Bound Transcendence and the Invisible: On Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Painting

Author(s): Vronique M. Fti

Source: symplok, Vol. 4, No. 1/2, special issue: Rhetoric and the Human Sciences (1996),
pp. 7-20
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40550381
Accessed: 26-10-2017 06:46 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Nebraska Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to symplok

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
bound transcendence
and the invisible:
On merleau-ponty's
philosophy of painting

VRONIQUE M. FH

In his last and unfinished work, The Visible and Th

Merleau-Ponty seeks to develop - at a critical distance f
and from the philosophies of reflection and essential i
ontological implications of an interrogation of "experie
both "irrecusable and enigmatic. " Among these registers of
experience, vision exerts, for him, a particular fascination, because it
challenges one to rethink, or think otherwise, the distance and
separation that it involves.
In ancient as well as modern philosophical discourses, vision
functions as a privileged trope for philosophical understanding: as
possession at a distance, it is supposedly free from the distractions
and contaminations of materiality, and so is able to grasp the whole
or the essential in its unobstructed presence. As an idealized vision
or mentis inspection philosophical understanding, from its sovereign
distance, is able to strip away the changing veil of appearances, the
"clothes," as Descartes puts it with respect to his piece of wax, so as to
reveal reality in its nakedness (22). Euclid, supposedly, has looked on
beauty bare.1
The very distance that allowed vision to function, in the
philosophical tradition, as a trope for sovereignty and unalloyed
purity of cognition becomes, for Merleau-Ponty, the mark of a
contamination or of encroachments that allow it to attest to the
latencies, lacunae, depth-articulations, and chiasmatic inter-
involvements that constitute the ontological structure of what he calls
"flesh." Precisely because vision involves a certain distance, it does
not support so much as the dream of seeing things "all naked;" for
only by "enveloping" them and "clothing" them in its own flesh does it
allow them to become manifest in a phenomenal self-containment

*Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnet, "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare,"
speaks of a passage into "luminous air," and of the shaft of "light anatomized" that
shone into Euclid's vision.

Symplok Vol. 4, Nos. 1-2 (1996) ISSN 1069-0697, 7-20.

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
8 Vronique M. Fti Merleau-Ponty' s Philosophy of Painting

that is straightway literalized or absolutized by the "perceptual

faith."2 Merleau-Ponty poses the transcendental question as to how it
is possible that the gaze "unveils" phenomena precisely by "veiling"
them (1964, 173; 1968, 139), that it lets them appear, so to speak,
through a translucent but irremovable screen. This questioning of
the screen, as one might call it, of phenomenalization leads him on to
sketch, at least in outline, the revisions of traditional ontology that it
mandates.
In answer to the transcendental questions, Merleau-Ponty
characterizes the visible as a fleeting crystallization formed from out
of a matrix of latencies and participations, rather than as an atomic
sense datum that is passively offered up to the seer. The seer, for her
part, is not contracted into a detached and purely active gaze, but is
caught up in the visible which, so to speak, folds back upon itself by
passing through the density of her "flesh." This density that seems to
set apart the seer and the seen is, quite to the contrary, their one
means of communication. In its separative capacity - as a spacing or
gap {cart) - it guards that communication against being collapsed
into an undifferentiated "coincidence" that would be a sterile as it is
illusory.
By way of prolegomena to a future ontology, Merleau-Ponty
indicates how the problem of inter subjectivity might be resolved, if
not dissolved, by a recognition of intercorporeity, which is not a
communion among discrete bodily selves, but rather the very
generality of the sensible, "this anonymity innate to myself that just
now we called flesh" (1964, 183; 1968, 139). Flesh is not materiality,
but rather an "element" of being that introduces the "style" of a
decentered recursion, of a reflection always promised yet, in its
completion, withheld. It comes to expression in the "carnal" or bound
essences which remain in latency within the visible from which they
cannot, however, be exorcised. One gains access to them through a
sort of "initiation" that is very different from the Platonic "initiation
into the Mysteries," but that, once entered upon, can likewise not be
undone. In the dimension that it opens up, one is not so much the
possessor of knowledge or of privileges as one is, ambiguously, the
haunted and the possessed.

