Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy

Emmanuel Alloa, Frank Chouraqui, Rajiv Kaushik, Emmanuel Alloa, Frank Chouraqui, Rajiv Kaushik

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438476926
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Fenomenologia in filosofia

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century philosophy. The recent publication of his lecture courses and posthumous working notes has opened new avenues for both the interpretation of his thought and philosophy in general. These works confirm that, with a surprising premonition, Merleau-Ponty addressed many of the issues that concern philosophy today. With the benefit of this fuller picture of his thought, Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy undertakes an assessment of the philosopher's relevance for contemporary thinking. Covering a diverse range of topics, including ontology, epistemology, anthropology, embodiment, animality, politics, language, aesthetics, and art, the editors gather representative voices from North America and Europe, including both Merleau-Ponty specialists and thinkers who have come to the philosopher's work through their own thematic interest.

Legacies

The Three Senses of Flesh

Concerning an Impasse in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology

RENAUD BARBARAS

In French, the word flesh—la chair—invites a metaphor that, as always in such cases, one should exploit: the very possibility to invest this word into fields other than its own designated one conversely reveals a depth of meaning that must sustain our thinking. In any case, it is within the field of phenomenology, in France particularly, that this notion attained the status of a major philosophical concept. In Husserl, Leib refers to the living and sensible body, the body I inhabit, in contrast to the body as a fragment of matter; in short, Leib refers to one’s own body (le corps propre). But even though this concept plays an important role, it only designates a specific being; its reach is merely ontic. It is with Merleau-Ponty, in particular in The Visible and the Invisible and texts of that same period, that the flesh—discussed without any possessive article since it is no longer the flesh of anyone—comes to occupy a central place and in fact becomes the major concept of the new ontology in the making. In the corps propre, Merleau-Ponty discovers a sense of being that gives us access to the very meaning of being; my flesh becomes the ontological witness of an originary dimension exceeding it and of which it is only a privileged modality. It brings forward the dimension of the flesh, which Merleau-Ponty sometimes refers to as the flesh of the world (la chair du monde). Thus, with Merleau-Ponty, one moves from an ontic concept of the flesh to an ontological one, and it is in this ontological sense that we use the word flesh most of the time. It is also in this way that it has been understood in subsequent phenomenological enterprises—Michel Henry’s in particular—so that when in phenomenology one mentions the flesh, it is generally accepted that one means something else than the mere corps propre, and that the emphasis is placed on a more originary dimension, which in truth determines the latter.

The whole challenge of the notion of the flesh is understanding exactly to what dimension it refers. For, insofar as Merleau-Ponty is the thinker who attempted to make that move from ontic flesh to ontological flesh, from corps propre to flesh of the world, any approach to this question requires that one comes face to face again with this enigmatic flesh, which seems to be Merleau-Ponty’s name for being. It is precisely because of Merleau-Ponty’s work that we take for granted the need to consider the corps propre as an ontological witness, calling out toward a dimension that is deeper and, so to speak, foundational to it. The question is, rather, that of the modality of this call or of this move toward (ontological) flesh. Is the way that Merleau-Ponty passes from my flesh to the “flesh of the world” satisfactory? Indeed, might we be content with a univocal concept of flesh, one that would include as part of its ownmost modality both the appearing of beings and the subject to whom they are appearing? By immersing my flesh into a general flesh, so to speak, doesn’t Merleau-Ponty remain dependent on the perspective that he intends to dismiss and isn’t he displaying a certain degree of naïveté? We shall attempt to show that the overcoming of ontic flesh toward its “foundation” cannot be carried out in such a simple—and so to speak direct—manner and that, consequently, this overcoming must in fact follow two divergent yet correlative directions. This is why we will have to distinguish between three senses of the flesh.

