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The enigma of reversibility and the genesis of sense in Merleau-Ponty

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Abstract

This article clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s enigmatic, later concept of reversibility by showing how it is connected to the theme of the genesis of sense. The article first traces reversibility through “Eye and Mind” and The Visible and the Invisible, in ways that link reversibility to a theme of the earlier philosophy, namely an interrelation in which activity and passivity reverse to one another. This linkage is deepened through a detailed study of a passage on touch in the Phenomenology’s chapter on “Sensing,” which shows how reversibility is important to the genesis of sense, not from some already given origin, but through a creative operation within being, beyond the perceiver, wherein the field of perception internally diverges into active and passive moments. The article connects this point about the genesis of sense to themes in Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on institution and passivity. Altogether the article shows how reversibility is a sign of a divergence and thence of a sort of gap or excess in being that allows for a genesis of sense within being itself.

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Notes

  1. References to “Eye and Mind” are given in the form OE [pg# in Merleau-Ponty (1964b)]/[pg# in Merleau-Ponty (1964a)]. References to The Visible and the Invisible are given in the form VI [pg# in Merleau-Ponty (1964c)]/[pg# in Merleau-Ponty (1968)].

  2. In a discussion of reversibility in relation to the body (OE 18/162), he refers to it as an “enigma of the body.”

  3. For other contributions, some overlapping with various issues broached in this paper without yet making its point, see, e.g., Vasseleu (1998, pp. 65–67); Cataldi (1993, pp. 105–106); Grosz (1999, pp. 158–159); Zahavi (2002); Dillon (1988), ch. 9; Kleinberg-Levin (1999, p. 207) and Irigaray (1993, pp. 160–161), who links reversibility to activity-passivity (Irigaray, though, does so in the name of undoing this difference for a “middle-passive”); Hass (1999), which draws an important link with the figure-ground relation; and Hass (2008), which links reversibility to activity-passivity in passing, and gives an extensive discussion of reversibility that links it to expression and différance in ways supportive of this paper’s linkage between the themes of reversibility and sense—although Hass ends up rooting reversibility in our cognitive, epistemological operations, rather than heading in the ontological direction taken here.

  4. Merleau-Ponty (2002) gives an extensive study of this problem in Husserl, and Lawlor (2002) gives an excellent introduction to and context for this issue, which is also central to Merleau-Ponty (2003a, b), and at play in Merleau-Ponty (1995), see Vallier (2005).

  5. Links between the earlier and later philosophy are here deployed not so much to argue for a simple continuity between them, but to open details behind Merleau-Ponty’s later, enigmatic philosophy.

  6. References to the Phenomenology are given in the form PhP [pg# in Merleau-Ponty (1945)]/[pg# Merleau-Ponty (1962)].

  7. Merleau-Ponty’s chapter title is “Le sentir,” which I here translate as “Sensing,” to capture the chapter’s broad concern with sensation and its engagement with the issue of sense as meaning.

  8. OE 19/163.

  9. VI 184/139.

  10. OE 22/164.

  11. In VI 237/183 Merleau-Ponty notoriously notes that PhP retains a philosophy of consciousness and must be brought to “ontological explicitation.” To accept this criticism is to take the earlier work as boiling down to the claim that the condition of perception is bodily, which merely converts the Cartesian subject into a body-subject but does not escape the philosophy of subjectivity. This paper, though, shows that there is a much greater ontological affinity between PhP and VI. In addition, we should note that PhP’s effort to bed the personal in pre-personal habits and movements prolongs The Structure of Behaviour’s efforts to conceptualize a discontinuous continuity of the natural, vital and human orders (see Merleau-Ponty 1965, p. 139), which would mean that PhP’s account of the body subject already overlaps with an ontology of nature, albeit this is not yet explicit.

  12. Compare with Merleau-Ponty’s point in the institution lectures that “the instituted has sense without me,” which arises in his discussion of time as a “passivity-activity” that is the “very model of institution” (IP 36; see note 25 for citation convention). This means not only that things have a sense, but that I am not the wholly active constituter of sense, for institution requires an activity that surpasses me.

  13. See VI 195/149, where Merleau-Ponty speaks of ideas lining the sensible.

  14. See, e.g., OE 16–21/162–3, VI 183–196/139–149.

  15. See van Cleve and Frederick (1991) for Kant’s writings on this topic and extensive context and discussion.

  16. VI 194–5/147–8.

  17. The fold and hollow are two of Merleau-Ponty’s favourite concepts, going back to Structure (see pp. 161–3) and forward to the last writings (VI 286–7/233–4 is apt here). We return to this theme below.

