SOURCE: Silverman, Hugh J. “Re-Reading Merleau-Ponty.”¹Telos, no. 29 (fall 1976): 106-29.

[In the following essay, Silverman argues that Merleau-Ponty's last publication, Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel, serves as a criticism of his earlier thought and a bridge from modernism to postmodernism.]

In Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel, Merleau-Ponty reassesses the European philosophical tradition which highlights the names of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. His problematic is the status of philosophy in relation to its non-philosophical sources and goals. I shall propose that Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel, Merleau-Ponty's last course, elaborates a thematic which is both critical to his earlier philosophical activity and transitional to the increasingly significant “structuralist” perspectives—even to their current “post-structuralist” phases. The central role that Merleau-Ponty's thought plays is decentered into its actual expression just as much as his positions demand particularized formulations in order to be understood. Thus Merleau-Ponty's influence cannot be revealed only through explicit references to his name and to his writings. Rather what concerns us is the conceptual dissemination: his collaboration and “quarrels” with Sartre, his characterization of behaviorism, freudianism, and gestalt psychology, his response to the 1937 Stalin purge trials, his existentialized conception of Husserlian phenomenology, and his rethinking of philosophy in its history. These elements of a philosopher in the making—se faisant as he said of Bergson—are reconstituted in the light of Saussurian linguistics (which Merleau-Ponty taught at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1948-49), Lévi-Strauss' structural anthropology (the subject of an essay entitled “From Mauss to Claude Lévi-Strauss” which was first published in 1959), Lacan's neofreudianism (referred to in Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language of 1949-50), Althusser's break with the young Marx (signalled in the Adventures of the Dialectic of 1955 and especially in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel taught in 1960-61), and the revived return to an archeological Hegel in the forms Foucault offers (developed out of Hippolyte's commentaries and essays). As for the post-Merleau-Ponteans (Derrida, Lyotard, and Deleuze), invoking philosophy to become non-philosophy by inscribing itself in our own lives is echoed throughout grammatological traces, libidinal economies, and rhyzomal dispersions. This Merleau-Pontean context, as transformed into a multiplicity of texts, continues to announce its presence as ambiguous radicalism (and radical ambiguity) within considerations of language, anthropology, psychoanalysis, political theory, and history. By entering these various disciplines, by passing through their domains of expertise, by thinking their content, and by bringing understanding out of them, philosophy can reach its fullest achievement as non-philosophy. Non-philosophy is philosophy rendered experiential. What must be shown is how philosophy qua conceptualization can become absolute in the various realms of our practical life.

I. PHILOSOPHY BECOMING EXPERIENCE

Merleau-Ponty's sudden death in 1961 has been described, on various occasions, as the termination of a thought in the act of becoming. To substantiate the point, we were first presented with The Visible and the Invisible (1964), that monument to the survival of ontology in an age when the whole domain was about to be relegated to an archive somewhere. Then for those of us who did not hear him at the Collège de France, summaries of his courses from 1952 to 1960 were published as Themes from the Lectures (1968). Finally, The Prose of the World arrived in 1969 with a philosophy of language, developed in the early 1950s, but announced previously only in essays now found in Signs (1960) and in some early courses, such as Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language (1949-50).

Could we have expected that there was more to come? The answer is given in the form of a response to those who might have wondered what Merleau-Ponty would have entered in the Collège de France Bulletin at the end of 1961—Themes from the Lectures ends with 1960. The content of the answer is now given in terms of working lecture notes entitled Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel and published by Claude Lefort.² The character of Merleau-Ponty's work in the year of his death established not only themes and concerns that occupied him many years earlier, but also new directions of thought. In both cases, however, the pervading interest was for philosophy to accomplish what he took to be its ultimate task: becoming experience.

Of the two posthumous books The Visible and the Invisible and The Prose of the World, the latter was written earlier, specifically in the year or so prior to his inaugural lecture, delivered in January 1953 at the Collège de France.³ In one sense, then, The Prose of the World cannot be regarded as chronologically representative of Merleau-Ponty's final philosophical position. In another sense, the formulations of the early fifties are also expressions of a position taken a decade later. The problematic of In Praise of Philosophy (his inaugural Collège de France lecture) focuses on the dialectic of history and philosophy (Hegel and Marx; Marx and Hegel) resolving itself into an ambiguity of philosophy and absolute being. From the Hegel who identifies philosophy and history “by making philosophy the understanding of historical experience, and history the becoming of philosophy,”⁴ to the young Marx, who said that “one ‘destroys’ philosophy as a detached mode of knowing, only to ‘realize’ it in actual history,”⁵ we find the basis for the recovery of meaning that takes possession of itself, through philosophy, in the “fecund moments” of experience.⁶ We are told that the philosopher takes a distance (the Heideggerian interpretation of the Husserlian epoché as “stepping back”) in order to see a meaning; it “comes to itself only by ceasing to coincide with what is expressed.”⁷ But if philosophy remains at a distance, this pensée de survol (overview thinking) cannot accomplish the task that is the philosopher's vocation. Philosophy cannot maintain itself outside history and common experience. Hence “in order to experience more fully the ties of truth which bind him to the world and history, the philosopher finds neither the depth of himself nor absolute knowledge but a renewed image of himself placed within it among others.”⁸ This earlier formulation of philosophy becoming non-philosophy is itself parallel in structure to the incarnate phenomenology of his first major work, the Phenomenology of Perception (1945).⁹ There the non-philosophical experience of spatiality, motility, and even freedom are an elaboration of a lived, pre-objective philosophy.

Merleau-Ponty's task in The Prose of the World was to move from Hegel's claim that the Roman state was the prose of the world to an introduction to the prose of the world in which “the category of Prose [will go] beyond the confines of literature to give it a sociological meaning.”¹⁰ With the publication of this work by Claude Lefort in 1969, the theme of the transition from philosophy to non-philosophy is given expression through various types of language, from the most formal, as in the algorithm, to the most indirect, as in painting and gesture. Here again, meaning enters into the presence of the world through language and the various forms of prose. As he had indicated in the “Preface” to Phenomenology of Perception, “we are condemned to meaning.”¹¹ In The Prose of the World, not only is meaning expressed through prose, but also prose is extended throughout the inter-world (l'entre-monde). Philosophical meaning then becomes the lived expressive world, a Lebenswelt, without fulfilling Husserl's transcendental reduction (which requires that existence be placed in suspension). In this sense, philosophy can become what Merleau-Ponty characterizes in 1961 as non-philosophy.

The seeds of this non-philosophy were already germinating in The Prose of the World. Just as he often opposes a “bad ambiguity” to a “good ambiguity,”¹² Merleau-Ponty considers (and rejects) the possibility of a non-philosophy that will be the complete annihilation and denial of philosophy. He writes: “… no philosophy of history has ever carried over all the reality of the present into the future or destroyed the self to make room for the future. Such a neurotic approach to the future would really be non-philosophy, the deliberate refusal to know that in which one believes.”¹³ Hegel certainly does not introduce history as a brute necessity which obliterates judgment and suppresses the self; on the contrary, history is their true fulfillment. Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty espouses a philosophy of presence. Just as Heidegger's Presence (Anwesenheit) has, as its ontic correlates, the present (Gegenwart) of presence (Präsenz), similarly Merleau-Ponty cannot envision philosophy finding a home solely in the future. Such a utopian outlook would deny philosophy its lived aspect. For philosophy to become non-philosophy, non-philosophy must be on-going experience, and such experience cannot be in the future. The movement of intention and expression must appear now in order to fulfill the philosophical, i.e., phenomenological, enterprise. Since philosophies have dealt either with “mediating transcendences” or with “how the self makes itself world or culture which in turn must be animated by the self,”¹⁴ true history must be lived and expressed in the present. Thus of the two types of non-philosophy, the one, which translates as a future in which the self is destroyed, is unacceptable. The other, described in 1961, is to be investigated within a signifying perceptual field and within a language of experience which means, but does not propose.