Painting and Ontology

In "Eye and Mind," written in July and August of 1960, and thus
contemporary with Merleau-Ponty's progress on The Visible and
Invisible (in particular, with a large section of the Working Notes that
attests to the audacious new reach of his thought), he shifts the focus

2For discussion of the perceptual faith, see Dastur's "Perceptual Faith and the
Invisible." For Merleau-Ponty's discussion of perceptual faith, see ch.i of Le visible et
l'invisible.

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Symplok Winter / Summer 1996 9

back from ontology to his lifelong preoccupation with painting.3

Painting is not, however, considered here merely as an artistic
practice sufficient unto itself, but rather in the light of, and as
uniquely capable of, shedding light on the problems of ontology and
historicity that preoccupied him.
In its power to bring about a pure opening, a space for
manifestation to entrace its ciphers, painting occupies, for Merleau-
Ponty, the place in which Heidegger installs poetry, or Dichtung in
the larger sense. His initial and recurrent discussions of techno-
science respond, moreover, to Heidegger's problematic of technicity.
He insists/however, precisely upon painting's wordless silence, upon
the painter's unwillingness - or even incapacity - to enter into a
"dialogue" with the philosopher concerning being and historicity.
While repudiating any dialogical retrieval, he stresses painting's bond
to materiality and; to the sensuous articulations of the lifeworld that
subtend what Mongin (following Lvi-Strauss) calls "the language of
culture," drawn upon by music (Mongin 253). Painting's bond is to a
"wild being" that will not accept the yoke of philosophical
essentialism.
If I may be pardoned for lapsing briefly into an extra-
philosophical discourse, I would like to retell here a Provenal
folktale. The tale narrates the capture of a "wild woman," a being
who - not least in virtue of her femininity - inhabits the undefinable
boundary of the human, by a highborn and wealthy young hunter. To
desire and possess her, as a helpless captive, is not enough; he strives
to put her into the positions of bride and legitimate wife. Having duly
"civilized" and schooled her, in captivity, he arranges for an elaborate
wedding. In the course of the nuptial ceremonies, however, the wild
woman breaks free and runs for her integrity, for the high cliffs, the
uninhabitable country. All that her relentless pursuers ever found of
her was her bridal finery, and in particular her veil. Draped over a
sheer rock face, it became a waterfall which seemed to make the
rainbow palpable. As soon as touched, however, it dissolved into mist
and air. And so it has been to this day ....
What is the motivation, and the point, of this montage of
discourses? It is, first of all, to stress that painting, in virtue of being
a pure art of vision, functions, for Merleau-Ponty, as an exegesis of
"wild being," which is not any sort of substratum that could be
localized, mapped out, and intellectually appropriated, but rather an
upgraspable play of "dehiscence." Painting's mode of interrogation is
unique; for, unlike the constructivist thought of techno-science, it
does not and cannot remove itself from the complexities of sensory
experience; yet even so-called "realist" painting does not degenerate
into a pretense of fusion with the real. Painting shares with classical
(e.g. Cartesian) science a sense of and respect for the opacity of the
world; but, rather than to delimit itself over against this opacity in a

3Merleau-Ponty, L'Oeil et l'Esprit. I refer to the work as 1964a, and give the
French pagination before the English. The translations are my own.

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
10 Vronique M. Fti Merleau-Ponty' s Philosophy of Painting

search for essential truth, it situates itself in the primary upsurge of

the "there is." The painter, like the classical phenomenologist,
performs a certain bracketing or reduction (from the world and from
the clamor of history, Merleau-Ponty remarks, s/he draws - of all
things - canvasses) (1964a, 15; 123); but in keeping the world
suspended, s/he seeks only to release the differential energies of "wild
being," whereas the phenomenologist seeks eidetic invariants.
Finally, painting, in its practice of contemplation, does not leave
behind mundanity but obstinately inhabits it. As the painter Andrew
Wyeth has remarked: "The commonplace is the thing, but it's hard to
find" (Wilmerding 154). It is, to be sure, encountered most
everywhere; but what is difficult to realize is the flash of vision that
discloses it as though it had never been seen before, yet gives it the
compelling power of a universal.
Painting attests, for Merleau-Ponty, to the ontological structure of
vision by its refusal of any complete appropriation or reflective
closure, by its attention to the inter-involvements of sentience and
sensibility, visibility and the invisible, self and other - as well as by
its recognition of the translucent screen of manifestation or
figuration. As Jacques Taminiaux points out, Merleau-Ponty here
carries forward the thought of Husserl, for whom "the phenomenal
character specific to the perceived brings about a constant
overlapping of those terms deemed antithetical and heterogeneous in
the [Western philosophical] tradition" (Taminiaux 280). For Merleau-
Ponty, painting (which Husserl neglected) performs an ontological
meditation:

