SOURCE: Flynn, Bernard Charles. “Textuality and the Flesh: Derrida and Merleau-Ponty.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 15, no. 2 (May 1984): 164-79.

[In the following essay, Flynn suggests what he terms “correspondences” between Merleau-Ponty's late writings and certain features of the work of French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida.]

The title of this essay obviously suggests a comparison, a comparison which at first glance seems highly unlikely. Merleau-Ponty is the author of an essay entitled “The Primacy of Perception,”¹ and Derrida is the author of the statement, “I don't know what perception is and I don't believe that anything like perception exists.”² Furthermore, in Derrida's thesis defence, “The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations,” when he is discussing the itinerary of his thought, he speaks of the importance of transcendental phenomenology for the development of his thinking but “not—especially not—in the versions proposed by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty which were then dominant, but rather in opposition to them or without them …”³ He then goes on to mention the importance of Tran-Duc-Thao's Phénoménolologie et matérialisme dialectique.⁴ Thus both thematically and in terms of ‘influence’ a comparison between these two thoughts would seem forced and violent.

Let me begin by stating that I am simply not interested in the question of ‘historical influences.’ I shall neither try to establish nor to dismiss the possible influence of Merleau-Ponty on Derrida. What I will argue is that some of the most important ideas in the thought of Derrida are already adumbrated in the late work of Merleau-Ponty, especially in the posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible.⁵ In particular I wish to point out these ‘correspondences’ between the work of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence, his ‘concept’ of différance and his conception of textuality. The word ‘correspondence’ is used here advisedly and in quotation marks because I do not wish to suggest an identity between these ideas in each thinker. I am using the word ‘correspondence’ as it is used in the Paris metro—as switching points—as points of philosophical gestures that may lead from one thinker to the other, as places which suggest the construction of an intertext. I shall proceed by sketching out Derrida's conception of metaphysics as the thought of presence, his critique of metaphysics, his ‘notion’ of différance, his conception of writing as arché-writing and textuality as that which escapes presence thereby being repressed by metaphysics. Subsequently, I shall construct the points of correspondence to locations in the text of Merleau-Ponty.

For Derrida, in this respect close to Heidegger, metaphysics as onto-theo-logy is the thought of Presence. Metaphysics is the thought, or the desire to be the thought, of a Presence which excludes Absence. Metaphysics is constituted by sets of oppositions, the most fundamental of which is that of presence and absence, inside and outside. In his study of Plato's Phaedrus, Derrida writes:

In order for these contrary values (good/evil, true/false, essence/appearance, inside/outside, etc.) to be in opposition, each of the terms must be simply external to the other, which means that one of these oppositions (the opposition between inside and outside) must already be accredited as the matrix of all possible opposition.⁶

Derrida views metaphysics as the strategic operation by which one attempts to think the first term of these oppositions in such a way as not to implicate the second term. Thus the second term can be conceived of as being derived from the first by privation. These systems of oppositions are not simply oppositions, they are hierarchically arranged in such a way that the first term dominates the second term—it (the second) simply being the privation of the first term, what is external to it.

With the purpose of exposing this strategy which is constitutive of metaphysics, Derrida ‘reads’ a number of thinkers within the metaphysical tradition which is the only tradition that we have. In this paper I have chosen to briefly consider Derrida's reading of the philosophy of Husserl because it can serve as an example of his reading of other writers, and also because Merleau-Ponty has written on Husserl. The text that Derrida deals with is the First Investigation of Husserl's Logical Investigations,⁷ a text where some ‘essential distinctions’ are proposed. These essential distinctions are the two senses of the word ‘sign’: expression and indication. Derrida's analysis of this text will not be presented here in detail but only in an outline sufficient to show that with the maintenance of this distinction Husserl imports the tradition of metaphysics into the heart of the phenomenological project, or one might say that the particular strategy of maintaining this distinction is the phenomenological project. What Derrida attempts to show is that in the First Investigation of Husserl's Logical Investigations the die is cast, that the seed of transcendental phenomenology is contained within these ‘essential distinctions.’ He perceives that these distinctions already contain what will later become the transcendental reduction—the epoché. Let us see how this is the case. All signs by definition have signification; but an indicative sign is a sign without meaning, which is to say that it does not bear a meaning within itself. Rather an indicative sign triggers an empirical association, it makes the mind pass from one thought to the anticipation or expectation of another thought. “There is no meaning-content present in indication; there is only an empty signifier and nothing that is signified.”⁸ Smoke is an indication of fire but it is not animated by the meaning ‘fire’; it rather provokes an empirical association. Whereas, on the contrary, expression is a sign charged with meaning. “Expressions are signs which ‘want to say,’ which ‘mean’ (vouloir dire).”⁹ The expressive sign is animated by a meaning. Furthermore, Derrida writes, “Meaning doubtless comes to the sign and transforms it into expression only by means of speech, oral discourse.”¹⁰