Unlike The Prose of the World, Merleau-Ponty did not table (or abandon) The Visible and the Invisible.¹⁵ Doubtless, it was the focus of his attention even in the final year, since the last entry of the “Working Notes” is dated March 1961.¹⁶ The book was to be entitled The Origin of Truth, for the return to origins (the arché and genesis of knowledge) would uncover the source of truth. The notes begin with the truth of being and the being of truth, which are the ontological conditions for “our state of non-philosophy.”¹⁷ But what, in effect, can non-philosophy be? Merleau-Ponty proposes a dialectic between two alternative solutions (dialectics): “either the ‘bad dialectic’ that identifies the opposites, which is non-philosophy—or the ‘embalmed’ dialectic, which is no longer dialectical. End of philosophy or rebirth.”¹⁸ Either the dialectic selects discrete entities (facts) and hence cannot escape disparate multiplicity or it becomes solidified and devoid of movement. The very dialectic between the two alternatives: the end of philosophy (which Heidegger has proposed)¹⁹ and the renaissance of philosophy (which philosophers wish for) is inherent in the problematic itself. Is non-philosophy then a termination point and conclusion to philosophy or is it the basis for a revival? Only the former was suggested in The Prose of the World. In this 1959 note, the dichotomy is present: non-philosophy could also be the basis for a bridge between complete positivity and complete negativity. In fact, philosophy itself may serve as that very bridge between those two forms of non-philosophy.

The only other explicit reference to non-philosophy in the “Working Notes” reiterates its duality: “… philosophy is not immediately non-philosophy—it rejects the positivism in non-philosophy, a militant non-philosophy—which would reduce history to the visible, would deprive it precisely of its depth under the pretext of adhering to it better: irrationalism, Lebensphilosophie, fascism and communism, which do indeed have philosophical meaning, but hidden from themselves.”²⁰ Philosophy looks within itself in order to fulfill itself, in order to become lived experience. As philosophy becomes non-philosophy, its self-givenness may appear in a harmonious functional form in which non-philosophy—living—is precisely what was sought by philosophy. The risk, however, is that non-philosophy may be the destruction (without possibility of renewal) of philosophy. If history is reduced to the visible, or the produced, the vital dialectic of visible and invisible cannot be realized. Since history is in production (in the making), its invisibility is as present as the specifically visible. The heart of philosophy is its chiasm (or intertwining) of taking and being taken, seeing and being seen, touching and being touched, perceiving and being perceived, enveloping and being enveloped. Within this mutual coincidence (Ineinander),²¹ this “identity difference of difference,”²² this “interrogative ensemble,”²³ “the becoming-man of nature”²⁴ leaves no space for a metaphor to occur in between.²⁵

Though some may wish to argue that the position is a new direction in Merleau-Ponty's thought—and it is true that the language has changed from the formulations of the early forties—the basic structure of the position is the same. What is now non-philosophy as the fulfillment of philosophy was then an “intentional arc”²⁶ and a circuit of existence delineating a phenomenal field, experienced as already there. Or even earlier in The Structure of Behavior (1942), Merleau-Ponty indicated the necessity of recognizing the originality of the dialectical pair “perceived situation-work” as much as the irreducibility of “vital situation-instinctive reaction” to the pair “stimulus-reflex.”²⁷ Each subordinated dialectic is fulfilled as it is surpassed in another pair. Nature, life, and mind are the successive moments in a series of visible-invisible relationships. They are also the expression of philosophy becoming non-philosophy in a meaningful fashion.

The dialectic of philosophy and non-philosophy is another form of the ambiguous life which permeates Merleau-Ponty's various perspectives. In each case, the rethinking of this ambiguous domain has been central to his formulation of the dialectic. This was particularly the case in Humanism and Terror: “The dialectic of the subjective and the objective is not a simple contradiction which leaves the terms it plays on disjointed; it is rather a testimony to our rootedness in the truth.”²⁸ As he was to develop in The Visible and the Invisible, the subjective-objective dialectic is the locus of meaning, visibility, ambiguity, truth. The revealing of truth (as in Heidegger's Unverborgenheit) is the bi-directionality of philosophy coming out of individual knowledge and entering into the common domain. In connection with Bukharin and the ambiguity of history, bi-directionality is expressed as the opposition between the Commissar and the Yogi: “the true nature of tragedy appears once the same man has understood both that he cannot disavow the objective pattern of his actions, that he is what he is for others in the context of history, and yet that the motive of his actions constitutes a man's worth as he himself experiences it. In this case we no longer have a series of alternations between the inward and the external, subjectivity and objectivity, or judgment and its means, but a dialectical relation, that is to say, a contradiction founded in truth, in which the same man tries to realize himself on the two levels.”²⁹ For the same person to express both philosophy and non-philosophy is not a simple task. Yet it is the banner under which Merleau-Ponty operates both in 1947 and 1961.

To indicate in another area, this repetition of the same, we find the concluding passage to the essay on “Trotsky's Rationalism” delineating the Scylla and Charybdis of philosophy's move to non-philosophy. On the one hand, we find a utopianism, on the other, a dogmatic philosophy of history: “Marxism does not offer us a utopia, a future known ahead of time, nor any philosophy of history. However, it deciphers events, discovers in them a common meaning and thereby grasps a leading thread which, without dispensing us from fresh analysis at every stage, allows us to orient ourselves toward events.”³⁰ This final self-orientation toward events—similar to the “tending toward expression” by which Merleau-Ponty characterizes the child's imitative behavior—is the ultimate realization of philosophy. Philosophy cannot satisfy itself with analysis, nor even with description. For Merleau-Ponty, it must initiate a movement in the direction of actual lived experience (Erlebnisse). This can be accomplished through Marxist praxis only if one carefully interprets social phenomena. The traditional Heraclitean metaphor of life as a flowing river is here transformed into a curriculum vitae—a course of life—which the philosopher thinks and writes about in order for it to enter into the texture of the world. Each person must, however, enact his own course of understanding—as Merleau-Ponty did from Humanism and Terror to The Prose of the World to The Visible and the Invisible.

The initial phases of the basic themes, later developed in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel were begun at the time of The Adventures of the Dialectic (1955),³¹ or, more precisely, in 1956, when Merleau-Ponty offered his Thursday course on “Dialectical Philosophy.”³² Although a continuation of the recently published book, the lectures also explored new ground. After moving from the “fecundity of contradiction” and “the labor of the negative” in Hegel to the “subjective reflection” of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty then turned to a “circular dialectic” in which “the experience of thought” undergoes a journey to learn “what was already there, ‘in itself,’ before reflection.” This itinerary, which takes him through Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre establishes an uneasy equilibrium between the negative and the positive, the one and the many, the subjective and the objective, the null and the total. These different dialectics might be said to return eternally—as Nietzsche claims of life in general—to the same: philosophy and non-philosophy.

Each equilibrium reintroduces the question of the status of non-philosophy in its relation to philosophy. In order to clarify the question, Merleau-Ponty takes up the role of nature. His studies on nature are not to return to a physicalism. Nor is this nature precisely the physis of the ancients—though it does accompany a logos that seeks to know it. In Aristotle's logos of physis, the structure of the natural world is known by living in it and observing one's surroundings. However, for Merleau-Ponty, what counts is not the distance between logos and physis, but the immediacy of the former in the latter.

