The Review of Metaphysics

Taking its cue from the Husserlian battle cry “To the things themselves!”, phenomenology aims to plumb and critically unpack the concrete transcendental depths of lived intentional experience. It does this on the basis of a methodological “reduction” that, by suspending ordinary ontological presuppositions, leads back to horizonal apriorities that frame and condition the experience in question. There is nothing reductive about this—Husserl derived his term Reduktion from the Latin reducere without fussing over misleading connotations in English. Indeed, even in Husserl’s own work the precise nature of the reduction grew increasingly elusive as the scope of this transcendental undertaking steadily expanded, through its own internal logic, to encompass corporeal, intersubjective, cultural, historical, and ultimately ontological dimensions. For this reason, and as is well known, the pathways of post-Husserlian phenomenology are manifold and diverse. The most important followers of Husserl tended to be those who did not so much aim to follow him as to cleave to the logic of the project itself, and who, as a result, worked out more radical conceptions of transcendentality that were even further removed from the traditional paradigms of rational subjectivity than Husserl himself was prepared to recognize.

Merleau-Ponty represents one such pathway. Indeed, his attempt to rethink the transcendental conditions of experience in terms of the prereflective intentionalities of embodied existence, and how this evolved, over a scant two decades of work before his untimely death, into novel ontological proposals concerning what he termed “flesh” is arguably the most authentically Husserlian way to go beyond Husserl himself. Yet owing to its unfinished status, plus the fact that much of his thinking can be found only in recently published or still unpublished lecture notes, Merleau-Ponty’s work remains imperfectly understood. Most recent [End Page 630] scholarship aims to redress this by drawing upon the recently published material as a way to help elucidate the ontological implications of a Merleau-Pontian phenomenology. Rajiv Kaushik’s new book is precisely this sort of contribution.

Drawing especially on Merleau-Ponty’s notes for his 1955 courses at the Collège de France—“Institution in Personal and Public History” and “The Problem of Passivity: Sleep, the Unconscious, Memory”—Kaushik’s main claim is that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is best understood in terms of a primal institution. This is in effect a redeployment of Husserl’s Urstiftung, and in this Kaushik wants to emphasize the generative sense of a primal instituting. Merleau-Ponty took up and elaborated the idea of institution as a way to go beyond the subjectivism that is implied by analyses of experience undertaken simply in terms of constitution. As Kaushik reminds us, institution is tied to notions of sedimentation and interiorization and in this way provides a more robust framework for grasping the natural and historical conditions of lived experience. Developing indications found in Merleau-Ponty, Kaushik discusses this framework as a kind of diacritical matrix that constellates differences on the basis of a “positive negation.” At the primal level of ontology—that is, the lived significance of being, the sense of the “ontological tissue prior to formal ontology”—institution is articulated as an anonymous symbolic matrix. Experience in general, including critical philosophical reflection, is ultimately situated within a pregiven symbolism that “matrixes” ostensible dualisms (for example, being and nonbeing, materiality and ideality, nature and consciousness, world and language, sense and meaning, and so on), not by imposing identity but by grounding chiasmatic divergence or “dehiscence” concretely. All expression will thus involve a certain repression, but the terms of this symbolism are not set in stone. There is an open-endedness, and what Kaushik calls “matrix events” can occur. But crucially, ontological generativity pertains to a “primordial passivity” that, in virtue of making signification and intentionality possible, lies beyond the reach of reflection. Indeed, Kaushik provocatively suggests that primal symbolism has much in common with dreamless sleep. Lucid recognition of this fundamental limit to phenomenological clarification...