At this point it looks as if things are fairly straightforward: an expressive sign is employed in oral discourse, and any other type of sign as something leading us to think of something else is an indicative sign. However, things are not that simple because expression is always caught up with, entangled with, intertwined with indication. Derrida quotes Husserl from the First Investigation:

… meaning—in communicative speech—is always bound up (verflochten) with such an indicative relation (Anzeichen-sein), and this in its turn leads to a wider concept, since meaning is also capable of occurring without such a connection.¹¹

This is to say that in actual communication expression is intertwined with indication, but that there can be expression without indication. It is toward the telos of an expression without indication that the technics of the reduction will be elaborated. “Indication must be set aside, abstracted, and ‘reduced’ as an extrinsic and empirical phenomenon.”¹² This must be the case, Derrida claims, even if getting rid of this confusion involves an infinite task.

The ‘occasion’ of the intertwining of expression and indication in the communicative use of language are basically twofold: the fact of intersubjectivity and the sensible character of the signifier. In both cases one encounters what Derrida calls the core of indication: “indication takes place whenever the sense-giving act, the animating intention, the living spirituality of the meaning-intention, is not fully present.”¹³ When I understand the speech of another, his words indicate to me the intentional acts by which his discourse is animated and transformed from noise into meaningful speech. There is indication in this intersubjective situation because the intentions of the other are not fully present to me as they are to him, nor as mine are to me. This brings us to the second indicative movement of communication, since I have access to the other's meaning only as indicated by the sensible character, the ‘physical side,’ of the signifiers that he employs. This physical side, this sensible character of the signifier, is an obstacle to the full self-presence required for the expressive employment of signs.

The ‘reduction’ of indication will require a movement from the ‘real’ communicative employment of language to ‘solitary mental life,’ to thinking as an interior ‘dialogue’ that I have with myself. This dialogue happens within the sphere of ‘ownness.’ Within this solitary sphere of mental life there is nothing which exists as an obstacle to my immediate presence to myself. Precisely what made the communicative use of language indicative rather than expressive was the lack of any immediate intuition of the other's lived experience. Indication is inextricably linked to otherness. Within the solitary sphere of mental life there is no need for indication because there is nothing to be indicated. There is nothing that eludes my immediate self-presence. When an ‘alter-ego’ does seem to emerge in an inner dialogue, as for example when I say to myself, “You cannot go on spending money like this, you will end up in the poorhouse,” the one, the I, seems to have become two—the moralizing judge and the profligate—but when this happens it is brought about by means of a false, fictitious, use of language; “… it is a fiction, and after all, fiction is only fiction.”¹⁴ It is neither indication nor expression; rather it is a practical exhortation and not a theoretical statement. The subject learns nothing about itself that could be put into the propositional form S is P. This is not the case even when it seems superficially to be so as when I say to myself, “You are a monster.” This utterance is really an evaluation merely taking the form of a declarative statement. For Husserl, there is always and in principle a subordination of practical or evaluative uses of language to theoretical statements. “He [Husserl] always determined the model of language in general—indicative as well as expressive—on the basis of Theorein.”¹⁵ One recalls that Husserl's debate with ‘psychologism’ is centered around the question of which theoretical discourse would found logic as a practical and evaluative enterprise—psychology or pure logic; but that a theoretical discourse would found or subtend a practical one was never put into question. Not only is the advent of the other in the sphere of ownness fictitious, but even the words used in the soliloquy are “the imagination of the word”¹⁶—words as imagined. The inner monologue has no recourse to real empirical words, nor even to the ‘real’ representation of words in the imagination. All that is needed is the word as imagined, the word as the unreal correlate of the act of imagining.

Thus, for Husserl, the expressive employment of language unmixed with any indicative function is encountered only in the sphere of ownness, what in his later works will be called the transcendentally reduced sphere of experience—the sphere of experience that would survive unchanged “the hypothetical destruction of the world.”¹⁷ Indication is a re-presentation of my meanings with the purpose of communicating them to another who does not have direct access to my mental life, Within my interior monologue there is no need to re-present my meanings because they are immediately present to me. In this discussion of a return to the ‘inner man,’ of the sphere of ownness, one must not be led to believe that Derrida conceives of Husserl's regression to interiority as a sort of collapse of the self upon itself—a confused, unarticulated intuition of self. Indeed, for Husserl, even within the sphere of ownness the structure of consciousness is highly articulated. It is intentional—“All consciousness is consciousness of something.” As has been shown above, Husserl's paradigm for the inner monologue—the sphere of expression—is not my ruminations about myself, it is rather my thinking to myself about something, that is to say, a thinking, which intends a meaning (Bedeutung).

