies effort or violence or green restfulness and peace,13 is thus not the mystery or enigma that it remains for the realist, for the appearance of quality, like color, is already the appearance of a complex of sens. In this way, in spite of our commonsensical, empiricist manner of thinking, we may recognize that color entails entire complexes of significance: it shines forth beneath my eyes not as data or input but against the background of the past as it reaches forward into the open future. Color shines forth at the thither end of a process of Sinngebung—and it is this bringing forth that must be understood. The idealist response to the question of quality, however, is also inadequate insofar as it is compelled to appeal to the spontaneity of constituting consciousness in order to account for the genesis of this sens and its complexity. As soon as quality is explained in terms of the spontaneous, constituting activity of a consciousness, it ceases to be an experience of sensing at all and becomes yet another modality of thought. Quality, in this case, would simply be yet another thing “noted” by consciousness in its sensebestowing activity. Seeing would be reduced to a form of thinking. What the idealist cannot account for is the constitutive passivity that circumscribes the possibility of sensing—that the experience of color is not something constituted by a thinker, but is something that one undergoes in the same manner that one cannot think oneself to sleep. The experience of a color thus comes, like sleep, “when a certain voluntary attitude suddenly receives from outside the confirmation for which it was waiting.” In this way, Merleau-Ponty, anticipating the motif of empiètement, says that “the sensible takes possession of my ear or my gaze, and I surrender a part of my body, even my whole body, to this particular manner of vibrating and filling space known as blue or red.”14 It would be absurd to describe my experience of color as thinking precisely at the point where it overtakes me, where the brightness of the world fills and overwhelms my vision like a fever dream that is so vivid it cannot be distinguished from waking life. In our ordinary navigation of our environments, this experience slides into the background, forgotten, as it is taken for granted. It becomes reawakened, however, the moment that the purples and oranges of the sunset or the pristine, clear blue of a beautiful person’s eyes consumes us. It is this kind of sensitivity to the significant brilliance of color, of course, that distinguishes the gaze of the painter, who is able

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to reawaken this experience of wonder more easily, and for whom color would be unimaginable as a unit or bit of information. What is peculiar about our experience of and openness to the sensible, and why neither realism nor idealism can adequately explain this openness, is that it lies somewhere between activity (on which side the idealist errs) and passivity (on which side the realist errs). On one hand, the sensible is not given as the culmination of an intellectual, constituting act, but like sleep, it comes upon us and envelops us, usually in spite of our reflections. The sensible shows itself as part of the world and situation in which we find ourselves and of which we are not the authors; it is something we encounter and which takes possession of us. On the other hand, the sensible is also not an “inert setting,” part of a ready-made world—a quale which would act upon a wholly passive sentient. The sensible has sens and the question that must now be addressed is this: if the sens of the sensible cannot be attributed to a constituting consciousness, and if it also does not inhere in a ready-made world, then how does it emerge? If we are to admit that quality and color always entail an excess of signification—if the sens of a color is always more complex than an atomistic quale—then we must inquire into how this sens becomes instituted or established. In other words, what follows from Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of quality and color is that sentir must have an intentional structure—the question for this account, however, is what kind of intentionality is appropriate to this experience since it cannot be a matter of thinking or intellectual construction. What these reflections on color establish, for Merleau-Ponty, is the opportunity to recover the sense of the sensible, that what shows itself in vision is ineluctably meaningful. As he says, it now “becomes possible to give back to the notion of sens a value which intellectualism has refused it,”15 namely, a phenomenological value. Classical phenomenology states that all consciousness is consciousness of something and therefore the consciousness of a quality must have an intentional structure.16 For classical phenomenology, however, “The object is made determinate as an identifiable being only through a whole open series of possible experiences, and exists only for a subject who carries out this identification. Being is exclusively for someone who is able to step back from it and thus stand wholly outside being.”17 As we have seen, such remarks anticipate what Merleau-Ponty will make more explicit in Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression under title of survol absolu. To conceive intentionality and the structure of sense-genesis as “determination” and “identification” carried out by a constituting subject renders the very sens of sentir unthinkable—for we are left within the limits of a perhaps distinctively Cartesian form of intellectualism in which all sense-genesis is reduced to a form of cognition sustained by a transcendental subject, one that occupies the referential center of all sense, a constituting consciousness that reaches being only across an infinite distance which is simultaneously infinite proximity. Such an understanding of intentionality therefore re-inscribes phenomenology within the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism, which, as we have already seen, is the target of Merleau-Ponty’s critique. In place of a transcendental subject that can have no relation to the being it constitutes, we see Merleau-Ponty respond to this problem in Phenomenology of Perception by describing the genesis of sense in terms of a movement of reprendre or resumption and reprise,18 recovery



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and repetition. It is this logic that circumscribes the account of genesis offered in this text, and it directly challenges the idealist theory of sense-genesis, understood as “constitution,” which, as he later makes explicit in the “Institution” lecture, requires consciousness as its necessary correlate. In the first place, every instance of sense-genesis takes the form of reprendre, “taking up” or “resumption.” While the idealist typically understands sense-genesis in terms of the spontaneity of constituting acts, for Merleau-Ponty, the sense of the sensible emerges only in the resumption of sense that was already under way. Reprendre, accordingly, has two important features that differentiate it from the spontaneity that characterizes constituting consciousness: first, reprendre necessarily references a past sense that, in being resumed, is again made present. Second, because this past is never made fully present, the sense that is accomplished by resumption is never fully accomplished but retains a certain “haecceity” or “this-ness.” As reprendre, sense is not constituted extemporaneously at each instant by an identifying act but emerges in its reference to the sense that it elaborates and carries forward. As resumed, the becoming of sense follows through on “a certain rhythm of existence,”19 and any instance of what MerleauPonty calls l’intentionnalité d’acte, our thetic or explicit intentional comportment, is always late with respect to l’intentionnalité opérante,20 an intentionality always already at work. The accomplishment of sens in this way opens upon a world of “autochthonous significance,”21 and sense-genesis, as reprendre, is never an unanticipated and spontaneous genesis—the birth of a fully constituted sense in the presence of an identifying consciousness—but the recreation or rebirth of sense that already dwells in being. The autochthonous sense that is taken up in the shining forth of our experience, however, does not dwell in being in the realist sense—this sense is not ready-made nor does it inhere in an objective reality. This should already be clear insofar as MerleauPonty refers this sense to an l’intentionnalité opérante. Rather, its autochthonousness is a function of its temporality—it has the structure of “always already” or “having-been.” Insofar as sense-genesis resumes a sense already under way, every instance makes reference to the horizon of the past; the world, as Merleau-Ponty notes, is always “already constituted.”22 In its function of reprendre, however, sense-genesis does not reference the past strictly as past but folds this past into the present. As Merleau-Ponty notes, speech, in its expressive function, “is to ensure, by the use of words already used, that the new intention resumes [reprend] the heritage of the past, it is at a stroke to incorporate the past into the present.”23 In other words, each expressive instance is the heir to an entire history of sense that has the structure of “having been”—this history is its “heritage,” as Merleau-Ponty here invokes Heidegger’s terminology, and in this manner, expression precisely lacks the timeliness that has characterized the spontaneity of constituting consciousness. The sens of the sensible does not emerge from a punctual intentionality, a spontaneous consciousness, but takes up the movement of sense that is always its forebear and ancestor. It is in this manner that, as reprendre, the sens of the sensible is characterized by a certain lateness and delay with respect to this historical sense, the depth of a significant past that is already under way and that echoes through our present experience. The second feature of reprendre is that it remains constitutively incomplete. Though sense-genesis is understood as the resumption or, to put it slightly differently, the

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inheritance of a certain history, it is never able to fully attain this inheritance. In other words, what is resumed in sense-genesis is never fully resumed, and the sense of the past retains a certain opacity and depth in becoming present, and what is resumed in expression never manages to be fully elaborated. The sense of the sensible, therefore, as Merleau-Ponty says, “is not constituted in full clarity, it is reconstituted or resumed [repris]24 by a knowledge which remains latent, leaving it with its opacity and its haecceity [eccéité].”25 This incompleteness is a function of a certain “blindness” [aveuglément] through which sense shows itself, a blindness resulting from the fact that the sense of the world is not posited by a consciousness but works itself out in the appearance of a living body, a flesh, which in turn, is immersed and enveloped by this sense. As reprendre, sense-genesis picks up the past and resumes it, but never picks it up completely, and this resumption in this way remains an attempt that fails to articulate the sense of the world in exhaustive clarity, an articulation that never manages the lucidity of a statement. In the second place, in addition to being characterized by reprendre, every instance of sense-genesis is simultaneously understood in terms of reprise, repetition.26 Insofar as it references a heritage of sense already under way, sense-genesis only ever incompletely and blindly resumes this heritage. The sense of this heritage, as reprendre, then, simultaneously requires reprise, the repetition of this heritage in the present. This reprising function of sense-genesis is a result of the perpetual failure of reprendre to fully elaborate the sense it resumes—because the sense that is resumed is never fully articulate, the task of articulation remains always to be done and thus requires an infinite repetition that never fully succeeds and results in a perpetual disappointment. As Merleau-Ponty notes, “the pretention to objectivity of each perceptual act is repeated [reprise] by its successor, again disappointed [déçue] and again repeated [reprise].”27 Sense becomes articulate not ex nihilo in the spontaneity of consciousness but only in the reference it makes back to its heritage of acquired meanings—a heritage which it resumes, repeats and carries forward into the future, albeit always incompletely and never as an exhaustive elaboration. To reiterate the points thus far, we have seen that the experience of quality cannot be reduced to an inert and atomistic quale but that each qualitative experience entails an excess of sens that transcends this traditional, empiricist account. To understand the sense of the sensible, we must account for it in terms of the intentional structure of its genesis. Classical phenomenology, however, insofar as it understands intentionality as the explicit acts of a spontaneous consciousness, risks re-inscribing itself within the framework of the intellectualist position he challenges. In place of a spontaneous constituting consciousness, Merleau-Ponty invites us to understand the genesis of sense as the resumption and reprisal of a sense already under way, a resumption and repetition that remains constitutively incomplete and unfinalizable insofar as it is the result of a blind, incarnate intentionality that leaves sense a certain historical density and obscurity. Even if we accept this invitation, however, we must still see the extent to which Merleau-Ponty’s account of sense-genesis in Phenomenology of Perception manages to overcome the traditional understanding of passivity and activity that circumscribes realism on one hand and the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism on the other. It seems that even within the context of Merleau-Ponty’s



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emphasis on reprendre and reprise in this text, we still have the duality of the active term of the recovering and repeating subject and the passive term of the heritage of sense which is resumed and repeated—the sentient and the sensible seem to remain nothing other than “two mutually external terms.”28 What we must now see is the extent to which Merleau-Ponty’s account of sense-genesis in Phenomenology of Perception succeeds in challenging this traditional duality and the extent to which this text anticipates what he will describe in The Visible and the Invisible as a philosophy capable of thinking the “passivity of our activity.”29 Merleau-Ponty addresses this question in the wake of his discussion of the blindness of sense-genesis in the context of a somewhat pointed engagement with Sartre, all the more rare in Phenomenology of Perception for its apparent explicitness.30 What we see is at stake in the question of passivity and activity is a deeper ontological problem—what he calls the alternative of the “for-itself ” and “in-itself.”31 On one hand, the sentient, as we have seen, is not a pure spontaneity—it does not posit objects, accordingly, but “sympathizes with them.” On the other hand, “sensation is not an invasion of the sensible in the sentient [sentant].”32 Rather, in the échange between the sentient and the sensible, it is impossible to assign the values of passivity and activity, to designate one as the term of origination and one as the term of effect. In fact, we cannot say which gives sense to the other.33 In place of the opposition of passivity and activity, what we have is an important ambiguity, what Merleau-Ponty will later designate as a chiasmatic relation:34 the sentient and the sensible are Ineinander—the sentient is “inside” the sensible precisely to the extent that the sensible is “inside” the sentient. As mutually enveloped and enveloping, the sensible only gives back what is put there by the sentient, and the sentient only confers sense when it has already taken its cue from the sens of the sensible.35 This is stated quite eloquently in a famous passage quoting Valéry: As I contemplate the empty blue sky, I am not set over against [en face] it as an a-cosmic subject; I do not possess it in thought, or spread out towards it some idea of blue as might reveal the secret of it, I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it ‘thinks itself within me’ [se pense en moi], I am the sky itself drawn together and unified, and as it begins to exist for itself, my consciousness is saturated [engorgée] with this limitless blue.36

On one hand, the blue of the sky is by no means a static object lacking sense—this blue is “sensitive”—and thus, as Merleau-Ponty notes, becomes “the milieu of a certain vital vibration that my body adopts.” The sky is not merely an inert en soi, and it is in this sense that one can say that it exists “pour soi.”37 Likewise, on the other hand, insofar as the sensible is not a pure or unadulterated en soi, so the subject “need not be a pure nothingness with no terrestrial weight.”38 Such a Sartrean opposition between pure being and pure nothingness, accordingly, “would be necessary only if, like constituting consciousness, it had to be simultaneously omnipresent, coextensive with being, and in the process of thinking universal truth.”39 While there is certainly room for debate regarding Merleau-Ponty’s apparent identification of Sartre with the idealist tradition under attack, it will be helpful to briefly attempt to spell out what is at stake in more detail.

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The worry that motivates Merleau-Ponty’s accusation is that Sartre’s understanding of consciousness is the correlate of a very specific understanding of the sense of being, a sense that Sartre, allegedly, uncritically adopts from the history of philosophy and which he thus shares with the intellectualist tradition. The problem is that Sartre’s ontology of being and nothingness retains the specter of a finalized and total being—a being that would indeed be what it is and nothing more, a pure en soi.40 For Sartre, the solidity and presence of objects, their completeness and objectivity, are the inverse of a consciousness not of their order—the consciousness that, while in a certain movement of objectification, perpetually fails to become anything in particular and is to this extent adequately described as nothingness. For Sartre, it is because consciousness is the condition of possibility for things, because it is their source, that it cannot be identified with any being. The purity of nothingness, in Sartre’s account, is really a function of the purity of the being which it is not. For Merleau-Ponty, what is at stake in the dilemma of the for-itself and the in-itself is precisely an ontological claim about the purity or completeness of being. This dialectic is premised on an understanding of being as completed, enclosed and finalized—that being is what it is and nothing more. On the contrary, if we jettison a commitment to the purity of being, we are no longer obligated to conceive consciousness as a nothingness—we are no longer obligated to conceive of the world as an inert in-itself nor the movement of sense-genesis in terms of the freedom of a pure for-itself. This movement, rather, is part of the very fabric or flesh of the world itself, and if there are subjects there, it is only because they are the articulation of an “anonymous” expressivity always already at work.41 The perceived world, Merleau-Ponty says, is not of pure being. Taken exactly as I see it, it is a moment of my individual history, and since sensation is reconstitution, it presupposes in me sediments left behind by some previous constitution, so that I am, as a sentient subject, a repository stocked with natural powers at which I am the first to be filled with wonder.42

Once we abandon the idea of pure being, we need not, with Hegel and Sartre, speak of the negativity of consciousness, “a ‘hole in being’ [un ‘trou dans l’être’].” Rather, we have an impure being, an unfinished being that is not quite something and not quite nothing—what might more aptly be described as a “becoming.” The perceiving subject is in this way also not a pure negativity in the fullness of being but “a hollow [un creux], a fold [un pli] which can make itself and which can unmake itself.”43 The sentient is only a plicature in the sense of the sensible as it becomes, a fold in the living dehiscence and “deflagration”44 of the sense of the world. To elaborate this understanding of sense-genesis, we must re-consider the synthesis through which sense becomes articulate, but before delving into the discussion of perceptual synthesis and temporality that concludes Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on sense-genesis in Le sentir, it will be useful to sum up the results so far. On one hand, the study of motor physiognomy indicates that empiricism is inadequate insofar as the sensible is not an array of ready-made qualia but stands at the thither end of a process of sense-accomplishment. On the other hand, intellectualism is also inadequate insofar as we must understand the “initiation” of the sense of the sensible in terms otherwise than the spontaneous, constituting activity of transcendental consciousness.



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The solution to this dilemma, ultimately, lies in being able to think the sentient and the sensible in their mutual envelopment and implication rather than as two mutually external terms. In order to understand the intentionality through which the sense of the sensible is articulated, we must no longer understand the world as an inert en soi nor the sentient as pure nothingness, for such a duality presupposes the ontological purity of being and nothingness. The sentient, rather, must be understood as something like a defect, a lacuna, an imperfection in that which is neither fully being nor fully nothingness.45 What a phenomenology of perception introduces, and what Merleau-Ponty’s account of sense-genesis articulates, then, is an ontology no longer founded on the idea of a “summation of being”46 but one which is capable of rendering the deflagration of sense in its nascence, its incompleteness—indeed, in its impurity and becoming. In order to come to grips with this philosophy in the context of Le sentir, however, we must turn to Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on perceptual synthesis and temporality. What we see in the closing gamut of Le sentir is that the intentionality appropriate to this deflagration of sense is not the movement of a “consciousness of …” toward an object, but the power of time as the simultaneous movement of articulation and disarticulation, its systole and diastole. Merleau-Ponty’s theses regarding sense-genesis and the relation of the sentient to the sensible, then, will not receive their full articulation until La temporalité, to which we shall turn in some detail in the next chapter.

2. Perceptual synthesis and temporality Merleau-Ponty begins his discussion of synthesis in the second-to-last section of Le sentir, “Perceptual synthesis is temporal,” by considering the traditional, idealist account. For the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism, synthesis is typically understood as the imposition of an a priori form onto the matter of sensation. Synthesis is the active constitution of sense from what is given by mere sense impressions or intuitions, which must be then “worked through” into order to make sense. According to this understanding, synthesis is identified with the spontaneous activity of intellectual consciousness—a consciousness that acts upon inert and passive sense-data in order to render it into sense.47 If we are to abandon this idealist understanding of constitution as well as the manner in which activity and passivity have been assigned here, then, following our previous reflections, synthesis can no longer be understood as the activity of consciousness on sensations, and the whole sense of “working through” must be rethought. The first thing to be noted is that the intellectualist understanding of synthesis is the correlate of a perceptual field that has been distorted by the introduction of the idea of the quale, which Merleau-Ponty already challenged in his discussion of color sensations. What is important and what the idea of synthesis misses is that perceptual experience is not characterized by an array of sensible impressions or intuitions but by an original and primary phenomenological unity. When I am looking at a table, Merleau-Ponty says, I am not aware of a manifold of sensory units nor am I aware of a reflecting consciousness that subsumes these units under the rule of a concept.

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Rather, what I am aware of is the table only in its various perspectival deformations and the possibilities it presents—perhaps work or a meal, perhaps tidying if it is messy. Perceptual experience, in this way, begins as a unity of sense and becomes divisible into qualities, sensations, impressions or intuitions only later and secondarily, and, indeed, precisely as the result of taking up a reflective, analytic attitude on it. Atomistic sense-data, according to Merleau-Ponty, are not actual features of the world as it is perceived—for they never appear in the perceptual field—but are reflective constructs resulting from a certain epistemological attitude. The philosophies littered with various forms of sense impressions, intuitions, qualia, and so forth thus remain confined to a certain theoretical attitude that has failed to attune itself to the perceptual field and what is given in it. Indeed, only the philosopher reflecting on the nature of knowledge is concerned with sense impressions, intuitions or data and not the person perceiving the table or making use of it. The traditional notion of synthesis, understood as the subsumption of sensory matter under the form of a concept, emerges only as a necessary auxiliary for reconstructing the unity and coherence of the perceptual field from atomized sense impressions, for of course such impressions on their own would only be blind without being subsumed under a concept.48 If we begin with such a “mutilated and dissociated”49 perceptual field—one that has already been broken down into atomized qualities—then we must account for the reconstruction of these atoms into the phenomenological unity of the perceived world. We must be able to move from discrete units of sense-data, qualia, or color patches, and so forth, to the concrete unity of the world as it is given in perceptual experience and lived. The idea of synthesis, of course, is supposed to account for this movement and show how our knowledge of the world can begin with sense impressions and end in the phenomenological unity of the perceived—how the recognition of things and a world can proceed from the original, blind givenness of sensible intuitions. The ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism, of course, posits transcendental consciousness as the agent of this synthesis, and the unity of the perceived world is the outcome of this agency and its spontaneous synthetic activity. Through such activity, transcendental consciousness takes the matter of the sensibly given and organizes and orients it into a perceived world of sense—into a world in which objects stand out and are recognizable in their unity. We have already seen, however, some of the ways in which the plausibility of such a transcendental, constituting consciousness is challenged in Phenomenology of Perception. If we are to follow through on Merleau-Ponty’s critique of this understanding of consciousness, the idea of synthesis that has been the correlate of consciousness must also be revised since it appears only in conjunction with a perceptual field mutilated and atomized by a certain epistemological attitude. While Merleau-Ponty will not abandon the notion of synthesis entirely in Phenomenology of Perception, what we have is an understanding of this idea that has been reworked through the introduction of the concept of “perceptual synthesis.”50 First of all, as Merleau-Ponty’s account of sensing as reprendre and reprise suggests, perceptual synthesis is not a punctual, transcendental origin. Rather, he says, it takes advantage of work already done, of a general synthesis constituted once and



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for all, and this is what I mean when I say that I perceive with my body or my senses, since my body and my senses are precisely that habitual knowledge of the world [savoir habituel du monde], that implicit or sedimentary science.51

This is to simply repeat the claim that perceptual experience is not reducible to a synthetic consciousness which must bring the sense of the world into being ex nihilo, indeed, from nothingness—it does not construct a world through spontaneous acts of constitution but, as Merleau-Ponty has remarked earlier, always takes the form of resumption and reprisal. Perception takes advantage of a heritage of meanings with respect to which it has arrived late and of which it is not the author. Because perceptual experience is late to rather than the source of the world’s meaning, it relies, MerleauPonty says, on a “latent knowledge … which remains forever beneath [deçà] our perception.”52 Objects confront our gaze with their characteristic thickness and depth not because they are born through the synthetic act but precisely because perception “makes use of something which it does not put in question [qu’elle ne met pas en question].”53 Perception in this way is not a matter of apodictic certainty, but of a certain kind of faith—believing in the perceived in spite of its perpetual withdraw, precariousness and contingency. As Merleau-Ponty will remark later in the text, “perception is the ‘opinion’ or the ‘primary faith’ which binds us to a world as to our country, and the being of the perceived is the antepredicative being to which our total existence is polarized,”54 and we recognize here the idea of perceptual faith that becomes so central in The Visible and the Invisible and that we have already had occasion to encounter. There is a more fundamental problem with synthesis that Merleau-Ponty must address, namely, that it seems to entail a paradox: on one hand, sense stands at the thither side of a process of sense-accomplishment and, on the other hand, this sense is always already constituted—it is also on the hither side of the same process. In other words, the unity of the perceived world stands at the end of an order of sensegenesis—it is, in a sense, a “constituted” unity; and yet, on the other hand, its genesis is never the work of a constituting consciousness but is always the reprisal of sense already under way. How can we speak of a world that is already constituted without lapsing into metaphysical realism? As Merleau-Ponty asks, “what is the unified without unification, what is this object which is not yet an object for someone?”55 To put it differently—where in this order is the expressive moment of the first word, the moment of origination?56 Perception finds itself in the midst of a sensical and sensible world because the perceiving subject is late: because she “has historical density [épaisseur], [she] takes up a perceptual tradition and is faced with a present.”57 In perception, we do not constitute objects in the present but take up a sedimented heritage of sense that was already there. But how is this pre-constitution achieved? The task for a phenomenology of perception is to think through this paradoxical thesis: thinking the emergence of sense, not as its spontaneous birth in the present of constituting consciousness, but in an original past, as having-been.58 This question— the question of origin—which has been raised in the context of an investigation into our openness to the sensible, brings Merleau-Ponty’s reflections to the question of temporality. In Le sentir, Merleau-Ponty has argued against idealism by suggesting that

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perceptual experience is not the work of constituting consciousness but that it takes advantage of a sense already under way. This is to say that the moment of origination is not to be found in the presence of a pure spectator, a constituting consciousness, but in the heritage of a past which has already gone by. To understand the order of sensegenesis and the manner in which the world is always already constituted yet never fully constituted, we must consider the manner in which sense-genesis itself is already an order of temporalization—for as Merleau-Ponty notes near the end of Le sentir, “the perceptual synthesis is a temporal synthesis, and subjectivity, at the level of perception, is nothing but temporality.”59 To further elaborate the extent to which Merleau-Ponty’s account of sense-genesis in Phenomenology of Perception contributes to the articulation of a philosophy of lateness, and the manner in which this philosophy addresses the paradox of synthesis, it will be useful to consider the discussion of time that concludes Le sentir and the extent to which the phenomenon of time contributes to Merleau-Ponty’s early theory of sense-genesis. In fact, the closing gamut of Le sentir makes a striking promissory note with respect to the question of temporality: If we are to solve the problem which we have set ourselves—that of sensoriality, that is to say of finite subjectivity—it will be by thinking about time and showing how it exists 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.60

A more detailed account of whether Merleau-Ponty fulfills this promise in La temporalité will have to wait. For now, however, it will do provide some indications of how these reflections on the temporality of perceptual synthesis contribute to the question of sense-genesis and how these reflections challenge the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism by articulating a philosophy of lateness. In place of the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism that “reveals me as the non-temporal thinker of the object,”61 perceptual synthesis understands sensegenesis not as a temporalization founded upon a non-temporal origin but in terms of a bottomless or abyssal temporality—a temporal deflagration of becoming. This thesis is worked out in the closing gamut of Le sentir. First of all, the perceptual “synthesis,” as temporal, is nothing other than a structure of prospection and retrospection—both looking forward to an object that as yet remains on the horizon and looking back toward an object that gives itself as the motif or le premier moteur of the gaze.62 When I look at the table, my gaze always has a temporal orientation insofar as the table is sliding through time from a future of imminent possibilities on the horizon of the perceived to an immediate past of what has been perceived. The table presents itself as a series of potentialities that slip into the past without ever being fully realized, and the genesis of sense, precisely as this temporal passage, Merleau-Ponty says, is “based on the unfolding of time.”63 The perceptual gaze can only fix objects insofar as it projects “around the present a double horizon of past and future,” insofar as it “secretes time” and in this way receives “a historical orientation.”64 The perceptual field is structured by this modulation of the temporal horizon in which potentialities—the



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gray surface of the table, the angle of its edge against the background of the brown carpet—constantly slide into the immediate past, giving way for further perceptual potentialities, which are themselves in the same state of modulation. Sense therefore comes into being through time, but precisely because it is temporal, sense is simultaneously subject to a perpetual dissolution and disintegration. Sense is constantly menaced by dissolution, importantly, because the “syntheses it performs are themselves temporal phenomena.”65 Because perceptual synthesis is itself immersed in temporal flux, what it initiates is always tenuous and subject to the erosion and decay brought about by temporal becoming and the constant temporal modulation of the perceptual field. Each instance of sense-accomplishment, reprendre and reprise, is both the instant of its dissolution and repetition. The result is that sense-accomplishment, understood as the crystallization of the world into a final sensible and sensical order, is a perpetual disappointment [déçue] and failure [échec]—indeed, a failure “foreseeable from the start.”66 Therefore, even though each perception always resumes and reprises the sense of the past, it nonetheless always fails to “realize the synthesis of the object” because “the unity of the object makes its appearance through the medium of time, and because time slips away [s’échappe] as fast as it catches up with itself [se ressaisit].”67 As temporal, the accomplishment of sense is simultaneously its undoing, as “every synthesis is both distended [distendue] and remade [refaite] by time which, with one and the same movement, calls it into question and confirms it because it produces a new present which retains the past.”68 Sense is in this way nothing other than a temporal deflagration of being—the immolation of sense as it makes itself visible and its burning away. The world as it is perceived never manages to live up to my expectations of clarity and objectivity and in this way is never quite finished. It is, therefore always there, waiting to be perceived. Sense-accomplishment fails because each perception, each moment of sense-genesis, is succeeded by another and because what is accomplished in and through time is always simultaneously undone by it. It is precisely this conflagrant movement of articulation and disarticulation that comes to characterize Merleau-Ponty’s account of time in La temporalité.69 The repetition of sense as reprendre and reprise is made necessary by the dissolution entailed in its temporal becoming, and indeed, in this manner, sense-genesis is always an attestation to and renewal of a “prehistory.” Because what I perceive constantly gives way to further potentialities, each fixation of an object must perpetually be repeated and renewed [renouvelé] lest it “fall into the unconscious.”70 Insofar as time possesses the power to dissolve sense, it is simultaneously the means by which sense is articulated as resumption and reprisal. As Merleau-Ponty will now indicate, however, this resumption and reprisal is possible only in virtue of the retentive and historical structure of sense-genesis and its temporality. Sense can be repeated in perception only because its reprisal, Merleau-Ponty says, referencing Hegel, “keeps a past in its present depth [gardait un passé dans sa profondeur présente]” and because it contracts the past “into that depth.”71 The present is never an unanticipated spontaneity but always, again to use Hegel’s words, contains the “traces” or “patterns of the past” in their “shadowy outline.”72 The present is, as Hegel understood perhaps better than any other, always haunted by these shadows and, indeed, presence is nothing other than the resumption and reprisal of these traces, the manner in which they remain

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inscribed in and on us, and the myriad ways they find to remain with us. Our present is thus like a scar, and as Merleau-Ponty says, “time never completely closes over itself and it remains like a wound through which our strength ebbs away.”73 It is in virtue of time’s inability to close over itself, to coincide with itself, that the present is subject to its perpetual dissolution and thus never saved from openness, fragility and precariousness. The present is, in a sense, never fully present. In other words, to carry on with Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor, there is no healing for this wound, for with such a cure-all, an a-temporal constituting subjectivity, for example, time would simply cease to be time. Because it is temporal, sense-genesis is a becoming or unfolding of sense perpetually on its way to being but never coincident with being. The lateness of sense-genesis thus has precisely this structure of “always on the way to”—always on its way because it cannot arrive, because it is always late to being, and this becoming is not the work of a constituting subject but of time in its deflagration.74 At the end of these reflections on sense-genesis, it is no longer a question of understanding the activity of the naturant or the passivity of the naturata, but of understanding the structure of temporality as both—that on the level of this abyssal temporal synthesis, sense-genesis is always auto-affective because time is always both “constituted and constituting time.”75 Sense, in its unfolding through time, we could say, enfolds or inflows on itself—sense-genesis is the reprisal of its own past that is simultaneously its dissolution and disintegration—that is to say, its renewal as differentiation. Sense-genesis, therefore, as temporal, is sich einströmen, and it is precisely in this manner that sense is never constituted as such but, following Husserl, is a bottomless auto-constitution.76 *** What we have tried to show is that already in Phenomenology of Perception we see Merleau-Ponty begin to work out a philosophy that dispenses with the cruelty of realism and idealism and to point toward another philosophy that no longer stakes a claim to arriving at the scene of being. Against cruel thought, Phenomenology of Perception begins the task of thinking through a philosophy of lateness that makes no claim to finality. While Phenomenology of Perception may not yet go as far as making the empiètement of the constituting and constituted thematically explicit, we nonetheless see this text approach this thought in its theory of sense-genesis. Sense-genesis, for Merleau-Ponty, is not the spontaneous activity of a constituting survol absolu but has the dual structure of reprendre and reprise—sense always articulates itself as the resumption and reprisal of a sense always already under way, a resumption, however, that remains constitutively incomplete because of its incarnate blindness. Sense-genesis is never constitution as such but always takes the form of reconstitution. In order to come to terms with the full implication of his understanding of sense-genesis as reprendre and reprise, however, it was necessary to turn to Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the concept of synthesis. In place of the traditional understanding of synthesis as the subsumption of an intuition under a category, Merleau-Ponty offers a theory of “perceptual synthesis” in which the world is already constituted and yet never fully constituted. In place of a



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theory of sense-genesis that takes the constituting to be an a-temporal survol absolu, perceptual synthesis is, on the contrary, characterized by a bottomless or abyssal temporality, and unsurprisingly, Merleau-Ponty’s final remarks in Le sentir on the question of sense-genesis take up the theme of temporality explicitly. Because of its temporal structure, perceptual synthesis is not the organization of sense into a final or absolute order—rather, the sense articulated through this process is subject to a perpetual dissolution, a dissolution that precisely necessitates its resumption and reprisal. The articulation of sense thus remains constitutively incomplete—sense never quite reaches a final expression but is always under way and in the process of articulating itself. Phenomenology of Perception, in the theory of sense-genesis offered in this text, thus evinces a certain understanding of being—not as pure being, self-identical, complete and enclosed—but as becoming. Sense is not constituted but becomes or unfolds through a bottomless or abyssal temporal dehiscence or deflagration. Sense is not noted by a consciousness but, like a flame, shows itself only in the dynamic incompleteness of its appearance, and indeed, this term seems apt since fires are precisely the kinds of things that show themselves without every fully becoming anything. Merleau-Ponty attempts to think the appearance of sense not at the thither end of a constituting or sense-bestowing act of consciousness, but as he will say in La temporalité, the éclatement or eruption of sense in its temporal articulation and becoming. This éclatement, as we have already seen in Le sentir, is not the attempt to think the adequacy of the réfléchissant to the réfléchi, but to understand the extent to which consciousness, as well a philosophy itself, arrives late to the becoming of sense. What is essential is not the lateness of a body, thought or philosophy but the lateness of becoming to being—the manner in which the articulation of sense remains incomplete because sense-genesis is structured by an important temporal non-coincidence and delay. As Merleau-Ponty himself has already suggested in his promissory note at the end of Le sentir, it will be only through thinking about temporality more explicitly and in more detail that we will have the clues necessary to understand the full implications of this philosophy of lateness and the lateness of becoming to being. We shall therefore now turn explicitly to Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Husserl in La temporalité in order to get a sense of the theory of temporality articulated in Phenomenology of Perception, its importance for continuing the theory of sensegenesis began in Le sentir and, finally, for understanding the philosophy of lateness articulated in this text.

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As Merleau-Ponty’s account of sense-genesis suggests in Le sentir, temporality is the central phenomenon—probably for understanding Merleau-Ponty’s thought overall. The chapter of Phenomenology of Perception dedicated to investigating the nature of time, La temporalité, as Barbaras has suggested, may be considered the central chapter of the text.1 In this chapter, I will turn to this part of Merleau-Ponty’s work in an effort to further elaborate his theory of sense-genesis. Our openness to sense and the sensible, as we have seen, is not a function of data or qualia to which we are wholly given over or passive; nor is it the outcome of a process of calculation or relation effected by an active transcendental origin. Making sense, rather, is the resumption, reprendre, of a sedimented history of meanings that press down upon us and that we inherit, albeit problematically and incompletely and at the same time, a repetition and reprisal, reprise, of this sense. It is in virtue of this movement, its systole and diastole, its respiration, that the sense of the sensible shines forth. This movement, according to Merleau-Ponty, is ineluctably temporal. The discussion of sense-genesis taken up in the previous chapter in this way necessitates turning to Merleau-Ponty’s account of temporality in more detail. I begin by turning to what is perhaps the most important point of reference for Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of temporality, Edmund Husserl’s Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins or Lectures on the Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness. Merleau-Ponty had the opportunity to study this text along with some of its at the time unpublished Beilagen on his visit to the newly established Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium, during May of 1939 as he began writing Phenomenology of Perception. We will turn to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the famous time diagram and what he calls le champ de présence, the field of presence, in order to demonstrate that, contrary to some standard interpretations of La temporalité, what we have is far afield from a “metaphysics of presence.”2 The field of presence, rather, must be understood as the framework for time’s manifestation, which is not presence itself nor does it take place in the present. Instead we must hear this in terms of what Husserl describes as a continuity of Ablauf, of lapse or flow. This discussion again brings us before the problem of “synthesis,” and we turn to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of operative intentionality, transition synthesis, and passive synthesis, all of which he borrows from Husserl. What we learn from this discussion is that temporal synthesis—or temporal articulation—is simultaneously

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characterized by a kind of disarticulation, that what is bound together in time is simultaneously disintegrated in the total phenomenon of what Merleau-Ponty describes as temporal “dehiscence,” the bursting open of time like an unhealed wound. In so far as time is understood as this bursting open, this explosion or deflagration, there is no present as such, according to Merleau-Ponty: there is only this wave of becoming and decay we call time, its perpetual flight and escape from actuality and fullness of being. In the context of this account of temporality, the second part turns to what Heidegger called Zusammenhang des Lebens, the unity of a life. It is a strange term for Merleau-Ponty, for as we shall see, unity is not a function of a resolute decision in which one grasps and comes to terms with the manner of being that they are. Such a coincidence is foreclosed by the ecstatic structure of time’s dehiscence and differentiation. Rather, the unity of a life is only the continuity of its sense as it unfolds in time, a problematic unity that remains open and that sets itself forth toward the indefiniteness of the future. Because our lives are set forth in time, they have no final or ultimate meaning and therefore they remain open and everything remains to be done. But this absence of a final reason given in advance is exactly the nature of our encounter with time, the very problematic that leads Merleau-Ponty to turn to Husserl’s time diagram. Time does not appear as presence or in the present; time, rather, because it is ek-static, because it is beyond, outside, has already departed: it is gone, disparue, like the elusive Albertine from Proust’s Recherche.

