Abstract
In Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence, Merleau-Ponty draws on Malraux’s theory, developed in Le Musée Imaginaire and Les Voix du Silence, according to which modern art is the achievement of subjectivity’s creative powers in its ability to achieve the metamorphosis of the world through her works. This essay aims to show that the idea of “coherent deformation” illustrates Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to rethink subjectivity’s individuation as a creative yet ontological pattern that recasts the dynamics of operative intentionality and its expressions. I show that in response to Malraux, Merleau-Ponty works out a diacritical sense of individuation as style that conveys existential possibilities. This conception proposes a “phenomenology from within” that relies on literary, psychoanalytic and artistic works to exhibit the metamorphosis of the subject in and through her world.
When Malraux writes that style is the ‘means of re-creating the world according to the values of the man who discovers it’; or that it is ‘the expression of a meaning lent to the world, a call for and not a consequence of a way of seeing,’ or finally, that it is the ‘reduction to a fragile human perspective of the eternal world which draws us along according to a mysterious rhythm into a drift of stars’; he does not get inside the functioning of style itself. Like the public, he looks at it from the outside. […] The painter at work knows nothing about the antithesis of man and the world, of signification and the absurd, of style and ‘representation.’
Merleau-Ponty, Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence, 53
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Notes
- 1.
Merleau-Ponty delves into Husserl’s concept of operative intentionality in order to recast perception independently from consciousness. What is at stake is twofold: (1) deconstructing the positive identity sought by the theory of intentionality as fulfillment (on this topic, see the analysis of Emmanuel Lévinas in “Intentionalité et sensation”); and (2) rejecting as well the understanding of consciousness in terms of nihilation offered by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, according to which consciousness is defined by its “lack of identity” and its capacity to introduce negation in the opaque world of the “in-itself” and in the other’s fundamental project thanks to the possibilities it constantly creates for itself.
- 2.
The process of passive synthesis is part of what Husserl describes in his later texts as “operative intentionality,” along with genetic constitution and unconscious processes. It cannot be thematized as such even though its products are ultimately constituted by the ego: “What is constituted for consciousness exists for the ego insofar as it affects me, the ego. Any kind of constituted sense is pregiven insofar as it exercises an affective allure, it is given insofar as the ego complies with the allure and has turned toward it attentively, laying hold of it.” Husserl, Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, §34, 162. On this topic, see J. N. Mohanty, “Husserl’s Concept of Intentionality.”
- 3.
In Ideas II, §64, Husserl distinguishes between absolute and relative individuations. The former refers to the act-intentionality and the constituting activity of the transcendental ego while the latter are expressions through attitudes and life-styles of the more fundamental one. Merleau-Ponty tries to think here the self-grounding nature of expressions and individuations where Husserl made sense of subjectivation processes.
- 4.
Despite having in common an emphasis on life and affectivity, Merleau-Ponty takes here a different path from Michel Henry, who disqualified the concept of intentionality by claiming that even in its “operative” form one might see the traces of representational thinking—the latter annihilating life’s auto-affection. See “Hyletic Phenomenology and Material Phenomenology,” in Material Phenomenology, 7–42.
- 5.
The first section of the Phenomenology of Perception notably provides a criticism of the constancy hypothesis that presupposes the objective world and a constant connection between elements of it and a sensory perception apparatus that records them. According to Merleau-Ponty our perceptions always fail this consistency and science errs in conceiving of the body as an object of experience instead of an active embodied participant engaged in the process of experiencing.
- 6.
“The body schema is essentially the back of a praxis, pre-objective spatiality and the background from which take shape actual objects of action.” Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, 159 (my translation). Hereafter MSME.
- 7.
On the influence of the works of Paul Schilder on Merleau-Ponty’s notion of schéma corporel, see Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeity, Chap. 1.
- 8.