Without forcing Husserl's intention we could perhaps define, if not translate, bedeuten by ‘mean’ (or ‘want to say’; in French vouloir-dire), in the sense that a speaking subject, ‘expressing himself,’ as Husserl says, ‘about something,’ means or wants to say (veut dire) something and that an expression likewise means or ‘wants to say’ something.¹⁸

This something that the act of meaning wants to say is a meaning, that is to say, it is an ideal object. The meaning is not a real part of the act that intends it, as is the hylectic data through which it is intended. This ideal object is characterized by Husserl as not being a part of the irreversible temporal flow, as is the act which intends it; this is to say that unlike the temporally unique act that intends a meaning, the meaning itself is repeatable—repeatable as identical not as similar.

The purely expressive sign excludes indication because it excludes all reference to absence. Since my meanings are fully present to me, I have no need to indicate them to myself. It is to the intersection of these two problematics in Husserl's text—the ideality of meaning and the distinction between the expressive and the indicative sign (the phenomenological reduction)—that Derrida directs our attention. The ideality of meaning is what will generate the distinction between indication and expression, since only the ideal which is essentially independent of the empirical, real, signifier is fully present. “Ideality is the preservation or mastery of presence in repetition.”¹⁹ For Husserl, ideal being (meaning) is repeatable because it is ideal; its repeatability is the index of its ideality. Derrida will argue, on the contrary, that ideality is constituted by and across acts of repetition. Repetition is not something that simply befalls fully constituted original ideal being—meaning—from the outside; rather there is no original ideality except through its repetition. The possibility of repetition is constitutive of the essence of ideal being. “The presence-of-the-present [ideal meaning] is derived from repetition and not the reverse.”²⁰ Try to consider the contrary: an act of consciousness would have to intend, to be of, a meaning which would be in principle non-repeatable. It is obvious that such a situation is impossible, since the non-repeatable meaning would have to become a real part of the intentional act. But if repetition is essential to ideality, it is not possible to oppose an original present meaning to its future, not present, absent, ‘merely’ possible repetitions. It is impossible to oppose presence to absence—original to reproduction.

Similarly, Derrida shows that the sign as such, before it is bifurcated into indicative and expressive, exists within a structure of repetition. A sign that would not be repeatable would not be a sign at all, it would be an event.

… this unity of the signifying form is constituted only by its iterability, by the possibility of being repeated in the absence not only of its referent, which goes without saying, but of a determined signified or current intention of signification, as of every present intention of communication.²¹

In “Signature Event Context,”²² Derrida argues at length for the essential repeatability of all signifying forms. But for Husserl only the indicative sign re-presents, whereas the expressive sign employed in solitary mental life has no need to re-present. The living presence of consciousness to itself renders re-presentation superfluous. However, if all signs exist within a structure of repetition, then the distinction between indicative and expressive signs, and along with it the possibility of a reduction to a sphere of immanence, is undermined. Ultimately, what thwarts the self-reflective project is our prior inherence in a domain characterized by repetition—a domain where presence is generated through and across repetition.

What Derrida, and as will be shown later the late Merleau-Ponty, testifies to is the inability of reflection to extract itself from dispersion and to constitute the coincidence of reflective consciousness with itself.²³ That which renders impossible this coincidence of consciousness with itself is what Derrida calls writing. As is well known by now, what Derrida calls writing is not to be equated with the ordinary sense of writing—black marks on a white paper. Writing, or better arché-writing, is everything that resists assimilation to the presence of consciousness to itself—the materiality of the signifier, the work of différance, spacing, gaping, deferring in time, and internal differentiation. According to Derrida, metaphysics constitutes itself as the desire to be the thought of presence and self-presence—presence without distance; it does this through the repression of writing and the valorization of an idealized conception of speech and voice.

Derrida traces this repression of writing and the valorization of speech in Plato (“Plato's Pharmacy”²⁴), in Hegel (“The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel's Semiology”²⁵), in Saussure (Of Grammatology²⁶) and in other texts. Nevertheless, in this paper we shall remain with his analysis of Husserl. It is the phenomenological voice—the voice that keeps silent, the voice that conducts an inner soliloquy in which expression is found uncontaminated with indication—that for Derrida is the metaphysical moment par excellence in Husserl's thought. In Speech and Phenomena, he writes:

The ‘apparent transcendence’ of the voice thus results from the fact that the signified, which is always ideal by essence, the ‘expressed’ Bedeutung, is immediately present in the act of expression. This immediate presence results from the fact that the phenomenological ‘body’ of the signifier seems to fade away at the very moment it is produced; it seems already to belong to the element of ideality. It phenomenologically reduces itself, transforming the worldly opacity of its body into pure diaphaneity. This effacement of the sensible body and its exteriority is for consciousness the very form of the immediate presence of the signified.²⁷

And further, “The signifier would become perfectly diaphanous due to the absolute proximity to the signified.”²⁸ Thus for Derrida the moment of presence is constituted by the occultation of the ‘body’ of the signifier in the inner voice. The phenomenological voice disengages consciousness from the contingency of the world in the form of the ‘materiality’ of the signifier by being an “auto-affection of a unique kind.”²⁹ Hearing oneself speak is an auto-affection onto which the form of universality is joined. Because it is an absolutely pure auto-affection, implicating no moment of exteriority or particularity, it has the form of universality—the absence of empirical determinations.

