Abstract
Phenomenology has been too pacifying, Deleuze tells us, and he suggests that we leave Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty for what they are and turn to Foucault in order to discover a more profound Heracliticism.1 Genealogy is too much a war-machine, others respond, and they recommend different remedies. There is nothing extraordinary about this situation. We are, in fact, all too familiar with it. We have come across it in different philosophical settings, with different parties engaging one another and with different choices to be made. We all know from our own experience — and lest we forget, there will always be a flourishing para-philosophical literature to remind us — that this “originating” miracle we know as the philosophical tradition has been “breaking up” (cf. VI, 124/VI, 165). And, now as always, the question is not whether we will be able to live with it, but how we will do so, how we will “accompany this break-up, (…) this differentiation” (ibid.). Hence, perhaps, my hesitation and the uneasiness which haunted me at the thought of having to enter in this arena crowded by all those choices that, like the war, “have taken place” (cf. SNS, ch. 10): for or against “the” subject, for or against universality, for or against the origin of truth. Either Foucault or Merleau-Ponty, either discourse or existence — no doubt such apparently clear-cut choices confront us with questions ranging far beyond method. For does not the standard academic response against the kind of pseudo-politicization of philosophy which I have been evoking, suffer from the ills it is supposed to cure? Is there really such a difference between those who bid us to take sides and “merge” with one of the “existing” positions (VI, 127/VI, 169) and those who, in refusing to do so, nestle themselves in the comfortable teichoscopic position from which they can observe the heroes at the foot of the wall (Iliad, 3, 121-244) and report in a completely detached manner on the choices that others found themselves making?
Article Footnote
References to Foucault use the following abbreviations: AK: The Archaeology of Knowledge, London, Tavistock (1974), L’Archéologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1977 (19691); ODis: The Order of Discourse in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, (ed. R. Young), Boston, London and Henley, Routledge (1981), L’ordre du discours, Paris, Gallimard, 1971; OT: The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London, Tavistock (1977), Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines, Paris, Gallimard, 1979 (19661). Abbreviations for Merleau-Ponty: IPP: In Praise of Philosophy (transl. John Wild & James M. Edie), Northwestern University Press, Evanston (1970), EP: Eloge de la philosophie, in Eloge de la philosophie et autres essais, Paris, Gallimard (Collection Idées), 1960, p. 7–79; OE: L’Oeil et l’esprit, Paris, Gallimard (Folio Essais), 1964; PhP: Phenomenology of Perception (transl. Colin Smith), London and Henley/New Jersey, Routledge & Kegan Paul/The Humanities Press (1981), PP: Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Gallimard (Collection TEL), 1945; PriP: The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics (transl. James M. Edie), Northwestern University Press, Evanston (1964), PriP: Le Primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques, Grenoble, Cynara, 1989; PW: The Prose of the World (transl. John O’Neill), Northwestern University Press, Evanston (1973), PM: La prose du monde, Paris, Gallimard (nrf), 1969; S: Signs (transi. Richard C. McCleary), Northwestern University Press, Evanston (1964), S: Signes, Paris, Gallimard (nrf), 1960; SNS: Sense and Non-Sense (transi. Hubert L. Dreyfus & Patricia Allen Dreyfus), Northwestern University Press, Evanston (1964), SNS: Sens et Non-Sens, Paris, Les Editions Nagel (1966); SO Merleau-Ponty à la Sorbonne — résumé de cours 1949–1952, Grenoble, Cynara (1988); TLC: Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960 (transi. John O’Neill), Northwestern University Press, Evanston (1970), RC: Résumés de cours. Collège de France 1952–1960, Paris, Gallimard (Collection TEL), 1968; VI: The Visible and the Invisible. Followed by Working Notes (transi. Alphonso Lingis), Northwestern University Press, Evanston (1970), VI: Le Visible et l’invisible suivi de notes de travail, Paris, Gallimard (Collection TEL), 1964. English pagination is given first.
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Notes
Deleuze, G., Foucault, Paris, Minuit, 1986, p. 120 (“la phénoménologie est trop pacifiante, elle a béni trop de choses”) and passim.
The phrase is Hyppolite’s, from his intervention at the famous 1957 Royaumont-colloquium on Husserl, where he coined the expression “a transcendental field without a subject” (un champ transcendantal sans sujet) which, as the preceding quote suggests, seems to have been taken up by Foucault, who was his student and successor at the Collège de France. (See Husserl. (Cahiers de Royaumont. Philosophie N° III). Paris, Minuit, 1959, p. 323).
