Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh

CHAPTER 12:

CHAPTER 12 Écart: The Space of Corporeal Difference GAIL WEISS [U]ltimately, it is only the strange which is familiar and only difference which is repeated. —Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. —Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women Taken together, these two claims challenge clear-cut divisions between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the natural and the unnatural. Inverting the Platonic understanding of mimesis in which copies not only depend for their existence upon a prior origin(al), but derive their own (moral) value and aesthetic merit through the preciseness with which they imitate that origin(al), Deleuze argues that the new and the different can only arise through repetition ; as he says: “We produce something new only on condition that we repeat.”1 Repetition, he maintains, cannot be understood as a recurrence of the same, rather, “repetition is the power of difference and differentiation: because it accelerates or decelerates time, or because it alters spaces.”2 Although Deleuze and Haraway have markedly different projects and methodologies, as well as different conceptions of both humans and machines , I would argue that both are indebted to the notion of reversibility articulated in the later Merleau-Ponty. While for Deleuze, this connection is more obvious given that Deleuze acknowledges Merleau-Ponty as a formative influence on his thought, I would maintain that Haraway’s own understanding of the cyborg as “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social 203 204 GAIL WEISS reality as well as a creature of fiction”3 is itself a chiasmic notion that foregrounds the reversible, mutually constitutive relationship between the human and the nonhuman. The place where Merleau-Ponty most eloquently (and enigmatically) articulates what he means by reversibility is in the chapter “The IntertwiningThe Chiasm” of his final, unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible. Feminist theorists, in particular, have focused on this particular essay, critically examining the examples of reversibility Merleau-Ponty offers there, challenging the limitations of this “metaphysical principle,” and exploring its radical possibilities. Most of the recent work feminist theorists have done on this essay has involved approaching this chapter through Luce Irigaray’s mimetic reading of it: “The Invisible of the Flesh: A Reading of Merleau-Ponty,” The Visible and the Invisible, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm.”4 In this essay, Irigaray repeats the Merleau-Pontian text, challenging its omissions, exploring its fissures, in order to produce an alternative account of reversibility that could be said to precede Merleau-Ponty’s prior articulation of it. Passing in and out of Merleau-Ponty’s essay, picking up certain themes only to drop them and move on to related issues, Irigaray folds her own essay into his, intertwining them to produce an account of corporeality that extends back before birth (Merleau-Ponty’s starting point) and forward to an imagined future in which the reversible relations that continuously unfold within women’s own bodies are recognized and appreciated sites of knowledge, pleasure, and desire. Before examining Irigaray’s subversive strategy and the critique of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of reversibility that issues from it more closely, let me begin by discussing those aspects of reversibility that are crucial for both thinkers as well as for Deleuze and Haraway. First, and foremost, it should be noted that the image of reversibility Merleau-Ponty provides in The Visible and the Invisible and in his earlier essay, “Eye and Mind,” is extremely spatial. Reversibility, as depicted by Merleau-Ponty, might best be described as a metaphysical principle that functions on both a micro and macro level to characterize the body’s interactions with itself, with others, and with the world. On a micro level, reversibility breaks down the (conceptual) boundaries between what have traditionally been understood as discrete bodily sensations, performing what Butler has called a kind of “transubstantiation” of vision into touch, movement into expression, whereby I see by “touching” and move by “speaking” with my body.5 On a macro level, reversibility describes an ongoing interaction between the flesh of the body, the flesh of others, and the flesh of the world, a process in which corporeal boundaries are simultaneously erected and dismantled . Bringing these two levels together, Grosz maintains that: Flesh is being as reversibility, being’s capacity to fold in on itself, being’s dual orientation inward and outward, being’s openness, its [18.190.156.212] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 19...