Castoriadis, C. (1993) Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition

8/12/2019 Castoriadis, C. (1993) Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition

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http://the.sagepub.comThesis Eleven

DOI: 10.1177/072551369303600102

1993; 36; 1Thesis ElevenCornelius Castoriadis

Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition

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MERLEAU-PONTYAND

THE WEIGHT OF THE

ONTOLOGICAL

TRADITION

Cornelius Castoriadis

NOTICE

The following pages are excerpted from a work in progress, LEl6ment

imaginaire [The Imaginary Element].1A few, more than schematic, remarkson the direction and themes of this work might facilitate the task of the reader.

Despite the risk of one-sidedness, it is illuminating to think the history ofthe mainstream of philosophy as the elaboration of Reason, homologous to the

positing of being as being-determined, or determinacy (peras, Bestimmtheit).The risk involved, which may be reduced when one is aware of it, is indeed initself quite low. For, what does not pertain to Reason and determined Beinghas always been assigned, in this central channel, to the infrathinkable or to the

suprathinkable, to indetermination as mere privation, a deficit of determination,that is to say, of being, or to an absolutely transcendent and inaccessible originof all determination.

This position has, at all times, entailed the covering back over of alterityand of its source, of the positive rupture of already given determinations, ofcreation not simply as undetermined but as determining, or as the positing ofnew determinations. In other words, it has at all times entailed the occultation

of the radical imaginary and, correlatively, that of time as time of creation andnot of repetition.

This occultation is total and patent as concerns the social-historical dimen-

sion of the radical imaginary., that is, the social imaginary or instituting society.In this case, the motivations, if one may express oneself thus, are clear. It ap-pertains intrinsically and constitutively to the known institution of society, asheteronomous institution, to exclude the idea that it might be self-institution,the work of society as instituting.At most (in modern times), the self-institution

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of society will be seen as the implementation [rnise en oeuvre] or applicationto human affairs of Reason in its finally understood form.

Philosophy could not avoid, however, an encounter with the other dimen-sion of the radical imaginary, its psychical dimension, the radical imaginationof the

subject. Here,the occultation of the radical character of the

imagi-nation, reduction of the latter to a secondary role, sometimes a perturbingand negative one, sometimes auxiliary and instrumental: the question has al-

ways been posed in terms of the role the imagination plays in our relationto True/False, Beauty/Ugliness, Good/Bad posited as already given and de-termined elsewhere. What mattered, indeed, was to assure the th~oay-theview, or the constitution-of what is, of what must be done, of what is valid,in its necessity, in its very determinacy. The imagination is, however, in itsessence rebellious against determinacy. To this extent, it most of the timewill be simply scotomized, or relegated to &dquo;psychology&dquo;, or &dquo;interpreted&dquo; and

&dquo;explained&dquo; in terms of its products, using flagrantly superficial ideas such as

&dquo;compensation&dquo; for some unsatisfied need or desire. (The imagination is obvi-

ously not effect of, but condition for desire, asAristotle already knew: &dquo;There

isno

desiring without imagination&dquo;,DeAnima 433b29.)And

even

where thecreative role of the imagination will be recognized, when Kant sees in the workof art &dquo;produced&dquo; by genius the undetermined and indeterminable positing ofnew determinations, there will still be an &dquo;instrumentality&dquo; of a higher order, asubordination of the imagination to something else that allows one to gauge itsworks. In the Critique of judgment, the ontological status of the work of art isa reflection or a derivative of its value status, which consists in the presentationwithin intuition of the Ideas for which Reason cannot, in principle, furnish adiscursive representation.

Nevertheless, this cover up will be interrupted twice in the history of

philosophy. Each time the rupture will be difficult to achieve, antinomical in

character, and creative of insoluble aporias. What is thereby discovered, the

imagination, does not allow itself to be held and contained, nor put into place

or in its place in a clear, univocal, and assignable relation to sensibility andthought.And each time the rupture will be followed immediately by a strangeand total forgetting.

It isAristotle who first discovers the imagination-and he discovers it

twice, that is, he discovers two imaginations. He discovers first (DeAnima,Book III, Chapter 3) the imagination in the sense that later became banal, whatI will henceforth call the second imagination, and he lays down the doctrineof the imagination that has become since his time the conventional one and

that still reigns today in fact and in substance. He then discovers another

imagination, one with a much more radical function that enjoys almost nothingbut a homonymic relation to the previous one, and which I will henceforth callthe first imagination. This discovery takes place in the middle of Book III ofIWAni171a; it is neither made explicit nor thematized as such; it interrupts



4/37

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the logical order of this treatise and, of infinitely greater importance, it virtuallybursts apart theAristotelian ontology-which amounts to saying, ontology totitcourt. And it will be ignored in interpretations and commentaries, as wellas in the history of philosophy, which will use the discovery of the second

imagination to cover up the discovery of the first imagination.One will have to wait until Kant (and, following him, Fichte) for the ques-

tion of the imagination again to be posed, renewed, and opened in a muchmore explicit and much broader fashion-but just as antinomical, untenable,and uncontainable. And, in this case again, a new cover up will rapidly su-

pervene. In his youthful writings Hegel pursued and, at times, radicalized themovement initiated by Kant and Fichte: the imagination, he writes in Fctithand Knowledge, is not a &dquo;middle term&dquo; but &dquo;that which is first and original&dquo;.These writings, however, will remain unpublished and unknown. Things wentin an entirely other direction in the published work. No trace of the theme orthe term imagination will he found in the Phenomenology of the Mind.Andlater on, Hegel will switch the emphasis from imagination to memory, to whichhe will transfer the &dquo;objectifiable&dquo; works of the imagination (reproaching theAncients for

havinglowered

memoryto the rank of the

imagination: Ency-clopaedia section 462 Zusatz); and what he will again call, in the propaedeuticand the Encyclopaedia, &dquo;active imagination&dquo; and &dquo;creative imagination&dquo; will infact be only a selective recombination of empirical data guided by the Idea-an

astounding banality, after the Kantian Critiques. Thus, with regard to this ques-tion, Hegel restores and re-establishes the vulgar tradition, still dominant today,which merely reproduces the first exposition of the imagination inAristotlestreatise: relegation of the imagination to the realm of &dquo;psychology&dquo;, fixationof its place between sensation and intellection (which completely obliteratesthe admirable ninth chapter of Book III of DeAnima, and its refutation inadvance of the Encyclopaedias apothecaty storage system), making it merelyreproductive in character and recornbinatory in its activity, thereby granting itsworks a deficient, illusory, deceptive, or suspect status.

No doubt it is to Heidegger, with his Kantand the

Problem of Metaphysics(1929), that we owe both the restoration of the question of the imaginationas a philosophical question and the possibility of an approach to Kant thatbreaks with the somnolence and aridity of the neo-Kantians. No doubt, too,that Heidegger reintroduces in his turn and completely on his own-an im-

pressive spectacle-the successive movements of discovery and covering backover that have marked the history of the question of the imagination. I will

speak elsewhere of the rediscovery by Heidegger of the Kantian discovery ofthe imagination, and the-in my view-partial and biased character of this re-

discovery. Let me simply note here, with respect to the &dquo;recoiling&dquo; Heideggerimputes to Kant when faced with the &dquo;bottomless abyss&dquo; opened by the dis-

covery of the transcendental imagination, that it is Heidegger. himself who ineffect &dquo;recoils&dquo; after writing his book on Kant.A new forgetting, covering over,



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and effacement of the question of the imagination intervenes, for no furthertraces of the question will be found in any of his subsequent writings; there isa suppression of what this question unsettles for every ontology (and for every&dquo;thinking of Being&dquo;).

Nearer to us, the trace of the difficulties and aporias to which the questionof the imagination and the imaginary gives birth persist in Maurice Merleau-

Pontys 7be Visibleand the Invisible. How else can we comprehend this hesita-tion which sometimes, in this work, makes of the imaginary a synonym for irreal

fiction, for the nonexistent without further ado, and sometimes goes almost sofar as to dissolve the distinction between the imaginary and the real? Herewe see Merleau-Ponty striving very far toward his goal of effacing the &dquo;ancient

cleavages&dquo;, and yet at the same time something draws him back: undoubtedly,this is the persistence of the schema of perception in the broadest sense, fromwhich he will never completely succeed in freeing himself, perception havingbecome now experience or ontological reception.

