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(Re-Reading The Canon) Dorothea Olkowski - Gail Weiss (Eds.) - Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty-Pennsylvania State University Press (2006)
(Re-Reading The Canon) Dorothea Olkowski - Gail Weiss (Eds.) - Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty-Pennsylvania State University Press (2006)
INlfHPHflAlIONS
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Already published:
Nancy Tuana, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Plato (1994)
Margaret Simons, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir (1995)
Bonnie Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (1995)
Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, ed., Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel (1996)
Maria J. Falco, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft (1996)
Susan J. Hekman, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault (1996)
Nancy J. Holland, ed., Feminist Interpretations ofjacques Derrida (1997)
Robin May Schott, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant (1997)
Ce!eine Leon and Sylvia Walsh, eds., Feminist Interpretations of SIJren Kierkegaard (1997)
Cynthia Freeland, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (1998)
Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche
(1998) ,
Mimi Reise! Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Ayn
Rand (1999)
Susan Bordo, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Rene Descartes (1999)
Julien S. Murphy, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre (1999)
Anne Jaap Jacobson, -ed., Feminist Interpretations of David Hume (2000)
Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly (2000)
Tina Chanter, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (2001)
Nancy J. Holland and Patricia Huntington, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Martin
Heidegger (2001)
Charlene Haddock Seigfried, ed., Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey (2001)
Naomi Scheman and Peg O'Connor, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein
(2002)
Lynda Lange, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2002)
Lorraine Code, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer (2002)
Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson, eds., Feminist Interpretations of W.V. Quine
(2003)
Maria J. Falco, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Niccow Machiavelli (2004)
Renee Heberle, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno (2006)
Penny A. Weiss and Loretta Kensinger, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman
(2006)
Nancy J. Hirschmann and Kirstie M. McClure, eds., Feminist Interpretations of John Locke
(2006)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
B2430.M3764F462006
194-dc22
2006018172
It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper.
This book is printed on Natures Natural, containing 50% post-consumer waste, and
meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Preface vii
Nancy Tuana
Introduction: The Situated Subject 1
Dorothea Olkowski
1 Merleau-Panty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 25
Sonia Kruks
2 Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 49
Dorothea Olkowski
3 White Logic and the Constancy of Color 71
Helen A. Fielding
4 From the Body Proper to Flesh: Merleau-Panty on
Intersubjectivity 91
Beata Stawarska
5 Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics: Alterities of the
Flesh in Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty 107
Judith Butler
6 Culpability and the Double Cross: Irigaray with Merleau-
Panty 127
Vicki Kirby
7 Urban Flesh 147
Gail Weiss
8 Vision, Violence, and the Other: A Merleau-Pontean Ethics 167
Jorella Andrews
vi Contents
Take into your hands any history of philosophy text. You will find com~
piled therein the "classics" of modem philosophy. Since these texts are
often designed for use in undergraduate classes, the editor is likely to offer
an introduction in which the reader is informed that these selections
represent the perennial questions of philosophy. The student is to assume
that she or he is about to explore the timeless wisdom of the greatest
minds of Western philosophy. No one calls attention to the fact that the
philosophers are all men.
Though women are omitted from the canons of philosophy, these texts
inscribe the nature of woman. Sometimes the philosopher speaks directly
about woman, delineating her proper role, her abilities and inabilities,
her desires. Other times the message is indirect-a passing remark hint~
ing at women's emotionality, irrationality, unreliability.
This process of definition occurs in far more subtle ways when the
central concepts of philosophy-reason and justice, those characteristics
that are taken to define us as human-are associated with traits histori~
cally identified with masculinity. If the "man" of reason must learn to
control or overcome traits identified as feminine-the body, the emo~
tions, the passions-then the realm of rationality will be one reserved
primarily for men,l with grudging entrance to those few women who are
capable of transcending their femininity.
Feminist philosophers have begun to look critically at the canonized
texts of philosophy and have concluded that the discourses of philosophy
are not gender~neutral. Philosophical narratives do not offer a universal
perspective, but rather privilege some experiences and beliefs over others.
These experiences and beliefs permeate all philosophical theories
whether they be aesthetic or epistemological, moral or metaphysical. Yet
viii Preface
this fact has often ~en neglected by those studying the traditions of
philosophy. Given the history of canon formation in Western philosophy,
the perspective most likely to be privileged is that of upper-class white
males. Thus, to be fully aware of the impact of gender biases, it is impera-
tive that we re-read .the canon with attention to the ways in which phi-
losophers' assumptions concerning gender are embedded within their
theories.
This new series, Re-Reading the CanOn, is designed to foster this process
of reevaluation. Each volume will offer feminist analyses of the theories
of a selected philosopher. Since feminist philosophy is not monolithic in
method or content, the essays are also selected to illustrate the variety of
perspectives within feminist criticism and highlight some of the contro-
versies within feminist scholarship.
In this series, feminist lenses will be focused on the canonical texts of
Western philosophy, both those authors who have been part of the tradi-
tional canon, and those philosophers whose writings have more recently
gained attention within the philosophical community. A glance at the
list of volumes in the series will reveal an immediate gender bias 'of the
canon: Arendt, Aristotle, Beauvoir, Derrida, Descartes, Foucault, Hegel,
Hume, Kant, Locke, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Plato, R!=lusseau, Witt-
genstein, Wollstonecraft. There are all too few women included, and
those few who do appear have been added only recently. In creating this
series, it is liot my intention to rectify the current canon of philosophical
thought. What is and· is not included within the canon during a particu-
a
lar historical period is result of many factors. Although no canonization
of texts will include all philosophers, no canonization of texts that ex-
cludes all but a few women can offer an accurate representation of the
history of the discipline, as women have been philosophers since the
ancient period. 2
I share with many feminist philosophers and other philosophers writ-
ing from the margins of philosophy the concern that the current canon-
ization of philosophy be transformed. Although I do not accept the
position that the current canon has been formed exclusively by power
relations, I do believe that this canon represents only a selective history
of the tradition. I share the view of Michael Berube that "canons are at
once the location, the index, and the record of the struggle for cultural
representation; like any other hegemonic formation, they must be con-
tinually reproduced anew and are continually contested."3
The process of canon transformation will require the recovery of "lost"
Preface ix
texts and a careful examination of the reasons such voices have been
silenced. Along with the process of uncovering women's philosophical
history, we must also begin to analyze the impact of gender ideologies
upon the process of canonization. This process of recovery and examina-
tion must occur in conjunction with careful attention to the concept of
a canon of authorized texts. Are we to dispense with the notion of a
tradition of excellence embodied in a canon of authorized texts? Or,
rather than abandon the whole idea of a canon, do we instead encourage
a reconstruction of a canon of those texts that inform a common culture?
This series is designed to contribute to this process of canon transfor-
mation by offering a re-reading of the current philosophical canon. Such
a re-reading shifts our attention to the ways in which woman and the
role of the feminine are constructed within the texts of philosophy. A
question we must keep in front of us during this process of re-reading is
whether a philosopher's socially inherited prejudices concerning woman's
nature and role are independent of her or his larger philosophical frame-
work. In asking this question attention must be paid to the ways in which
the definitions of central philosophical concepts implicitly include or
exclude gendered traits.
This type of reading strategy is not limited to the canon, but can be
applied to all texts. It is my desire that this series reveal the importance
of this type of critical reading. Paying attention to the workings of gender
within the texts of philosophy will make visible the complexities of the
inscription of gender ideologies.
Notes
1. More properly, it is a realm reserved for a group of privileged males, since the texts also
inscribe race and class biases that thereby omit certain males from participation.
2. Mary Ellen Waithe's multivolume series, A History of Women Philosophers (Boston: M. Nijoff,
1987), attests to this presence of women.
3. Michael Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992),4-5.
Introduction: The Situated Subject
Dorothea Olkowski
curs: the room, the pe~son walking through the room, and the falling
object become vertical. This "miracle" can take place because the body
is not some thing in an objectively held space but is located where there
is something to be done, an activity to be carried out, no matter how
rudimentary. Walking; sitting, opening a door, using an object, all resitu-
ate the embodied subject so she feels that she can inhabit the room. As
Merleau-Ponty claims, "It is then, a certain possession of the world by
my body, a certain gearing of my body to the world."?
This account of the spatial realignment of an embodied, situated sub-
ject reflects the body's potential for certain movements such as sitting,
standing, and reaching, and also the demand for vertical rather than
oblique planes. Likewise it reflects the spatial environment as something
that calls for certain kinds of movements and certain kinds of actions so
that not only does the embodied subject inhabit and enjoy space, but she
is also open to the influence and power over herself of things and spaces
and, also, of other embodied beings. The integration that the embodied
subject experiences between herself and her environment takes place
when the subject's motor'" intentions unfold as the world responds in ac-
cordance with the subject's expectations. Such a perceptual ground is
fundamentally "a basis of my life, a general setting in which my body can
coexist with the world," and so with others. B The connection to other
living beings arises because every conceivable being, Merleau-Ponty
maintains, is related directly or indirectly to this general setting, this
perceived world, making it the horizon of all our perceptions, each of
which passes on. its spatial orientation to whatever perception follows it.
In order for this not to result in an infinite regress, Merleau-Pontyopts
for a prepersonal orientation for the experiencing subject, a prepersonal,
anonymous life that can only be located in the body, a communication
with the world that he declares is ~ore ancient than thought, saturating
consciousness, yet impenetrable to reflection. 9 These considerations are
at the basis of the feminist invocation and feminist critique of Merleau-
Ponty. Beauvoir voices no fundamental disagreement with Merleau-
Ponty's conception of the situated subject, and Merleau-Ponty even ar-
gues that it is Beauvoir who laid the foundations for existential phenome-
nology in her novel She Came to Stay .10 There, in her account of a woman
on the edge of a love triangle, Beauvoir creates a character who discovers
that her fundamental cO!llmunications with others occur less in relation
to her intentional consciousness than in her bodily situatedness, her spa-
a
tial location in world in which other beings and things are integrated
Introduction 5
that are prior to and the ground of any intellectual relations with the
world have been subject to extensive critique for their masculinist bias.