1. Husserl’s Zeitbewußtsein in La temporalité To begin we shall turn to the section of La temporalité entitled “The ‘field of presence:’ the horizons of past and future,” and Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl’s diagram from his Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness, or as Merleau-Ponty likes to say, simply the Zeitbewußtsein. It is arguably through and thanks to Husserl that temporality becomes such a central figure of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and it is Husserl who guides his endeavor, as he says, to “arrive at authentic time.”3 In light of this influence, however, Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl in these pages has become the subject of some controversy among scholars: that in his commitment to what appears to be a Husserlian model, Merleau-Ponty retains the vestiges of a “metaphysics of presence,” especially in light of his discussion of le champ de présence or “field of presence”; and that the signs pointing beyond this perhaps over-emphasis on presence, found in Bergson especially, remained under-exploited by Merleau-Ponty.4 It is not my intention to go into the details of this discussion here. Rather, I will turn to Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Husserl’s lectures on temporality, the famous diagram specifically, in order to begin outlining what Merleau-Ponty thought about time and how this exceeds what Husserl may have had in mind. Time, for MerleauPonty, is precisely not a “point” or “unit” of presence, but rather the bursting forth of a movement of simultaneous bringing-forth and erosion, becoming and decay, articulation and disarticulation. It is thanks to this model of temporality, as we shall see, that

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we can say, with Merleau-Ponty, that becoming is late to being, that what is remains only ever partially here and that all things manifest themselves only in their disparue, that their shining forth here before us is granted only by their departure. The philosophy of time is a very old and fairly complicated area, and as philosophers over the millenia have discovered, our attempts to come to terms with it—something that everyone experiences, that is so close and familiar to us—often end in confusion. Much of this confusion revolves around making sense of the being of time and the strange paradox of the present.5 When one begins to reflect on time, accordingly, one finds that the temporal dimensions of the past and future refer themselves to the present and that this referral, furthermore, appears primary with respect to time’s passage. In other words, time apparently only “exists,” only has “being” in the present—since neither the past nor the future could be said “to be.” The past is no longer and the future is not yet. Thinking the being of time seems to require accounting for the manner in which time makes itself present—the manner in which time appears and manifests itself, and we are confronted with the strange task of accounting for the presence of time, the presence of the present. It is through this kind of reasoning—time may only appear in the present and as presence—that the temporal dimension of the present seems to have a privileged position with respect to the past and future in the manifestation of time. After all, it seems that past and future must in some way make reference to the present in order for them to appear at all since neither temporal dimension could be said to “exist.” The past accomplishes this reference by being the past of a present that has already passed, and likewise, it is in what MerleauPonty calls le champ de présence, the field of presence, that the future gives itself as being anticipated by the present and as “sliding into the past.” The past is of a present that is no longer and the future of a present that is not yet, and both past and future “exist” insofar as they are connected to the present in this way. The field of presence seems to be, as Merleau-Ponty says, “the originary experience in which time and its dimensions appear in person, with no intervening distance and with final evidence [évidence dernière].”6 This is to say that the field of presence circumscribes that domain within which time makes its appearance: the field of temporal manifestation. Time makes itself known, announces itself, insofar as it is structured and organized around the present. Accounts of time that emphasize presence and the present like this are fairly traditional,7 and at the beginning of the chapter on temporality in Phenomenology of Perception, it seems to be the kind of position that Merleau-Ponty takes up and defends. If we read the text more closely, however, and if we consider more carefully the structure of this reference and the manner in which the temporal dimensions make their appearance in this field, the story Merleau-Ponty tells in La temporalité becomes considerably more complicated. In the pages following the remarks cited above, we see that “presence,” in this context, is not restricted to designating the temporal dimension of “the present” but is employed in a narrower sense—it is intended to circumscribe the field of temporal appearance and manifestation and the sense of time’s appearance as what Husserl calls Ablauf, passage and flux. In order to flesh out the stakes of Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on le champ de présence, we must turn to his dialogue with Husserl’s diagram from the Zeitbewußtsein in more detail.

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Husserl’s discussion of the structure of time in this text is intended to account for the experiential continuity of time in consciousness. If we attend to our experience closely, we see that we never experience something like an immediate, punctual “now point.” We do not experience a present as such, but only a present that is always on its way out of the future and into the past. The diagram, and the attendent discussion of what Husserl calls “primal impression,” “retention,” and “protention,” are intended to account for this continuity and at the same time the distinctness of past and futural temporal horizons. Let us briefly consider the phenomenon of retention (see Fig. 1). In becoming past, the present that I have experienced does not simply vanish from the horizon of my experience—rather, it is retained, like a temporal halo or atmosphere that recedes into the background and against which my present experiences stand out. For example, in considering my relationship to the past, I need not recall each instant of the day in order to feel that “it weighs upon me with all its weight,” and though I may not be tracking each instant that has passed, I can nonetheless recall what has passed without effort. As Merleau-Ponty says, quoting Husserl, “I still ‘have it in hand,’”8 and having the past “under control” in this manner is possible thanks to the retentive aspect of time’s organization. The past is available precisely insofar as its passage is characterized by the modification of primal impressions into retentions. It is this retained past to which Merleau-Ponty is referring when he notes that “it is there, like the back of a house of which I can see only the façade, or like the background beneath a figure.”9 When we attend to our experience, what becomes visible under our eyes does so as a sliding back into the past—a past that simultaneously presses down upon us and in a way structures what we see. The tree here outside the window is swaying the breeze, and the movement of the branches and leaves unfold a rythmic dance. The scene that unfolds has a kind of liquid coherence, as each movement, each gesture of the tree follows from and is anticipated by its predecessor. In this way, the swaying movements of the tree throw themselves back into an immediate past that is just barely gone as the new present comes to take its place. Likewise, the future does not make itself present through “guesswork or daydreams,” as Merleau-Ponty says, but rather the world is carried forward by “lines of intentionality which trace out in advance at least the style of what is to come”10—the future makes itself present through the protentional intentionalities that anticipate the “not yet.” As its branches move and dance, the tree outlines a future for itself. One can “see” the probable tilts and shakes of its branches on the very tip of the present as it throws itself forward into the future. In this way, through this retentional-protentional structure, the unfolding of time is not the broken chaos of temporal units that would have to be reassembled by the mind but is composed of lines and curves that blend and bleed into one another without at the same time becoming undifferentiated or indistinct. The shining forth of time, accordingly, cannot be accounted for as a series of now points but must be understood, to use Husserlian language, as the progressive modification of primary impressions, retentions, and protentions. Each impression, in its passage, is retained and each retention is in turn modified as a retention of a retention, and so on. As retained, however, the primary impression of the present that has now passed nonetheless exerts a certain weight on the present. Likewise, each impression has its futural or protentional dimension as well, and Merleau-Ponty actually goes so far as to transcribe a version of Husserl’s diagram from the Zeitbewußtsein, which we copy here.11

Temporality disparue Past

A A'

B

103 C

Future

B'

A'' Figure 1 Merleau-Ponty’s purpose, however, is not to merely repeat what Husserl says, and the account offered in fact serves to introduce and set up a series of problems, the solution to which will provide the opportunity for finding something perhaps “unthought” in Husserl’s account of time. The first problem is a problem of presentation, and indeed, Husserl’s diagram in the Zeitbewußtsein may seem somewhat misleading and paradoxical insofar as it appears to provide only an analytics of time. In other words, Husserl, by diagramming time, seems to reduce a dynamic phenomenon to a system of static relationships that would lend themselves to pictorial representation in the first place. It presupposes time’s reprensentationality and, in a way, linearity, and thus it seems that Husserl is presupposing a series of claims about time in the very act of diagramming. This is the paradox of Husserl’s diagram, for as Merleau-Ponty notes, “time is not a line, but a network [réseau] of intentionalities.”12 This is not to repeat Bergson’s complaint about the spatialization of time,13 Merleau-Ponty is quick to note, nor does the task consist in dwelling on the letter of what Husserl says in the Zeitbewußtsein but in thinking through what that text nonetheless offers us to think about. Following through on this task, for Merleau-Ponty, requires thinking about the manner in which Husserl’s sketch provides a theory of time’s manifestation as a totality of Ablauf, as flow or passage. What we must recall is that Husserl’s diagram only represents a cross-section of an instant of time, and while it is true that the “field of presence” is the field in which past and future show themselves, as the field of temporal phenomenalization, it in fact designates a field of Ablauf in which the lapse between the temporal dimensions become manifest. The continuity of time, then, is the perhaps strange continuity of a fission, the continuity of passage and flux.14 It will be worth citing some passages from the Zeitbewußtsein to see how this concept figures in Husserl’s text and to provide some context for Merleau-Ponty’s reading. The key term here is Ablauf, which can mean “flow” but also “course,” as in the course of a river or a course of events, as well as something like “discharge.”15 We will stick with “flow.” In §9, for example, Husserl says that “Every temporal being ‘appears’ in some mode of flow [Ablaufsmodus] that changes continuously, and in this change ‘the object in its mode of flow’ is always and ever a different object.”16 The tree outside does not simply appear, once and for all, but manifests itself only through the liquidity of its movements, only across the modulation of its sway, and in this way there is not simply “a tree” but a continuity of differences, a sequence of changes that constitute the thing, the tree in this case, only in the unity of their rententive and protentive profiles. This claim is elaborated in a lengthy passage from §10 when he says that

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We speak here of the “phenomenon of flow,” [der Ablaufsphänomenen] or better still, of the “modes of temporal orientation;” and with respect to the immanent objects themselves, we speak of their “flow characters” … (e.g., now, past). We know that the phenomenon of flow is a continuity of constant changes. This continuity forms an inseparable unity, inseparable into extended sections that could exist by themselves and inseparable into phases that could exist by themselves, into points of continuity. The parts that we single out by abstraction can exist only in the whole flow; and this is equally true of the phases, the points that belong to the flow-continuity.17

The manifestation of time does not take place in a present that itself would be already wholly present or wholly real. In other words, we misunderstand time if we ask of it a final statement, to give us something beyond becoming or decay. What there is, rather, is the continuity of this flux, the wholeness, the flow of constant variation and change—an aqueousness that is precisely not divisible into units, “moments” that could be adumbrated, quantified, or calculated. We divide time into parts, and thus construct the edifice of its division into countable digits only upon reflection and only through the abstraction of the time that is lived and that we suffer. To this extent, clocks and calendars represent a kind of fantasy or illusion—time does not tick away: it bleeds. The sun sinks only slowly over the horizon and the light fades into darkness almost imperceptibly, and it would be impossible to draw a precise line between one and the other; likewise, one season slowly, gradually melts into the next. There is no precise or exact instant when summer gives way to autumn, and it is in the name of this continuity, this variation of things in the course of this whole, that we say that time passes. Merleau-Ponty, following this line of thought, translates Husserl’s word “Ablauf” as “écoulement” in Phenomenology of Perception, “flow,” “flux,” or “passing,” and it is thinking through time as flow and passage that becomes the focus of the account in La temporalité in the pages following the inscription of the diagram. In fact, Husserl’s diagram, on Merleau-Ponty’s reading, is intended to represent this temporal whole which is always in passage or under way: this parting of things in which we could only say that it is already disparue, already gone. We tend to think of past, present, and future as distinct, as if we could differentiate between them by drawing a line. But because the manifestation of time is a continuity, a flow of differences, this is not the case. This, however, means that we must think carefully about how we understand Husserl’s diagram. The points on the diagram, representing primal impressions and their retentive and protentive profiles, are misleading insofar as they seem to suggest discrete and successive instances or units. We know, however, that there is no such thing as a temporal unit. In fact, for Merleau-Ponty, as for Husserl, “There is … not a multiplicity of linked phenomena” but “a single phenomenon of écoulement,” a single phenomenon of “flow, “circulation,” or “flux.”18 What is designated as the “field of presence,” then, precisely as the zone of time’s presentation, is not a static framework in which time shows itself as divisible into self-identical temporal units that could be assigned the values of A, A´, A´´, B, etc., as one might think looking at the diagram (see Fig. 1), but is more aptly described as the field of manifestation for time’s passage

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and expiration, the field in which time manifests itself precisely in its Ablaufmodus, in its mode of flow and passing. Beyond this perhaps merely presentational problem, however, there is yet another issue with Husserl’s account in the Zeitbewußtsein that Merleau-Ponty will address. The problem is this: if time is a kind of synthetic principle, in other words, if it has the function of giving sense, articulating, and bringing into manifestation, then does it not require a synthesizing agent standing at its point of origination? Given that the moments of primal impression, retention, and protention form a dynamic totality of passage, does the web of intentionalities that constitutes the passage of time and allows for its manifestation nonetheless not require a primordial synthesis that would organize and orient the sense of this passage and that would establish the relationships between impressional, retentive and protentive profiles precisely in their passing? One of the important features of Merleau-Ponty’s account of temporality is that he denies the necessity of positing any a priori identifying synthesis that would unite and organize the givenness and presentation of time’s passage as well as the necessity of a synthesizing agent. Time is a self-articulating whole, not the accomplishment of some transcendental agency. Positing such an agent and unification is unnecessary if we take into account the fact that Husserl’s discussion of the matrix of temporal intentionalities, according to Merleau-Ponty, was never intended to provide a temporal mechanics— the interaction of the discrete temporal components of primary impression, retention, and protention—but rather to disclose a temporal continuity precisely in its dynamic passage.19 It will do to turn to Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on Husserl’s diagram in more detail in order to understand the sense in which time is not “constituted” but instead is “auto-consituting.” “Synthesis,” σύνθεσις in Ancient Greek, “bringing together,” has since Kant been the correlate of a constituting agency—the idea being that any relation requires a point of view that establishes the relationship, that all sense is always “sense for” someone. In this way, the concept of synthesis has been associated with the primacy of subjectivity and consciousness in the ordinary perspective of transcendental thought. MerleauPonty, on the other hand, in his account of the auto-constitution of sense in time, offers an important re-evaluation of this. Because time is self-articulate, because it is a primordial whole and unity that needs no prior synthesizing agent, what he says in Phenomenology of Perception renders the traditional idea of synthesis problematic and suspect. In fact, it is probably more accurate to suggest that even though he does not quite go so far as to abandon the language of synthesis all together at this stage, what he says about it looks forward to what becomes more explicit later in the years of The Visible and the Invisible.20 To begin unravelling this web, let us consider what MerleauPonty designates, following Husserl, as “operative intentionality,” l’intentionnalité opérante and “synthesis of transition,” synthése de transition.21 The continuity of temporal profiles, the reference one moment makes to another, my ability to recognize A in A´, A´´, etc., does not come about because each profile “participates in an ideal unity of A which is their common reason,” but, indeed, because the visibility of A is dependent on its reference to the system of profiles precisely in their passage and not the reverse (see Fig. 1).22 In other words, the manifestation of a temporal profile is not grounded in the originality of the primal impression—primal impression, here,

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does not have the function of origin (nor do retentions or protentions). Looking at the diagram, one may imagine that as A passes to B and is thus retained as A´, etc., A would function as a the “cause” or “reason” of both B and A´. This, however, is not the case. As I watch the tree outside dance in the breeze, it is impossible to locate a single “master” instance around which everything else is organized. The unfolding of the wind and the tree in time takes place across a matrix of references, a complex of sense, a temporal expanse across which the scene unfolds. The appearance of a temporal profile is possible only in its reference to this matrix, this continuous bursting forth of sense in time. Merleau-Ponty elaborates: What is given to me is not first A´, A´´ or A´´´, and I do not go back from these “profiles” to their original A, as one goes from the sign to its signification. What is given to me is A transparently visible through A´, then the ensemble through A´´, and so on, as I see a pebble through the mass of water that slides over it … If the Abschattungen of A´ and A´´ appear to me as Abschattungen of A, this is not because they all participate in an ideal unity A which is their common reason. It is because through them I obtain the point A itself, in its irrefutable individuality, founded once and for all by its passage in the present, and because I see it flow [jaillir] from the Abschattungen A´, A´´ … .23

What is at stake is the function of the primal impression in structuring this field of passage. Merleau-Ponty’s argument, perhaps against the letter of Husserl’s text, is that it would be a mistake to construe the primal impression as the ground or origin of this flux. This passage is not instituted or initiated by the immediacy of the primal impression. Rather, the primal impression as such depends on its placement in the flux for its very recognizability—we do not see a primal impression that subsequently generates its retentive and protentive profiles but, indeed, only see the profiles precisely in their flux—in the very reference they make to the system as a whole. Insofar as there is a present, it is not given as an absolute transparency but only translucently, through the flow of time as it washes over. The tree dances in the wind through the layers of the past that accumulate and sediment behind it and into the openness and indefiniteness of the future. The present is thus never fully present but only visible as in its disintegration, as it dissolves into the past and is pushed away by the onslaught of the future. The present is only the blur between these poles that render it into non-presence. The result of these considerations, for Merleau-Ponty, is that the constitution of this web or matrix of references is not the work of an explicit act of identification but of an intentionality that was already under way. The articulateness of sense in time unfolds in advance of any attitude I take on it—and in this way, the movements of the tree as they emerge across this temporal continuum outrun my reflections, come to me in advance of my reach or relation to it. Thanks to this operative intentionality, “my present outruns itself [se dépasse] in the direction of an immediate future and an immediate past and touches [touche] them where they are, namely in the past and in the future themselves.”24 Past and future need not be brought into articulation through a relational agent who expressly posits the series of profiles, beginning with the primal impression, but rather this matrix and its referentiality “possess a natural and primordial unity.”25

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If the traditional concept of synthesis is inadequate for thinking this operative intentionality and the primordial unity of time, perhaps Husserl’s idea of passive synthesis will suffice. As Merleau-Ponty will go on to argue, however, the concept of passive synthesis in Husserl “is clearly not a solution, but an index for designating a problem.”26 The tension here is between needing to provide an account of the genesis of time’s sense while thinking this genesis in terms otherwise than an explicit, positing act. The problem is to account for the presentation of time as passage in terms of what Merleau-Ponty will later famously designates as “the passivity of our activity,”27 and indeed, Merleau-Ponty elaborates the primordial phenomenological unity of temporality in the section of La temporalité aptly entitled “Passivity and Activity,” to which we will now turn. The problem of passive synthesis, which circumscribes the enigma of passivity and activity more generally (an enigma, of course, that spans Merleau-Ponty’s reflections from Phenomenology of Perception onward), is that “subjectivity” is both capable of authorship and agency, and yet its authorship is always limited and circumscribed by a situation of which it is not the author. The world is constituted and yet we cannot claim to be the authors of this constitution. The world has sense and meaning, and yet we cannot claim to have brought it into meaning. Time is not something we dominate—it both opens the sense of the world and at the same time closes it. This tension becomes pronounced in the context of a reflection on time because, as Merleau-Ponty indicates, while realism cannot account for time at all (since it reduces time to the succession of now-points), idealism seems to require a transcendental synthesis of time. In rejecting realism, we can admit that time is, therefore, constituted in some sense, but can this constitution really be attributed to the agency of a transcendental subjectivity? The concept of passive synthesis, accordingly, is both the site for and the key to this enigma. It will be worth citing a lengthy passage in which Merleau-Ponty articulates this tension: A passive synthesis is contradictory if the synthesis is composition, and if the passivity consists in receiving a multiplicity instead of composing it. We wanted to say, by speaking of passive synthesis, that the multiple is penetrated by us and that, however, it is not we who effectuate the synthesis. Now temporalization, by its very nature, satisfies these two conditions: it is clear, in effect, that I am not the author of time any more than of the beating of my heart; it is not me who takes the initiative of temporalization; I did not choose to be born, and, once I was born, time gushes [fuse] through me, whatever I do. And yet this flowing [jaillissement] of time is not a simple fact that I suffered; I can find in it a remedy against it itself, as it happens in a decision which engages me or in an act of conceptual fixation. It tears me [m’arrache] from what I was going to be, but at the same time gives me the means for taking hold of myself at a distance and for realizing myself as myself [et de me réaliser comme moi]. That which we call passivity is not the reception by us of a foreign reality, or causal action from outside of us: it is a surrounding [investissement], a being in situation [un être en situation], before which we do not exist, that we perpetually recommence and which is constitutive of our selves.28

The very idea of a passive synthesis might well immediately strike one as paradoxical since any synthesis, by definition, seems to entail activity and agency. Time, however, is

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both the emblem and solution to this paradox—it is, as it were, the hinge or vinculum of passivity and activity, the place where the one reverses itself and becomes the other, the site of their Ineinander. On one hand, I am completely passive with respect to time. It constitutes for me a situation, a world, of which I am not the author—it comes upon me and passes regardless of the decisions I make or the paths I take or do not take, and once it has passed, that which time has deemed to be the case is irrevocable as having been. In its passing, then, time is that through which the world makes its appearance as the passage of events. Through time, the sense of our lives comes to be as events take shape; it is the means of growth and decay, of birth and death, and these events come to me from beyond what could be initiated through a decision, indeed, beyond what could come from any resolve, determination or “unwavering discipline” on my part.29 Time is the means given to everything for it to be, a gift that comes to us in spite of what we will, what we want or even, sometimes, in spite of what we could possibly imagine. This power that time exerts over us is expressed simply by saying that I did not choose to be born and yet I am here anyway, and because of my passivity with respect to time, it perpetually eludes my mastery as I am by definition subject to it. On the other hand, in the same manner in which I am subject to time, it is the very means of my openness and possibility. At the very moment time seems to subjugate me to the law of what it brings to pass, what has been and what cannot be undone; in time’s very passing, it simultaneously cracks open for me an indefinite future, yet to be determined, yet to be lived. Time passes and closes off the future by making it present and past, and yet at the same time, each present and past open onto the unknown, that temporal distance into which we cannot penetrate. It is precisely in the indeterminacy of its passage, that time provides me with the means for overcoming its seemingly ruthless domination of everything. For because the future is open and indefinite, I can, in a sense, outrun the vicissitudes of my passivity by making the indeterminacy of the future determinate—by making a choice or exercising my agency. In this way, insofar as time is the measure of my passivity—insofar as I am ineluctably subject to its law—it is also the measure of my freedom. Merleau-Ponty’s accesses the concept of passive synthesis through Husserl’s Formale und Transzendentale Logik, and it will be worth situating his reflections on passivity in La temporalité in light of the conclusion of this text.30 It is in the context of Husserl’s discussion of the a priori and his claim that a “transcendental aesthetics … functions as the ground level [Grundstufe]” that the concept of passive synthesis is mentioned in this text.31 Beneath the explicit sense-giving activities of consciousness, for Husserl, there is already an operative sense of the world—an αἴσθησις, a meaning already inscribed in our percpetual opening onto things. Such a transcendental aesthetics, accordingly, undertakes the task of describing the “universal a priori,” which includes “the aesthetic a priori of spatio-temporality.” This aesthetics assumes the task of disclosing the primordial λόγος, the reason, the logic of space and time beneath the derivative and secondary λόγος of “objective worldly being.” This primordial λόγος is the “Logos of the aesthetic world,”32 and it precedes any categorial acts in the order of sense-genesis and constitutes a primordial unity of the world as a “passively synthesized unity.”33 This “Logos of the aesthetic world,” for Husserl, refers to the very articulateness and eloquence of time itself—time’s potency for bringing

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sense into being beneath l’intentionnalité d’acte and its explicit intentional comportments of meaning-bestowal. In summarizing his position on passive synthesis, Merleau-Ponty echoes these remarks from Husserl. As he notes in La temporalité, “the subject was no longer understood as a synthetic activity, but as ek-stase, and … every active process of signification or Sinngebung appeared as derivative and secondary in relation to that pregnancy of meaning [prégnance de la signification] within signs which could serve to define the world.”34 Beneath l’intentionnalité d’acte, a phenomenology of perception discloses an operative intentionality “already at work before any positing judgment,” a λόγος of the aesthetic world or, quoting Kant, “an art hidden in the depths of the human soul.”35 Passivity designates the extent to which I am immersed in this λόγος and the extent to which one’s agency, one’s individual λόγος, is an expression of this more fundamental eloquence of sense in its temporal deflagration. The eloquence of things, their visibility, is not the work of an active or thetic synthesis but is the passive synthesis of time’s own unfolding and autoconstitution, what Merleau-Ponty describes, borrowing another concept from Husserl, as a synthèse de transition or Ubergangsynthesis.36 As Merleau-Ponty notes, The synthesis of time is a transition synthesis; it is the movement of a life which unfolds, and there is no other manner of effectuating it than of living this life; there is no place of time; it is time which carries itself and relaunches itself. Time as indivisible thrust and as transition alone can make possible time as successive multiplicity, and what we place at the origin of intratemporality is a constituting time.37

As we can see, the concept of transition synthesis is crucial for understanding time’s eloquence, but it is actually introduced as early as the Introduction.38 Besides the discussion in La temporalité that we will take under consideration here, MerleauPonty will also mention it explicitly in L’espace and then again La chose et le monde naturel under the section titled “Transition synthesis.” In both instances, what Merleau-Ponty wants to underline is that if we must retain the concept of synthesis at all, and by now we should be sensitive to Merleau-Ponty’s skepticism about this need, we must think about this process not as the organizing and orienting activity of a consciousness—not as an identifying synthesis—but precisely as the Ablauf, the flow and passage between temporal dimensions.39 The discussion of Husserl’s diagram and le champ de présence, then, really do anticipate the discussion of passive synthesis and transition synthesis that follow. Transition synthesis is not a matter of establishing a link between discrete and atomized units through an act of identification but of describing how one temporal profile or phase expires, flows and passes into the next without the positing activity of transcendental subjectivity underlying and effectuating this passage. The transition synthesis of time’s eloquence is self-effectuating, and this is just what it means to describe temporality as auto-constitutive. Time requires no identifying synthesis because the logic of its passage is established only in its occurrence, its unfolding and becoming—an event described by MerleauPonty as éclatement or “eruption.” The logic of this explosion, this conflagration, is immanent to time’s manifestation, and, indeed, time manifests itself only as the

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passage of this flow. There is no pre-established reason or law in advance of temporal becoming—its λόγος is established only in its eventuality. Precisely as eruption, time cannot be understood as a succession of temporal instants—for it is a flow, a continuum of eruptivity—nor can it be understood as the product of an identifying synthesis that would condition the possibility of its eruption. It cannot, therefore, be understood as being. Rather, by designating the passage of time as éclatement, Merleau-Ponty’s aim is to understand the manifestation and shining forth of time precisely in its becoming, and he describes this becoming or passage as a “disintegration” [désintégration].40 Time, we could say, is the force thanks to which being is never able to maintain its integrity as being—because what is shines forth in time, it lacks the strength, the completeness, and coherence of being as such. It is, rather, only becoming—the constant washing away of its wholeness. As he says in a striking remark: What there is in reality, is not a past, a present, a future, not discrete instants A, B, and C, nor really distinct Abschattungen A´, A´´, B´, nor finally a multitude of retentions on the one hand and a multitude of protentions on the other. The upsurge of a new present does not cause a heaping up [tassement] of the past and a tremor [secousse] of the future, but the new present is the passage of a future to the present, and of the former present to the past and is a single movement that begins moving across time from one end to the other. The ‘instants’ A, B and C are not successively but differentiate themselves from each other and correlatively A passes into A´ and from there into A´´.41

Time is a constant flow of change, of mutation and modification. In spite of what we may think looking at the diagram, which is misleading at this point, there are not clear distinctions between one temopral instant and another—each “moment,” if we must retain that term, disintegrates, collapses into the one that follows, and so on. It is this process of flux, this liquidity as the future melts into the present, which already is melting into the past, this process, that time itself is and that Husserl and MerleauPonty attempt to capture with the concept of “transition synthesis.” The eruption of time is not a self-identical, static structure, but, as Husserl says, a continuum of Ablauf—of passing or flow—and the passage of this continuum, Merleau-Ponty says, takes the form of self-differentiation.42 The continuity of time’s passage is thus not the continuity of identity or homogeneity between instants: temporality is not composed of discrete parts that must be sorted out and related to one another through a master transcendental synthesis. One might even go so far as to suggest that each temporal profile is “identified” only in its difference from the others, and that therefore the field of temporal phenomenalization is not a system of temporal identities or units at all but nothing other than a system of continuous divergences. The passage from one moment to the next is, he says, rather like a “continuous emission of Abschattungen, [profiles]” which, he says, “no sooner has come into existence than it already begins to lose its substance.”43 As éclatement, then, Merleau-Ponty can conclude that temporality “is nothing but a general flight out of the Itself [hors du Soi], the one law governing these centrifugal movements, or again, as Heidegger says, an ek-stase.”44 The passage from one temporal profile to the next, time in its autoconstitutive appearance, is also aptly described by Merleau-Ponty as the total déhiscence of sense, its splitting

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and bursting open like a wound that cannot heal.45 Because time shows itself in this dehiscence, as éclatement, there is no absolute presence of time in a twofold sense: no temporal present which is not already the disintegrative passage between past and future and simultaneously no presentation of time that is not already its departure and its “disarticulation” [désarticulation].46 Insofar as the primordial unity of time is effectuated through transition synthesis, the dimensions of time described by Husserl’s diagram in the Zeitbewußtsein are not linked through an act-intentionality but through an operative intentionality, which we now understand as the total phenomenon of lapse or flow, the Ablaufsphänomenen, that time itself is. As Merleau-Ponty notes in La temporalité, While B becomes C, it becomes also B´; and simultaneously A which, while becoming B, had also become A´, collapses [tombe] into A´´. A, A´ and A´´ on the one hand, and B and B´ on the other, are interconnected, not by a synthesis of identification, which would freeze [figerait] them at a point in time, but by a transition-synthesis (Übergangssynthesis), in so far as they issue [sortent] one from the other, and each of these projections is merely one aspect of the total eruption [éclatement] or dehiscence.47

The future becomes present and the present past. As the future flows into the present, its sense is not lost but retained as an echo in continuity with the new present, and in this way one temporal moment splits open into the next. Insofar as the primordial unity of time is established by transition synthesis, its power of articulation is indeed nothing other than this fission, this passage, which by its very nature is characterized by collapse, decay and disarticulation, an unending state of departure. The primordial unity of time is thus the curious unity of an eruption, a unity established only in its transition, in its dehiscence and differentiation. In the passage of this continuum, precisely because it is a passage, what is inscribed fades, and the eloquence of time is thus only the inverse of its silence. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the passage of temporal dimensions as éclatement, however, requires further elucidation. If it is the case that time shows itself as passage, and that we must understand the transition between primal impression, retention and protention as a passage of disintegration, as eruption, then how can we account for the apparent stability and unity of time? To put it differently: how can time present itself as the relatively ordered unfolding of “before” and “after” such that the “temporal ek-stase” is not an absolute or total disintegration in which “the individuality of the moments disappears?”48 Does accounting for this unity not require the priority of a reason or logic given in advance of time’s manifestation, the primacy of an identifying synthesis? In order to answer this question and show how the primordial givenness of time’s passage as écoulement and éclatement, flow and eruption, can generate and account of objective time, we must consider the manner in which the disintegration of time is the inverse function of its eloquence. The disintegration of the present in becoming past is not its absolute dissolution— the loss of time in becoming past is not a total loss, for as Merleau-Ponty says, “its disintegration is forever the inverse or the consequence of its coming to maturity,” or perhaps better:

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Time maintains what it has caused to be, at the very time it expels it from being, because the new being was announced by its predecessor as destined to be, and because, for the latter, to become present was the same thing as being destined to pass away.49

It is precisely this that concept of retention accomplishes. The differentiation of the present in becoming past and the loss of integrity it undergoes do not spell its total erasure but rather its transformation, its modification into a now-retained past. At the same time, the modification of a moment in time gives voice to its protentive profile and so forth. In this way, the event of time’s éclatement, its total dehiscence, establishes the sense of time’s eloquence but only as the inverse of the lapse and disintegration between temporal dimensions in its passage. A quote from Claudel’s Art poétique, cited in full, summarizes Merleau-Ponty’s point: Time is the means offered to all that which will be to be, in order to be no more. It is the Invitation to death, to each phrase to decompose in the explanatory and total harmony, to consummate the speech [parole] of adoration in the ear of Sigé [silence], the Abyss.50

Time’s eloquence, its expressive, consummating power, is the inverse of its passage— its disintegrative logic—because the shining forth of the present is nothing other than the affirmation and repetition [reprise] of the past which had anticipated it.51 Time’s power of disarticulation is thus the inverse of its power to articulate, to bring sense into being. We are still not brought back to the ontological primacy of an identity, however, because the consummating power of time must also be understood as part of a larger structure of écoulement and Ablauf. For, as Merleau-Ponty notes, what there is, is not a present … there is only one single time which is selfconfirmatory, which can bring nothing into existence unless it has already laid that thing’s foundations [fondé] as present and a past to still come [passé à venir], and which establishes itself at a stroke.52

Time’s eloquence, its power of articulation, then, does not lead us back to the ontological primacy of the present for this power itself is bound to the total structure of time as passage, expiration, and lapse—as disintegration and disarticulation. If I were to try and identify a “present” as I watch the tree dance in the wind, I would fail—because there is no present. There is only the total unfolding and shining forth of the tree, its swaying movements, the light reflecting off the green leaves, only the continuous becoming of its dance, the deliquescence of its passage before my eyes. And of course there is no terminus, no point of arrival for this passage—even when the wind stops and the tree is still its sway and dance remain behind it, and the slight tremors in the leaves recall those more grandiose gestures and sweeping movements of its branches. If I were to sit here long enough watching the tree, both of us together would be carried off into the future by time’s disintegration. The becoming of time, we could suggest, is this dual movement of articulation and disarticulation: the contractions and respiration53 of temporality as it unfurls itself and

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that in doing so, sets forth the sense of the world. Actually, one of the two epigraphs to La temporalité,54 another quote from Art poétique, brings Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the passage of time into focus. The Claudel passage reads: “Time is the sense of life (sense: as one says of the direction of a course of water, the sense of a phrase, the sense of a fabric, the sense of the sense of smell).”55 There is something lost in the translation of the French word sens into the English “sense” that this line from Claudel underlines. Time is what gives life meaning, such as it is. More than that, however, time is the principle through which there is a life to be lived at all, that which opens possibility before it and in this way sets one on a certain path, in a certain direction. It is in this way also the principle of life’s orientation, of trajectory, and in a way, fate. But it is also what gives life its feel, its texture, color, flavor, its sentir, and in this way time is the principle of the sense of the sensible. But time only gives sense as the dual movement of articulation and disarticulation that is its éclatement—the eruption of time is the floration of the visible but one that, in its departure, remains incomplete and uncompletable, “a unique structure,” Merleau-Ponty says, “which is presence.”56 Time is that thanks to which sense comes to life, that thanks to which sense comes into being—not as a final resolution, not as complete and enclosed, but only insofar as it we find it at its point of departure, as that which is already outside, beyond. Time is a respiration, breath, the passage of a rhythm of affirmation and disintegration, and it illuminates the world and things only insofar as they are subject to temporal undifferentiation, a kind of oblivion or forgetfulness, as what is accomplished in time lapses into non-sense.

2. Time and the sense of life Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on passive synthesis and the synthesis of transition culminate at the end of “Passivity and Activity,” where he turns briefly to what Heidegger called the “Zusammenhang des Lebens” or “cohesion of a life.”57 It seems that these reflections include some of the important lessons we can take away from La temporalité. For Merleau-Ponty the unity or coherence of life is not a function of a decision or even an act—not even the resolute determination to confront the terminus of one’s possibilities—but the “cohesion” of time in its lapse, passage and disarticulation. The unity of life is not given from the futurity of the closure of one’s possibilities but through life’s very passage and unfolding—through time’s eloquence, achieved precisely in its collapse and dehiscence. The coherence of a life, we could say, is thus the event of its own manifestation and becoming in and through time.58 While Heidegger stresses the thither end of Dasein’s life—its death—Merleau-Ponty, again following Husserl, shifts the emphasis to the opposite end—birth. As he notes: Our birth, or, as Husserl has it in his unpublished writings, our “generativity,” founds both our activity or individuality, and our passivity or generality—that inner weakness [faiblesse] which prevents us from ever achieving the density of an absolute individual. We are not, in an incomprehensible manner, an activity joined

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to a passivity, an automatism surmounted by a will, a perception surmounted by a judgment, but wholly active and wholly passive, because we are the emergence [surgissement] of time.59

The event, or to use one of Merleau-Ponty’s preferred locutions, the advent of life’s cohesion is the becoming of something that affirms, as Merleau-Ponty says in “Cezanne’s Doubt,” “that there was something rather than nothing to be said.”60 The means for this adventure is not a pre-ordained reason, not an originative principle that gives shape to what is to come, but the becoming of temporality in its dual movement of articulation and disarticulation. The becoming of time is the ek-stase of life, its transcendence, and this transcendence is both the means for its unity and cohesion and the means of its dispersal and fragmentation that no resolution could outstrip. Because life and time have this form of becoming, there is no question of an opposition between an active, thetic consciousness, which organizes and orients the sense of the world, on one hand, and a passive body, itself merely an effect of external causal forces. Because the cohesion of our lives is nothing other than the cohesion of time in its becoming, we are, in a sense, both activity and passivity at once. Of course these remarks recall an oft quoted working note from The Visible and the Invisible in which Merleau-Ponty refers to Valéry’s thought about “a body of the spirit.” The passage reads: new as our initiatives may be, they come to birth at the heart of being, they are connected onto the time that streams forth in us, supported on the pivots or hinges of our life, their sense is a ‘direction’—The soul always thinks: this is in it a property of its state, it cannot not think because a field has been opened in which something or the absence of something is always inscribed. This is not an activity of the soul, nor a production of thoughts in the plural, and I am not even the author of that hollow that forms within me by the passage from the present to the retention, it is not I who makes myself think any more than it is I who makes my heart beat.61

As living beings, beings who are born, the cohesion of that life emerges from our situation in time—because as living beings, we are time. It was this kind of passivity, or, indeed, the “passivity of our activity” that the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism seemed to overlook when it identified this unity with the activity of a constituting consciousness. We are bodies of course. But this means that, like the tree, we are organisms that are born from the splitting open of time. As the tree dances in the wind, so do our own lives unwind across the distancing, the spacing, the transcendence of temporality, which both makes us possible and at the same time ensures that we too will mutate, disintegrate, that we will be unable to catch up with ourselves and that we will always be other, on the outside of what we were. To sum up this analysis of La temporalité, we have seen that while MerleauPonty frames his discussion of Husserl’s diagram from the Zeitbewußtsein in terms of le champ de présence, this field is not a designator for the primacy of presence but rather describes the field of manifestation in which time shines forth.

