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Conclusion
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124 M E R L E A U - P O N T Y ’ S P H I L O S O P H Y O F N A T U R E ecceity of the thing cannot be expressed in language or concepts, and the intersubjective significance of things has no existential density. Only a mute perception enjoys the full reality of the thing, while language draws us toward an intellectualization of the world “as object of an infinity of true judgments” (SC 229n1/249n54). What is lacking in The Structure of Behavior is a satisfactory ontological grounding for the relationship between structure and signification. When Merleau-Ponty returns to this problem in Phenomenology of Perception, the dual aspects of the thing are presented as a function of the body’s dialogical exchange with the world. On the one hand, “the thing is inseparable from a person perceiving it, and can never be actually in itself because its articulations are those of our very existence” (PP 370/373). Yet, on the other hand, the thing maintains an aloofness that is the index of its aseity, since it is “rooted in a background of nature which is alien to man” (PP 374/378). The task is therefore to understand “both that the thing is the correlate of my knowing body, and that it rejects that body” (PP 375/379). As we have described in chapter 2, Merleau-Ponty aims to account for this autonomy of the thing in terms of an immemorial dimension that correlates with the anonymity of the “natural self.” The aseity of the thing, as an element of nature, runs deeper than its perceptual structure and presents itself as a nameless resistance to reflection. But it is precisely the being of the “natural self” that remains ambiguous in Phenomenology of Perception, where it is presented both as “co-natural with the world” and as a “tacit cogito” that introduces a fissure or gap into the world of nature. The ambiguity extends to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of radical reflection and its access to the immemorial resistance of nature: what would it mean, then, to think nature in its openness and its aseity? The concept of chiasm in The Visible and the Invisible is MerleauPonty ’s response to this difficulty. The distinction between structure and signification has its ontological foundations in the intertwining of sensible and sense, and the perceptual question-and-reply is subtended by a more fundamental ontological questioning, that is, by the self-interrogation of being. In other words, the reversibility of touching-touched and more generally of sensing and sensible is a manifestation of the reflexivity of being, its own dehiscence into sensible nature and meaning. The encroachment between sense and sensible, on which the duplicity of the thing rests, first inaugurates body and world. Perceptual dialogue is not, therefore, the originary disclosure of the duplicity of the thing, but only its echo or its aftershock. The paradoxical difficulty of reflecting on the prereflective can no longer be treated as a specifically human intrigue but becomes a paradox of being, since reflecting and reflected-on are 125 T H E H U M A N – N A T U R E C H I A S M the dimensions opened by being’s self-segregation. The consequence is that being is not primordially self-identical but an event of originary nondifference of which the divergence between touching and touched is the exemplar. The duplicity of the thing is the reverberation of the duplicity of the body and, ultimately, of being. One consequence of this duplicity of being is that meaning, its invisible dimension, is not a pure negation of or break with its visible dimension , and neither can it be founded on acts of consciousness: “The separation [écart] which, in first approximation, forms meaning, is not a no I affect myself with, a lack which I constitute as a lack by the upsurge of an end which I give myself—it is a natural negativity, a first institution, always already there” (VI 270/216). Rather than locate meaning within the gap that the negating subject opens within the positivity of being, we must instead recognize that being doubles itself from within, that its dehiscence into visible and invisible is already a separation or folding of a natural negativity. Reflection is therefore the movement through us of a negation sunken into being: “He who questions is not nothing, he is— and this is something quite different...