Iris Marion Young points out that Merleau-Ponty has attracted the inter-
est of feminist philosophers by locating subjectivity in the body, thereby
giving the lived body ontological status as the first locus of intentionality,
a pure presence to the world and an openness to its possibilities.1 5 Never-
theless, she echoes Irigaray's concerns by stating that an epistemology
emerging from a feminine subjectivity might well privilege touch over
sight and that Merleau-Ponty only occasionally offers a concept of the
lived body specific to women, a bodily comportment typical of both femi-
nine existence and of the modes and structures in the world that condi-
tion that existence. 16 Others, among them Judith Butler, have praised
some aspects of Metleau-Ponty's work while at the same time voicing
skepticism. Butler commends Merleau-Ponty for his recognition of social
and historical factors that are intrinsic to any theory of the body, which
is not, for him, coextensive with mere existence. Nevertheless, Butler,
more forcefully than Young, has argued that Merleau-Ponty privileges the
gaze in matters of sexua.1ity, which he describes in unremittingly hetero-
sexual terms, a perspective that he tends to naturalize, forgetting his pre-
vious commitment to historical and cultural life. 17 Michel Le Doeuff is
even more explicit in her critique of Merleau-Ponty, arguing that the
visible body, perceived by the so-called normal subject, is a woman's body
seen by the gaze of the man, who will soon move from gaze to gesture,
from vision to touch, remaking what he sees, accenting his own eroge-
nous tastes. IS The disturbing implication of this position is that each
woman seen by-a man is seen from within the framework of what Le
Doeuff takes to be a generalized structure of power, the power of each
man to redraw or remake anything he sees no matter how idiosyncrati-
cally this is done. She finds this particularly disturbing in the intellectual
realm, where male scholars still publish books about women making use
only of the work of other male scholars and implying-using reasoning
very much like that used by Merleau-Ponty-that a man has the right to
represent women as he wishes. 19
More recently, feminist philosophers have begun a reassessment of the
value of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy for feminism. Although they do not
deny the masculine bias of his thinking, there is, nevertheless, a con-
certed attempt to take up what is most useful in his work. Sonia Kruks
and Gail Weiss, who have both contributed essays to this volume, are
significant in this new effort. Kruks traces Merleau-Ponty's usefulness to
Introduction 7
cause, if, as we claim~d above, the body's place is defined according to its
tasks or interests in the world, this will be the case not only with respect
to the world of things but also with respect to other human beings. As
human beings, our tasks and interests situate our experience. Thus, in
this volume, the question will often arise of whether Merleau-Ponty has
solved the problematic of sexual difference, especially with respect to the
question of the gender of the pre personal as well as the intentional sub-
ject. Many of the chapters in this volume address whether, or the extent
to which, the ethics of sexual difference can be successfully formulated
by his phenomenology. The answer may well lie in how each of the au-
thors takes up the question of Merleau-Ponty's as well as her or his own
tasks and interests, for on Merleau-Ponty's account, what interests us is
what we will seek to ground and situate with respect to our experience
and knowledge.
The tasks and interests with which this volume begins are those of the
relation of intersubjeotivity to embodiment as they encourage or discour-
age sexual difference in Merleau-Ponty's work. In the opening chapter,
"Merleau-Ponty and. the Problem of Difference in Feminism," Sonia
Kruks lays out the framework for an ethics of sexual difference from the
perspective of an intersubjective interpretation of Merleau-Ponty. Al-
though Kruks admits that Merleau-Ponty does mostly conceive of the
body as masculine, she argues that embodiment alone is not necessarily a
guarantee of intersubjectivity, since embodiment is a site of antagonisms
and conflicts as much as it offers positive potentialities for communica-
tion and harmonious'intersubjectivity. Kruks maintains that feminism
has a need t~ acknowledge both situated know ledges and objective or
shared and public knowledges, and she argues that Merleau-Ponty's exis-
tential phenomenology performs precisely this task. He does this, she
thinks, because his philosophical arguments are dialectical, so that his
abstract accounts of embodiment must be interpreted through the lens of
his later, more complex ideas on culture, language, politics, and history.
Merleau-Ponty thus places the perceiver in a situated world that she can-
not wholly control where perceiver and perceived form a whole, a gestalt
in which each interacts with the other in order to be what it is. For
Kruks, this is the basis of Merleau-Ponty's conception of an anonymous
and prepersonal embodiment, but it is also the basis of anyone's particular
point of view insofar as having a body and being able to look gives one a
spatial location and so' a view of the world. Thus the prepersonal is always
also particular and suffused with social Significations, and the relation
Introduction 9
between self and world can thereby be understood to involve both affir,
mation and negation and so is dialectical. However, the existence of oth,
ers presents difficulties, and solipsism affirms the extent to which it is
possible, on Merleau,Ponty's account, for others to exist only as objects
for the subject. Kruks proposes that, in the end, what brings us together
is our affective bond with others, by which we participate in acts of soli,
darity with those whose social identities are different from our own. This
is the basis of feminist solidarity: since women's bodies and lives are
highly differentiated with respect to one another, only the generic nature
of feminine embodiment is adequate to account for solidarity and possible
positive intersubjective relations. Yet Kruks seems to acknowledge that
intersubjective relations will of necessity be partial, for the dialectical
nature of embodiment incorporates a negative moment as well as a posi,
tive one so that it is up to us to choose which aspect of our embodiment
to live.
The felt, affective bond with others that Kruks proposes as the basis of
intersubjective relations is precisely the problem taken up in Dorothea
Olkowski's chapter, "Only Nature Is Mother to the Child." Beginning
with Merleau,Ponty's claim that understanding an experience, as op,
posed to living through it, tends to produce distortions that never quite
capture the authenticity of the lived, through moment and that the
child's experience of authenticity and immediacy is an indispensable ac,
quisition underlying maturity, the question Olkowski raises is, Why does
Merleau,Ponty insist on the primacy of nature so as to exclude any traces
of the child's relation to a mother? Nowhere in the human cultural world
does the child appear to find positive affective relations between human
beings; thus, without an originary experience of coexistence or reciproc'
ity, intersubjective attachments appear to be impossible. Even though
Merleau,Ponty recognizes that the child's world is originally a world of
feeling, he is led to give up the idea of the psyche, the feeling one has of
one's own existence, and to replace it with the concept of behavior. In
other words, Merleau,Ponty trades off what is felt-including the felt
relation to the mother, who nurtures and cares for the child, for behavior,
which can be seen and so is predominantly visual. This move resolves
certain crucial problems, such as how the child comes to have an experi,
ence of the other. But in dismissing a fundamental tactile or felt experi,
ence of the child, Merleau,Ponty gives up the child's felt relation, not
just with an other, but with a mother, proposing instead that the child
begins in a state in which she is unaware of any self,other differences at
10 Introduction
all, and then by means' of the specular image, comes to see herself and
others as separate beings.
Olkowski then asks, If the child truly begins in an undifferentiated
world, what could possibly introduce differentiation? Intersubjectivity
may well commence with the felt experience of the child, which begins
in the body of the woman who gives birth, who carries the child to term,
and who then nurtures and cares for the child. Without this felt, inter~
subjective life, vision alone does not guarantee that what is seen is under~
stood by the child to be an other or a separate being. This is affirmed
in Merleau~Ponty's own account by his acknowledgment that specular
knowledge of oneself is also alienation, that in gazing into the mirror the
child is no longer what she felt herself to be but is only that image in the
mirror; Since the feeling component of lived experience has been dis~
missed by Merleau~Ponty as being too chaotic to offer any meaningful
information to the child, the child can only experience herself, the world,
and others through the specular image. However, caught up in this image,
the child is alienated from herself, from the world, and from others to the
point where intersubjec~ivity becomes alienation. Confronted with this
empty human world, Merleau~ Ponty falls back upon the hypothesis of an
originary experience of harmonized nature. Yet, as Olkowski concludes,
if the child's felt experience of birth and being nurtured by the mother is
nothing but undifferentiated chaos, there appears to be an unbridgeable
gap between the experience of the child and the experience of the adult,
which vision does not close.
In "White Logic and the Constancy of Color," Helen Fielding ad~
dresses intersubj~ctivity by means of what she calls an underlying theme
for Merleau~Ponty, that is, the suppression of lived corporeal creativity
and its submission to the mind's unifying representational activity. She
asks, How does an embodied subject both encounter a sedimented, thus
familiarly significant, world and also remain open to new forms of sedi~
mentation? How can we use our cognition to make sense of what we
experience even while remaining alive to the possibilities that our corpo~
real interactions generate? One the one hand, Fielding argues that phe~
nomenological description can be used to reveal the invisible operations
of the suppression of corporeal creativity, but on the other, she finds that
phenomenology also neutralizes its own activities and so obscures the
relations of dominance that it creates. Exemplary, in this regard, accord~
ing to Fielding, are the invisible operations of the phenomenal structures
that privilege white skin in Western culture, structures that obscure the
Introduction 11
embodied persons. She notes how Merleau~ Ponty describes the intrasub~
jective bodily experience of touching one's own hand in which touching
and being touched are reversible. He claims that the same principle oper~
ates between bodies, since active touching can always be reversed into
passive being touche<;l, or the seer can become the seen. The problem,
according to Stawarska, is that in making the move from intracorporeality
to intercorporeality, the very difference between these two modes of being
is erased and the sensible difference between what is mine and what is
other disappears. As a result, the concrete specificity of any corporeal dy~
namic gets submerged in a collapse into the universal model of reversible
self~touching. This is a result, she argues, of the masculine frame of mind
that continually misrepresents the structures of intersubjectivity as well as
gender in its tendency to reduce the other to the same. Thus the male
regards his body as a direct and normal connection to the world and sees
himself as the essential and sovereign subject for whom the other recedes
to the status of an inessential and dependent object. The latter tendency
makes it impossible to account for an authentic relation with the other.
Stawarska acknowledges that Merleau~Ponty conceived of flesh as a
prototype of being, thtis as apersonal and anonymous, the generality of
incarnate being, not of the personal experience of the body. The personal
perspective was the focus of Merleau~Ponty's earlier work and the ques~
tion raised here is whether he successfully abandoned the perspective of
the body proper or merely generalized it in his ontology of flesh. The
intercorporeal encounter with an other is understood through analogy
with one's intracorporeal reversibility, insofar as in a handshake, for ex~
ample, the other's body is annexed by one's own. However, as Merleau~
Ponty makes clear, only touching one's own body yields the double sensa~
tion of toucher~touching; that is, I cannot be an other, since I have my
own place. No actual reversal is possible except from the point of view of
a detached spectator who could incorporate both the hand touching and
the hand being touched in a single act. Stawarska concludes that if only
an impersonal spectator could uphold the thesis of intracorporeal revers~
ibility, its characterization in terms of world flesh must be universalization
of the experience of a unique "body proper," which serves as a norm for
Merleau~Ponty's ontology.· But this universalisalizing tendency has a
larger scope than has previously been identified in the feminist interpre~
tations ofMerleau~Ponty, in that it leads both to the bracketing of gender
and the self/other specifi'city. Stawarska argues that this failure to develop
an authentic relation to the other is an inherent trait of the masculinist
Introduction 13
too much emphasis on the need for a home in which to cultivate one's
individual identity and those who ignore the often profound alienation
that cities may evoke for their inhabitants, not to mention those for
whom even a beautiful home is a prison. In the end, Weiss argues for a
much more nuanced picture of the flesh of dwelling, one that does not
gloss its violence any more than it romanticizes its possibilities, which
may include peace and joy but also discord and disorder.
The complex relation between intersubjectivity and ethics, perception
and the other, is explored in Jorella Andrews's "Vision, Violence, and
the Other: A Merleau-Pontean Ethics." She grants that for Merleau-
Ponty, perception opens up the intersubjective world to human beings,
but in so doing, it also opens up an ethical world and a metaethics.
Merleau-Ponty claims that perception is in some sense violent, but it is a
violence that is not connected to any sort of objectification. Vision, in
particular, although strongly associated with fixing things in their place
as objects, need not objectify. Instead, Andrews argues, the gaze is pre-
cisely antiocular, a refusal to see and to engage in seeing, since seeing
does not fix objects in place but opens up the possibility for ongoing
interaction in our perceptual relations. Therefore, Andrews argues, per-
ception makes and unmakes worlds, selves, and others. To deny this open-
ness and vulnerability would be to flee the intersubjective world, where
all bodies are marked with the traces of mortality, for the stable but
limited realm of the rational and the willful. To refuse to acknowledge
the instability of perception is to refuse the experience of another kind
of permanence, one found only among bodies, and to enter a solipsistic
realm. Any failure to recognize others implies the failure to experience
ourselves as seen by them, which is not the same as merely assigning
others a place in our world through our conceptions of them.