The interrogation of nature is philosophy's move toward nature. In contrast to classical metaphysics which establishes the distance between philosophy and nature, Merleau-Ponty's metaphysics is an ontology of nature, i.e., a natural ontology. In “The Possibility of Philosophy” (1959), philosophy interrogates its foundations. When it becomes evident that nature is foundational, the question arises as to whether philosophy occupies a place apart from nature? With Hegel the answer is negative—“something comes to an end,”³³ and philosophy is denied a special status. In the process, a philosophical void is created by the denial. The filling that Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche offer is itself a destruction of philosophy. The end of philosophy begins where philosophy becomes nature.

With the naturalization of philosophy, “we enter an age of non-philosophy. But perhaps such a destruction of philosophy constitutes its very realization. Perhaps it preserves the essence of philosophy, and it may be, as Husserl wrote, that philosophy is reborn from its ashes.”³⁴ The problem is not whether philosophy is such a phoenix, but rather how it is reborn from its ashes. The preoccupations, obscurities, equivocations, and interpretations of these post-Hegelian thinkers do not solve the problem any more than the numerous commentaries on their writings. What is philosophical in non-philosophy is not a series of recommendations for our own time. Thought can no longer provide guidelines, evaluations for present and future action. Whatever we discover in Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, it is not a picture of how they understood their era. On the contrary, we find in them the very condition of our own time: “They live on in us rather than our having a clear perspective on them and we involve them in our own problems rather than solving theirs with ours.”³⁵

Their philosophy of non-philosophy is to become our non-philosophical philosophy. The history of non-philosophy is a continual restatement of a negated metaphysics. At each moment that a philosopher refuses to accept the standard metaphysical assertions in favor of a renewed understanding of life, then non-philosophy is at work. Non-philosophy is not anti-philosophy, for the former is philosophy put to work, while the latter runs counter to the enterprise of understanding itself. By interrogating the meaning and possibility of non-philosophy, philosophy is reborn in nature and in experience. Philosophy inserts itself into everyday life such that the interrogation is a realization of our own activity. Along the path of its history, Heidegger, following Husserl, moves to interrogation—not of the Lebenswelt as such, but rather of the ontological conditions of existence. Merleau-Ponty's identification of Heidegger as embarking on the path of non-philosophy signals a certain change in orientation. Throughout Merleau-Ponty's work, we find explicit reference to Husserl, while the insertion of Heidegger into his corpus only a year prior to Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel suggests that he has made the very ontological turn which determines the direction of The Visible and the Invisible.

Following Heidegger, some, such as Sartre, spoke of man as negated being and the being which negates. Merleau-Ponty is aware that the early translations (by Henri Corbin) of Da-sein as la realité humaine (human reality) lead directly to the substitution of humanism for metaphysics. The end of philosophy was understood as the end of metaphysics. However humanism, in the sense of a philosophy of man, would triumph. For Merleau-Ponty that was a misinterpretation. Certainly man is implicated in the experience of the world—but man need not be glorified. Heidegger sought “through Dasein, to get at Being, to analyze certain human attitudes only because man is the interrogation of Being.”³⁶ Man enters into the interrogation and is interrogated along with Being. But he does not appear as an isolated entity. Man participates in “pre-objective Being” just as much as any other essent or being. For philosophy to enter into such participation through understanding is for philosophy to become non-philosophy. By expressing and describing our living through pre-objective Being, i.e. nature, philosophy can return to what is fundamental, and hence to what is not philosophical.

If the fundamental is not philosophical, which is Merleau-Ponty's position in his 1959 course, a clarification of what is fundamental comes in the next year. Eye and Mind, his last publication, explores vision. Given the name visibility in his working manuscript, vision is nature at work. Philosophy surrenders to vision as is exemplified in the activity of a painter such as Cézanne who interprets how we see by making us see. Unlike thought with its Cartesian supports through construction and transformation, vision goes to the things of the world in order to uncover their sense. This necessarily corporeal vision delineates the zone of Merleau-Ponty's post-Hegelian philosophy.

Space is “reckoned starting from me as the zero point or degree zero of spatiality. I do not see it according to its exterior envelope, I live in it from the inside; I am immersed in it. After all, the world is all around me, not in front of me. Light is viewed once more as action at a distance. It is no longer reduced to the action of contact or, in other words, conceived as it might be by those who do not see in it. Vision reassumes its fundamental power of showing forth more than itself.”³⁷ Vision enters into spatiality and participates in more than it reveals. The task of philosophy is to take thought to the spatiality of vision. Once there, philosophy must divest itself of its pretensions. Philosophy learns that the study of painting can teach us how to understand the world as non-philosophy. “The painter's vision is not a view upon the outside, a merely ‘physical-optical’ relation with the world. The world no longer stands before him through representation; rather it is the painter to whom the things of the world give birth by a sort of concentration or coming-to-itself of the visible.”³⁸ The painter reveals nature as the emergent meaning of the visible. As Being arises, the painter enters into the painting. On this basis, he can return to himself in order to complete his vision, his understanding. “Vision alone makes us learn that beings that are different, ‘exterior,’ foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are ‘simultaneity’.”³⁹ The unity of beings is the unity that philosophy seeks to know, but which it can know only by experiencing them in their spatiality and visibility.

Merleau-Ponty finds an unmediated expression of Being in literature which is similar to the “meaning of the visible” in painting, for they both activate an “intentional are.” From among his writings in 1961, Merleau-Ponty left five notes on the novelist Claude Simon.⁴⁰ The three principal themes of these notes, (1) vision, (2) Vorhaben, and (3) the felt, are reformulations of the same experience. One asserts: “To see is to allow us to avoid thinking a thing, since we see it.”⁴¹ Cartesianism requires that whatever is thought be included in the cogito. The cogito cannot itself allow us to enter the world of things in order to see them. We must in fact suspend our thoughtful judgement in order to perceive what is there. Vision is itself a grasping of what is already there (vorhaben). To speak of the Vorhabe as pre-objective experience is to include what is imaginary as well as perceptual. In both cases, the task of the novelist is to describe what is felt. Without the work (le travail) of the novelist, “feeling, living, and sensorial experience are not worth anything. Work does not involve simply the conversion of the lived into words, but rather making what is felt speak.”⁴² The philosopher is also engaged in making what is felt speak but not in sensorial language. The philosopher must return to experience in order to develop the language of experience. But that language is an elaboration of whatever achieves meaning in our daily lives.

II. PHILOSOPHY AND NON-PHILOSOPHY

Merleau-Ponty's 1960-61 course explores the relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy in two distinct parts. In the first portion, after some introductory remarks concerning the appearance of the absolute, he identifies the absolute with the phenomenon, establishes the relationship between knowledge and experience, proposes a phenomenological dialectic, develops the place of self-consciousness, and indicates Hegel's failure to link philosophy and non-philosophy. The second part focuses on stages in Marx, immediate philosophy, Marx's critique of Hegel, the possibilities of praxis, Marx as philosopher, and the relationships between thought, man, and nature. Although Merleau-Ponty is moving toward a unified thematic, the cryptic form of the work makes this difficult to perceive readily. The directions that he had developed prior to 1961 all point to the possibility of philosophy becoming non-philosophy. First Hegel, then Marx, serve as the means of articulating this movement.