As soon as this strange system of exchanges is given, all the

problems of painting are there. They illustrate the enigma
of the body; and it [in turn] justifies them. (1964a, 21; 125)

He stresses the "exchanges" that interlink self and other, in

contrast to the Sartrean objectifying gaze that threatens to annihilate
the other's freedom. If, for Spinoza, man is God to man (in the
generic sense), s/he is, for Merleau-Ponty, her or his mirror: and one
must leave to the mirror its potentialities of dis-figuration.4
The mythical figure of Narcissus - often, if marginally, invoked by
Merleau-Ponty, is exemplary here. Narcissus loved and desired his
own likeness in a primary alienation - in the mutability of water -
and not in sheer self-identity (which would annihilate desire). He
refused, however, to love himself through, in, or as the other - or
simply to love the other who, unlike water, retains the power to
misconstrue, to see otherwise, to reject. Narcissus is perhaps an
archetypal figure engaged in a tragic quest for ontological
simplification, by substituting the mutability of aqueous reflection for
the betraying gaze of the other - from which one can turn away far

4See, in particular, Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the motif of the mirror in Dutch

painting (1964a, 32-35; 129ff.)

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Symplok Winter/ Summer 1996 11

less easily than from a mirroring pool. It is an open question - one

Merleau-Ponty does not address - whether and to what extent
painting follows somnambulently, at times, in the footsteps of
Narcissus. Merleau-Ponty rather innocently construes its traditional
fascination with the mirror image as a fascination with a pre-human
gaze; and he does not interrogate the tradition of obsessive self-
portraiture that reaches at least from Rembrandt to Frida Kahlo, and
that includes Czanne, whom he is preoccupied with.5 To shift focus,
Merleau-Pont/s meditation on painting, in "Eye and Mind," is also a
meditation on historicity - though less explicitly so that is his
dialogue with Malraux in "Indirect Language and the Voices of
Silence" (first published in 1952).6 As Mongin points out, the
historicity of painting sketched in "Eye and Mind" involves a dialogue
with both Hegelianism and structuralism. Mongin also finds that
Merleau-Ponty elaborates a historicity of the event (Mongin 245). My
own view, however, is that the notion of a "poetic information of the
world" is more important for Merleau-Ponty's sketch of historicity
than is the notion of the pure event; for "the language of painting" is
not, for him, a natural language; it is "to be made and remade (1964a,
51; 135). Just as it is necessary that that which is intrinsically
"without place" should be "subjugated to a body," (1964a, 83; 146) so
also the artwork is necessary to bring to awareness the enigma of
manifestation. Merleau-Ponty here echoes Heidegger's thought, in
"Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes," that the creation of an artistic
work opens up and keeps open the enigma of manifestation:

The orienting installation [Einrichtung] of truth into the

work is the bringing forth of a being such as there was not
before, and there never will be again. Bringing forth sets
this being into the open in such a manner that what is to be
brought first clarifies [lichtet] the openness of the open, into
which it comes forth. When the bringing forth specifically
brings the openness of beings, truth, that which is brought
forth is a work. Such bringing forth is creating. (50; my
translation)

For Heidegger, the creator's "true-keeping^ of truth in the work is

the very mark of the historiality of art, which he characterizes in
terms of the three aspects of instauration: donation, free grounding,
and initiation (64). However, whereas Heidegger's thought follows
out a crypto-potical orientation, Merleau-Ponty retreats from politics
to point out that the work itself "opens up the field in which it will
appear in another light," precisely because its own density opens up
access to another density, that of the lateral and vertical articulations
of phenomenalization. In doing so, it cannot absolutize itself; but
rather, it calls for other works that open up and keep open the space

5See here Silvennan's "Cezanne's Mirror Stage. "

6This text, in a re-translation by Michael B. Smith, appears in The Merleau-Ponty
Aesthetics Reader (76-120).