Andrews hypothesizes that it is precisely these notions of intersubjec-
tive life that form the basis of Merleau-Ponty's ethics. A truly ethical
situation, she argues, is a truly intersubjective one in which human beings
reveal themselves by generously meeting others whose perspectives are
juxtaposed to their own. Rather than suppressing others' perspectives,
Andrews maintains that Merleau-Ponty argues for their expression so
that differences may be negotiated. This is evidenced in Merleau-Ponty's
account of Simone de Beauvoir's novel L'inviree, which he finds contains
numerous descriptions pointing to this kind of ethics, one that arises
within a situation rather than being externally imposed. In such descrip-
tions of situated ethical connections, freedom, according to Merleau-
18 Introduction
taken away, it left them without the anticipation and promise of things
and shut down the chiasm, reducing their life. Doyle asserts that it is the
very doubleness of the chiasm that allows this to happen, that turns one's
own things, once taken away or stolen, against oneself. So the prisoner
learns to hoard and to hide even the most trivial things, using the folds
of the world to reaccess space, to revivify time. In this manner, the inside
of the isolated prison cell where things from the outside world are
hoarded and hidden maintains the prisoner in the chiasm where inside/
outside and isolation/connection are still lived. This same interpretation
of the chiasm guides Doyle's reading of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye,
whose protagonist suffers immeasurably from a life in which the very
persons, objects, and events that open the world to her also make possible
her abject condition. This intercorporeality epitomizes the gap between
the protected reader of these accounts and the prisoners/sufferers, a read-
ing that does not merely inform but that brings the reader to witness
events both alienating and involving, focusing on the disparity between
the sufferings of the subjects and the safety of the witness, yet not allow-
ing for a closure of the chiasm, leaving open the gap, the wound.
The relation between embodiment and freedom is the subject of Jo-
hanna Oksala's chapter, "Female Freedom: Can the Lived Body Be Eman-
cipated?" Against those who criticize Merleau-Ponty for universalizing
intracorporeality into intercorporeality, Oksala argues that Iris Young's
adaptation and Jean Grimshaw's and Judith Butler's earlier criticisms of
Merleau-Ponty each presuppose a foundationalist reading of Merleau-
Ponty, that is, an analysis of the body's structures as a universal and stable
foundation for subjectivity. Oksala opposes this understanding of the
body-subject as an existential constant whose universal structures are the
foundation for all forms of subjectivity. Rather, she maintains, subjectiv-
ity is always historically constituted, even for the anonymous body, and
this makes it possible to suggest new and interesting ways to think about
the freedom of the female body. Oks ala focuses on the operative inten-
tionality of the body, which is directed to the world and places one in
situations in the world. This intentionality is prior to or beneath the
intentionality of acts directed toward particular objects; it is the inter-
twining of body and world and is expressed in the idea of the prepersonal
or anonymous tacit cogito, a prereflective subjectivity as yet unaware of
itself because it is inseparable from the world with which it is intertwined.
Oksala wishes to articulate a more radical reading of Merleau-Ponty,
one that rejects the anonymous body as foundational by emphasizing the
20 Introduction
possible the transfer of care for self to care for others, within the realm of
visibility and tactility.
But what if gender is suppressed in considering the moral perspective
of care? In such circumstances, the evidence of a different voice, a self
attached to others, and a new ethic will all also be suppressed. If gender
and care are causally connected either to the social milieu or to biological
factors, then care cannot be a general principle of morality upholding
personal autonomy. If every person has the capacity to alternate between
justice and care, then it is possible that a gender difference might be
associated at this particular moment in history with one or the other
choice. Ultimately, Brubaker concludes, the moral perspective of care for
the flesh is not the same as an empirical understanding of the structural
relations that cause social and economic inequality in society. If a corpo-
real ethics can contribute to the desire to change the world, then the
concreteness of subjectivity is of the greatest importance and the voices
of women may indeed lead to a more interconnected existence that does
not exclude sexual difference. This would be an existence in which the
subjective contexts of visibility and touch bind each thing to every other
and constitute zones of indeterminacy that enable body-images, self
concepts and conceptions of sex, gender, race, and class to inhere within
the realm of the individual person's own unique and practical existence.
Ann Murphy captures this same tension in her examination of the
desire to unveil a "wild" or originary experience and the sedimentation
of language and culture in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. In "Lan-
guage in the Flesh: The Disturbance of Discourse in Merleau-Ponty,
Levinas, and Irigaray," she explores the split between our collective im-
mersion in a primordial historicity that prereflectively informs our judg-
ments and the political need for difference or alterity. What is at stake
here is the concern that if Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology cannot suf-
ficiently theorize alterity, it is neither politically nor ethically viable.
Such, at least, she maintains, is the critique aimed at Merleau-Ponty by
Emmanual Levinas and Luce Irigaray. Murphy argues that Irigaray assents
to Merleau-Ponty's return to prediscursive experience in order to con-
struct language differently. However, Merleau-Ponty's description of this
world, where all the possibilities of language are pregiven, provokes the
accusation that language must remain tied to patterns of patriarchal ex-
clusion. Moreover, Levinas, whose idea of ethics requires the Other's
transcendence of history and irreducibility to a common material soil,
suggests that lacking this sort of ethics, Merleau-Ponty has none at all.
22 Introduction
volume argue that the concept of flesh describes the general atmosphere
of intersubjective communication prior to cognition and so prior to social
or gender stratification. Yet, as Sullivan has also claimed, echoing several
other authors in this volume, we must take care not to overestimate the
usefulness of bodily commonalities and shared structures for philosophy.
The social and cultural milieu are powerful determinants, influencing the
direction and meaning of human acts, diminishing and redirecting the
embodied intentionality of any being who thereby expects the acts of
others to echo her own. It may be the case, then, that the future of
feminist interpretations of Merleau~Ponty as well as the working out of
feminist questions regarding embodiment will be located precisely here
in this nexus between generality and specificity, between the structure
of anonymous, prepersonal, embodied existence and that of gendered,
personal life in order to discover some structure that might account for
both while privileging neither.
Notes
ern University Press, 1968); ]34; originally published as Le visible et l'invisible (Paris: Gallimard,
1964).
13. Luce Irigaray, "The Politics of Difference," trans. Sean Hand, in French Feminist Thought,
ed. Toril Moi (London: Blackwell, 1987), 121.
14. For a fuller account of Irigary's use of the concept of the interval in the context of Merleau-
Ponty's phenomenology, see Dorothea E. Olkowski, "The End of Phenomenology: Bergson's Interval
in Irigaray," Hypatia IS, no. 3 (2000): 73-91.
15. Iris MarionYoung, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social
Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 147, 148.
16. See, for example, Young's unique essay on "breasted experience," in Throwing Like a Girl,
189-209. What matters most to women about the breasts, Young states, is their feeling and sensitiv-
ity, not their looks (194).
17. Judith Butler, "Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of
Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modem French
Philosophy, ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989),
85-100.
18 .. Michel Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing, trans. Kathryn Hamer and Lorraine Code (New York:
Routledge Press, 2003); originally published as Le sexe du savoir (Paris: Aubier, 1998). See especially
the section titled "Knowing by Dreaming? Object Versus Objectification," 79-85.
19. Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing, 83. The book Le Doeuff cites is Ian Maclean, The Renaissance
Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1983).
20. Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2001), 49; emphasis added. In this chapter, Kruks subtly weaves together
and separates the ideas of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty.
21. Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York and London: Routledge
Press, 1999), 17-19.
22. Shannon Sullivan, "Feminism and Phenomenology: A Reply to Silvia Stoller," Hypatia IS,
no. 1 (2000): 183-88, 184 ..
1
Merleau,Ponty and the Problem of
Difference in Feminism
Sonia Kruks
For some time now feminists have been more concerned with what di-
vides women than with what they may have in common. Critics of essen-
tialism have demonstrated the dangers of universal characterizations of
"woman" or of "women's experience." Likewise, epistemological discus-
sions have focused our attention on-variously-the multiplicity of di-
Some passages in this chapter are based on material previously published in "Identity Politics
and Dialectical Reason: Beyond an Epistemology of Provenence," Hypatia, A Journal of Feminist
Philosophy 10, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 1-22 and Retrie"ing Experience: Subjecti"ity and Recognition in
Feminist Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
26 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
control the field that "my" perception organizes around me. What I per-
ceive has always a certain autonomy, a "generality," which escapes me.
There is an "anonymity" to perception and to other sensory experiences,
which means that they never are completely "mine." Rather, in the expe-
rience of sensation, I discover "a modality of general existence ... which
runs through me without my being its author" (PP, 216). I am a subject,
as Merleau-Ponty later put it, "ex-centric" (excentrique) to myself. 13 In
Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty uses the term "the One"
(l'On) to describe this anonymous, or prepersonal, embodiment that runs
through my own embodied being and so decenters me. Strictly speaking,
he tells us, "I ought to say that one perceives in me, and not that I per-
ceive" (PP, 215). The perceiving self, he insists, "is not myself as an
autonomous subject, but myself in so far as I have a body and am able to
'look'" (PP, 240).
It is my situation, in even this most minimal sense of the spatial loca-
tion of my body, that gives me my particular viewpoint on things-a
viewpoint that, as Haraway :;llso observes, gains its reality from its very
lack of completeness. 14 But situated perception also involves more than
spatial qualities. For the things that we perceive also have such qualities
as color, texture, weight-all of which we "perceive" together in the
thing. For example, "a colour is never merely a colour, but the colour of
a certain object" (PP, 313); and, in seeing the "woolly colour" of the
carpet, I will also see it as "soft." Here, we quickly discover that my
perceptual situation will already include a world of both personal and
social meanings. The "woolly" softness of the carpet will carry personal
and social significations for me. It may signify comfort, and perhaps lux-
ury. It may recall other occasions or places to me, inciting memories or
desires.
In addition, temporal dimensions inform even the simplest acts of per-
ception. "Recollections" and "sediments," habitual ways of perceiving
that originate in my prior perceptual experience and my general social
existence-habits that may be imbued with my gender, for example-are
part of what I bring to any situation. I also bring a future. For my percep-
tion involves my own movement towards a future, that is, my"project."IS
Merleau-Ponty describes the drawing together of these multiple dimen-
sions of a perceptual situation in the notion of an "intentional arc" that
"subtends" perception, as well as desire and cognition. It is such an arc,
he says, "which projects round about us our past, our future, our human
setting, our physical situation, our ideological situation, and moral situa-
32 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
tion, or rather whicb. results in our being situated in all these respects"
(PP, 136). Here we see how the prepersonal is always also particular; and
how, in its particularities, it is always suffused with social significations.
The arc metaphor suggests, moreover, that situations are not stable,
but are always open and in flux. Forming and re,forming, each is in part
structured by the "sediments" of prior situations, while also merging into
and partly structuring future ones. Situated actions involve complex rela,
tions of freedom and necessity, in which situations impose their own
significations on us, even as we transcend them. Merleau,Ponty remarks
at one point that "ambiguity is of the essence of human existence and
everything we live or think has always several meanings" (PP, 169). Be,
cause it synthesizes past and future, perceiver and perceived, self and so'
cial ,World, there can be no one determinate meaning-or sens-to a
situation. 16 But "ambiguity" can also mean more than the presence of
multiple or indeterminate meanings. In the French original of the above
passage Merleau,Ponty. uses the word equivoque to denote ambiguity. Else'
where, however, he uses the term ambiguiti, and this term implies not
merely multiple but con~adictory meanings.