* * *

Representation pertains to the radical imagination; it is radical imaginationmanifesting itself and taking shape [se figu~~taat]. It is so just as much when itis perceptual representation and when it &dquo;leans&dquo; [setaye]-to reprise a term of

Freuds, which we shall often use-on a being-thus of the sensible, the evidentand unintelligible coalescence of &dquo;what senses&dquo; and &dquo;what is sensed&dquo;. No eyein act [en c~cte] without light, and no light without an eye in act. The image,what is seen, however, is not in the eye, or in the light, or in &dquo;the thing&dquo;, anymore than it can be, as such, &dquo;explained&dquo; by any of them. Nor is the imageany more &dquo;here&dquo;, &dquo;in my head&dquo;, than &dquo;over there&dquo;, &dquo;at the thing&dquo; or &dquo;amongthings&dquo;; it is that by which and in which a &dquo;here&dquo; and an &dquo;over there&dquo; arise. Icannot see without spacing or spatializing-and I space or spatialize as soon asI imagine, since every figure, whatever its quasi-matter (visible, sonorous, etc.,or even noematic), is immediately (h~tmc~) the positing [position] of ordered

gaps. It would not suffice to say that perceiving presupposes imagining. Toperceive is to imagine, in the literal and active sense of this term. To perceive(as well as to remember) is a species of imagining, perception a variant of

representation. That it raises an indefinite number of specific and interminable

problems (though no more grave than remembering, dreams, or fiction) in no

way suffices to dislodge it from its being as representation or to confer upon it,in relation to other species thereof, any ontological privilege, except by virtue ofthe same slippage (by homology, not analogy) that has regularly, for twenty-five centuries, made one seek in the characteristics of the being [tant] parexcellence, of the ens realissimum, the signification of &dquo;to be&dquo; [etr~] tout court.

Now, this privileging has continued throughout the philosophical tradi-tion. From the idea that perception gives access to &dquo;things&dquo;, one continuallyslides toward the idea that perception alone truly gives access to something (or,



6/37

5

symmetrically, but in the same logico-ontological organization: that since per-ception does not truly give access to things, nothing can dislodge the &dquo;subject&dquo;from the sphere of &dquo;its&dquo; representation), that, therefore, every other speciesof representation at the same time finds its origin in perception and is only acarbon copy, an enfeebled variant, a lacunary and deficient residue thereof.Whence comes, then, this privilege? Obviously, it is only the other side of the

ontological prejudice philosophy has always granted to the ~es-whether it beextensa or cogitans, or even brought back to the idea, ousia, or Wesen-evenwhen philosophy has, on occasion, striven to show that there i,s no res (or thatthe res is not &dquo;truly&dquo; res), thereby testifying once again that for philosophythis question has remained primary. But what is the re,s?And what is percep-tion ? Is it truly primary, or has a fatal pre-emption taken place here that hasset in a determinate rut everything that was to follow, whatever might havebeen the modalities and variants? Why is the philosopher, even when s/he has

pledged to abandon or to put into question the classical dichotomies of the

&dquo;subject&dquo; and of the &dquo;object&dquo;, still carried away toward this triadic situation inwhich there is &dquo;the one who&dquo; gazes, the &dquo;thing&dquo; gazed upon-the eternal table,the eternal

inkwell,essential instruments of the

profession,or

else,when s/he

boldly innovates, &dquo;the mountain that rises from the plain&dquo;-and their canon-ical relationship, which is never anything but one of tbeoria, of vision-not

only and not inasmuch as the metaphor of vision constantly impregnates the

philosophers language, but inasmuch as the structure of this relationship has

always been posited as &dquo;passive&dquo; reception of a &dquo;given&dquo; or of something that

&dquo;gives itself&dquo;? The positing of this situation as primary and canonical carrieswith it an indeterminate number of prejudices and prior decisions henceforth

imported irreflectively into allegedly ab ovo constitutions, descriptions of what

gives itself such as it gives itself, and decisions to &dquo;let&dquo; the beings &dquo;be&dquo; [ &dquo;laisser[treles etc~a2t.s] and to let them &dquo;come forth&dquo;.

How tenacious this philosophical situation is may be seen in the finallabours of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, at least such as we know them through

The Tjisible and the Invisible2 and the accompanying Working Note,5. There isno question here of &dquo;criticizing&dquo; an author whose work was interrupted at the

very moment when it was embarking on a new flight, still less of polemiciz-ing against it, but rather of showing, on the basis of a case that to us seems

exemplary, the enormous weight the implicit prejudices of the inherited on-

tology bring to bear upon someones thought at the very moment when itis struggling to free itself therefrom.An exemplary case not only insofar as

Merleau-Ponty affirms his programmatic intention to break with the traditional

ontology and the egology that is consubstantial with it, but also insofar as, in

him, this intention was beginning to achieve realization. That, in its turn, isdue to the fact that Merleau-Ponty was one of the first (and remains one ofthe rare) contemporary philosophers to show himself philosophiccslly attentiveand open to the properly philosophical interrogations to which politics, society,



7/37

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psychoanalysis, the institution, and art imperiously give rise; that, in ceasingto be dominated by the cognitive sphere, he was able to see therein regionsand &dquo;objects&dquo; as worthy of consideration as &dquo;knowledge&dquo;; and that he oftenknew how to talk about them, not by &dquo;applying&dquo; to them a ready-made philos-ophy, but by

sheddinglight on their specific mode of being and by renewing

in this way his thought, thus showing through actual deeds that an effort to

go beyond the inherited ontology cannot but jeer at &dquo;ontological difference&dquo;.

Thus, in particular, and in a domain that for us enjoys a central importance,when he reprises from Husserl, the idea of institution [Stiftung]-an idea that,in the latter, is essentially taken up only within the horizon of the cognitivesphere and has only a quite determinate and very narrow function, viz., toassure the presence of significations within the immanence of a history that,itself, is seen, when finally it is seen, only as a teleology of Reason-is he

able, due to the very fact that he had been able to see history as history, andnot as external contingency or as &dquo;destiny of Being&dquo;, to give to the term an

incomparably stronger signification and does he go so far as to speak of an&dquo;institution of Being&dquo;. Thus, too, in his last writings, do the term and the idea

of&dquo;imaginary&dquo;

return

frequently-evenif these remain indeterminate due to

their equivocality-and can one see therein the outlines of a movement that,had it been prolonged, would perhaps have permitted, not a &dquo;shake-up of thedivisions of traditional ontology&dquo;, but a reverse take [prendre a reversal on thewhole of this ontology, from its origins onward.

This movement aborts, however, at the very moment when it is sketchedout-and for that, it is not his death that is responsible. Certainly, it is notthat Merleau-Ponty would have been unable, had he had the time, to resumethis movement, to continue it, and to affirm it. Rather it is that he would

then have had to put aside 7be Visible and the Invisible, and not only thestatements in this work, but its unvoiced [silencieuse] orientation, the qualityof its ontological intention. For, in that case, he would have had to abandon,to begin with, &dquo;reality&dquo; and the traditional ontological illusion, exacerbated

by Heidegger and taken up again from him by Merleau-Ponty, theone

thatmakes of being the self-giving of what is given and is fatally obliged, therefore,to adjust itself to the being-given. The few attempts at the imaginary in 7beVisible and the Invisible remain and could remain only attempts because theyare deeply heterogeneous to what is essential to the thought that is deployedtherein and ultimately incompatible with it.