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
12 Vronique M. Fti Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy of Painting

of manifestation, without prescribing or delimiting them. The screen

of manifestation, entraced by the painterly work, becomes here a
protective screen, a shield against both a quasi-Hegelian totalization
of history and a historicity that absolutizes structure.

Bound Transcendence

Merleau-Ponty's reflections on painting take up the fundam

philosophical problem of how transcendence is possible for b
bound to the conditions of experience - a problem that is invo
philosophy's self-understanding. In post-Kantian philosophy,
specifically in German Idealism, this problem motivates a tu
artistic creation and to the work of art which contrasts markedly
the long indifference or hostility of the Western philosoph
tradition to art. For Schelling, the art-work becomes the
accomplishment of an otherwise inachievable synthesis of nature and
freedom and for Hegel, art constitutes an essential moment in the
self-realization of absolute truth - a moment which must, to be sure,
be surpassed since, as Taminiaux puts it, "the element within which
art produces its works, the sensible, is [for Hegel] not adequate for a
genuine manifestation of the Idea" (279).
Not only does 19th century thought approach art in terms of the
oppositions of the sensible to the intelligible, of object to subject, or of
freedom to nature, thus foreclosing the possibility that the
philosophical study of art might lead to a critical examination of these
oppositions and their intellectual dominance; but it also regards
artistic creation straightforwardly as production, and the art-work as
product. Heidegger, in "The Origin of the Work of Art," is perhaps the
first Western philosopher to argue for a sharp separation of artistic
creation from production, and of the art-work from objects, utensils,
and products in general. He still gives primary importance, however,
to the created form (Gestalt), which is a bearer of truth, but which
confronts one enigmatically in its atelic character and in its sheer
contingency and particularity. Merleau-Ponty, by contrast,
emphasizes neither product nor form, but process, and with it, a
certain "mystery of passivity;" for vision, which painting interrogates,
is not "in possession of its proper premisses;" it is "the means given
me to be absent from myself, to assist the fission of being from
within" (1964a, 80; 146).
The ontology which Merleau-Ponty finds to be called for by his
study of painting in its interrogative and process character, and by
his exegesis of sensible articulation as antecedent to language and
ideality (which it nevertheless from the outset contaminates and is
contaminated by) is not only an ontology of the lacunae, of perpetual
incompletion, divergences, and deferrals, and of inextricable
interencroachments; but it is also entirely dislocated into "the
beings," so that the difference between being and beings is collapsed.

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Symplok Winter/ Summer 1996 13

This collapse, however, does not bring with it any obliteration of

difference and alterity, as would happen if "the beings" could be
totalized or invested with inherent reality of ultimate self-identity.
The question of bound transcendence becomes the question of how
regions of translucency come to open up within the fissioning of being,
of how bound idealities or "carnal essences" attest to the inter-
encroachments of ideas and flesh, and of how artistic creation, an
the philosophical reflection that thematizes it, participate in the
ontological process.
To shift the focus from ontology to painting, Merleau-Ponty
achievement is to have thought philosophically - at least to an
extent - the detachment of the visual arts, specifically of painting,
from the dominance of literature - a detachment that can be traced to
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Heidegger, by contrast,
remains entirely under the spell of a literary or poetic paradigm, even
when he discusses painting and architecture, since language is for
him the primary locus of manifestation.
As Clement Greenberg (1992) points out, painting and sculpture
were historically particularly vulnerable to literary annexation, since
they lent themselves to the creation of illusions, and since, by the
17th century (when, he finds, the dominance of literature began to
assert itself), they had reached so high a degree of technical facility as
to be able to conceal their media, or to let them disappear into the
created illusion.
Greenberg stresses that the "purity" sought by much of early 20th
century art, specifically by abstract painting and sculpture, involves
"the willing acceptance of the limitations of the medium of the specific
art, so that, in order [t]o restore the identity of an art, the opacity of
the medium must be emphasized" (558). The screen here interposes
itself between image and illusion, notably the illusion of fictive space.
Whereas Merleau-Ponty emphasizes, in modern and near-
contemporary painting, its thematization of the registers of visibility,
its autofiguration, and the articulation of a logos of perceived
equivalences, the primary emphasis should really fall on what
Greenberg calls "the destruction of realistic pictorial space" (559). In
painting, the flatness of the canvas or other support begins
increasingly to assert and foreground itself, so that the image not
only moves "up front" but also sets in motion and explores complex
and not necessarily univocal spatial dynamics.7
One can perceive the abandonment of fictive space in several of
the illustrations Merleau-Ponty selected for "Eye and Mind," notably
in de Stal's "Coin de l'atelier," in Klee's "Park bei Luzern," and in
Cezanne's watercolor of Mont Ste. Victoire. Furthermore, Merleau-
Ponty discusses, with respect to Cezanne's paintings, the emergence
of a polymorphous spatiality from the unstable modulation of colors,
and in general, painting's abandonment of represented space. Here