  18. It is wrong to say that reversibility inflects being as perceiver or perceived, as if being is a purely invisible substratum that appears in one of two visible forms. The right-hand glove turned inside out is a left-hand glove, not the appearance of a right-hand glove; and the left- and right- hand gloves are not two visible appearances of some underlying, ambiguous being that would be purely invisible (a non-handed version of a handed glove is impossible). To say that the counterparts seem incongruent is not to say that they are really two appearances of the same thing, but that, despite their own looks, the one counterpart can turn to the other. This point is at work in a passage from VI on the reversed glove, discussed here on page 6. The ontology of reversibility and écart is not an ontology of appearance. As Merleau-Ponty insists, the invisible is of the visible (see e.g., VI 247/300–1), ontologically internal to the visible, not behind it.

  19. See Derrida (1981).

  20. See Levin (2005) for a review.

  21. VI 317/263. Research prompted by my own realization that reversibility can be conceptualized in terms of chirality shows that in several places Merleau-Ponty links reversibility and the gap between the perceiver and the perceived to mirror phenomena (which are closely linked to chirality, since mirroring turns a left-hand enantiomorph into a right-hand one). See VI 327/274, 192/146, 303/249, 309/255–6 and Merleau-Ponty (2003a, b, p. 224), and the glove passage discussed here.

    Chirality itself is thematized by Merleau-Ponty at VI 270/216–7, where he says “[c]onsider the right, the left,” and, referring to Kant’s discussion of incongruent counterparts, writes that the “two” parts of such pairs announce “a fragmentation of being” that is “the possibility for discrimination” and “the advent of difference.” This reinforces the point that an incongruence and gap between reversible terms is crucial to Merleau-Ponty.

  22. That is, the finger tip, as sensed by its curvature, internally affords divergent representations of both inside-out and non-inside-out gloves.

  23. VI 193/147.

  24. The present claim that there is a gap and incongruence between reversible terms, intersects with Lawlor (2006), which importantly identifies a “mixturism” in Merleau-Ponty, in which traditional poles of oppositions such as subject/object are inseparably mixed, yet must never coincide. Lawlor argues that for Merleau-Ponty (in contrast with Deleuze and Foucault as more radical philosophers of immanence) this non-coincidence is rooted in an ambiguity of a field of experience, thus maintaining a residue of transcendence. This paper urges that the matter is not so clear in Merleau-Ponty. On this issue, the passage on chirality and the fragmentation of being, cited in note 21, is especially apt.

  25. Merleau-Ponty (2003a) contains his lectures on passivity and institution. The translation here is by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey, from their forthcoming edition, with some minor modifications. The lectures are cited using the abbreviation IP, followed by the page number in the French edition, which is provided in angled brackets in the Lawlor and Massey edition.

  26. IP 199.

  27. IP 160.

  28. IP 157.

  29. Ibid.

  30. IP 124.

  31. IP 37. My thanks to Lisa Guenther for her insights on Merleau-Ponty on birth.

  32. IP 36.

  33. PhP 245/211, also see 191/163.

  34. Thanks to Petri Berndtson for pointing out to me the importance of this theme of respiration.

  35. OE 9/159.

  36. We would have to acknowledge, though, genuine moments of wonder in science, when the scientist passively opens to things, and these are strikingly correlative to insight.

  37. OE 16/162, citing Valery.

  38. OE 13/161.

  39. OE 28–9/166.

  40. OE 31/167.

  41. OE 34/168–9.

  42. OE 31–32/167. Translation modified to include omitted portion.

  43. VI 318/265, Merleau-Ponty’s emphases. The equal sign here does not remove the incongruence between activity and passivity, since the topic is reversibility as an “act with two faces.” In fact, the ability to indicate, with the equal sign, that activity and passivity are counterparts or equals precisely depends on the two maintaining separate faces. Again, in the OE quote about the respiration of being, Merleau-Ponty writes that activity and passivity are “so slightly discernible”—they are ever so close, yet still slight discernible, and this makes all the difference. See note 24.

  44. 80d.

  45. OE 30/167.

  46. It would be easy to discharge this enigma by saying that it is true that things actively look at the painter—but this is true only from the subjective point of view of the painter. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty suggests this when he notes that the painter practices a “magical theory of vision.” (OE 27/166) But in OE (and throughout his philosophy) Merleau-Ponty takes painterly experience seriously as challenging traditional ontologies. In OE he speaks of a “philosophy still to be done,” a philosophy that “animates the painter” and of painting as having a “metaphysical significance.” Reducing the enigma to subjectivism would betray Merleau-Ponty’s project.

