Abstract

In 20th century thinking, few concepts have provoked as many misunderstandings as Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘Flesh’. Such misunderstandings (of which the article sketches the outline of an archaeology) rest on the initial assumption that the Flesh has to be derived from the body. The article suggests that the dominant readings of the Flesh can be organized along what could respectively be called the scenario of propriety and the scenario of expansion, beyond which a third way comes into view which does not think Flesh as plenitude, but as an interstitial fabric. In this sense, the genesis of the last ontology of the Flesh is neither to be found in Husserl or in a simple anti-Sartrianism, but in a fecund and still underestimated reading of Saussure’s notion of the diacritics. The ontological turn of the last writings can thus only be understood on the grounds of the expressive turn from the intermediate period.