The voice is the being which is present to itself in the form of universality, as consciousness; the voice is consciousness.³⁰

Derrida's critical practice is to show that the ‘second term’ of the metaphysical opposition (expression/indication, speech/writing, identity/difference), far from being merely external to the first, is deeply implicated in it. In the case of Husserl, he shows a writing within speech—a difference within identity. The inner voice constitutes a domain of identity because it remains within a sphere of ‘ownness,’ with no recourse to the other, the different, the world. However, Derrida argues that this very self-identity is constituted by self-differentiation.

Auto-affection is not a modality of experience that characterizes a being that would already be itself (autos). It produces sameness as self-relation within self-difference; it produces sameness as the nonidentical.³¹

This moment of alterity within ipseity, Derrida locates within Husserl's own doctrine, namely in his conception of subjectivity as radically temporal. Subjectivity produces itself as itself by retaining a past and protending a future. It is itself by an auto-differentiation into a past which it retains and a future which it protends. Temporality is this spontaneous generation of alterity. “… this process [temporality] is indeed a pure auto-affection in which the same is the same only in being affected by the other, only by becoming the other of the same.”³² Temporalization has the structure of the trace, of always already being affected by the other—of being oneself across and through differentiation. An origin—a moment of simple, indifferentiated, present—is always already past; as Levinas has said, it is a past that has never been present. The same is always already implicated in the other, and likewise expression is always already implicated in indication. “Their intertwining (Verflechtung) is primordial; it is not a contingent association that could be undone by methodic attention and patient reduction.”³³

Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence does not lead to a metaphysics of absence, but rather to a reflection on what is neither present nor absent—the movement of différance. He writes the French word ‘difference’ with an ‘a’ (différence, différance); the presence or absence of the ‘a’ is inaudible, it exists only as written, it cannot be spoken. According to Derrida, metaphysics is constituted by the repression of writing both in the ordinary sense of writing and as arché-writing. This repression has been effected by the claim that writing is ‘only’ a representation of speech, which in its turn is ‘only’ a representation of a pure signified. Writing is thus the sign of a sign. Derrida plays with the ‘a’ in différance to indicate, certainly not to ‘prove,’ his contention that there is a dimension in writing (in both senses) which cannot be assimilated into speech. With the ‘notion’ of différance Derrida wishes to indicate all that resists identity. He evokes the two senses of the word différance: to ‘put off’ in time, as in a deferred payment; to differ, in the sense of being other than. Writing as arché-writing is repressed by metaphysics because it refuses identity, which is to say, it is inhabited by the ‘structure’ of différance. Différance refers us “to an order that resists the opposition, one of the founding oppositions of philosophy, between the sensible and the intelligible.”³⁴ Metaphysics conceives of the sign as deferred presence. The sign is a moment of the sensible that refers to, that takes the place of, that provisionally stands in for, a purely intelligible signified—the moment of the fulfilled intuition. The signifier (the sensible) is to the signified as a re-presentation is to an original, it is deferred indication. Derrida argues that the ‘original’ is constituted through différance.

Due to the limited space of this article, rather than dwelling at length on Derrida's notion of différance, let us simply point out that his critique of, his deconstruction (“… a word I have never liked and one whose fortune has disagreeably surprised me.”³⁵) of Husserl has been effected by locating the operation of différance within the texts of Husserl. Put somewhat grossly, Husserl's writings are metaphysical texts—texts finalized toward the opposition between identity and difference, presence and absence—nevertheless Derrida finds within them operations which contest and undermine this opposition. Specifically, following Derrida we have indicated two instances of the eruption of the play of différance within a work dedicated to identity: firstly, in Husserl's analysis of the ideality of meaning, repetition was to be an index of the ideality of an original meaning, whereas Derrida has shown that on the contrary, the ideality of the ‘original’ is generated through and across acts of repetition; secondly, Husserl evokes the solitary sphere of mental life as a “sphere of ownness”—a sphere of immanence—it is the domain of a voice which rejecting the effective and communicative employment of language speaks only to itself, it is a domain of ‘auto-affection,’ and as Derrida has shown, the differentiation implicated in this auto-affection is not accidental to the ‘self’ that is differentiated, on the contrary, this differentiation is what generates the self. In both of these cases, différance (alterity) precedes identity (ipseity).