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This field, furthermore, precisely as the field for time’s appearance, is a field of Ablauf, flow, which is characterized both by its écoulement and its éclatement. As écoulement and éclatement, flow and eruption, time manifests itself in the field of presence only as the dehiscence and differentiation of sense, a structure that makes sense and at the same time ensures that, in its disintegrative movement, its sense is never closed. The disintegration of time in its éclatement, however, is not a total disintegration or loss, and time is nonetheless the power that sustains the unity of our lives. This unity and cohesion is not the result of an identifying synthesis but of time’s passive synthesis, its synthesis of transition. The unity and cohesion of life is established in the very advent of temporality as it unfolds, in its éclatement and dehiscence. It will be worth returning to some considerations about the extent to which the reflections outlined above fulfill the theory of sense-genesis opened in Le sentir. Let us recall the striking promissory note Merleau-Ponty offers in the closing gamut of that chapter: If we are to solve the problem which we have set ourselves—that of sensoriality, that is to say of finite subjectivity—it will be by thinking about time and showing how it exists 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.62

From this remark, it seems as if everything in Phenomenology of Perception hinges on the theme of temporality and that La temporalité, therefore, should be read as the central chapter. This remark also suggests that understanding what it means to say that time is autoconstitutive is the key for understanding the significance of subjectivity for this text. As we have seen, time’s autoconstitution can be understood within the horizon of the advent of its éclatement and dehiscence—time’s lapse or disintegration, which is always the inverse of its eloquence and power to bring sense into being. It is probably no coincidence, then, that Merleau-Ponty returns to the question of sense genesis in the closing gamut of La temporalité. We will briefly turn to this discussion before closing. At the opening of one of the final sections of La temporalité, “The world as the place of significations,” Merleau-Ponty summarizes the task of his earlier work, La structure du comportement, which was understood to be the elaboration of the exchange between consciousness and nature, the inner and the outer. Phenomenology of Perception presumably takes a step beyond the first book insofar as it is, perhaps, no longer bound to the earlier dualistic ontological framework of consciousness and nature. As he says it was articulated elsewhere, Merleau-Ponty sees his philosophical task in Phenomenology of Perception in terms of “understanding what, in our world and in ourselves, is the relation between sense and non-sense.”63 To put it differently, the task of this pivotal work, as stated here, is to elaborate the passage between the disarticulation of sense, non-sense, and the moment of expression, the time of the first word. In cashing out this passage or differential between sense and non-sense,

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Merleau-Ponty briefly rehearses some of the arguments from Le sentir. Of course, Husserl and other idealists have understood this passage to be established in the intervention of constituting consciousness. As we have seen, sense, for idealists, is understood as the product of “centrifugal” processes of construction [construire], constitution [constituer], and synthesis [synthèse].64 The analyses of perception and the body that Merleau-Ponty takes up in Phenomenology of Perception, however, “have revealed a more profound significance” for the genesis of sense.65 As we have already seen, for Merleau-Ponty in this text, we no longer have a theory of sensegenesis understood as the centrifugal activity of constituting consciousness but understood as the reprendre and reprise of sense always already under way, understood, as he says here, referencing Heidegger of course, as “ek-stase.” Sense is thus no longer understood to refer to constituting consciousness as its origin, its cradle or dwelling, as Merleau-Ponty says, but to the world itself, to the flesh of things, which is on its way to articulating itself and yet never arrives. It is along these lines that Merleau-Ponty will claim that Phenomenology of Perception discloses a “a new sense of the word ‘sense.’”66 *** At the beginning of Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on temporality he considers the framework, the modality, and style through which time announces itself. There is already something strange in this question: where does one find time? How does one encounter it? It is strange because it surreptitiously poses a spatial question (where?) to a phenomenon that is distinctively non-spatial, and as Bergson understood, defies our attempts to reduce it to space or see it only thanks to space.67 Time has no place. Therefore, when I ask this question about how one encounters it, we must conclude: nowhere. Time has already gone—it is, like Albertine in Proust’s Recherche, disparue.68 When we engage in this task of encountering time and understanding its manner of making itself known, we find that we have missed it: the room is empty; it has already departed. But this is because this departure, its absence, is essential to what time is. It is not a phenomenon that manifests itself right where (and when) it is: being— rather it is an ek-stase, outside of itself, a passage to the beyond. In this way, there is something problematic in Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on le champ de présence. There can be no field of presence as such because time, as he himself admits, is not present (nor presence). It is the total dehiscence of sense in its becoming, differentiation, disintegration, flow, eruption, and explosion: the deflagration of the visible, its flaring up, the brightness of its color, its burning as it shines forth. This fire metaphor, which Merleau-Ponty invokes in L’Œil et l’Esprit,69 is appropriate: fire is an element that is difficult to locate since it has no definite outline, since it is only a flicker, a dance. Fire is decisively visible, for it is light, and yet like all light, it shines forth without boundary, without shape, without quite becoming a thing. It is in this sense that the visible manifests itself: as an emergence, a φύω that rises and sets, and because it is temporal, ek-static, it never quite manages to catch up with itself. It remains open, even in its decay.

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In a way, this answers the question Merleau-Ponty asks about our encounter with time. We do not encounter time in the present or as presence. For in that case we would not encounter time itself but something outside of time. Rather we encounter time only in its escape, in the flight of the visible, in the distance and spacing between what it is seen the eyes of the seer. We encounter time in the spectacle of what appears in its unreachability, in its withdraw from our grasp, in the eloquence of sense that is already its unraveling. This is why MerleauPonty favors the language of disintegration and dehiscence: we encounter time in the becoming of things but must recognize this advent as a flux that renders the sense of the visible into liquid, a flow that splits open, into fission, into deflagration. Time, then, becomes visible in the indefiniteness of movement, in the depth that recedes beyond the horizon, in the concealment and withdrawal of what is before my eyes. I see the world through time as I see the pebble or the tile at the bottom of the pool only through the flux and distortion of the water.70 As the tree sways in the wind outside the window, I encounter time in its blurred outlines and changes in focus; I encounter time because, insofar as it is visible to my eyes, I cannot say for sure where or that the tree itself is. The rock of the branches, the flicker of the leaves under the sun, makes it elusive, and like fire, it has no definite outline as it gently sways in the continuous vibration and tremor of its manifestation. If I were to take a photograph of the tree or make a sketch, this tree here would precisely cease to be the visible one that I see, not only because now I would have a representation or image of it, but because these create the illusion of an a-temporal essence, the manifestation of the thing behind time. What we learn from Merleau-Ponty, however, is that the reverse is true: there is nothing outside becoming in time, and the representation of things as outlines, as essences, as beings in their own proper place and at their proper time, is a fiction. What is true, if we must use this language, is the indefiniteness, the openness of the visible—that when we look with our eyes, we only find the visible at its point of departure, in its distance and egress. In other words, we encounter the world as we encounter time: not present but as missing, having already gone, disparue. *** As indicated in the previous chapter, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the genesis of sense in Phenomenology of Perception relies on a “perceptual synthesis,” a form of sense-making that he says is ineluctably temporal. In an effort to expand upon this account of sense-genesis, this chapter has turned to the La temporalité chapter of that text. The sense of the world, Merleau-Ponty says, following Husserl, comes to be in the temporal framework of le champ de présence. Examining Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl’s Zeitbewußtsein lectures, however, we see that this problematic designation does not indicate a commitment to the ontological primacy of the present or presence but rather refers to the modality of our encounter with time, the field in which time announces itself and becomes manifest. Time, Merleau-Ponty

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argues, makes itself known not in accordance with a pre-established reason or law, and not as the result of an a priori, transcendental synthesis that would organize and orient what comes to pass in advance, but rather through an operative intentionality already at work. Time is not the succession of “nows,” not an array of discrete temporal units standing in mutual exteriority and in need of being related through the intervention of a pre-given constituting origin. The “synthesis” of time, insofar as we can still retain this concept, must rather be understood as a “transition synthesis,” which is also a “passive synthesis.” Transition synthesis, accordingly, is not the active relation of pre-given components but the emergence of sense through fissure and differentiation. Temporal dimensions are not exterior to one another but part of this common flux and come into their distinctness in virtue of their divergence, in the wake of the total phenomenon of splitting open, of the continuous explosion and deflagration that is time. This emergence is not under the authority of a constituting agent but is “autoconstituting,” and insofar as we can attribute something like agency or freedom to our acts and decisions, it is only as the inverse of the passive synthesis of time that works its wonders both upon us and through us. The unity of a life, then, what Heidegger called Zusammenhang des Lebens, is not accomplished in the certitude or resolution of a decision. It is rather only the strange unity of flux, the continuousness of our shining forth, which is already our disintegration in time. Time, as Heidegger understood, is an ek-stase: transcendence, already on the outside, already beyond being what it is, beyond being whatsoever. In this way, such unity remains elusive: because we live in time, because in a way we are time, there is no ultimate meaning to the unfolding of our lives, no beautiful or perfect narratives, only the humdrum mess of how and what we live as we live. Insofar as we live, time continues to unfold and unwind us, allowing to us our own φύω, our own floration and bloom, such as it is. But if we were to look for the secret key that would unlock the mystery of this becoming—the final harmony and λόγος that would pull back the veil—we would look in vain. There is no such secret because it is not of the nature of time to be present itself. Time, precisely because it is ek-static, outside, has already gone: disparue. We have missed it—we encounter it only in the distance between our eyes and the visible, in the blur of movement, in the uncertainty of our finite perspective and the occlusion of what makes itself visible in the depth of vision. We encounter time at the point where the object of our reach escapes, in the flight, the fuga of becoming as it breaks open. Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of time places a special emphasis on the extent to which our lives are subject to its rule. This emphasis, and the attendant account of passivity, is addressed to the ordinary perspective of transcendental thought, which, for Merleau-Ponty, effectively excludes the possibility of passivity in the name of the constituting agency of transcendental subjectivity. As we have already seen, albeit briefly, we would misunderstand the sense of passivity at stake in Merleau-Ponty’s thought in general and Phenomenology of Perception specifically if we concluded that we are wholly passive with respect to time—as if we were mere effects, epiphenomena of an underlying cause. Merleau-Ponty rejects this understanding of passivity right along with the absolute activity endemic to the traditional perspective of

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transcendental thought. In order to come to terms with Merleau-Ponty’s account of passivity and activity, we must turn to the final chapter of Phenomenology of Perception, La liberté, and his most explicit engagement in that text with his friend and eventual enemy, Jean-Paul Sartre.71

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In the final chapter of Phenomenology of Perception, La liberté, the account of sensegenesis and temporality that was set in motion in Le sentir and La temporalité reaches its fullest articulation. Though obviously essential to moral and political questions, this chapter is also Merleau-Ponty’s opportunity for concluding the theory of sensegenesis set forth. Beneath its ethical and political register, the story told about freedom here is also, and perhaps more urgently, about the power of expression and, ultimately, the incompleteness and lateness of becoming to being—more urgent because whatever moral and political conclusions we wish to draw presuppose the ontological architecture that makes such questions possible. Merleau-Ponty’s claim is twofold: on one hand, our freedom, our ability to interrupt and to bring sense into being through our explicit intentionalities, is late with respect to the dehiscence of sense described and which we encountered in the previous chapter. Our freedom is not identified with an unmitigated and pure néant, nothingness, but is, as Merleau-Ponty insists, être en situation: inscribed within a situation. Our freedom always finds itself in a fecund history of which it cannot claim to be the author. This is one sense of lateness at stake, and we get a glimpse of the extent to which Merleau-Ponty was critically situating the philosophy of lateness with respect to Sartre. On the other hand, however, this story of sense-genesis is not just about the lateness of “consciousness” to a “world,” but, as we have already seen, is about the lateness of becoming to being—ontological lateness. While freedom finds itself immersed in a historical sense of which it cannot claim to be author, the becoming of sense itself is characterized by a certain delay, non-coincidence and unfinalizability. These themes come together in La liberté, and this chapter will attempt to reconstruct some of the narrative that closes Phenomenology of Perception in order to provide some further indications of the philosophy of lateness it articulates. While Sartre remained committed to the ontological purity of the néant as it surges up into the fullness and plenitude of being, Merleau-Ponty argues that ontological purity is precisely what we cannot have: instead we have an ontology of “mixture” and “confusion”—indeed “contamination.”1 The point of contention between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty is not Sartre’s account of facticity or even his identification of sense-genesis with freedom but the alleged ontological purity of the en soi and pour soi, the “in-itself ” and “for-itself.”2 Following through on the account of sense-genesis developed in the previous chapters, we see that sense is not oriented in accordance with the upsurgence of pure nothingness within the plenitude of being

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but that our reflective comportment in the world always comes in the wake of the temporal becoming of sense: for Merleau-Ponty, the articulating and articulated are blurred, confused, and ambiguous in their mutual intertwining. The first part of this chapter will take up the opening gamut of La liberté and show how, for Merleau-Ponty, the theme of freedom, like for Sartre, is a means for once again opening up the question of sense-genesis. While phenomenological method discloses the absolute flux of temporality as the transcendental field, such a method risks a kind of transcendental a-historicism insofar as it understands sense to emerge through the upsurgence of negativity in the fullness of being—a rupture centered in the living present, the time of the absolute and unconditional source of the world’s meaningfulness. Against this Sartrean account, Merleau-Ponty tries to restore a generativity and fecundity to history—to think sense-genesis as the resumption and reprisal of a meaningful history already under way. This effort, however, requires rethinking some basic assumptions that have characterized the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism. Transcendental inquiry, for Merleau-Ponty, is not about securing the “necessary conditions of possibility without which …” that characterize the ordinary perspective of transcendental thought. “Possibility,” accordingly, remains bound to its modal partner, necessity, which closes the future within the strict outline of its course. In place of “possibility,” then, Merleau-Ponty offers a philosophy of “probability,” the “maybe.” Probability, for Merleau-Ponty does not refer to a statistical calculus that reaches out to subject being to the control and mastery of its forecasting but indicates the unknown, the unpredictability and unmasterability of the future. Merleau-Ponty elaborates these reflections by turning to a more explicitly political discussion of class-consciousness and revolution, and the second part of the chapter follows this account. Revolutions and the forms of class-consciousness that motivate them, accordingly, are neither “possible” futures initiated by the unconditional agency of absolute freedom nor the “necessary” outcomes of objective historical forces. They are, rather, only probable: they have a kind of eventuality; they take place through the problematic contingency of freedom, its insertion into history, which presses down upon it. What we see through this discussion is that freedom, understood as a power to articulate sense, is not the pure and unmitigated upsurgence of néant but, following the thread of the reflections in Le sentir and La temporalité, is situated with the historical deflagration of meaning. The negativity of freedom, its revolutionary power to interrupt and to begin again, is not identified with the intervention of a nothingness purified of its historical density and specificity, but carries the weight of its situation as it is set forth through the becoming of sense in time. Oppression and exploitation are not situations submitted to the exteriority of freedom—they are lived through from the inside, carried forward by those who have to endure them in spite of what their freedom may wish. In contrast to the opposition of autonomy and heteronomy that could be said to characterize Sartre’s position, Merleau-Ponty posits an account of freedom as contaminated by its body, its history, and the burden of its existence. This discussion, finally, provides an opportunity for considering the sense of lateness at stake: consciousness is late to its world and to its history and only assumes them “after the fact.” This lateness, however, is a function of a more fundamental,



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ontological lateness we have already encountered: the lateness of becoming to being, its indeterminacy, its incompleteness, that is to say, its openness onto the unknown, undetermined future.

1. Freedom and sense-genesis Merleau-Ponty begins his discussion of sense-genesis in La liberté by reiterating an argument for the absoluteness of freedom, an argument clearly intended to echo Sartre’s account in L’être et le néant. This reconstructed version of Sartre, which we will take the opportunity to assess, will ultimately become the target of the critique. The absoluteness of freedom follows if we accept the premise that constituting consciousness is the transcendental condition of possibility for establishing the sense of things and therefore cannot be identified with what it has constituted.3 In other words, any transcendental point of view, which is essential to phenomenology, seems to require the purity of the transcendental and the empirical, an absolute difference between what constitutes and what is constituted.4 Sartre, in following this line of reasoning, identifies freedom with the transcendental: freedom is absolute in its absolute purity, its absolute difference from the meaning that it conditions and brings into being. To this extent, the purity of freedom seems to be the logical conclusion to taking up the transcendental attitude, and this is one way of interpreting the results of La temporalité insofar as the transcendental field was identified with an “anonymous flux, a global project in which there are so far no ‘states of consciousness,’ nor, a fortiori, qualifications of any sort.”5 If we admit any degree of conditionality to the transcendental, we have already identified this flux with a thing and predicated to it the sense it constitutes, thereby violating its transcendental status—we have reduced it to being merely a part of the world it was supposed to found. The result is that there is nothing that can impinge on this field, and, as Merleau-Ponty says, “My freedom and my universality cannot admit of eclipse.”6 Within this perspective, even what appear to be obstacles to freedom are revealed to be consequences of a choice that has been made as part of the subject’s negotiations with the world, negotiations that constitute its sense and illuminate things precisely as “obstacles.” A rock face, for example, can show itself as “un-climbable” only insofar as the subject already navigates a significant and meaningful world that is already the result of its own constitutive, sense-bestowing activity. I choose its unclimbability and choose the means by which I will inherit this—either to give up and go home or to try and fail. The only limits to freedom, then, are the limits always imposed by freedom.7 As Merleau-Ponty says, Since it is the latter [freedom] who, on arising, brings to light sense and value in things, and since nothing can reach it except through acquiring, thanks to it, sense and value, there is no action of things on the subject, but merely a signification (in the active sense), a centrifugal Sinngebung.8

As the transcendental condition of possibility for sense-genesis, this freedom is radically a priori and nothing can circumvent its power to bring significance into

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being. All significance, even what may be an obstacle to it, refers to this freedom, which is the source and origin of the sense of the world. We seem to be left with a duality between a kind of mechanical determinism and the transcendental attitude, which here seems to require an unchallengeable freedom “without exterior.” As Merleau-Ponty notes, “It is impossible to mark a point beyond which things cease to be ἐφ’ ἤμιν. All are in our power or none.”9 For Sartre, I even choose my pain at the point where I choose the attitude I take up on it and how I respond to it. My freedom, for Sartre, is all-enveloping, for because néant is the source of all sense, it is always positioned to make sense of whatever factical circumstances befall it. It is the unlimitedness of freedom in this sense that bothers Merleau-Ponty, and his task in this part of the text is to restore to freedom its finitude, situatedness, and historicity. What is at stake, as we can see, is an account of sense-genesis that can, on one hand, account for the manner in which the world comes into view through the accomplishment of certain interpretive acts, what Merleau-Ponty calls its outward or centrifugal movement. The first point, then, is to accept the thesis, basic to the transcendental attitude, that the world arises through certain processes of sensedonation or givenness: the world, for phenomenology, is ineluctably meaningful. On the other hand, this account of the coincidence of freedom and sense-genesis remains inadequate insofar as it retains the vestiges of the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism at the point where it limits its account of sense-genesis to this centrifugal movement, to the activity of a pure, constituting point of view. Merleau-Ponty must, somehow, reconcile the ipseity of sense—that the visible always manifests itself to a point of view that belongs to someone—with the recognition that this “someone” is neither a transcendental unity of apperception nor a purified nothingness. Merleau-Ponty states this tension in this way: It is true that nothing has sense and value for anyone but me and through anyone but me, but this proposition remains indeterminate and merges with the Kantian idea of a consciousness which “finds in things only what it has put into them,” and with the idealist refutation of realism, as long as we are not more precise on how we understand sense and the self. By defining ourselves as a universal power of Sinngebung, we have reverted to the method of the “that without which” and to reflexive analysis of the classical type, which seeks the conditions of possibility without occupying itself with the conditions of reality.10

Consistent with Merleau-Ponty’s analyses in Le sentir and La temporalité, the task is to provide account for sense-genesis in a way that is no longer beholden to the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism—to conceive the birth of meaning otherwise than as the centrifugal activity of a constituting consciousness that, as we have seen, is caught in the tension of absolute distance and proxmity. The important lesson of the analysis of absolute freedom that begins La liberté, then, is to illustrate the extent to which a commitment to unconditioned freedom retains these vestiges and therefore remains within the confines of the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism. The analysis of sense-genesis must therefore be resumed once again, now more explicitly in the context of the differentiation of being into sense, the power to bring significance into the world. If absolute freedom can only see sense-genesis



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as a centrifugal movement—that sense radiates from a center of unconditioned freedom—and if this account is only another version of the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism, then the task of re-conceiving sense-genesis would see it as “both centrifugal and centripetal,” that sense does not only move outward from an empty center—unconditioned freedom—but simultaneously moves toward that center, that there is a centripetal movement that encroaches upon and envelops the centrifugal flight of sense accomplished in Sinngebung. This centripetal movement, as MerleauPonty will show, is the movement of a historical and institutional sense in which all explicit intentionalities find themselves immersed. Such historical and institutional sense is possible, of course, on the basis of the temporal dehiscence of sense outlined earlier in Le sentir and La temporalité, and the various threads of Merleau-Ponty’s account of sense-genesis—reprendre, reprise, and temporal dehiscence—come together in the discussion of freedom and history in the following sections of La liberté. Merleau-Ponty begins his revised account of Sinngebung and freedom by reconsidering the argument that freedom constitutes its own obstacles, i.e., that “the only limit to freedom is freedom.”11 He returns to the example of climbing a rock face to outline this revised account. If we adopt the transcendental attitude, which his critique of realism requires, then it seems that we are compelled to accept the premise that freedom does not merely confer sense episodically, here and there, but is the condition of possibility of any sense whatsoever. To reiterate the point made earlier, freedom appears not only as the condition of possibility for means and ways but for obstacles as well—that freedom is the condition of possibility for the “structure of the ‘il y a,’ that of the ‘here’ and the ‘there’, [and that] it is present wherever these structures arise.”12 Freedom, from the transcendental standpoint, is the condition of possibility for the structure of “there is” in general, for the sense of any situation whatsoever, the condition of possibility for there being possibilities. In order to understand the manner in which Sinngebung provides the general structure for the il y a, indeed, for the world, we must allow a distinction between my express intentions and general intentions, what up to this Merleau-Ponty has designated as l’intentionnalité d’acte and l’intentionnalité opérante. The former, of course, describes the manner in which I explicitly navigate and constitute the sense of the world as it is given, e.g., when I make judgments about things; the latter, on the other hand, describes the potentialities my environment exhibits, the presentation of sense prior to taking up a definite stance on things. My express intentions are always founded on my general intentions, for no matter how hard I try, to reference the previous example, I cannot choose that there is no rock face before me.13 General or operative intentionality, as we have seen, is not the activity of a pure or transcendental ego, but indicates an aspect of subjectivity that Merleau-Ponty here describes as a “natural self which does not quit its terrestrial situation and which sketches absolute valorizations without cease.”14 This natural self is what is designated by my incarnation in the world, and through it, as Merleau-Ponty says, “As I have hands, feet, a body, a world, I carry around me intentions which are not decisive [décisoires] and which affect my surrounding characters that I do not choose.”15 Such carnal and terrestrial intentions have a double generality: first they constitute a “system where all possible objects are at once enclosed,” i.e., constitute the givenness of what is given and my most basic

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openness to it: a visible world before my eyes in advance of my judgments, which are secondary and only come later. Second, these terrestrial intentions do not refer themselves to the monocular and unified perspective of a pure ego but dispossess the ipseity and sovereignty of subjectivity insofar as they “come from beyond me.”16 As a terrestrial self, incarnated in a situation, I find that I am already a project of a world, of the dehiscence of becoming in time, and that I am enveloped by and immersed in a sense for which I cannot claim to be the author. I am adrift in the wake of the deflagration of sense. Taking an interpretive stance on the world, making a judgment, always presupposes this background of sense that is given in its carnality, and this background is presupposed by all evaluations. It is precisely in reference to this background that Merleau-Ponty will speak of “an autochthonous sense of the world which constitutes itself in the commerce which our incarnated existence has with it, and which forms the soil [sol] of every decisive Sinngebung.”17 In sum, MerleauPonty is arguing that every active sense-genesis, every thetic or explicit intention, is nourished by a passive sense-genesis, the passive synthesis of time, which constitutes the field of its possibility, its field of “presence.” It is precisely this kind of passivity that is at stake for Merleau-Ponty in his attempt to shift the emphasis of transcendental philosophy from “possibility” to “probability” and his proposed attempt to “find a phenomenological basis for statistical thought.”18 This position might seem strange considering Merleau-Ponty’s unequivocal opposition to the realist ontology and cruelty that statistical thinking seems to imply, but in fact his intention is not to defend a form of scientific realism or mathematical forecasting but to undermine the idealist’s emphasis on necessity and underscore the precarious ontology of contingency at stake. Providing a phenomenological basis for statistical or probabilistic thinking allows us to dispense with the kinds of certainty and apodicticity with which the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism has traditionally been enamored. “Possibility,” a concept that has, since at least Kant, been the marker of transcendental thought, is the modal correlate of “necessity,” and it is this implication that worries Merleau-Ponty. By retaining the concept of “possibility,” the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism becomes a discourse of necessity, of apodicticity, and in this way the concept of possibility is really a signal for totality, closure, and cruelty. “Probability” is a term chosen by Merleau-Ponty to replace “possibility” in order to underscore indeterminacy, uncertainty, and indeed, openness. Probability in this sense is thus not about forecasting algorithms or a calculus of the future, but about the unknown, the “maybe,” the words we speak when we cannot predict and do not know, when we remain open to what will come. Probability is about a lack of absolutely clear vision, and this blur, this indeterminacy, Merleau-Ponty says, “belongs necessarily to a being who is fixed, situated and invested in the world.”19 In its uncertainty, the probable, the maybe, nonetheless flows from the eloquence of the world itself—it might come to pass and maybe just because what comes forth to me does so from my history. In this sense, to say that something is probable means that there is an “engagement” in it—that it counts as part of my “dwelling” [domicile]; the probable follows from a past, “which is not a fatality [fatalité],” but “has a specific weight, which is not a sum of events over there, far from me, but the atmosphere of my present.”20 Probabilistic thinking thus enables a way to think the event of sense



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that undermines the rationalist’s dilemma of realism and idealism, determinism and freedom: that “either the event comes from me or it is imposed from outside.”21 In place of this alternative, a phenomenology of perception, insofar as it makes room for probabilistic thinking, allows for indeterminacy, and the problems of human freedom and sense-genesis are to be conceived in the interstice of this undecidability. Insofar as the perceiver is situated within a world which has the weight and density of being past, a sense for which the perceiver is late, there is no question of attributing the event of sense to his presence or to the upsurge of his negativity in the fullness of being; likewise, there is no question of accounting for this event in terms of realism, as a series of causal relationships, partes extra partes. Rather, the event of sense engages the perceiver in a world—with an inferiority complex, for example—and this engagement is “probable” insofar as it constitutes for the perceiver a sense which he must reckon with, either by allowing this complex to determine the shape and style of the world within which he dwells or by marking out the possibility of a new beginning—a beginning and nascence opened up by the weight that the sense of the world exerts on us. If someone interrupts the course of the sense of one’s life, in acknowledging or confronting the otherwise silent limitations exerted by the world and by history, such an interruption, such a moment of vision or Augenblick, is possible only on the basis of those limitations, in virtue of the fact that we find ourselves in a world and situation for which we are late.22 There is a “break in time,” a power to interrupt which is simultaneously the power to begin.23 Such a break or rupture is precisely what Merleau-Ponty understands by freedom, which he says, “does not destroy our situation, but meshes with it: our situation, as long as we live, is open, which implies both that it calls up privileged modes of resolution, and also that it is powerless to procure anything by itself.”24 In place of the absolute standpoint of constituting consciousness or absolute freedom, Merleau-Ponty argues for a conception of Sinngebung and freedom that is conditioned by the dehiscence and éclatement of sense in its becoming: the perceiver has always been given over to a specific situation, and its situation is never exhaustively in its grasp.

2. The lateness of becoming The reflections on freedom, sense-genesis and temporality that close Phenomenology of Perception also provide some indications of the philosophy of lateness at stake in this text, and it will be worth taking them into consideration before turning to what a philosophy of lateness means more explicitly, as we shall do in the following part. As we have seen, Merleau-Ponty’s thesis is that freedom, understood precisely as sense-genesis, a power to bring meaning into being, comes late with respect to a sense already under way because of its temporal and historical structure. The meaning that freedom enables, furthermore, because it is temporal and historical, never becomes fully articulate, and the tasks of expression, therefore, remain “like a repeated disappointment and failure.”25 As temporal and historical beings, we find that we are late for a situation we did not constitute and that, in spite of our best efforts, we cannot

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coincide with that situation, which transcends our grasp and which perpetually withdraws. This is at least one reason why political revolutions tend to exceed their intentions and vacillate from their intended course. Because of our lateness, the project of making sense, of expression, remains always to be done and our state, because of the lateness of becoming to being, is that of the beginner—of being born into a world for which we are not the authors, of giving birth to a world that will defy our mastery. Merleau-Ponty etches out this sense of lateness in the latter half of La liberté, beginning with the considerations of history and institutionality in the section titled “Valorization of historical situations: class before class consciousness.” Here, he draws a connection between his account of sense-genesis, heretofore articulated in terms of reprendre and reprise, and history and institutionality. In opposition to the apparent a-historicism of the Sartrean account of freedom, Merleau-Ponty argues that there is sense in history because its unfolding is a process of resuming and reprising institutions of sense already under way. Echoing his earlier considerations of the process of sensegenesis, the sense of history perpetually eludes our attempts to inherit it and make it our own. Our projects and endeavors remain within the grip of the historical institutions that constitute us, and at the same time the meaning of history remains elusive for those of us who are still immersed in its unfolding and subject to its adventure. It is in this context that Merleau-Ponty will again critically situate himself with respect to the Sartrean26 understanding of freedom and sense genesis that he defended in the opening pages of the chapter, and while a more exhaustive and systematic account of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of history remains beyond what can be accomplished here, it will be worth turning to this discussion and the closing gamut of La liberté to illustrate the philosophy of lateness at play in Phenomenology of Perception. If we retrace the steps taken in the phenomenological analysis of the text, we arrive at a transcendental field identified with an “anonymous and pre-human flux”27 and recall what is at stake here from our discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s reflections in La temporalité. The transcendental field, accordingly, is neither to be identified with a constituting consciousness nor indeed even with the temporal dimension of the present. The field of presence, rather, is the field of time’s manifestation as écoulement and éclatement—the dehiscence and self-differentiation of time in its autoconstitution and becoming. As the designation for the transcendental field, this flux is ontologically more primordial than what can be predicated to it, and Merleau-Ponty’s considerations of class-consciousness presuppose and follow up on this argument. The field of presence, accordingly, lies beneath the various identities that saturate our mundane being in the world such as “worker” or “bourgeois,” and the question that seems to be motivating the reflections in this section is whether the phenomenological results of the preceding analyses, particularly the disclosure of the field of presence as the field of time’s dehiscence, can be reconciled with a theory of sense-genesis that would restore its temporal and historical density. The discussion of class-consciousness here thus provides an opportunity for showing that the phenomenological method adopted by Merleau-Ponty is not irreconcilable with a theory of sense genesis that takes the force and weight of historical institutionality seriously.28 If we remain within the strictly phenomenological viewpoint, one that sees all sense as determined by the flux of transcendental subjectivity—or in this case, by



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freedom—then it follows that class-consciousness can never be more than a “second view” upon myself. Within this phenomenological perspective, identifying myself with the workers or with the bourgeoisie seems to be the result of some fundamental choice, and the significance of my life is always the result of some explicit agency and its ipseity. From such a perspective, any claims that I can be essentially identified with the workers or bourgeoisie—indeed, that I could be essentially identified with anything—would be a function of a certain form of denial, dissemblance and bad faith. Such an identification would simply carry out a process of objectification consistent with the natural attitude—it would see the condition of the proletariat strictly in terms of external causal correlations, partes extra partes. Within the phenomenological attitude, then, I am never “at my center a worker or a bourgeois but a consciousness which freely valorizes itself as a bourgeois consciousness or proletarian consciousness.”29 Likewise, according to this phenomenological viewpoint, revolution would never be the outcome of a materially determined history of “objective conditions” but would be the result of “the decision taken by the worker to will [vouloir] revolution,” and it would be through this kind of resolute decision that the worker would constitute him or herself as a proletarian.30 Such resolve, decision, and freedom is, of course, exercised in reckoning with the circumstances that show themselves in the present, and the result of this phenomenological account is that “history does not make sense by itself, it only has what we give to it through our will.”31 It thus seems that if we remain within the phenomenological attitude, we are compelled to reduce all sense to the constituting activity of pure consciousness. History itself would have no power to generate sense—there would be no historical meaning as such—for all sense, according to this story, has the free decision of the flux of consciousness as its origin. The sense of history would be only retrospective, a function of transcendental consciousness determining its sense in the present, and insofar as this consciousness could be said to circumscribe the transcendental field, there is nothing beneath or behind it.32 This position, however, besides being naïve about historical materialism, comes too close to the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism and, for Merleau-Ponty, fundamentally distorts the meaning of phenomenological method. This account of sense-genesis and history lapses into the dialectic of realism and idealism, which, he says, “are two aspects of the same error, two ways of ignoring the phenomena.”33 According to this dialectic, class-consciousness is either a function of the determination of external and objective conditions or is reduced to the freedom and self-determination of the flux of transcendental consciousness. In either case, MerleauPonty says, “we are in the realm of abstraction because we abide in the alternative of the en soi and the pour soi.”34 The mistake common to both realism and idealism, and which inscribes them in the dialectic of the en soi and pour soi, is that both poles fail to see the fecundity of history and the temporal, institutional dehiscence of sense. As Merleau-Ponty notes, they consider only intellectual projects instead of bringing into account the existential project, which is the polarization of a life towards a determined-undetermined goal, which has no representation and which is recognized only in being attained.35

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Idealism only understands one kind of intentionality—l’intentionnalité d’acte—and therefore necessarily overlooks “true intentionality,” l’intentionnalité opérante. For operative intentionality, it is a question of “belonging with,” être à, rather than positing the object; it is a matter of recovering the “interrogative, the subjunctive, the wish, waiting [l’attente], the positive indetermination of these modes of consciousness,” for objectivating, act intentionality only understands “indicative consciousness, in the present or in the future.”36 An authentic understanding of history and classconsciousness requires the recovery of these indeterminate, open modes of setting forth toward the world and the operative intentionality that constitutes them. What is required is a certain kind of phenomenological analysis that does not reduce all sense to the transparency of absolute, constituting consciousness and which is capable of restoring to history its generativity and fecundity. As Merleau-Ponty’s analysis in La liberté has already suggested, the possibility of this historical genesis is located in operative intentionality, which, as we know, has already been identified with passive synthesis, with time’s power to articulate sense in its becoming. It is precisely because realism and idealism restrict themselves to intellectual consciousness—and to l’intentionnalité d’acte—that they cannot but fail to understand class, oppression, and exploitation. Class and class antagonism are situations that are lived-through, that we exist. And the historical forces that press down upon us and that constitute this existence to which we are given over—global capital, its alienation and perversion, and so forth—are not strictly objective, “impersonal” forces but “institutions as I carry them within me and experience them.” Likewise, whatever explicit decisions I may make and whatever political project may emerge from these decisions are “my way of being in the world within this institutional framework.”37 Class antagonism, the material and historical forces of political economy, the ideologies they give birth to, oppression, and exploitation, all erupt from the deflagration of sense, the permanent dissonance of being, and as Merleau-Ponty says, “they are lived through in ambiguity.”38 It is the world into which we are born, a world to which we are late, and which precisely for that reason remains our responsibility because it is the limit to our freedom and action. Neither realism nor idealism can account for class-consciousness because both fail to understand history; they fail to take the temporal dehiscence of sense as their point of departure. In the account of sense-genesis that begins in Le sentir and is carried forward in La temporalité, Merleau-Ponty has already indicated the means for moving beyond this dilemma and the dialectic of the en soi and pour soi. What is required for understanding class-consciousness and history is nothing other than the phenomenological method outlined in Phenomenology of Perception—what he here calls a “truly existential method.”39 This method serves to restore sense to history—to give space for an authentically historical genesis of sense that is no longer organized around the presence of transcendental constituting consciousness. According to this “more radical reflection,” I grasp around my absolute individuality a kind of halo of generality or a kind of atmosphere of ‘sociality’ … I must seize myself as eccentric to myself and that my singular existence diffuses around itself, so to speak, an existence in quality.40



