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Touched by Time: Some Critical Reflections on Derrida’s Engagement with Merleau-Ponty in Le Toucher

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Abstract

This essay raises some critical questions about the interpretation that Derrida offers of Merleau-Ponty in his recent book, On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, where Derrida implies that the latter’s work remains mired in theological prejudices. As well as defending Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of the senses and inter-subjectivity against such claims, this essay is also concerned to examine Derrida’s transcendental philosophy of time (or philosophy of the contretemps that breaks open time but nonetheless pertains to it) that undergirds and motivates his engagement with various philosophies of touch. In this latter respect, I will argue that Derrida’s philosophy is itself ‘touched’ by time, in the peculiar sense of ‘touched’ that connotes affected and wounded. His work instantiates an ethics of non-presentist time (which is also the transcendental condition for any event of touch) and I ask whether there is reason to look for a different understanding of both time and the transcendental to Derrida’s.

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Notes

  1. See Derrida, J., Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. P. Brault & M. Naas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993; and On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. C. Irizarry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

  2. R. Bruzina describes Derrida’s work “less as anti-presentialism, i.e., asserting that presence has neither validity nor significance, than as countering presentialism, i.e., marshalling ways of indicating presence is not an absolute secured by own manifestness, but rather a kind of ‘constitutive’ result, the ‘constitution’ in this case being the paradoxical systematically unmanifestable play of ‘différancing’” (‘The Future Past and Present—and not just perfect—of Phenomenology’, Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 30, No. 1, p51–2). Despite Derrida’s suggestion in ‘Ousia and Gramme’ that perhaps there is no concept of time that is not metaphysical, his transcendental arguments for the necessity of something that interrupts presentist time, and that opens on to the past and the future, amount to something rather close to a non-presentist philosophy, or so I will argue in what follows.

  3. As we will see in the context of his discussions of Merleau-Ponty’s work, Derrida’s reservations about any priority accorded to embodied coping revolve around the way in which its recuperative and binding component, based on habitual syntheses of time (e.g., the scar), covers over a certain structure of time that is considered to be both ontologically prior and ethico-politically more important (e.g., the wound of time: the immemorial past that nonetheless subsists, the future that defies our expectations and is the condition for the event).

  4. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari make precisely the same comment about the concept of the flesh that features in Merleau-Ponty’s later work, describing it as a “pious” thought that “plunges into the mystery of the incarnation”—see p178). Despite Merleau-Ponty’s early Christianity and the problematic persistence of metaphors like ‘communion’ and ‘original ecstasy’ in his work (as Derrida shows), Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology is nonetheless problematic. See Reynolds, J., and Roffe, J., ‘Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology’ (The Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, Vol. 37, No. 3, October 2006, p228–51).

  5. Derrida, J., ‘Speech and Phenomena’ and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. D. Allison, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, pp 62–8.

  6. Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith, London: Routledge, p345, 410–33.

  7. The findings of much contemporary cognitive science, for example, suggest that the history of the tradition, and particularly phenomenology, far from being wrong, may have provided an account of the human congruent with both phenomenology, the findings of developmental psychology and neo-natal life. In particular, evidence suggests that there is an originary synaethesia of the senses, despite the fact that Derrida bemoans the philosophical explication of this ‘confusion’ or ambiguity in Merleau-Ponty’s work (OT 193). Similarly, even Derrida’s denigration of the privileged role given to the hand is at least partially redeemed when it is recognized that this may be ‘hard-wired’ into the human constitution—hand-mouth relations, for example, govern both fetal and neo-natal life, and arguably this priority is never wholly abandoned (for more on this, see Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Whether this justifies these philosophical traditions depends upon what one takes the task of a philosophy to be, but it is perhaps not overly surprising (and it may even be desirable) that phenomenology serve to explicate experiential structures that are likely to have concomitant (but irreducible) explanations in the cognitive sciences, developmental sciences, etc.

  8. Thanks to Jon Roffe for helping to clarify the significance of the transcendental to this dispute, and for proffering this likely reply.