Such conception reflects the influence of Maine de Biran on Merleau-Ponty as shown in his lectures: “[Maine de Biran] introduces the motor subject as a subject capable of having thought: the motor subject is thinking, ‘we find in ourselves the intelligence which operates through the will.’ Willing and understanding cannot be dissociated. Therefore, we can acknowledge that Biran wanted to show that the presence of the body was necessary for thought itself.” Merleau-Ponty, “Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito,” in The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul, 76.
- 9.
In this sense, and in light of Merleau-Ponty’s working note of The Visible and the Invisible (hereafter VI), titled “Teleology,” it seems problematic to maintain the teleological terminology to describe the generativity that is here described as Ted Toadvine does in his article “Singing the World in a New Key: Merleau-Ponty and the Ontology of Sense.”
- 10.
Some comparison could be made between Merleau-Ponty’s notion of vision and Nietzsche’s perspectival seeing and the way they are both sustained by the intertwining of Apollonian and Dionysian forces. See Johnson, “Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty: Art, Sacred Life, and Phenomenology,” in Nietzsche and Phenomenology.
- 11.
In a working note of The Visible and the Invisible, dated February 1959, Merleau-Ponty writes: “One cannot make a direct ontology. My ‘indirect’ method (being in the beings) is alone conformed with being – ‘negative philosophy’ like ‘negative theology’ […] What is philosophy? The domain of Verborgen (philosophy and occultism).” VI, 183.
- 12.
On the non-representational or non-objectifying kind of thematization worked out by Merleau-Ponty, see Khan, “The Time of Flesh and the Memory of the World,” 238.
- 13.
Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, 17.
- 14.
“For me the infinity of Being that one can speak of is operative, militant finitude: the openness of the Umwelt – I am against finitude in the empirical sense, a factual existence that has limits, and this is why I am for metaphysics. But it lies no more in infinity that in the factual finitude.” The Visible and the Invisible, May 1960, 251.
- 15.
Merleau-Ponty writes: “It gives vision that which clothes it within, the imaginary texture of the real.” EM, 124.
- 16.
See Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of Imagination.
- 17.
In a working note of The Visible and the Invisible, dated November 1960, Merleau-Ponty explicitly refers to Bachelard’s notion of elements in order to challenge Sartre’s ontology of the imaginary.
- 18.
On the relation between Bachelard and Corbin, see Cheetham, All the World an Icon, 84. Referring to Terre Céleste, Bachelard wrote to Corbin in May 1956: “It is the élan of verticality that I receive from each page of Terre Céleste. […] Reading you, I imagine that I yet could have the power to speak of the dynamicity of human verticality” In a note working note of The Visible and the Invisible dated April 1960, Merleau-Ponty refers to Bachelard’s notion of the imaginary—a notion that Bachelard himself defined as the “power of deforming the images given by the senses” in L’air et les songes, “Introduction: ‘Imagination et mobilité,’” 5
- 19.
“Hermeneutics does not consist in deliberating about concepts, it essentially unveils what goes on inside us, what makes us build up such conception, such vision, such projection when our passion becomes action, an active pathos, prophetic and poeitc.” Corbin, “De Heidegger à Sohravardî,” 25 (my translation).
- 20.
Corbin, Philosophie iranienne et Philosophie comparée, 23.
- 21.
Two different interpretations of this ontological discourse have been presented in a collection published in 2010 entitled Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Perception and Religion. In this volume, Richard Kearney and Joseph S. O’Leary discuss the notion of sacrality in Merleau-Ponty and how it relates to Being’s life. According to Richard Kearney (158): “By relocating the moment of sacred transcendence in the immanence of nature, Merleau-Ponty is restoring logos to the flesh of the world. Deus sive Natura.” In his contribution Kearney offers a picture of the sacrality of Being as a fleshing out of transcendence in immanence, as a sort of pantheism (affirmed by the reference to Spinoza) reflecting the presence of God among beings thanks to what he would call a “relocation.” On the other hand, Joseph S. O′ Leary argues that Merleau-Ponty’s esoteric suggestions about Being should be limited to an aesthetic interpretation which puts the emphasis on depth as the existential pattern of the creative activity of life as Being. We argue here that the ontological and the aesthetic dimensions are not mutually exclusive and converge under the notion of “coherent deformation.”
