The Barbarian Principle: Merleau-Ponty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Listening for the Voice of the Light

287 CHAPTER FOURTEEN Listening for the Voice of the Light Mythical Time through the Musical Idea Jessica Wiskus Abstract Taking as our theme a question from Eye and Mind (“What is depth, what is light, what is being?”), we trace Merleau-Ponty’s final ontological project in its movement to uncover the “genesis of ideality.” Depth (as a third dimension or “voluminosity” through which the presence and absence of things coheres) is, for MerleauPonty , similar to Schelling’s concept of light (as a “third” state binding together or conceiving the Ideal and the Real). Indeed, these notions of depth and light serve as emblems of “a new type of being, a being by porosity, pregnancy, or generality”—a being akin to the χώρα in Plato’s Timaeus. Yet, thanks to its generative capacity, this being must be investigated not only with respect to space (χώρα) but also time. Thus, in the final completed chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty articulates the sense of this “new type of being” through a temporal means: the musical idea of Proust. For the musical melody operates as that through which “incompossibles” cohere (past, present, and future), and in its temporal depth offers a dynamic expression of the very genesis of ideality. I seek in the perceived world nuclei of meaning which are in-visible, but which simply are not invisible in the sense of the absolute negation . . . but in the sense of the other dimensionality, as depth 288 Jessica Wiskus hollows itself out behind height and breadth, as time hollows itself out behind space. (VI2, 236) —Maurice Merleau-Ponty “WhAt is depth, WhAt is light, τί τὸ ὄν?” (eM, 178) questions MerleauPonty in one of his last essays, Eye and Mind. For it is through the process of interrogating these three entities—depth, light, and being— that Merleau-Ponty begins to draw the outline of his final ontological project. And yet this project will lead him into realms increasingly difficult to articulate—beyond the realm of the visual and beyond even the realm of the written—toward the attempted recovery of philosophy as “auscultation” (VI2, 128). But of what could the expression of such a philosophy—“a-philosophy” (NC, 278)—consist?1 It is a question that, perhaps, receives no explicit answer. Let us, nevertheless, follow the pathway of this question, “listening”2 for the unthought that unfolds between the lines of Merleau-Ponty’s later work, for, as he writes, we cannot “define a philosopher’s thought solely in terms of what he had achieved.” Rather, we must “take account of what until the very end his thought was trying to think” (HLP, 5). I. “What is depth?” Depth Through Merleau-Ponty: The Realm of the Simultaneous Because it is seeking depth, writes Merleau-Ponty, modern painting gives “a feeling of mutation within the relations of man and Being” (EM, 179). Thus painting presents, for Merleau-Ponty, an open field for the interrogation of this new relation. He writes, “The enigma [of depth] consists in the fact that I see things, each one in its place, precisely because they eclipse one another, and that they are rivals before my sight precisely because each one is in its own place. Their exteriority is known in their envelopment and their mutual dependence in their autonomy” (EM, 180). Quoting Robert Delaunay, he confirms: “ ‘Depth is the new inspiration’ ” (EM, 179). This idea of depth receives philosophical attention from MerleauPonty because of this “enigmatic” quality of uniting, in one sole gesture, otherwise contradictory elements: exteriority and envelopment, dependence and autonomy. As precisely a relationship between contradictory elements, depth comes to be perceived not in itself but only through the presentation of these elements. That is to say, depth— despite our ability to describe its presence clearly among the situated 289 Listening for the Voice of the Light objects on a painted canvas—does not show itself in the same way as a thing to be seen: It shows itself only through the relationship between things of the visual field. Moreover, it shows itself to the extent that the things themselves are obscured from view (i.e., “because they eclipse one another”); it shows itself as the other side—the unpresentable side—of the things. Is it not, in fact, a kind of absence that gives rise to the perception of depth within the two-dimensional field of a painting? How then, might we think about this third...