Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh (review)

Chiasms is a collection of essays intended to help situate Merleau-Ponty's notion of flesh within the "modernism-postmodernism debate." Evans and Lawlor identify this debate as today's "chief intellectual and cultural problem" and describe it as revolving around the question of whether we can find any order and whether thought can have any credibility once God is announced dead and the foundations established within modern philosophy are dismantled by the critical maneuvers of postmodernism (2-3). Merleau-Ponty's notion of flesh is taken to be "central to this debate" for two related reasons, the first implied by the editors and the second explicitly stated. First, the editors read Merleau-Ponty's own thought as undergoing an important shift between his Phenomenology of Perception, which "can be seen as the culmination of the humanistic tradition within modernism" (2), and The Visible and the Invisible, which takes a more postmodern attitude by virtue of giving up the problematic, modernist starting point of the Phenomenology—namely, the distinction between consciousness and object (9). Within Merleau-Ponty's thought, then, a struggle between modernism and postmodernism can be seen. Second, the editors see this notion of flesh as central "because," having been "left in an incomplete state" by Merleau-Ponty's death, it "still requires explications allowing us to extend it and to consider limitations within it" (1). In other words, the notion of flesh is at the center of the "modernism-postmodernism debate" because the precise way in which it contributes to this debate still requires interrogation.

Lawlor and Evans make this openness of the notion of flesh the organizing principle of the collection, gathering together essays that elucidate this notion in different ways and dividing the book up into three sections: "Explications of the Flesh," "Extensions of the Flesh," and "Limitations of the Flesh." The contributors are philosophers from Europe and the United States, many of whom have had long-term involvement in the field of Merleau-Ponty scholarship. Some of the essays are previously published, though (with one exception) not in the English language.

Explications of the Flesh

Françoise Dastur, in "World, Flesh, Vision," claims that though Merleau-Ponty retains a primacy of sensibility, which would seem to place him amongst philosophers of consciousness and presence, he is not in fact a philosopher of consciousness and presence, for he radicalizes that mode of thinking by questioning its presuppositions from the inside. Part of this claim is that Merleau-Ponty does not do away with consciousness, but rather conceives of Being (called flesh) as pregnant sensibility and dehiscence, such that consciousness is reconceived as the openness that develops out of Being.

In his "Flesh and Verb in the Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty" (which might also be translated "Flesh and Word" in order to suggest a reference to biblical themes of creation and incarnation), Henri Maldiney understands The Visible and the Invisible not as a turn from phenomenology to ontology, but as a "new phenomenology of perception" (57) motivated by the recognition that "phenomenology is short-circuited . . . if it does not take into account the invisible" (56) for "what makes visible is not visible; it is an 'invisible in principle'" (59). Maldiney devotes considerable attention to Merleau-Ponty's notions of invisibility, transcendence, and negativity, finishing with the claim that "the intervention of speech in wild Being accomplishes the visibility of the invisible" (73).

Renaud Barbaras's "Perception and Movement: The End of the Metaphysical Approach" argues that Merleau-Ponty's criticism of empiricism and intellectualism brought him to the recognition that he needed to articulate an ontology different from the ontology that these philosophies presuppose, namely, an ontology in which Being is conceived as...