Abstract
This paper considers the move from passivity to a generative passivity in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty calls this generative passivity a “secondary passivity” and in his passivity lectures he describes it as “passivity without passivism.” The paper argues that this secondary passivity must be understood in terms of an écart within the phenomena. That is, in terms of a separation and distance which is matrixed and configured within what appears. This is the basis for Merleau-Ponty’s statement in his passivity lectures that “the touchstone of a theory of passivity,” is a “notion of oneiric symbolism,” and why for him passivity is intimately connected to a “primordial symbol.” If the symbolic is so associated with passivity, the symbolic also does not concern origins but is both the ontological limit and divergence in phenomena. This association forces Merleau-Ponty to consider what it means for phenomenological reflection retrace its steps back to an initial event of expression and even whether phenomenology is ultimately served by description. Finally, this paper considers Merleau-Ponty’s attitude toward the literary usages of language as a means of doing a phenomenology of the secondary passivity.
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Notes
I am borrowing the phraseology from §9 of the 1929–1930 manuscripts, in which Husserl appears to have first treated passivity and which were published in 1939 as Erfahrung und Urteil. See Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg: Meiner, 7th ed., 1999); English translation: Experience and Judgment, trans. by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1973).
Bernet is mostly speaking of the notion of affectivity that arises from a claim like Husserl’s about the “field of passive doxa” above. Husserl writes, for example, “affection primarily follows the constitutive process of becoming.”
Edmund Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis.Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten (1918–1926), ed. Margot Fleischer, Husserliana XI (The Hague: Nijhoff,1966), 153; English translation: Analyses Concerning Active and Passive Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 200. Husserl goes so far as to distinguish between a primal “affective allure” of the object’s subsoil and the object’s givenness, in which “the ego complies with the allure and has turned toward it, attentively laying hold of it” (162/210). Since the now-presentation is always already pregnant with an affective tendency that is bonded to the very latency and unfolding of the phenomenon, there is no such thing as neutrality in givenness. Affectivity is inescapably compulsory and contractual with an appearance in its appearing. Thus, according to Bernet, there is an “intentionality without an object in Husserl.” If so, he continues, this intentionality belongs not to “impressional self-manifestation” and “could scarcely be said to belong to a life of subjectivity.” Instead, affectivity plunges the subject into a paradox: “sensible revelation arises from within a withdrawal and concealment that benefits the massive and visible presence of the things of the world; and here the subject finds itself at a distance from itself, coinciding with this withdrawal and concealment” Bernet, Rudolf. “An Intentionality without Subject or Object?” Man and World 27 (1994) pp. 250, 251, 249.
In Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel, Husserliana VI (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954) p. 149.
Ibid.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, edited by Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University, 2007) p. 76.
Le Visible et l’invisible, suivi de notes de travail (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), translated by Alphonso Lingis as The Visible and the Invisible, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) p. 146/110. Henceforth referred to as VI.
Ibid. p. 155/117.
Ibid. p. 112/82.
Ibid. p. 266/217.
Ibid. p. 162/128.
Ibid. p. 313/265.
Ibid. p. 318/270.
L’Institution, Passivité: Notes de Cours au Collège de France (1954–1955) (Paris: Éditions Belin, 2003), translated by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey as Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010). p. 197/149.
VI pp. 224–225/173.
In a 1959 Working Note to The Visible and the Invisible titled “Einströmen—Reflection” Merleau-Ponty returns to this problem: “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 p. 224/173.
IP p. 159/118.
VI p. 266/216.
IP pp. 195–196/148. About “being in the divergence”: I may wake up right before my alarm if I have to get up early. If I have to get up for something important, I may even wake several times throughout the night to see if my alarm is working. I wake to the cry of my child yet sleep through all kinds of other noise. I know when I have been asleep. Sleep does not preclude waking and sense-perceptions any more than it does dreaming and dream-perceptions. The ontological character of sleep for Merleau-Ponty is precisely this interventional character. Whatever of sleep resists appearing also intercepts and continues to intercept the intentional structure of consciousness and experience.
Ibid. p. 185/139.
Ibid. p. 189/142.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 200/151.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. La Nature, Notes, Cours du Collège de France (Paris: Seuil, 1995), translated by Robert Vallier as Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003) pp. 239/183.
Ibid. p. 68/43.
Ibid.
Ibid. p. 66/42.
IP pp. 201–202/152.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003) p. 212.
For example, Freud on resistance and censorship in his “Revision of the Theory of Dreams”: "You have long been aware that this censorship is not an institution peculiar to dream-life. You know that the conflict between the two psychical agencies, which we—inaccurately—describe as the ‘unconscious repressed’ and the ‘conscious,’ dominates our whole mental life and that the resistance…is nothing other than the resistance due to [a] repression by which the two agencies are separated.” Freud, Sigmund. “Revision of the Theory of Dreams” in Essential Papers on Dreams, edited by Melvin R. Lansky (New York: New York University Press, 1992) p. 39.
IP p. 203/154.
In this context, he associates passivity with “resistance,” “censorship,” “dictatorship”—an interdiction. Ibid. pp. 210–211/158–159.
See also Saint Aubert, Emmanuel de. “La « promiscuité» Merleau-Ponty à la recherche d’une psychoanalyse ontologique” in Archives de Philosophie 1 (2006): pp. 11–35.
IP p. 238/182.
Ibid. p. 241/184.
Ibid. p. 242/185.
VI p. 182/139.
Ibid. p. 317/270.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Notes de cours: 1958–1959 et 1960–1961 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) p. 83.
“Préface” dans A. Hesnard, L’Œuvre de Freud (Paris: Payot, 1960) pp. 5–10, translated by Alden L. Fisher as “Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis: Preface to Hesnard’s L’Oeuvre de Freud,” in Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 18 (1982) p. 8–9/71.
Ibid. p. 8/70.
Ibid. pp. 8–10/70–71.
Ibid. p. 82/44.
Ibid. p. 204/154.
Ibid. p. 205/155.
Ibid. p. 203/154.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What is Literature?” and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). See especially p. 37 where he speaks about “disclosure.”
VI pp. 137/102–103.
ibid. p. 230/178.
ibid. p. 260/210. Consider, too, this remarkable statement from Claude Lefort’s introduction to the text: It is therefore not saying much to say that the work survives the writer, that, when its incompletion will be forgotten, we will know only the plenitude of its meaning. This plenitude is de jure. The work alone seems to have a positive existence, for, even though its fate be suspended on the decision of future readers to let it speak, at least each time they will turn to it, it will come to interpose itself, as on the first day, between him who reads and the world to which he is present, compelling him to question that world in it and to relate his own thoughts to what it is. Such is the fascination the finished work exercises on its reader that for a moment it renders vain all recrimination of the death of the writer. The writer disappears just when he was preparing for new beginnings, and the creation is interrupted, forever beneath the expression it announced, from which it was to draw its final justification.” ibid. p. 337/xiv–xv.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Recherches sur l'usage littéraire du langage: Cours au Collège de France Notes, 1953, (Geneva: MētisPresses, 2013) p. 103.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Parcours deux, 1951–1961 (Paris: Verdier, 2000) p. 339.
Notes de cours p. 209.
VI pp. 247–248/197.
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Kaushik, R. The secondary passivity: Merleau-Ponty at the limit of phenomenology. Cont Philos Rev 54, 61–74 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09514-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09514-9