Thus, in what seems to have been a first bid at the beginning of the book,Merleau-Ponty wrote:

We also do not allow ourselves to introduce into our descriptionconcepts issued from reflection, whether psychological or transcen-dental... We must, at the beginning, eschew notions such as &dquo;actsof consciousness&dquo; &dquo;states of consciousness&dquo;, &dquo;matter&dquo;, &dquo;form&dquo;, and



8/37

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even &dquo;image&dquo; and &dquo;perception&dquo;. We exclude the term perceptionto the whole extent that it already implies a cutting up of whatis lived into discontinuous acts, or a reference to &dquo;things&dquo; whosestatus is not specified, or simply an opposition between the visibleand the invisible ... We do not yet know what to see is and what

to think is, whether this distinction is valid, and in what sense. For

us the &dquo;perceptual faith&dquo; includes everything that is given to thenatural man in the original in an experience-source, with the forceof what is inaugural and present in person, according to a view thatfor him is ultimate and could not conceivably be more perfect orcloser-whether we are considering things perceived in the ordi-

nary sense, or his initiation into the past, the imaginary, language,the predicative truth of science, works of art, the others, or history.We are not prejudging the relations that may exist between thesedifferent &dquo;layers&dquo;, nor even that they are &dquo;layers&dquo;; and it is a part ofour task to decide this, in terms of what questioning our brute orwild experience will have taught us. (pp. 209-210F/157-158E)

We will not discuss here whether it is possible to discuss something without

prejudice, which would distance ourselves from our purpose. Moreover, thisresidue of Husserlian naivete espoused here is in fact abandoned in the bodyof the work and in the Working Notes. Let us retain the refusal to cut up what is&dquo;lived&dquo; not only for what would be temporal discontinuities, but also &dquo;qualita-tive&dquo; oppositions: visible/invisible, things perceived/language/imaginary, etc.

Now, here is what immediately follows the passage just cited:

Perception as an encounter with natural things is at the foregroundof our research, not as a simple sensorial function that would ex-

plain the others but as the archetype of the originating encounter,imitatedand renewed in the encounterwith the jaast, the imaginary,the idea. (p. 210F/158E; emphasis added)

How, after having affirmed that one was not prejudging the relations that mightexist between different &dquo;layers&dquo;, &dquo;nor even that they are layers&dquo;, could one

distinguish and oppose perception as &dquo;encounter with natural things&dquo; and the&dquo;encounter with the past, the imaginary, the idea&dquo;? What has authorized us, atthis stage, to distinguish absolutely perception and the imaginary?Above all,what allows us to consider perception, not as explanatory principle, hut, whatis infinitely weightier, as &dquo;archetype&dquo;, and to affirm that the &dquo;encounter with... the imaginary&dquo; is the imitation and the renewal thereof? All the ontologicaldecisions have already been taken with this simple word: my perception is

archetype; the past, the imaginary, the idea, its &dquo;imitation&dquo; and &dquo;renewal&dquo;.This is not some accidental manner of expressing oneself; we shall see

it again. When it becomes a question of undertaking anew an examination



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of &dquo;presence&dquo;, of the &dquo;thing&dquo;, and &dquo;of the something&dquo;, what naturally flowsfrom his pen, this &dquo;something&dquo; that presents itself and that is present to us,is &dquo;this pebble or this sea shell&dquo; (p. 213F/160E). Similarly, in what is by datethe last version-and little matter the dialectic within which the formulation

appears-Merleau-ionty is able to declare without difficulty: &dquo;Now that I havein perception the thing itself, and not a representation ... &dquo; (p. 21F/7E).

Say, however, that some outlandish person rejects the rules of the gameand refuses to &dquo;begin&dquo; with tables and pebbles. Let that person say: &dquo;I am

beginning without any prejudice, without privileging one form of lived expe-rience over against the others, I want to consider what gives itself such as it

gives itself. Let us therefore tctke my dreum froa~ last night... &dquo;-and, voila, allof philosophy is knocked out of order. Will s/he have &dquo;the thing itself&dquo;, the

&dquo;representation&dquo; thereof, or the &dquo;representation&dquo; (in a waking state) of a &dquo;repre-sentation&dquo; (the dream)?And if that were posited as &dquo;experience-source&dquo; underthe same heading as any other-after all, it is a &dquo;lived experience&dquo; like another-are there many pages of any book of philosophy whatsoever that could followthereafter? What philosophy has discussed interminably has always been the

puttinginto

questionof the

&dquo;reality&dquo;of a correlate of

perceptionon the basis

of the &dquo;evidence&dquo; of the absence of an &dquo;objective&dquo; correlate of the dream-and

always on the presupposition that at least an indubitable idea of &dquo;reality&dquo; isfurnished by this reference to an &dquo;objective&dquo; correlate, as Merleau-Ponty quitewell has shown (pp. 19-21F/5-7E)-btit never the dream, for example, as sucb,the mode and the type of being that it makes be and that, if it is a matter of

beginning &dquo;without prejudices&dquo;, are just as valid as any others. What traditional

philosophy would object to in this undertaking would be that the dream doesnot furnish us an &dquo;originary&dquo; mode of being, since when the dream is therewe are not &dquo;fully&dquo; there, which in fact means: as dreaming and thinking the

dream-and, when we think the dream, we do not have the dream &dquo;in per-son&dquo;, &dquo;in flesh and bone&dquo;, but only its reproduction in a difficult remembrance.The tacit postulates of this argument boil down, however, to a doubtful thesis

andto a

logical blunder: thesole

legitimate and admissible experience is the&dquo;presence in person&dquo; of something to a lucid consciousness; therefore, onlywhat gives itself in such an experience (and, rigorously speaking, what can

necessarily be inferred therefrom) is.This thesis is certainly not that of Merleau-Ponty. After having shown that

Pyrrhonism shares with a naive realism the idea of &dquo;a Being that would bein itself only&dquo; and noted that &dquo;we answer Pyrrhonism sufficiently by showingthat there is a difference of structure and, as it were, of grain between the

perception or true vision, which gives rise to an open series of concordant

explorations, and the dream, which is not observable and, upon examination,is almost nothing but blanks [lacunes]&dquo;, he continues:

To be sure, this does not terminate the problem of our access to



10/37

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the world; on the contrary it is only beginning ... [I]f we canwithdraw from the world of perception without knowing it, nothingproves to us that we are ever in it, nor that the observable is ever

entirely observable, nor that it is made of another fabric than the

dream. Then, the difference between perception and dreamnot

being absolute, one is justified in counting them both among &dquo;our

experiences&dquo;, and it is above perception itself that we must seekthe guarantee and the sense of its ontological function. We willstake out that route, which is that of the philosophy of reflection

[la philosophie reflexive], when it opens. But it begins well beyondthe Pyrrhonian arguments. (pp. 20-21F/5-6E)

Why, then, would the route that would pass &dquo;above perception itself&dquo; nec-

essarily be that of the philosophy of reflection, and why, when it becomes a

question of coining the idea that the difference between the observable andthe dream is not absolute, will one rediscover only the &dquo;conversion to reflec-

tion&dquo;, by means of which &dquo;perceiving and imagining are now only two modes

of thinking&dquo; (p. 49F/29E)? What the imaginary becomes in such a philoso-phy Merleau-Ponty has nevertheless described with a rigour that is not lackingin irony: &dquo;the narrow circle of objects of thought that are only half-thought,half-objects or phantoms having no consistency, no place of their own, dis-

appearing before the sun of thought like the mists of dawn, and that are,between the thought and what it thinks, only a thin layer of the unthought&dquo;(pp. 50-51F,/30E).And yet, this philosophy for v~lhich, in effect, the imaginarynecessarily has this place-and which, for this very reason, tips completely tothe side of incoherent fiction as soon as the question of the imaginary is seri-

ously taken into consideration-is challenged only to the extent that it forgetsthat it is only a half circle, that &dquo;it dissimulates from itself its own mainspring&dquo;-namely, that &dquo;in order to constitute the world, it is necessary to have a notion ofthe world as preconstituted&dquo; (p. 56F/34E). The critique of Descartes and of the

philosophy of reflection (pp. 48-74F/28-49E) rests entirely on the evidence of&dquo;the perceptual life of my body ... presupposed in every notion of an object,and ... that accomplishes the primary openness to the world&dquo; (p. 60F/37E); thedifference between real and imaginaly becomes again as absolute as it could

be, their qualities opposed, the consubstantiality of the first with the true andof the second with illusion massively affirmed (&dquo;the real is coherent and prob-able because it is real, and not real because it is coherent; the imaginary isincoherent or improbable because it is imaginary, and not imaginary becauseit is incoherent&dquo; [p. 63F/40E]). There is a &dquo;presence of the whole world in onereflection&dquo; and &dquo;irremediable absence in the richest and most systematic deliri-ums... and this difference is not a difference of the more and the less&dquo; (ibid.).It could be remarked that it is difficult to exclude delirium from the world (for,where then to include it?), and that a world without delirium is another inco-