As is to be expected, the starting point for the notion of flesh is paragraph 36 of Ideen II, which deals with the constitution of corps propre through touch as a “ground of localised sensations.” Just like other objects appearing within the world, my body is characterized by the fact that I can at once see it and touch it, at least in part. There is however a fundamental difference between visual and tactile appearances, and it is this difference that will allow one to conclude that the corps propre (Leib) can only be constituted through touch. By touching my left hand, I obtain appearances of the tactile kind, which present themselves as characteristic of the thing “left hand”: soft, smooth, warm, etc. But Husserl continues: “When I touch the left hand I also find in it, too, series of touch-sensations, which are ‘localized’ in it, though these are not constitutive of properties (such as roughness or smoothness of the hand, of this physical thing). If I speak of the physical thing, ‘left hand,’ then I am abstracting from these sensations. … If I do include them, then it is not that the physical thing is now richer, but instead it becomes Body [es wird Leib], it senses.”1 Therefore, saying that my right hand touches my left hand, that is to say, touches a fragment of my flesh, amounts to saying that it reveals a certain sensitivity in this left hand, which suddenly reveals itself as sentient: my right hand doesn’t uncover any objective qualities but it arouses a sensing (un sentir) that embodies itself and unfolds itself on the very surface being touched. Of course, it immediately follows that my left hand, now flesh, becomes itself sensible to the right hand which was touching it and which therefore becomes demoted to the rank of a thing touched. Touch, insofar as it applies to the corps propre, is characterized by a fundamental reversibility—the touching can at any moment become a thing touched by this very body part that it was touching—and it is within this reversibility that the fundamental mode of being of flesh comes to light. One must recognize the importance of this description: what it reveals isn’t some physiological singularity; it is an irreducible sense of being. Indeed, the flesh is characterized by the fact that no part of it is immune to becoming actively sensible; and neither is any active sensibility immune to transforming itself into an object of touch at the very moment it becomes localized. So the ability to feel is not superadded to any preexisting objective reality, a flesh is not superadded to a body (Körper)—for this superaddition would amount to appealing to some objective plane of corporeity when it is precisely this plane that is always already challenged by the experience of reversibility.

Sensibility is constitutive of corporeity and, as Husserl himself declares, the body as physical thing can only be attained through an act of abstraction. Such abstraction applies itself to a reality that is neither corporeal nor subjective, and this is what the very concept of flesh intends to name. If the body is sensible in its very corporeity, one must also reject the idea of a subjectivity that would be, at least in principle, independent of the body. The reversibility of touch shows on the contrary that every active touch may be localized on the surface of a body, which then delivers itself over to another touch, and that it is a feeling that is incarnate; in short, corporeity is constitutive of (sensible) subjectivity. Here, we are indeed faced with a fundamental effacement of the sensing/sensed and subject/object distinction. Since no part of my body can remain pure body (touched), and since no tactile activity can escape incarnation, one must renounce the very use of the categories of subject and object: as Merleau-Ponty writes, “The distinction between subject and object is blurred in my corps propre” (S, 167, orig. 211). The critical reach of the analysis of chair propre seems undeniable.

The discovery of the reversibility of touch introduces us to an original sense of being, which we have hitherto only described negatively and which is precisely the first sense of the flesh.2 The whole challenge is for us to appropriate the singularity of this sense of being, to measure its importance without surreptitiously reintroducing any of the categories that the flesh is meant to challenge. The flesh is nothing but the locus of experience itself, since its sensibility toward itself is merely a particular mode of its sensibility to what it isn’t, which one might call, provisionally, “the world.” But once it is recaptured from this point of view, the reversibility of touch, which initially makes apparent the carnal mode of being, signifies that the experience of the world essentially includes a fundamental belonging to this world. To say that my touch is essentially incarnate amounts to recognizing that feeling can be said to be thrown or deported toward that which it feels. In other words, sensible experience, of which touch is an eminent modality, is characterized by a sort of fundamental iteration: sensibility allows the world to appear only because it already is on its side, so that, according to a relationship that is only apparently paradoxical, it already belongs to that which it constitutes. Sensibility, on this view, is a zero of the world—in the sense that the zero is both something other than a number and the very first of all numbers: the flesh is not the world and yet it already is on its side. This is to say, therefore, that it stands on both sides like a step toward the world which would be at the same time a step into the world. It is this strange iteration that chair propre invites us to reflect upon an iteration in which the subject (since one must admit that what appears appears to somebody …) is engaged in what it sees, exceeding itself or rather existing on the mode of its own excess and therefore ahead of itself. The meaning of being of flesh is that is of an originary advance, unveiling the ground that it simultaneously re-covers, showing a ground that it has already presupposed and upon which it lands. This advance is deeper than the partition of perception and objective motion since it unveils itself as it approaches and advances within this that it sheds light on. Such is the meaning of being of this ontic flesh which phenomenology has discovered and it is this that remains to be thought through.

Provided one per...