Abstract
In this paper I address some related aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished texts, The Visible and the Invisible and The Prose of the World. The point of departure for my reading of these works is the sense of philosophical disillusionment which underlies and motivates them, and which, I argue, leads Merleau-Ponty towards an engagement with art in general and with literature in particular. I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s emerging conception of ethics—premised on the paradox of a “universal singularity” and concerned with the concrete experience of the individual subject, rather than with abstractions and formal categories—can best be articulated through the formalist concept of “defamiliarization,” the fundamental performativity of all literature, and the dialogic relations which, though inherent in all discourse, become most powerfully evident in the dynamics of reading.
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Notes
As pointed out by an anonymous reader of this essay, the work of Blanchot and Bataille is also highly relevant in this context. I suggest, however, that what is at issue is not just the spectrum of rich resonances and echoes among French philosophers from the 1930s to the 1970s, but a wider fraternity of thinkers of which Bakhtin, too, is a prominent member.
Though published posthumously, The Prose of the World is another unfinished fragment, dating from the early 1950's. It was part of a planned work which was to include The Origin of Truth, eventually entitled The Visible and the Invisible.
A similarly liminal conception of subjectivity underlies Bakhtin’s dialogism: “A person,” he writes, “has no internal territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary” (1961, pp. 287–288). If inter-subjectivity is prior to subjectivity, we can no longer relate to the self as a territorial enclosure. Living on borderlines is what we should all do.
The analogous reversibility of the visual, the tactile and the discursive has been extensively discussed by Jeffrey Wayne Froman (1982).
The New Critics of the 1940s, and Brooks as one of their Founding Fathers, have served as convenient straw-figures for a wide range of post-structuralist literary and cultural theories, and some of the criticism leveled at their work is undoubtedly sound, but—I would argue—one would be hard put to find more subtle, articulate, and responsive readers of poetry. Elitist, ensconced in their ivory-towers of culture, and rather deaf to the voices of history they may have been, but their writings on poetry are still classics, and Brooks’ “heresy of paraphrase” is a good case-in-point.
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Erdinast-Vulcan, D. That Which “Has No Name in Philosophy”: Merleau-Ponty and the Language of Literature. Hum Stud 30, 395–409 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9069-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9069-2