11/37

10

herent philosophical fabrication. In this philosophy, The Castle and Tristanand Isolde must also be incoherent and improbable, or else &dquo;imitations&dquo;. ~Uhatmust especially be seen, however, is that in fact we have here a characteristic

amphibology on the term &dquo;world&dquo; and a just as characteristic slippage (neitheraccidental nor the result of some

&dquo;negligence&dquo;)from a narrow sense of

&dquo;world&dquo;,in relation to which these statements are apparently justified, to a broad sense,in relation to which they are untenable but which actually is aimed at sincewhat is at stake here is the true itself and Being, the different perceptions ofwhich are &dquo;perspectives&dquo; and which &dquo;in any case [is] itself beyond contestation&dquo;

(pp. 64-65F/41E). Thus also does Merleau-Ponty write in another context, be-fore taking up again the Husserlian approach in order to expose it to criticism,and while reaffirming a thesis of the world and trying to show that no doubtcould affect it absolutely: &dquo;[W]hat remains [after the destruction of beliefs] is not

nothing, nor of another sort than what has been struck off: what remains aremutilated fragments of the vague omnitudo realitatis against which the doubtwas plied, and they regenerate it under other names-appearance, dream, Psy-che, representation. It is in the name and for the profit of these floating realities

that the solid reality is cast into doubt&dquo; (pp. 143F/105-106E).As there was, asearly as the Republic, an ousia that was so to such an extent that it no longerwas ousia but beyond the ousia, and as the ens entium always fatally turns outto be the sole genuine ens-and from then on how is one to distinguish it fromthe esse?-so is there in the omnitudo realitatis a reality more &dquo;solid&dquo; than the

others, and from then on how is one to avoid its being the archetype and the

&dquo;floating&dquo; residues having little of anything to teach us about what solidly is?

Certainly, there is just as much of a double sense, or rather a floatingsense, to the term &dquo;imaginary&dquo;. Sometimes second-order, derived productionsof the imagination or of the radical imaginary are intended, sometimes it is themode of being of the imaginary as such that is at issue, sometimes, finally, itis the imaginary as dunamis, origin, source that is in question. Thus is oneable to attenuate the incompatibility or the nonhomogeneity of statements that

are quite close to one another: &dquo;Conversely, the imaginary is not an absoluteinobservable: it finds in the body analogues of itself that incarnate it. This

distinction, like the others, has to be reconsidered and is not reducible to thatbetween the full and the void&dquo; (p. 108F/77E; let us note again the character of

ontological discriminant implicitly imputed to the notion of the observable andof the body).Also, however, apropos of Sartres &dquo;imaginary In-Itself-for-itself&dquo;:&dquo;We only say that the In-Itself-for-itself is more than imaginary. The imaginaryis without consistence, inobservable; it vanishes when one proceeds to vision&dquo;

(p. 117F/85E).And finally, a few lines later: &dquo;The truth of the Sartrean In-Itself-for-itself is the intuition of pure Being and the negintuition of Nothingness. Itseems to us that on the contrary it is necessary to recognize in it the solidity of

myth, that is, of an operative imaginary, which is part of our institution, andwhich is indispensable for the definition of Being itself&dquo; (p. 118F/85E).



12/37

11

~

Let us consider the view taken of the being of representation when it is ex-

plained in relation to the visible. The visible is not &dquo;a representation for a mind:a mind could not be captured by its own representations; it would rebel againstthis insertion into the visible which is essential to the seer&dquo; (p. 194F/139E)~ Itis not the idea of the visible, nor that of the &dquo;flesh&dquo;, that we are

discussinghere, but what this incident highlights. Whence comes this idea of a mind that&dquo;has&dquo; representations but could not be &dquo;captured&dquo; by thern? That against which

thought here defines itself-and that is what, as always, is decisive-is onlythe vulgar idea of representation constructed by Heidegger in 1938 by way ofa straw man to be knocked down and since then accepted uncritically nearlyeverywhere. To what extent this vulgar idea can be backed up by certain ofDescartess statements, and to what other, much greater extent by textbooksin psychology, is of no interest here. What alone matters is to note that it hasbeen able to be granted a measure of credence only by means of a massiveand monstrous deformation of Greek thought (which itself constituted itself

straight off in a bodily struggle with the problematic of doxa) and a repeatedoccultation of Kantian thinking on Vonslellung and on imagination.

Indeed, itis

only against this vulgar idea that Merleau-Ponty is settinghimself off here. This idea rests on a mechanical model of vision, of whichit is only a copy. I am supposed to be quite distinct from that which I see,not implicated therein; sight is, in a sense, at my disposition inasmuch as, for

example, I can always close my eyes or turn my head. Likewise, therefore,I dispose of an internal screen, on which I project at will this or that image.There is a metaphorical third eye, an internal dark room, a projection screen.Behind the third eye stands a &dquo;mind&dquo; that, by flipping a switch, lights up thescreen and then &dquo;has&dquo; a representation. Demolishing this ridiculous fabricationallows one to forget what is here in question, it allows one, above all, to avoid

demolishing fabrications that are just as arbitrary but that cling much more

firmly to the entire fabric of inherited thought.The mind does not &dquo;have&dquo; representations. The mind [esprit], if one wants

to use this term, is this: representational flux (and something else as well,of course). The &dquo;mind&dquo; is, first and foremost, this perpetual &dquo;presentation&dquo; of

&dquo;something&dquo; that is not there for something else (re-presentation, Vertretung)or for &dquo;someone&dquo;. Perception, dreams, reverie, memory, phantasm, reading,hearing music with eyes closed, thought are first and foremost that, and theyrigorously enter under the same heading. Whether I open or I close my eyes,whether I listen or I stop up my ears, always, except in dreamless sleep, there isthat itself-and, to begin with, nothing but that-which is in and through this

presentation; there is (since the metaphor of vision, and not by chance, dom-inates) absolute &dquo;spectacle&dquo;, which is not spectacle of another trans-spectacle,nor spectacle for a spectator, the spectator him/herself being, inasmuch as s/heis at all, on stage. It is again by a second-order thought, by a reflection, thatthis is described as a clearing fc5clairciel that would occur &dquo;within&dquo; what would



13/37

12

be unlit [non clair], in a preceding night of identity, through a dehiscence ofand in something else. The night of identity is a thought of &dquo;turning back on&dquo;(on the there is), a supervening metaphor, certainly legitimate in its moment,but nonetheless constructed. There is a Vorstellung, a representation in the&dquo;active&dquo; sense, a

puttingforward-a

positingin advance-a before that is not

&dquo;before&dquo; or &dquo;in front of&dquo; something else, that is not placing-something-in-front-of-someone but rather is that by which and in which every placing and everyplace exists, originary positing starting from which every position-as &dquo;act&dquo; ofa subject or determination&dquo; of an object-has being and meaning.