In exploring Hegel's “Introduction” to the Phenomenology of Mind, the absolute appears in such a way that the phenomenon is the whole truth. Since the phenomenon must appear, its manner of appearance encompasses all that is, i.e. the absolute. This means that philosophy cannot present itself in any way other than as non-philosophy. Philosophy must be engaged in questioning. Heidegger's understanding of the question of Being and Sartre's discovery of the origin of negation in the interrogative attitude establish characteristic modes of philosophical questioning. In Nietzsche's claim that the Greeks knew how to live, the stress on appearance as life manifesting itself places them at the level of the phenomenon, at the level of non-philosophy. Philosophy, through its questioning, interprets and thereby transfigures what is lived.

In order to interpret experience, philosophy sets itself apart from experience. When Nietzsche proposes the absolute of appearance, he sets the stage for Hiedegger to claim that the absolute is “a-philosophy” and for the Sartre of Critique de la raison dialectique to assert that Marxist praxis offers the best example of an unsurpassed philosophy. Accordingly philosophy for Heidegger and Sartre becomes non-philosophy, experience, life.

Philosophy has no access to the absolute through understanding (Erkennen). Understanding, which seeks to know the absolute, requires some instrument or medium by which it can approach the absolute qua appearance. In mediating between the philosopher and the absolute, understanding serves as an indicator of appearance. However, it reveals only an empty space or a pure directionality. Because of this mediating function, understanding cannot succeed in bringing out the appearance in its absolute form. As a substitute for understanding qua mediating function, we would have to become understanding itself. This could be accomplished in history if life were to make itself into a type of knowledge and knowledge were to make itself into life. In that way, the relationship between the absolute and our acquaintance with it would be realized in our own experience.

To accomplish this task, a recognition of the identity of the phenomenon with the absolute is required. Philosophy is not understanding because philosophy demands that understanding perform a mediating function. If understanding mediates, then acquaintance-knowledge (Bertrand Russell's formula for Erkennen) of the absolute will differ from the appearance of the absolute. For the absolute to be true, it must be known in its truth and it must appear in its truth. Furthermore, understanding must be the manner of revealing the truth of the absolute. Thus revealing the phenomenon is presence of the absolute.

In the appearance of the absolute, natural consciousness seeks to be the real accomplishment of knowledge. However, since there is also a natural unconscious, which Merleau-Ponty attributes to Marx as well as to Freud, knowledge cannot grasp the totality of the phenomenon. The structure of consciousness is such that the phenomenon is not fully revealed. Because the phenomenon is both in relation to itself and in relation to the external world, a chiasm is formed. By this chiasm, consciousness interweaves the phenomenon within its natural context. “Nature,” which was the theme for Merleau-Ponty's lectures in 1957-59, provides an environment whereby consciousness can be its own concept, but not its own self-realization. Consciousness must also become nature in order for it to realize itself in addition to manifesting its identity.

Such a consciousness is engaged in negation. What is negated is not the for-itself, as in Sartre. According to Sartre, the for-itself negates itself so as to give itself a being which it is not and to project beyond that being. But its projects define itself as another in-itself. The operations of consciousness force the in-itself into transcendent objectification. For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness negates in order to affirm its own movement to a new form of being and expression. In this way, the intertwining of the relation to self with the relation to the external world is a dynamic orientation toward an unfulfilled self-realization and not a denial of true identity as in Sartre. Its telos is to be unified with itself and nature. But since that unification is not possible, consciousness must be unhappy. As long as it remains unhappy, divided within itself, and alienated, it cannot become the absolute unification that it seeks.

What appears out of this impossibility for consciousness to achieve unification is the intentionality of consciousness. Intentionality is itself experience (Erfahrung)—but it is a restless experience. It is never content in that it continues to delineate the chiasm (the intertwining). As long as the chiasm exists, a polarity will be found within natural consciousness. The measure of experience, then, will be the identification of what is measured and that by which it is measured. This binary opposition between mésurant and mésuré parallels that of the signifiant and signifié in a semiological formulation. Since the standard of measurement cannot be what is measured, the measurement qua experience or knowledge cannot be the appearance of the absolute. The absolute must remain unachieved.

To measure consciousness is to make it a mediated intuition. But if it were a mediated intuition, how could consciousness learn anything? On the one hand, consciousness is the standard of measurement and the external world is measured in order to establish what consciousness knows. In the first case, consciousness is philosophical, in the second, consciousness is natural. Since, however, these two types of consciousness can exchange their roles, they can each be subject or object for the other. They are the same for each other—even though together they cannot be absolute, for measurement is the denial of the absolute.

For the attainment of the absolute, knowledge must be experience. But in order for this to be true, knowledge must undergo a transformation. Knowledge, that is knowledge of the object, is insufficient. After the dichotomy between subject and object, and between the standard of measurement and what is measured, what remains is “a pure act of vision.” Though Merleau-Ponty finds this formulation in Hegel, it is repeated in his own work: the surpassing of these dichotomies is visibility, or, to put it otherwise, ambiguity. Both visibility and ambiguity are restatements of intentionality, the dual process which unifies the opposition within it. The bi-directionality of standard of measurement to what is measured and vice versa establishes the relation as pure unmediated experience.

The exchange between standard of measurement and what is measured is dialectical. The dialectic arises out of the tension between the relation to self and the relation to a transcendent object. This dual relation characterizes the function of consciousness, which accomplishes its tasks through experience. Such experience is ambiguous (zweideutig) in that its many meanings are unified in a synthetic activity.

If we examine the role of ambiguity in this connection, we find that it is at once phenomenological and dialectical. It is phenomenological in that consciousness comprehends itself in a moment. That moment is the full revelation of the phenomenon as neither object nor subject but as “the co-givenness of both” (für dasselbe). Consciousness stands out as meaning: the signification of the relation as the appearing of appearances. Since nothing can enter phenomenology from the outside, it is unmediated. As a description of experience, phenomenology brings out the various dimensions and aspects of that experience as it takes place.

Ambiguity is also dialectical in that it moves in two directions, integrating whatever enters its path and surpassing itself by preserving its own integrity. As dialectic, ambiguity is the operation of knowledge (Wissen) upon the object and the object delimiting the extent of knowledge. The dialectical relation is surpassed in experience itself. What remains is the ambiguous totality that is no longer differentiated. In its totality, the dialectic forms the absolute. Merleau-Ponty illustrates this notion of the absolute by mentioning the historical conditions underlying the purge trials of 1937, which he had discussed at length in Humanism and Terror. Here experience has brought out the ambiguous alternatives and resolved them into the nakedness of events, i.e., the absolute of appearance.⁴³

A consciousness that is truly self-conscious, Merleau-Ponty claims, is empty. The case in point is Hegel's assumption that his own self-consciousness (which would be analogous to the bourgeois state) is identical with consciousness in general (which would be similar to the state). But the bourgeois state cannot fulfill itself (become fully aware of itself) if it assumes that it is the state. The state must be conscious (i.e. appear in consciousness). Since consciousness permeates what appears through experience, it must permeate the state. The state cannot be limited to its determination of itself as the bourgeois state would do. Therefore, the bourgeois state is not fully self-conscious.

Because experience operates within a total situation, praxis must be the absolute (full consciousness in self-consciousness). To become itself, consciousness must tear itself away from itself so that it may participate in the absolute. Although consciousness “designates” absolute knowledge, it can only become that absolute by entering into it experientially, by practicing it in action.

Though Hegel sets up the move to the absolute through consciousness, he does not link philosophy and non-philosophy. Both the relation to the self and the relation to the external world are preserved. Consciousness remains ambiguous without the necessary experiential unification. The absolute here is absolute negation or absolute affirmation. It cannot be both at the same time. Yet for philosophy to become non-philosophy, experience of the world as an appearance, it cannot maintain the disjunction between affirmation and negation. That disjunction signals the continuance of philosophy and the refusal of non-philosophy. For the possibility of non-philosophy, pure praxis must take place. Here neither affirmative nor negative judgement can play a part—only experience in its fullness is necessary. Since Hegel is still involved in negation and positive surpassing, one must look beyond him for the requisite move to the absolute.