It is this latter kind"of ambiguity that leads Merleau,Ponty to talk also
of the "tension" of human existence and of dialectic; and it leads him to
recognize the potentially antagonistic dimensions of human life. To be
human is to be a place where being ceases wholly to coincide with itself.
"Man [sic]" is, as Merleau,Ponty had put it in his essay on Hegel, "a place
of unrest."17 It is symptomatic of Merleau,Ponty's sexism that he often
uses the term man when the referent of his statement is not necessarily
male. However~ I will leave other such uses stand without further com,
ment, while using more gender, inclusive language myself when appro'
priate. We-both men and women-outstrip the world, and yet we are
outstripped by it. For existence outstrips, or transcends, us insofar as the
world around us perpetually creates meanings or takes up our meanings in
ways beyond our controL "We shall give the name transcendence to this
act in which existence takes up, for its own purposes and transforms [a
de facto] situation," Merleau,Ponty tells us (PP, 169). He adds: "Precisely
because it is transcendence, existence never utterly outruns anything, for
in this case the tension which is essential to it would disappear." Such a
movement of transcendence perpetually delimits individual existence
and reveals its finitude. But this delimitation is not necessarily a loss, for
it may be experienced in one of .two ways: either as an enrichment and
prolongation of individual existence, or as a threat and its negation.
Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 33
Thus, in this account, far from the other person threatening to make my
situation disintegrate around me, he (or she, as it could be in this exam-
ple) enriches it. This other is not, for me, a negating or objectifying
transcendence, but an equal who shares with me, through our common
participation in embodiment and sensation, and through our common
world and history, a common perceptual experience.
body that is male (and probably also young, white, heterosexual, and
middle class)? I will respond, with some caveats, yes to the first question,
and no to the second.
There are, self,evidently, certain dimensions to embodiment that most
(though not all) human beings share irrespective of such differentia as
sex, gender, race, or nationality. The specificities of the human body that
distinguish us from other animal species, what Merleau, Ponty following
Husserl refers to as the "I cans" (PP, 137) of human embodiment, do
offer us certain commonalities of perception, spatiality, and motilityP
These are, at their most general, common to men and women alike. Un,
like dogs, we see in color, for example, while the forward placement of
our eyes precludes us from seeing as far behind us as most birds do. Our
senses of scale and speed are a function of our size and the speed of the
human gait-the latter being much faster than that of a tortoise, but slow
in comparison to a rabbit.23 We cannot navigate by smell as some species
can, have limited night vision, and so on.
Such differentia are not merely biological "facts." Nor are they trivial.
These invariants of hl!man embodiment structure our experiences such
that we may recognize other human beings as sharing similar (though not
identical) experiences to our own. If I see somebody running for a bus,
struggling under a heavy load, or reaching to remove an object from a
high shelf, for example, I will "know" roughly what it feels like. I will
do so not through a process of rational construction, but prereflectively,
through the immediacy of anonymous embodiment, through the preper,
sonal body as it runs through me. Since we are each particular as well as
general, I will not of course know exactly how another feels, but my grasp
will be sufficient immediately to understand the action and what it en,
tails. Likewise, I may immediately recognize another's most basic emo'
tions as expressed in her or his body: if I see somebody weeping, that
person's body will immediately communicate her or his grief to me. 24
Although the general characteristics of the prepersonal body are not
in themselves gendered, Merleau,Ponty's account allows for the possibil,
ity that our styles of embodiment may be so. Carol Bigwood describes the
body for Merleau,Ponty as "an indeterminate constancy," and I find this
phrase a helpful way of describing the possibilities for variation that
Merleau,Ponty finds always run through the general aspects of embodi,
ment. 25 For example, although as I have suggested the human gait is a
distinctive way of traversing space and is different from that of any other
species, our styles of walking will be encultured in ways that may be gen,
Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 37
not return to haunt me, for I would not feel another's suffering. My victim
would indeed remain a mere surface in front of me, her or his face only
shadows, light, and colors-an object. But as soon as I engage in action,
it becomes difficult to maintain this distance. Thus if violence begins
from a solipsistic withdrawal into a dominating subjectivity from whence
the other is only an object, it can complete -its trajectory only by aban-
doning that initial stance. For in doing violence to another I must engage
with her or him in a relation of embodied existences, in which I discover
in my victim a body that suffers like my own.3 5
Yet the initial solipsistic moment of this encounter is not to be dis-
missed as simply mistaken. On the contrary, in Phenomenology of Percep-
tion Merleau-Ponty argues that solipsism is a pervasive and significant
aspect of our experience of others. I do tend, even prereflectively, to
constitute another as merely a figure in my field of vision-until a sudden
recognition of "reciprocity" decenters that perception (PP, 356-57). But
even before such a decentering, the existence of other people presents
me with difficulties. In solipsism I initially seem to transcend other peo-
ple: they only exist for me as objects of my experience. But the problem
is that I still cannot avoid recognizing them as "people"-that is, as be-
ings "like myself." Less dramatically than the executioner's sudden dis-
covery of himself in his victim, I still discover that people do not stand
before me like other objects of perception, such as rocks or buildings. But
recognizing them as people, even antagonistically so, then presents me
with "the absurdity of a multiple solipsism" (le ridicule d'un solipsisme a
plusieurs) (PP, 359).
A way out of this paradox that may be chosen-but that may also be
refused; there are no guarantees-is to recognize that solipsism is but one
"moment" of our relation to the world, and of the dialectic in which we
may both deny and sustain one another. "Solitude and communication
cannot be the two horns of a dilemma," Merleau-Ponty writes, but are
rather "two 'moments' of one phenomenon, since in fact other people do
exist for me" (PP, 359). For, finally, as we may realize, "the refusal to
communicate is still a form of communication" (PP, 361).
Of course, after hesitating, the executioner my well suppress his mo-
mentary recognition of his victim and carryon with his grizzly task; and
contrary to romanticized notions of sisterhood, women may be horribly
cruel to one another instead of acknowledging the mutuality that their
shared embodiment invites. We may refuse the potential for affirmative
intersubjectivity offered by another's body for many reasons: perhaps from
42 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
Notes
1. An alternative strategy has been to shift toward a postmodern emphasis on the fragmen-
tary, unstable, or split nature of the self. Although such postmodern notions capture some of the
complexities of multiple identity well, they also present difficulties. For they frequently tend to
beg the question of how to characterize a "self" that experiences itself as multiple and unstable.
Against their own grain, postmodern feminist celebrations of multiple identities and mobile
subjectivities often implicitly posit an autonomous subject, which is the site of a disembodied
and self-reflexive metaexperience of its own existence; one that can contemplate and consciously
shift between its multiple identities. For example, in "U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory
and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World," Genders 10 (Spring
1991): 1-24, Chela Sandoval characterizes the "differential consciousness" of U.S. Third World
Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 45
12. "The most importan"'t lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a
complete reduction" (PP, xiv).
13. Signs, 123.
14. Lived, situated perspective, for example, does not conform to the rules of geometry, but
involves my perception of the thing within my particular field of vision. Thus, for example, a
church steeple in the distance will seem larger or smaller depending on what, in the foreground
of the view, attracts my att~ntion (PP, 48).
15. Some feminists have argued that the very concept of a "project," with its resonances of
thrust and assertiveness, is phallocentric. Certainly, its metaphorical connotations are so. But it
is the term that Merleau-Ponty uses to describe any intentional action and one could, I think,
talk of feminine (and feminist) projects without any major contradiction.
16. The term sens, which Merleau-Ponty uses frequently, connotes direction or sense, as well
as meaning. Since no one English word carries all these connotations, I retain the French.
17. Sense and Non-sense, 65-66.
18. Ibid., 29.
19. Maurice Merleau,Ponty, "The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Conse-
quences," in The Primac:y of Perception and Other Essays, ed. J. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1964), 17; original French publication of this essay 1947.
20. Sullivan, "Domination and Dialogue," 1.
21. Ibid., 8. Sullivan eXp'ands on this critical point in her treatment of Merleau-Ponty in
Living Across and Through Skins; "when one rejects the anonymous body . . . it does mean,
however, that one cannot assume that bodily habits, behaviors, and structures automatically
provide a common ground fqr ~ommunication and community that has not yet been inscribed
by differences and particularities. There are no short cuts prOVided by 'the body'" (74).
22. Some of these commonalities may, of course, be absent in cases of disability. In what
follows, then, my claims will be about what is generally, but not universally, the case. As
Merleau-Ponty himself notes, "generality and probability are not fictions but real phenomena,"
so that statistical thought may have a "phenomenological basis" (PP, 442).
Susan Stocker has persuasively made the case that disability does not pose a problem for
claims that embodiment may be a site of relations of human mutuality. Drawing on Maxine
Sheets-johnstone's argument,in The Roots of Thinking (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1990), that we may have a primordial concern for others engendered through "analogical percep-
tion" of bodies, Stocker pointS out that disabled bodies are not always a source of stigma; nor do
they always invoke the hostility of others. On the contrary, disabled bodies may also arouse our
concern and invite the development of mutuality. See Stocker, "Problems of Embodiment and
Problematic Embodiment," Hypatia; A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 16, no. 3 (2001): 30-55.
23. In the context of the interspecies comparisons I am making here, variability within
human walking speeds is not significant. But, of course, when we come to look at different styles
of walking as expressions of particular human ways of being in the world differences will be
significant.
24. Of course, in a particular instance, I might be mistaken: somebody could be weeping not
from grief but for joy. But again, such exceptions are perfectly compatible with the claim that
generally somebody weeping will express grief to another.
25. Carol Bigwood, "Renaturalizing the Body (with a Little Help from Merleau-Ponty},"
Hypatia; A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 6, no. 3 (1991): 54-73.
26. Again, it should be clear here that my statements are only generally-that is, statisti-
cally-accurate. I am not claiming that full sexual dimorphism is present in every human being,
for obviously it is not a universal phenomenon.
27. See Emily Martin, The Woman in' the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1987), esp. chap. 6.
Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 47
28. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essa.y on the Communist Problem,
trans. J. O'Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969); original French publication 1947.
29. Ibid., 102.
30. Ibid., 103.
31. Ibid., 102.
32. Herein lies one of Merleau-Ponty's most Significant divergences from the early Sartre. In
Being and Nothingness it is "the look," pure and simple, that has the power to objectify the other.
33. Although Merleau-Ponty mainly has class relations and capitalist exploitation of labor
in mind here, his observations also fit the long history of Western gender relations, in which
men have tried to control women's bodies for their own purposes.
34. Signs, 212, translation altered.
35. Of course, a factor that makes the conduct of warfare by aerial bombardment so easy is
that the killers do not ever have to encounter their victims as vulnerable and suffering bodies.
36. Sadism is, I think, a different relationship. For the sadist does recognize another's body
in pain-but takes pleasure in it. However, sadism is not my concern here.
37. Mortality rates from diabetes for African American women are two and a half times
those of white women. See Catherine F. Collins, ed., African-American Women's Health and Social
Issues (Westport, Conn: Auburn House, 1996),7.