7 1 have discussed this in more detail, with respect to the work of three
contemporary abstract painters, in Fti 1995.

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
14 Vronique M. Fti Merleau-Ponty* s Philosophy of Painting

again he contrasts with Heidegger who understands the art-work's

thematization of its own materiality, first of all, as a timeless rather
than a specifically modern characteristic, and as bringing the "earth,"
which symbolizes being's self-refusal in the very granting of
manifestation, to stand forth (36). For Heidegger, in a sense, the
medium still disappears - not, to be sure, into illusion, but into the
articulation of the truth of being, which happens first and foremost in
the poetic word. Merleau-Ponty is quite alone among philosophers in
endeavoring, first of all, to understand in its own terms the self-
relinquishment of painting to its media and to the registers of
visibility in its philosophical bearing, in keeping with his conviction
that "[t]he entire modern history of painting, its effort to disengage
itself from illusionism, and to acquire its own dimensions, have a
metaphysical significance," attesting to "a mutation in the relations
between man and being" (1964a, 61 & 63; 139). Even if one may
agree with Magritte that "Eye and Mind," for all its philosophical and
literary brilliance, "hardly makes one think of painting"8 in the sense
that it addresses the philosopher's concerns rather than those of the
painter, its fascination (for many artists, as well as for certain
philosophers) derives in good part from Merleau-Ponty's
unprecedented effort to take the philosophical measure of key
developments in recent and contemporary painting.

Out of Nature
Merleau-Ponty dissociates painting from the work and embeds it
in the expressive articulation of sentience carried on together by the
human eye, mind, and hand. The sentient body is from him above all
a nexus of the ontological structures of reversibility and inter-
encroachments. As Elaine Escoubas explains:

Reversibility as a structure of aisthesis points back to a still

more general structure which qualifies not only the order of
the sensible, but the ontological order: the structure of
inherence, which is implication or encroachment. This
structure is designated as a "system of exchanges" in "Eye
and Mind," and as "intercrossing" and "chiasm" in The
Visible and the Invisible. This is why the body is not
"objective" but "expressive;" it is a knot of living
significations. (126; my translation)

Unlike Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty approaches the issue of

phainesthai or of the inapparent granting of phenomenalization
through what philosophy has, throughout its tradition, marginalized:
sheer sentience with its exposure and vulnerability, its confusions
and obscurations, its ambiguities, enchantments, illusions, and

8 As cited by Johnson 35.

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Symplok Winter/ Summer 1996 15