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If we restore sense to history, I find that I am no longer the center of the world’s significance and, indeed, no longer center even to myself. I find that I am immersed in and confronted with sense that must be reckoned with and that I am participating in a situation of which I am not the author. I find myself to be immersed in the becoming and unfolding of time, and as such, I find that I dwell within a historical becoming and genesis. Indeed, I find “that my life must have a sense that I do not constitute.”41 Restoring sense to history—making room for a temporal and historical genesis of sense—completes Merleau-Ponty’s account of sense-genesis in Phenomenology of Perception. Sinngebung, sense-genesis, is not exclusively centrifugal42—it does not only move outward from a center occupied by a transcendental subject—but is immersed in a historical tradition that it resumes and reprises, and this sense is given through historical institutions, complexes of sedimented and hardened meaning that are lived through, what Merleau-Ponty describes as “a zone of generalized existence and projects already formed, significations which hang between us and things.”43 The point of orientation of sense is thus not a center at all, but the “absolute flux” that was identified with the transcendental field, which, of course, is nothing other than the temporal dehiscence of sense in its becoming—what Merleau-Ponty described in La temporalité, not as a center or even a transcendental ground of sense, but as the passage of sense in its éclatement. As dehiscence, as becoming, we must not represent this flux as “absolute contact with self, as an absolute density without internal fault.” Rather, this flux is an ek-stase, “a being which pursues itself outside.”44 What is given in “true reflection,” accordingly, is not a series of episodes, one flux and then another, but the reprisal of this total dehiscence and becoming in “the generality of a nature, the cohesion of an intersubjective life and of a world.”45 As Merleau-Ponty notes in a striking passage, “I am all that I see; I am an intersubjective field, not in spite of my body and my historical situation, but on the contrary, in being this body and this situation and through them, all the rest.”46 Though of course he had not yet developed the terminology in Phenomenology of Perception, such a remark comes very close to saying that what I am is an expression of the flesh of the world. I am not a subject in possession of itself—not even a subject centered and identical to itself—but an articulation of this expressive, temporal éclatement, of this total genesis which gives sense to history and which, in turn, gives sense to life even in all its turmoil. What Sartre’s identification elides, accordingly, is the notion of a “natural” or “generalized” time—a time which is the “perpetual recommencement and consecution of the past, present, future,” a succession that is nonetheless “like a repeated disappointment and failure,” a failure, as we have seen, endemic to the very lapse and expiration of time itself, a time that “eats away at itself and undoes what it has done.”47 In other words, echoing the reflections from La temporalité, this natural time is the time of becoming, its articulation and disarticulation. It is through reprising these considerations of temporalization that Merleau-Ponty resituates the problem of negativity and freedom in his dialogue with Sartre. The dehiscence of time as articulation and disarticulation, in its gushing forth, is the event of the birth of an existent for which the world is already constituted and who never, accordingly, “chooses its being or its manner of being,”48 and it is this thought about situatedness, about lateness, that the Sartrean account ignores. By placing néant beneath

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being—by making negativity the means for being to be—the Sartrean account remains silent about the éclatement and dehiscence of sense in its becoming and therefore, to an extent, passes over the phenomenon of temporality. To put Merleau-Ponty’s objection differently, if we assert the ontological primacy of negativity in the Sartrean fashion, then we have rendered the genesis of sense without place—we “remain suspended in nothingness [le néant].”49 Sartre, in other words, has no account for the historicity of néant, its placement and immersion in sense. What Sartre refuses to consider, accordingly, is that negativity is precisely an event—or an advent, to use Merleau-Ponty’s terminology—which as such has its own context and history, its own eventuality that provides for its appearance and without which it could not appear. The place or dwelling of negativity is the dehiscence of sense—it is in the becoming of sense that negativity appears and precisely for that reason, negativity, if we choose to talk of negativity, is not pure, unspoiled nothingness but has a certain line and contour, a certain style of manifestation and of making itself known. Merleau-Ponty’s position is therefore a kind of reversal of Sartre. Becoming is not the outcome of the unconditioned, nihilating power of consciousness in its unmitigated upsurgence in being, but this power, insofar as it is possible, has its place, its dwelling, within the total dehiscence of becoming, within the unfolding of temporality and history. It is in this sense that Merleau-Ponty says that: We are always in the fullness, in being, like a face, even in rest, even dead, is always condemned to express something (there is, in the dead, surprise, peace, discretion), like silence is still a modality of the sonorous world.50

What Sartre seems to have forgotten and elided is the inherently institutional and historical structure of negativity—that this power of interruption is never unconditioned but takes place in the unfolding and becoming of sense, that it is a power of interruption only insofar as it also a power of resumption and reprisal and, therefore, a power to begin again. Remarks like this follow through on what Merleau-Ponty says about history in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception. In a line of reflection that clearly anticipates these passages from La liberté, he makes a remark there clearly playing on Sartre’s statement that we are “condemned to be free”:51 In relation to their fundamental dimensions, all periods of history appear as manifestations of a single existence or as episodes in a single drama—for which we do not know if it has a denouement. Because we are in the world we are condemned to sense, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.52

Freedom appears only in the unfolding of temporality in its dehiscence, only in the becoming and unfolding of sense and history. We are immersed in a drama that we did not constitute and therefore the scope and outcome of this drama is beyond our reach. We arrive late on the scene. We are condemned to live through it, nonetheless, precisely because we belong to this drama—we are condemned to the becoming of significance that we did not author, to a situation not of our making. In other words, the problem with Sartre’s account, for Merleau-Ponty, is that it remains a-historical insofar as it retained Kant’s distinction between autonomy and



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heteronomy. For Sartre, we are either free in giving law unto ourselves and to the world, or we are subject to laws imposed on us from outside. We are either radically and unconditionally free or we are determined. In opposition to Sartre’s idea that freedom is the unmediated and unconditioned upsurgence of nothingness,53 for Merleau-Ponty, freedom means that we are beings who find ourselves immersed in a world and a history for which we are constitutively late. This is to say that we are beings who are part of a meaningful history—a history that constitutes the sense of the world for us; we find ourselves in the midst of time and history in their becoming and genesis. This is not an episodic history, furthermore, but, as Merleau-Ponty has already emphasized, has a certain unity and coherence, an overall sense, a direction, in a manner analogous to drama. As Merleau-Ponty says in answer to the question, “What is freedom?”: To be born is at the same time to be born of the world and to be born into the world. The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted; in the first relation we are solicited, in the second we are open to an infinity of possibilities. But this analysis is still abstract, for we exist in the two relations at the same time. There is, therefore, never determinism and never absolute choice, I am never a thing and never a naked consciousness.54

Our freedom, understood as a power of interruption, is possible only in virtue of its lateness. It comes on the heels of the dehiscence of sense and history which envelop it and which it cannot outstrip. For Merleau-Ponty, freedom necessarily involves a certain constitutive degree of passivity. There is a sense in which one could suggest that the very term “freedom,” in this context, is a misnomer insofar as this term, by definition, seems to entail the opposition of agency, which is subjective, autonomous and unconditioned, and determinism, understood as a series of causal correspondences or correlations related partes extra partes. Subverting this very duality is what is at stake in Merleau-Ponty’s considerations of freedom, and the result is an understanding of human agency which is, in a sense, no longer “autonomous,” which, rather than giving law unto itself unconditionally, is prescribed its sense by its immersion in history—its immersion in the unfolding of a temporal sense that envelops this capacity and, in so doing, nurtures and sustains it. There is thus neither strict autonomy nor strict heteronomy, for Merleau-Ponty, but “an inextricable confusion” of the two in which it is “impossible to delimit the ‘share of the situation’ and the ‘share of freedom.’”55 These reflections on freedom, sense-genesis and temporality give us a sense of the kind of lateness at stake in Phenomenology of Perception and in Merleau-Ponty’s work more broadly. Lateness, for Merleau-Ponty, functions on two simultaneous levels. On one level, there is the lateness of l’intentionnalité d’acte to l’intentionnalité opérante— the lateness of our explicit, thetic, indeed conscious orientation in the world, including our judgments, positings, what Merleau-Ponty elsewhere describes as the “positing of a statement [énoncé]” or “speaking consciousness”56 to our immersion in history, our envelopment in the dehiscence and becoming of sense that is always already under way. This level of lateness circumscribes our situatedness, the fact that we find the world behind and ahead of us. Even at this level of lateness, for Merleau-Ponty, we

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can see a direct challenge to the ordinary understanding of transcendental idealism insofar as what has traditionally been understood as “constituting consciousness,” ipseity, pensée en survol, self-possession, even as the unmitigated upsurgence of néant, is no longer identified with the transcendental field. Consciousness is no longer understood to be the origin of sense, but if we must speak of consciousness, it is only to the extent to which this form of existence is late to a world not of its making, to the extent that this existence is immersed in the autochthonous becoming of sense and in the advent of history. This level of lateness is what Merleau-Ponty designates by the term “être en situation,” being in situation, and it is one way in which we could understand his references to our “internal weakness.”57 As situated beings, we are not a power standing at the center of the cosmos but are given over to a world that eludes our mastery, which was there before us and which perpetually escapes our attempts to grasp it. We reach out to knowing, yet we cannot fully take it hand. There is another level of lateness that functions in concert with the lateness of our être en situation, however, and this is the kind of lateness at play in MerleauPonty’s account of sense-genesis, temporality, and history. This other level of lateness is the lateness of becoming to being—the incompleteness of sense that prevents it from every becoming fully articulate, from having the clarity and transparency of a statement, the lateness which prevents becoming, the φύω, from realizing itself as being. As Merleau-Ponty indicates, this level of lateness is a function of the temporal structure of sense-genesis—its articulation and disarticulation, the inspiration and expiration of the world in its unfolding. On this level of lateness, becoming is understood as the perpetual disappointment, failure, and weakness that prevents sense from ever closing over itself, that withholds it from being—the weakness that prevents sense from realizing itself as actuality. We understand now that this weakness is a function of the temporal flux and that it is also perpetual beginning—the resumption and reprisal of the project of expression. This resumption and reprisal is an infinite task. As some remarks from MerleauPonty’s final publication, Eye and Mind, indicate, the incompleteness of the task of giving voice to what as of yet remains silence, the task of expression, which falls to the painter as well as the philosopher, issues a profound disappointment for those who expect this investigation to resolve itself into a final accord, those who wish to end reflection in the final diapason, to take hold of being right when and where it is. To one with such an expectation, the task of expression seems futile, and we may recall a passage quoted earlier: “Is this the highest point of reason, to realize that the soil beneath our feet is shifting, to pompously call interrogation a state of continuous stupor, to call research a circular path, to call Being that which never fully is?”58 This disappointment, however, is the result of a “false imaginary, which claims for itself a positivity that would fill its own emptiness. It is the regret of not being everything, a regret that is not even entirely grounded.”59 We already have some sense of how Merleau-Ponty wishes to overturn a certain style of philosophizing, one that holds fast to this “false imaginary,” which takes the necessity of coincidence, contact, indeed, a philosophy that takes the task of the disclosure of being in its limpidity and purity as the first, regulative principle for its condition of possibility. We have, following MerleauPonty, designated such a philosophy as “cruel thought” precisely to the extent that this



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imaginary cannot conceive of itself beyond the scope of exhausting itself in making contact with being, in reaching a final accord to what Merleau-Ponty, following Valéry, refers to as this “permanent dissonance.”60 Against cruel thought, Phenomenology of Perception attempts to think the scope and tasks of philosophy otherwise—as articulating a style of philosophizing that, insofar as it discloses the incompleteness and weakness of becoming, also sees itself as subject to this very same incompleteness and weakness. We have designated this other philosophy, the one that no longer takes the pretense to finalizability and completeness as its first principle, a philosophy of lateness, and it is precisely the attempt to mark out this style of thinking that seems to concern Merleau-Ponty’s meta-philosophical project—articulating the meaning and sense of philosophical inquiry—over the course his oeuvre from Phenomenology of Perception to The Visible and the Invisible. In Part 3, “The Philosophy of Lateness, the Lateness of Philosophy,” we will turn explicitly to the meta-philosophical implications of lateness in Phenomenology of Perception and some of the later writings. A radical philosophy, a philosophy that does not pass the task of thinking over to pre-established styles and forms, for Merleau-Ponty, not only discloses the lateness of becoming to being, but understands itself as subject to this lateness. A radical philosophy sees itself as a form of weakness, as perpetual resumption and reprisal, as a form of genesis and becoming, as a constant beginning that never catches up with itself. What we see in these meta-philosophical reflections is not a break or revision between the earlier and later works, but the continuous development of this style of thinking and philosophizing. This philosophy, finally, is not a call to nihilism—not a call to quietism or silence—but is to be understood as a call to expression, a call to take up the tasking of thinking “beyond all hope”61 in the recognition that the reflections initiated by philosophy will give themselves indefinitely and without end. *** We have examined Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of freedom in Phenomenology of Perception, particularly as it is addressed to Sartre’s L’être et le néant. For Sartre, freedom names the transcendental condition of possibility for the sense of the world.62 The world has sense, for him, at the point where it is taken up by my freedom, at the point where I make a choice that orients the direction of my existence and my projects, articulating the framework within which my life will unfold. Freedom, for Sartre, is in this way a story about Sinngebung, sense-genesis. The world takes on the shape and contour of its meaning as the correlate of this freedom, which is its pivot and point of orientation. Merleau-Ponty’s concern with this account of unconditional freedom is that it retains the specter of the ordinary perspective of transcendental thought: freedom becomes liquid, purified of the weight and density of its body and its history. Merleau-Ponty’s task is to restore to freedom its gravity. He tries to show that freedom is not the diaphanous, unconditioned nothingness imagined by Sartre, disburdened of its history, but that freedom, my power to interrupt, is carried forward in the wake of institution and launches itself forward from the incrustations of sense in which it is embedded. There is in this way nothing pure about freedom; it ineluctably carries the

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stain of its past, the inscriptions and marks of sense that make it possible, that make it part of the world. If we are condemned to be free, it is only because we are already condemned to meaning, condemned to be born into a world that is already perhaps too heavy with the odor of sense. Time, as continuous dehiscence and differentiation, refracts itself into the massive flesh and texture of sense we call the world, and in so doing, it splits off into infinite probabilities: probabilities, Merleau-Ponty insists, precisely in opposition to the modals of possibility and necessity that have hitherto characterized transcendental thought. Time gives birth to the probable, the maybe, the uncertainty of the future that it opens up before us, the abyss that no calculus, no metrics nor forecasting could hope to exhaust. In probability we find the openness proper to the future, the lack of foresight that makes it unknown and that allows it to escape from our grasp. The probability of freedom, for Merleau-Ponty, is exemplified in class-consciousness. No one chooses to be oppressed; no one chooses exploitation. These structures, like we ourselves, are produced by the machinations of political economy and the historical forces that mobilize it. These “historical forces,” however, for Merleau-Ponty, are nothing other than the deflagration of sense in time: the historical institutions of meaning that frame, set up, and set forth the world. There is no absolute freedom because the weight of these institutions crushes down upon us—the proletarian finds herself in a situation that she did not create, the victim of hostile and external forces that strip her of her humanity. There is also, however, not absolute determinism. Freedom, for Merleau-Ponty, is a kind of differential, a divergence from the sense in which I am embedded, but this divergence, contra Sartre, requires this institution. I am only free at the point where I find myself already thrown into a world, free only insofar as I already find myself être en situation. The same is true for philosophy, and in this way philosophy is late to the world, late to time, for the unfurling of the φύω has already taken place, is already taking place, and precisely in its adventure it escapes— that toward which we reach out our hand is already gone, disparue. But the lateness of reflection is only a figure, an expression of the lateness of the φύω to being, for if our inquiry remains probabilistic at best, that is to say, open, it is because the flux of sense in which we find ourselves, from which we emerge, is itself incomplete, on the way to something that is never finished. The distance of vision, its spacing, the occlusion of things within the perceptual field, the indefiniteness of its outlines, the vibration of objects, the indefinite play of light and shadow, what Merleau-Ponty tries to condense into the word “ambiguity,” all of this is the emblem of our openness, of our lateness.

Part Three

The Philosophy of Lateness, the Lateness of Philosophy

7

Eulogy for Philosophy

It is perhaps no coincidence that Merleau-Ponty’s inaugural address at the Collège de France was a eulogy for philosophy, precisely in the double sense that the word éloge indicates: recognition that something has come to an end and marking a beginning by giving praise to what has passed. It is from the Ancient Greek, εὐλογία: λόγος, speech, that is εὖ, made well, but for the sake of or in the interest of the one of whom we speak. In this way we get the typical meaning: praise, and traditionally the funerary address that has this name takes the form of speech in praise of the departed.1 Whatever praise Merleau-Ponty has to offer on behalf of philosophy, however, must be understood as marking a departure and acknowledging a loss. On one hand, we recognize and mark the end of philosophy: the death of cruel thought, the passage of that thought which wanted to secure and bind being in the clarity of knowledge. On the other hand, we see that this end does not signify the death of the tasks of thinking or the impossibility of another stance with respect to wisdom, to σοφία, a stance no longer organized around the reaching, grasping hand. For at its end, φιλοσοφία, “love of wisdom,” like the phoenix, as Merleau-Ponty notes elsewhere in reference to Husserl, “is reborn from its ashes.”2 What we see in this eulogy is the marking of a departure and passage that is at the same time a beginning as well as a meditation on the meaning of a philosophy that has ceased to be what it was. In marking that something has become past, we begin again, since to begin is nothing other than to allow for the passage of what was, to be present at the point of departure. Such a beginning, for Merleau-Ponty, consists of once again inquiring into the sense and meaning of philosophical inquiry.3 The thinking that emerges from this beginning, one that “must not take itself as acquired, in so far as it might have managed to say something true,”4 is philosophy understood as interrogation, thinking that takes up a questioning regard with respect to what it seeks, that stands in astonishment rather than reaching out to take being in its grasp.5 Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on the tasks of thinking and what is possible for it are a philosophy of lateness in a twofold sense. On one hand, as we have seen, this style of thinking is Merleau-Ponty’s formulation for a radical phenomenological method that discloses the manifestation of temporal becoming in its éclatement, its transcendence, ek-stase, and dehiscence. As this becoming, sense shows itself as opening itself up into the indeterminateness of the future, an incomplete articulation, unfinished, its own erasure inscribed within the movement of its unfolding. Becoming retains its depth and opacity because it never coalesces into the fullness of actuality: it is the explosion

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of a disintegration, on the way and never present. This is the ontological sense of lateness. There is also a philosophical or reflective sense of lateness, on the other hand, insofar as this thinking recognizes itself as immersed in this becoming. It is able to welcome its own weakness and incompleteness and open itself to the probability that it is, at best, a fissure, an écart in the sense of the world. As Merleau-Ponty notes in his inaugural address: The philosopher does not say that a final transcendence of human contradictions may be possible, and that the complete man awaits us in the future. Like everyone else, he knows nothing of this. He says—and this is something altogether different—that the world is going on, that we do not have to judge its future by what has happened in the past, that the idea of a destiny in things is not an idea but a dizziness, that our relations with nature are not fixed once and for all, that no one can know what freedom may be able to do, nor imagine what our customs and human relations would be in a civilization no longer haunted by competition and necessity. He does not place his hope in any destiny, even a favorable one, but in something belonging to us which is precisely not a destiny—in the contingency of our history.6

This remark expresses a number of things about the philosophy of lateness. The problem with knowledge, understood as cruel thought’s desire to possess being, to arrive at the source and secure its principle, is that it is an effort to close. If I possessed such a secret, the explanation for everything, a unified theory, then in a profound sense nothing further would be possible. I could predict, without error, all possibilities, and the future would be set before me only as another past that has not yet come to pass; for there would be no indeterminacy, nothing that could elude the perfect calculus of my science. As Merleau-Ponty indicates, such a calculus is neither possessed nor desired by the philosopher, for, like all of us who struggle through the ambiguity of existence here on Earth, that person only knows the opening of their experience as it is caught up in the tide of events. The properly philosophical gesture, for Merleau-Ponty, is only the recognition of indeterminacy, the freedom that the unknown of the future bestows on us insofar as it has not been inscribed on our flesh in advance. In this way, there is no question of a fixed path, the fulfillment of a logic already set forth and of which we are only effects. We have no destiny—no righteous path; there is only the vague and yet crucial possibility that things could have been otherwise, that things may still be otherwise. For Merleau-Ponty, to philosophize is not to seek a thought which “achieves itself the moment it begins”7 but to proceed with the recognition that we thinkers are immersed in the contingency of a history that we did not bring to pass but for which we must nonetheless take responsibility. But taking responsibility means welcoming our own unfinalizability and incompleteness. Because it is unfinalizable and incomplete, the task of thinking, for Merleau-Ponty, is not guided by the possibility of its consummation: unlike the modern science and technology that measure themselves by what they accomplish, by their monumentality and progress, to think, to philosophize, is to welcome one’s own finitude and weakness, the strange vulnerability of bearing witness to the splitting open and disintegration of the sense of the world. Such reflections,



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Merleau-Ponty says, “justify philosophy even in its weakness. For it is useless to deny that philosophy limps. It dwells in history and in life, but it wishes to dwell at their center, at the point where they come into being with the birth of meaning,” and yet “the limping [claudication] of philosophy is its virtue.”8 Philosophy limps: we have thought, probably since Plato, that to philosophize is to soar above the world, time, and life, but as we have seen, this is only the desire of a survol absolu. A philosophy of lateness does not seek to subject existence to its all-encompassing surveillance but to see itself as inscribed in the eruption and unfolding of life. Recognizing our inscription, that we are embedded in the flesh of the world’s sense, we understand that the center, the origin, are beyond us. There probably is no center—we are adrift, and the task of thinking is no longer understood as the acquisition of knowledge but the welcoming of the unknown. We understand that the Earth is adrift in the empty expanse of space where there is no center. As Nietzsche says, Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker?9

As for Nietzsche, the loss of the center for Merleau-Ponty is not cause for grief but cause for celebration. We acknowledge its departure with a eulogy and begin again. The limping of philosophy is its virtue: its languidness and delay, its inability to reach the center are what allow it to see, what allow for the untraversable distance between one who sees and the φύω, the becoming of what is: φύσις.10 It seems that Merleau-Ponty never ceased to be concerned with articulating this philosophy. In the later years of his life, we see that this is the project outlined in The Visible and the Invisible: What we propose here, and oppose to the search for the essence, is not the return to the immediate, the coincidence, the effective fusion with the existent, the search for an original integrity, for a secret lost and to be rediscovered, which would nullify our questions and even reprehend our language. If coincidence is lost, this is no accident; if Being is hidden, this is itself a characteristic of Being, and no disclosure will make us comprehend it.11

If coincidence is lost, if we are adrift in the infinite darkness, this is not because of an error or divinely posed riddle set before us to unravel: there is no destiny, there is no lost secret here for us to disclose. If the φύω of sense cannot be grasped and taken in hand, if it perpetually eludes our reach, then this is because it is of the nature of this φύω to fold itself back into concealment. As Heraclitus says: φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ.12 The folding in on itself, the invagination and withdraw of φύσις is embedded within its bursting open, its dehiscence, and this κρύπτεσθαι, this distance, is inscribed into the manifestation and shining forth of the flesh of sense.13 Even though Merleau-Ponty never finished articulating what he meant when he named his idea of philosophy “interrogation,” we can see from what he says in The Visible and the Invisible that he was in the process of giving voice to a modality of

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thinking capable of welcoming the distance of becoming, that recognizes its weakness and its inscription in the φύω it takes as its object. The thinker finds herself in the midst of this growth, the texture and color of things that surround her, and yet all of this beckons something else foreign to it, points beyond itself into the open. We wanted to arrive at the scene of being and find it at its proper time and in its proper place, but we arrive only afterwards, and to this extent we do not find it: what we were looking for has gone, disparue. Coming after the world, after nature, after life, after thought, and finding them constituted before it, philosophy indeed questions this antecedent being and questions itself concerning its own relationship with it. It is a return upon itself and upon all things but not a return to an immediate—which recedes in the measure that philosophy wishes to approach and to fuse into it.14

To philosophize is only this: finding oneself given over to a world that, in virtue of the structure of its genesis, precedes our reflections, and in finding oneself immersed in the flux of this world’s unfolding, the philosopher endeavors to turn herself back into its stream like a course of water that flows into itself. Like a course of water, however, such a reflection cannot hope to arrive—the source and origin, as Merleau-Ponty says, recede in accordance with the measure of our reach. There is no question of making contact with the center, with the source, and therefore this folding back into itself is sustained only as this questioning regard, the questioning of things that no longer requires the satisfaction of answers. We lay cruel thought to rest and mark its passage, and in so doing, mark the initiation of another modality for thought: a philosophy of lateness. It is therefore appropriate that Merleau-Ponty’s inaugural address is a eulogy for philosophy, as marking this passage would never cease to occupy his reflections in the following years. We already have seen this understanding of philosophy at play in Phenomenology of Perception, even if only in a nascent state that had yet to be fully worked out or realized. In order to give some indications of how the philosophy lateness figures across the texts of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre, we will return to the considerations of the phenomenological reduction as they figure in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception. What we see is the philosopher attempt to think through the question with which this earlier text begins: what is phenomenology? MerleauPonty does not abandon what he says about the meaning of phenomenology there but resumes and reopens this vision years later in the “preface” to his late ontology, “The Philosopher and His Shadow.” The philosophy of lateness also figures both in the chapter of The Visible and the Invisible entitled Interrogation et intuition, cited above, and the draft of this text, the Brouillon de rédaction. As he says, the task of this philosophy is not to reach out and take hold of the sense of the world but to welcome “its becoming in us”; philosophy, he says in his eulogy, is “the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement”;15 it is the task to “bear witness” to this search and its “inner disorder.”16



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1. Phenomenological reduction and ontological lateness In the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty’s answer to the question “What is phenomenology?” and the subsequent survey of its significant themes is intended to differentiate phenomenology from the desire to possess being, especially from interpretations that identify phenomenology with idealist metaphysics. As we have seen, while idealist interpretations of the sense of phenomenology, the phenomenological reduction in particular, are perhaps true to the letter of Husserl, they nonetheless misunderstand the implications of its methodology when they posit the standpoint of a pure, transcendental origin.17 Insofar as phenomenology opposes itself to the ordinary perspective of transcendental idealism, which would render the world fully transparent, an authentic understanding of phenomenological method does not recognize its purpose as arriving at the consummation, the ἀποκάλυψις of necessary conditions of possibility for sense. For Merleau-Ponty, there is no terminus, no final end point of the reflections initiated by phenomenology. The reduction discloses the temporal flux through which sense erupts and unfolds, a flux in which this reflection finds itself immersed. Merleau-Ponty’s famous and perhaps controversial claim that the phenomenological reduction cannot be completed must be understood in this context. Let us examine this part of the text more closely. For Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenological reduction does not conclude with the disclosure of a “pure spectator”—neither in the realist or idealist sense. When I set my reflective and metaphysical prejudices aside and I attend closely to what is before my eyes, or even attend closely to myself, at no point am I confronted with an absolute origin for the world’s sense: I see a world that is already there, a tissue of sense of which I myself am only a fold. Phenomenology recognizes that “the world is there before any possible analysis of mine.”18 It realizes that philosophical reflection never takes place from a standpoint independent of this texture of sense that we call the world and that my reflections always take place in the wake of and fold back upon my experience as it splits open out of this tissue. Idealistic interpretations of phenomenology that posit the presence of a transcendental consciousness as the point of origin of this eruption are “ingenuous” insofar as they pretense to be a form of “pure reflection” able to occupy a perspective outside of this eruption and in this way to secure its own coincidence with that upon which it gazes.19 In order to achieve this reflective fusion, idealist interpretations of phenomenology must disavow the situatedness and contingency of inquiry, on one hand, and the transcendence of that which it seeks to understand on the other, both of which compromise its claim to adequacy. As we have seen, idealist philosophies are a form of philosophizing that we have designated as cruel thought. Against this tendency, Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on phenomenological method recognize that in order “not to take itself as acquired,”20 phenomenology understands that it flows out of an unreflective experience that always precedes it. This unreflective ground of reflection, in Phenomenology of Perception especially, is given the name “perception”21 for when I look at the world with my eyes, I understand that my vision is only a ripple, a plication in the wave of visibility that rises up behind it and that surrounds me. The task of the phenomenological reduction, according to Merleau-Ponty, is to make the swell of the perceived, which our reflections always

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obfuscate, manifest by suspending the ossified accomplishments of reflective life. My perceptual experience is misunderstood if it is taken as yet another kind of reflection, as a kind of thinking, like Descartes believed: it is rather the presupposed soil of my reflections and thinking, which are always parasitic on it. “Perception,” therefore, “is not a science of the world. It is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the ground [fond] from which all acts detach themselves, and is presupposed by them.”22 Perception, for Merleau-Ponty, cannot be encapsulated by mere “sensation” if we mean by that the organized reception of qualia, data, and so forth, but more accurately describes the manner in which we are given over to a world prior to the point we take up a position or make a judgment about it; it describes our openness to the situation in which we find ourselves immersed and of which we have not yet taken a reckoning. In perception I have already found myself in a world that is not the work of my judgments, a world of color, light, and shadow that opens forth onto an indefinite horizon. Insofar as it makes itself known in my perceptual experience, far from being spread out before me in transparency, “the world is not an object such that I have in my possession the law of its constitution; it is the natural setting [milieu] of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.”23 The sense of the world that shines forth in perceptual experience is the abode or dwelling in which I find myself and is the foundation of my judgments and my explicit, positional comportment within a space of reason that my reflections elaborate. The phenomenological reduction returns our attention to the perceived in this sense—the oblique and visible world with its depth, occlusions, imperfect angles, the ambiguity of distance and the open horizon that surrounds us. The perceived, as we have seen, for MerleauPonty, is nothing other than our sensitivity, our sentir of the sens of the world. That philosophical reflection is set forth from the soil of this sens, Merleau-Ponty remarks, “reveals the true sense of the celebrated phenomenological reduction.”24 As a return to perception, the reduction does not reveal the omniscience of a pure, constituting ego; rather, what it reveals is that philosophical reflection is always caught up in the becoming, the éclatement and dehiscence of sense, which it attempts to illuminate and for which it is always late. A complete reduction, one that would consummate itself in the reflective coincidence with its conditions of possibility, he says, would entail a “return to transcendental consciousness before which the world deploys itself in an absolute transparency, animated through and through by a series of apperceptions that the philosopher is charged with reconstituting from their results.”25 A completed reduction would amount to the possession of being, the termination of thought in a final reflective fusion. It would amount to the closure of philosophy, the shutting down of thought in the stilling and silencing of its movement. Maintaing philosophy’s openness requires abandoning the primacy of a constituting consciousness and its survol absolu. The incompleteness, the impossibility of a complete reduction is Merleau-Ponty’s way of thinking through and maintaining this openness. Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on phenomenological method and the reduction will consistently elaborate the motif of incompleteness and unfinalizability from Phenomenology of Perception onwards. As he says of Husserl, the problem of phenomenological reduction will never cease to occupy his work and is a problem to which he will continually return.26 In “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” said to be the



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preface to Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology27 and published almost fifteen years after Phenomenology of Perception, he returns again to phenomenological method with notable similarities to his earlier discussion. Again, the problem is with idealistic interpretations of the reduction and the possibility of disclosing transcendental consciousness as its point of termination. Again, Merleau-Ponty’s concern is to think through a philosophy that recognizes what is before and beyond the scope of constituting consciousness and the claim, as he says, that “There must be beings for us which are not yet kept in being by the centrifugal activity of consciousness.”28 The aim of this discussion of phenomenological reduction in this essay, to articulate a philosophy of ontological lateness, seems to remain essentially the same. Let us consider some of these pages of “The Philosopher and His Shadow.” For Husserl, as Merleau-Ponty argues here in the pages of this essay, the phenomenological reduction is characterized by a double movement, or, as he says, is “rent by an inverse movement which it elicits”: the return to transcendental consciousness is simultaneously “going outside of ourselves.”29 We should not confuse the reduction with a kind of pure introspection, the return to one’s ownmost interiority, for the inquiry that traces the birth of the sense of the world, at the point where it is an “immanent” inquiry of the “inside,” at that very moment describes a trajectory to the outside. Phenomenology never has been the restoration of a zone of pure consciousness. Phenomenological reduction, he says, “does not install us in a closed, transparent milieu … and it does not take us (at least not immediately) from ‘objective’ to ‘subjective,’ but … its function is rather to unveil a third dimension in which this distinction becomes problematic.”30 If we take the spirit of Husserl’s work seriously, especially that after Ideen II, we see that rather than unveiling a transcendental nucleus or point of origination, phenomenological reduction escapes the “tête-à-tête between pure subject and pure things,” idealism and realism, and it does so because it courses its way back through the flood of sense; it is neither a return to the pure subject nor the pure object but to the dehiscence of sense in which subjects and objects take shape and become articulate.31 Phenomenological reduction does not disclose the a priority of transcendental, constituting consciousness that soars above this flood nor the hardness of an objective reality. Precisely to the extent that it moves in the direction of an interiority, it also moves in the direction of exteriority. Phenomenological reduction does not disclose the singularity of subjectivity but the φύω of φύσις: the coming forth, the coming into being of the tissue, the flesh of sense in its folding and unfolding, its respiration, its exposure, and expression. Echoing the position elaborated in Phenomenology of Perception, phenomenological method discloses this becoming and éclatement precisely to the extent to which it is able to put our theoretical prejudices out of play and attend to that layer of sense that nurtures such theses and makes them possible. Beneath the sedimented accomplishments of reflective life lies what Husserl calls our Welthesis, our unreflective orientation in the world, our stance and attitude, as Merleau-Ponty says, “prior to any thesis,”32 and the proper task of phenomenology is to “unveil this pre-theoretical layer.”33 But how does this pre-theoretical layer come to have sense? Must there not be some prior, original act of constitution? To think through this question, we must begin by considering the theme of “pre-theoretical constitution,” what we have already

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encountered as passive synthesis and again what Merleau-Ponty will call here and in Phenomenology of Perception, operative, latent or general intentionality,34 the manner in which reflecting consciousness already finds itself in the midst of a world of sense for which it is late. Speaking of this sense-genesis, Merleau-Ponty will here repeat, almost verbatim, the sense of lateness we saw above in Phenomenology of Perception: things “are always ‘already constituted’ for us or … they are ‘never completely constituted’—in short … consciousness is always behind or ahead of them, never contemporaneous.”35 We are given over to sense on all sides; it rises up around us and we are embedded within this surge. But its principle, its λόγος, remains hidden and concealed beyond the horizon of its manifestation: it is too far behind us or too far ahead of us, and we are too late or too early, never on time. What Merleau-Ponty will designate as philosophical interrogation dwells in the interstice of this delay as becoming flows through it, without contact and without finality. Phenomenological reduction, as a return to our Welthesis, makes our condition of lateness visible, and it is precisely this that indicates the truth of the reduction which is, as Merleau-Ponty says in Phenomenology of Perception, “the impossibility of a complete reduction.”36 As noted above, a complete reduction would ascribe a power to reflection in which it would coincide with the final unveiling of the principle of the becoming in which it is immersed. On the contrary, for a philosophy of lateness, the very performance of phenomenological reduction always takes place in the grip of the becoming of sense. A complete reduction would entail reaching out for and seizing upon that which holds us, even sustains us, to place before us what is behind us and what must remain behind us. Phenomenological reduction cannot be completed because this frontality remains impossible for it. From the standpoint of the false imaginary of cruel thought, the phenomenological reduction to this extent appears to be a perpetual disappointment and failure.37 But the lateness of reflection to becoming, because it remains in the grip of the unfolding of time and sense, is the emblem and sign of its openness: rather, it is the definition of this openness. It is because it is late that reflection cannot be closed, and because it cannot be closed, it must always be taken up again and renewed; philosophy, like art, is a constant reprisal and perpetual beginning.38 Phenomenological reduction does not disclose a static set of transcendental idealities that would constitute the absolute origin for the becoming of sense—a basis that would capture and arrest this becoming in being. Rather, the truth and virtue of phenomenology is its capacity to bear witness to becoming in its passage, in its departure, to welcome this departure, and even to dwell at this point of departure. The reflections phenomenology carries out in its inquiry into the structures of sense-genesis are themselves enveloped in this temporal dehiscence, are themselves on the point of departure. To return to an important remark from Phenomenology of Perception: “since we are in the world, since indeed, our reflections take place in the temporal flux that they seek to capture (since they sich einströmen [inflow on themselves], as Husserl says), there is no thought which embraces all our thought.”39 Phenomenology remains incomplete—remains open—because it itself is immersed in the temporal flux of sense that it endeavors to witness and therefore the point of origin remains asymptotically on the horizon, at a distance, eluding our reach. There is a temporal écart that erupts between the réfléchissant and the réfléchi as that which



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reflection seeks slips forever out of its grasp. It is precisely in this context that MerleauPonty remarks “The greatest lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction.”40 All of our reflections are caught within this influx, the vortex, if you will, of the setting forth of sense, and it seems that the idea of “inflow” or “influx” that Husserl indicated by the term Einströmen never ceased to be of interest to MerleauPonty as a reflection on this concept appears again in a working note of The Visible and the Invisible.41 The remark reads: “Because there is Einströmen, reflection is not adequation, coincidence: it would not pass into the Strom if it placed us back at the source of the Strom.”42 What distinguishes phenomenology is that it is an inquiry that endeavors to pass into the stream of becoming without attempting to occupy its center, which attends to this passage without pretensing to return to its source and origin. Because philosophical reflection is in and of this flow, it cannot coincide with this source and the ground that transcendental philosophy was looking for remains impossible. It is, as Merleau-Ponty says, “being at a distance,”43 the distance of the spacing of the visible as it opens before our eyes. It is in this sense that philosophical interrogation is late. It is immersed in the flow of the temporal efflorescence of becoming, and it would not be possible otherwise. Because it is immersed in this Strom, by the time that reflection arrives on the scene, the firm ground it was looking for has already passed into unsteadiness, the meditation it takes up remains ineluctably untimely.44 This thought is rehearsed again by Merleau-Ponty in his Brouillon d’une rédaction text, when he remarks that philosophical interrogation is “too late for knowing the naïve world which was before it and too early for knowing everything precisely as initiative, optional operation, critical enterprise, and cultural second.”45 This is only to say that philosophical interrogation takes place only within the eruptive écoulement of becoming which escapes its grasp. This thought about lateness is repeated again in the published version of the Brouillon, the chapter of The Visible and the Invisible entitled “Interrogation et Intuition,” where Merleau-Ponty remarks that, “as passive beings, we feel ourselves caught up in a mass of Being that escapes us,” and for this reason “we oppose to this adversity the desire for an absolute evidence, delivered from all facticity.”46 Thought wanted to overcome the adversity of its condition in the absolute, but this overcoming is only a myth and fantasy that attempts to extricate thought from the depth of its own sense. As interrogation, thought realizes itself as a movement, that like the écoulement of sense, it is subject to its own dissolution and erosion the moment it becomes and therefore remains always to be done. As Merleau-Ponty notes in the same chapter, There is an experience of the visible thing as pre-existing my vision, but this experience is not a fusion, a coincidence: because my eyes which see, my hands which touch, can also be seen and touched, because, therefore in this sense they see and touch the visible, the tangible, from within, because our flesh lines and even envelops all the visible and tangible things with which nevertheless it is surrounded, the world and I are within one another, and there is no anteriority of the percipere to the percipi, there is simultaneity or even lateness [retard].47

The visible things that manifest themselves before my eyes shine forth across the distance and spacing that, for Merleau-Ponty, is the definition of visibility itself: I

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see the world precisely because I never coincide with it, because what there is makes itself known at the hither end of my glance, because whatever proximity I have to things is always relative to a distance between my eyes and the world, even between my hand and the world. Things show themselves in this depth, shifting dynamics of foregrounding and backgrounding, occlusion, angles, vanishing points, and the withdraw of the visible into the indefiniteness of the horizon. There is always the intrusion, the empiètement, of light, shadow, relative degrees of focus and clarity, even the distortions of the atmosphere that intervene between my gaze and the world. I never see things in absolute clarity; the world does not make itself known to me in the immediacy and apodiciticity of some final disclosure, an absolute transparency; what I see is always more or less distorted, more or less uncertain. But Merleau-Ponty’s invocation of vision here is not intended to privilege one modality of perception above another: for even in the apparent immediacy of touching the world with my hands there is distance, for the surfaces that run beneath my fingers conceal other layers, interiorities, and dimensions that I do not touch. Smells and tastes remain imprecise as when I try to find the words to describe the flavor of a fine wine and invariably fail or try to describe the taste of a dish to someone else. I hear the world across distances and spaces with a lack of transparency similar to the visible, full of echoes, reverberations, and timbres that make me unsure of what I hear or from where. In any case, this ambiguity stems from my embeddedness in what appears: I am not a pure spectator, hovering outside of the things that I see, but as a seer, as one who touches, I too am seen and touched. I am within the visibility that spreads out before me, and my point of view is one of the things that manifests itself among the things I see. My flesh spreads out into the world as the flesh of the world holds me; seer and seen are Ineinander, entwined, one emerging only from the insides of the other. Because the seer is entwined in the visible, there is lateness and delay, noncoincidence, spacing and distance.