38. In The Psychology of Sympathy (New York: Plenum Books, 1991), Lauren Wispe reviews
a body of psychology experiments and concludes that "sympathy"--defined as both a heightened
awareness of another's suffering and a desire to alleviate it--does involve forms of immediate
embodied response to others (68). Indeed, there is evidence that we undergo physical responses,
such as a change in heart rate, when we see or know about another's pain. We also engage in a
process of "muscle mimicry," in which we contract our own muscles as if in pain, and in so doing
induce a change of mood and shift of affect in ourselves (135-55).
39. The politics of Western feminist attitudes to clitoridectomy, or "female genital mutila-
tion," are complex. Many Western feminists refuse to take an evaluative stance, since in doing
so they risk imposing their own judgments on "third world" women who may desire the proce-
dure. Stanlie James provides a good overview of the debates on this issue in "Shades of Othering:
Reflections on Female Circumcision/Genital Mutilation," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 23, no. 1 (1998): 103-48. But irrespective of one's political stance, it is impossible to
avoid an upsetting "gut" reaction on hearing about or seeing pictures of the procedure. On
this point, see also Sandra Bartky, "Sympathy and Solidarity: On a Tightrope with Scheler,"
in "Sympathy and Solidarity" and Other Essays (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002),
chap. 4.
40. I discuss this and subsequent points at considerably more length in Retrieving Experience:
Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), chaps. 5
and 6.
41. Lorraine Code, Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations (New York: Routledge,
1995); Elizabeth V. Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1997).
2
Only Nature Is Mother
to the Child
Dorothea Olkowski
"Theoretical and practical decisions of personal life may well lay hold,
from a distance, upon my past and my future, and bestow upon my past,
with all its fortuitous events, a definite significance, by following it up
with a future which will be seen after the event as foreshadowed by it,
thus introducing historicity into my life. Yet these sequences always have
something artificial about them."! With these words, Merleau-Ponty
makes a strong claim for the phenomenology of lived experience, that is,
that we will never be more sure of our past than we were when it was our
present and we were living through it. This takes on particular impor-
50 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
tance in light of his' concern that our current understanding of our past
and therefore of ourselves is a reconstruction, an interpretation that itself
is interpreted with the mistaken aim of determining the truth-value of
both the interpretation of the original event and of the interpretation of
the interpretation in an endless chain of signifiers that never quite seems
to capture the authenticity of the moment when we lived through it,
when "the world itself was more beautiful, [and] things were more fasci-
nating."2
This appears to happen, for Merleau-Ponty, because what he refers to
as "natural time" transcends; it leaps beyond the moment in which I may
willfully and rationally understand anything. What is lived and what is
"understood" are pever on the same plane and so appear to be incom-
mensurate. Every 'time we try to understand an experience, Merleau-
Ponty argues, we understand it in opposition to living it in the natural
time that is at the center of our history. What is inaccessible to our lived
experience, such as the time of our prenatal existence, is inaccessible
because the fetus does not yet perceive and it is perception alone that
gives access to the r~al world of our lived experience. These ideas and
others that follow from them are, at first, wholly confusing, burying us in
an avalanche of seemingly contradictory or irreconcilable concepts. If we
accept, for the moment, the thesis that there exists an intimate relation
between perception and lived experience, then we still might ask, When
and how does this intimacy begin? What does a fetus undergo in the
realm of the senses' and how does the preperceptual life of the human
organism differ from -its perceptual and cognitive lives? That is, is there
such an ano~ymous and impersonal preperceptuallife at the basis of per-
ception and cognition? And if so, is this life impersonal and anonymous,
as emptied of human contact as Merleau-Ponty claims it to be? And
finally, in the time of our prenatal and infantile experience, why does
whatever intimacy we are capable of flow from the natural world and not
from the infant's relation to the mother?
Although the newborn baby may be characterized as a mostly passive
beneficiary of its own experience, human beings have not long to wait for
initiation into the wonders of the "real" world, since already, by its fif-
teenth month, the baby actively perceives. The baby will open its mouth
in response to an adult who playfully places one of the baby's fingers
between "his" teeth pretending to bite it. This observation allows
Merleau-Ponty to conclude that the lived experience of the baby must
take place in an environment rich with intersubjective significance. The
Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 51
baby "perceives its intentions in its body, and my body with its own, and
thereby my intentions in its own body."3 That is, embedded in a human
form of behavior, the fifteen-month-old baby, who is not yet capable of
interpretive reflection, must be able to experience in the body of the
adult a "miraculous prolongation" of its own intentions, "a familiar way
of dealing with the world, "which is to say that a fifteen month old baby
acts intentionally," but what is the nature of those intentions?4 It is a
strange sort of intentionality in which the baby's body and the playful
adult's body are two sides of a structure of behavior and so form a behav-
ioral whole. Thus, the baby and the adult embody a single system of
intentional behavior. But is this behavior an effect of intentional con-
sciousness or is it possible to imagine that it is organized in terms of some
other formation, some other imperative? As it turns out, Merleau-Ponty
does have something else in mind, something that is not an intentional
consciousness at all but is bound up with the child's and the father's
involvement in the intersection of the natural and the cultural world. It
is largely this intersection that will be explored in this chapter insofar as
it is an intersection from which all signs of the female, the woman who
gives birth, who cradles, caresses, nurses, and cares for the infant, are
erased. As such, in place of the personal, intimate relation with this fully
human woman, the infant comes to itself from out of the prepersonal and
anonymous realm of nature.
Although baby and adult embody a behavioral whole, this does not
yet constitute the baby as an other human being for the adult, nor does
it make the adult an other human being for the baby. At fifteen months
the baby has, at most, a limited and partial experience of human being.
To the extent that such experience is possible, it is a result of what the
baby feels. As Merleau-Ponty acknowledges, the baby responds to the
father's playful gesture because it feels, but what it feels is only its own
mouth and teeth as an apparatus with which to bite; its feeling is highly
self-reflexive. This leaves a lot in question. The organization of this be-
havioral whole, the relation between feeling and perceptual intentions in
particular, might need to be more fully articulated in order to determine
how it is that a baby becomes fully human, how it comes to constitute
the adult as a human being. This, we are advised, is where cultural objects
and cultural life first come into play. Before this, there has been nothing,
no feeling of being born from out of the intimacy of another body, no
feeling of being cared for, held, nursed by a mother, nothing but the
preperceptual natural life, which as unperceived is largely lost. The ca-
52 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
resses and care that the infant receives prior to fifteen months are lost to
it forever, since they are not perceived, since they are not produced by
an activity like biting, an act that the infant itself carries out, a playful
self-assertion. Nonetheless, insofar as we are thrown into the natural
world at birth, a world more beautiful and fascinating than any that
comes after, all our perceptions and thoughts will stand out against this
background of anonymous natural life. Each perceptual field (sight,
touch, sound, taste, and smell) will contribute a little perceptual "con-
sciousness" to the total field that embraces these "absent-minded and
dispersed" consciousnesses. It is as if the natural objects are prior to and
outside one's personal existence but enter into that personal existence
once they are able to be perceived. Then, certain behavior patterns settle
into "that nature;J in the form of a cultural world and cultural objects.
But the cultural world is enigmatic; like the natural world, it lacks con-
crete persons who caress and care for the child, but unlike the natural
world, it is not beautjful and is no longer a realm of harmony. Its objects,
each of which "spreads round it an atmosphere of humanity," appear as
mysterious relics of all existence, strange and empty traces of habitual
human ways of life >that stand in service to those ways of life.5 These
empty traces of human life appear as footprints in the sand, fragile and
fleeting, or as a deserted house, empty and unlit. Such traces are the
anonymous residue of the acts of human beings, yielding even fewer clues
than archeological sites, where along with physical remains, traces of the
everyday appurtenances of life may still be found. But for Merleau-Ponty,
human traces are oddly deserted and impersonal, the abandoned and des-
olate remains of life, with few clues of the nature or character of the
humans who inhabited those terrains. Although they remain as indica-
tions of the existence of human intentions, acts, or projects, these traces
linger on in their isolation, strangely dissociated from anything ordinarily
related to the feeling of one's own existence and the specificity of female
or male, mother or father. It is as if every child becomes an orphan; as if
the infant wanders alone in an idealized natural world, offspring of a
generous natural, physical world, never having been enfolded in the arms
and against the breast of a flesh-and-blood mother who cradles, nurses,
comforts, and loves.
In Merleau-Ponty's account of the coming into being of the human
world, the originally splendid natural world is suddenly emptied of all its
charm, >even as the 'cultural .world is introduced through its own ex-
hausted, anonymous remains. The child soon abandons the purely lived
Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 53
the apparent absence of human mothers amid the signs of either the
natural or the cultural world, nonetheless calls for action adeux (coupling
or pairing)? Is it the case that the physical and social world functions as
a stimulus to which human beings respond but that they do so only be-
cause there is an originary generality, a single system of peaceful, anony,
mous coexistence in which two otherwise separate consciousnesses
couple? And why, if the originary natural world is a generality, why is it
that it calls for pairs, couples?
To reach these conclusions, Merleau-Ponty, first of all, evades the
question of mothers and mothering or nurturers and nurturing. This, in
turn, may well be related to the decision to give up the idea of the psyche,
which he defines as the feeling one has of one's own existence, and to
replace it with the hotion of behavior. The feeling of one's own existence
characterized by the psyche is not primarily visual. It is clear from
Merleau-Ponty's account that the world of the perceiver is primarily a
visual world and that, for him, intersubjective relations arise primarily if
not wholly from visual stimuli. When we abandon the idea of a psyche
that feels its existence'" and put behavior in its place, the dominance of
the visual becomes a given. From this point of view, the relation of con-
sciousness to the body is "postural"; it is consciousness of the body as an
organized totality with respect to its different sensory domains and of the
body's position in relation to its vertical and horizontal axes in space. IO It
appears as such to be a body ready to act in that space on the basis of
its perceptual interests. When I perceive the other as another corporeal
schema, this perception appears to be overwhelmingly visual. The visual
perception of the other's corporeal schema stands in contrast to Merleau-
Ponty's initial account of the psyche, especially the psyche of the child
as it opens out upon the world. For the child, as for the adult, the "prob-
lem" of experiencing the other is 'described as involving four components:
first, one's own psyche defined as the feeling of one's own existence;
second, the "interoceptive image," the image one has of one's own body
by means of the sense of touch; third, the "visual body," the other as seen
by me; and fourth, the reconstitution of the psyche of the other, that is,
the feeling of her or his existence. ll
Even Merleau-Ponty admits that problematized in this manner, the
relation to the other raises numerous difficulties. Notably, the child's own
body is given to itself as felt, while, on this model, the body of the other
is given as seen. Experiencing -the other would be an indirect process at
best wherein the child would have, for example, to compare the visible
Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 57
smile of the other with its own primarily felt smile. This model is all the
more questionable, since "the child's visual experience of his own body
is altogether insignificant in relation to the kinesthetic, cenesthesic, or
tactile feeling he can have of it."12 By what means would a child systemat-
ically compare the body felt with the body seen? In spite of the hypothesis
that the child is given to itself as felt, Merleau-Ponty is forced to forego
the idea of the psyche, the feeling of one's own existence, for the idea of
behavior or comportment, since the latter can be characterized in primar-
ily visual terms, for both the self and the other, while the former necessi-
tates recognition of the primary role played by tactility and even, I would
suggest, by what is entirely imperceptible. That is, although Merleau-
Ponty acknowledges that we respond to the stimuli that the world pres-
ents to us and he acknowledges that for the child, vision is insignificant
in comparison to what is felt, he nonetheless overlooks the conclusion
that for the child, the world and others might therefore be given through
, what is felt as well as what is seen. Is it not possible that in existing one's
own body, one is not just seeing but also sensing all the things and beings
in the world whose motions directly and indirectly affect one's own body
whether one can cognitively recognize them or not? To set aside these
conclusions, Merleau-Ponty turns to psychoanalysis, whose arduous con-
struction of a visible self also conceals the primary role and importance
of what is felt and for which feeling arrives through consciousness rather
than through pleasure or pain localized on the body.