According to Derrida, metaphysics represses or rather contains the play of différance. In Speech and Phenomena, he writes, “… this determination of being as ideality is properly a valuation, an ethico-theoretical act …”³⁶, and in “Signature Event Context,”³⁷ he speaks of Austin's exclusion of ‘non-serious’ language as motivated by ethical considerations. The constitution of being as fundamentally identical with itself (as substance, as subject, as spirit), and therefore not subjected to the play of différance, has ethical and even institutional implications. If the constitution of being as presence, as identity, is or is perceived as an ethical imperative, then in what would its transgression consist? Note that we are not evoking the idea of a thought outside of metaphysics, but rather a practice of thinking which transgresses what might be called the metaphysical imperative: “Thou shalt think being as identical with itself.” This practice is a transgression of boundaries, an effacement of lines of demarcation, a contestation of the rights of property and parental authority—the written text disjoined from living speech is like a child sent into the world without the protection of its father, says Plato in the Phaedrus. The institution of property, parental legitimacy and authorial intention exist to circumscribe, to limit, the play of différance. The play of writing is presided over and made into a totality by the pre-existent totality of the signified. This totality of the signified Derrida characterizes as the Book.

The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the disruption of writing … against difference in general …³⁸

He thus constitutes an opposition between the book and the text. The text is writing insofar as it escapes the totalizing circumscription of the book.

Our reflection on Derrida will end by specifying in what sense writing can be said to escape totality. In his discussion of the work of Lévi-Strauss in “Structure, Sign and Play,” Derrida speaks of two senses in which a field may be said to escape totalization: on the one hand, in the classical sense when the field is too rich and contains more than could be included in any totalization; on the other hand, in Derrida's sense when there is not too much but too little, when “there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions.”³⁹ The text liberated from the book is this wandering, meandering, play of significations without a determinate or definitive center. Having thus sketched out some of the fundamental ideas of Derrida, let us now turn to the work of Merleau-Ponty to see if indeed we can find there the ‘correspondences’ that were mentioned above.

Merleau-Ponty's style of doing philosophy is markedly different from that of Derrida. It does not for the most part take the form of ‘commentaries’ or reflections on other philosophers within the tradition. This is not to say that the thoughts of other philosophers are far from his mind when he elaborates his own position. Merleau-Ponty does not attempt a ‘historical reduction’ in the manner of Descartes or Husserl; rather he develops his own thought in opposition to the dominant strains within the tradition—empiricism or objectivism and idealism or intellectualism—which as we shall see have for him an underlying unity.

In The Structure of Behavior,⁴⁰ Merleau-Ponty follows research done in empirical psychology, especially gestalt psychology, for the purpose of showing that the actual advance of its research throws into question the ontological foundation on which this research was predicated. In particular, he shows that the notion of gestalt is incompatible with either an objectivist or an intellectualist ontology.

More generally, [this notion] form or gestalt saves us from the alternative of a philosophy which juxtaposes externally associated terms and of another philosophy which discovers relations which are intrinsic to thought in all phenomena.⁴¹

In this work, Merleau-Ponty opposes the notion of the universe as the sum of fully determinate entities, to the concept of the world as an open-ended system of references given to perception. He is critical of any attempt to analyze the world as the causal product of the universe—the indeterminate as a function of the determinate. “It is not the real world which constitutes the perceived world.”⁴² On the contrary, the ‘real world’ is constituted on the basis of the perceived world.

In The Phenomenology of Perception,⁴³ Merleau-Ponty again elaborates his own position against the background of a presentation and critique of objectivism and intellectualism, empiricism and idealism. What he accomplishes by this procedure is to show that the positions at the opposite poles of the philosophical spectrum share one common assumption, namely, the determinacy of being. In their analyses of perception, both objectivism and intellectualism relegate the ambiguity of the perceived world, the trailing off of objects into an indefinite horizon, to the status of mere appearances—something ‘on the side of consciousness.’ Being is itself determinate, it is merely ‘for us’ that there is ambiguity, indeterminacy, horizons. Empiricism analyzes perception not in terms of what we see but “what we ought to see, according to the retinal image.”⁴⁴ What is ‘really perceived’ is what is caused by the world on the retina which is itself a part of the real world. Intellectualism does not reduce perception simply to the reception of stimuli, nevertheless, it bases perception upon the reception of determinate sensations. The activity of mind—judgment—supplements the passive reception of stimuli from the ‘real world.’ “Judgment is often introduced as what sensation lacks to make perception possible.⁴⁵ Both empiricism and intellectualism analyze perception in terms of a ‘constancy hypothesis.’