The early Marx is Hegelian in orientation, attempting to reform philosophy by dissociating himself from Feuerbach. Merleau-Ponty refers to this point in Marx's development as the “philosophical” or “pre-Marxist” period and argues that it is followed by a break with philosophy as a form of alienation.⁴⁴ Two problems characterize this change. First, in the early period, views which are reminiscent of Feuerbach are mixed with those which are non-Feuerbachian. For example, we find the claim that the destruction of philosophy must be its realization and its realization must destroy philosophy. The latter formulation cannot be simply a return to speculative philosophy. It must mean that philosophy is itself transformed—a position which Feuerbach did not take. Thus inherent in the early Marx are signs of a move to non-philosophy.

The second problem concerns the role of a Hegelian dialectic in the case where socialism is to be scientific. If philosophy has become socialism in its rigorous and non-utopian form, has Hegel's method also been excluded? If so, can the move to non-philosophy maintain its signification and importance, or is philosophy reified and excluded (as a positivism), rather than reintegrated in another form? Merleau-Ponty would wish to support the dialectical reintegration. Thus to those who charge Marx with not having written a Logic, the answer that Capital is its substitute can indeed provide a basis for understanding Marx's later project. In the orientation toward appearance by means of essence, we find a reconstruction of experience. The structure of that movement is fully Hegelian. Hence the scientific socialism proposed through Capital is actually philosophy following out the movements of experience. The later Marx is therefore both the refusal and the reintegration of his earlier philosophy.

Merleau-Ponty attempts to understand this reunification by asking whether it is a question of logic (Sache der Logik) or a logic of the thing in question (Logik der Sache). If it is a question of logic, then it has little importance for the material conditions at work in society. If, however, it is a logic of the thing in question, where what is in question is historical materialism, then the project for philosophy is to become that logic which brings out the very thing in question. In reformulating the lived ambiguity, what is to be surpassed here is the distinction between idea and thing. In history, the difference becomes the identity of the thing in question with its intrinsic logic.

Such an identity of the thing in question with its logic goes by the name of immediate philosophy. Here philosophy is unavailable for mediation. When Hegel understands and conceptualizes experience, the absolute is self-presentational, self-enclosed, and self-defining. It is mediated only by its affirmation of itself as absolute. With this affirmation, the absolute gives itself as true. The movement of truth brings consciousness. Consciousness renders the truth of the absolute evident for itself. But since this movement is pure conceptualization for Hegel, Marx's mandate is to return to immediate philosophy. With Marx, experience no longer becomes philosophy, conceptualization, and self-presentation. Now philosophy becomes experience, pure movement, and immediate philosophy.

At the same time that the Marx of Capital believes he has abandoned philosophy by presenting the realities of inter-human economic relations, in effect he has rediscovered philosophy in its experiential form. The negation of philosophy is its revival as non-philosophy. Realizing non-philosophy is the fulfillment of philosophy becoming world and the recognition that it is no longer necessary for the world to become philosophy. What was self-consciousness is now praxis, for praxis is philosophy in its immediacy. Where Narcissus required the river in order to see himself, self-consciousness is mediated by its conceptualization of itself. In praxis, Narcissus no longer looks at himself in order to know himself. Now he goes for a swim. Conception becomes action within concrete conditions.

Such a reversal involves an implicit critique of Hegel. However, Marx also engages in an explicit critique. His writings in 1843 and 1844 revise Hegel in favor of embodied man and non-philosophy. The movement toward the realization of incarnate reality and the movement from philosophy to non-philosophy represent an identical directionality. Where the Hegelian philosophy was a philosophy of the concept and thought, the Marxian formulation is the presumed denial of philosophy per se and the introduction of praxis as the inheritor of absolute knowledge. The absolute therefore becomes bodily experience, that is, openness to material need, exchange, and alienation. Since praxis is both “the head and heart of the Revolution,” Marx views philosophy as a hindrance to the realization of the Revolution. However, if philosophy becomes non-philosophy, then praxis can operate freely within the historical reality that founds it.

The move from philosophy to non-philosophy is not a pure denial of philosophy as such. Rather it is a reunion of philosophy with non-philosophy, in which a philosophy of the concept will no longer dominate over a philosophy of experience. Philosophy is not therefore annihilated. On the contrary, it achieves life through negation. The negation of philosophy qua non-philosophy is both the failure and the realization of philosophy. When the specific relation between philosophy and world has been overturned (verkehrt), the world and its problems prevail.

The Marxian critique of Hegel rejects the non-engagement that is characteristic of the Hegelian State. An action which evolves according to the highest principles is an intellectual's praxis. Such praxis is anti-philosophical (not non-philosophical) and hence it is another form of philosophy. What it requires above all is a realization of its possibilities in the proletariat, not in the conceptual realm. Merleau-Ponty speaks of this realization as the positive possibility of the German emancipation in the proletariat. What he means is that the full freedom of the proletariat in Germany, as envisioned by Marx, is also the fulfillment of philosophy as a meaningful enterprise. With the proletariat as “universal spirit” (Weltgeist) comes negativity (reaction against the bourgeoisie) and a dialectical union of philosophy and the proletariat. The proletariat negates its oppressor; philosophy negates its conceptual orientation.

The superstructure needed to carry out the movement of negativity is not a philosophy of consciousness, but a philosophy of man incarnate. Thus we find mirrored in the Marxian critique of Hegel, the Merleau-Pontean response to Husserl. Just as Hegel integrates phenomenology into knowledge as soon as he sees that he is part of that knowledge (what appears is known for the self), Marx returns to his early essays in order for them to become true in Capital and in its self-surpassing, i.e. the denial of capitalist production.

In Capital, Marx has moved from reality (the actual capitalist conditions of production) to appearance (the proletariat which comes into view as an oppressed class). The task of Capital is to give a basis to proletarian philosophy as a movement of things. It also brings about a consciousness of separation between the de facto proletariat and the philosophico-historical function which conditions it.

For Marx qua philosopher the task is to provide critique, which Merleau-Ponty sees as taking four forms: (1) the critique of philosophical exhaustiveness, i.e. philosophy cannot cover existence in its entirety; (2) a critique of the pretensions of self-consciousness, i.e. by knowing oneself one does not know all of one's historical and material conditions; (3) a critique of the negation of negation, i.e. the success of the proletariat will be an affirmation and not another negation; and (4) the critique of objectivity, i.e. objectivity is an alienation of subjectivity in the object.

The Marxist philosopher recognizes that his true Dasein is in nature. Nature is the locus in which the man's existence is realized as ambiguous. This ambiguity is not the “bad” ambiguity of contradiction and duality in subjectivity and objectivity. This ambiguity indicates a multiplicity of meanings unified through experience in concrete situations. When object-being is alienated, consciousness has ground for action. However when consciousness is experienced as pure object-being, it loses its range of possibilities. Self-affirmation is dependent upon the recognition of one's alienated state. Alienation arises when the self responds to the will of the other, which denies the selfness of the first. This type of negativity, which Hegel called the desire of the other as it occurs in the master-slave relation, is nevertheless the ground for the possibility of self-affirmation in a concrete socio-historical context.

In Hegel, nature and man are extracted from thought (Denken). Hence, thinking and pure knowledge are primary. However, if reversed, if nature or man were predicated upon consciousness, the problem would still not be rectified. What is needed is a single being in which negativity can operate. This singularity, repeated in Sartre's “singular universal,”⁴⁵ has the character of ambiguity without the divisive aspects of duality and multiplicity. Marx would understand such a being to be concrete reality informed by history with signification.