Inherited thought cannot conserve within itself for one instant this primaiyontological region, for such thinking hastens immediately to ask: Positing ofwhat by whom?, thus covering it over straight off by means of ulterior logico-ontological determinations, and thereby immediately dissociating that whichthere is in something for someone, therefore transforming, even before havingfelt it, the originary surging forth of an impersonal and non-thing-like thereis-that by which there always is a world and that which always is, even in themost extreme delirium, only as: There is a world-into an &dquo;intra-worldly&dquo; or

thing-like relation; whence results, the following instant, the almost ineluctablenecessity of thinking this relationship under the habitual &dquo;real&dquo; determinations(from container to contained, from cause to effect, from matter to form, from

producer to product, from reflection to object reflected), and, immediatelyafterward, the interminable (and vain) effort to rid oneself of these determina-

tions, which are ineffaceably inscribed in the very enunciation of the question.Nevertheless, the &dquo;something&dquo; (as ob-ject, Gegen-stand, whatever its particu-lar tenor incidentally might be, but as holding itself [se tenctnt] apart from the

representational flux) and the &dquo;someone&dquo; (as subject, whatever the &dquo;interpre-tation&dquo; thereof: man, soul, consciousness, &dquo;mind&dquo;, or Dasein) are separationsresulting from reflection; they are inevitable and legitimate-but of a second

order; they are &dquo;real&dquo;, and &dquo;logical&dquo;, and even &dquo;solid&dquo; so far as they can be-but of a second order. That in the there is of the representational flux the

(allegedly full-bloomed) perceptual thing rapidly (though not inevitably) blos-soms forth is of importance and even decisive-but of a second order. This

blossoming forth, moreover, will never be total separation-save as limit of

objectifying thought (a limit that, it too, possesses, in its time and in its place,its relative legitimacy). It never can be so, for perception is inseparable fromthe radical imagination, though it could not be reduced to the latter, either.

Likewise, that, within the representational flux, a reflection of the flux (which

always remains caught within the tlux) and a subject of this reflection emergeis again decisive-but of a second order.And in this case, there can be no

question of separating, even &dquo;partially&dquo;, the subject and the flux (save in con-texts so reduced and specific that they hardly have any interest but technical:as in the &dquo;transcendental subject&dquo;, for example), still less of placing the latterat the formers disposal. The subject is not possessor of &dquo;its representations&dquo;,



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13

&dquo;its affects&dquo;, and &dquo;its intentions&dquo;: the subject is that, representational-affective-intentional flux in which has emerged the permanent possibility of reflection(as modality of representation, implying a re-presentation of the representa-tion) and in which the raw spontaneity of the radical imagination has in partconverted itself into reflected

spontaneity.That, within the representational flux (we are limiting ourselves to thisabstraction for the moment in order to be brief), emerge, as quasi-separated,perception of something &dquo;real&dquo; and reflection referred to a subject of the re-

flection, in a time that is at once psychogenetically, logically, and ontologicallyof a ,second order, does not signify that we would be dealing here with mere&dquo;derivatives&dquo;. Perception of the real and reflection supervene as true synthe-ses; if they presuppose, from beginning to end, the representational flux, theycould at no moment be deduced, produced, or constructed starting from thelatter. As much as thought itself, the thing as it is perceived is a creation ofthe social-historical radical imaginary (this proposition, which might appearscandalous, is an immediate consequence of the fact that there is no thoughtwithout language and no &dquo;transcendental language&dquo;, any more than there is

any perception without elementary logical forms). This is thereason

whythe interminably difficult questions they pose have been rendered properlyunthinkable within the traditional outlook [perspective], which is sometimes

&dquo;realistic&dquo;, sometimes &dquo;egological&dquo;, and in fact almost always both at the sametime.

What the true way of considering representation, the representational flux,shows us, therefore, is something else entirely than a &dquo;mind that has represen-tations&dquo; and infinitely more than the &dquo;insertion (of the seer) in the visible&dquo;: an

indescribable reciprocal implication of the &dquo;subject&dquo; of the representation and ofthe &dquo;representation&dquo;, which we must think starting from itself. Representation&dquo;of the subject&dquo;-and outstripping the subject; subject &dquo;of the representation&dquo;-and outstripping every given representation. For, the subject is only as synthesisoccurring to the emergent representational flux, but always also this indeter-

minate representational flux; and &dquo;the&dquo; representation is as representation &dquo;ofthe subject&dquo; only starting from the moment when a subject is, that is to say,by means of the creation and social-historical institution of a language and ofa public world. This reciprocal inherence that is neither identity, nor simpledifference, nor covering over of the one by the other, nor intersection definingan assignable common part, has no name among the relations of inherited

logic. In particular, we cannot think it as &dquo;insertion&dquo; (of the seer in the visible,or of the &dquo;subject&dquo; in the &dquo;represented&dquo;, the &dquo;representable&dquo;, or even the rep-resentational flux), for we would still then be missing its absolutely decisive

aspects. We would miss, on the one hand and above all, the fundamental fact

that there is nothing visible that is fully given and completely made in whichthe seer could insert him/herself, any more, indeed, than there is a &dquo;repre-sentational picture&dquo;, but rather emergence, continued creation, incompletion



15/37

14

[inacb8vement] that is never filled out but rather transforms itself into another

incompletion. We would remain in the rut of the traditional ontology, witha being-of-always (aei), always and simply given and given to be seen. Wewould thereby also miss the genuine essence of the question of temporality,

since fora

&dquo;seerinserted in the

visible&dquo;what

could time beif not

eitheran

&dquo;objective&dquo; time, an hour the seer reads on the visible, or a clock that s/he

transports &dquo;within him/herself&dquo;, but really apart-in a watertight pocket-sothat it might not interfere with his/her functioning as a seer? Finally, we wouldrender ourselves incapable even of beginning to think the question of subjec-tivity, since this way of conceiving the &dquo;relationship&dquo; of the seer and of thevisible makes it impossible to comprehend how the seer could ever take somedistance with regard to what is as visible, a distance that is qualitatively otherthan the one that might metaphorically be posited between &dquo;parts&dquo; of the vis-

ible, how s/he ever could turn him/herself away from it, &dquo;relativize&dquo; it otherthan by comparison with &dquo;spatial&dquo; viewpoints, still less dream, enter into delir-

ium, invent something, or compose music. In this way we would remain-andthis is what actually occurs in The Visible and the Invisible-with a series of

brute aporias, of interrogations totally disarmed before the being of the subject(cf. pp. 244, 247, 255F/190, 194, 202E), before both what always qualifies itand what, at the same time, makes of it each time a &dquo;being-mine&dquo; in a senseother than descriptive and external, and we would continue to be condemnedto posit it simply as an X that would come &dquo;to animate the perceived world and

language&dquo; (p. 244F/190E)-therefore in this mysterious schema of &dquo;animation&dquo;

Merleau-Ponty knew so well how to denounce apropos of behaviour and of

perception, and which, whatever one might do, inevitably refers back to an

already completed circuit that lacks only a puff of air [snuffle] for it to beginfunctioning. Like its venerable Kantian ancestor, this X would have to be dif-ferent each time, since it is &dquo;from my side&dquo; (ibid.) and yet, being only X, itcannot but be everywhere and always essentially the same-therefore, a con-

cept that contradicts itself simply and not mediately, a negative nothingness, an

absolute nothing. &dquo;I do not perceive anymore than I speak-Perception has

me as has language&dquo; (ibid.)-these Heideggerian pronouncements, which are

only simple negations and inversions of the corresponding &dquo;anthropological&dquo;(or &dquo;transcendental&dquo;) pronouncements, are rigorously situated on the same ter-rain as what they contradict, they posit the same structure of relations betweenthe two &dquo;terms&dquo; they take into consideration while limiting themselves to a

permutation thereof, and therefore they belong to the same order of thought.From a profound point of view, there is strictly no difference between the

pronouncements &dquo;man has language&dquo; and &dquo;language has man&dquo;. Both posit the

&dquo;relationship&dquo; (which is not, properly speaking, a relationship) between thesetwo &dquo;terms&dquo; in the mode of one of them &dquo;having&dquo; the other (whatever com-mentaries one might hasten to present on the metaphoricality of this usageof &dquo;having&dquo;; after all, it may be doubted that the most insipid &dquo;anthropolo-