The objective world being given, it is assumed that it passes on to the sense-organs messages which must be registered, then deciphered in such a way as to reproduce in us the original text. Hence we have in principle a point-by-point correspondence and constant connection between the stimulus and the elementary perception.⁴⁶

This hypothesis of constancy, this “obsession with being, this attempt to think the phenomenal world as the causal product of the ‘real world’,” all of which Merleau-Ponty criticized in his early works, is renamed positivism in his late work. Merleau-Ponty's use of the term ‘positivism’ is not limited to the type of philosophy that grew up in Vienna, although it would certainly include Vienna Circle philosophy with its phantasm of an ideal language—a language without ambiguity. By positivism Merleau-Ponty means any philosophy for which Being is ultimately full positivity, any philosophy in which “being is what it is.” It is as a form of positivism that he criticizes the philosophy of Sartre.⁴⁷

Merleau-Ponty's thought on the hither side of positivism, or metaphysics, generates a radically new philosophical sensibility.⁴⁸ It is on this style of thinking that we will now focus our attention in order to indicate a mode of philosophical thought in some respects strikingly similar to that of Derrida. Let us begin with the concept of the flesh, “that for which there is no name in traditional philosophy.” The flesh exists as divergence (écart), as non-coincidence. In his article entitled “Le Corps, La Chair” (“The Body, The Flesh”), Claude Lefort gives a description of Merleau-Ponty's notion of the flesh:

Flesh, ‘mass worked interiorly’, he writes; not substance, but ‘element’; not positive being, but ‘latency’, ‘dimensionality’. Tissue of difference, continual accession to itself, we would like to say, in a ‘dehiscence’, a scission such that the self, as originary, is ‘always elsewhere’, such that the advent is always marked by its expulsion, by its rejection, by its amputation, rivered here and now, at a distance from another shore, turned toward something through the effect of a returning which makes its own absence, opens itself in two by the movement which opens it to the outside—it is that which is given to us to think there, the writer designates it as the ‘last notion’, as ‘that which has no name in any philosophy’.⁴⁹

In this quotation, Lefort has assembled those aspects of Merleau-Ponty's concept of the flesh which separate it from the concepts of traditional metaphysics. In the existent chapters of The Visible and the Invisible, particularly in the last chapter, Merleau-Ponty elaborates the notion of flesh in terms of the reversibility of vision and the visible.

If it [the body] touches them and sees them, this is only because, being of their family, itself visible and tangible, it uses its own being as a means to participate in theirs, because the body belongs to the order of the things as the world is universal flesh.⁵⁰

Later he writes, “it [the flesh] is Visibility sometimes wandering and sometimes reassembled.”⁵¹ In “Le Corps, La Chair,” Lefort shows in detail that the notion of the flesh in The Visible and the Invisible is not a re-elaboration of the concept of the body from The Phenomenology of Perception. It is not a notion to be used exclusively in the analysis of the sensible or of perception, in fact Merleau-Ponty speaks of a flesh of language and a flesh of history. For him the notion of the flesh does not designate a particular region of being but Being itself as non-coincidence, or as coincidence deferred. The Flesh is Being as reversibility. Insofar as this notion of reversibility is orchestrated through an analysis of the body—the right hand touching the left hand as it touches the things—it is our contention that Merleau-Ponty was interested in the body not in terms of a “regional ontology” but in terms of the body as archetype of Being. Between the hand that touches and the thing touched there is a “relationship of principle.” The hand that touches can in its turn, take its place among the tangible things and be touched. But Merleau-Ponty adds,

… we spoke summarily of a reversibility of the seeing and the visible, of the touching and the touched. It is time to emphasize that it is a reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the things, but I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization, and one of two things always occurs: either my right hand really passes over to the rank of touched, but then its hold on the world is interrupted; or it retains its hold on the world, but then I do not really touch it—my right hand touching, I palpate with my left hand only its outer covering.⁵²

When Merleau-Ponty analyzes language he shows a similar deferred reversibility between signifier and signified. Both of these analyses present the Being of flesh as unachieved reversibility. Being as non-coincidence subverts the metaphysical categories of inside and outside, since Being resides neither in the interiority of a subject defined as coincidence with itself—the ‘outside world’ being its other—nor in the ‘objective world’ with the ‘interior mind’ as simply a domain of representation. Nor is Being a synthesis of interior and exterior, mind and object; rather Being as flesh exists as non-coincidence, as the coming and going which poses each as other than the other.

Earlier we cited Derrida to the effect that the opposition between the sensible and the intelligible (the visible and the invisible) was one of the founding gestures of metaphysics. Indeed Nietzsche writes his ‘history of metaphysics,’ “How The ‘True World’ Became a Fable: The History of an Error,”⁵³ in terms of the gradual fading of the ‘true world’—the super-sensible. We wish to insist that Merleau-Ponty not be understood as attempting to rediscover the ‘richness’ and immediacy of the visible world in opposition to the supersensible world, since this would be yet another version of the metaphysics of presence. With his notion of the flesh as écart, as non-coincidence with itself, ‘both’ the domain of the visible and the domain of the invisible refuse coincidence with ‘themselves.’