Nature is transformed in the movement of history by “sensuous-practical man,” that is, by a meaning-laden human praxis which takes on a carnal, “material” shape. While history is produced by man, it also produced him. Merleau-Ponty quotes Jean Hippolyte as claiming that “human nature will resolve itself after the resolution of historical conflict.” Once we recognize that man's self-estrangement and self-consciousness are not reserved for the mind, we see that they are realized only in surpassing (aufheben) history. As a self-surpassing and a self-conserving process, man's true being is revealed within nature's movements. The advances and retreats of non-philosophy occur within history and nature in such a way that philosophy surrenders its autonomy in order to live as flesh in the world.

Where philosophy for Hegel was the absolute appearing in experience, that experience remained a phenomenon in thought. The presence of philosophy at work provides a place for Hegelian thinking. Non-philosophy for Hegel can, at most, be another type of negation within thought. With Marx, however, the reversal, by which philosophy becomes historical experience, praxis, and the concrete, is a revitalization of philosophy. This revitalization does not occur as philosophy, but rather as non-philosophy, the historical conditions of embodied human beings confronted with the realities of exchange and alienation. However, by rendering these conditions evident, philosophy is revived like a phoenix through and out of non-philosophy.

III. THE DISSEMINATION OF CENTRALITY

The reconstruction of phenomenology that accompanies Merleau-Ponty's work is based in an understanding of Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre. We cannot trace the full development of this reconstruction here, though its outlines can be sketched. The presence of a transcendental ego in Husserl as the condition, and source, of all intentional acts give the self and hence all philosophical reflection a well-defined central point of emanation.⁴⁶ Heidegger replaces the focus on the transcendental ego with an emphasis on the movement between Being and beings. Interpretation and the ontological difference alter the point of attention from the starting-point to the intentional relation of in-betweenness, where neither subjectivity nor objectivity prevail.⁴⁷ The Sartrian appeal to the transcendence of the ego⁴⁸ is a response to both the pure subjectivity claim and the intermediary postulate. For Sartre, what might have been called a center in the tradition is now regarded phenomenologically as “nothingness.” If a self can be identified as such, one must look to each transcendent ego that is taken as the object of a reflective act. Such selves, however, are outside consciousness and, therefore, false versions of the self. It would be bad faith to deny them. Only the unreflected or pre-reflective cogito might serve as a place for the truth of the self. Yet a non-place, non-entity cannot be regarded as a center. The philosophizing self finds its identity in its projects and possibilities and in the transcendent forms of its self-expression. The latter remain, in effect, a third alternative to the Husserlian and Heideggerian conceptions.

Merleau-Ponty moves to combine all three alternatives. His reconstruction of the immediate tradition—as well as that of Nietzsche, Marx, and Hegel, whom he discusses explicitly in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel—is the basis for his own articulation of the self as ambiguous. Here the self is regarded as the unifying source, the intentional activity, and the worldly transcendent form of the person. Philosophy becomes experience and non-philosophy because it is the enactment of signification in operation delineating the incarnate importance of the individual in an intermundane context. Significations are gathered together as the expressive manifestations of consciousness in the self's relations with others.

This reconstruction is the basis for praxis and action. The philosophizing self cannot be isolated, cannot simply be interpretive understanding, and cannot be only a series of reflected beings-in-themselves. The philosophizing self must bring the consciousness of its own activity to action itself and that action must be philosophy in the style and form of non-philosophy.

Although Merleau-Ponty's elaboration of philosophy becoming experience can be regarded as a useful unification of what is present in his immediate tradition, what, on the other hand, is the place of his writings in the expressions of thought that have followed in the wake of his death? We may regard the post-Merleau-Pontean expression of the movement toward “non-philosophy” as the “decentering of philosophy.”

While Merleau-Ponty argues for a multiplicity of significations delineating our human experience, structuralists insist upon signs and structures. That two of Merleau-Ponty's books announce these same notions is not irrelevant. The first work, The Structure of Behavior (1942), refers to structures as the basis for a system of human behavior. Signs (1960), on the other hand, presents the signs of contemporary life at the linguistic, sociological, literary, and political level.

What is both peculiar and important in the discussion of structures and signs is expressed by the two thinkers most influential for post-Merleau-Pontean expression: Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Even though the former made his principal contribution (The Course in General Linguistics⁴⁹) in the first decade of this century and the latter published his principal study (The Elementary Structures of Kinship⁵⁰) in 1947, their renown predominates largely in the sixties.

For de Saussure, a sign is the combination of a signifier (word) and a signified (concept). Signification is the act or process of relating signifier to signified in relation to a value system of other signs. Such a system of signs would be a langue. When spoken or activated at a particular moment, parole is given expression. In combination, the speaking (parole) of a particular language (langue) gives rise to a system of use-signs, i.e. a langage. A langage is the manifestation of significatory signs within a system. Such a unity of multiplicity does not, however, establish a center. Any philosophical formulation that is in this way semiological will find itself proliferated throughout the system.

Similarly in structural anthropology, structures are formed by a combination of elements that are repeatable in different times and/or places. That which operates their production, whether in myth, kinship, or ritual, will not be a fixed, locatable subjectivity. Rather, the savage mind as Lévi-Strauss later calls it, will reproduce itself throughout cultural products.

These two approaches within the human sciences cannot be regarded as philosophical expression. In fact, some emphasize that structuralism is a methodology and not a philosophy. If it were to be a philosophy, it could be termed “ideology” or theory. As long as it remains a praxis of semiological and structural operations, its status as a decentered philosophy (what Merleau-Ponty calls “non-philosophy”) can be maintained.

In the work of Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and their followers, we find a field of inquiry in common with Merleau-Ponty's interrogations. Sartre's essay on Merleau-Ponty in the special issue of Les Temps Modernes (1961) points to this decentered space: “He buried himself in the night of non-knowledge, in search of what he then called ‘the fundamental’.”⁵¹ Sartre selects a passage from “De Mauss à Lévi-Strauss” in Signs to make his point. He writes: “What is of interest to the philosopher (in anthropology) is precisely that it takes man as he is, in his effective situation in life and knowledge. The philosopher interested in anthropology is not one who wants to explain or construct the world, but he who aims at inserting us more deeply into being.”⁵² In Merleau-Ponty's move to non-philosophy, he finds philosophy appearing in various forms of life, such as those examined by structural anthropology.

The interest in entering deeply into being is not limited to linguistics and anthropology. It also arises notably in literary criticism (Barthes), psychoanalysis (Lacan), political theory (Althusser), and the history of ideas (Foucault).

Roland Barthes distributes philosophical subjectivity throughout the surfaces of literary expression. His championing of Robbe-Grillet and other nouveau romanciers illustrates his orientation toward the representation of geometrical relations circumscribing the production of human acts and relations without identifying a localized human subjectivity. The Voyeur announces a murder.⁵³ We follow the expressed elements of a series of relations—an island, cigarette butts, the nape of a woman's neck, etc. Nowhere, however, do we find the establishment of a subjective perspective. Knowledge is dispersed throughout the elements of material, geometrical, geographical, interhuman relations. Events are recounted as an inventory of real consciousness distributed throughout Nature.

Barthes' own criticism also moves away from the interpretational mode. A textual reading is not an individual's personal statement of themes and images. Reading a text involves the elaboration of its semiological components: binary oppositions, myth, and structure. Writing begins and transpires at “degree zero.”⁵⁴ The authorial mode remains absent. Signification is dispersed throughout the system of signs in the language (langage) of the novel, play, fashion, and most recently autobiography.⁵⁵ Criticism is thus articulated at the level of non-philosophy.