2. The lateness of philosophy As we have seen, the philosophy of lateness comes into view against the background of the impossibility of another understanding of philosophy, what I have described as cruel thought. Cruel thought, at least implicitly, begins with the belief that philosophy can, so to speak, “be on time” with respect to the objects of its inquiry, that it can reach them at the time and place where there are and make them its own, that it may conclude by attaining a final resolution of its movement. Such resolution, as I have tried to show, is foreclosed, not because reflection has made insufficient progress toward its destination but because this lateness is already inscribed into the manifestation of the sense of the world. I want to conclude the reflections on lateness in this chapter by returning again to what I view to be one of the most beautiful moments of Merleau-Ponty’s work, the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception.48 There are two important motifs to note in this text a propos of the philosophy of lateness: first, as we have seen, that philosophical reflection is set forth against the background of its history, in the wake of the depth of an institution on which it draws and for which



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it remains late. Second, as a result of its embededness, philosophy remains open and incomplete. The first claim, that philosophical reflection takes up and resumes an institution for which it is late, is intended to underline the historical contingency of thinking and thereby challenge the belief that philosophy is a strictly rational enterprise, a set of purely intellectual or academic problems rather than enigmas of human life on Earth. “All knowledge,” Merleau-Ponty says, “bases itself on a ‘ground’ [sol] of postulates and finally with our communication with the world as the first establishment of rationality.”49 When the philosopher sits down to think, she finds herself in the midst of the historical deflagration of sense, which she must in some way resume, reprise and renew. It is only through such repetition that philosophy establishes its possibility. Thought must in this way acknowledge that it is part of a historical tradition, i.e., that it does not, as Heidegger says, take the form of “free-floating” questioning,50 but must recognize its immersion in an historical and institutional sense which was already underway and which it takes up. There are, then, no geniuses; there are no individuals who, through the sheer uniqueness of their intellect shatter the foundations of thought. The thinker, rather, is only an expression, only an articulation of the sense of this history as it makes itself manifest. Acknowledging this historicity and contingency, philosophical inquiry acknowledges that it is inevitably late with respect to itself or, in other words, that it necessarily finds itself in the midst of a tradition that has preceded it and which has informed its tasks. Here we recognize the manner in which philosophy and its sense accomplishments take the form of reprendre and reprise. In recognizing this historical contingency, however, philosophy must simultaneously resist the mere “traditionalism” of taking up the sedimented problems of philosophy uncritically—that is, it must resist the temptation to take itself and its own possibility for granted.51 Philosophy, then, must not only come to realize its historical and institutional situation but must subject this ground to the same interrogation to which it subjects all branches of knowledge: as an interrogation of the world it remains an interrogation of itself, and in questioning itself, it is the institution and establishment of itself anew.52 Thought’s historical contingency is the basis for Merleau-Ponty’s second claim that it is marked by nascence and unfinalizability. Philosophical reflection, MerleauPonty says, “duplicates itself infinitely” and becomes, quoting Husserl, “a dialogue or infinite meditation.”53 As we recall, phenomenology begins by placing the prejudices and superstitions characteristic of the natural attitude in abeyance. This attitude, which conceals the very accomplishments of sense that open us onto the world by taking them for granted, we see now includes the accomplishments of philosophical institution. The result is that by suspending these accomplishments, the philosopher must begin again: “The philosopher,” he says, “is a perpetual beginner. That is to say he takes nothing for granted that men or scholars believe they know.”54 Merleau-Ponty conceives philosophy, therefore, not in terms of what it completes and finishes, which is to say in terms of death, but as what it can start again, in terms of birth: the task of thinking is not to put an end to itself, not about resolutions, but about fecundity, opening onto an indefinite and undetermined future.55 The weakness of thought, its lateness, its perpetual failure, necessitates its reprendre and reprise, its resumption and

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repetition, its constant beginning and its constant self-renewal. As Merleau-Ponty’s final remarks in the Preface indicate, the question that begins the text, “What is phenomenology?” and the fact that we may pose this question again, even over half a century after Merleau-Ponty’s death, does not designate the end of phenomenology but rather its ownmost virtue. This question is the constant theme of phenomenology in its continual self-interrogation, weakness, nascence, and perpetuation. It is precisely to the extent that thought orients itself in terms of this self-interrogation that it also is directed toward a truth that it cannot embrace; it reaches out toward being, toward knowledge, but cannot hold them in its grasp. Merleau-Ponty carries forward the reflections that we find in the Preface to Phenomenology of Perception over the course of his career. Rather than seeing the pages of the later works as giving an indication of a significant revision of the earlier work, we can see his philosophical development after Phenomenology of Perception as an attempt to articulate this philosophy in a revised language with more nuance. The concept of the chiasm, the χ, the crossing, the Ineinander of the seer and the seen, already expresses the impossibility of holding being in our grasp. In a working note of The Visible and the Invisible dated twelve years after the publication of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty defines this concept as follows: “the idea of chiasm, that is: every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken, the hold is held, it is inscribed and inscribed in the same being that it takes hold of.”56 The interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought offered here provides some indications of how we should hear this remark. As reflection reaches out to grasp being, it finds itself in the grip of a becoming in which it is immersed and what it inscribes onto this becoming is simultaneously inscribed on reflection. Thought and the becoming of sense are Ineinander: one dwells within the other. We ourselves are the expressions of this becoming, this φύω of φύσις, and if we see the sky, it is only the sky that sees itself in us, only nature that thinks itself through us in the “fundamental narcissim of all vision.”57 Immediately following this important remark, Merleau-Ponty says: Starting from there, elaborate an idea of philosophy: it cannot be total or active grasp, intellectual possession, since what there is to be grasped is a dispossession. It is beneath. It is the simultaneous experience of the holding and the held in all orders.58

We reach out toward being, toward the truth, toward nature, but what we reach toward already has us in hand, what we touch, in the end, is only the untouchable mist of our becoming in time, our outsidedness, our ek-stasis, that pulls us away from ever being anything completely. If we possess anything it is only our own dispossession. The question that introduces Phenomenology of Perception, “What is phenomenology?” already anticipates the dispossession entailed by thought’s chiasmatic lateness—its hold on becoming is already held in the advent of that becoming and therefore what we reach for always eludes us. The philosophy of ontological lateness, finally, is not an attempt to make sense of being, if we understand by that fusing and coinciding with it, but to make sense of the manner in which the sense of this becoming is constantly working itself out, to think through the fact that human inquiry, including the project of philosophy itself, is



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circumscribed by its immersion in the Strom and that therefore what it seeks remains at a distance. Merleau-Ponty gives succinct expression to this thought in a radio broadcast from 1948 when, again, he remarks that Reason does not lie behind us, nor is it that where the meeting of minds takes place: rather, both stand before us waiting to be inherited. Yet we are no more able to reach them definitively than we are able to give up on them.59

The call for a philosophy of ontological lateness, however, is not a call for skepticism, for the very epistemological terms of traditional skeptical philosophies are excluded by his account.60 Nor is it a call for nihilism, for the result of a philosophy of ontological lateness is not the claim that values and knowledge are impossible but, as he says in the same radio broadcast, “precarious.”61 We do not have the solid, indestructible truth dreamt about by cruel thought, rather what we have is a world in the process of working itself out, in the process of coming into articulation, and what we recognize is that this process, because it is the eruption of time, will never come to rest in the fullness of actuality but that its coming into being is only the inverse of its dissolution, that whatever stability we encounter is only relative to the flux, and that, therefore, we must always start again. We are called upon to recognize the fragility of the human condition and our achievements, to recognize our immersion in the deflagration of becoming, and to see that what we institute in this world is subject to the disarticulation that marks our birth in time.

8

At the Point of Departure

What does it mean to philosophize? What does it mean to have φιλία, friendship and love, for σοφία, wisdom? As Plato says, the true philosophers are τοὺς τῆς ἀληθείας … φιλοθεάμονας.1 Plato will of course go on to argue that what is ἀλήθεια, what has been taken out of hiddenness, usually translated as “truth,” is that which is always identical with being and never otherwise. But what is interesting here is Plato’s identification of the proper task of philosophy with the φιλοθεάμων, the lover of the θέαμα, the sight or spectacle, indeed, the theater. The philosopher is the lover of the visible. For Merleau-Ponty, to love the visible means to love its distance and spacing, to love that what shines forth under my eyes recedes from my grasp and that it opens up before me in all of its indeterminacy. Such a love is the opposite of the desire of cruel thought, which wishes to arrive at the center and to be everything. Such a desire, we recall Merleau-Ponty saying in his Brouillon text, is not motivated a love of wisdom but by a fear of error.2 Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to articulate a style of thinking that overcomes cruel thought aims to rethink what we mean when we speak of a φιλία for σοφία. In rethinking the meaning of φιλία, however, we also understand that there is also another meaning for σοφία, that wisdom does not mean possession but dispossession, and to love means to be able to give oneself over to this dispossession, to be present at the point of distance, to be present at the point of departure. In this final chapter, I will try to show that in place of cruel thought’s desire to arrest, Merleau-Ponty’s thought offers a sense of φιλία no longer identified with the cruel desire to tame and subdue but one identified with the fuga, the flight of becoming in its manifestation. To love is not to possess, not to keep, nor to see in unconcealed nakedness, but to love the fugitive precisely in her flight, understanding that she will remain unknown, concealed across an infinite distance.3 As Proust’s account of the narrator’s love affair with Albertine in the Recherche teaches us, love, which has always been an emblem for the experience of philosophy, is not an experience of fulfillment but of letting go, of ἀπόφασις, sending away. The sense of loving the fugitive in ἀπόφασις is perhaps captured most beautifully in the scene of Christ’s appearance to Mary Magdalene, and it is therefore not a coincidence that Merleau-Ponty mentions the phrase, “noli me tangere,” “touch me not,” in his analysis of Proust.4 This is also the title of a work by the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. By bringing Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of love in Proust into dialogue with Nancy’s commentary on this scene or advent of appearance, we see

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that, rather than an apocalyptic discourse in which the λόγος appears at the end of time to reveal the finality of its truth, the words Noli me tangere, for both MerleauPonty and Nancy, offer something else for reflection: the distance and spacing that is, for them, essential to truth. Allowing for this distance, for both Merleau-Ponty and Nancy, requires a certain kind of πίστις, faith in place of certainty,5 and the chapter concludes by considering this faith beyond belief, the faith of Mary Magdalene who is able to send the beloved forth. Merleau-Ponty’s formulation of a philosophy of ontological lateness, therefore, can be seen as a reformulation of the meaning of φιλοσοφία. Φιλία, here, means the faith, the πίστις demonstrated in the κάλυψις, the veiling, of ἀπόφασις, sending away, and to this extent Merleau-Ponty’s thought inaugurates a new relation to the becoming of sense that departs from cruel thought. Loving wisdom, to love σοφία, is no longer understood as possession of anything—not of some secret, not of knowledge, truth, the other, nor even of oneself—rather this is a wisdom in which one allows oneself to be dispossessed by the partance, the departing, allowing for the other’s decay and disintegration: allowing for one’s own decay and disintegration.

1. At the point of la partance In his book, Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body, Jean-Luc Nancy offers a methodological and ethical injunction against philosophy’s fear as well as its cruelty, its disciplinary desire and need to seize, arrest, and interrogate. He stages this injunction in the context of an extended meditation on what he takes to be one of the central episodes of Christian theology: the appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene. Nancy’s task in his consideration of this scene is to challenge the desire of what we have here called cruel thought and consider the possibility of another φιλία: loving the fugitive even in his flight and loving the fuga itself. Before returning to Merleau-Ponty, it will be worthwhile to consider Nancy’s reflections and the manner in which many of the themes we have encountered become crystallized: the withdrawal of the beloved from our reach, faith, and our stance and posture with respect to what we love. The scene of Christ’s appearance to Mary Magdalene at the tomb is essential: rather than an apocalyptic discourse in which Christ, the λόγος, the word, the reason, appears at the end of time to reveal the finality of its truth, the words of the beloved, “noli me tangere,” “touch me not,” offer something else for reflection: καλυψις rather than ἀποκάλυψις, veiling rather than unveiling, letting die opposed to a morbid desire for eternal life, ἀπόφασις, setting forth, rather than ἀπόφανσις, making assertions. The figure of Mary Magdelene, who is cast as the foil of the one who doubts—Thomas, in this case—is the incarnation of this love, this φιλία that eschews the cruel desire to possess. It is through through her love that faith is possible for her because Mary, unlike Descartes and Proust’s narrator, requires no certainty: neither proofs nor demonstrations. Her reaching hand does not seek to possess and detain the beloved, but she is able to love him precisely in his inaccessibility, ingraspability, and untouchability: she loves him in his departure. Because she loves, Mary Magdelene, unlike Thomas, does not need to touch. She does not even need to believe as she exhibits a faith beyond knowledge.



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What is phenomenologically distinctive about the noli parable is that the λόγος that appears shows itself only in its partance, its departing. What we have is a distinctive account of manifestation: the appearance of the λόγος is nothing other than the event of its parting. The concept of partance figured here is essential, and it is through it that Nancy will mobilize his double injunction against the cruelty of thought: methodologically, the partance signals the impossibility of satisfying the desire for certainty—to allow for the partance of the λόγος means that we no longer ask for security or guarantees; ethically, it signals that we must give ourselves over to the impossibility of the touch: that if we love the other, we must let him ascend—we must even let him die.6 The incident that Nancy describes, and which has simply become known as the Noli me tangere in the artistic works of art that figure it, makes the first apparition of Christ after the crucifixion appear. We may recall the scene under consideration.7 Mary Magdalene comes to visit the tomb in the early hours of the morning only to find that the stone has been rolled away and that the tomb is empty. She goes to collect the other disciples, who follow her back to the tomb. They see the empty tomb and the shrouds lying about and then leave, going home, and Mary finds herself alone outside the empty tomb, weeping. Some angels are sitting inside the tomb, and they ask her why she cries. She tells them that it is because Christ’s body has been removed, and she does not know to where, by whom, or why. At this point, she turns around and sees a gardener. Assuming that this is the person who has removed the body, she asks him where he has taken it. In response, the gardener only speaks her name, “Mary,” at which point she recognizes him as the arisen. She cries out “Rabboni,” Aramaic for “master” or “teacher,” and in her grief and surprise, she reaches out her hand to touch him. It is at this moment that the arisen utters the words “noli me tangere.”8 According to Nancy, this is the essential moment since it is the point of conjuncture between the parable and la partance—between the appearing of the flesh of the λόγος and its departing. Nancy appropriately names this conjuncture “resurrection,” and his claim, echoing the philosophy we have encountered in the texts of Merleau-Ponty, is that manifestation is possible only because the departure of the λόγος is always already under way in its appearance—a structure that Christianity’s own understanding of itself, according to Nancy, tends to elide.9 First, we may note with Nancy that this scene is a parable rather than, say, an allegory or a myth. According to Nancy, what distinguishes the parable is that it is an expressive modality that makes the λόγος itself manifest in the image without mediation. There is nothing “between” the λόγος and its manifestation; it does not pass through some symbol or representative that indicates its presence but behind which it would nonetheless remain concealed. It is present in the image in the flesh—the image is its flesh. As he says, in the parable (in contrast to an allegory or illustration), the logos is not distinct from the figure or the image, since its essential content consists precisely in the logos’s figuring, presenting, and representing itself, announcing itself like a person who appears unexpectedly, who shows himself and, in showing himself, shows the original of the figure.10

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The λόγος that appears in the parable is not a copy, an εἰκόν of a hidden original. The figure in the parable is the manifestation of the λόγος. In the parable under consideration, the λόγος, Christ, unexpectedly appears on the scene and cannot be separated or distinguished from his mode of appearance or expression. The gardener who appears to Mary outside the empty tomb is not a proxy or functionary of the λόγος but Christ himself, present, there, before her astonished eyes. In this sense, parable, as an expressive form, is distinct from representational modes of signification that maintain a gap or difference between the λόγος and its “signifier,” for example, in the realist metaphysics that posits a reality hidden behind the epistemological veil of appearances or in a priori conditions of possibility that would become visible only to reflecting consciousness. In the parable, there are no signifiers per se because the λόγος itself appears and not its symbols or representatives—it is the figure itself. The parable is phenomenologically distinctive, then, to the extent that the operation of zeigen in it is unique: what shows itself points only to its own manifestation and not elsewhere. The figure does not gesture toward something it represents or stands for—it makes itself known; it announces itself in its own interest and through its own power, and in this way, is a φαινόμενον in the proper sense as the middle-passive voice of φαίνω, “to show”: that which, we recall, shows itself of itself das Sich-an-ihm-selbst-zeigen, in and of itself, by virtue of its own power and not another. The parable, for Nancy, is thus a distinctive manner of making manifest in which the figure, in this case Christ, makes itself known through a figuration that is its own, makes itself known of itself without mediation. What appears in the noli parable is the flesh of the λόγος itself, already naked, without symbolism or representation: the showing, the appearance of Christ—his first after the crucifixion.11 This parable is particularly interesting, for our purposes, to the extent that what it makes appear is an appearance: manifestation becomes embedded and folded within and on itself; it is the making present of a becoming present, and incrusted inside this fold is the flesh of the λόγος itself. What is significant about these phenomenological concerns, for Nancy, is that this moment of apparition par excellence is coupled with la partance, the departing,12 and it is this coupling that is essential for the noli episode and its bearing on the injunction issued against cruel thought. The coupling of appearance and withdraw, for Nancy, the arrival and departing of the λόγος, contains an important lesson for how we ought to understand the meaning of “resurrection.” According to Nancy, Christianity’s ownmost sense remains concealed insofar as resurrection has been taken to mean the eternal return of presence—rebirth, eternal life—at the expense of the partance, departing into nothingness, the “return to the father.” Nancy has a specific way in mind for how we should hear this part of the text. According to the scripture, Christ says the following after issuing his injunction to Mary: “for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.”13 The reference to “father,” of course, resonates profoundly with the tradition of psychoanalysis and Nancy clearly intends us to register this.14 To return to the father, contrary to tradition, is not to return to the absolute origin but to return to the empty signifier that points but has no referent, what Nancy will simply call nothingness or death. In



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this way, he wishes to underline the “calypticality” implicit in Christianity, that it is fundamentally a discourse of occlusion and withdraw as opposed to the apocalyptic discourse professed in its letter. Christ, for Nancy, does not return to a lost principle; he does not go to unlock and possess the secret, nor does he make a promise to unveil the absolute truth. He departs, and it is the departure that is essential for Nancy. He offers the following summary interpretation of what Christ means when he says “noli me tangere”: Do not touch me, do not hold me back, do not think to seize or reach toward me for I am going to the Father, that is, still and always to the very power of death. I am withdrawing into it. I am fading away into its nocturnal brilliance on this spring morning. I am already going away; I am only in this departure; I am the parting of this departure. My being consists in it and my word is this: ‘I, the Truth, am going away.’15

Nancy, here, is setting up his deconstructive reading of a set of ideas important to Christian theology: the promise of revelation, of ἀποκάλυψις, and the promise of eternal life. The noli episode raises an important question that Nancy wants to press: If the figure of Christ is the manifestation of the divine λόγος here on Earth in the flesh, the mediation of the eternal and mortal, the becoming human of God, what does it mean that this manifestation is not to be touched? What does it mean that the λόγος departs? How are we to take and understand this departure? The first lesson is that the λόγος forbids our reach. We reach out toward it and yet it withdraws and eludes us. We wanted to reach out and take hold of reason but it escapes us, and in this way the words of Christ signal this flight: touch me not, for I am already gone, disparue. It is in this sense that we must take Christianity to be a discourse of καλυψις—of veiling—rather than of ἀποκάλυψις—unveiling. The final revelation, the closure and consummation we wanted from the λόγος will not be given. The absolute that God seems to have always signalled has departed, and we are left, like Mary, to live through this temporal existence here on Earth. The second lesson is about the promise of eternal life and the meaning of resurrection. In addition to the manifestation of the divine λόγος, the figure of Christ makes the strange restitution of human finitude visible. On one hand, Christ is one of us—he is mortal, and we know this thanks to the crucifixion. On the other hand, he represents the possibility of resurrection, typically understood as eternal life. But what can eternal life mean for temporal beings? What can this signify for the φύω of the visible? Like Merleau-Ponty, Nancy does not think that this can mean our liberation from time. For Nancy, Christianity is not properly a discourse of resurrection in that sense, the expiation of mortality and temporality in the divine and eternal, but is a discourse dwelling on the impossibility of such atonement, a discourse of decay, lapse, and disintegration, even in spite of its protestations otherwise. It seems it must be, otherwise we have no means for understanding the ungraspability of the eternal in time that the noli episode expresses: the departure of the λόγος. If we accept MerleauPonty’s claim that eternity makes sense only thanks to time and not outside of time, then what could eternal life mean? Only the infinite repetition of life—the return of an endless cycle of biological processes. Life, in that case, would no longer be human in

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any meaningful sense. It would be life and life only: the “putrefaction” of a cancerous and contagious “vivification,” a parasitic and invasive life, undead rather than living, and we would be stripped of the wondrous blessing that death is. Nancy summarizes this connection in a striking passage: Culture in general—all human culture—opens up the relation to death, the relation opened by death, without which there would be no relation at all: there would be only a universal adhesion, a coherence and a coalescence, a coagulation of all (a putrefaction that would always be vivifying for new germinations). Without death there would only be contact, contiguity, and contagion, a cancerous propagation of life that would consequently no longer be life—or rather, it would only be life and not existence, a life that would not at the same time be anastasis.16

Resurrection, ἀνάστασις, cannot mean simply “eternal life,” for eternal life signals the absence or impossibility of death, and there can be no resurrection without death. Resurrection thus requires death, as the story of Christ clearly illustrates. The resurrection promised by Christianity, like all articulations of human culture, opens us onto our own mortality—that we are beings who are born and die in time, that we come into being and pass away, and that our arrival here, as Nancy will insist, is, like Christ, already our departure. Eternity, by contrast, would deprive us of that outside, that non-being, the non-existence, which, as existing beings we reference, and which, according to Nancy, makes all relationality possible. If we were immortal we would be fused into the total “coagulation” of life—we would be stripped of the transcendence, the ek-stasis we have thanks to time that both makes us what we are and at the same time ensures that this φύω will remain incomplete. It is the appearance of the necessity of death on the scene of a discourse that claims to be about immortality that is figured in the concept of la partance, and it is precisely this departure, this concealment, this καλυψις, that shines forth in the Noli me tangere episode. In the apparition of the arisen on the scene, his presence, what shows itself, is nothing short of his withdraw and absence. In this way, Nancy says, the partance is inscribed into every appearing—that which shows itself, the phenomenon, is in every case already in the process of its departure; it is already “on the way to,” Unterwegs,17 its disappearance: The departing [la partance] is inscribed onto presence, presence is presenting its vacating. He has already left; he is no longer where he is; he is no longer as he is. He is dead, which is to say that he is not what or who he, at the same time, is or presents. He is his own alteration and his own absence: He is properly only his impropriety.18

We get a better sense of how, for Nancy, the noli episode expresses a certain figure of manifestation, a figure with a clear resonance with what we have encountered in Merleau-Ponty. The appearance of the λόγος in the phenomenon—its articulation—is simultaneously its disappearance—its disarticulation. What appears is not the λόγος itself, there, before us, all its heavenly glory shining down, but its disappearance, its disintegration and dissipation—what appears is only the partance of the λόγος. Therefore, if what shows itself in the noli episode is the flesh of the λόγος, it is not



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in the flesh, en personne, that the λόγος appears but only in its irredeemable and irremediable distance and inaccessability: there is a gardener and an empty tomb and the arisen is gone, already departed. To this extent, the becoming of the sense of the world, as we have already seen, is not of the order of the present or of presence—there is no presence as such, for every “presencing” is only the appearance of a departure, of an “absencing.”19

2. La partance, faith, and love The parable is significant because the words Noli me tangere, according to Nancy, speak this partance; they tell us that our meeting each other here is already our parting and that it is not our proximity but our distance that makes it possible for us to be with each other. The partance is the condition of our Mitsein,20 our being-with, and thus of our intersubjectivity. Likewise, the time of our meeting is not the present as such but the time of an Ablauf, of passage, the time of flux and flight: “Touch me not for I am already gone; my departure is already under way.” When we reach out to grasp what shines forth for us, indeed beckoning our touch, even the touch of our eyes, we must realize that the event of this shining forth is simultaneously the event of its withdraw— its brightness is simultaneously a darkening, just as the play of light that illuminates a canvass is only possible through the shadows that surround it. So our being with others is also made possible by the fact that the other of necessity eludes me: to the extent to which she is awake, alive, and animate, I can never possess the secret of her movements or consciousness, and it is precisely our parting from each other in this sense that makes it possible for us to be here together. It is in this sense that the words “touch me not” also function as a methodological and ethical injunction. Methodologically, the words mean that the reflection that grasps, holds and seizes—cruel thought—understands neither the manner in which the sense of the world is expressed nor the meaning of life, death, and intersubjectivity.21 The discourse that seeks fusion, coagulation as Nancy suggests, is a discourse committed to the putrefaction of the flesh, to the eternal return of a meaningless, undead vivification, a mechanical, automatic life that is precisely not an existence. To refuse the desire of cruel thought to touch and possess, philosophy must become a discourse of resurrection in Nancy’s sense: it must let go of its adherence to being, to think without the requirement that such an endeavor must place being under arrest. Ethically, the words call us to allow the other his withdraw and impossessability, to allow for his escape, allowing him to be fugitive, allowing him to be other. Nancy summarizes these points in the following way: Do not touch me, do not detain me, seek not to hold or retain, renounce all adhesion, think not of a familiarity or a security. Don’t believe that there is an assurance of the kind Thomas wanted. Don’t believe, in any manner. But remain firm in this nonbelief. Remain true to that alone which remains in my departure: your name, which I utter. In your name, there is nothing to grasp and nothing for you to appropriate, but there is this: that it has been addressed to you, from the

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immemorial and up to the unachievable, from the ground without ground that is always in the process of leaving.22

To allow for the partance of the phenomenon in its appearance is to dispense with assurances, security (national, personal, private), guarantees, indeed, to dispense with the kind of certainty required by Thomas when he insisted on placing his fingers into the Holy Wounds.23 Thomas, to this extent, suffered from a distinctively Cartesian affliction: doubt and its correlate desire for certainty, and there is something cruel in Thomas’s desire to lay his hands on the beloved. Allowing for the partance of the λόγος—to desire something other than to touch with one’s own hands, to grasp, to place one’s fingers inside the wounds of the other—requires something beyond recognition, security, and certainty: it requires ἀπόφασις rather than ἀπόφανσις, the suspension of belief that lies beyond the assertoric. There is perhaps too much to say here about the significance of this transition or “mutation” from philosophy understood as ἀπόφανσις, roughly translated as “assertion,” to philosophy understood as ἀπόφασις, which is probably poorly translated as “denial” or “negation.” In contrast to the Sartrean sense of nihilation, ἀπόφασις has the sense of “putting under way” or “sending away,” of partance, rather than the more apocalyptic sense of “Weltnichtung” or “world-annihilation” found, for example, in Husserl.24 To think through this more thoroughly, however, one would not only have to turn to significant commentators on Aristotle’s use of ἀπόφανσις and ἀπόφασις in the Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας, such as Heidegger in On the Question of Truth, but also to the tradition of classical skepticism, where ἀπόφασις has the sense of “sending away by holding oneself back.”25 What seems to be indicated by Nancy is the possibility of a hermeneutics or a legibility of being from the perspective of ἀπόφασις in this latter sense. This sense of ἀπόφασις is what is named by Noli me tangere, particularly as it is figured in the themes of love and faith: in meeting here together, I send you away as I send myself away. It is at this point that we may turn to the account of φιλία, love, outlined in Nancy’s reading of the noli episode. Love is not what is expressed in the desire to possess the other. It is expressed, rather, in the ἀπόφασις—sending under way, to let go and to allow for his withdrawal. In other words, to love is to let die. To love means to make space for the unattainable—making space for the possibility of being touched, being seized, as Nancy says, precisely by the unattainability, the distance, that the partance makes visible: Love and truth touch by pushing away: they force the retreat of those whom they reach, for their very onset reveals, in the touch itself, that they are out of reach. It is in being unattainable that they touch us, even seize us. What they draw near to us is their distance: they make us sense it [sentir], and this sensing [ce sentiment] is their very sense [sens].26

To be touched by and in love is to be touched in partance—and of course Nancy’s deconstructive paradox is apt: touched in partance, touched in withdraw, touched through removal, distance, and unreachability. It is the touch of distance, the touch of the spacing of vision as the sense of the world opens forth beneath my eyes. To be touched by love is precisely the opposite of contact, fusion, transparency and mastery:



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it is to be touched by the fugitive precisely in his fuga, in his vanishing, to be touched by “the daughter of the mists and the outside,” as Proust says.27 Love, for Nancy, means openness to this distance, being sensitive to it. When the arisen speaks the words Noli me tangere to Mary Magdalene, he speaks them out of love. On hearing them, Mary Magdalene does perhaps the only loving thing she could in response: she too departs. It is not enough to love the beloved across the distance: one must also love the flight and the withdrawal—one must love the partance itself. To love the appearance of something or somebody—to love it in its shining forth, its manifestation—means simultaneously to love its recession and eclipse: to love its degeneration, decay, and death. This is perhaps what is most difficult. This is echoed explicitly in Nancy: “You hold nothing; you are unable to hold or retain anything, and that is precisely what you must love and know. That is what there is of a knowledge and a love. Love what escapes you. Love the one who goes. Love that he goes.”28 In this sense, nothing could be further from the cruel desire to possess in transparency, to keep jealously under lock and key, under surveillance, sitting in her room, staring at her while she sleeps. It is in her expression of this “fugitive love” that Mary Magdalene shows her faith, a faith that is different from the merely “formal” faith of Thomas, who wished to touch and be closest to the λόγος. Mary Magdalene is able to acknowledge and live the distance between her and her beloved.29 This is a more a more radical faith, beyond belief, beyond correctness and incorrectness, or to use a locution from Merleau-Ponty, faith “beyond all hope.”30 To this extent, this is not an apocalyptic faith that waits in anticipation for the final revelation; nor the morbid faith that must touch the open wounds but one that expresses itself in the partance: “Mary does not demonstrate her faith through statements, hypotheses, or calculations: She leaves. The response to the truth that is on the point of departure [en partance] is to leave with it.”31 Nancy offers several additions to this expression of faith: It does not consist in recognizing the known but in entrusting oneself to the unknown (certainly not in taking it as a substitute for the known, for that would be belief and not faith) …. It is as if this faith consisted in trusting the emptiness as such, without searching for what has become of the dead.32

Unlike Thomas, Descartes, or Proust’s narrator, Mary Magdalene does not require proofs, identification, titles, or definitions, and she has now overcome her desire to exhume and display the lost dead. She does not ask to see the Holy Wounds nor does she stop and frisk the gardener for concealed indications of his identity—she requires neither zeigen nor referrals. When the arisen speaks Noli me tangere, she does not touch—she departs, and in so doing entrusts herself to the partance of the λόγος. She places her trust in the withdrawal into nothingness, the “return to the father”; she does not lie on the ground and weep in the face of this withdrawal, the face of death; she simply “goes on her way” to live: to wander in the desert among the shifting, unrecognizable dunes.33 She lets the beloved ascend; because she loves and has faith, she allows the beloved a distance not to be traversed; she allows for the beloved to die. Noli me tangere: “Touch me not; allow for the distance between us; let me die.” Cruel thought refuses this injunction, and it is this refusal that makes it cruel. In this

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sense Merleau-Ponty was right: cruel thought does not love; it fears only. It does not and cannot love because its only desire is a violent touch—closing its hands around the λόγος, around the essence, keeping it under surveillance, watching it sleep. Nancy’s account of the noli episode can also be heard, echoing Merleau-Ponty, as a call for a new φιλία and a new σοφία. In this way, cruel thought is not capable of φιλία—it understands love only as jealousy, lies, domination and inquisition, and in this sense, it can know only fear. In place of this fear, Merleau-Ponty’s idea of philosophical interrogation offers a φιλία of καλυψις, veiling rather than ἀποκάλυψις, unveiling— and this φιλία makes a new kind of σοφία possible: a wisdom of πίστις—of faith or trust, of ἀπόφασις, “negation” understood as the sending forth of vision, rather than the ἀπόφανσις, the circumscription of propositional discourse. Wisdom is no longer understood as possession of anything—not of knowledge, truth, the other, or even of oneself—rather this is a wisdom of dispossession, allowing oneself to become dispossessed by the partance, allowing for the other’s decay and disintegration, one’s own decay and disintegration, allowing for the rising and setting of all things in time.