simulacra. This approach is what calls for the integration of paintin

into a phenomenological ontology in critical dialogue with Husser
and Heidegger, as well as Hegel and Sartre, and against the
background of rationalist thought. The approach and integration a
compelling; yet they leave one with a sense of irresolution and
dissatisfaction, both as regards ontology and painting.
I will not here pursue issues of phenomenological ontology or, in
particular, the difficulties that attend Merleau-Ponty's placement of
vision into a quasi-transcendental position, and his ambiguous
treatment of perception as both a sensory relation to the world that
can, to an extent, be empirically studied, and as the figure of an
originary differentiation approaching the Derridean notions of
diffrance and espacement. Instead, I want to focus on what remains
problematic in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of painting, for all its
sensitivity {pace Magritte) to painterly vision and to the concerns of a
devoted and perceptive spectator.
The opacity of the visible world which painting respects is not
merely an opacity for perceptual exegesis or for scientific and
philosophical analysis; it is also a felt, affective, and oneiric density,
as well as a density of historiality, of myth, of the noumenal, of
cultural narratives. These are not just "prolongations" of,
participations in, or sedimentations encrusted upon a primary
perceptual upsurge; they are also densities, opacities, and
translucencies in their own right which are at the origin as layers of
the screen of phenomenalization. Michel Haar (1995) has criticized
Merleau-Ponty's neglect of affectivity and language in his studies of
painting, pointing out that "the symbolization of our incarnate
existence .... is necessarily historical," so that there is no pristine
and natural stratum of incarnate existence to which painting could
possibly return. As Merleau-Ponty himself says - but without fully
integrating this insight into his philosophy of painting - "the whole
landscape is overrun with words . . .," so that "wild meaning" surges
up into a language which is also "the voice of no-one" (1964, 203ff;
1968, 155). What he touches on here is both the irreducibility of
historically and culturally informed meaning and the emptiness at
the core of phenomenalization. This emptiness is concealed by the
screen of phenomenalization; yet it is also what allows the screen to
organize ceaseless configurations. Painting cannot truly claim any
privilege over other arts, such as poetry as an art of language, or
dance (which Merleau-Ponty never mentions) with its extraordinary
conjunction of spatiality and temporality, in granting access to "wild
being" and to the upsurge of phenomenalization and meaning.
As concerns affectivity, Merleau-Ponty does not do justice to the
felt intensity from which paintings so often springs, and which is not
merely an intense fascination with visibility. Haar points out that
Cezanne's mysticism of color and nature - revealed in his
correspondence - is filtered out by Merleau-Ponty. Even a painter
such as Andrew Wyeth, whose work is often regarded as descriptive of
the perceived world, stresses emotion as "the only thing I want to

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
16 Vronique M. Fti Merleau-Ponty' s Philosophy of Painting

search for" and as making for the power of a painting.9 It should,

however, be noted that emotion or feeling becomes here dissociated
from the merely personal to open upon what one might call, with a
term borrowed from Levinas, the "height" of beings, and also their
piercing strangeness. One can extend what Rothko says about "ideas
and plans" - namely that they are just "the doorway through which
one left the world in which they occur" - to encompass merely
personal emotion (563).
Except in the sense of being afflicted with forgetfulness, one
cannot be alienated from a natural and immemorial ground; but
much of modern and contemporary art shows, or comes to terms with,
a sense of alienation or a loss of belonging. While a strong sense of
political, social, or cultural alienation is a peculiarly modern
phenomenon, reflecting, at least in part, the rise of mass culture and
the genocidal events of this century, a more metaphysical sense of
alienation can be traced through many periods of Western art. For
instance, Yves Bonnefoy reflects on the collapse of the heroic
humanism of Quattrocento painting:

Before long, a painter who has certainly reflected on the

absolute and uncompromising demands of Piero della
Francesca's art, Cosimo Tura, paints at Ferrara his 5a n
Giacomo delle Marche, a terrifying monument to the futility
of all ascesis, and to a life that abdicates in the face of death
.... Perhaps the most resolute optimism known to history
gives way to the most terrible anguish. We possess an idea
of man's divinity impervious to all affliction; we possess the
certainty of his affliction impervious to all his glory. (26)

Botticelli's Derelicta, Bonnefoy adds movingly, symbolizes "the

cruelty of the soul's abandonment in physical space" (26). No glimpse
of this terrifying vision, of affliction, abandonment, or anxiety,
disturbs the serene detachment of Merleau-Ponty's proto-
philosophical "secret science" of incarnate existence and of the
primary upsurge of meaning, as which he casts painting. Even in
"Cezanne's Doubt," where he considers, with respect to Czanne and
da Vinci, the relationship between an artist's creative transcendence
and his bondage to psychopathology or particular life traumas, he
insistently understands Cezanne's transcendence as putting
"intelligence, ideas, sciences, perspectives, and tradition back in touch
with the world of nature," and of recapturing "the vibration of
appearances which is the cradle of things" (64, 68). The realization
that Cezanne's sitters appear "as if viewed by a creature of another
species," and that the nature he depicts seems frozen and "stripped of
the attributes that make it ready for animistic communication" (66),
does not, for him, bear witness to an affliction that cannot be
assuaged by revealing "the base of inhuman nature upon which man

^ilmerding 39. See also p. 161.

