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CHAPTER TWO

ONTOLOGY IN MERLEAU-PONTY AND DELEUZE

In the first chapter, we saw that Merleau-Ponty confirms Descartes’s idea that the relation between the thinking subject and the thought object cannot be external. The world must already exist for us if it is to be perceived. Unlike Descartes, Merleau-Ponty does not think that it follows from this that the thinking subject constitutes the world, that it coincides with the world and thus has absolute knowledge of it. Thought is familiar with the world and with itself, but this familiarity does not imply an absolute transparency. Our analysis of the perception of something remote, for example, showed that perception is grounded in the hold our body takes upon the world, and that this hold originates in a field in which the perceiving body and the world refer to one another endlessly. The gaze “prepossesses” (VI, 133) the visible before actually perceiving it, but this “prepossession” cannot be localized, nor is it possible to tell what exactly is possessed.

This nonabsolute and originless familiarity between the perceiving body and the perceived world requires an ontological foundation. If the perceiving body is to prepossess the perceived world, Merleau-Ponty needs to explain how this is ontologically possible. It is evident at the outset, however, that to do so he will have to abandon Descartes’s thesis about the fundamental difference in being between the thinking subject and the thought world, the dualism between res cogitans and res extensa.

In what concerns Deleuze, we looked at how his theory of “thinking thought” is built upon the idea of exteriority, and how this exteriority does not allow for any familiarity between thought and its “object.” However, we also saw how Deleuze conceives the relation between thought and its ground (which is also the “object” of original thought) as intrinsic. These claims have ontological implications, albeit contradictory ones; one seems to suggest a fundamental difference, whereas the other points to some sort of unity. To determine whether or not they are contradictory, we need to examine Deleuze’s ontology in more detail. The present chapter focuses on the ontological underpinnings of the theories of thinking thought we find in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.

MERLEAU-PONTY’S ENDO-ONTOLOGY

A good starting point for any explanation of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is the famous passage in The Visible and the Invisible about the chiasmatic relation between the touching hand and the touched hand. In that passage, Merleau-Ponty explains that in order for our hand to be able to touch something, that is, in order for the hand to exit itself toward the world and be more than a noncommittal play of bodily movements, it must have an experience both from within and from without. It must have an experience of what it is like to be touched, of what it is like to be an object. The body is capable of this experience because it can sense being sensed. More than that, when our right hand touches our left, we are able to alternate between the experiences of touching (right hand) and of being touched (left hand); this alternation, in fact, can even take place within one and the same hand. It is this possibility of reversal—which Merleau-Ponty extends to all of our senses—that allows the body to be included in the reality it examines, and thus to have access to this reality.

It is important to note that the participation of the perceiving body in the world does depend on the fact that it is, like the world, extended. The body is not part of the world because it is partes extra partes, but because it is sentient. This means that the aforementioned world is not the extended world, but the world as sentient. In other words, Merleau-Ponty thinks that in order to perceive, the body must become world and the world must become carnal, or perception. “The immersion of perception into the world makes sense only as the immersion of the world into perception; the becoming-body of the one who perceives is the becoming-flesh of the perceived” (Barbaras 2004, 158). What does this “immersion of the world into perception” mean? It means that the world must be “in agreement with visibility rather than the negation of vision,” that it must “consent to this grasp” of perception, that it must offer itself to perception (Barbaras 2004, 159).

In perception, the perceived world and the perceiving body are no longer opposites. The world is not characterized by a complete absence of perception, but is always a world haunted by vision. And perception, for its part, does not mean the complete absence of the world, but the unfolding of the world itself. Rather than saying that the perceiving body is part of the world that it perceives, it would be more accurate to say that the perceiving body and perceived world participate in a being in which both poles are not clearly distinguishable. “Flesh” is the name Merleau-Ponty gives to this level of being, which precedes the distinction between the for itself and the in itself, and hence precedes any determination.

However, the impossibility of separating the active and the passive pole within the flesh does not mean that they coincide. Merleau-Ponty notices that when my right hand touches my left hand, I never have the experience of touching and being touched simultaneously: “Either my right hand really passes over to the rank of touched, but then its hold on the world is interrupted; or it retains its hold on the world, but then I do not really touch it—my right hand touching, I palpate with my left hand only its outer covering” (VI, 148). This reversibility between both experiences notwithstanding, the touching can never completely coincide with the being touched. Indeed, they must not coincide, as that would throw us back into the position of a solipsist ego incapable of accessing the world. That is why Merleau-Ponty suggests that the perceiving body and perceived world must be separated by a thickness (VI, 127); a dehiscence or fission (VI, 146); a divergence (écart) (VI, 148, 153, 191, 198, 216, 257, 272); or a distance—without this distance, however, installing an exteriority between both. This is not a gap that must be bridged as quickly as possible, but a distance that is, at the same time, an opening toward the thing itself (VI, 101–2, 216). That which separates us from being is at the same time that which allows us to access it, and vice versa. Consequently, touching/seeing is always also not-touching/seeing. In perception, the world presents itself to us, though not transparently. Hence, what distinguishes the perceiving body and the perceived world is not a classical difference, and what unites them is not an identity.