3. Love as absencing We find this account of love, of φιλία, in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and the narrator’s infamous affair with Albertine in his 1954 lecture course, “Institution in Personal and Public History.” The themes of jealousy and paranoia are prominent, and the concern that occupies Merleau-Ponty is to understand at what point, if any, love can be understood beyond the cruel desire to possess and denude the other. It is the cruel desire to possess Albertine that leads Proust’s narrator down a path of jealousy, suspicion, and surveillance that reaches its climax at the end of La prisonnière when he discovers that the beloved has departed. As Merleau-Ponty underlines in his lecture, the narrator’s jealousy and suspicion are foreshadowed in Swann’s relationship to Odette and may be seen even as a repetition of this love. At first glance, according to Merleau-Ponty, Proust seems to be offering a picture of love that is founded on jealousy—founded on the fear of not knowing her intentions, of not having uninhibited access into her consciousness. In spite of the salience of jealousy, fear, and surveillance in the Recherche, Merleau-Ponty finds another account of love in Proust not reducible to this epistemological desire. Proustean love, for Merleau-Ponty, is love of the withdrawal—not possession, as he will say, but dispossession, perhaps even evisceration: Love, we could say, in partance. It is in the conclusion of his reflections on love in this lecture that Merleau-Ponty draws together the important lessons to be taken from Proust. First, love is not presence, not possession. This is because one must love the other in her alterity, in her unpossessability. Others are never present before us in the fullness of their positivity but only make themselves known as others across the distance and spacing of vision; they only become present to us insofar as they remain occluded; we encounter them only in their partance. As Merleau-Ponty notes in this regard, “The other is present in my anxiety, my lack of her, in her absence. There is no ‘true’ presence that fills in this absence: no possession” and “this is true all the way to the end.”34 We understand that



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the other is present in the longing we feel, in the distress we undergo in our desire to make her present even in her ungraspability. But this is an absence, a withdrawal that no reach could hope to overcome. The other is present in her visibility—in the distance and spacing between her and myself, a spacing, an écart, a differentiation that no one could hope to traverse, and we are able to see each other, to be present before one another in this meeting, only across this distance. In love, then, Merleau-Ponty says, it is this distance, this withdrawal that one loves: “One loves nothing but the absent. Love is a hollow in us, not the presence of the other. Love is ‘unrealizable,’ ‘outside of the plane of life.’”35 It is the “outside” here that is essential: as the experience undergone of this longing and this absence, love is ek-static; it takes me outside of myself, and in love, I am no longer the “self ” that I thought was. I too become other; in love, I too am rent by an internal distancing and spacing. In this way, the space between myself and the other, her distance, confronts me with my own disintegration, the diffusion of the self in time. As Merleau-Ponty notes, “love entails a beyond oneself, the very beyond of the false desire of possession.”36 The other is beyond; I too am beyond, both of us together at a distance: she not quite who I thought she was, both imaginary and real at the same time; I not quite myself, not the person I believed myself to be nor the person she believes in. We are both torn asunder across this distance and our meeting and presence together is made possible by this mutual absence and withdraw. The absencing we undergo in love, however, is also disclosive. It is even the model for the manifestation of the sense of the world, for we already understand that it is only in virtue of this distancing, this ek-stasis, that I am open onto a visible world—one that eludes me even as I run my hand over its textures, a world for which I arrive late. The sense of the world makes itself known in its partance. I am open to a visible world only on the condition that at some point I am also excluded from it. Love, MerleauPonty says, allows us to see everything that someone is, how someone is the world itself, being itself, a world, a being from which we are excluded; in the experience undergone of this pain, one is beyond desire and domination: “through the intensity of one’s pain one arrives at the mystery, at the essence.” At the mystery: how one can be non-self with all of one’s strength. At the essence: revelation that the essence of someone is the non-essence, guilt and innocence, and both at once. Albertine is present at a distance like the little phrase in its sounds, not separable from them and yet intangible, noli me tangere …: grief teaches you how to see.37

Love makes the other visible as that which cannot be possessed precisely in its ungraspability. We reach out our hands to knowing and yet what we seek cannot be grasped. It allows for the one with whom we cannot coincide to appear and at the same time allows us to see the impossibility of holding on to her at all. It shows us our lateness, our exclusion from being everything, and the experience of this exclusion, accordingly, is one of a visionary grief in which the essence appears: to cease to be oneself, to open what one is to the dissonance of becoming in time, to allow for the dehiscence of our minds and bodies “with all one’s strength.” Our loved ones are to us as we are to ourselves, like the world that opens forth in our perceptual experience, both transparent and opaque, visible and invisible, here and not here, “at a distance.”

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What the experience of love teaches us is that if we love, as Mary Magdalene loved Christ, we must allow for the beloved’s departure; we must let go and allow the beloved his or her withdraw; we must allow for the clearing of the beloved’s impossessability: we must let each other die. In the grief of this Gelassenheit,38 this letting-be, in its disclosive power, love may teach us how to see again. As Merleau-Ponty notes in the lecture, “Love is clairvoyant; it addresses us precisely to what is able to tear us apart.”39 Love, if it is love and not fear, is not possession, not of oneself nor of the other, but dispossession—openness to the grief of withdraw, not integrity but the loss of integrity, disintegration, openness to the possibility of being torn apart from the inside. Like time, or perhaps even as time, love is what allows for us to come forth even as it is what eviscerates us, the principle both of our becoming, of our φύω, and of our στέρεσις, our decay and disintegration.

Conclusion: What Can We Have?

Ontological lateness means that as reflection turns around to put in view what makes it possible, it discovers that any such conditions are in a state of departure and that it too is on its way, caught in the stream of this departure. We reach out toward knowledge but it escapes; reflection finds that it does not stand on absolute foundations but that the soil under its feet is already in a state of erosion, that it is swept away in the flood of becoming, in the φύω of the visible. Because it is in this state of flux, the ceaseless ῥέω of things in their rising and setting, the world spreads out in its depth and with all the occlusion and indeterminacy its distance brings to pass. I see the others there and our eyes meet but only as we are already parting ways. The visible world expands into the horizon, beyond the extent of mortal eyes, beyond the reach of my hand, into the infinite distance, vague, blurry, indistinct, and at some point, I am no longer sure what exactly it is that I see. It is at this point, when I am no longer sure, when the absolute coagulation of myself and the world longed after by cruel thought is split asunder in this distance, it is then that I again wonder what it means to see, “Where am I? What time is it?”1 It is on the precipice of such wonder that I am ready to think, ready to express my φιλία and attend to the point of the partance of the sense of the world in its fuga, in its escape. I look and it is gone. But the critique of cruel thought presented here, it will no doubt be said, only tells us what we cannot have and says nothing about what we can. If we accept that our hand should be open, that thought should let go, let escape rather than attempting to seize upon being in its own proper place, then what is there to hope for? If we are to give up on absolute certainty, what is there of truth? We hoped that the wisdom of our sciences would advance us on the path to the absolute consummation of being and that the secrets of nature would be unveiled once and for all and now we are told to hope for no such thing, that there will be no ἀποκάλυψις but only the egress and the flight of all things out of themselves. What can we have? The problem with this question is what we mean when we ask about “having.” If by this we mean to possess, to keep, to coagulate and fuse with, then we pose such a question, “What can we have?” only from the point of view of cruelty. Our question betrays our wish to penetrate into things and exhaust them, to dissect and display in total and absolute transparency, and it is this desire that Merleau-Ponty’s thought calls into question. There is a sense in which this the wrong question and that, therefore, we must ask something else: what is there? What is it that I see? And at this point we recognize that our questions are those of an interrogation; instead of hoping for an impossible integrity the questioning regard we raise to the world is reflected back upon we who ask, this question-savoir that is the flesh of all things.2 Insofar as it makes

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sense to speak of what we have, we can only say that we have the world and its history from which we emerge in all of its conflict, difficulty, incongruence and permanent dissonance. We have the visible and its piercing brilliance, distance, occlusion and coherent deformations. We have others with whom our communication remains ineluctably problematic, who, like us, are born and die, who we meet here at the point of departure, and who in greeting we at the same time bid adieu, “to God,” “God be with you,” who we send away into the nothingness as we ourselves make our way to the outside. There is the rising and setting, the respiration, the deflagration of being in its φύω, a streaming forth of things in time, integration and disintegration in which “we can never know complete rest.”3 But is there not something profoundly pessimistic in a philosophy that bids us to give up on completing the tasks of thinking? Are we only left to despair in the impossibility of arriving at the final diapason that thought asked for? Are we left, then, only with problems, enigmas, and difficulties and without hope? These kinds of questions, however, again are only asked from the point of view of thought that began with a presupposed ideal of finality. On the contrary, for Merleau-Ponty, a philosophy of lateness is optimistic precisely because it does not seek closure—because it allows for the openness of the present and the indeterminacy of the future, because it does attempt to reduce the ambiguity of the probable to the possible and necessary. As Merleau-Ponty notes at the end of Humanisme et terreur: “The human world is an open and unfinished system and the same radical contingency which threatens it with discord also rescues it from the inevitability of disorder and prevents us from despairing of it.”4 The philosophy of ontological lateness does not provoke in us the quietism of despair but the necessity of courage and action. It is a philosophy that does not seek to escape the world for the safety of some pensée en survol but that endeavors to be in and of the world, one that awakens us to the importance of daily events and action. For it is a philosophy which arouses in us a love for our times which are not the simple repetition of human eternity nor merely the conclusion to premises already postulated. It is a view which like the most fragile object of perception—a soap bubble, or a wave— or like the most simple dialogue, embraces indivisibly all the order and disorder of the world.5

The grand schemes of past generations, the various projects of modernity, which envisioned a world of perfect symmetry, transparent, liberated from the veils of ignorance have brought us to this point, where we stand. For Merleau-Ponty, the greatest crime of the past is the pretension that reason could, like Clytemnestra bestriding the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra in pools of blood, “bring good order to our house at least,”6 and this crime has always been premised upon its desire to eradicate uncertainty. What should our posture be with respect to our lateness? Even if we agree that we cannot possess the secret, what is asked of us? In the Causeries radio broadcast, his answer is simple: anxiety and courage in the face of this anxiety. Should the impossibility of a final unveiling of things fill us with some dread? Yes, and this is why we must turn toward the world and toward one another. He says:



Conclusion: What Can We Have?

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It is understandable that our species, charged as it is with a task that will never and can never be completed, and at which it has not necessarily been called to succeed, even in relative terms, should find this situation both cause for anxiety [inquiétude] and a cause for courage. In fact, these are the same thing. For anxiety is vigilance, it is the will to judge, to know what one is doing and what there is on offer. If there is no such thing as benign fate, then neither is there such a thing as its malign opposite. Courage consists in being reliant on oneself and others to the extent that, irrespective of differences in physical and social circumstances, all manifest in their behavior and their relationships that very same spark which makes us recognize them, which makes us crave their assent or their criticism, the spark which means we share a common fate.7

There is only the often violent setting forth of the world and our immersion in it, and if we must cling to something as we find ourselves adrift in the darkness of this upheaval, then the best we have is to cling to each other even across the distances that separate us and with the understanding that this distance, this difference, will never be eliminated: that we will misunderstand one another, that there will be miscommunication, and that the others to whom we cling will depart, and that we here today already find ourselves at the point of departure. There is no grand destiny awaiting us in the future—only the same contingency, the same fragility of mortal life that we are confronted with today, and perhaps the most important lesson of the philosophy of lateness is to confront that uncertainty on its own plane, without the illusion that this struggle will somehow resolve itself into a final victory. For Merleau-Ponty, it is not a question of quietism but of picking up and carrying the world we have with the understanding that we never be able to completely cleanse it of the stains of the past or erase the markings of time and history. What we are called upon to do, far from giving up, is to live—in all the contingency, fragility, and difficulty of our world, to live the finitude of human life on Earth and be grateful that there are no gods after all.

Notes List of Abbreviations 1

Works by Merleau-Ponty cite the original French followed by the English translation. Likewise for texts in German.

Introduction 1

Attentive readers will note that I remain virtually silent regarding Merleau-Ponty’s first book, La structure du comportement. The reason for this silence is that MerleauPonty completed this book in 1938 but delayed its publication until 1942 because of the war. It is clear from reading this text that Merleau-Ponty’s relationship to phenomenology was naïve at the time. It would not be until a year later that he would “discover” Husserl and make his entry into the field of phenomenology. Because my concern here is primarily with Merleau-Ponty as a phenomenologist, this work does not receive the due consideration it obviously deserves. 2 Proust, In Search of Lost Time, I: 853–4. 3 Descartes, Meditations, 13. 4 Deconstruction, Derrida and Nancy specifically, is perhaps the best exemplar of this “mutation” in recent continental philosophy though I should think one also finds it in other thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze. For Merleau-Ponty’s relationship to these thinkers, see Lawlor 1998 and 2003. For more on Foucault and Merleau-Ponty see Fielding 1999. 5 NC, 359. 6 This is a delicate territory to tread. Merleau-Ponty understood better than anybody that the thought here deemed “Cartesian,” what he calls “cruel thought,” could not be unilaterally attributed to Descartes without a certain degree of betrayal. Nonetheless, there is this cruel gesture in Descartes even if he himself is not always adequate to it, and from Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, it is not a coincidence that the privileged perspective of the cogito that would echo from Kant to Husserl in the tradition of transcendental thought finds its inaugural moment in Descartes. For an excellent account of Merleau-Ponty’s relation to Descartes, see Heinämaa 2003. 7 NC, 359. 8 IP, 68/32. 9 Proust 1998, II: 503. 10 For other studies of the significance of delay and lateness in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, see Al-Saji 2008 and Waldenfels 2000. 11 EP, 67–8/58, 71/61. 12 In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty cites a passage from Valéry,

170 Notes Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci (PhP, 461/465, trans. modified). See also “Eye and Mind” (OE, 70/370–1, trans. modified). 13 PhP, 14/xv. 14 For a remarkable account of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of philosophy, see Dastur 2007. As Dastur rightly emphasizes, “Philosophy cannot overcome its ambiguity, which is at once an internal weakness or disability, and a virtue: it can never become an ‘intellectual possession’ of the world, a ‘positive’ philosophy in the sense of constituting a second order beyond the sensuous” (162). See also Heinämaa 1999. 15 See Emmanuel Saint-Aubert’s work for a more thorough elaboration of the concept of promiscuity in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, for example, Saint-Aubert 2006. 16 Husserl’s Ursprung der Geometrie was published in the Revue Internationale de Philosophie in January of 1939, and Merleau-Ponty would write to van Breda in March requesting permission to visit the archive. He had obviously read this issue since he cites several articles from that volume, including the Ursprung der Geometrie itself. For more on Merleau-Ponty’s trip to Leuven, see the letter published by van Breda after the former’s death in Texts and Dialogues. 17 There has been some discussion among Merleau-Ponty scholars about the extent to which the development of his work evinces a significant break between the project of Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. Barbaras, for example, has argued that there is a significant break between the early and later work, a reading that has had a wide-ranging impact. See Barbaras 2000, 2004, 2009 as well as, for example, Vallier 2006 and Saint-Aubert 2011. This claim is based upon remarks Merleau-Ponty makes in the documents he submitted as part of his candidacy to the Collège de France as well as in The Visible and the Invisible. See Merleau-Ponty, “Un inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” 48, and VI 222/171, 227/175, 234/183, 250/200. While no doubt there are significant and notable differences between Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, especially in the available conceptual vocabulary, I think that these have been overinflated. The development of Merleau-Ponty’s work, accordingly, is characterized by a shift in a polarization that characterizes the first period: on one hand, that, in his early works, phenomenology was understood as the recovery of a positively articulated layer of sense, and, on the other hand, the impossibility of such a positively articulated layer and the impossibility of its recovery. The development of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, accordingly, is characterized by a turn to the latter pole, which is most decisively articulated in The Visible and the Invisible. While Carbone is of course right to point out this polarity in the early works, it seems that the latter thought, that the return to perceptual experience is neither the recovery of a fully articulated sense nor phenomenology the “translation” of this text, is, at least to some extent, the focus of Phenomenology of Perception. For more on this polarity, see Carbone 2004. Gutting has offered an alternative view, namely, that in virtue of the fragmentary state of The Visible and the Invisible, which we have little hope of understanding, we should read Phenomenology of Perception as an “enrichment … on the basis of a deeper level of ontological thinking” (Gutting 2001: 185). 18 PhP, 103/42. Beaufret was a prominent Germanist during the post-war period and was instrumental in bringing Heidegger’s philosophy into France. For more on Beaufret’s relationship with Heidegger and his impact on the reception of Heidegger’s philosophy in France, see Janicaud 2001: 83–9. For a more detailed

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discussion of Beaufret’s critical remarks in the context of La primat de la perception see Saint-Aubert 2006, 2011. 19 Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, 14. 20 There seems to be a temptation to relegate existential phenomenology, particularly as it was articulated in the works of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, to its place in the history of philosophy as a form of philosophizing that tried but failed to overcome the idealist vestiges inherited from Descartes and Kant. This view is supported, for example, by Descombes (1980, 76). According to this reading, furthermore, the post-war philosophies of the 1960s, particularly Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, are legible as a rejection of phenomenology’s “incontestable idealism.” If we accept this view, furthermore, then it makes sense that The Visible and the Invisible was perhaps Merleau-Ponty’s most interesting text, insofar as it could be said moving furthest away from existential phenomenology toward something more similar to the philosophy of the 1960s. This view has been, and I think rightly, challenged by more recent scholars, who argue for more of a continuity between phenomenology and the philosophies of the 1960s. See Lawlor 2003. 21 PhP, 87/70. 22 Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger 2004: 191. 23 Ibid. 24 See Al-Saji 2007, 2008; Barbaras 2000, 2004, 2009. 25 For an important exception, see Ricoeur 2009. 26 S, 260/160. An excellent account of Merleau-Ponty’s relationship to the phenomenological tradition can be found in the essays collected in Dialectic and Difference: Modern Thought and The Sense of Human Limits. See Taminiaux 1990. 27 S, 260/160.

Chapter 1: Philosophical Interrogation and Perceptual Faith 1 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 130. 2 OE, 92/149, trans. modified. 3 The term is most immediately recognizable from Plato, who, especially in the Republic, casts the philosopher as a member of the elect, the wise, who stand apart and opposed to the popular beliefs of the masses often mired in mythology and superstition. See Plato 489b. 4 Duane H. Davis and William S. Hamrick compellingly make the case that MerleauPonty understood perceptual experience itself as an art in their recent collection, Merleau-Ponty and the Art of Perception. I agree with this claim but would take it one step further and add that not only did he understand perceptual experience as an art but also philosophy itself. See Davis and Hamrick 2016. 5 OE, 92–3/149, trans. modified. 6 Merleau-Ponty describes his ontology as “indirect” in The Visible and the Invisible, specifically in order to contrast his approach with what he perceived be Heidegger’s “direct” ontology. See VI, 231/179. Emmanuel de Saint-Aubert has elaborated this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology in his book, Vers une ontologie indirecte. See Saint-Aubert 2006. 7 Aristotle 980a. 8 The number of commentaries on this text are too numerous to list. Direct references

172 Notes to Aristotle in Merleau-Ponty are few and far between and as far as I know, he never mentions this passage specifically. It is not my intention here to go into an extended discussion of this passage—only to highlight some interesting specifics that will be of interest for the reading of Merleau-Ponty I would like to offer. 9 Apostle, for example, translates “All men by nature desire understanding.” See Apostle, 12. 10 As Judith Butler notes in her eloquent account of Merleau-Ponty, Malebranche, and touch, “we should not think that we will be able to grasp ourselves or, indeed, any object of knowledge, without a certain failure of understanding, one which makes the grasping hand, the figure for so much philosophical apprehension, a derivative deformation of originary touch” (Butler, “Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche,” 2006). For a critical perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s account of touch viz Lacan, see Dolar 2008. Dolar relies on an account of la chair that fails to take seriously the extent to which Merleau-Ponty meant this to be a principle of differentiation rather than unity. 11 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 981a30. 12 Descartes “Meditations,” 13. 13 Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” 47. 14 Proust, Within a Budding Grove, 1:853–4. 15 NC, 359. This text has been published in the Notes des Cours au Collège de France 1958–1959 et 1960–1961. According to Stéphanie Ménasé, this text is a “draft of a revision,” dated November 1960, of the chapter of The Visible and the Invisible that would be published under the title “Interrogation and Intuition.” According to Ménasé and Lefort’s editorial note in The Visible and the Invisible, this text was not included in the published version since Merleau-Ponty abandoned in it in favor of the published version (NC, 31). 16 NC, 359. 17 See Deleuze and Guattarri, A Thousand Plateaus, 261. 18 Augustine, IV, X. 19 We don’t know whether Merleau-Ponty would have made this argument or not. The texts published as The Visible and the Invisible as well as those written around the same time suggest that his project was beginning to approximate a deconstruction of Western metaphysics, as is indicated by his intention to return to the understanding of being at play in ancient Greece. He didn’t live to complete these portions of the text, so we will never know. It is certainly not my intention here to enter into such a grandiose endeavor. 20 VI, 166/127. 21 OE, 58/138. 22 VI, 166/127 23 Ibid., 160/122. 24 Lawlor, “Friend of the Future,” 83. 25 IP, 68/32. 26 Proust, In Search of Lost Time, II: 503. This passage evokes Sartre’s famous commentary in Being and Nothingness. Sartre says: “Proust’s hero … who installs his mistress in his home, who can see her and possess her at any hour of the day, who has been able to make her completely dependent on him economically, ought to be free from worry. Yet we know that he is, on the contrary, continually gnawed by anxiety. Through her consciousness, Albertine escapes Marcel even when he is at her side, and that is why he knows relief only when he gazes on her while she sleeps. It is

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certain then that the lover wishes to capture a ‘consciousness.’ But why does he wish it? And how?” (Sartre, EN, 434/478). 27 A tale about Descartes popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tells that he had constructed a female automaton travel companion and that the two were inseparable until she was cast overboard during a sailing voyage. See Stephen Graukoger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. While the story is almost certainly fictional, it makes one reconsider what is at stake in the famous passage from the Meditations: “But then if I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax. Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment” (Descartes, 85). 28 There is a lot to say about cruel thought and the sexual violence implied by Proust. The desire to possess that characterizes cruel thought is already a form of pre-sexual violence, discursively if not empirically. Pre-sexual, because this cruelty need not have the sexual assignments that Proust gives. At the same time, however, we must not ignore the manner in which this cruelty is complicit with and perhaps even acts in the name of patriarchical oppression. A philosophy of ontological lateness, insofar as it distances itself from this cruelty, also tries to distance itself from this violence. I thank Ann Murphy for her correspondence on this matter. 29 IP, 69/33. I will render the Greek word φιλία as “love” rather than “friendship,” even though it is in many ways, even etymologically, closer to the latter. The reason is that, as Aristotle argues in the Nichomachean Ethics, φιλία is reserved for that human bond that transcends ἔρως, sexual desire. It is the love that obtains between family members and between married couples, what we today would probably understand as that more profound love, even beyond mere romance. See Aristotle 1155a18. 30 IP,. 69/33. 31 Ibid., 34. 32 In the “Philosophy Today” course, Merleau-Ponty speaks of this crisis specifically in reference to Husserl’s Krisis. 33 NC, 39. 34 Ibid. For commentary on the idea of non-philosophy in Merleau-Ponty, see Carbone 2004 and Bimbenet and Saint-Aubert 2006. 35 Ibid., 359. 36 Ibid. 37 This description more or less follows the structure of the Meditations. Indeed, Descartes’s is a world full of dreams, illusion, confusion, and infinitely powerful and malicious demons, all cast against the backdrop of absolute certainty. Only a miracle, the grace of God, can save us from this macabre scenario. This Cartesian nightmare issues, as Merleau-Ponty knew, from fear and paranoia—fear of errors, the paranoia of not being able to enter into being exhaustively, of not being able to coincide with pure being or even to be pure being. One could suggest, then, that Descartes’s nightmare extends from his fear and anxiety of being only human. 38 In his adieu, written the year of Merleau-Ponty’s death, Ricoeur describes MerleauPonty’s thought as an “incomplete philosophy of incompleteness.” See Ricoeur 2009. 39 Heidegger, SZ, 5/24. For excellent commentary on Heidegger, especially Sein und Zeit, see Critchley 1998, 2008.

174 Notes 40 RC, 153–4/177–8. This course is listed as Possibilité de la philosophie in the Résumés de cours, which notes that the course was untitled. It’s called La philosophie aujourd’hui in the Notes de cours text, which includes the notes for the course but not the précis published in the Résumés. To make matters even more confusing, the title of the course is translated as “Philosophy and Interrogation” in In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. In any case, this is the course Merleau-Ponty gave at the Collège de France in 1958–9. I will consistently refer to it as “Philosophy Today.” 41 NC, 92–3. The parenthetical references are Merleau-Ponty’s. 42 This is what is known as the correspondence theory of truth, famously criticized by Heidegger. For Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the correspondence theory of truth is parasitic upon a more fundamental phenomenological theory of truth that it does not acknowledge. The correspondence between a proposition and state of affairs, accordingly, is made possible only on the basis of an older, more primordial truth. Heidegger borrows the Ancient Greek term for truth, ἀλήθεια, which he translates as Unverborgenheit or “unconcealment.” We may only speak of correctness or incorrectness of propositions later, in the wake of the unconcealment of the world’s sense. 43 NC, 130. In this passage Merleau-Ponty is making reference to Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking? 44 This remark first appears in the 1950 lecture Die Sprache and was repeated frequently in his later works. In this part of the lecture, Merleau-Ponty refers to “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” and What Is Called Thinking? 45 NC, 131–2. 46 VI, 169/129. 47 Ibid., 168–9/128–9. 48 Literally “grasp of consciousness.” 49 VI, 135/101; 133/99. 50 Ibid., 135/101. 51 Ibid. 52 See Heidegger, “Conversations on a Country Path about Thinking” in Discourse on Thinking. For an extended commentary on this text in connection with MerleauPonty, see Carbone, The Thinking of the Sensible. 53 VI, 135/101–2, trans. modified. 54 Ibid. 55 For a thorough account of the accusation of ocularcentrism in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, see Cathryn Vasseleu Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty. This accusation comes from Luce Irigaray, who sees the ocularcentrism of the Western canon, from at least Plato to Merleau-Ponty, as tied to the dominance of a male, heterosexual gaze. She posits touch as a distinctively feminine access to the world in place of this. It is not my intention to go into the specifics of this debate here as there is simply too much to say. 56 OE, 70/142. 57 Claudel, Art poétique, 9. 58 VI, 117/103. 59 OE, 31/9. Merleau-Ponty cites Charbonnier, La monologue du peintre, 1959. The words belong to André Marchand from his interview with Charbonnier but are said to express some sentiment of Klee. 60 VI, 117/103.

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61 Ibid., 17/3. 62 Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, Chapter XIV. 63 VI, 17/3. 64 As Merleau-Ponty remarks in the Le cogito chapter of Phenomenology of Perception, quoting Valéry (PhP, 461/465, trans. modified). 65 As Merleau-Ponty notes in the Brouillon, “exemplar of an alogical essence, what Hermes Trismégiste called ‘the scream [cri] of light’” (NC, 373). Merleau-Ponty makes reference to the same remark by Hermes Trismégiste in Eye and Mind: “Art is not skillful construction, skillful artifice, the skillful relation, from the outside, to a space and a world. It is truly the ‘inarticulate scream [cri],’ as Hermes Trismegistus said, ‘which seemed to be the voice of the light’” (OE, 70/370). 66 VI, 48/29. 67 VI, 135/101–2. 68 Plato, Phaedo, 81a. 69 Heidegger says: “death, as the end of Dasein, is Dasein’s ownmost possibility— non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped. Death is, as Dasein’s end, in the Being of this entity towards its end” (SZ, 258/303, Heidegger’s italics). 70 PhP, 390/388. 71 Probably the most important instance is M. C. Dillon’s account in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. See Dillon 1988: 199ff. For Dillon, realism and idealism result from the “ontological wedge” Descartes drives between immanence and transcendence. On Dillon’s reading, Merleau-Ponty’s thesis of the primacy of perceptual experience is intended to overcome the paradox of immanence and transcendence that results from such a bifurcation. Dillon’s reading is astute and follows the letter of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. Dillon’s account, however, sees Merleau-Ponty as solving epistemological problems, and this is where our interpretations differ. I don’t think Merleau-Ponty was as interested in solving epistemological problems as he was in challenging epistemology’s place as first philosophy. Dillon is responding to an older but excellent commentary on Merleau-Ponty’s thought, Madison’s The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (1981).

Chapter 2: The Real and the Outside 1

Zahavi defines metaphysical realism as a philosophy in which “knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be knowledge of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience” (Zahavi 2010: 5–6). There have even been attempts by Merleau-Ponty scholars to recover some sense of realism in his thought. Lawrence Hass, for example, has gone so far as to describe MerleauPonty’s project in Phenomenology of Perception as the articulation of what he calls “perceptual realism.” See Hass 2008: 55. 2 The most notable commentary on Kant’s philosophy and transcendental idealism is, of course, Allison’s Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. 3 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B295/A236. 4 Nancy, The Sense of the World, 54. 5 We are reminded here of what Nietzsche says in The Gay Science a propos the death

176 Notes of God: “At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not appear bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea” (Nietzsche, 280). 6 Sparrow, for example, expresses this concern in The End of Phenomenology. Even phenomenologists, like Jean-Luc Marion, have had this concern, as Moran points out when he takes up the question of immanence and transcendence in “Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Karl Jaspers.” 7 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 62. 8 This is the paradox of sense-genesis that would come to disturb Merleau-Ponty. See, for example, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression. We will turn to a detailed discussion of this text in the following chapter. 9 Meillassoux charges transcendental thought, and phenomenology specifically, with “correlationism,” the necessary reference of the appearance of the world to consciousness. I will not take up the charge of correlationism here. For a representative account of this charge with respect to phenomenology, see Sparrow, The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism. 10 For a thorough and detailed defence of phenomenology against the charge of correlationism, see Zahavi, “The End of What? Phenomenology vs. Speculative Realism.” 11 Almost paradoxically, we find this desire in Heidegger. Except for Heidegger, hearkening oneself to the call of the alien Dasein doesn’t take one outside of phenomenality but closer to its center. Rather than an escapism, Heidegger seeks to maintain the strangeness at the heart of sense, a strangeness constantly being rendered into the commonplace by das Man; see SZ, 277/321ff. 12 Meillassoux, 7. 13 Badiou, of course, argues that ontology prohibits the thinking of the event insofar as it encloses us in being-qua-being. See Badiou, Being and Event. It is not my intention to engage in detail with Badiou, but I don’t agree with the claim that phenomenology, at least, necessitates the thinking of being-qua-being. For an excellent account of thinking the event within the phenomenological tradition, see Dastur 2000. 14 Meillassoux, 108. 15 Ibid., 117. 16 Ibid., emphasis Meillassoux. 17 Ibid., 126. 18 Plato, Republic, 517b–c. The εἴδη are the last things to be seen, specifically the idea of the good in this case. 19 It’s worth noting that Meillassoux, at least, does not wish to identify his speculative project with Leibniz on this point. Speculative materialism does not, he thinks, issue a vindication of the principle of reason because it is concerned with the un-thought possible—not with providing explanations. Nonetheless, its desire to make contact with the absolute clearly echoes these basic Platonic desires. 20 SZ, 30/53. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 30/54.

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24 It is here that we can say that in Merleau-Ponty we have an ontology of sense. See Toadvine 2004. 25 It is said that Thales first brought geometry to Greece from Egypt. Geometry, however, was necessary for the Egyptians in order to redraw the property lines each year after they were erased by the Nile’s annual flooding. We like to think, with Meillassoux, that mathematics has no place, that it is outside the dwelling of mortals on Earth. As Husserl and Merleau-Ponty try to show, however, mathematics too belongs to the horizon of sense—it too has its style and manner of appearance, which includes its formality, abstractness, and universality. Geometry, and all mathematics, belong to the flesh of existence—it has its history, its context, and circumstances, and it also stands out against the backdrop of its past and projects itself into an indefinite future. For the history of geometry in Egypt and its transmission into Greece, see Phiroze Vasunia, The Gift of the Nile: Hellenizing Egypt from Aeschylus to Alexander, 90. 26 Merleau-Ponty says in The Visible and the Invisible, “In short: nothingness (or rather non-being) is a hollow and not a hole.” VI, 246/196. 27 See Heidegger, SZ, 74/103–4. Heidegger notes that the object, which formerly presented itself in its readiness-to-hand, shows itself in its Aufsässigkeit, its obstinacy, when it no longer appears as ready to hand. It appears as an obstacle rather than a means and thus confronts Dasein as something to be “shoved out of the way” (ibid.). 28 In a bar fight, a broken glass (or preferably a bottle) may be more than garbage—it could be “weapon,” in which case it still opens itself onto a possible future. Likewise, if I look at the broken glass and say “how beautiful,” it may again open onto another possible future. The broken glass piled onto the plinth at the museum is not exactly garbage (in spite of the possible opinions of the critics). 29 PhP, 387/385, trans. modified. 30 Ibid., trans. modified. 31 A well-known locution from “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” that Merleau-Ponty adopts from Malraux. See S, 88/54. 32 This phrase actually comes from Saint-Exupéry and it quoted and discussed at length by Smyth, who highlights the apparent tension between Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body in Phenomenology of Perception and what appears to be SaintExupéry’s penchant for pensée en survol (literally and figuratively). See Smyth, 7ff. 33 S, 265/162. 34 Ibid., 265/163, trans. modified. 35 Husserl, Ideen, 25/27. 36 Ibid., 26/28. 37 PhP, 388–9/387, trans. modified. 38 Meillassoux, of course, places special emphasis on the “necessity of contingency” in order to distance himself from Cartesian metaphysics. He says, “if we are to think the Galilean-Copernican fact of science without denaturing it further, we must think, as Descartes did, the speculative importance of mathematics, but this time without relying on, as he did, upon the metaphysical pretension to be able to prove the existence of a perfect being, which alone is supposedly capable of guaranteeing mathematics’ own intrinsic mode of truth … It is a question of absolutizing ‘the’ mathematical just as we absolutized ‘the’ logical by grasping in the fundamental criterion for every mathematical statement a necessary condition for the contingency of every entity” (Meillasssoux, 126). There is something disingenuous in these protestations, for it is clear that the absolutization of mathematics, even if it founds

178 Notes necessary contingency, is in the name of surpassing perspectivity, of attaining the absolute. Meillassoux doesn’t directly address the question of mathematical truth, which nonetheless stands at the center of his argument. 39 Plato, Republic 527b. Here, we see the opposition between ἀεὶ ὄντος, “eternal beings,” and those subject to γιγνομένου καὶ ἀπολλυμένου, “entering a new state of being and destruction.” 40 Ibid., 387/385. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 387/386. 43 Ibid., 390/388. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 390/389. 46 See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §47. 47 Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence, 8. 48 PhP, 389/387, trans. modified. 49 Nancy, The Sense of the World, 54. 50 Ibid., 55. 51 Nancy, Corpus, 33. 52 PhP, 481/487.

Chapter 3: A Consciousness Without Fissures 1

2

3

4 5

This is a remark made by Merleau-Ponty in Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression when he defines the notion of consciousness ascribed to subjective idealism “cette conscience est sans fissures.” Smyth’s rendering is “this consciousness can only deal with its significations. Nothing can affect it except by awakening within it one of the significations that it conceives. Receptivity is the death of this consciousness. Hence at once both immediate presence of this consciousness to its objects: nothing separates it from them, it reaches them without distance, — and at the same time, since with regard to them it is absolute overview [survol absolu], and they cannot turn against it, it is altogether distant from them” (MSME, 48). All translations of Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression are by Bryan Smyth. His English translation of this work is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press. All references are to the French edition. Kant defines the transcendental as “all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori” (A11/B25). For Merleau-Ponty, Kant’s accent on epistemology is displaced, for the world becomes manifest in ways that are not easily reducible to a merely cognitive opening onto its sense. There is some discussion among Kant scholars regarding the exact status of Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception. One of the most compelling accounts has been provided by Longuenesse in Kant and the Capacity to Judge, where she argues that we may only speak of this unity as a conatus toward judgment (Longuenesse, 394). In the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl was greatly concerned with demonstrating that phenomenology does not degenerate into transcendental solipsism and speaks of “transcendental intersubjectivity” (130). See PhP, 62–3n/58–9n.

