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CHAPTER 11 Embodying Perceptions of Death: Emotional Apprehension and Reversibilities of Flesh SUZANNE LABA CATALDI Perceptions of death are extremely evocative, intrinsically affective experiences . Unless we are coroners or undertakers, our knowledge of the significance of death is not based on dispassionate observation. An advantage of MerleauPonty ’s philosophical approach to perception is that perceptions and emotions can be thought as together, as copresently implicated. In this chapter, I implicate two emotions relevant to our understanding of the death of others, the emotions of horror and grief, to show how the reversibility thesis of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh ontology may be applied to emotional perceptions of death. I think that some account of our emotional responses to perceptions of death may help us to affirm that there is something right both about Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility thesis and about his bodily based sense of the elementally intercorporeal aspects of our perceptions. I hope to show how even live and dead bodies can be brought together, thought together, in the folds of flesh. When I speak of “reversibilities” or “crossovers,” I have in mind certain reversals of meaning that can take place between “sides” of phenomena that are ordinarily thought in opposition; and I point out how these “sides” can switch places—“reverse” and “become” each other. Here of course I follow Merleau-Ponty’s intuition, which he applied in the area of perception, that socalled opposites can reverse only because they are not so opposite after all— only because they do in fact share some common ground. He called this common ground that “identifies incompossibles”—flesh. The in-sensible places “in” Flesh where these crossovers or “reversibilities,” as he called them, are thought to take place are conceived as “chiasms.” As a philosophical expression, flesh includes but means something more than human embodiment or human flesh. Elementally, it is thought as a 189 190 SUZANNE LABA CATALDI generalized surface of sensibility, a “skin” or fabric into which our own enfleshed sensitivities—the sight of our eyes, the taste in our tongues, the touch in our hands—are indivisibly interwoven or enmeshed. As perceptibleperceiving fabric, flesh is two-sided; and its two sides—the sensitive and the sensed—are not thought entirely as apart from each other. The sides of perceptibility are reversible—as a jacket or the windings of a Mobius strip, so that, as “insides” and “outsides” are reversibly confused, “one no longer knows,” as Merleau-Ponty says, who is perceiving and who is being perceived (VI 318–19/264–65). According to Merleau-Ponty, such reversibilities are the way of all “flesh.”1 It is also the way of all live flesh to die, eventually, and decay. Inasmuch as this process is irreversible, seemingly linear and unidirectional, perceptions of this process, of dead bodies, do not, at first blush, appear to fall within the compass of the reversibility thesis—at least in its interpersonal or intercorporeal applications, since dead others, who no longer perceive, appear to be incapable of returning our perceptions in requisite ways—to revert our perceiving to a sense of being perceived or to model MerleauPonty ’s belief in the transitivity of human experience—transitivities of meaning “from one body to another” in the intercorporeal body of flesh. Perceptions of death may also be thought as part of a larger, more general problem with reversibility, namely, how to convincingly extend it to perceptions of inanimate objects. (The problem to which I refer here has to do with the ascription of the “activity” of perceiving to the “passively” perceptible . This side of the thesis is not as compelling as its converse—the claim, i.e., that perceiving has perceptible dimensions.) In terms of my project, one aspect of this problem is that the insensible gap between life and death, between living and dead bodies, may not appear to be as fruitfully chiasmatic as is the “gap” between, say, touched and touching hands, the emblem of reversibility. For while we do, or may, perceive life crossed, or crossing over into death, we are not so cognizant of the ways in which we may perceive death, crossed or crossing over into life. Thus we might be led to believe that the boundary between life and death is not chiasmically reversible, and that Merleau-Ponty’s provocative contention that all perceptions are is simply wrong. But we know that Merleau-Ponty meant his reversibility thesis to apply even to perceptions of inanimate objects (trees returning...

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