It is therefore not a de facto invisible, like an object hidden behind another, and not an absolute invisible, which would have nothing to do with the visible. Rather it is the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being.⁵⁴

The invisible is not a being of the supersensible world that would be given in an intellectual intuition, rather it is the invisible of the visible. The invisible “is not alien to the flesh [it) is that which gives it its axes, its depth, its dimensions”;⁵⁵ and conversely, the visible is not full presence, total immediacy. The visible is crisscrossed and given to sight by its invisible logos. The object of perception, far from being a moment of full presence that would ‘found’ other strata of meanings, is itself caught in the play of the visible and the invisible—the reversibility of the vision and the visible. In at least one respect, the perceived is like the sign in Saussure's conception of language: its presence is subtended by absence. Of the visible, Merleau-Ponty writes:

… a visible is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null, but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world—less a color or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility.⁵⁶

(emphasis mine)

What is being suggested here is that in the late work of Merleau-Ponty Being is not thought of as identical with itself, which is to say that it is not thought metaphysically, and that something like the structure of différance is already operative in this work.

Now let us turn to the notion of auto-affection, a notion which as we have seen in Derrida's analysis of Husserl, and could have seen in his analyses of a number of other philosophers, plays a major role in the constitution of metaphysics. According to Derrida, for metaphysics the prototype of auto-affection is hearing oneself speak. As was shown above, the diaphanous character of the signifier of inner speech—the living breath—motivates the occultation of the body of the signifier thus giving rise to the phantasm of a consciousness totally present to itself, coinciding with itself and being the bearer of universality. Hearing oneself speak is the only form of auto-affection that will perform the role that metaphysics assigns to it. Derrida evokes other forms of auto-affection, e.g., “touching and being touched,” nevertheless, he finds this form of auto-affection unsuited for the role that metaphysics would assign to it because “the surface of my body, as something external, must begin by being exposed in the world.”⁵⁷ For Merleau-Ponty, the experience of touching myself touching the world is a form of ‘auto-affection’ which plays an important role in his thought. In the ‘choice’ of paradigm experience, one sees the distance separating Merleau-Ponty from metaphysics.

For metaphysics, hearing oneself speak was to open up a domain where consciousness would coincide with itself and the signified would become purely universal by its disjunction from the signifier. Merleau-Ponty shows that what the experience of touching-touched teaches us is that in fact this coincidence with myself never takes place: “I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization.” The coincidence is “always imminent and never realized in fact.” It is in fact always deferred. The domain of ‘externality,’ of ‘being exposed in the world,’ is irreducible. There is no domain of pure interiority confronting a domain of pure exteriority. Thought and language, even interior language, never “occult the body of the signifier” as Derrida has shown. Rather as Merleau-Ponty writes:

It is as though the visibility that animates the sensible world were to emigrate, not outside of every body, but into another less heavy, more transparent body, as though it were to change flesh, abandoning the flesh of the body for that of language, and thereby would be emancipated but not freed from every condition.⁵⁸

In his late works, Merleau-Ponty has elaborated a profound critique of the metaphysics of presence. He has done this by showing that every attempt made by metaphysics, in the form of a philosophy of reflection, to withdraw itself from its dispersion in the world and to view itself as the subject which constitutes the world thus becoming its foundation is forted by a ‘prior,’ more fundamental, intertwining of interior and exterior. Speaking of analytic reflection—transcendental philosophy—as the attempt to regress from our experience of objects to the subject as the condition of their possibility, Merleau-Ponty writes:

… precisely inasmuch as they are a return or a reconquest, these operations of reconstitution or of re-establishment which come second cannot by principle be the mirror image of its internal constitution and its establishment, as the route from the Etoile to the Notre-Dame is the inverse of the route from Notre-Dame to the Etoile: the reflection recuperates everything except itself as an effort of recuperation, it clarifies everything except its own role.⁵⁹

Reflection cannot efface this prior intertwining of ipseity and alterity; it is always already too late. One could almost say that reflection has the structure of the trace. “… in the measure where there is a relationship ‘to an always already there … it is what authorizes us to call a trace that which does not permit itself to be reassumed in the simplicity of a present’.”⁶⁰ reflection cannot occult an ‘original’ affection of the self by the other. Merleau-Ponty proposed the notion of hyper-reflection which takes into account the limits of self-reflection or transcendental reflection. Put somewhat grossly, Merleau-Ponty's critique of Sartre consists of showing that the pure concepts of being and nothingness are abstractions, and that what experience gives us is “nothingness sunken into being.”⁶¹ This is to say, that being and nothingness are always already affected, intertwined, with one another.