For a lucid account see Russell Keat’s “The Critique of Objective Thought” which is the fifth chapter of the jointly written Understanding Phenomenology (M. Hammond, J. Howarth, R. Keat), Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1991.
On this shift see my “Michel Foucault”. Genealogie als Kritik, München, Fink, 1991, p. 78 ff.
On the strategy behind Foucault’s quotation marks, see, apart from the book in note 6, the summary remarks in my “Can genealogy be critical? A somewhat unromantic look at Nietzsche and Foucault”, in Man and World, 1990 (23: 4), pp. 441–52.
Merleau-Ponty’s view that classical Italian painting “lacked any idea of the subjectivity of the painting” (SO, 518) should perhaps be qualified somewhat in the light of recent research pointing to “an increasingly articulate sense of the artists’ individuality” in the course of the 15th century Italian Renaissance, which was, however, primarily based on differences in skill (e.g. the mixing of colours, the drawing of faces, etc.) and does not yet seem to imply the notion of subjectivity Merleau-Ponty seemed to have had in mind (Baxandall, M., Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, Oxford/New York, O.U.P., 1991, p. 20 ff.).
Panofsky, E., La perspective comme forme symbolique et autres essais, Paris, Minuit (1975), pp. 63–6. Merleau-Ponty quotes repeatedly from Panofsky’s famous 1924 piece on ‘perspective as symbolic form’ in “Eye and Mind” (see PriP 174–510E, 49–51).
For a brief exposition see Putnam, H., Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1981, esp. chapter 3.
As can be inferred from Merleau-Ponty’s discussion with Kant throughout PP and in the opening chapter of VI or from Foucault’s explicit disclaimers in AK 126 ff./166 ff. (on ‘conditions of reality’) and in the 1973 interview “An Historian of Culture” (in Foucault Live (Interviews,1966–84), New York, Semiotext(e), 1989): “What I called episteme in The Order of Things has nothing to do with historical categories, that is with those categories created in a particular historical moment” (p. 75).
Raw being seen as an ‘inaccessible radical exteriority’ makes Jean Pierre Le Goff, in an otherwise interesting article, interpret Merleau-Ponty’s last writings as an attempt to turn philosophical reflexion into “an intellectual mysticism” (“Le paradoxe du language et l’être brut”, in Actualités de Merleau-Ponty (Les Cahiers de Philosophie 7), pp. 69–84, esp. p. 76 ff.).
On this “transition from the mute world to the speaking world” (VI, 154/V/, 202) which was already a major theme in PP, see Taminiaux, J., “Experience, Expression and Form in Merleau-Ponty’s Itinerary”, in Dialectic and Difference: Finitude in Modern Thought, New Jersey, Humanities Press (1985), pp. 133–54 and Thierry, Y., Du corps parlant. Le langage chez Merleau-Ponty, Brussels, Ousia, 1987.
Most succinctly in “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language”, in Derrida, J., Margins of Philosophy, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press (1982), pp. 155–73.
Rainville, M., L‘Expérience et l’expression. Essai sur la pensée de Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Montréal, Editions Bellarmin, 1988, p. 119.
Lefort, Cl., ‘Editor’s Foreword’, in VI, p. XXX.
Waldenfels, B., “Vérité à faire. Merleau-Ponty’s Question Concerning Truth”, in Philosophy Today (1991), (35: 2), p. 189.
Waldenfelds, B., Ordnung im Zwielicht, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, (1987): “Mit jedem Anspruch, der in der Erfahrung auftritt, tritt etwas auf, das selektive und exklusive Formungen produziert, aber in diesen nicht aufgeht,” (p. 178). Waldenfels’ attempt to generate from this insight a notion of a ‘responsive rationality’ is further documented in some of his essays in the two companion volumes to Ordnung im Zwielicht: In den Netzen der Lebenswelt, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1985 and Der Stachel des Fremden, Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp, 1990.
As is suggested in Waldenfels, B., “Das Zerspringen des Seins. Ontologische Auslegung der Erfahrung am Leitfaden der Malerei”, in Leibhaftige Vernunft. Spuren von MerleauPontys’ Denken, (ed. A. Métraux and B. Waldenfels), München, Fink (1986), p. 185.
A solution which, it should be noted, is explicitely rejected in “Das Zerspringen des Seins”, p. 159.
Kundera, M., The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, London, Penguin Books, 1983, p. 61 ff. (‘On Two Kinds of Laughter’).
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Visker, R. (1993). Raw Being and Violent Discourse: Foucault, Merleau-Ponty and the (Dis-)Order of Things. In: Burke, P., van der Veken, J. (eds) Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective. Phaenomenologica, vol 129. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1751-7_9
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