Sartre, in his essay on Merleau-Ponty, comments: “Savage and opaque, it is the work which retains being within its recesses. This unreason is the undertaking which will subsist in the community as its future raison d'être. And above all, it is language, that ‘fundamental,’ for the Word is only Being in the heart of man thrown out to exhaust itself within meaning. In short, it is man, burst forth in a single spurt, transcending his presence in being, to reach towards his presence in the other, transcending the past to reach towards the future, transcending each thing and his selfness to reach towards the sign. For this reason, Merleau, towards the end of his life, was inclined to give an ever more important place to the unconscious. He must have agreed with Lacan's formula: ‘The unconscious is structured like a language’.”⁵⁶ Merleau-Ponty's language of silence may well be a form of the unconscious. For Lacan, however, the Freudian unconscious is not entirely silent—it is revealed as a chain of signifiers. Freudian “condensation” and “displacement” are forms of metaphor and metonymy. The language of the self is once again dispersed throughout produced forms.

Since the psychoanalyst is limited to what the patient says, the analyst must attend to the letter and word in speech. The unconscious expresses itself in many ways. The signifying chain is dispersed such that meaning insists in the chain of the signifier but none of its elements consists in the meaning of which it is capable at a particular moment.⁵⁷ The self does not dispense meanings conscious or unconscious. Rather it maintains an “ex-centricity” that has no nucleus, only symptoms of other realms of self-expression.

Similarly in political theory, philosophy enters into the lives of human individuals in their concrete situations. Theory does not stand apart from practice. Althusser's term “theoretical practice” will show that philosophy can live, but not as separate, “high altitude” thinking. Philosophy must enter the fray. The practice of theory must itself be non-philosophy, i.e. philosophy that has become experience and action. “Theoretical practice falls within the general definition of practice. It works on a raw material (representations, concepts, facts) which it is given by other practices, whether ‘empirical,’ ‘technical,’ or ‘ideological.’ In its most general form theoretical practice does not only include scientific theoretical practice, but also pre-scientific theoretical practice, that is, ‘ideological’ theoretical practice …”⁵⁸ Non-philosophy is not the refusal to think, to write, to uncover the bases of social elements of knowledge. Yet it cannot at the same time ignore concrete human concerns in their “empirical,” “technical,” and “ideological” forms. Theoretical practice is both the practice of theory and the theory of practice. Is this position not in effect what Sartre attributes to his fellow editor of Les Temps Modernes? “Merleau's commentaries on politics are only a political experience in the process of becoming, by itself and in every sense of the word, the subject of mediation. If writings are acts, we can say that he acted in order to appropriate his action and to find himself in depth.”⁵⁹ The self that he sought was not a transcendental self,—nor, for that matter, a transcendent ego. His writings were a theoretical practice which also created self-expression.

The fourth area in which Merleau-Ponty's legacy achieves relevance is in the history of ideas, or what Foucault calls the history of systems of thought.⁶⁰ Uncovering the epistemé of a particular set of structures, forming a system on a synchronic plane, is once again not the building of systems of ideas. Rather it reveals the presence of the absolute within human experience. “Ressemblance” for the Renaissance, “representation” for the classical age, and “man” for the modern epistemé are forms of the dispersal of knowledge. Yet they are also evidence of the underlying unity of knowledge, that is, knowledge experienced as a structure.

We do not live at a particular time in relation to the discrete development of some particular idea, concept, or scheme. We live in an intercontextualized set of contemporaneous relations. Biology, linguistics, and economics, although separate realms of investigation, all carry on their work at the same time. They also affect one another because of the types of knowledge that are produced due to interrelated conditions. The task of philosophy is not to simply explain what is, it must enter into knowledge of life, language, and labor. If it remains aloof, it will fail, if it participates in the experience of the world it will negate itself. But this latter path, though the hardest of the two, is nevertheless the vocation of philosophy. In this respect, philosophy becomes archeology, i.e. both semiology and hermeneutics: the presentation of systems of signs and the interpretation of those signs as they appear in their contexts.

Merleau-Ponty's unspoken presence also permeates post-structuralist activity. Dominant directions, particularly in France, continue in Merleau-Pontean fashion. We cannot even claim that the non-philosopher has been forgotten,—like negative theology, his presence appears everywhere but is identified nowhere.

The blossoming of Jacques Derrida in 1967 announced grammatology as the study of the written unit.⁶¹ Writing elaborates speech by an exteriority. Meaning and signification do not arise out of an act, rather they arise throughout the appearance of writing. Writing is the visibility that Merleau-Ponty appealed to in the speaking spoken and the spoken speech which appears in a painting, in an event, or in the expression of thought. The closing (clôture) of the epistemé is the insertion of speech and voice within verbal language (langage). The grammé is throughout a later Heideggerian presence of that which is present (a visibility of the visible). By claiming that the distinction between difference and differance is available only in writing,⁶² (in spoken language the “a” is not heard), Derrida points to “traces” of a linguistic experience.

These “traces” are an index of decentered subjectivity. The self is only in the logos of grammé, just as with Merleau-Ponty the speaking subject appears as absolute only in experience—an experience arising contemporaneously with the presence of the phenomenon. As philosophy becomes this experience, its form, as we have seen, is that of non-philosophy. For Derrida, as the absence of a reference to the subject becomes evident, signification operates within the free play of differentiation between signifier and signified.⁶³ Meaning is disseminated⁶⁴ throughout writing—specifically, the presence of writing—the voice of silence and the silence of voice.

For Lyotard, once author of a Que Sais-je? volume on phenomenology,⁶⁵ the translation of intentionality into libidinal desire plays a Merleau-Pontean refrain. With Lyotard, figural expression is sent out in various directions at the level of discourse. Desire meets the painting or the text at a moment perpendicular to its formalization.⁶⁶ The field in which discourse is present indicates the place of human desire, the place in which the libidinal is at work. This unification of Freudian singularity and Marxist collectivity at the point of intersection in art is philosophy-become-text.⁶⁷ The textual presence of the unconscious, however, is also theoretical work (travail) announcing itself as work (oeuvre) of art.

Similarly all magisterial discourse has as its goal the assertion of mastery over an audience.⁶⁸ In seeking to gain the confidence of his students, the sophist entered into the art of persuasion. Persuasion became the expression of the master's desire over the language of the student. The student in speaking for himself would in fact be dispensing the desire of the other—the student's language could only be a repetition, extension, and multiplication of a discourse that belongs to his teacher and is therefore not his own. Merleau-Ponty had already noted that with non-philosophy an autonomous subjectivity does not speak. What he found in Hegel and Marx was the corporeal expression of philosophy no longer identifying itself as such. The study of magisterial discourse is the presence of the very same language. The discourse that seeks to negate that of the master takes the place of the master as in the Freudian desire for paternal replacement. Non-philosophy becomes the child and parent of philosophy.

Difference, repetition, dissemination—these are the indices of Merleau-Ponty's legacy. His unspoken presence permeates these formulations of current thought. Their presence in Deleuze's writing once again signals that the empire of signs is at work delineating the contemporary epistemé. Just as Deleuze sees Proust embroiled in the intricate construction of a spider's web, one would be hard put to find the place of an individual subjectivity at the center of French thought. The spider continues to weave—Marcel, the character, becomes, in the end, at the point of recovering lost time, the author of the narrative that sought the fulfillment of its temporal teleology. When the ends meet, one cannot say that a point is established. Rather, like the rhizome, growth extends outward forming a network. The end point is as undiscoverable as the starting place. Yet the web, the network, the text are non-philosophy philosophizing.

Deleuze's books on Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, and Bergson are evidence of a passing-through-philosophy.⁶⁹ Yet the return which interrogates Sacher Masoch, Proust, Lewis Carroll, Freud-Marx, and Kafka⁷⁰ is the refusal to present philosophy in a hierarchical, geneological, linear fashion. The Merleau-Pontean flesh of the world is, in Deleuze, the transmission of the absolute at the level of textual experience.

The texture of the world becoming an interpretation of human activity and consciousness becoming carnal presence could not avoid articulation in the writing of those who developed along with Merleau-Ponty. We can only mention Ricoeur's hermeneutic, Dufrenne's aesthetic, Lévinas' metaphysic, and, of course, Sartre's dialectic, which extend the tradition that would have continued to speak.

Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is not non-philosophy in the sense of a lost philosophy. Its presence is prolonged despite his absence. The absence of a living subjectivity is not the absence of a lived philosophical adventure.

Notes

1. This paper was presented at the inaugural meeting of the “Merleau-Ponty Circle,” which was held at the University of Akron, September 3-4. In the preparation of the text, I have benefitted from discussions with Dick Howard and from editorial remarks by James Schmidt.

2. Two series of lectures were offered during 1960-61, for only in the years 1957-59 did Merleau-Ponty consolidate his two courses into one. Thus for 1960-61, there exists another set of inquiries announced as Cartesian Ontology and Modern Ontology and not included in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel. In this other course, Merleau-Ponty explored the visible with Cézanne, out of the invisible in things, through Leonardo's perspectival projection, and at the oscillating center in the chiasm of visual perception and kinesthetic apperception. Alexandre Métraux summarizes these materials in “Vision and Being in the Last Lectures of Maurice Merleau-Ponty” in Life-World and Consciousness, ed. Lester E. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 332-336. The course parallels specific elements in Eye and Mind, trans. Carleton Dallery in The Primacy of Perception and other Essays, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), which was the last work to have been published by Merleau-Ponty during his lifetime. It develops certain aesthetic theories that remained nascent since Sense and Non-Sense (1948), trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964)—including particularly the transformation of Cézanne's Gestaltism into the painter's thinking in space as visibility.

3. Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963).

4. Ibid., p. 48.

5. Ibid., p. 51.

6. Ibid., p. 58.

7. Ibid., p. 58.

8. Ibid., p. 63.

9. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).

10. Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text” trans. Arleen B. Dallery in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 9.

11. Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., p. xix.

12. See footnote 81 in “Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel” included in this issue of Telos.

13. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O'Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 84.

14. Ibid., p. 84.

15. Note Lefort's doubts that the work was fully abandoned and that were there time it could have been revived out of the tissue of The Visible and the Invisible. The Prose of the World, op. cit., p. xx.

16. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1960), p. 165-275.

17. Ibid., p. 165.

18. Ibid.

19. See Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). This is selected from Vol. II of Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961).

20. The Visible and the Invisible, op. cit., p. 266.

21. Ibid., p. 268.

22. Ibid., p. 264.

23. Ibid., p. 187.

24. Ibid., p. 185.

25. Ibid., p. 221. The inherent critique of Heidegger's notion of the Zwischen will be discussed later in this essay.

26. Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., p. 136.

27. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon, 1963) p. 162.

28. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, trans. John O'Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), p. 96.

29. Ibid., pp. 62-3.

30. Ibid., p. 98.

31. Merleau-Ponty, The Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

32. Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures, trans. John O'Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 51-61.

33. Ibid., p. 100.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., p. 101.

36. Ibid., pp. 109-110. Translation altered.

37. Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, trans. Carleton Dallery in The Primacy of Perception, p. 178.

38. Ibid., p. 181.

39. Ibid., p. 187.

40. These notes were published posthumously in Méditations, 4, 1961-62, pp. 5-9. They are reprinted in Entretiens: Claude Simon, ed. Marcel Séguier (1972), pp. 41-46. Dates of these notes extend between October 1960 and March 1961. Therefore they cover the same period as Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel.

41. Entretiens: Claude Simon, op. cit., p. 42.

42. Ibid., p. 45.

43. For a discussion of the meaning of these events and related issues in Merleau-Ponty's political theory, see Dick Howard “Ambiguous Radicalism: Merleau-Ponty's Interrogation of Political Thought” in G. Gillan, Horizons of the Flesh (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1973), pp. 143-159 and his essay included in this issue.

44. Louis Althusser in his “Introduction” to For Marx (Paris, 1965) dubs this break, the coupure épistémologique, following Gaston Bachelard's description on the philosophy of science. Since it announces a shift from an earlier position, the transition that it signals is the move to science and a “scientific socialism.”

45. J. P. Sartre, “The Singular Universal,” trans. John Mathews in Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York: Pantheon, 1974).

46. See my “The Self in Husserl's Crisis,” The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 7, No. 1 (January, 1976), pp. 24-32.

47. In “Man and the Self as Identity of Difference,” Philosophy Today, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer, 1975), pp. 131-136, I develop this particular Heideggerian formulation of selfness as between subjectivity and objectivity (establishing difference), and as inclusive of both (establishing identity).

48. See J. P. Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Noonday, 1957).

49. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon, 1969). Although first published in 1949, a revised edition appeared in France in 1967.

50. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linquistics, (New York, 1959).

51. J. P. Sartre “Merleau-Ponty” in Situations, trans. Benita Eister (Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett, 1965), p. 211.

52. Ibid.

53. Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove, 1958).

54. See Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston: Beacon, 1967).

55. For examples, see Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Want, 1974); On Racine, trans. R. Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964); Système de la mode (Paris: Seuil, 1967); and Roland Barthes (Paris: Seghers, 1975).

56. Sartre, “Merleau-Ponty,” p. 211.

57. See Jacques Lacan, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in The Structuralists, ed. Richard and Fernande De George (New York: Anchor, 1972), pp. 287-323.

58. Louis Althusser, For Marx, p. 167.

59. Sartre, “Merleau-Ponty,” p. 209.

60. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. anon. (New York: Vintage, 1970), and The Archaelogy of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972).

61. In 1967, Jacques Derrida published three books: Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973); L'Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967); and De la Grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967).

62. See particularly “Differance” in Speech and Phenomena, pp. 129-160. This essay was originally published in 1968 as vol. LXII of the Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie after having been read before that society. The significance of its oral exposition is internal to the understanding of the distinction between “differance” and “difference.”

63. See Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Eugenio Donato and Richard Macksey (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970).

64. See Derrida, La Dissèmination (Paris: Seuil, 1972). The semé as unit of meaning is dispersed throughout writing.

65. Jean-François Lyotard, La Phénomenologie (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1954).

66. See Lyotard, Discours, figure. (Paris: Klineksiech, 1971).

67. See Lyotard, Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud. (Paris: Union Générale de l'Edition, 1973) and Economie libidinale (Paris: Minuit, 1974).

68. Reference is made here to Lyotard's “magisterial” lecture for the “Schizo-Culture” Semio-text(e) Conference held at Columbia University (Fall 1975). The experimentalization of translation methods used in the course of the lecture illustrated not only the proliferation of “desire,” but also the repetition of the discourse of the other—in this case, Lyotard's.

69. See Gilles Deleuze, Empirisme et subjectivity (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953); Spinoza et le problème de l'expression (Paris: Minuit, 1969); La Philosophie critique de Kant (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1966).

70. See Deleuze, Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1967); Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969); L'Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et schizophrenie, with Félix Guattari (Paris: Minuit, 1972); and Kafka, with Guattari (Paris: Minuit, 1975).