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6 Ibid., 73/69. 7 Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, 2004. 8 PhP, 87/70. 9 Ibid., iv/x. 10 “Eternitary” would be a more literal translation even though no such word exists in English. The French word éternitaire is the correlate of temporaire, which we would render as “temporary.” I will leave the word untranslated to spare us this awkwardness. 11 This is a phrase Merleau-Ponty borrows from Valéry’s Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci. See PhP, 461/465. 12 The reasons cited are that Köhler explicitly describes his project as “phenomenological description”; and Koffka, for his part, studied with Husserl. Finally, Husserl will turn to the concept of “configuration” or even Gestalt in the Crisis, attesting to the influence of the Gestalt psychologists. Of course there are many other possible lines of convergence and refraction between Husserl and Gestalt psychology. For more on this topic, see Dillon 1988, 58ff. 13 The constancy hypothesis basically states that there is a one-to-one ratio between what appears in vision and qualia or sense data. One of the important critiques of empirical psychology mobilized by Merleau-Ponty, which he borrows from Köhler, is that no such ratio or correspondence exists. 14 PhP, 70/86. Phenomenology of Perception is often taken to demonstrate an unequivocal commitment to Husserlian phenomenology in contrast to The Visible and the Invisible (Al-Saji 2007, 2008; Barbaras 2009). While there is certainly room for debate regarding the position he takes up in either text with respect to Husserl or Heidegger, it would be a mistake to obfuscate the manner in which Merleau-Ponty attempts to take up a critical position with respect to Husserl’s articulation of the project of phenomenology in this text. 15 This is of course an allusion to Spinoza’s Ethics, meaning the movement from nature as it has been “natured,” i.e., constituted, to nature precisely in its function of “naturing,” i.e., constituting. 16 PhP, 73/70. 17 Ibid., 62n/59n. 18 Ibid., 72/69. 19 Ibid., 87/69. 20 It is on this basis that charges of correlationism gain their force. As we shall see, however, Merleau-Ponty’s thought challenges the primacy of constituting subjectivity. 21 See Husserl, Crisis, 130. 22 Ibid., 152–3; PhP, 87/69. 23 As Husserl says in the closing gamut of Part IIIA of the Crisis, “At all events, however, we must—for the most profound philosophical reasons, which we cannot go into further, and which are not only methodical in character—do justice to the absolute singularity of the ego and its central position in all constitution … Accordingly, as against the first application of the epochē, a second is required, or rather a conscious reshaping of the epochē through a reduction to the absolute ego as the ultimately unique center of function in all constitution” (Husserl, Crisis, 186). 24 PhP, 73/69. 25 The ordinary perspective of transcendental philosophy and its understanding the transcendental field as éternitaire comes under consideration in the opening gamut of

180 Notes Le cogito and Merleau-Ponty’s considerations of the work of one of his contemporaries, the French neo-Kantian philosopher, Pierre Lachièze-Rey. Merleau-Ponty argues, against Lachièze-Rey, that what idealist philosophy takes to be the a-temporality of the transcendental field is in fact a function of the temporal acquisition of sense. The mistake of idealism, then, is its failure to think the transcendental field precisely in its temporal extension. We shall come back to this below. 26 PhP, 87/70, trans. modified. Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl, as becomes explicit in “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” is centered around the identification of an important tension that arguably plays out over the development of Husserl’s thought. On one hand, Husserl maintains a commitment to the ontological primacy of consciousness throughout his career, especially in his insistence on articulating a transcendental phenomenology. On the other hand, the return to transcendental, constituting consciousness, in Husserl’s texts, is “rent by an inverse movement which it elicits” and thus the return to consciousness is simultaneously “going outside of ourselves” (S, 204/161). 27 Husserl, Ideen, 148, 168. 28 PhP, 87/70, trans. modified. 29 Husserl’s now somewhat platitudinous call to the things themselves [zu den Sachen selbst] is a call to abide by the phenomena in their appearance. As he remarks in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science”: “‘To things themselves!’ Not, however, to things as they are ‘in themselves’ (an sich), where their being is relative, but in the psychic flow, where their being is absolute, an essential being with the absoluteness of subjectivity” (Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science”, 108). As he remarks earlier in Ideen I: “But to judge rationally or scientifically about things signifies to conform to the things themselves or to go from words and opinions back to the things themselves, to consult them in their self-givenness and to set aside all prejudices alien to them” (Husserl, Ideen, 35). 30 PhP, 74/71, trans. modified. 31 Ibid., 88/70. 32 Ibid., 74/71, trans. modified. 33 Ibid., 14/xv. In a working note of The Visible and the Invisible dated February 1959 and entitled “Einströmen—Reflection,” Merleau-Ponty returns to the concept of the Einströmen, when he remarks that “Because there is Einströmen, reflection is not adequation, coincidence: it would not pass into the Strom if it placed us back at the source of the Strom” (VI, 224/173). Husserl discusses the concept of Einströmen in a working manuscript to the Crisis dated 1935 bearing this word as its title. This text is included in Hua XXIX, 78:19–30. While Merleau-Ponty had access to the then unpublished manuscripts of the Crisis during his visit to the Husserl archives in 1939, it is unclear whether he would have seen or read this text, though the references he makes would seem to suggest the affirmative. For more on this text and the significance of the concept of Einströmen for Husserl’s articulation of the project of transcendental phenomenology, see Dodd 2004. 34 PhP, 89/72, trans. modified. 35 Ibid., 425/424. 36 This philosophy, he says in The Visible and the Invisible, “would also take itself and the changes it introduces into the spectacle into account … it would set itself the task of … reflecting on the transcendence of the world as transcendence, speaking of it not according to the law of the word-meanings inherent in the given language, but with a perhaps difficult effort that uses the significations of words to express, beyond

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ourselves, our mute contact with the things, when they are not yet things said” (VI, 60/38). 37 In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty famously criticizes Phenomenology of Perception precisely for retaining this idealist vestige. See VI, 222/171; 227/175; 234/183; 250/200. We shall return to this self-critique, which has become of some importance among recent commentators, in the next chapter. 38 Lachièze-Rey appears in Merleau-Ponty’s works as one of several representatives of French neo-Cartesian and neo-Kantianism. For philosophers of Merleau-Ponty’s generation and in his circle, figures like Lachièze-Rey symbolized the old, tired tradition of French thought. The discovery of Husserl and Heidegger’s writings in particular represented, for this younger generation, an exciting alternative to what was perceived to be a more establishment form of philosophizing. 39 PhP, 9/ix; 430/427. 40 Lachièze-Rey 1932. 41 PhP, 433/430. 42 Ibid., 433/430. Merleau-Ponty only cites Lachièze-Rey, but the quote is from Spinoza’s Ethics, E5P23S: “we experience that we are eternal.” 43 Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, Chapter XXX. 44 The relation between sense-genesis, acquisition, and temporality will be elaborated in more detail in Chapter 4, where we shall return to the theme of temporality. 45 PhP, 433/430, trans. modified. 46 We can see here the point at which Merleau-Ponty thinks that Sartre is an idealist of this stripe—insofar as the obstacles that I confront remain functions of my freedom. We will take this up in Part 2. 47 Ibid., 433/431. 48 One of the most important recent contributions to discussions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in Merleau-Ponty’s thought is Marratto (2012), The Intercorporeal Self: Merleau-Ponty on Subjectivity. See also the essays collected in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (1990) as well as Slatman 2009. 49 Descartes, Meditations, 32/85. 50 PhP, 434/431. 51 While the language of déhiscence and éclatement might initially invoke the later works, they are already important for Merleau-Ponty’s account of sense-genesis and its relation to temporality in Phenomenology of Perception; see PhP, 481/487ff. We shall take up their significance in more detail in the following chapters. 52 Ibid., 435/432. 53 Ibid., 433/435. 54 Ibid., 238/229, trans. modified 55 Ibid., 456/453. Merleau-Ponty’s account of temporal retention is essential for this remark, and we will turn to this more explicitly later. 56 Ibid., 221/220, trans. modified. It is interesting to note here that, contra Husserl’s claim in The Origin of Geometry, a claim that would become essential for Derrida, Merleau-Ponty says “speech” and not “writing.” 57 Ibid., 445/451. 58 Ibid., 457/453. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 This is a term Merleau-Ponty uses in The Visible and the Invisible in a working note

182 Notes entitled “(Bergson) Transcendence—forgetting—time”; see VI, 247/197. We will return to this idea later. 62 PhP, 464/459. 63 Ibid., 474/469. 64 These are the terms Merleau-Ponty uses in La temporalité to describe temporality in its dynamic passage (ibid., 481/487ff.). We shall return to this cluster of terms later. 65 Ibid., 461/465, trans. modified. The quote is from Valéry, Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci, 194. 66 MSME, 48. 67 PhP, 396/401, 432/439, 438/444. 68 Ibid., 5/xii. 69 Saint-Aubert 2011, 15. 70 Ibid. All translations of Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression and of SaintAubert’s commentary are by the author. 71 MSME, 49. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 48, 49. 74 Ibid., 55. 75 Ibid., 48. 76 Saint-Aubert 2011: 15. 77 Ibid. 78 MSME, 49. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid., 56. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Saint-Aubert 2011: 16. 86 See Saint-Aubert 2006. 87 PhP, 68/65. 88 Ibid., 5/xii. This remark recalls something Husserl says in Ideen I: “The new field [of an eidetic science] does not lie spread out before our view with a wealth of salient data in such a manner that we can simply reach out and be sure of the possibility of making them the objects of a science—to say nothing of being sure of the method by which we ought to proceed” (Husserl, 120/147). 89 Ibid., 69/65. 90 Ibid. The opposition between order and chaos, sense and non-sense, seems to occupy a central place in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in the period of Phenomenology of Perception. For an interesting account of how Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “chaosmos” figures in Merleau-Ponty, see Evans 2000. 91 This recalls Butler’s emphasis on precarity, especially in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Butler’s account there is understandably inspired by Levinas and Merleau-Ponty is not mentioned in spite of the latter’s insistence on the precariousness of the human condition, especially in his political writings Humanism and Terror and The Adventures of the Dialectic. 92 C, 23/88. 93 MSME, 47. 94 PhP, 69/65–6.

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Chapter 4: Le sentir de sens 1 In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty translates Stiftung as “initiation”; see VI, 292/243. 2 In the “Institution” lecture, Merleau-Ponty remarks that “In the concept of institution we are seeking a solution to the difficulties found in the philosophy of consciousness. Over and against consciousness, there are only the objects constituted by consciousness. Even if we grant that certain of the objects are ‘never completely’ constituted (Husserl), they are at each moment the exact reflection of the acts and powers of consciousness.” Furthermore, institution “makes no sense for consciousness or, what amounts to the same thing, everything for consciousness is instituted in the sense of being posited … To constitute in this sense is nearly the opposite of to institute: the instituted makes sense without me, the constituted makes sense only for me and for the ‘me’ of this instant … The instituted straddles its future, has its future, its temporality, the constituted depends entirely on the ‘me’ who constitutes (the body, the clock)” (IP, 76; 8). 3 A constituting power, as Merleau-Ponty says, identified with an “impregnable subjectivity [subjectivité invulnérable], as yet untouched by being and time” (PhP, 10/xi). 4 PhP, 240/240. In fact, he even goes so far as to say that “I am not a constituting thought” (ibid., 434/437) and that subjectivity “does not constitute the world, it divines the world’s presence round about it as a field not provided by itself; nor does it constitute the word, but speaks as we sing when we are happy; nor again the sens of the word which instantaneously emerges for it in its dealing with the world and other men living in it” (ibid., 465/470). 5 Barbaras has criticized Phenomenology of Perception for this approach insofar as, in his view, Merleau-Ponty fails to articulate a positive philosophy of perception because he begins by “refusing to adopt a philosophical position.” As Barbaras notes, “His approach then consists not so much in reconceiving the originality of the perceptive field as making its irreducibility to realism and intellectualism obvious” (Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, 6). 6 MSME, 46. In Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, Merleau-Ponty addresses several concerns about the reception of Phenomenology of Perception, particularly some of the issues raised in response to his presentation at the Société française philosophique, “The Primacy of Perception.” In the 1953 lecture, he states: “re-establish the unity and at the same time the difference between the perceived world and the intelligible world through a redefinition of consciousness and of meaning. Classically (Descartes, Kant), [the] unity [is] ultimately founded on the understanding. The difference is simply a fact, unthinkable except through myths. For us it is a matter of finding another sort of unity: everything is perception, the mode of access to being that is present in perception is present everywhere. But perception in the restricted (sensory) sense demands its own expression” (MSME, 45). 7 As Merleau-Ponty notes in Le sentir, the dilemma of the in-itself and the for-itself, that is, the dialectic of realism and idealism, being and nothingness, must be re-examined, and overcoming this dilemma, we could suggest, is one of the primary task of a phenomenology of perception (PhP, 260/250). 8 Ibid., 10/xi.

184 Notes 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23

Goldstein and Rosenthal, Zum Problem der Wirkung der Farben auf den Organismus, 1930. PhP, 253/242. Ibid., 253/242. Ibid., 255/244. This by no means should suggest that the significance of color is fixed or determinate, as, I think, the art of painting indicates. After all, one could suggest that the art of painting is nothing other than exploration of color’s power to signify—and indeed, to signify precisely beyond their typical sens. Thus, while red may indeed signify effort or violence, the earth in Cezanne’s Grand Pin Terre Rouge is red, not merely because red pigments have filled in the outlines of the landscape, but precisely through the complex use of color and their referential contrasts. PhP, 256/246. Ibid., 257/246, trans. modified. For some of Husserl’s remarks on act intentionality, see for example Ideen I, 65/75. PhP, 257/246. As Leonard Lawlor points out in the translator’s note to the Institution lectures, this term has a much more fluid meaning that its English translations: “The term reprise … a term which is central to the idea of institution, connotes the idea of taking up and repetition” (IP, xxxv). As I have tried to show, the account of sense-genesis offered in Phenomenology of Perception is simultaneously reprendre, re-opening or resumption, and as such, reprise, repetition. As such, the emphasis placed on institution in the later lectures is not so much legible as a significant revision of the insights of the earlier text but, indeed, its reprisal and deepening. Ibid., 258/248. The distinction between l’intentionnalité d’acte and l’intentionnalité operante occurs in PhP, 18/xx, 480/486. Ibid., 504/512. Dillon addresses what he describes as “the principle of autochthonous organization” in the “Ontological Implications of Gestalt Theory” chapter of Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology. This thesis, according to Dillon, following the Gestalt psychologists, is directed against the constancy hypothesis of traditional empirical accounts of perceptual experience. As Dillon defines it, “According to the principle of autochthonous significance, the perceptual world is intrinsically meaningful.” It asserts that “culture, history, language and other human meaning structures… are founded upon a primordial level of meaning which is intrinsic to perception at its most fundamental level” (Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 66). An important ambiguity remains problematic in Dillon’s account, however, insofar as he insists on describing perception as “intrinsically” meaningful, an ambiguity that indeed stems from Merleau-Ponty’s own use of the term “autochthonous” [autochtone]. One could construe such remarks as tacitly committed to the claim that the perceptual world is meaningful in itself, that is, committed to a certain form of realism. Neither Dillon nor Merleau-Ponty would agree with such an interpretation since this would indeed re-inscribe the account within the dialectic of the in-itself and the for-itself, thing and consciousness. Rather, we must understand the sense of the autochthonous significance of perceptual experience as a sense which is not ready-made or inherent but as a sense which is in transit and in process, a sense in becoming, a sense to which reason and discourse have, as it were, only arrived after the fact. Ibid., 517/527. Ibid., 453/456, trans. modified.

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24 As in the passé simple of reprendre. 25 Ibid., 258/248, trans. modified. I render eccéité “haecceity” here, which comes from medieval philosophy, meaning “thisness.” This is also an important term for Deleuze. As he notes with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: “This is sometimes written ‘ecceity,’ deriving the word from ecce, ‘here is.’ This is an error, since Duns Scotus created the word and the concept from haec, ‘this thing.’ But it is a fruitful error because it suggests a mode of individuation that is distinct from that of a thing or a subject” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 540). Deleuze and Guattari’s remark is useful since it suggests a manner of understanding Merleau-Ponty’s use of this term that is reducible to neither realism nor idealism. 26 In Le sentir, Merleau-Ponty describes sensation as the “repetition [reprise] by the sentient subject of a form of existence identified by the sensible” (PhP, 255/257); that it is through time that there is a “nesting [emboîtement] and repetition [reprise] of earlier in subsequent experiences” (ibid., 278/279); that certainty is the “repetition [reprise] of a tradition of thought which cannot be condensed into evident truth without renouncing explication” (ibid., 454/461); indeed, “there is sense for us when our intentions are fulfilled, or inversely, when a multiplicity of facts or signs are ready on our part for a repetition [reprise] which comprehends them, or in any case, when one or more terms exist as … representative or expressive of something other than themselves” (ibid., 490/498). 27 Ibid., 287/278, trans. modified. 28 Ibid., 258/248. 29 VI, 270/221. 30 Of course in a way Phénoménologie de la perception is littered with L’être et le néant. Merleau-Ponty and Sartre were working very closely at the time, and there was only a two-year hiatus between the publication of the texts. It is for this reason, it seems, that Merleau-Ponty, quite intentionally, maintains an oblique trajectory with respect to Sartre. It would not be until after their rupture in 1952 that MerleauPonty will begin to criticize Sartrean philosophy explicitly and directly. In spite of this, however, I think we already see Merleau-Ponty marking out the philosophical divergence from his friend that would become explicit in “Interrogation and Dialectic” and, of course, The Adventures of the Dialectic. 31 PhP, 258/247. 32 Ibid., 258/248. 33 Ibid., 259/248. David Morris relates this échange to the concept of reversibility that will play an increasingly central role in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s thought; see Morris 2008 34 VI, 313/266. 35 Ibid., 259/249. 36 Ibid., 259/249. In “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty quotes Cézanne saying “The landscape thinks itself in me … I am its consciousness” (SNS, 24-25/40). MerleauPonty is in all likelihood alluding to Le Cimetière Marin though the only Valéry quoted in the essay is Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci. Merleau-Ponty refers to Souvenirs sur Paul Cézanne (Paris, 1912) for the quotes used in the essay though none are cited. Valéry’s text reads: En soi se pense et convient á soi-meme … (Valéry, Le Cimetière Marin). 37 Ibid., 259/249. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid.

186 Notes 40 While we cannot go into a more detailed account of the repartee between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the following passage from “Being in-itself ” in L’être et le néant gives some indication of the debate: “Being is itself. This means that it is neither passivity nor activity. Both of these notions are human and designate human conduct or the instruments of human conduct. There is activity when a conscious being uses means with an end in view. And we call those objects passive on which our activity is exercised, in as much as they do not spontaneously aim at the end which we make them serve. In a word, man is active and the means which he employs are called passive … The self-consistency of being is beyond the active as it is beyond the passive” (Sartre, EN, 31/lxiv). 41 Ibid., 260ff./250ff. 42 Ibid., 249/259–60. 43 Ibid., 249–50/260, translation modified. It is clear that this remark is addressed to Sartre. As Beauvoir states in her review of Phenomenology of Perception: “While Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, first emphasizes the opposition of the ‘for-itself ’ and the ‘in-itself ’ and the nihilating power of the mind, Merleau-Ponty, on the contrary, concentrates on describing the concrete character of the subject that is never, according to him, a pure for-itself ” (Beauvoir 2004, 163). This review was originally published in Les Temps modernes 1 (2) (1945): 363–7. Deleuze states in the “Note on Heidegger’s Philosophy of Difference” in Difference and Repetition that “MerleauPonty, on the other hand, undoubtedly followed a more thoroughly Heideggerian inspiration in speaking of ‘folds’ and ‘pleating’ (by contrast with Sartrean ‘holes’ and ‘lakes of non-being’) from The Phenomenology of Perception onwards, and in returning to an ontology of difference and questioning in his posthumous book The Visible and the Invisible” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 64). 44 This is a term Merleau-Ponty uses in “Eye and Mind” (OE, 65/140). 45 At the very beginning of Le sentir, Merleau-Ponty remarks: “There be no question of describing perception itself as one of the facts which produces itself in the world, since we never efface from the tableau of the world this lacuna that we are and by which it comes to exist for someone since perception is the ‘defect’ in this ‘great diamond’” (PhP, 251–2/241, trans. modified). 46 Ibid., 265/256. 47 Kant seemed to place special emphasis on spontaneity in his remarks on synthesis in the first Critique. In the table of categories, for example, he says: “Space and time contain a manifold of pure a priori intuition, but at the same time are conditions of the receptivity of our mind—conditions under which alone it can receive representations of objects, and which therefore must also always affect the concept of these objects. But if this manifold is to be known, the spontaneity of our thought requires that it be gone through in a certain way, taken up, and connected. This act I name synthesis” (Kant, A77ff.). 48 This is of course Kant’s famous saying from the beginning of the Transcendental Logic: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (Kant A51/B76). 49 These are the words Merleau-Ponty uses in reference to Hume’s understanding of the phenomena of experience (PhP, 265/256). 50 We recognize this concept from the previous chapter and the discussion of Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression. Now we can note how that it already appears in Phenomenology of Perception and that the 1953 lecture course is only a development and elaboration of ideas introduced much earlier.

Notes 51 52 53 54 55 56

187

PhP, 285/277, trans. modified. Ibid., trans. modified. Ibid., trans. modified. Ibid., 371–2/375. Ibid., 286/277. The problem of originary expressivity or sense-genesis is broached in Le corps comme expression et la parole. In a footnote there Merleau-Ponty remarks: “what we say here applies only to originary speech—that of the child uttering its first word, of the lover revealing his feelings, of the ‘first man who spoke’, or of the writer and philosopher who reawaken the primordial experience beneath these traditions” (PhP, 208/208, trans. modified). This problem is arguably the central question of the 1948 essay, “Cezanne’s Doubt.” As Merleau-Ponty remarks there: “[The artist] speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before. What he expresses cannot, therefore, be the translation of a clearly defined thought, since such clear thoughts are those which have already been uttered by ourselves or by others … There is nothing but a vague fever before the act of artistic expression, and only the work itself, completed and understood, is proof that there was something rather than nothing to be said … the artist launches his work just as man once launched the first word, not knowing whether it will be anything more than a shout … The meaning of what the artist is going to say does not exist anywhere—not in things, which as yet have no meaning, nor in the artist himself, in his unformulated life. It summons one away from the already constituted reason in which ‘cultural men’ are content to shut themselves, toward a reason which contains its own origins” (SNS, 24–5/40, trans. modified). 57 Ibid., 285/277. 58 As Merleau-Ponty remarks in an oft-cited passage: “Reflection does not itself grasp its full significance [sens plein] unless it refers to the unreflective fund of experience which it presupposes, upon which it draws [profite], and which constitutes for it a kind of original past, a past which has never been present” (PhP, 289/282). This remark has received much attention in recent literature, especially in debates surrounding Merleau-Ponty’s perhaps fraught philosophical relationship to Bergson, for example in Al-Saji (2008). Without entering into such debates, we can perhaps minimally suggest that this “original past” or fund of sense nonetheless necessitates the question of the originary moment of sense-genesis or expressivity. I will turn to this question in a bit more detail in Part 2 vis-à-vis the phenomenon of temporality. For other accounts of sense-genesis and the paradoxical structure of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s thought see Waldenfels (2000), “The Paradox of Expression,” as well as Landes’s book by a similar name, Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression (2013). 59 Ibid., 286/278. 60 Ibid., 288/280. 61 Ibid., 286/278. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 286–7/278–9. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 287/279. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., 287/279. 68 Ibid., 288/280, trans. modified. 69 The “subject” of sense-genesis, furthermore, is not exempt from the rule of time and

188 Notes therefore is never an absolute subject. Perceptual experience is thus not the work of a transcendental “I” but “is always in the mode of the One,” and sense-genesis is thus “not a personal act enabling me to give a fresh significance [sens] to my life” (ibid., 287/279). 70 Ibid., trans. modified. 71 Ibid., trans. modified. Merleau-Ponty doesn’t cite this reference, but it is presumably to Phenomenology of Spirit, paragraph 679: “the later moment contains within it the preceding one.” 72 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 28. 73 PhP, 114/98. 74 Though this is certainly up for debate, if we identify temporalization as transcendental subjectivity, then we have, in a sense, already abandoned subjective idealism, for we have substituted for the personalistic, unitary constituting subject an impersonal, constitutive temporal dehiscence. Transcendental idealism, in this radical sense, can therefore no longer be identified with subjective idealism. 75 Ibid., 288/280. 76 Ibid. For an account of the “backward flow of time” in Merleau-Ponty, see Mazis 1992.

Chapter 5: Temporality disparue 1 Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon, 218. 2 This is most easily recognized from Derrida, thought it is worth noting that he pulls it from Heidegger; see SZ, 25/47ff. While there is not space to consider this in the detail it deserves, it is worth noting that this term is also the centerpiece of Derrida’s critique of phenomenology—i.e., that phenomenology is, in spite of its best efforts, committed to such a metaphysics. In Voice and Phenomenon, Derrida ascribes this to the concept of ideality, which “is the salvation or the mastery of presence in repetition,” as well as to the centrality of the “punctual now,” especially in the Zeitbewußtsein; see Voice and Phenomenon, 22, 53ff. I hope to show that, at least in Merleau-Ponty, this is far from obvious. 3 PhP, 477/483. 4 For some discussion of these issues, see Alia Al-Saji, “A Past Which Has Never Been Present: Bergsonian Dimensions in Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of the Prepersonal” (2008) and “The Temporality of Life: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the Immemorial Past” (2007), as well as Barbaras, “The Turn of Experience,” (2009). As Al-Saji has noted, the extent to which Merleau-Ponty’s account of time in La temporalité centers the account of time on “the living present” can be shown to be at play behind this misreading (2008: 42–4). See also Olkowski 1996. 5 One could suggest that this names the paradox at stake in La temporalité: that as soon as we set ourselves to think temporality in terms of its being we have already immersed ourselves in a series of insurmountable problems. The solution is to jettison our commitment to thinking time as being since time, by its very nature, is a structure of passage or becoming. Indeed, we recall that Merleau-Ponty even goes so far as to remark that “It is … through time that ‘one thinks being’ [qu’on pense l’être]” (PhP, 430/492). 6 Ibid., 477/483, trans. modified.

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See, for example, Aristotle, Physics, 217b30; Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, xxvi–xxxi. 8 PhP, 478/483. Merleau-Ponty quotes “Noch im Griff behalte” (Husserl, ZB, 390). 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 For compelling analyses of Husserl’s theory of time consciousness, see de Warren 2009 and Zahavi 2010. 12 Ibid., 479/484. In fact, a remark made in a well-known working note of The Visible and the Invisible makes exactly this point: “Husserl’s diagram is dependent on the convention that one can represent the series of nows by points on a line,” and a bit further in the same note, “the representation of flow [écoulement] is faulty” (VI, 245/195). 13 Merleau-Ponty makes the same claim in Phenomenology of Perception: “In order to arrive at authentic time, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to condemn the spatialization of time as Bergson. It is not necessary, since time is exclusive of space only if we consider space as objectified in advance, and ignore that primordial spatiality which we have tried to describe, and which is the abstract form of our presence in the world. It is not sufficient since, even when the systematic translation of time into spatial terms has been duly stigmatized, we may still fall very short of an authentic intuition of time. This is what happened to Bergson. When he says that duration ‘snowballs upon itself,’ and when he postulates memories in themselves accumulating in the unconscious, he makes time out of a preserved present, and evolution out of what is evolved” (PhP, 476–7n/482n.). For a thorough account of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of space, see Morris 2004. 14 Much like Bergson’s description of time as a continuity of heterogeneities; see Time and Free Will, 104. 15 It is sometimes translated as “running-off,” and while this is actually a good translation in many ways, it sometimes comes across as awkward in idiomatic English. 16 Husserl, ZB, 388/28. 17 Ibid., 388–9/29, trans. modified. 18 Ibid., 481/487. 19 While it is not my intention to enter into the task of providing a reading of Husserl’s Zeitbewußtsein nor to assess the extent to which Merleau-Ponty’s reading is accurate or inaccurate, it is nonetheless worth noting that thinking through the paradoxical nature of time’s manifestation appears to be what is at stake in these lectures; see Husserl, ZB, 384/23ff. 20 For example, we find this passage at the very beginning of The Visible and the Invisible: “We can effect the passage by looking, by awakening to the world; we cannot witness it as spectators. It is not a synthesis; it is a metamorphosis by which the appearances are instantaneously stripped of a value they owed merely to the absence of a true perception. Thus in perception we witness the miracle of a totality that surpasses what one thinks to be its conditions or its parts, that from afar holds them under its power, as if they existed only on its threshold and were destined to lose themselves in it” (VI, 22/8). 21 Ibid., 480/486. While Merleau-Ponty explicitly attributes the distinction between l’intentionnalité opérante and l’intentionnalité d’acte to Husserl (PhP, 18/xx, 480/486), in the texts cited (ZB, 79–80/430 and Formal and Transcendental Logic, 235/208), Husserl never actually uses the exact phrase fungierende Intentionalität. Indeed, Husserl speaks of a lebendige Intentionalität, a living intentionality, that as lebendig fungierende, living 7

190 Notes operatively, may be unthematisch, non-thematic. In the same footnote, Merleau-Ponty also cites Fink, Das Problem der Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls, 286. Operative intentionality, as Merleau-Ponty adds upon mentioning this concept in La temporalité, “is what Heidegger terms transcendence” (PhP, 480/486). For a compelling account of Merleau-Ponty’s distinction and its relation to Husserl, see Kelly 2010. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 479–80/485–6, trans. modified. 24 Ibid., 480/486, trans. modified. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 481/486, trans. modified. 27 VI, 270/221. 28 PhP, 490/496, trans. modified. 29 Heidegger, SZ, 323/297, “ungebrochenen Disziplin.” Merleau-Ponty expresses some anxiety about the implicit commitments of Heidegger’s terminology in La temporalité; see PhP, 490/496–7. 30 For the purposes of brevity, we’ll restrict our considerations to the conclusion even though the theme of passivity figures prominently in Appendix II of the text. Also, Merleau-Ponty never references the appendices to this text as most of his considerations reference the conclusion and Husserl’s understanding of the a priori in section 98. 31 Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 256/292. 32 Ibid., 257/292. 33 Ibid. 34 PhP, 492/498. 35 Ibid. Merleau-Ponty makes another reference to this passage in the Critique of Judgment in the Preface. It is actually there, at the very beginning of the text, that he introduces the distinction between l’intentionnalité d’acte and l’intentionnalité operante. His claim is that Husserl is usually mistakenly attributed with the discovery of intentionality, which can actually be traced back to the “Refutation of Idealism” in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the first critique Kant only acknowledges an act intentionality. In the Critique of Judgment, however, Kant recognizes a pre-conceptual unity of the sensible and the conceptual. “Here [in the Critique of Judgment],” he says, “the subject is no longer the universal thinker of objects rigorously interrelated, the positing power who subjects the manifold to the law of the understanding, in so far as he is able to put together a world—he discovers and enjoys [se goûte] his own nature as spontaneously in harmony with the law of the understanding. But if the subject has a nature, then the hidden art of the imagination must condition the categorial activity” (PhP, 18/xix). It is this gesture from the third Critique, accordingly, that Husserl takes up and radicalizes when he distinguishes between l’intentionnalité d’acte—“the only intentionality discussed in the Critique of Pure Reason”—and l’intentionnalité operante or fungierende Intentionalität. It is this distinction that distinguishes Husserl’s theory of intentionality from that of Kant’s (or at least from the Kant of the first Critique) (ibid.). What this indicates, minimally, is that the manner in which Kant figures in Phenomenology of Perception, particularly the manner in which he mediates Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Husserl, bears further elucidation. 36 Husserl mentions this concept explicitly in Erfahrung und Urteil though MerleauPonty doesn’t cite a text; see Husserl, Experience and Judgment, 252/213, 267/224, 273/229, and 274/230. 37 PhP, 485/491, trans. modified.

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38 See PhP, 55/35. 39 Ibid., 315/309, 386/384. 40 Ibid., 481/487. 41 PhP, 481/487, trans. modified. 42 Ibid. Se différencient, emphasis Merleau-Ponty’s. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 This is a term Merleau-Ponty uses in The Visible and the Invisible in a working note entitled “(Bergson) Transcendence—forgetting—time”; see VI, 247/197. 47 PhP, 481–2/487, trans. modified. 48 Ibid., 482/488. 49 Ibid. While Merleau-Ponty’s fascination with Husserl’s account of time in the Zeitbewußtsein is evident in these pages, after this remark, Merleau-Ponty actually cites Heidegger from Sein und Zeit: “Temporalization is not a succession (Nacheinander) of ecstasies. The future is not posterior to the past, or the past anterior to the present. Temporality temporalizes itself as future-which-lapses-intothe-past-by-coming-into-the-present” (ibid.). The reference is to Sein und Zeit, 350. It is worth noting that it is in this Heideggerian rather than an explicitly Husserlian context that Merleau-Ponty explicitly criticizes Bergson. 50 Merleau-Ponty only cites the beginning of this extraordinary passage from Art poétique. Claudel uses the Romanized version of the Ancient Greek word σιγή or “silence”; see Claudel, Art poétique, 61. 51 Ibid., 287/278. 52 Ibid., 483/489, translation modified. It is perhaps in this remark that Merleau-Ponty distances himself most from Husserl insofar as, unlike Husserl, who consistently emphasizes the ontological primacy of the present and presence in his account of time’s Ablauf, he explicitly denies the primacy of the present in time’s passage. 53 In “Eye and Mind,” the theme of respiration becomes more explicit: “We speak of ‘inspiration,’ and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, respiration in Being, action and passion so slightly discernable that it becomes impossible to distinguish who sees and who is seen, who paints and what is painted” (OE, 31–2/129). 54 The other is a famous quote from Sein und Zeit: “Der Sinn des Daseins ist die Zeitlichkeit” / “The meaning of Dasein is temporality” (Heidegger, SZ, H331). 55 PhP, 471/476. “Le temps est le sens de la vie (sens: comme on dit le sens d’un cours d’eau, le sens d’une phrase, le sens d’une étoffe, le sens de l’odorat).” 56 Ibid., 494/500. 57 Merleau-Ponty uses this phrase twice in La temporalité and in reference to Sein und Zeit; see PhP 483/489, 485/491 and Heidegger, SZ, 373/342. 58 In fact, Heidegger himself seemed to have some anxiety about this in the passage referenced by Merleau-Ponty from section 72: “Dasein has been our theme only as to how it exists, so to speak, ‘forward’ and leaves everything that has been ‘behind.’ Not only did being-toward-the-beginning remain unnoticed, but, above all, the way Dasein stretches along between birth and death. Precisely the ‘connection of life’ [Zusammenhang des Lebens], in which, after all, Dasein constantly somehow holds itself, was overlooked in our analysis of being-a-whole” (Heidegger, SZ, 373/342). 59 PhP, 491/497. 60 SNS, 24–5/40, trans. modified.

192 Notes 61 VI, 270/221. In this note, written almost fifteen years after the publication of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty repeats almost verbatim a remark from this text cited in full above: “it is clear, in effect, that I am not the author of time any more than of the beating of my heart; it is not me who takes the initiative of temporalization; I did not choose to be born, and, once I was born, time gushes [fuse] through me, whatever I do” (PhP, 490/496). 62 PhP, 288/280. 63 Ibid., 490/497, trans. modified, emphasis Merleau-Ponty. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 172/170. 67 See Bergson, Time and Free Will, 99ff. 68 Albertine disparue is the French title for the sixth volume of Proust’s Recherche, usually translated as “The Fugitive.” It literally means “Albertine gone,” and at the beginning of this work the narrator wakes to find that his lover has packed her bags and vanished. Years later, after the grief and pain of this departure has faded, he discovers that she has died in a riding accident some time after she left. 69 OE, 65/140. 70 “When through the water’s thickness I see the tiled bottom of the pool, I do not see it despite the water and the reflections; I see it through them and because of them. If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were without that flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would cease to see it as it is and where it is— which is to say, beyond any identical specific place” (OE, 70/142). 71 Sartre’s account of their friendship and falling out can be found in his adieu after Merleau-Ponty’s death, “Merleau-Ponty vivant”; see Stewart 1998.

Chapter 6: Freedom and Lateness to Being 1

2

A persistent point of reference in Derrida’s engagement with phenomenology, especially Husserl. In The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, he says: “It is always a question of an originary complication of the origin, of an initial contamination of the simple, of an inaugural divergence that no analysis could present, make present in its phenomenon or reduce to the pointlike nature of the element, instantaneous and identical to itself. In fact the question that governs the whole trajectory is already: ‘How can the originarity of a foundation be an a priori synthesis? How can everything start with a complication?’ All the limits on which phenomenological discourse is constructed are examined from the standpoint of the fatal necessity of a ‘contamination’ (‘unperceived entailment or dissimulated contamination’ between the two edges of the opposition: transcendental/‘worldly,’ eidetic/empirical, intentional/nonintentional, active/passive, present/nonpresent, pointlike/non-pointlike, originary/derived, pure/impure, etc.), the quaking of each border coming to propagate itself onto all the others. A law of differential contamination imposes its logic from one end of the book to the other; and I ask myself why the very word ‘contamination’ has not stopped imposing itself on me from thence forward” (Derrida, The Problem of Genesis, xv). There has been a great deal of literature produced addressing the personal and philosophical relationship between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty over the years. Some

Notes

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of this, as well as primary source material, is collected in The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (Stewart 1998). Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Sartre (1982) is an older study that poses a thinker of lucidity (Sartre) against a thinker of ambiguity (Merleau-Ponty). Much of the literature focuses on their respective political philosophies and the rupture between them occasioned by the outbreak of the Korean War. See, for example, Compton 1998, Bernasconi 2006, Flynn 2009. 3 We already have a sense of how Merleau-Ponty will challenge the absoluteness of freedom; it is precisely this premise, the centrality of constituting consciousness for sense-genesis, that has been challenged in Le sentir and La temporalité. If absolute freedom is premised on this thesis, then it follows that Merleau-Ponty’s critique of constituting consciousness will also require a revised sense of freedom that is no longer absolute or unconditioned. 4 This was a great concern for Derrida; see the Introduction to Voice and Phenomenon, esp. 11–12, as well as The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, xv. 5 PhP, 497/504. Sartre articulates his position in detail in La Transcendance de l’Ego where transcendental consciousness is understood in terms of its absolute purity, transparency and limpidity, “all lightness, all translucence” (Sartre 1998, 25/42). 6 PhP, 498/505. 7 See Sartre, EN, 174/129. 8 PhP, 499/507, trans. modified. 9 Ibid., 500/507, trans. modified. The Ancient Greek phrase, ἐφ’ ἤμιν, means “according to my own power,” an important notion in Epictetus, who distinguishes between that which is in our power and that which is not. It is interesting that Merleau-Ponty is invoking a kinship between Sartreanism and Stoicism. 10 Ibid., 502/510, trans. modified. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 503/510. 13 Merleau-Ponty cites an image from Gestalt psychology. A series of dots placed in rows of two is impossible to see in another combination. This is not to be explained in terms of realism, of course, but in terms of the manner in which the world always confronts me with a certain configuration and sense, a sense precisely accomplished in the temporal dehiscence of becoming or the unfolding of l’intentionnalité operante. In the same way that I cannot choose that there is no rock face, I also cannot choose to see the organization of this sense otherwise than as it presents itself to my gaze. 14 PhP, 503/511, trans. modified. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., trans. modified. 17 Ibid., 504/512, trans. modified. 18 Ibid., 506/513. 19 Ibid., 506/514. 20 Ibid., trans. modified. 21 Ibid. 22 Heidegger says in Sein und Zeit: “When resolute, Dasein has brought itself back from falling, and has done so precisely in order to be more authentically ‘there’ in the ‘Augenblick’ as regards the Situation which has been disclosed”; “That Present which is held in authentic temporality and which thus is authentic itself, we call the ‘Augenblick.’ This term must be understood in the active sense as an ecstasis. It means the resolute rapture with which Dasein is carried away to whatever

194 Notes possibilities and circumstances are encountered in the Situation as possible objects of concern, but a rapture which is held in resoluteness” (SZ, 328/376). 23 Ibid., 501/508. 24 Ibid., 506/514, trans. modified. 25 Ibid., 517/526, trans. modified. 26 Merleau-Ponty consistently identified Sartre with Hegel, or at least a certain brand of Hegelianism, even in The Visible and the Invisible. It is not my intention to enter into questions regarding the accuracy of this identification or questions about Sartre’s reading of Hegel in contrast to Merleau-Ponty’s. What is worth noting is that Merleau-Ponty consistently articulated his own philosophy in contrast to a certain Sartrean-Hegelian brand of dialectics. This is the case in La liberté as well as “Interrogation et dialectique” in The Visible and the Invisible. 27 PhP, 506/514. 28 Of course the manner in which Merleau-Ponty inhabits both a phenomenological and Marxist methodology in this text is an important question, one that has been taken up by recent Merleau-Ponty scholars. See Smyth, “Heroism and History in Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology” (2010) as well as Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology and the Realization of Philosophy (2013). Going into a detailed account of these methodological questions is beyond the scope of what can be accomplished here, but let it suffice to say that Smyth’s conclusions seem correct insofar as Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological method is one clearly informed by a Marxist understanding of history. For further commentary on the social aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, see Bimbenet 2006. 29 Ibid., 506/514, trans. modified. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 506/514. 32 According to this account, we are left within an ontology organized around the primacy of the present, the very kind of ontology that some scholars have criticized Phenomenology of Perception for adopting. This ontology seems justifiable, at first glance, especially in the context of Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on le champ de présence in La temporalité. If it the case that Merleau-Ponty is committed to the ontological primacy of the present, then it seems that there is a tension between this position and the account of class consciousness, historicality and institutionality presented in La liberté. If it is the case, however, as we have tried to show, that le champ de présence is not so much about the ontological primacy of the present as it is about designating the field of time’s appearance as passage, then this tension seems to disappear. What we have is not an account of the ontological primacy of the present in sense-genesis, on one hand, and an account of the historical genesis of sense on the other, but, as we have tried to show, an account of the temporal becoming and dehiscence of sense that has the historical structure of reprendre and reprise. That is, precisely because his account of sense-genesis consistently underlines its functions of reprendre and reprise, Merleau-Ponty offers us a consistently historical and institutional account of sense-genesis in Phenomenology of Perception. 33 Ibid., 507/515. 34 Ibid., trans. modified. 35 Ibid., 510/518, trans. modified. 36 Ibid., 510/518–19. 37 Ibid., 507/515. 38 Ibid., 509/517.