- 22.
See Le paradoxe du monothéisme, 14.
- 23.
See Corbin, Philosophie iranienne et philosophie comparée, 17.
- 24.
Corbin, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, 9.
- 25.
“A second postulate, evidence for which compels recognition, is that the spiritual Imagination is a creative power, an organ of true knowledge. Imaginative perception and imaginative consciousness have their own noetic (cognitive) function and value, in relation to the world that is theirs – the world, we have said, which is the “alam al-mithal,” mundus imaginalis, the world of the mystical cities such as Hurqalya, where time becomes reversible and where space is a function of desire, because it is only the external aspect of an internal state.” Corbin, “Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal,” 16
- 26.
Corbin, “Eyes of Flesh and Eyes of Fire,” quoted in Cheetham, The World Turned Inside Out, 47.
- 27.
Corbin, Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, 14.
- 28.
“In order to bestow a name upon the piece of sculpture, he had called it to himself Gradiva, ‘the girl splendid in walking.’” From Jensen’s “Gradiva: a Pompeiian Fancy,” quoted in Freud, Delusion and Dream, 148.
- 29.
Merleau-Ponty is reversing here the Freudian phrase according to which dreams achieve desires.
- 30.
Merleau-Ponty writes: “Here we will truly see that oneirism is not non-being of the imagining consciousness qua imagining, but just beneath the surface of perceptual consciousness.” Lectures on Institution and Passivity, 161.
- 31.
See Saint Aubert, Du lien des êtres aux éléments de l’être, 64.
- 32.
“Thinking ‘operationally’ has become a sort of absolute artificialism, such as we see the ideology of cybernetics, where human creations are derived from a natural information process, itself conceived on the model of human machines.” Merleau-Ponty, EM, 122. Merleau-Ponty’s approach differs here from Simondon’s conception of individuation.
- 33.
In the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception (xxiv), Merleau-Ponty states: “If Phenomenology was a movement before becoming a doctrine or a philosophical system, this was attributable neither to accident, nor to fraudulent intent. It is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valéry or Cézanne—by reason of the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being. In this way it merges into the general effort of modern thought.”
- 34.
Merleau-Ponty quoting Cézanne’s words, in “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 68.
- 35.
The lectures titled “Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage” (1953–1954) were given at the same time as the lectures titled “Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression,” which focus on the body schema. Even if the course on literary expression aims to address the issues at stake in Sartre’s theory of literature (1947), it is interesting to note that Merleau-Ponty examines this concept in light of his developing ontology of the imaginary and his theory related to the body schema, motility, and expression. The description that Derrida gives of the Implex could well apply to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of expression in spite of the criticism addressed by post-structuralist thinkers (notably Foucault in chapter 9 of The Order of Things) to Merleau-Ponty’s concept of expression. On this topic see Lawlor, “Eschatology and Positivism: The Critique of Phenomenology in Derrida & Foucault.” Concerning the “implex,” Derrida writes that the concept “marks an implication that is not one, an implication that cannot be reduced to anything simple, an implication and complication of the source that in a certain way cannot be disimplicated: this, the IMPLEX.” Margins of Philosophy, 303.
- 36.
Merleau-Ponty provides a detailed analysis of Saussure’s theory in The Prose of the World. His unpublished lecture on speech contemporary to his work on literary language (1953–1954) has extensive passages on Saussure.
- 37.
In the conclusion of the preface of Signs (35), Merleau-Ponty makes this implicit reference to Camus and Sartre: “The remedy we seek does not lie in rebellion, but in unremitting virtù. A deception for whoever believed in salvation, and in a single means of salvation in all realms.”
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Archives Husserl de Paris, Marie Curie Actions – To carry out her research, the author has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 657712. The author is sole responsible for the views defended in this essay.
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Boublil, E. (2020). Individuation, Affectivity and the World: Reframing Operative Intentionality (Merleau-Ponty). In: Apostolescu, I. (eds) The Subject(s) of Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 108. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29357-4_15
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