We can understand how the visual perception of others is possible,
according to Merleau-Ponty, not by taking into account our real and
evident feeling of the world, but by postulating an initial precommunica-
tive state, a state that evokes that fascinating and beautiful natural world
prior to reflection, the world of prepersonal life that mysteriously does
not include any feelings arising from the infant's relation to the very
person who gave it life. The initial state is characterized variously as
anonymous, undifferentiated, or indistinct. So it is somewhat surprising
when Merleau-Ponty goes on to designate this state; as a "group life" (vie
aplusieurs) , a necessarily anonymous community, a community neverthe-
less. It seems, however, that the recognition of an identifiable group or a
community would require the recognition of individuals constituting a
group, something that the incapacity to differentiate or distinguish would
clearly preclude. The existence of an anonymous and impersonal but
nonetheless group' life would make it possible for the child to begin in a
state in which she or he is unaware that there are differences between
58 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
her- or himself and ~ther beings yet without being isolated. The anony-
mous community precludes solipsism. As Merleau-Ponty will later state,
the child is nobody, the anonymous, the unknown, the one to whom all
will be given to see or to think, that to whom all will appeal, but whose
origin is negativity, ungraspable, nothing. But really, nobody to whom?
While it is certainly the case that many children are born into the world
unwanted, abandoned, or cruelly treated, this is not universal. To the
woman who has chosen to give birth and who has carried the maturing
fetus in her body for nine months; to the man who sought to mix his
body with that of the woman in order for her to give birth to a child, that
child is not nobody, and the feelings passing between these persons and
their infant begin before birth, already in the prenatal stage.
But for Merleau-Ponty, each newborn baby is born into a contradic-
tion, a group life in which it remains unable to differentiate or distinguish
anything. And somehow, gradually, what the child starts to see is not
others. The child sees that her body is closed in on itself and was all
along. Yet if the child begins in a truly undifferentiated world, what could
possibly bring it to differentiate or distinguish between itself and any
other thing? Merlea~-Ponty argues that this occurs long after birth and
only when the child looks into a mirror, which, according to Lacanian
theory, discloses once and for all that each body exists in isolation from
the other. "I can perceive, across the visual image 0/ the other, that the
other is an organism, that that organism is inhabited by a 'psyche,' be-
cause the visual image of the other is interpreted by the notion 1 myself
have of my own boefy and thus appears as the visible envelopment of
another 'corPoreal schema.' "13 Does the arrival of the mirror stage beg
the question, which is, How does one arrive at the notion of one's own
body if the child begins its existence in an undifferentiated world? Vision,
in and of itself, does not guarantee that what is seen is understood to be
a separate being. This is reinforced by the claim that consciousness of
oneself as a unique individual comes later and is not primitive. Not even
the gestalt perception guarantees that we see separate beings, since a
figure on a ground is merely the minimum perceptible, not the necessary
perceptible, and may not be interpreted as an individual figure. So what
can this so-called me possibly be and how can it live in others of whom
it is not yet conscious as well as in itself when it is entirely unaware of
both itself and others as separate beings? How does the child orient itself
starting from the mere feeling of its own body, which it does not yet
realize is its own, so as to arrive first at the perception of its body, which
Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 59
organs are far more otganized than those of a fetus, the sound of a familiar
voice further differentiates the many influences felt in its own body from
their sources in the world. Taking advantage of the stimulus that the
voice provides, Merleau-Ponty quickly elides what is heard with what is
seen. When a baby is two months old, the sound of a human voice (pre-
sumably one the infant has felt and heard over and over already) provokes
smiles, and likewise, although for unknown reasons, since it is initially
not linked to feeling, looking at the child makes her smile; that is, sud-
denly the child perceives. Is not the sound of a voice that evokes a smile
a perception? Is this not a voice that has been with the infant since it
first became viable? This child perceives, but Merleau-Ponty claims that
there is "at least one perception of a look as of something that makes
him complete."l6 The perception of a look that completes the child is
that of the father. It is the father whom the child recognizes visually
and who makes the child complete. Nonetheless, Merleau-Ponty reports,
when anyone at all leaves the room, the child starts to cry, and at three
months, the child cries out when anyone at all enters the room. Who is
this mysterious anyo~e? Does the child feel the presence or absence of
the one who gave birth, who caresses and cares for it? Does the child see
this or does the child feel the change in the room? And what happens if
the father enters in an unfamiliar setting, a strange room? There is no
recognition, we are told. Does the child see the father and perceive itself
as complete or does the child feel, smell, and hear what has already be-
come familiar? Perhaps the recognition of the father, who may not be
close enough to the child to evoke recognition through feeling alone,
requires the security of a familiar setting? A clue that this last might be
the case comes with the acknowledgment that according to the observer,
who finds it "intuitively quite noticeable," what the child sees first are
not persons at all but parts of the' body. The child looks at hands, fingers,
feet, the mouth, but not at a person. It "does not seek to grasp the other
as such."l? That is, what the intuitive observer actually observes is that
the child does not see the other as a whole but reaches out its hands and
tries to grasp the other, feeling its way through the world. What the child
learns about the other's body then, may not arise at all from the look but
from touch, from grasping fingers, mouth, hair, and ears, just as it grasps
its own fingers, mouth, hair, ears, and toes. So at six months when the
child looks at the face of another child, is it a sign of the visual recogni-
tion of an other or is it primarily an effect of tactility and motion, of
reaching and' grasping, touching and being touched, crying and hearing
Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 61
only the smooth surface of the mirror with its hand. Although, according
to Merleau-Ponty, there are no recognizable felt experiences in relation
to the mother or the father, the child has two visual experiences of the
father, one when the child looks at him and one when he looks into the
mirror. This may be.why, in the case of the child's own body, there is one
and only one experience, that of the mirror. "Thus for him it is a problem
first of understanding that the visual image of his body which he sees
over ther.e in the mirror is not himself, since he is not in the mirror but
here, where he feels himself."19 If vision dominates all the senses and if
felt experience really amounts to nothing, as is implied here, then' this
answer makes perfect sense, but what happens when we rethink this ques-
tion from the point of view of what the child recognizes through its
feeling? From this' point of view the problem for the child is knowing
that the visual image of its own body is in fact the image of its own body
precisely because the child is here where she feels herself and not in the
mirror. The image in the mirror is the problem that has to be worked
out, much more than the feeling one has of one's own body or even the
feeling of the world, since heat and cold, loud and soft, as well as modula-
tions of these extremes, are felt by the infant as soon as the sensory-
motor body awakens to the world and it awakens to the world through its
mother. Still, the 'question remains, How does the child, come to know
that the image in the mirror is itself or its father? How is what the child
feels related to what the child sees and finally, what the child knows?
The elevation of sp~cular behavior over the child's grasping and touch-
ing may well. be the reason why Merleau-Ponty must be so concerned
about solipsism. The beautiful and fascinating natural world has been
resignified as valuable for its useful objects but thereby depleted of its
fascination. The cultural world consists of empty artifacts. The child's
felt connection to the mother and through her to the world is interpreted
away as nothing but confusion. Merleau-Ponty does recognize his own
implicit claim that the child first feels its body as a center of action and
that it is this that makes perception and specular differentiation, as well
as the natural and social worlds, tenable. In an empty world, the world
where no mothers give birth to and care for their infants, where human
beings are signified by their relics and representations, not even the real,
felt presence of the father connected with the sight of him brings the
child into the intersubjective, cultural world. The child finds itself, ac-
cording to Merleau-Ponty, not with and through the other, but alone,
completely alone. No mother caresses and cares for her, tickles her and
Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 63
makes her laugh. No father lifts her into the air and hugs her close. She
does not first feel and then see the mother, the father, or both looking at
her; she sees herself. She only discovers that she is visible and a self
when she finds herself completely alone in the world. Surely it is an
understatement to make a claim like the one Merleau-Ponty makes in
this context. "At the same time that the image of-oneself makes possible
knowledge of oneself, it makes possible a sort of alienation. I am no
longer what I felt myself immediately to be; I am that image of myself
that is offered by the mirror. To use Dr. Lacan's terms, I am 'captured,
caught up: by my spatial image.' "20 Likewise, as the child now has only
an exterior image of herself, others will also have only an exterior image
of her and she of them. The entire tactile (including auditory and olfac-
tory) realm is dismissed as merely confused feeling; its inhabitants are
unrecognizable, so that, in this view, the child is forced into the signify-
ing chain, forced to resignify again and again and to wait for primal coex-
istence to reemerge. To call this "reciprocity" is to obfuscate, since there
are nothing but exterior images available to the child, images that alien-
ate so cannot connect.
It has been argued that rather than originating in the specular self of
the mirror, the body image must be taken to arise out of sexually pleasur-
able sensations associated with different body parts, so that knowledge of
oneself implies a complex series of interactions between the infant and
others in a dynamic, ongoing situation. This alternative thesis offered by
Gail Weiss would make way for admitting feeling into the constitution of
the self, but only if Merleau-Ponty were not so ready to repudiate feeling
as mostly chaos and confusion. 21 The tum to the primacy of the specular
perception with its accompanying shift away from psyche, defined as the
feeling of one's existence, to behavior bears a significant relation to
Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of the character of the child's ego and
superego. The child looks in the mirror and identifies with the visual
image, thereby passing from one form of behavior to another. Freud iden-
tifies the ego as that aspect of the self that has been modified by the
direct influence of the external world and is differentiated from the id in
the context of reality testing. Furthermore, according to Freud, the ego,
which represents reason and common sense, arises out of and as a differen-
tiation of the id, which is felt as passion. Thus it is surprising that Merleau-
Ponty here reduces the ego to nothing more than "the collection of con-
fusedly felt impulses" and that only the ideal image of the superego pro-
vides the child with a sense of self. For Freud even feelings playa role in
64 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
the learning process'in that pleasure and pain teach us much about our
own body, and so even Freud affirms the priority of touch over sight. "A
person's own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both
external and internal perceptions may spring. It is seen like any other
object, but to the touch it yields two kinds of sensation, one of which
may be equivalent to an internal perception. Psychophysiology has fully
discussed the manner in which a person's own body attains its special
position among other objects in the world of perception."22 Freud argues
that for sight, the body is simply another object, but for touch it is the
source of orientation for the ego, which is always a bodily ego.
But when human existence and the recognition of others is identified
solely with the vis\,lal point of view, not only is the child's feeling of itself
secondary to its representation of self; more important, the child never
obtains a sense of self in relation to touch, smell, and taste, the elements
of felt existence. Moreover, when Merleau-Ponty identifies lived experi-
ence with the visuals it becomes impossible to make sense of how the
visible image of the self can be both pure experience and knowledge. The
image in the mirror i~ deemed, as has been noted above, to be knowledge,
and as we saw reflected in Merleau-Ponty's comments cited at the begin-
ning of this chapter, such knowledge is, when compared to lived, felt life,
always alienated. Caught up in the spatial image, we are no more what
we felt ourselves to be, but we are not related to the world that we see
either. This is because in perceiving the self-image, we are thrice alien-
ated. First, we are alienated from what we feel ourselves and the world to
be, thus from feelings that begin in the body of the mother; second, we
are alienated 'from what we visually perceive the world to be; and finally,
we are alienated from what we recognize and so know by means of the
mirror. Insofar as there are others in the world, we are unable to either
feel or see them except by meanS of the mirror. Thus intersubjectivity is
more like extreme alienation. Separated from itself by the mirror image,
the child is left to imagine that the other is like the self it is separated
from, that other human beings are like the mirror image, that they sepa-
rate the child from itself and that it separates them from themselves.
There cannot even be room for conflict in the child between these differ-
ent interpretations of itself, because the felt self and world and the seen
self and world are completely overridden by the ideal image in the mirror.
The constructed self is everything and all. 23
Merleau-Ponty argues that the gaze of the other objectifies me and my
gaze objectifies the other and that when this occurs it signifies that we
Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 65
unique and indepenqent self, not as a being with whom one shares a felt
relation, but as an object.
But once again it is "my fundamental capacity for selffeeling" that
Merleau-Ponty initially appeals to in his attempt to pull himself out of
his isolation. Visually the other is a replica; and following this model, on
the level of self-feeling, the other would be nothing but a response. Yet if
self-feeling remains a fundamental capacity, the remnant of the idea of
a psyche, it is nonetheless immediately dissembled by a reflection that
abandons self-feeling and orients itself largely in terms of behavior. I
observe the other protect herself from the sun. Her comportment con-
vinces me that the other must have the same perception as I. I perceive
the hot sun; I generalize from my experience to that of all the phantoms
in my view. Even though they are nowhere in being, they slip into my
field and behave as I might. This is how language functions among us as
well. If the movements of other's bodies are nothing so much as patterns
of gestures and actions and if sounds are words arranged in propositions
that signify, this is because, like the body of the other, the language of
the other is enacted Cl;s'a behavior, a general outline that replicates one's
own. The words of the other do not break the isolation of the self; they
do not comfort or console. They are behaviors, gestures such as putting
on one's hat in the- sun, which likewise are part of a general outline. The
words of the other are a behavior whose Significations are like the foot-
prints in the sand or the empty rooms of the vacant house, Significations
that belong to the cultural world and that are found there every bit as
arbitrarily. Ye~ with perception and with language, Merleau-Ponty wants
something more. He wants to "awaken a carnal relation" that would also
be our "first insertion into the world" and, more important, "into
truth."26 Not surprisingly, this can only be the lived-through truth of our
childhood, but what can this mean?27 Is not our first insertion into the
world, our carnal relation, one with our birth, one with the intimacy of
feeling between mother and child? And yet, just as Merleau-Ponty
claimed primacy for perception, he will likewise claim primacy for
speech, in the sense that there is nothing separating being and speech.
Speech is both action and feeling but does not even require that we hear
the sound of the mother's words or the volume and tone of her voice
because speech somehow already pronounces itself in us as we speak. The
speaking "I" is in the body, inhabiting the speaker so that its impossible
to say what comes from the sp~aker and what comes from language, al-
Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 67
though it is certain that nothing comes from the voice of the mother, her
breath, her tone, her cadence, her use of words or sounds, her sighs.2s
In his later work, Merleau-Ponty refers to "reversibility" to try to
ground the description of the relation between the speaker and language
as well as between speakers. Linguistic reversibility has been described as
"the expression I share with the other," or "two sides of the same
Being."29 Linguistic reversibility is, as we have seen, modeled on percep-
tual reversibility. Reflecting on this, Helen Fielding argues that "as corpo-
real beings our bodies are both sensed and sentient, visible and invisible,
our perceptions arise from the midst of our relations and not from the
periphery," and she adds that such perception is not experienced as con-
sciousness but it is the latency in which visible and invisible are simulta-
neous and simultaneously pervade our being. 30 But as we have already
seen, such reciprocity is predicated not on an original feeling of the rela-
tion to the mother, but on the conflict between oneself and oneself, the
self that is felt but passed over as confused feeling and the self who sees
itself or who speaks. Either way, the subject is no longer a psyche born
into a felt world, a world of sound, smell, touch, and taste, but now a
behavior, a generalized outline. With the idea of reversibility, Merleau-
Ponty seems to want to collapse the two dimensions (the felt and the
seen/spoken) into one another even while claiming that what is felt and
what is seen or spoken are two different structures of behavior. He does
this by insisting that they are not unrelated, since they form a continuum.
"The child's problem is not so much one of understanding that the visual
and the tactile images of the body-both located at two points in space-in
reality compromise only one, as it is of understanding that the image of
the mirror is his image, that it is what others see of him ... [yet] the
conquest of the image is only one aspect in the total continuum made up
of all the lived relations with others and the world."3! Thus, the adult
regresses to childish states without actually having the perceptions and
language of a child. And, as Merleau-Ponty imagines it, the adult can also
slide back down this continuum in order to reconnect with the peaceful
coexistence of undifferentiated, lived experience without ever acknowl-
edging the mother who gave birth. Yet, as I have tried to argue, insofar as
the child's felt experience has been described as undifferentiated and
chaotic and does not contribute to either perception or language, there
appears to be an unbridgeable gap between the child and the adult, a gap
that no perceptions and no words can explain. This is a confusing situa-
tion, making it seem as if the child is born alone, without a mother or at
68 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
least a caregiver to nurture and sooth the child, to be the child's felt
connection to the world. Nevertheless, it appears that this is what is
posited.
The reasons for this enigma may only be guessed at. Merleau-Ponty
himself has given us some indication of his reason for this strange situa-
tion from the very beginning. Apparently reflecting on his own experi-
ence, Merleau-Ponty writes that "it is at the present time that I realize
that the first twenty-five years of my life were a prolonged childhood,
destined to be followed by a painful break leading eventually to indepen-
dence."3z A prolonged childhood indeed, followed by a painful break-
little wonder that the existence of other people and of the cultural world
are an outrage for thought or that the actions and thoughts of others have
to be grasped from the outside. Although I can only speculate on this,
these few comments lead me at least to wonder if the difficulties and
contradictions reflected in Merleau-Ponty's attempts to make sense of
others and the human world do not arise from the shock of his own
break from a prolonged childhood and the manner in which this break is
formulated by him OJ: for him by others. Let us ask ourselves, structurally,
does the break from childhood to the voluntary and rational life of inde-
pendence really require a break with feeling and a denial of mothering?
Does it require that we renounce the feeling of the mother who gives
birth, nurtures, and cares for the infant so as to replace it with reflection?
Or may it not be the case that Merleau-Ponty's commitment to intellec-
tual independence brought him to the point where that commitment
came to ovefshadow felt life, just as in his work, perception overruns
subtle sensibility and behavior overruns a psyche that feels its existence?
Notes
21. Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge Press, 2000),
13-20. Weiss, following ~aul Schilder, emphasizes the extent to which human interactions produce
the body image. Thus, to the point where even when our body image binds us to the past or to our
physical, psychical, or social situation, we resist this binding by transforming the body image through
clothes, decoration, jewelry, tatoos, and so on. However, she is also cognizant of the limits of this
kind of activity, since the body image is for her implicated in a psyche and not merely in forms of
behavior.
22. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962),
15-16. See also "Child's Relation with Others," 136, where Merleau-Ponty dismisses the ego as a
confused and chaotic state without further comment.
23. "Child's Relation with Others," 137.
24. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 361,362.
25. Merleau-Ponty, "Dialogue and the Perception of the Other," in The Prose of the World, trans.
John O'Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 133; originally published as La prose
du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
26. Merleau-Ponty, "Dialogue and the Perception of the Other," 139. This cannot be the artifi-
cial truth of our histo~icity, a truth that Merleau-Ponty clearly disdains as a mere reconstruction of
the fundamental life that we have lived through.
27. See, for example, G. B. Madison, "Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: La difference," in Ecart et
difference, ed. M. C. Dillon (Atlantic Highlands, N.].: Humanities Press, 1997), 103-4. Madison
invokes William James and Henri Bergson to make the claim that lived experience follows from or
is properly interpreted through language, but in these texts Merleau-Ponty seems to be making a
very different claim. The claim is that speech becomes possible on the basis of a more fundamental
carnal experience. .
28. Merleau-Ponty, "Science and the Experience of Expression," in Prose of the World, 15, 19.
29. Duane H. Davis, "Reversible Subjectivity," in Merleau-Ponty Viwnt, ed. M. C. Dillon (Al-
bany: State University of New York Press, 1991): 31-45, 35. Davis argues that language is one with
Being insofar as it is :I. human creation.
30. Helen Fielding, "Envisioning the Other: Lacan and Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity," in
Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life, and the World, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and
James Morley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 185-99, 191.
31. Merleau-Ponty, "Child's Relations with Others," 140-41.
32. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 346. Even in France and even in the period
between two world wars, twenty-five seems to be an extended childhood. Perhaps I have exaggerated
the import of the painful break and the move to independence; there is no way of knowing. However,
I am stressing that this way of speaking and thinking may imply the feeling that there must be a
break.
3
White Logic and the
Constancy of Color
Helen A. Fielding
This chapter was originally a paper presented at the "Merleau-Ponry Circle" conference, Wash-
ington, D.C., September 13, 2000. I am indebted to the philosophical challenge offered by
Dorothea Olkowski to think Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology against itself. See Olkowski, Gilles
Deleute and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Universiry of California Press,
1999); I am also indebted to Grace Jantzen for guiding my work on color in this direction and to
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support.
72 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau,Ponty
and color as symbol~in Western culture. z In each of the four films, named
after the color with which he respectively smears his own body, White,
Pink, Green, and Black, Nauman reveals the relations involved in the
perception of the body as a lived, moving, sinuous center of specific ca~
pacities, and in the perception of color as hue, skin color, and symbol.
What is revealed are the ways that color, according to specific lighting,
shapes and defines the contours of flesh and how color is deeply linked
to racialized symbolization in Western culture. The power of these films
is that they do not directly state the obvious; rather, they draw the viewer
who tarries with the films into each film's lighting and spatial level, and
thus invite complicity with what the films as a whole reveal. Indeed,
what was disturbingly revealed to this viewer was her complicity in the
symbolization belonging to the dominant lighting level of Western cul~
ture that cuts whites off from their bodies even as it identifies blacks with
bodies tied to nature and to an animality that is inherently raced and
sexed. 3
What I would like to argue is that in Western culture there is a devalu~
ing of color that is linked not only to an epochal repression of embodi~
ment, but also to a collapse of difference and multiplicity into sameness
and unity. The intensity of color, moreover, is diffused in our readings of
representations that shut out in advance our encounters with otherness
and our openness to creative change. While Merleau~Ponty's observa~
tions about color help to reveal its participatory and vital aspects, they
also reveal the prope,nsity to maintain constancy that is inherent to the
phenomenal, body he describes. This propensity to depend upon an estab~
lished corporeal schema, and yet at the same time to see anew, allows us
contact with being that is open to creative sedimentation. What, then,
is phenomenologically revealed in Nauman's films is the tenacity of dom~
inant ideological spatial and lighting levels and the focus on representa~
tion to the detriment of our lived corporeal creativity, which allows for
and is open to otherness as well as to multiple, embodied meanings.
This suppression of lived corporeal creativity under the rubric of the
cognitive and its unifying representational activity is an enduring theme
for Merleau~Ponty. How does the embodied subject rely on structures
that allow her to encounter the world as meaningful even as she remains
open to the creative sedimentations of new structures? And how can
our thinking become more open to the creative possibilities engendered
through our corporeal engagement with the world even as our cognitive
systems of meaning help us to make sense of what we see? Both are ques~
White Logic and the Constancy of Color 73
tions that have also been raised in the context of feminist theorizing
where creative change of existing social relations is an abiding goal. In
turning to Merleau-Ponty, I want to show how phenomenological de-
scription can reveal the invisible operations of the dominant illumination
that privileges as neutral white skin as white race in Western culture.
These operations allow for a relation between phenomenally perceived
colors, their representative values, and the phenomenon whereby the
color white illuminates a field of relations in accordance with its repre-
sentative values. Not only do things and people appear according to this
illumination, but there is also an obscuring of these relations behind a
screen of neutrality and normality. This screen prevents Merleau-Ponty
from fully realizing the potential of his own insights into spatial levels
and the phenomenal body, for he is clearly unaware of the extent to
which this screen of supposed neutrality haunts his own work.
If our perceptual capacities provide our opening to the world that in-
deed allows us to encounter it at all, then it is vision, Merleau-Ponty
explains, that allows us to have a sense of a situation, of the relations
within a field. The ways we observe objects and people bending into
one another, reflecting, deflecting, absorbing, and obscuring are not, for
Merleau-Ponty, barriers to objective vision. Rather, they reveal a field
of relations that challenges conceptual and causational thinking, which
operates at a level removed from the lived world. Our perception of color,
in particular, defies conceptual thinking, since it cannot be reduced to
abstract knowledge; it is experienced more in the mode of participation
and of mediation. 4 And yet color is so often reduced to representation
and linked to specific significations, although in fact, what is particular
to color is that it exceeds the cognitive; it exceeds delineated lines of
concrete fact. This is perhaps why Western philosophers have tended to
devalue color, assigning to it the status of a secondary quality.
Although reversing the devaluation of the body in Western metaphys-
ics was central to Merleau-Ponty's project, he did not make the connec-
tion between the devaluation of the body and that of the feminine, which
is closely associated with the body in Western culture. Significantly, the
logic of binary thinking, inherent in metaphysics, that underlies this de-
valuation also aligns people, whose skin is understood as having color,
with the feminine and with the body, in opposition to white, male, and
mind. Indeed, the feminist term women of color, which is meant to denote
women whose skin color is not white, would seem to subtly reenact this
devaluation through the connections it makes with these existing equiva-
74 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
lences. As Richard Dyer points out in his book White (207), white people
of course have a color; but in keeping with binary alignments, this color
also "signifies the absence of colour" even as, paradoxically, color itself is
a "characteristic of life" and of bodily presence.
These devaluations, then, also make life itself subservient to the petri-
fying demands of a cognitive unity that is produced through the imposi-
tion of racial markers on the body, signifying in advance how that body
is to be understood and read. Logic is not open to incompossibles, to
contradictions, to that which exceeds or does not fit into the equation.
However, bodily being, as Merleau-Ponty reveals, is open to incompossi-
bles, for example, the separate touches of the two hands bound together
in one being. But even more important, perception altows one to move
beyond the self, to be open to otherness. As he explains, the perspectival
representation of depth in Renaissance painting that is mathematically
calculated along disappearing lines does not present the world as it is; "it
refers back, on the, contrary, to our own vantage point."s It does not
reveal to the viewer the otherness of that which is viewed.
Accordingly, when we tum to Nauman's films, what becomes apparent
is that they displace the subject position of the viewer by opening her
gaze to an otherness that goes beyond the assumed logic of representa-
tion, challenging existing equivalences. Indeed, what is revealed in the
film White, where Nauman first smears his body with white art makeup,
is that his body is not actmilly white. As he repeatedly dips his fingers
into the paint, in a delicate gesture, and slowly massages the color white
into his skin, the difference between the color of his skin and the color
white becomes apparent. As he touches the end of his nose with paint,
as he slowly brushes his arm, spreading the color along his body's sinuous
contours, he shows up the enormity of the surface of the skin of his slight
body, thereby also emphasizing' its sheer presence as a body. At the same
time, the white paint seems to flatten his flesh, reflecting light so that the
fleshy curves of his muscles recede. His body almost begins to take on the
appearance of a blank page. If, as Dyer proposes, in Western culture "it is
spirit not body that makes a person white, then where does this leave the
white body which is the vehicle for the reproduction of whiteness, of
white power and possession, here on earth?" (w, 207). How is it that the
white body can appear as not appearing while simultaneously confirming
the ways in which we see? Nauman's film, in fact, seems to visually chal-
lenge the viewer to consider the status of white skin as a bodily lived
presence, introducing otherness and challenging cognitive unity.
White Logic and the Constancy of Color 75
skin to tan, whereas' people with black skin who use skin whiteners are
viewed negatively. Although both are harmful to the skin, they carry
diverse social meanings. As Dyer points out, these attitudes provide a
"terrible warning to black people who try to be various" (w, 49-50).
Moreover, white as a category has historically undergone slippage; for
example, both the Irish and the Jews have been considered both white
and nonwhite, depending upon the social and political situation of the
time and place (w, 52-57). Hence, although white in terms of skin color
"is just as unstable, unbounded a category as white as a hue," its strength
is that, in its instability, it allows white to be "presented as an apparently
attainable, flexible, varied category" even as the criteria according to
which who can be included as white continually shifts (w, 57). White
and black as symbols, however, do not exhibit such slippage or variation.
Embedded in the everyday language we use is a binary understanding of
black and white that marks white as good and black as bad: "'everything
has its darker side,' 'it's just a little white lie' and 'that's a black mark
against you'" (w, 60).
If we phenomenoklgically investigate color as hue, however, we learn
that what is particular to color is that it allows us to see the differences
between things, to see difference at all. While light is necessary to vision,
so too is color, which allows things to become differentiated. 9 For where
there is pure sensation without background or foreground, there is no
sensation. 1O Hence, we can only perceive where there is difference. Yet
for Merleau-Ponty, what is important is not only that we perceive color,
but that we perceive objects in the world, because inherent in this percep-
tion is a certain constancy about the way the objects appear in a range of
situations. Paradoxically, this constancy is not caused by the detached
objectness of the thing; in fact, he intuits that objects always appear
within a field, which means that constancy always emerges in the objects'
relations within that field. Significantly, this constancy is linked to color
and to light. He describes an experiment in which one looks first through
a hole in a box that is painted black and brightly illuminated, and then
through a hole in a box that is painted white and only faintly lit; both
appear to be grey. But when a piece of white paper is introduced into
the black box and a piece of black paper into the white, the two boxes
immediately appear as a black box strongly illuminated and a white one
faintly illuminated. He concludes, then, that "for the structure lighting-
object lighted to be presented, '9.t least two surfaces of different reflecting
power are needed" (PP, 307/355). In other words, in order for the lighting
White Logic and the Constancy of Color 77
sarily made complicit in a white logic that has, in the past, made them
appear according to the logic of white naming. Although, as he argues,
reversing this logic through self-naming was crucial to the civil rights
movement and to black identity, the tendency to tdentify with white
logic persists under the banner of an exclusionary identity that rigidly
demarcates who counts as black. Riggs's own bodily status in the film as
a black, gay man dying of AIDS is a reminder of how bodies, and some
bodies in particular, have been devalued in the light of Western culture.
Thus crucial in this film is a challenge to homophobia and sexism in the
context of its being destructive to black community. This film, as an
exploration of the color "black" as a category used to justify suppression,
violation, and exclusion, is offered by Riggs as a plea for an expansive
community rather than a unity based on the inherited violence of exclu-
sion, a unity, I would argue, that is only logical according to a white
lighting level in which color status is determined in advance from within
a field of relations.
Merleau-Ponty explains how color constancy can be upheld despite
apparent discrepancies, for constancy inheres in the objects themselves.
Color persists even when it is not visually apparent, as in the case of, for
example, his black fountain pen, which he still sees as black "under the
sun's rays." He continues: "But this blackness is less the sensible quality
of blackness than a sombre power which radiates from the object, even
when it is overlaid with reflected light, and is visible only in the sense in
which moral blackness is visible. The real colour persists beneath appear-
ances as the background persists beneath the figure, that is, not as a seen
or thought-of-quality, but through a non-sensory presence" (PP, 305/
352; emphasis added). Similarly, then, despite tanning, skin bleaching,
or other such superficial attempts to alter skin color, as Dyer argues, in
this white lighting level the "real color" of skin persists, since it is not,
in fact, so much about color as about its equivalences within a particular
spatial level. These equivalences, he notes, are linked to a dualistic sys-
tem that sees black as the opposite of white within a color system in
which no two other colors are seen as having opposites (w, 48). As
Merleau-Ponty himself writes, "We now begin to see a deeper meaning
in the organization of a field: it is not only colours, but also geometrical
forms, all sense-data and the significance of objects which go to form a
system. Our perception in its entirety is animated by a logic which assigns
to each object its determinate features in virtue of those of the rest, and
which 'cancel out' as unreal all stray data; it is entirely sustained by the
82 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty
certainty of the w6rld" (PP, 313/362; emphasis added). Thus stray data
that do not conform to the logic of lighting are canceled out by the
certainty of a world that exists; it is not merely the other side of the
visible, but is that which does not even appear as absence according to
this particular lighting level.
As Merleau-Ponty explains it, each sense opens out onto the same
world, providing a unity of the senses. Indeed, Cezanne, he writes, "de-
clared that a picture contains within itself even the smell of the
landscape .... [A] thing would not have this colour had it not also this
shape, these tactile properties, this resonance, this odour" (PP, 318-19/
368). The question is whether this unity is one that erases differences to
maintain the whole, or whether it allows for a coexistence of differences.
It we expect that which we hear to confirm that which we see, and that
which is not confirmed appears as a stray datum because it does not fit
into the unity, then this unity is open to exclusion. According to
Merleau-Ponty, it would seem that the "true significance of perceptual
constancies . . . is grounded in the primordial constancy of the world as
the horizon of all o~r experiences" (PP, 313/362). A picture hanging in
an art gallery must be viewed from the appropriate distance so that a
horizon of significance allows us to determine both the internal lighting
level of the pict~re itself as well as the representative values of the daubs
of color. If one stands too close, isolating a "part of the field, then the
colour itself changes, and this green, which was meadow green, when
taken out of its context, loses its thickness and its colour." The represen-
tative valu"es are disturbed, as is the internal logic of the lighting of the
painting (PP, 313/361).
Black Is ... Black Ain't opens with blurred images of Riggs running
naked through a forest. These .images, his voiceover later narrates, are his
attempt to search through the clutter, through the attempts to confine
him to some space where he is not seen for the "naked truth" of who he
is. