Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh

CHAPTER 4: The Paradox of Expression

CHAPTER 4 The Paradox of Expression BERNARD WALDENFELS THE APORIA OF EXPRESSION The ambiguous, equivocal phenomenon Merleau-Ponty calls the paradox of expression echoes one of Husserl’s statements, which the French phenomenologist often cites in the form of a motto. Section 16 of the Cartesian Meditations, which concerns the proper beginning of a phenomenologically oriented psychology, says: “The beginning is the pure and, so to speak, still mute experience, which now it is the issue to bring to the pure expression of its own sense.”1 In this statement, Husserl is opposing the position that substitutes sense-data or global forms for experience instead of interrogating experience for the sense intended in it. To the phenomenologist, nothing appears more obvious than this beginning; still, an aporia is hidden here. Husserl carefully limits his demand: experience is, so to speak, still mute. In fact, if it were fully mute, it would only allow something to be said about it, without experience finding its own sense. With the first word that violates the innocence of experience, it would already be defiled, since it would have an alien sense imputed or inserted into it. An entirely mute experience could only impose silence. If, in contrast, experience itself were already persuaded to speak, it itself would enunciate itself. “Pure enunciation” would fundamentally say nothing that had not already been spoken. Thus, speaking either would get tangled up in its own linguistic “overcoat” and would not go beyond language’s own designs and constructions, or it would sink back into the murmur of Being itself. In a type of reading that brings everything to a head, Foucault, in his L’ordre du discours,2 has brought phenomenology to a point where it must burst to pieces, unless it takes refuge in a “lazy” mediation. Foucault distinguishes three leading themes under which traditional “logophobia,” or (as we could also say) the forgetting of discourse, comes together. First, there is the founding subject who animates with his breath the “empty forms of language” 89 90 BERNHARD WALDENFELS and who “penetrates the inertia of empty things.” Second, an originary experience appears that sustains a “primary complicity” with the world: “the things already murmur a sense, which our language has merely to extract.” The third and last possibility is the theme of a universal mediation, which allows us at all times to rediscover the movement of the Logos; discourse becomes the mere “shimmering of a truth about to be born in its eyes.” If, in the course of a process of universal mediation, everything is language, discourse is not so much lost; but as “discourse already in operation,” it degenerates into an echo of itself. To be sure, Foucault is alluding to typical themes here, without mentioning specific books or authors. Thus he resists the temptation to divide up his phenomenological contemporaries into Fichteans, Schellingians, and Hegelians, and likewise we should not dwell upon this possible, but ultimately useless game. What really matters is to take a look at the enigma of the things themselves. Merleau-Ponty himself, to whom Foucault’s thought of language owes more than Foucault ever admitted, is not a master tailor, but rather a master of gradations and nuances, of gradual variations. When he cites Husserl’s statement noted above, he does it in his own way. He quotes it in an abbreviated form: “C’est l’expérience . . . muette encore qu’il s’agit d’amener à l’expression pure de son propre sens.” The careful “so to speak” has vanished ; the problematic of the beginning of experience recedes into the problematic of the passage of experience into expression. With Merleau-Ponty, we find ourselves already on a third way. This third way presents itself as a passage, as a transition, which leads neither to a beginning nor an end. At the same time, it is to be noted that Merleau-Ponty cites Husserl’s guiding statement in the most varied contexts. In the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, this statement emerges in a passage where Merleau-Ponty considers the eidetic reduction. Agreeing with the later Husserl, Merleau-Ponty here characterizes the way through the ideality of essences as an indirect way to the facticity of lived experience. “Husserl’s essences are destined to bring back all the living relationships of experience, as the fisherman’s net draws up from the depths of the ocean palpitating fish and seaweed” (PP x/xv).3 One might object that the net fishes...