  47. PhP 39/30.

  48. PhP 36/28. At this point in the Phenomenology Merleau-Ponty does not directly refer to Meno 80d, but does so in the “Cogito” chapter (425/371), after which he writes that “A thought really transcended by its objects would find them proliferating in its path without ever being able to grasp their relationships to each other,” which again echoes the passage from the passivity lecture and anticipates the quotation from the temporality chapter to which we shall shortly turn. For more on this theme of the seeker’s paradox, see Dillon (1988).

  49. PhP 39/30.

  50. PhP 248/21.

  51. OE 31–32/167.

  52. PhP 232/268.

  53. PhP 488/427.

  54. Compare: “I am installed on a pyramid of time which has been me. I take up a field and invent myself (but not without my temporal equipment), just as I move about in the world (but not without the unknown mass of my body.)” Merleau-Ponty (1964d, p. 14).

  55. PhP 239/206.

  56. PhP 237/205–6.

  57. PhP 235/203.

  58. PhP 241/208.

  59. I here refer to the chapter subtitles that Merleau-Ponty gives in the French, which Mallin (1979) translates and correlates with passages in the text.

  60. PhP 242/208–9.

  61. PhP 260–3/225–8. See Kelly (2005).

  62. OE 67/180.

  63. PhP 245/211.

  64. See Claudel (1929), which is cited in Merleau-Ponty (1965, p. 197) to make a point similar to the one in PhP; Claudel, is not, however, cited at this point in PhP.

  65. PhP 247/213.

  66. PhP 275/238.

  67. See Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Klee’s epitaph at OE 87/188.

  68. PhP 248/214.

  69. PhP 250–1/216–7.

  70. Compare OE 19/163.

  71. PhP 249/215; note the echo of OE.

  72. This point must be compared with the new working note of October 1959 on “Personne,” Merleau-Ponty (2007, pp. 425–426).

  73. PhP 280/242.

  74. PhP 74/61. See Lawlor (2003, p. 87) for insight into the significance of this passage; also see Lawlor (2002).

  75. PhP 249/215; crucially, the perceiver is not a ‘hole in being’ who punctures being from a transcending outside, a view Merleau-Ponty here elides with Hegelian negation, but would be better attributed to Sartrean activism.

  76. VI 172/130. On this methodological issue, compare the later point “Vision produces what reflection will never understand—a combat which at times has no victor, and a thought for which there is from now on no titular incumbent” Merleau-Ponty (1964d, p. 17), i.e., that reversibility, as interrelating activity and passivity, challenges traditional reflection’s activist claim that it is a wholly autonomous activity.

  77. The intuition-reflection distinction is linked to passivity-activity and reversibility in a working note (VI 318–9/264–5) that parses intuition-reflection in terms of Kant’s “real opposition” between perception and counter-perception. The issues invoked with Kant here in VI resonate with the turn to Kant in PhP, discussed below.

  78. IP 36.

  79. PhP 254/219.

  80. This passage must be compared with Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on the genesis of sense in his discussion of Husserl, in Merleau-Ponty (2002).

  81. PhP 254–5/220.

  82. See Dillon (1987), Dillon (1988). This indistinction is already a theme of Merleau-Ponty (1965). See, e.g., p. 171.

  83. As noted above, this is a key term in the institution lectures, where it signals repetition/temporality as generating sense without yet constituting sense.

  84. PhP 255–6/221.

  85. PhP 256/221.

  86. Ibid.

  87. See Seeley (1995), Hölldobler and Wilson (2009), Seeley and Visscher (2004), Seeley et al. (2006).

  88. Seeley (1995, p. 46).

  89. See Merleau-Ponty (1995, 2003a, b), and material from working notes on dynamic morphology cited in Barbaras (2001); also see Morris (2008).

  90. IP 124.

  91. Merleau-Ponty (2007, pp. 415–418).

  92. PhP 255–6/221.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Shiloh Whitney, Noah Moss Brender, Donald Beith and Lisa Guenther for their invaluable contributions to my understanding of Merleau-Ponty on institution and passivity. I would also like to thank members of the Concordia University Philosophy Department, especially Justin Smith, for their comments on a paper I presented, which led to this article.

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Morris, D. The enigma of reversibility and the genesis of sense in Merleau-Ponty. Cont Philos Rev 43, 141–165 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-010-9144-7

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