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49 Chapter 4 “The Words of the Oracle”: Merleau-Ponty and the “Philosophy of Freudianism” I. A NEW INTEREST FOR PSYCHOANALYSIS In the same year that Merleau-Ponty penned the lines I cited at the beginning of my second chapter, lines which connect the mythical time of Proust’s sensible ideas with “the Freudian idea of the unconscious and the past,” he also wrote the preface to a book entitled Lœuvre de Freud et son importance pour le monde moderne,1 written by the psychoanalyst Angélo Hesnard who at the time supported a position close to Laçan’s.2 In concluding this “Preface,” Merleau-Ponty stressed the “new motives” (PH, 10/72) which were stimulating his interest in Freud’s work. A few pages previously he had acknowledged that . . . a philosophy that is now perhaps more mature, and also the growth of Freudian research—precisely in the direction taken by Doctor Hesnard— would today lead me to express in a different way relations between phenomenology and psychoanalysis, the implicit philosophy of psychoanalysis itself, and in the long run would make me less indulgent than doctor Hesnard generously is toward my earlier attempts. (ibid., 7/69) Nevertheless, this did not stop Merleau-Ponty from noting that the critiques he had leveled against Freudian psychoanalysis in the past “still seem true to me” (ibid.). A few pages earlier, he had summarized such critiques as they were set out in “an early work” (ibid., 5/67), which one could assume to be the Phenomenology of Perception. At issue were the critiques of those who, like him, “consider the Freudian unconscious as an archaic or primordial consciousness, the repressed as a zone of experience that we have not integrated, the body as a sort of natural or innate complex, and communication as a relation between incarnate beings of this sort who are well or badly integrated” (ibid). The “Preface” to Hesnard’s book is contemporaneous with the last of the three courses dedicated to the “concept of nature” that Merleau-Ponty gave at 50 AN UNPRECEDENTED DEFORMATION the Collège de France between the academic years of 1956–57 and 1959–60: it is the course entitled, significantly, “Nature and Logos: the Human Body,”2 which focuses precisely on our body “as the root of symbolism” (N, 259/199). It is precisely in describing “the emergence of symbolism” (RC, 137/98) at this level that Merleau-Ponty refers to what he had qualified a few years earlier , in the summary of another course, the one dedicated to “The Problem of Passivity,” as Freud’s most interesting insight—not the idea of a second “I think” which could know what we do not know about ourselves—but the idea of a symbolism which is primordial, originary, the idea of a “non-conventional thought” (Politzer) enclosed in a “world for us,” which is the source of dreams and more generally of the elaboration of our life. (RC, 69–70/49) The definition of symbolism on which Merleau-Ponty insists with respect to the human body in the course he dedicates to the latter in 1959–60 thus motivates the fundamental place psychoanalysis occupies within it: “symbolism —not in a superficial sense, i.e., a term representing another, holding the place of another,—but in the fundamental sense of: a term which expresses another” (N, 281/219; trans. modified). Amongst the preparatory notes about psychoanalysis that Merleau-Ponty collected for this course, several pages have been rediscovered which he had written for the previous year’s course, entitled “Philosophy Today” (NC, 149– 156; 388–389).3 For a better understanding of these pages, one must therefore recall the intention lying behind this other course. Just like the working notes from The Visible and the Invisible, the “course outline” (ibid., 35–36) begins with the observation of “our state of non-philosophy ” (ibid., 35)4 with regard to which Merleau-Ponty states: “ . . . never has the crisis been so radical” (VI, 219/165). As the course notes explain, it is a matter of a “crisis of rationality in the relations between men” (NC, 40), as well as “in our relations with Nature” (ibid., 42), both of which reflect the “consequences of the development of technology [technique]” (ibid., 46). These course notes then concentrate on the attempt to identify the multiple “cultural symptoms” “that attest to [a] similar crisis situation, i.e., simultaneously both peril and possibility for the rebirth of philosophy: example, in our Western ideology...

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