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Symplok Winter/ Summer 1996 17

has installed himself (64). In short, Merleau-Ponty remains caught

up in a quasi-naturalistic fiction of belonging.
It is, of course, not at all necessary that a sense of alienation and
displacement should express itself in an imagery of trauma and
devastation. The experience can also become the gateway to a new
sense of artistic freedom, as was the case, for instance, for the
Chinese scholar-painters forced into exile or retirement by the Mongol
regime, who developed the spontaneously forceful calligraphic style of
"idea-writing" (hsieh-yi). Closer to our own vantage point. Rothko
states that, by freeing himself of a false sense of security and
community, or by losing his habitation in the familiar order of things,
the artist can gain access to "transcendental experience" (563).
Pollock remarks that what interests him about the contemporary
situation of painting is that painters no longer "have to go to any
subject matter outside themselves," but are free to work purely "from
within" (575).
Out of an experience of loss and liberation, much of recent and
contemporary painting has taken on a hieratic quality, a sacral
presence. It is certainly true (although Merleau-Ponty does not
acknowledge it) that, throughout history and the diversity of cultures,
painting, sculpture and architecture have maintained a bond to the
sacred - so much so that it may be fruitful to meditate
philosophically, in the spirit of Heidegger's meditation on the lack of
distinction, in ancient Greece, between the artist and the technits,
on the lack of any sharp distinction between art and religion in
certain (non-canonical) cultures.10 Rather than to point to and draw
upon a shared transcendent or religious dimension, however,
contemporary painting has, to an extent, become a sacral presence in
itself. Writing about Rothko's murals commissioned for a Manhattan
dining room, which the artist found it necessary, in the end, to
withdraw from their intended setting, Peter Selz reflects that they
ask for "a place apart" within which to carry out their essentially
"sacramental" function, which could not be conflated with ordinary
dining:

This is not an absurd notion when one considers the

profoundly religious quality of much apparently secular
modern art - indeed, the work of art has for a small but
significant number of people . . . taken on something of the
ecstatic and redeeming characteristics of religious
experience, (no pagination)

This sacral aspect is by no means peculiar to the work of Abstract

Expressionist painters, such as Rothko and Newman, who did not

10 1 am thinking here in particular of the installation of Northwest Coast Indian

art at the Seattle Art Museum - an installation that was developed in consultation
with representatives of the tribes involved and that, in its literature, stresses the point
that what, to contemporary Western viewers, is art, was for its creators part and parcel
of religious life, without their recognizing a concept of art as such.

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
18 Vronique M. Fti Merleau-Ponty' s Philosophy of Painting

hide their preoccupation with sacrality, tragedy, or the sublime. It

can also be found, for instance, in the severity of minimalist art, such
as Reinhardts "black" paintings or Martin's pale grids, or again in
hard-edge geometric abstraction, such as John MacDonough's series
of paintings on passages from the Psalms - paintings that grew out of
his visit to the site of the Dachau death camp.
Becoming a sacral presence, or a figuration of spirit, is not,
moreover, the only way in which painting has moved out of nature;
others are irony, intellectualism, geometric construction, and the
thematization of irresoluble perceptual tensions and ambiguities. In
none of these cases is the painter preoccupied with a proto-scientific
and proto-philosophical interrogation of visibility, incarnate
existence, nature, or the origin of meaning; but rather, as Peter
Pinchbeck, in his statement for the 1981 exhibition "Painting up
Front," puts its simply: "the painting has a life of its own and is self-
referential" (no pagination). To present it as the handmaiden of
philosophy is not only to shift the traditional role of "handmaiden,"
but to degrade painting.
One may gather that Merleau-Ponty neglects abstract painting
because it does not, to echo Pinchbeck, tell one much about what is
ordinarily considered "reality" (no pagination), but if so, he is left with
the problem as to what is the perceived world's claim to being a
primary stratum of reality. This question touches upon a vital nerve
of his philosophy of painting: the invisible pertains, for him, always
to the visible, as its reverses, prolongations, interior articulations,
depth dimensions, and furthest reach. As compared to the visible, it
has a more attenuated claim to reality. The visual arts remain, for
him, arts of the visible which claims ontological primacy. This
implicit ontology is not, however, seconded by contemporary artists. If
one reflects, for instance, on Donald Judd's (70) profound statement
that space is essentially unknown and invisible, and that there is, in
sculpture (or painting), "only the visible work invisible," or on
Anthony Lawlor's (87ff) point that space, which is "revealed" rather
than created by architecture, is entirely of the nature of the invisible,
in that, "like pure awareness, it has no tangible attributes," one is
constrained to acknowledge, in opposition to Merleau-Ponty, that the
visual arts are fundamentally arts of the invisible. They give visible
configuration to an invisible which is neither dependent on nor
naturally conjoined with visibility, but is,rather, freely correlated
with it in the process of creation. Contemporary painting, in
particular, does not offer support to Merleau-Ponty's claim that
painting can guide philosophy back to a pristine and natural upsurge
of wild being or meaning.1*
Like the Provenal folk tale narrated earlier, this claim is a
fiction born of a longing to return to the heart of nature, of crossing
the boundaries that debar human existence from natural life. The