  9. See Robert Stern, Transcendental Arguments and Skepticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, pp 10–11. He argues that truth directed transcendental arguments are ultimately problematic, relying on other question-begging assumptions, particularly either idealism or verificationism.

  10. Merleau-Ponty, M., Signs, trans. R. McCleary, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

  11. See, for example, Gallagher, S., How the Body Shapes the Mind, Dreyfus, H., & Dreyfus, S., ‘The Challenge of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment for Cognitive Science’ in Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, eds. H. Haber & G. Weiss, London: Routledge, 1999, and Kelly, S., ‘Grasping at Straws: Motor Intentionality and the Cognitive Science of Skilled Behaviour’, in Essays in Honour of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 2: Heidegger, Coping and Cognitive Science, eds. Wrathall, M., and Malpas, J., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

  12. Deleuze, G., Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Also, see Reynolds, J., “Deleuze and Dreyfus on l’habitude, coping and trauma in skill acquisition”, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Vol. 14, No. 4, December 2006, pp 563–83.

  13. These observations are partly indebted to Gayle Salamon. Her paper ‘The Sexual Schema: Transposition and Transcendence in Phenomenology of Perception’, delivered at the International Association of Philosophy and Literature, Cyprus, 2007, reminded me of these aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s work that have partly been forgotten due to Judith Butler’s critique of his chapter on sexuality for its unproblematized assumption of gender neutrality.

  14. Derrida, J., Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins, London: Verso, 1997, pp 16, 20.

  15. Derrida, J., Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas, trans. P. Brault & M. Naas, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999, p52.

  16. In both “Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” and “Sensibility”, Levinas criticizes Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for being an imperialism of the same, and for being sustained by an unaccountable affection. While Levinas accepts Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of reversibility as they pertain to an individual touching themselves while touching another object—he describes it as a “remarkable analysis”—he is critical of the extending of this type of reversibility on to the alterity of another person. See Levinas, E., “Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty” and “Sensibility” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, eds. G. Johnson & M. Smith, trans. M. Smith, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990.

  17. See Derrida, J., Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p218.

  18. The last couple of pages of the pivotal chapter, ‘Tangent III’, do, however, give the ‘Working Notes’ for this book some attention.

  19. Derrida, J., Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Mensh, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

  20. See Merleau-Ponty, M., ‘The Child’s Relations with Others’, trans. W. Cobb, Primacy of Perception, ed. J. Edie, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

  21. Fuchs, T., “Corporealized and Disembodied Minds: A Phenomenological View of the Body in Melancholy and Schizophrenia”, Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology, Vol. 12, No. 2, June 2005, p98.

  22. Meltzoff, A., and Moore, K., ‘Imitation in newborn infants: Exploring the range of gestures imitated and the underlying-mechanisms’, Developmental Psychology, Vol. 25, 1989, pp 954–62.

  23. Again, however, Derrida would contest any too easy distinction between incorporation and introjection. See, for example, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok”, trans. Johnson, in The Wolfman’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, Abraham, N., & Torok, M., trans. Rand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

  24. See Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p28.

  25. Recent analyses of brain functioning likewise suggest that bodily self-awareness and the perception of others share very closely related neurobiological functions. See Fuchs p103, and Mlakar, J., Jensterle, J., and Frith, C. ‘Central Monitoring Deficiency and Schizophrenic Symptoms’, Psychological Medicine, Vol. 24, p557–64.

  26. This point is well explored by James Hatley in his essay, “Recursive Incarnation and Chiasmic Flesh: Two Readings of Paul Celan’s ‘Chymisch’” in Chiasms, eds. F. Evans & L. Lawlor, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000, p237.

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Correspondence to Jack Reynolds.

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This paper is indebted to the financial support of the Australasian Research Council.

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Reynolds, J. Touched by Time: Some Critical Reflections on Derrida’s Engagement with Merleau-Ponty in Le Toucher . SOPHIA 47, 311–325 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-008-0070-7

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