The Intercorporeal Self

Chapter 5: Ipseity and Language

165 FIVE IpsEIty and LanguagE Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man. —Merleau‑Ponty I. LanguagE and gEsturE In each of the previous chapters we have come up against what some read‑ ers have identified as a certain tension in Merleau‑Ponty’s thinking about subjectivity in Phenomenology of Perception. On the one hand Merleau‑Ponty seems to suggest that, beneath the explicit self‑consciousness of the reflect‑ ing subject, there is a more fundamental “primary consciousness (conscience originaire)” (PhP, xv/X), or, as we have seen in the “Temporality” chapter, an ‘ultimate consciousness.’ The task of philosophical reflection would thus appear to be to make manifest this prior consciousness, an ultimate presence of the self to itself, through an interrogation of perceptual life, an interroga‑ tion concerned with disclosing the ‘I can’ in reference to which the world appears. Thus, when Merleau‑Ponty speaks of a “transcendental field” we might be inclined to think that he refers to a transcendental subjectivity that has not yet, as it were, found its voice. And when he says that phe‑ nomenology is “a study of the appearance of being to consciousness” (PhP, 61/74), we might be inclined to put the emphasis on ‘consciousness’ as the ultimate ground of the ‘appearance of being.’ Thus, as we saw in chapter 4, some readers have suggested that Phenomenology of Perception is limited by its reliance on the categories of a philosophy of consciousness, that it is preoc‑ cupied with epistemological problems concerning the subjective grounds of knowledge and that it is thus insufficiently attentive to the problems that its own analyses raise with respect to the category of ‘consciousness.’ In this 166 THE INTERCORPOREAL SELF connection, as we saw in chapter 4, some, like M.C. Dillon, have objected to the use of the term ‘tacit cogito’ precisely because it seems to suggest that we are already conscious before being explicitly conscious and that the act of reflection merely brings this primary consciousness to light. Accord‑ ing to these readers, what Merleau‑Ponty has in mind with this notion of a primary consciousness is far from clear. Renaud Barbaras, to take another example, argues that the notion of the tacit cogito is arrived at by way of a negation of the intellectualist cogito and that, The distance [Merleau‑Ponty] takes in relation to intellectualism when he defines this cogito as tacit takes the shape of a negation that is devoid of sense. We have to wonder, in fact, what could be meant by a cogito not defined by self‑presence, a cogito that neverthe‑ less makes the world spring forth without knowing it, a cogito that divines the world instead of constituting it. Merleau‑Ponty cannot maintain the cogito and simultaneously dismiss the intellectualist interpretation: the negations by which Merleau‑Ponty characterizes the tacit cogito in order to distance himself from intellectualism would be consistent only if they led to a negation of the cogito itself.1 According to Barbaras’s interpretation, Phenomenology of Perception remains caught up in a certain intellectualism insofar as it does not sufficiently criticize the notion of consciousness. It works backward from reflective con‑ sciousness toward the world of perception (which it takes to be the objec‑ tive correlate of a tacit consciousness) instead of grasping the phenomena of perception in their ontological originality. On the other hand, in our previous chapters, we have heard Mer‑ leau‑Ponty speak of an original past, a sense of a past that has never been present to a consciousness, but that nonetheless haunts a consciousness. As a conscious subject who is also, fundamentally, a sentient subject, I inherit “another self which has already sided with the world”; I find myself already responding to a ‘vague beckoning,’ a responsive activity that is my own, but whose origin “is anterior to myself” (PhP, 215–16/249–50). We have argued that all of this indeed attests to an ontological dimension within which a subject is situated, but that exceeds the scope of the ‘I can.’ To say that subjectivity is necessarily situated, in the sense that we have been advocating, would not simply entail that it is my ‘knowing‑body’ (precisely an ‘I can,’ rather than an ‘I think’) that anticipates the world, and that, for this reason, my consciousness is not able to overcome...