16/37

15

gists&dquo; ever have thought that they &dquo;have&dquo; language as they have their shirt),and thereby show that they are incapable of thinking what is at issue herein its irreducible originality, as eidos of itself, the sui generis relationship of

language and the speaking subject. The &dquo;thinking of Being&dquo; reveals here its

essence,which it succeeds better in

maskingin other contexts: this

negationof anthropology is only a concealed theology.One can still detail what Merleau-Ponty thinks of as &dquo;representation&dquo;-and

the immediate aporias to which what he thinks of it leads him-starting froma Note of May 1960 entitled &dquo; Visual Picture ---7 representation of the world

Todo y Nada&dquo; (pp. 306-307F/252-253E). It is a matter of &dquo;generaliz[ing] the

critique of the visual picture into a critique of Vorstellung &dquo;, to arrive at a

critique of the meaning of being given by both to the thing andto the world. That is, the meaning of being In Itself-(in itselfnot referred to what alone gives it meaning: distance, divergence,transcendence, the flesh) ... if our relation with the world is Tlo~:stel-

lung, the world &dquo;represented&dquo; has the In Itself as the meaning ofits being. For example, the Other represents the world to himself,i.e., there is for him an internal object which is nowhere, which is

ideali~y, and apart from which there exists the world itself. ~That Iwant to do is restore the world as a meaning of Being absolutely dif-ferent from the &dquo;represented&dquo;, that is, as the vertical Being whichnone of the &dquo;representations&dquo; exhaust and which all &dquo;reach&dquo;, thewild Being.

Yet, the second-order question of the meaning of being of the world,and the decision to refuse to it the meaning of being In Itself-which weshall not discuss here-cannot make me deny the being of the representationif the latter elsewhere offers itself primordially and indubitably. Nor doesthe suppression of the representation by a pistol shot eliminate the problemposed by the other and by his/her perception of the world, opening to being,or what you will. The pistol, moreover, jams and this suppression of therepresentation reveals its own impossibility in the very phrase that intends it:the obvious-but astonishing, considering the foregoing-affirmation that the

representation never &dquo;exhausts&dquo;, but always &dquo;reaches&dquo; the wild Being at thesame time restores the representation in a primordial place, puts it back into a

position of exteriority relative to this Being that it &dquo;reaches&dquo; (Being here visiblyand simply means the totality of beings [6tant,51), and leaves wholly outstandingthe question raised by the other and by &dquo;his/her&dquo; representation of the world.

For, granted that his/her representation, like mine, reaches the wild Being, howcan I know that what it reaches of it and what mine reaches of it are identical,

comparable, or participable by him/her and by me? Such a participability, and

even, much more, a rigorous identity, would be self-assured if there were ineffect a means of &dquo;exhausting&dquo; I3eing-including, for each mind, this &dquo;moment&dquo;



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of Being that is another mind (Hegelianism). This path being closed off, howis one to avoid, in the way in which Merleau-Ponty poses the problem (andwhich comes from Husserl), that participability cannot be conceived excepton the basis of a postulate bearing on its own conditions of possibility: What

each time is reached is &dquo;the same&dquo; or &dquo;comparable&dquo; or &dquo;homogeneous&dquo;.As that,quite obviously, is not literally true (or is true only for a thought of the In Itselfand of its &dquo;reflections&dquo;), a supplement of plausibility has to be solicited fromthe unending progression of concordant explorations: there is a path alongwhich one can show that what I reach of Being and what you reach of it tendto be concordant or to correspond with each other as one advances. Three

idealities, therefore, instead of one.The question posed by the duality of private world and public world-of

an indefinite number of private worlds and a still greater indefinite numberof public worlds, since quite obviously our public world is not the same asthat of theAztecs or of the hunters ofAltarnira-on an ultimate foundation

of one world is completely independent of the theory of perception or of

representation-even if the latter is understood in the flattest and most insipidsense possible. It is posed as soon as I ascertain that the other is thinking some-

thing that s/he is not saying, which is to say that it is constitutive of the alreadydouble world of a two-year-old child, long before his/her contamination bya bad philosophical theory of the In Itself. It is posed as soon as I ascertain,in learning a tongue [langue], that that tongue includes words without strict

equivalent in mine (and, more exactly, that none of its words is equivalentto those of mine). It is posed, quite simply, as soon as I look at anAfricanstatuette.

Now, that which the other thinks without saying, where is it?And what

is it? What the African sees in his/her statuette, and what I will never, properlyspeaking, see, all the while knowing categorically that it is-where and whatis it? That I might say that that is &dquo;for him an internal object which is nowhere,which is ideality&dquo;; or that I might say that it is a moment and a manner for

him/her to reach the wild Being without exhausting it, a moment and mannerthat will never be mine and that I will never be able to do more than think-and-

represent-to-myself-does that really change anything at all in the situation andin its interminable enigmas, which we constantly settle in life? In any case, asalso for all &dquo;subjective lived experiences &dquo;, I must &dquo;enter&dquo; them in the &dquo; reg-ister which is Being&dquo; (p. 239F/185E) (here again, therefore, an interminable

catalogue of beings [tants], simple lnbegriff aller Seienden); I therefore can-not prevent, if the other has not spoken of it, that &dquo;something&dquo; has been, andtherefore is forever in the mode of having once been so, due to the simple factthat it once was for a single person as a fleeting thought and for me a mere

ideality I cannot even designate except in empty fashion. How then is one to

escape the following dilemma: Eitber the meaning of being of the world is

effectively In Itself and ideality, since partaking interminably of this world are



18/37

17

the innumerable &dquo;somethings&dquo; essentially and necessarily inaccessible to meand to all save one (the last thought of the last person entered on the death

register of the city of Beauvais for the year 1788).An In Itself and an idealityinfinitely more pronounced than those that science is, for example, obliged to

postulate: &dquo;the continents two hundred million years ago had such and such aform&dquo; has as its &dquo;meaning&dquo;: &dquo;scientific subjects abstractly identical to us wouldhave observed that ... &dquo;, and, in this case, the abstraction is effectuable, just asthe content of the statement is interminably justifiable. However, the phrase &dquo;if

you were the last person entered on the death register, etc., you would in theend have thought ... &dquo; is doubly empty; it claims to designate an undesignat-able content and postulates an essentially ineffectuable operation. Or else, the

meaning of being is equivalent to &dquo;having been for someone&dquo;, and then thereis not one meaning of being, save nominally, since this meaning of being, &dquo;tohave been for someone&dquo;, is essentially empty, there being no means to allowone to give an identical or different content to &dquo;being for me&dquo; and &dquo;being for

X&dquo;; henceforth, whatever our interpretation of perception, of representation,etc., we are plunged hopelessly into the Ocean of the compossibility of anindefinite number not

onlyof

worlds,but also of

private meaningsof

being,which in other respects are completely unassignable.These aporias are immediate, we have said, and they result from the way

in which the problem is posed. How, indeed, is one to think the question ofthe public world, of the 6~osa~eos koinos, while eliminating or while forgettingwhat public means, while wanting to think it in the active forgetting of thekoinotes and of the koinonia and of that which makes them be-namely, ofthe social-historical and of its institution? To the extent that one wants to

escape from them, to the extent, too, that it has been recognized that the

phenomenological attitude, by an essential necessity, must make of the alter

ego an intractable impossibility and cannot escape from solipsism except bycommitting suicide-therefore, that it cannot escape from it-there remains

only one recourse, the return to the idea of a co-naturality or a co-nativity of

seers, beit

ofa

different qualityor

ofa

superior order.And this in effect iswhat, for the visible, is proposed in the chapter entitled &dquo;The Intertwining-TheChiasm&dquo;: &dquo;Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is

possible within each?&dquo; (p. 187F/142E). Surely, &dquo;there does not exist some hugeanimal whose organs our bodies would be&dquo;, but there is &dquo;a ray of natural lightthat illuminates all flesh and not only my own&dquo;. That the &dquo;colours&dquo; or &dquo;tactilereliefs&dquo; of the other are for me &dquo;an absolute mystery, forever inaccessible&dquo;,

is not completely true; for me to have not an idea, an image, nor a

representation, but as it were the imminent experience of them, itsuffices that I look at a landscape, that I speak of it with someone.

Then, through the concordant operation of his body and my own,what I see passes into him, this individual green of the meadow



19/37

18

under my eyes invades his vision without quitting my own, I rec-

ognize in my green his green ... There is here no problem of thealter ego because it was not I who sees, not he who sees, because

an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general,in virtue of that

primordial propertythat

belongsto the flesh, be-

ing here and now, of radiating everywhere and forever, being an

individual, of being also a dimension and a universal. (pp. 187-188F/142E; emphases added for the first two italicized phrases)

What we have here is only the exploration of another impasse-and wewill not linger over it. Quite obviously, the description &dquo;is not completely true&dquo;,to borrow Merleau-Pontys expression; the &dquo;as it were ... imminent experience&dquo;does not amount to the experience without qualifications, and the existence ofa single Daltonian, hallucinating person, or drunk would suffice to challengeit. One guards against this by giving oneself &dquo;the concordant operation&dquo; ofdifferent bodies-that is to say, by preventing in advance the other from being&dquo;be who sees&dquo; while plunging him into a natural generality that will permit

anonymous visibility to inhabit both of us. That such a natural generality notonly exists, but plays an ineliminable role in all of the questions that are ofconcern to us, we would be the last to doubt, but this role-of leaning on

[,6tayagel and of induction into the social/historical institution of the world-

absolutely does not suffice to resolve them. If they sufficed, there wouldnever be any philosophy, and not even any discussion whatsoever-for onedoes not see where and why the concord of operations would cease and whyit would not be prolonged into concord and identity of all discourses, anymore, indeed, than one can see why and how &dquo;anonymous visibility&dquo;, &dquo;visionin general&dquo; is coined or converted in such different fashions among Giotto,Rembrandt, and Picasso. The &dquo;what I see passes into him&dquo; and &dquo;I recognizein my green his green&dquo; is true only cum grano salis-a grain so large, trulyspeaking, that it would suffice to salt the foods of all generations to come.

In fact, Merleau-Ponty renders the individual unthinkable. For, &dquo;what I seepasses into him&dquo; would be true only if I passed into him, completely, with

my childhood memories and especially those ones that I do not know, these

gardens ofAthens where for the first time and forever afterward I have seenand been green, the Verde io te quiero verse that so often obsesses me, myway of aging in relation to the light and to colours that do not cease to amaze

me, my preoccupations of the moment, and so on, interminably. Or else, itwould then be necessary to state categorically that neither this green, nor I,have flesh, that we hold to nothing and are held by nothing outside this atomic

encounter, this flat coincidence, sectionable and made of a freely transferable

product: thas green, which passes from me into him without alteration-and

rightly so, since &dquo;it is not 1 who sees, not he who sees&dquo;. If seeing, however, is

something other than a tale of retinas, as Merleau-Ponty elsewhere has shown



20/37

19

quite well, then it is in effect the entire seer that is at issue in vision, andnot only his/her corporeal synergies: his/her entire history, thought, language,sex, world-in brief, his/her &dquo;personal institution&dquo;, if we dare permit ourselvesthis expression. The encounter of two seers then challenges something otherand something much more than anonymous visibility and vision in general,it can only be a more or less broad and deep coincidence of two &dquo;personalinstitutions&dquo;, highly dependent on their social-historical institution which makesthem each exist as an individual, which, all the while being possible, is never

assured, and ofwhich it must be said, more specifically, that in a sense it alwayssucceeds, whatever the social-historical and personal &dquo;distances&dquo; involved, and,in another sense, that it alway,sfails, whatever the &dquo;proximity&dquo; of the two seers.Now, this way of posing the question excludes one from ever being able tothink this necessity of the failure of concordance-in the same manner in whichand for reasons profoundly analogous to those that make it, like all inherited

thinking, exclude the possibility of thinking the being of error other than as adeficit and absence of truth.

To have the colours of the other as an imminent experience, writes Mer-

leau-Ponty,it suffices &dquo;that I

speakof it with someone&dquo;. I

speak,therefore-

and to &dquo;someone&dquo;. The transferability, the participable [part] of colour passestherefore-can pass? must pass?-by way of speech [la parole].And surelyMerleau-Ponty would be the last to think that speech can be, here or anywhereelse, pure instrument or diaphanous medium; and just as little would he thinkthat it could be limited to being only speech. Or, let him have to speak ofred-and let him have done so as in the beautiful passage (pp. 173-175F/130-133E) that opens the chapter discussed here and concludes with &dquo;a certainred is also a fossil drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds&dquo;. &dquo;It isalso&dquo;: it is perhaps especially so, for apart from &dquo;certain terrains nearAix orin Madagascar&dquo;, and the red of blood, all the reds evoked in this passage arehistorical reds, and all of them inseparable from-indefinable without-their

heavy imaginary charge: the tiles of rooftops, the flags of gatekeepers and

of the Revolution, the dresses of women, robes of professors, bishops, andadvocate generals, adornments and uniforms, pure essence of the Revolutionof 1917, the eternal feminine, the public prosecutor, and finally gypsies, dressedlike hussars, who reigned twenty-five years ago over an inn on the Champs-Elys6es. As much as the description justifies the important final idea-thata colour is &dquo;less a color or a thing ... than a difference between things and

colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility&dquo;-so muchdoes it also show that if I speak of it to someone, &dquo;what I see&dquo; &dquo;passes intohim&dquo; only by means of all these references implicitly at work-references that,quite evidently, do not concern solely an anonymous visibility, a vision in

general, but a becoming and a historical institution of this visibility and of thatwhich at once &dquo;fills&dquo; it and renders it participable. &dquo;To fill&dquo; is, moreover, a

very bad expression, and it is rather &dquo;to make be&dquo; that must be said: the red



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of the eternal feminine is certainly not so for other cultures, it is likely that

my grandchildren, unless they are buffs of fossilized films, will understand

nothing about these gypsies on the Champs Elys6es (will see nothing therein),and none of the examples cited would makeAristotle see anything at all. To

say that one

mightfind others that would have the same (visible)

meaningwould be to annul precisely the signification of this whole description, sincethat would amount to affirming that in all this it was a matter only of strictlyintersubstitutable instances of a generality given in its essence once and forall. For, obviously, the Red of the Revolution introduces another and a new

differentiation, another and a new modulation to those that the colour red hadmade until that point. But also, he adds it not only for those who see thereinthe red of the Revolution.And then we no longer can speak simply of a &dquo;fossildrawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds&dquo;: as these imaginary worldscontinue to make themselves, the red is not finished, there is no &dquo;natural&dquo; red

given once and for all, the natural red-the one whose physical characteristics

could, moreover, be specified in terms of wavelengths, levels of brightness,saturation, etc.-is here again only a support [6tayagel, the red of which itcould be a

questionis a historical

red,and as such it continues to make itself

as part of the concretion of visibility, itself part of the institution of the worldthat continues to make itself in and through history.

All that, Merleau-Ponty knew perfectly well. If, at moments, certain for-mulations still accredit the idea of a naturality, unmixed with perception, thatwould be, de jure and even ~le jacto, thinkable apart from the rest-thus,p. 220F/152E: &dquo;[TJhere is to be sure a question ... by what miracle a created

generality, a culture, a knowledge come to add to and recapture and rectifythe natural generality of my body and of the world&dquo; (emphasis added)-thedevelopments in the last pages of his manuscript (pp. 1~9-204F/144-155E),notably through the place accorded to language and to speech, render thisidea impossible. Yet this knowledge does not succeed in becoming the pointfor a new departure that it nevertheless demands to be, and this is not by

accident: the path it opens leaves immediately the ontological field in whichMerleau-Ponty continues to situate himself. In this way, what expresses it or

proceeds therefrom ultimately is only juxtaposed to the central inspiration, andits ambiguous character is thus constantly renewed.

This may be seen again in the same May 1960 Note previously cited

(pp. 306-307F/252-253E). &dquo;Moreover the distinction between the two planes(natural and cultural) is abstract: everything is cultural in us (our Lebensweltis &dquo;subjective&dquo;) (our perception is cultural-historical) and everything is natu-ral in us (even the cultural rests on the polymorphism of the wild Being).&dquo;The remark on the cultural-historical character of perception, far from beingaccidental or isolated, links back up with numerous previous formulations.3

3

It is clear, however, that the implications have not been drawn therefrom asconcerns the thematic treatment of perception. If our perception is cultural-



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historical, as it incontestably is, not only could it not be a question of main-

taining for it any ontological privilege whatsoever or the status of &dquo;archetype&dquo;relative to other forms of access to what is, of &dquo;giving itself&dquo; something or

making it be, what you will; it becomes important and urgent to explore theconsequences of this fact, to ask oneself what &dquo;components&dquo; of perception aresocial-historical in origin and in what manner they are so, whether one canthus distinguish any &dquo;components&dquo; therein and impute them in a distinct wayto this or that origin, and, finally, whether one can even preserve the traditionalsense of &dquo;perception&dquo;. To say that our perception is cultural-historical is to saythat, in part and according to modalities to be explored, it too originates inthe institution. But the institution of what? As culture does not install in us

mechanical devices for the transformation of sensory data, or minicomputersfor the elaboration of these data differently programmed in Babylon and in

Venice, this institution can concern only representation itself, the shared modeof representing; it is therefore-we shall return to this point at length-theinstitution of schemata and figures that render representation possible as par-ticipable and making/doing [lefairel collective. These schemata have to render

possiblethe

&dquo;perception&dquo;of what

is,each

time, positedas a

&dquo;thing&dquo;,but

theyhave to do much more than this, since they have to organize the totality ofthe actual social sphere [du social effectgl, as well as of what is, each time,thinkable. It is quite obviously impossible for these organizations-of things,of men, of acts, of thoughts-to be separated from and to be independent ofeach other; there is cohesion, internal solidarity, reciprocal inherence-whichwe shall have to explore-for each society of the positing and view of &dquo;natural

things&dquo;, of the status of men, of the rules and references of making/doing andof saying (Merleau-Ponty remarks, in the same Note: &dquo;a way of thinking oneselfwithin a society is implied in its social structure&dquo;). There is therefore an insti-

tution, by society, of the world qua kosmos koinos, a shared and public world

of and for this society, and in which this society necessarily also itself positsitself [se pose ... elle-merYte]. ~Ie cannot, short of falling into absurdity, think

this institution either as &dquo;reflection&dquo; or as &dquo;sublimation&dquo; of the &dquo;real&dquo; conditionsin which society would be placed, since such conditions are, trivialities apart,ungraspable and unassignable outside this social institution, any more than wecan see therein a &dquo;moment of Reason&dquo;, would it only be because such an af-firmation makes of the one who enunciates itAbsolute Knowledge in person.One cannot give oneself anything &dquo;real in itself&dquo;, anything &dquo;rational in itself&dquo;from which this institution might be derived; a discourse could have such a

pretention only by forgetting naively, not to say stupidly, that it itself proceedsfrom a particular social-historical institution and from the social-historical in-stitution of discourse as such, that it always remains enveloped therein, and

that, if its relationship to the institution from which it proceeds is character-ized by this fantastic liberty that permits it to take, in relation to the institution,all conceivable distances, this relationship accords this liberty only inasmuch



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as the relationship remains this relationship, inasmuch as these distances, be

they &dquo;infinite&dquo;, remain distances of and within this space, and inasmuch as onecould escape from them only in order to enter immediately into another space,that of pure insanity. The social-historical institution as such, and each institu-tion of a

society, alwayswill be/will

appear therefore,as to the real as well as

to the rational, arbitrary and unmotivated in its essential elements. It is cre-

ation, which could never find necessary and sufficient conditions outside itself,would it only be because the thought of the necessary and sufficient condi-tions is only a minuscule by-product of the social institution. It is a making-be,manifestation of the radical imaginary.

In what sense, then, can one say that it would also be &dquo;natural&dquo; becauseit would rest &dquo;on the polymorphism of the wild Being&dquo;? Let us limit ourselvesto noting the naturalness of Being as it is thus incidentally affirmed, and let usask what could be meant here by &dquo;resting&dquo;. If this signifies a simple negativecondition-that, within limits so broad that they have no interest, an indefinitenumber of different social-historical institutions of a public world is possible,that the diversity of modes of institution of society refers us back ineluctablyto a

plasticityor

labilityof a

&dquo;substrate&dquo;that

revealsitself

eachtime in and

through this institution -this is evident (which certainly in no way dispensesus from having to explore this evidence). If, however, this signifies that acrossthese diverse simultaneous and successive institutions is deployed and activelyexpressed a polymorphism that could not, save by a fallacious tautology, bemade into the materialization of possibilities fully preconstituted &dquo;elsewhere&dquo;and since an intemporal &dquo;always&dquo;-then it must very well be understood that itis the entire outlook of the inherited ontology that is being abandoned, alongwith the implicit but always sovereign signification of: Being. For, we no

longer then can make of this polymorphism the polymorphism of somethingacquired and de jure already determined or determined in itself, kat~uto; this

polymorphism is emergence of the other; the forrns-the eide-far from beingexhausted, surge forth as new and original-and thereby the &dquo;relationships&dquo;

between &dquo;already given&dquo; forms are retroactively modified. The signification&dquo;to be&dquo; implied in being [e~~j&horbar;the on 0 on or the einai of the on-no

longer can be thought, save under a provisional or path-breaking heading [1ititre provisoire ou de c.ber~iner~eeut], on the basis of appearing, phe~ia2esthe~i,of presence-for, any more than on the basis of self-sameness [soi-it], autots,of self-presence, or, more generally, on the basis of any presence whatso-ever. For, presence is an excrescence of the requisite of determinacy, thatis to say, of~ c~e jure achievable determinability-therefore a determinabilityachieved since the intemporal always. Presence has never been anything elsebut coincidence (implicitly and unconsciously posited very early on in Greco-Western ontology), the impossible identity of a now-instant and an intemporal&dquo;eternity&dquo;.4 Perhaps one day will be discovered a pre-Socratic fragment con-taining the phrase: nun to aei. In any case, the thinking of being cancelled



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itself out as soon as it became the thinking of determination, that is to say, assoon as it attempted to make ontology be absorbed by logic-as soon as it

tried, not to suspend temporality provisionally by transcendental hypothesis,but truly to suppress it. More clearly than everywhere else-more clearly stillthan in the second-order, derived character of time found in Platos Timaeus5this may be seen in the determination of the being of being [1,Otre de 16tant],of ousia, byAristotle, as to ti On einai, what it was [6tait] to be, what it had[aiJaii] to be. The essence or ousia of the being [6tant) consists in its being-something-determinate (ti: the what ... ); and this determination, determinedsince always in the imperfect of eternity (,On), determines it forever throughthe infinitive of eternal finality (einai). Into the essence of the being [6tantlthus fixed are contracted originarily the fact of being and the being-thus, since

nothing is except in being [8tant] and from the fact that it is a determinate this:the ti of the ti On einai is indissociably the interrogative of the determination(ti estin?) and the definitive of the being-something (esti ti). 76 ti On einai:

what, since always, that [cela] was determined forever to be and which thusmakes it that that [que cell is in being this. This contraction of a past beyond

every simply past (by-gone fr6voltil) pastand of a future

exceeding everycon-

ceivable future whichAristotle forces to meet by teleological fulguration (everyontology uses time only in order to abolish it: a telos immanent to becomingsignifies literally that the end is posited before the beginning, and that tempo-rality is purely external), like the conflation of the grammatical significations ofthe insignificant and infinite vocable ti, which materializes the conflation of theDass-seiv~ with the Wlas-sein and through whichAristotle ultimately affirms thatto be signifies to be something determinate (since always and forever), explainthe apparently insurmountable difficulties and the indefinite commentaries of

very learned

Castoriadis, C. (1993) Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition

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