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CHAPTER 13 Wild Meaning: Luce Irigaray’s Reading of Merleau-Ponty TINA CHANTER Merleau-Ponty calls for a new beginning, a recommencement of philosophy , a return to a place that will allow us to form “new instruxments” to replace those of “reflection and intuition.” Instead of the fixed subject-object opposition, or the rigid distinction between existence and essence, he wants to “rediscover . . . some of the living references” that sustain the “mystery” and enigma of the exercises that we call “seeing and speaking” (VI 172/130). Just as he was in Phenomenology of Perception, he is concerned in The Visible and the Invisible with the way in which language “promotes its own oblivion,” how the power of expression “exceeds language” (PP 459/401). He recalls in Phenomenology of Perception a children’s story about the “disappointment of a small boy who put on his grandmother’s spectacles and took up her book in the expectation of being able himself to find in it the stories which she used to tell him.” But the boy finds no story, “nothing but black and white.” Merleau-Ponty says “For the child . . . the story is a world which there must be some way of magically calling up by putting on spectacles and leaning over a book.” The power of expression that resides in language to bring “the thing expressed into existence’ ” to “ope[n] up to thought new ways, new dimensions and new landscapes, is, in the last analysis, as obscure for the adult as for the child” (PP 459–60/401). Merleau-Ponty consistently emphasizes both the enigmatic quality of perception and language, seeing and speaking, and the need to find new instruments of thought, to open up new dimensions and landscapes. He wants to “recommence everything” (VI 172/130), refusing to settle for the comfort of preconceived and sedimented oppositions between subject and object, I and world, vision and the visible, or the visible and invisible. With the notion of “flesh” he unsettles these distinctions, situating them in a medium that resists the fixity of mutually exclusive categories, an in between, “a sort of 219 220 TINA CHANTER incarnate principle that brings a style of being” (VI 184/139). Thus at the end of the chiasm chapter he can invoke what he calls “two aspects of reversibility”—a reversibility that he says is “the ultimate truth” (VI 204/ 155). First, there is the purpose of philosophy according to Husserl: the restoration of “a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning” (VI 203/155) and secondly there is the fact that “as Valéry said, language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, the forests” (VI 203–4/155). For Irigaray, the reversibility of Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible constitutes a “closed system”1 (ES 161/172), a “closed economy” (ES 161/173), a “closed world” (ES 163/174). “What Merleau-Ponty seeks” she says “is something that closes the circuit” (ES 163/174), that totalizes and encloses (see ES 163/175), that reduces the tactile to the visible (ES 164/ 175). His “way of talking about the flesh . . . already cancels its most powerful components, those that are moreover creative in their power” (ES 164/ 175). In his discourse there is “nothing new, nothing being born. . . . No new speech is possible here” (ES 166/178). “Nothing new can be said. . . . Everything is unceasingly reversible” (ES 167/180). “Nothing new happens, only this permanent weaving between the world and the subject. Which supposes that the subject sees the whole” (ES 170/182). “It is always the same”—“The phenomenology of the flesh that Merleau-Ponty attempts is without question(s). . . . [There is] no Other to keep the world open” (ES 170/183). “Everything is given” (ES 171/184). Is it possible, asks Irigaray finally, “to restore a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning . . . without changing the foundations of language? Without lifting the hypothesis that reversibility is the final truth?” (ES 171/184) How can Irigaray maintain that there is room for nothing new in MerleauPonty ’s phenomenology of the flesh, that nothing new can be said, that there is no room for the other? How can she insist on the closure and “solipsism” (ES 159/169) of his system, on its lack of questioning, and its failure to preserve otherness? Does not Merleau-Ponty precisely call for...

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