Merleau-Ponty describes flesh also as “a Visibility, a Tangible in itself” (VI, 139). This means that the flesh does not see or touch like a subject, and that it is not visible or tangible like an object. Instead, it is their essence, their condition (VI, 135). As the condition of visibility or tangibility—which includes seeing or touching as well as the visible or tangible—the flesh is visibility or tangibility par excellence, or visibility or tangibility in itself.

In what follows, I will discuss the indeterminate (which from now on I will call “openness,” for reasons that will be explained below), differential, and constitutive character of the flesh in more detail. An in-depth discussion of the last dimension, however, requires an examination of Merleau-Ponty’s transcendental project, and that is the subject of the third chapter. By then, it will be clear that also the first two dimensions are grounded in a transcendental project, and thus that their examination must likewise be carried over to the following chapters.

First Dimension: The Differential Nature of the Flesh

It is clear from what has been said so far that the flesh cannot be considered an identity, if by that we mean something that coincides fully with itself. The flesh unites an active pole and a passive pole, without annihilating the difference between them. That is why Rudolf Bernet (2004, 234) argues that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology cannot be considered an ontology of fusion and indifference.¹ We will now take a closer look at the difference and unity proper of the flesh.

To begin with, we must understand that the difference that characterizes the flesh is meant to be a fully fledged difference. We can deduce this from Merleau-Ponty’s claim that Leibniz’s notion of “incompossibles” served as his source of inspiration: “Certain Leibnizian descriptions—that each of the views of the world is a world apart, that nonetheless ‘what is particular to one would be public to all,’ that the monads would be in a relation of expression between themselves and with the world, that they differ from one another and from it as perspectives—are to be maintained entirely, to be taken up again in the brute Being, to be separated from the substantialist and ontotheological elaboration Leibniz imposes upon them” (VI, 222–23).²

However, as Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Sartre indicates, this incompossibility cannot be understood as a contradiction or an opposition. The flesh does not consist of the synthesis of two opposites, as Hegelian dialectics would have it. Merleau-Ponty’s “hyperdialectic” rejects the idea of a surpassing “that would retain everything the preceding phases had acquired” (VI, 95), and that as such installs a hierarchical order. On the contrary, it discovers, under the simple oppositions, “a swarm of relations with double meaning” and positions that are distributed over several planes (VI, 91). In other words, it discovers a fundamental ambiguity (VI, 94). Hence, the flesh unites not only an active and a passive pole, but a myriad of differences that are not clearly delineated.

This plurality of ever-shifting relations implies a true dynamics, which Merleau-Ponty invokes with Heidegger’s concept of “event”: wild being or flesh is an event (VI, 200) characterized by an explosive power (VI, 265, 124).³ Merleau-Ponty argues that that which makes something what it is—that is in fact what the flesh does, as we will see below—is not: it “essences” (west) (VI, 174). This German neologism is introduced to show that the essence (das Wesen) is not a static principle or form added to matter, but a dynamic process that develops in matter and thus has to be considered a verb: “to essence.” According to Merleau-Ponty, the essence of a table is first and foremost something that “tables” (VI, 175).

The differences that the flesh consists of are not incompatible with a certain unity. Actually, in his texts Merleau-Ponty pays more attention to the specific nature of this unity than to the differences it contains. Before we discuss Merleau-Ponty’s description of this specific unity, we should mention another Heideggerian concept Merleau-Ponty uses: the fold. This concept, which actually goes back to Hegel and eventually to Leibniz, can be said to form the link between the difference and the unity of the flesh. Merleau-Ponty (VI, 264) writes that the active and passive poles of the flesh are folded around one another. Just as a fold in a paper creates an outside and an inside that run across one another and can be reversed, in the flesh the active and passive poles can be reversed such that it is no longer clear who or what watches (or touches) and who or what is being watched (or touched). Rather than being the point at which things diverge, difference, at the level of the flesh, is a turning point, a point where one thing can turn into its so-called inverse. Thus, difference in the flesh is not so much a difference that separates but a difference that connects.

How, then, does Merleau-Ponty describe the unity of the flesh? Two notions that often return in this context are “style” and “typicality” (VI, 171; PriP, 16). What, one might ask, is the meaning of these notions in common terms? When one speaks of a literary style or a certain type of person, for example, we do not mean that every book subsumable under this style, or all the people of that specific type, shares some common elements. On the contrary, while one person of this type may be humorous, handsome, and intelligent, a second one may be smart only, while a third may be good-looking and funny. The same is true of books, where sharing a style need not imply a convergence in theme, register, plot structure, and so on. Moreover, the elements that connect books or persons of a same style or type are embodied differently in each book or person. Style or type is defined not by a common identity, but by a jumble of elements that refer to one another. A new book subsumed under a specific style, for example, will resemble as well as differ from the prototypical example that embodies this style. The relation between different works of one style is thus a relation of ever-shifting rapprochements and estrangements.