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39 Ibid., 507/515. 40 Ibid., 512/521, trans. modified. 41 Ibid., 512/521. 42 Ibid., 514/522. 43 Ibid., 514/524. 44 Ibid., 515/525. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 516/525. 47 Ibid., 517/526. 48 Ibid., 517/526–7. 49 Ibid., 516/525. 50 Ibid., trans. modified. 51 “In short the For-itself is free, and its Freedom is to itself its own limit. To be free is to be condemned to be free” (Sartre, EN, 174/129). 52 PhP, 20/xxii, trans. modified, emphasis Merleau-Ponty’s. 53 In a telling remark, Sartre says: “Freedom is the human being putting his past out of play by secreting his own nothingness” (EN, 63/28). 54 Ibid., 517/527, trans. modified. 55 Ibid., 519/528; 518/527, trans. modified. 56 See MSME, 49ff. 57 PhP, 13/xiv, 491/497. 58 OE, 92/377–8. 59 Ibid., 92/378. 60 See PhP, 461/465. 61 Ibid., 159/146. 62 Sartre’s induction into the phenomenological tradition takes place during his time at the French Institute in Berlin, which culminated in his famous essay on Husserl’s idea of intentionality, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” published in 1939. This work is developed in The Transcendence of the Ego and then further in Being and Nothingness.

Chapter 7: Eulogy for Philosophy 1 2 3

4

Merleau-Ponty’s address, “Éloge de la philosophie,” is translated into English as “In Praise of Philosophy.” This is certainly a correct and adequate translation, and yet I think we miss something that he intended by calling this a eulogy. RC, 142/168. This remark is from the résume to the course entitled “Philosophy as Interrogation.” The reference is to Husserl’s Krisis. As Merleau-Ponty says in the résume to “Philosophy Today”: “With Hegel something comes to an end. After Hegel, there is a philosophical void. This is not to say that there has been a lack of thinkers or of geniuses, but that Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche start from a denial of philosophy. We might say that with the latter we enter an age of non-philosophy. But perhaps such a destruction of philosophy constitutes its very realization. Perhaps it preserves the essence of philosophy, and it may be, as Husserl wrote, that philosophy is reborn from its ashes” (ibid.). PhP, 14/xv, trans. modified.

196 Notes 5 See VI, 60/38, 69/46. 6 EP, 52–3/43–4. 7 VI, 60/39. 8 EP, 67–8/58, 71/61. 9 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181. 10 In his lectures on nature, Merleau-Ponty specifically designates his task as the return to the Greek sense of φύσις and that recalling this concept helps us create space between our own ontology and that of modernity and thus reimagine it. See N, 3–4; NC, 109. 11 VI, 160/121–2. 12 Heraclitus, Fragment 123. 13 For an excellent discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about nature, especially in relation to environmental ethics, see Toadvine 1999, 2009, 2009b and Slatman 2000. 14 VI, 160–1/123. 15 EP, 11/5. 16 Ibid., 9/3. 17 PhP, 11–12/xii. 18 Ibid., 10/x. 19 As Husserl defines apodicticity in the first Cartesian meditation: “It is absolute indubitability in a quite definite and peculiar sense … it discloses itself, to a critical reflection, as having the single peculiarity of being at the same time the absolute unimaginableness (inconceivability) of their non-being, and thus excluding in advance every doubt as ‘objectless,’ empty” (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 15–16). It is precisely for this kind of certainty that the philosophy of ontological lateness substitutes the openness and incompleteness of philosophical inquiry. 20 PhP, 14/xv. 21 Ibid., 10/xi. 22 Ibid., 11/xi, trans. modified. 23 Ibid., 11/xii, trans. modified. 24 Ibid., trans. modified. 25 Ibid., 11/xii, trans. modified. In Ideen I, Husserl says that the outcome of the phenomenological reduction “is nothing else than what we shall designate, for essential reasons, as ‘pure mental processes,’ ‘pure consciousness’ with its pure ‘correlates of consciousness, and, on the other hand, its ‘pure Ego’” (Husserl, 58/64). 26 Ibid., 11/xii. 27 Barbaras 2004, 76. 28 S 207/165. 29 Ibid., 202/161. 30 Ibid., 202/162. 31 Ibid., 205/163. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 207/165. Let us recall the important distinction between the natural attitude as it names our pre-theoretical orientation in the world and the naturalistic attitude that emerges when this pre-theoretical attitude is made explicit as a thesis and becomes the normative ground of an epistemology. Merleau-Ponty’s claim is that the phenomenological reduction, in its suspension of the latter, precisely reveals the former: “The natural attitude really becomes an attitude—a tissue of judicatory and propositional acts—only when it becomes a naturalist thesis. The natural attitude itself emerges unscathed from the complaints which can be made against naturalism,

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because it is ‘prior to any thesis,’ because it is the mystery of a Welthesis prior all theses” (S, 207/163). 34 PhP, 18/xx, 480/486; 1960/64 207/165. 35 Ibid. Reflection, as Merleau-Ponty will note in The Visible and the Invisible, is in principle “delayed behind itself ” (VI, 55/34). 36 PhP, 14/xv. 37 OE, 92/378. 38 Ibid.; S, 204/161. 39 Ibid., 14/xv, trans. modified. Merleau-Ponty references this term again in La temporalité; see PhP, 489/495. Husserl elaborates this concept in a working note from 1935 entitled “Einströmen,” in Hua XXIX, 78: 19–30. For a detailed account of the significance of Einströmen and its significance in this working note, see Dodd 2004. 40 Ibid., trans. modified. 41 The working note is dated February 1959 and is entitled “Einströmen—Reflection.” It is also important to note that here Merleau-Ponty connects the concept of Einströmen to temporality. 42 VI, 173/224. 43 Ibid., 173/225. 44 This no doubt brings to mind Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen or Untimely Meditations, though many of Nietzsche’s writings give one a sense that he felt his writings out of place in his time and probably ours as well—for example, the madman’s remark that he has come too soon in The Gay Science. 45 NC, 358. 46 VI, 141–2/106. 47 Ibid., 162/123. 48 For a remarkable account of the meta-philosophy articulated by Merleau-Ponty in the Forward to Phenomenology of Perception, see Dastur 2007. As Dastur rightly emphasizes, “Philosophy cannot overcome its ambiguity, which is at once an internal weakness or disability, and a virtue: it can never become an ‘intellectual possession’ of the world a ‘positive’ philosophy in the sense of constituting a second order beyond the sensuous” (162). 49 PhP, 21/xxiii, trans. modified. 50 Heidegger, The Concept of Time, 50/76. 51 Ibid. 52 PhP, 21/xxiii. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 14/xv, trans. modified. 55 Merleau-Ponty’s burgeoning fascination with art and painting, which he will famously develop in his final published writing, “Eye and Mind,” as well as elsewhere, comes as no surprise given this position. Consequently, radical philosophical reflection and works of art can no longer and ought no longer be distinguished. 56 VI, 313/266. 57 Ibid., 181/139. 58 Ibid., 313/266. 59 C, 22–3/87–8. 60 For a concise and compelling account of the problem of skepticism and MerleauPonty’s philosophy, see Flynn 2009. 61 C, 23/88.

198 Notes

Chapter 8: At the Point of Departure 1 Plato, Republic, 475e4: “those who love to gaze upon what is unconcealed.” 2 NC, 108–9. 3 For Merleau-Ponty and love, see Lawlor 2008, Dillon 1985. 4 These are the words that Christ speaks to Mary Magdalene when she recognizes him as the arisen. 5 This term is most immediately recognizable from Plato’s image of the divided line (Republic, Book VI, 509D–513E), and is usually translated as something like “trust,” “faith,” or “belief.” I’ve chosen Plato’s word as a means for thinking about the stakes of la foi perceptive—where “faith” here is understood in terms of our openness to perceived, similar to the role it plays Plato’s image. 6 We should note that our interest in Christian scripture and theology at this juncture is, eventually, oriented toward understanding Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Nancy’s interest, in addition to this book being part of a larger project of deconstructing Christianity, is aesthetic, concerning works of art that represent the noli episode. Nancy’s interpretation is of interest to us at the point where it will inform the ideas of love and faith we encounter in Merleau-Ponty. Doubtless some of what Nancy claims will strike some as controversial. It is neither my intention to get involved in such controversy at this juncture nor to defend Nancy’s position on theological grounds—only to get a glimpse of how these reflections will inform our understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. 7 Nancy focuses mainly on the episode accounted in John 20:11. He references the other accounts but draws primarily from John. Because we’re more interested in the implications for Merleau-Ponty, we will follow Nancy and restrict ourselves to this part of the scripture. 8 Nancy emphasizes an important ambiguity here: do these words signify that Christ doesn’t wish to be touched, that he cannot be touched or that he should not be touched? Of course this ambiguity is essential for on it hinges the possibility and impossibility of touching, which, as anyone can guess, is critical in Nancy’s case. It’s worth mentioning that this text, Noli me tangere, is Nancy’s response to Derrida’s On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy. 9 We must remember that Nancy is treating the scripture, here, as a text that offers itself and perhaps even calls for deconstruction. There is an understanding of resurrection professed by Christianity—the promise of eternal life—but as Nancy will try to show, this professed understanding belies another understanding that the texts both insists upon and at the same time fails to acknowledge. We will have some opportunity to see what Nancy thinks resurrection means. 10 Nancy, 4. This statement is immediately followed by this passage from the New Testament: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father?” (John 14:9/Nancy, Noli, 4). Christ, in this sense, is the parabolic visibility of the λόγος. 11 Nancy is clearly eluding to the various passages in John 1 though he does not mention them explicitly, especially John 1:14: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us …” Of course in the Greek version of the New Testament the original term translated as “Word” is λόγος. In Corpus, in the section titled “Expeausition,” a play on “exposition” and peau, the French word for “skin,” Nancy remarks: “The body is self in departure, insofar as it parts—displaces itself right

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here from the here. The intimacy of the body exposes pure a-seity as the swerve and departure that it is” (Nancy, Corpus, 33). 12 I follow Sarah Clift’s translation of la partance as “the departing.” 13 John 20:17. 14 Lacan is clearly the important point of reference for Nancy, though he also cites Freud himself as well as Sophocles. 15 Nancy, Noli, 16. As the translator notes, ‘I, the truth, am going away,’ is an explicit nod to Lacan. 16 Ibid., 45. 17 A term favored by Heidegger; see, for example, Unterwegs zur Sprache. 18 Nancy, Noli, 28. 19 We recall Merleau-Ponty’s claim that temporalization is not strictly a process of phenomenalization, but to the extent to which it has this possibility, is simultaneously a process of “disintegration,” “self-differentiation,” écoulement or “flux,” and éclatement or “eruption” (PhP, 481/487, 48–2/487). This account is actually much closer to what Nancy is suggesting: phenomenality, insofar as it is the means for the appearance of being, is simultaneously its means not to be. 20 See Heidegger, SZ, 113/149ff. Without getting involved in a protracted discussion of this important concept, it will be worth noting that Heidegger, at least in Sein und Zeit, emphasizes Dasein’s recovery of itself from its dispersion in das Man, the “they.” 21 In a way, it is completely unsurprising that Descartes could not bring himself to believe that the people in the square were anything other than automata. 22 Nancy, Noli, 47. 23 The episode of Christ appearing to Thomas appears after the noli episode in John 20:25-29: “But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.” 24 See §49 of the Crisis. For commentary on this concept, see Lawlor, “Is It Happening? Or The Implications of Immanence?” (2014). 25 Heidegger’s discussion of λόγος in its capacity for ἀποφαίνω, showing, is consistently understood in terms of clearing and making space. In other words, Heidegger thinks of ἀπόφανσις in terms of making way for what shows itself for itself and in its own interest, for the φαινόμενον. To this extent, ἀπόφανσις may already been understood in terms of ἀπόφασις, a term borrowed from ancient skepticism, especially Pyrrhonism, where it is associated with the ἐποχή. Christopher Long has commented on Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in this regard in Aristotle on the Nature of Truth, 107ff. 26 Nancy, Noli, 37. 27 IP, 68/32. 28 Nancy, Noli, 37. 29 “Formal” is Nancy’s description of Thomas’s faith, which is the counterpoint to Mary Magdalene. 30 PhP, 159/146. 31 Nancy, Noli, 30. 32 Ibid., 28–9. 33 Ibid., 48. Magdalene in the desert was a popular theme in representations of her. Nancy refers us to Ribera and Fabre. This also recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s image of the smooth space of the desert; see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 474ff.

200 Notes 34 35 36 37 38

IP, 73/37. Ibid., 73–4/37. Ibid., 74/37. Ibid., 74/37–8. As Lawlor suggests, this is the experience of what Heidegger called Gelassenheit; see Lawlor “Friend of the Future,” 81. 39 IP, 75/38. As Carbone notes in regard to this passage: “we could characterize that clair-voyance as the blind clair-voyance of a force that looks for itself in the objects in which it invests itself and that can subsequently retro-ject them as sensible ideas, and favor the decisions about them which, as soon as they are made, appear to have been made ‘from time immemorial’” (Carbone, An Unprecedented Deformation, 81).

Conclusion: What Can We Have? 1 Claudel, Art poétique, 9. 2 VI 168–9/128–9. 3 C, 23/88. 4 HT, 206/188, emphasis Merleau-Ponty. 5 Ibid., 206/188–9. 6 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 1672. 7 C, 23/88–9.

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Glossary French Terms chair  “flesh,” 69, 172; 25, 28, 38–9, 43, 48, 67, 69, 88, 90, 116, 131, 136, 140–1, 145, 147–8, 155–9, 165, 177, 192, 199 champ de présence  “field of presence,” 99–101, 109, 114, 116–17, 195; 99–101, 103–4, 115–16, 128 cri  “scream,” 26, 170, 175; 3, 24, 26, 170, 175 déhiscence  “dehiscence,” splitting open as in a wound, 66, 110, 181; 3, 25, 49, 64, 76, 81, 83, 90, 97, 100, 111–13, 115–17, 125–33, 136, 139, 141, 144–6, 163, 188, 194–5 désintégration  “disintegration,” 66, 110; 47, 82, 95–6, 106, 110–13, 115–18, 140, 154, 157–8, 162–4, 166, 199 disparue  “gone,” “departed,” as in Albertine disparue, 18, 53, 76, 99–101, 104, 116–18, 136, 142, 157, 192 écart  “gap,” “spacing,” “fissure,” 13, 25–6, 55, 67, 70–1, 75, 140, 146, 163 échange  “exchange,” 89, 185 éclatement  “explosion” or “bursting open,” 3, 48, 60, 66, 77, 81, 97, 109–13, 115, 127–8, 131–2, 139, 144–5, 181, 199 écoulement  “flow,” 77, 104, 111–12, 115, 128, 147, 189, 199 éloge  “eulogy,” “praise,” 139; 139, 141–2, 196 empiètement  “encroachment,” “overlapping,” 52–3, 69–70, 74–5, 81, 85, 96, 148 en soi  “in itself,” 89–91, 121, 129–30, 186 enchaînement  “sequence,” “linked series,” 46 énoncés  “statements,” 20–1 epoché  the putting out of play of presupposed meanings characteristic of the phenomenological reduction, 43, 51, 58, 179 éternitaire  “eternitary,” 52, 55, 60, 62, 65, 72, 74, 82, 179 être en situation  “being in situation,” 107, 121, 134, 136 foi  “faith,” 3, 5, 10–11, 18, 25–8, 52, 65, 72–3, 76, 93, 129, 154, 160–2, 198, 200 foi perceptive  “perceptual faith,” 10, 19, 25, 27–8, 198; 10, 19, 22, 25–6, 28, 93 intentionnalité d’acte  “act intentionality,” 71 intentionnalité operante  “operative intentionality,” 87, 105, 191; 99, 105–7, 109, 111, 118, 125, 130, 190 interrogation philosophique  “philosophical interrogation,” Merleau-Ponty’s name for the tasks of philosophy at the end of his life, 9, 19; 2, 9–10, 12, 18, 19, 22–6, 28, 81, 146–7, 162 le monde vécu  “lived world,” but this is really Merleau-Ponty’s translation of Lebenswelt, “lifeworld,” 57–9 naturant  “naturing,” “that nature which constitutes,” 56, 58–9, 96 naturé  “natured,” “that which is constituted by nature,” 56, 58–9 néant  “nothingness,” a Sartrean term, 121–4, 131–2, 134 parole parlante  “speaking speech,” the constituting expressive gesture, 64

Glossary

209

parole parlée  “spoken speech,” sedimented, constituted meaning, 64 partance  “parting,” 154–6, 158–63, 165 pensée en survol  “thought in survey,” “high altitude thinking,” “thought that soars over,” 9, 13, 43, 46, 48, 66, 134, 166, 177 pour soi  “for itself,” 89, 121, 129–30 question-savoir  “to know by questioning,” 22, 165 réfléchi  “that which is reflected upon” and réfléchissant “that which reflects,” 59–60, 68, 82, 97, 146 reprendre  “take up again,” “resume,” 70, 81, 86–9, 92, 95–7, 99, 116, 125, 128, 149, 184–5 reprise  “repeat,” “recover,” 81, 87–9, 92, 95–6, 112, 116, 125, 128, 149, 184 sens  “sense” and “direction;” “meaning,” 82, 84–9, 113, 144, 160, 177, 183–4 sentir  “sensing” or “feeling;” importantly, however, the verbal form of sens, 82–4, 86, 113, 144, 160 surréflexion  “hyper-reflection,” literally “over-reflection,” Merleau-Ponty’s term for a reflective method that makes itself an object of interrogation, 60, 73 survol absolu  “absolute overview,” “absolute survey,” 52, 67–70, 74, 86, 96–7, 141, 144 synthèse de transition  “transition synthesis,” 105, 109

German Terms Ablauf  “flow,” “flux,” 99, 101, 103–5, 109–12, 115, 159, 191 Abschattungen  “profiles,” 106, 110 Befragen  “subject to questioning,” “interrogation,” 19 Begriff  “concept,” 12 bewohnen  “inhabits,” 21 blosse Sachen  “naked thing,” 41–2, 44, 48 Dasein  “existence,” but used in a peculiar sense by Heidegger: “being-there,” 19–20, 113, 175–7, 192, 194, 199 Dingen  it’s fairly clear that Merleau-Ponty intends us to hear “thing-ness,” 21 Einströmen  “instreaming” or “influx;” to flow into itself, 4, 60, 96, 146–7, 180, 197 Fragen  “question,” 20 Gelassenheit  “letting-be,” “releasement,” 23, 164, 200 Gesagtsein  “being-said,” 21 Geschichte  “history,” 64 Gestalt  “form,” “figure,” 52, 54–7, 84, 179, 184, 194 gewöhnlich  “ordinary,” 21 Ineinander  the state of two things being embedded inside each other, “in one another,” 52, 71, 89, 108, 148, 150 Lebenswelt  “lifeworld,” 57 Mitsein  “being-with,” 159 Richtigkeit  “correctness,” 21 Seinsfrage  “question of the meaning of being,” cf. Heidegger, 19–20 Sinngebung  “sense-giving” or “sense-donation,” 31, 83, 85, 109, 123–7, 131, 135 Stiftung  “institution,” 81, 183 Strom  “stream,” 147, 151, 180 Ubergangsynthesis  “transition synthesis,” 109 Untersuchung  “investigation,” 19

210 Glossary Welthesis  “world thesis,” 145–6, 197 wesen  “to be present,” 21 Zusammenhang des Lebens  “unity of a life,” 100, 113, 118, 192

Latin Terms differo  “that which makes different,” 21 fuga  “flight,” “escape,” 18, 118, 153–4, 161, 165 inquirere  “seek,” “ask after,” 116

Ancient Greek Terms αγαθών  agathon; “good,” 31, 38 αἴσθησις  aisthesis; “perception,” 108 ἀλήθεια  aletheia; “truth,” “unconcealment,” 22, 153, 174 αιτία  aitia; “cause,” “reason,” 13–14 ἀντίφασις  antiphasis; “contradiction,” 21 ἀποκάλυψις  apocalypsis; we would say “apocalypse,” but it literally means an act of pulling back the veil, revealing, or unconcealing, 28, 36, 143, 154, 157, 162, 165 ἀπόφανσις  apophansis; “assertion,” 154, 160, 162, 200 ἀπόφασις  apophasis; “negation,” “sending away,” 153–4, 160, 162 εἶδος  eidos; that which is visible; usually translated as “form” or “idea;” chosen by Plato to signify that which always is what it is and never otherwise; εἴδη, plural, 1, 27, 29, 35, 176 εἰκών  eikon; “image;” εἰκόνες, plural, 35, 36–7 ἐπιθυμία  epithumia; “desire,” “passion,” 12 εὐλογία  eulogia. “speech of praise,” 139 λόγος  logos; “word” or “speech” but also often “reason,” 2–3, 10, 21, 26, 28, 51–2, 55, 59, 65, 68, 72, 74, 76, 82, 108–10, 118, 139, 146, 154–62, 199 φαινόμενον  phainomenon; “appearance,” “that which shows itself,” 29, 35–6, 38, 156, 200 φιλία  philia; “friendship” or “love,” 2–3, 17–18, 153–4, 160, 162, 165, 173 φιλοσοφία  philosophia; “love of wisdom,” philosophy, 3, 18, 139, 154 φύω  phuo; “becoming,” 22–3, 29, 42–4, 59, 62, 75, 116, 118, 134, 136, 141–2, 145, 150, 157–8, 164–5, 168 φύσις  physis; “nature,” 21–2, 141, 145, 150, 196 οἱ πολλοί  hoi polloi; “the many,” not often used by philosophers in a flattering manner, 11 καλυψις  calypsis; an act of veiling or concealing, 3, 36, 154, 157–8, 162 πίστις  pistis; “trust,” “faith,” or “belief,” 3, 26, 154, 162 οἶδα  oida; “to know,” 13 ὀρέγω  orego; “to reach out toward,” 12 ῥέω  rheo; “flux,” 15, 165 σοφία  sophia; “wisdom,” 18, 139, 153–4, 162 σύνθεσις  synthesis, 105

Index of Names Aeschylus 177, 201 Al-Saji, Alia 188–9 Albertine 2–2, 12, 16–17, 100, 116, 153, 162–3, 173, 192 Allison, Henry 175 Arendt, Hannah 4, 171 Aristotle 10, 12–13, 160, 172–3, 189, 200 Augustine 14–15, 25, 61, 172, 174, 181, 189 Badiou, Alain 176 Barbaras, Renaud 4, 54, 99, 170–1, 179, 183, 188–9, 197 Beauvoir, Simone de 186 Bergson, Henri 100, 103, 116, 182, 188–9, 191–2 Bernasoni, Robert 193 Bimbenet, Etienne 173, 195 Butler, Judith 172, 182 Carbone, Mauro 170, 173–4, 200 Cezanne, Paul 114, 184, 186 Christ, Jesus 153–8, 164, 198–200 Claudel, Paul 112–13, 174, 192, 201 Compton, John 193 Critchley, Simon 173 Dastur, Francoise 170, 176, 198 Davis, Duane 171 Deleuze, Gilles 9, 169, 171–2, 182, 185–6, 200 Derrida, Jacques 169, 171, 181, 188, 193, 199 Descartes, Rene 1–2, 13–14, 17–18, 25, 34, 44, 144, 154, 161, 169, 171–3, 175, 177, 181, 183, 200 Descombes, Vincent 171 Dillon, Martin C. 175, 179, 184–5, 198, Dodd, James 180, 197 Dolar, Mladen 172 Evans, Fred 182

Fielding, Helen 169 Flynn, Bernard 193, 198 Graukoger, Stephen 173 Guattari, Felix 182, 185, 200 Gutting, Gary 170–1 Hamrick, William S. 171 Hass, Lawrence 175 Hegel, G. W. F. 90, 94–5, 115, 188, 194, 196 Heidegger, Martin 4–5, 10, 19–21, 23, 27–9, 36–8, 40, 47, 87, 100, 110, 113, 116, 118, 149, 160, 171–7, 179, 181, 186, 188, 190–2, 194, 198–200 Heinamaa, Sara 169–70 Heraclitus 141, 196 Husserl, Edmund 3–5, 18–19, 31–2, 38, 41–2, 51–5, 57–60, 75, 77, 81, 94, 96–7, 99–111, 113–17, 139, 143–7, 149, 160, 169–70, 173, 176–84, 189–93, 196–7 Janicaud, Dominique 171 Kant, Immanuel 28, 30–2, 35–8, 51–4, 60–1, 105, 109, 124, 126, 132, 169, 171, 175, 178, 180–1, 183, 187, 191 Kelly, Michael 190 Klee, Paul 24, 174 Lachieze-Rey, Pierre 52, 54, 60–2, 74, 84, 180–1 Landes, Donald 188 Lawlor, Leonard 16, 46, 169, 171–2, 178, 184, 198, 200 Long, Christopher 200 Longuenesse, Beatrice 178 Madison, Gary 175 Magdalene, Mary 10, 153–5, 161, 164, 198, 200

212

Index of Names

Marion, Jean-Luc 176 Marratto, Scott 181 Marx, Karl 194–6 Mazis, Glen 188 Meillassoux, Quentin 29, 32–4, 41, 176–8 Moran, Dermot 176 Morris, David 186, 189

Sartre, Jean-Paul 4, 89–90, 119, 121–4, 128, 131–3, 135–6, 160, 171–3, 181, 185–6, 193–6 Slatman, Jenny 181, 196 Smyth, Bryan 177, 194–5 Sparrow, Tom 176 Stewart, Jon 193

Nancy, Jean-Luc 30–1, 46–7, 153–62, 169, 175, 178, 198–200 Nietzsche, Friedrich 141, 176, 196, 198

Taminiaux, Jacques 171 Thomas the Apostle 154, 159–61, 200 Toadvine, Ted 177, 196

Olkowski, Dorothea 189

Valery, Paul 66, 89, 114, 135, 169, 175, 179, 182, 186 Vallier, Robert 170 Vasseleu, Cathryn 174 Vasunia, Phiroze 177

Plato 1, 11, 15, 25–7, 29, 31, 35–6, 38, 44, 47, 62, 141, 153, 171, 174–6, 178, 198 Proust, Marcel 1–3, 10, 12–13, 16–18, 100, 116, 153–4, 161–2, 169, 172–3, 192 Ricoeur, Paul 171, 173 Saint-Aubert, Emmanuel de 67, 69, 72, 170–3, 182

Waldenfels, Bernhard 169, 188 de Warren, Nicholas de 189 Zahavi, Dan 175–6, 189

Thematic Index abyss 94, 96–7, 112 advent 2, 66, 114–15, 117, 132, 134, 150, 153 alienation 130 ambiguity 1, 10, 14, 16, 27–8, 30, 41, 44, 89, 130, 136, 140, 144, 148, 166, 170, 193, 198–9 appearance 10–11, 14, 29–42, 46–7, 49, 51–6, 59–63, 65–8, 72–4, 76, 83, 85, 88, 95, 97, 101, 106, 108, 110, 115, 132, 153–6, 158–61, 176–7, 180 becoming 1–3, 15, 29, 35, 39, 43–5, 47, 49, 55, 60, 62, 66, 75–7, 81–2, 84, 87, 90–1, 94–7, 100–1, 104, 109–10, 112–14, 116–18, 121–2, 126–8, 130–5, 139–42, 144–7, 150–1, 153–4, 157, 159, 163–5 belief 10, 25–6, 35, 41, 57, 148–9, 154, 159–61, 171, 198 body 1, 13, 16, 24, 33, 37, 43, 70–1, 83–5, 88–9, 93, 97, 114, 116, 122, 125, 131, 135, 155, 177, 183, 199 certainty 1–2, 10, 13, 18, 26, 28, 44, 73, 76, 93, 126, 154–5, 160, 165–6, 173, 185, 196 chiasm 69, 71, 75, 81, 89, 150 cogito 32, 55, 58, 60–2, 65–7, 169 consciousness 2, 4, 16, 28–30, 32, 49, 52–5, 58–63, 65–76, 82–94, 97, 102, 105, 108–9, 114–16, 121–4, 127–30, 132–4, 136, 143–6, 156, 159, 162, 173–4, 176, 178, 180, 183, 185, 189, 193, 195, 197 constitution 31, 56–9, 64, 69, 76, 81–4, 87, 90–1, 93–4, 96, 106–7, 115–16, 144–5, 179 cruel thought 2–3, 9–10, 12, 14–19, 26–9, 35, 47, 51, 55, 73, 75–6, 81–2, 96, 134–5, 139–40, 142–3, 146, 148,

151, 153–4, 156, 159, 161–2, 165, 169 cruelty 10, 14–19, 28–9, 35–6, 43–4, 47, 49, 53–4, 72, 75, 96, 126, 154–5, 165 death 17, 27, 36, 40, 45–6, 48, 68, 108, 112–13, 139, 149, 156–9, 161, 175, 176, 178, 192 departing 3–4, 10, 24, 28, 30, 39, 47, 53, 76, 100–1, 111, 113, 116–17, 130, 139, 141, 146, 153–9, 161–2, 164–7, 192, 199 depth 3, 10–11, 13–14, 16–18, 21, 23–4, 27–9, 45, 67, 71, 87–8, 93, 95, 109, 117–18, 139, 144, 147–8, 165 doubt 2, 13, 17–18, 25–7, 73, 154, 160, 196 Earth 12, 38, 44, 140–1, 149, 157, 167, 177, 184 epistemology 1, 175, 178, 197 event 33–4, 61, 64–6, 103, 108–10, 112–14, 122, 126–7, 131–2, 140, 155, 159, 166, 176 existence 14–15, 20, 27, 45, 47, 57, 60, 64, 84, 87, 93–4, 110, 112, 115, 122, 126, 130–2, 134–5, 140–1, 157–9, 177, 185 experience 2, 22–3, 25, 29, 35, 37–9, 42–4, 48, 51, 53–60, 62, 71–2, 75–6, 82–8, 91–4, 101–2, 130, 140, 143–4, 147, 150, 153, 163–4, 170–1, 175–6, 181, 184–5, 187–8, 200 faith 3, 5, 10–11, 18–19, 22, 25–8, 52, 65, 72–3, 76, 93, 129, 154, 160–2, 175, 198, 200 freedom 31, 76, 84, 90, 108, 118, 121–5, 127–33, 135–6, 140, 181, 193, 195 God 13–14, 27, 31, 39, 44, 62, 69, 156–7, 166–7, 173, 176

214

Thematic Index

horizon 15, 23, 27, 38–41, 43, 45–6, 48, 62, 87, 94, 100, 102, 104, 115, 117, 144, 146, 148, 165, 176–7 idealism 4, 15, 28, 34, 49, 51–5, 59–63, 65–6, 68–76, 81–4, 86, 91–4, 96, 107, 114, 122, 124–7, 129–30, 134, 143, 145, 171, 175, 178, 180, 183, 185, 188 image 9–11, 28, 35–6, 46, 74, 117, 155, 194, 198, 200 immanence 29–36, 38–9, 44, 46–9, 71, 175–6 institution 81, 125, 128–32, 135–6, 148–9, 183–4, 195 intentionality 70, 84, 86–8, 91, 99, 102, 105–7, 109, 111, 118, 125, 130, 146, 184, 190–1, 195 inter-subjectivity 53, 62–3, 67, 159 interrogation 2, 9–13, 18–28, 54, 60–1, 81, 134, 139, 141, 146–7, 149–50, 162, 165 knowledge 1, 3, 10–13, 18, 22–3, 73, 88, 92–3, 139–42, 149–51, 154, 161–2, 165, 172, 175–6, 178 language 14, 16, 20–1, 34, 64, 141, 180, 184 logic 20–1, 59, 69, 82, 87, 108–9, 111–12, 140, 177, 191, 193 love 1–3, 10, 12, 14, 16–18, 26, 76, 139, 153–5, 159–64, 166, 173, 176, 187, 192, 198 mathematics 2, 13, 17, 33–4, 38, 44, 46, 126, 177–8 meaning 18–19, 22, 29–34, 38–42, 45, 48, 54, 63–5, 67, 69, 73–4, 82, 84, 86, 88, 93, 99–100, 107–9, 113, 116, 118, 122–4, 127–9, 131, 133, 135–6, 139, 141–2, 153–9, 179, 180, 184, 185, 187, 192 metaphysics 13, 15, 23, 29, 31, 42–4, 47–9, 57, 73, 76, 85, 89, 100, 143, 156, 172, 177, 188 nature 12–13, 21, 31, 34, 41, 65, 73, 92, 99, 100, 107, 111, 115, 118, 131,

140–2, 150, 165, 172, 179, 189–90, 193, 196 necessity 31, 56, 59, 64, 74–5, 105, 122, 126, 134, 136, 140, 158–9, 166, 177, 193 nothingness 23, 38, 89–91, 93, 121–2, 124, 132–3, 135, 141, 156, 161, 166, 177, 183, 195 object 5, 13, 15, 19, 21, 23, 30, 35, 38–44, 48–9, 51, 53–4, 56–8, 60, 64, 67–9, 73, 75, 82, 86, 89–95, 103–4, 118, 125, 130, 136, 142, 144–5, 148, 166, 172, 177, 178, 182–3, 186, 190, 194, 200 Ontology 18–19, 28, 41–2, 44, 67, 69, 77, 90–1, 121, 126, 142, 145, 170–2, 176, 186, 194–6 other 3, 16, 18, 28, 63, 148, 154–5, 159–60, 162–5, 167 perception 23, 25, 28, 37, 57, 64, 72–3, 83–4, 91, 93–5, 109, 114, 116, 127, 143–4, 148, 166, 183–4, 186, 190 phenomenology 3–5, 28–36, 38–9, 41, 43–4, 46–9, 51–2, 55–60, 64, 66–7, 73, 81, 84, 86, 88, 91, 93, 109, 123–4, 127, 142–3, 145–7, 149–50, 169–71, 176, 178–80, 183, 188, 191, 193 phenomenon 29, 36, 38–9, 56–7, 62, 65, 73, 83, 94, 99, 100, 102–4, 111, 116, 118, 132, 158–60, 187, 193 quality 84–6, 88, 130 realism 4, 15, 28–30, 32, 35–6, 39, 41–5, 47–9, 51, 54, 60–1, 70, 72–3, 75–6, 81–4, 86, 93, 96, 107, 124–7, 129–30, 145, 175, 183–5, 194 reduction 3, 21, 51, 53–4, 57–60, 62, 66–7, 84, 142–7, 179, 197 respiration 99, 113, 145, 166, 191–2 resurrection 155–9, 199 sedimentation 65 sensation 56–7, 89–92, 144, 185 skepticism 151, 160, 198, 200 solipsism 70, 178



Thematic Index

subjectivity 4, 30–1, 33, 42–3, 48, 51, 53, 57–8, 61–3, 67, 94, 96, 105, 107, 109, 115, 118, 125–6, 128, 145, 179–81, 183–4, 188 temporality 17–18, 39, 44–6, 52–4, 61–2, 65, 74, 76–7, 81–4, 87, 90–1, 93–7, 99–101, 105, 107–10, 113–16, 121–2, 127, 132–4, 157, 180–3, 187–9, 191–2, 194, 197 thing 10, 14–15, 18–19, 21, 23–5, 27, 29–33, 35–7, 39–46, 48–9, 51,

215

65, 71–2, 75–6, 82, 103, 117, 148, 180–1 transcendence 29–30, 32–3, 35–6, 38–9, 41, 43–4, 46–9, 67, 69, 71, 114, 118, 139–40, 143, 158, 175–6, 180, 182, 190–1 transcendental 4, 31, 33, 38, 51–76, 84, 122–5, 128–9, 131, 134–5, 178–80 trust 3, 26, 42, 161–2, 198 truth 9–11, 13–22, 27, 31, 34–6, 44, 47, 89, 146, 150–1, 153–4, 157, 160–2, 165, 174, 177–8, 185, 199