nI am grateful to Edwin Ruda for bringing Judd's article and the memorial
tribute to Judd to my attention.

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Symplok Winter/ Summer 1996 19

tale, however, cautions against reifying what is longed for: the wild
woman, though liminally human, is a captive in human society; she
cannot become a participating member or spouse. Painting, moreover,
does not seek to participate in the search for a primary
phenomenological stratum; and, as fundamentally an art of the
invisible that is given visible form, it does not offer privileged access
to a visibility that would constitute such a stratum. This realization
does not, by any means, return the visual arts to a position of
philosophical abjection; but, on the contrary, it holds out the promise
of a more profound and far-reaching interaction between philosophy,
painting, sculpture, and architecture than is possible as long as the
visual arts are cast in the role of philosophical ancillae.

THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

References

Bonnefoy, Yves. "Time and the Timeless in Quattrocento Paint

Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France. Trans. M
Sheringham. Ed. Norman Bryson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 198
26.
Dastur, Franoise. "Perceptual Faith and the Invisible. Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology 25.1 (January 1994): 44-52.
Descartes, Ren. Meditations on First Philosophy. The Philosophical Works
of Descartes. 3 Vols. Trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985-1991.
Escoubas, Elaine. "La question de l'oeuvre d'art: Merleau-Ponty et
Heidegger." Merleau-Ponty: Phnomnologie et expriences. Eds. Marc
Richir and Etienne Tassin. Grenoble: Jrme Milln, 1992. 124-137.
Fti, Vronique M. aThe Evidence of Painting: Merleau-Ponty and
Contemporary Abstraction." Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality,
Painting. Ed. Vronique M. Fti. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press,
1995.
Greenberg, Clement. "Towards a Newer Laocoon." Reprinted in Art in
Theory, 1900-1990. Eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992. 554-560.
Haar, Michel. "Painting, Perception, Affectivity." Trans. Vronique M. Fti.
Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting.
Heidegger, Martin. "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes." Holzwege. 4th ed.
Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1950. 7-65.
Johnson, Galen A. "Ontology and Painting: 'Eye and Mind/" The Merleau-
Ponty Aesthetics Reader. 35-55.
Judd, Donald. "Some Aspects of Color in General, and Red and Black in
Particular." Artforum 70 (Summer 1994): 70-114.
Lawlor, Anthony. The Temple in the House: Finding the Sacred in Everyday
Architecture. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1994.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le visible et l'invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968.

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
20 Vronique M. Fti Merleau-Ponty* s Philosophy of Painting

Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philo

Johnson. Trans. Michael Smith. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993.

Trans. Michael b. Smith.

Mongin, Oliver. "Since Lascaux." Trans. Michael B. Smith. The Merleau-
Ponty Aesthetics Reader. 245-255.
Pinchbeck, Peter. "Statement." Painting Up Front. Exhibition catalogue.
Ithaca: The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 1981.
Pollock. Jackson. "Interview with William Wright." Art in Theory. 574-580.
Rothko, Mark. "The Romantics Were Prompted

Selz, Peter. "Mark Rothko." Exhibition cat

of Modern Art, 1961.
Silverman, Hugh J. "Cezanne's Mirror Stag
Reader. 262-277.
Taminiaux, Jacques. "The Thinker and the Painter." The Merleau-Pont
Aesthetics Reader. 278-292 .
Wilmerding, John. Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures. New York: Abrams,
1987.

This content downloaded from 137.189.84.154 on Thu, 26 Oct 2017 06:46:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms