Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy

6 Dwelling in the Texture of the Visible: Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” (1961)

141 6 Dwelling in the Texture of the Visible: Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” (1961) The speech which speaks in us (die Sprache spricht), what does it say about language? That it is without foundation, Abgrund. Coming from Merleau-Ponty’s 1959–60 course at the Collège de France called “Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology,” this quotation shows the important role Heidegger plays in Merleau-Ponty’s final thinking. Heidegger’s importance does not, however, diminish the role that Husserl ’s thought plays in Merleau-Ponty’s final thinking: “Husserl never stopped speaking of Bewußtsein [consciousness], never stopped believing in the possibility of an intentional analytic, but converges with Heidegger through the idea of Verflechtung [interweaving], of the Ineinander [the “in-one-another”].”1 Freud too remains important: “Positing the unconscious not as a primary consciousness that has been masked, not as a forgotten adequation (postulate of the priority of conventional thought, of the priority of the thinking subject), but as indirect consciousness or consciousness without exactitude or thinking for itself, near to itself, according to systems of weakly articulated signs, of ‘near’ equivalences. Consciousness can be ‘unconscious,’ if it is not intellectual adequation, but a signifying or speaking subject” (NC 59–61: 151). And Heidegger, for Merleau-Ponty, does not diminish Bergson: “The truth of the matter is that the experience of a coincidence can be, as Bergson often says, only a ‘partial coincidence.’ But what is a coincidence that is only partial? It is a coincidence always past or always future, an experience that remembers 142 · Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy an impossible past, anticipates an impossible future, that emerges from Being or that will incorporate itself into Being” (VIF: 163–64/VIE: 122–23). Indeed, Merleau-Ponty is the inheritor of all the figures we have been following . But more than that, Merleau-Ponty’s final thinking draws together all the conceptual components we have been assembling for the research agenda called continental philosophy. The research agenda starts (1) with the universal epoché, which opens up a non- or presubjective level of experience. Following Deleuze, we have called this experience “immanence.” Immanence is not immanent to the subject or to the “I.” Using Heideggerian formulas, we can say that immanence is not a being; it is (the) nothing, or immanence is immanent to nothing but itself. Being ungrounded or abyssal, immanence is the same. Merleau-Ponty, however, makes the tautology explicit when he describes vision in terms of the seer-seen relation, in terms of a relation of auto-affection.2 Throughout our investigations, auto-affection has been in the background of immanence. Below reflection, and as the origin of reflection, is spontaneous self- or auto-experience.3 For Merleau-Ponty, auto-experience takes place in the sensible itself, or, as Heidegger would say, in Being itself. More importantly, (2) Merleau-Ponty transforms autoaffection into hetero-affection. Auto-experience is never self-adequate; it always contains latency and invisibility. In a word, it includes concealment . Even though it is auto, the same, there is a division. Indeed, Merleau -Ponty defines auto-affection by “in-division,” which resembles Heidegger ’s “Unter-Schied.” Ultimately, as we shall see, the Merleau-Pontean division consists in a multiplicity since what is concealed is a surplus veiled in silence. Silence leads to language. Clearly, (3) Merleau-Ponty conceives language as expression. However, Merleau-Ponty explicitly refers to Heidegger’s “Language” essay when he says that “[speech] falls towards the height.”4 Merleau-Ponty’s taking up of the Hamann passage, as quoted in Heidegger, means that there is no prior, already formed, internal representation to be expressed (it falls into the abyss); rather, the lack of ground (Ab-grund) allows speech to say more, to say what has never been expressed before (it ascends toward the height). As Merleau-Ponty says, “Language is neither Äußerung [externalization] of the organism, nor Ausdruck [expression] of life, nor even sign, nor even Bedeutung [meaning], but the advent of Being” (NC 59–61: 148; my emphasis). The liberation of language from representation implies (4) the overcoming of metaphysics. Dwelling in the Texture of the visible · 143 To claim that Merleau-Ponty is engaged in the project of overcoming metaphysics is perhaps controversial. Although his final courses at the Collège de France indicate this trajectory for his thinking, we cannot know for certain due to his untimely death. Nevertheless...