Is not this form of critical practice very close to what Derrida has called deconstruction? Consider Jonathan Culler's characterization of one of the strategies of a deconstructive argument:

What is proposed as a given, an elementary constituent, proves to be a product, dependent or derived in ways that deprive it of the authority of simple or pure presence.⁶²

In Merleau-Ponty's late work, critical reflection takes precisely this form, so much so that in his preface to The Visible and the Invisible Claude Lefort characterizes Merleau-Ponty's position by citing a quote from Kafka, “the things presented themselves to him not by their roots, but by some point or other situated toward the middle of them.”⁶³

Perhaps one can better hear the resonance of one text in another by citing side by side both Merleau-Ponty's and Derrida's characterization of Husserl's phenomenological reduction. In his preface to The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes, “The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction.”⁶⁴ In Of Grammatology, Derrida writes, “Between consciousness, perception (internal or external), and the ‘world,’ the rupture, even in the subtle form of the reduction, is perhaps not possible.”⁶⁵ For both of these thinkers, the intertwining of self and other is such as to make the regression to pure consciousness impossible.

We hope this article has established some ‘correspondences’ by which one can travel between the two texts—texts liberated from books. As was stated above, our concern has not been involved with the problematic of ‘influences’ (anxious or not); we are not suggesting that Derrida is simply repeating Merleau-Ponty, since there are many aspects of Derrida's work for which no correspondences could be found in the work of Merleau-Ponty, nor conversely are we suggesting that the richness of the thought of Merleau-Ponty is adequately assembled or retained in the work of Derrida.

Notes

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Primacy of Perception,’ The Primacy of Perception: And other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James Edie (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1964) pp. 12-43.

2. Richard Macksey & Eugenio Donato (ed.), The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970) p. 272.

3. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations,’ Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983) p. 38.

4. Tran-Duc-Thao, Phénoménologie et Matérialisme Dialectique (Paris: Gordon & Breach, 1971).

5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, III: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

6. Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato's Pharmacy,’ Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) p. 103.

7. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970) pp. 269-333.

8. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David Allison (Evanston, III.: Northwestern University Press, 1973) p. XXXIV.

9. Ibid., p. 32.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., p. 21.

12. Ibid., p. 27.

13. Ibid., p. 38.

14. Ibid., p. 70.

15. Ibid., p. 71.

16. Ibid., p. 43.

17. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962) pp. 136-9.

18. Speech and Phenomena, p. 18.

19. Ibid., pp. 9-10.

20. Ibid., p. 52.

21. Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context,’ Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) p. 318.

22. Ibid., pp. 307-330.

23. This theme is further explored by R. Gasche in his article ‘Deconstruction as Criticism,’ Glyph 6 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) pp. 177-215.

24. ‘Plato's Pharmacy,’ Dissemination, pp. 63-173.

25. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel's Semiology,’ Margins in Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) pp. 69-109.

26. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974) pp. 27-74.

27. Speech and Phenomena, p. 77.

28. Ibid., p. 80.

29. Ibid., p. 78.

30. Ibid., pp. 79-80.

31. Ibid., p. 82.

32. Ibid., p. 85.

33. Ibid., p. 87.

34. Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance,’ Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) p. 5.

35. ‘The time of a Thesis: Punctuations,’ Philosophy in France Today, p. 44.

36. Speech and Phenomena, p. 53.

37. ‘Signature Event Context,’ Margins of Philosophy, p. 325.

38. Of Grammatology, p. 18.

39. Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play,’ Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) p. 289.

40. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).

41. Ibid., p. 127.

42. Ibid., p. 88.

43. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962).

44. Ibid., p. 31.

45. Ibid., p. 32.

46. Ibid., p. 7.

47. For a further elaboration of Merleau-Ponty's critique of Sartre's philosophy see my ‘The Question of Ontology: Sartre and Merleau-Ponty,’ The Horizons of the Flesh (Carbondale, III.; Southern Illinois University Press, 1973) pp. 114-127.

48. For a further discussion of Merleau-Ponty's thought in relationship to metaphysics see Claude Lefort's ‘Le Corp, La Chair,’ Sur Une Colonne Absente (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1978) pp. 116-140.

49. Ibid., p. 130. All translations from this book are mine.

50. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 137.

51. Ibid., pp. 137-8.

52. Ibid., pp. 147-8.

53. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954) pp. 48-56.

54. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 151.

55. Ibid., p. 152.

56. Ibid., p. 132.

57. Speech and Phenomena, p. 79.

58. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 153.

59. Ibid., p. 33.

60. Roger Laporte, ‘Dé-construire la presence,’ Ecarts: Quatre Essais A Propos De Jacques Derrida (Paris: Fayard, 1973) p. 239.

61. The Visible and the Invisible, p. 89.

62. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982) p. 94.

63. The Visible and the Invisible, p. XXVI.

64. The Phenomenology of Perception, p. XIV.

65. Of Grammatology, p. 67.