Embodiment as Ambiguity: ‘Fatness’ as it is Lived

Abstract

Merleau-Ponty’s last work, published after his death, including many of his working notes for concepts he intended to develop further, was entitled The Visible and the Invisible. In this work, he presents a closer investigation of intersubjectivity as he outlined in The Phenomenology of Perception, making use of a biological term — ‘chiasm’ — to explain the inextricable connection of the self to the other in intercorporeal relations. In other words, his project of dismantling binary structures that have governed Western thought, such as mind/body and self/other, continues in The Visible and The Invisible in a more profound and considered manner than his previous assertions. Whilst, as the story of the ‘mirror-stage’ shows, Merleau-Ponty does not dismiss the boundaries of the subject that make possible such relations as being looked at, and looking, and touching and being touched, he does however stress that the relationship between self and other is essential to the construction of individual identities.

I know myself only in so far as I am inherent in time and in the world, that is, I know myself only in my ambiguity (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 345).

For Merleau-Ponty, your corporeal schema is never individual: it is fundamentally intersubjective and specific to your social and familial situation. Further, as a corporeal schema is constituted in relation to others, it is ambiguous. Insofar as any body claims absolute self-identity and difference from the other through building a partition between their body and the body of the other, this ambiguity is suppressed (Diprose, 1994, p. 119).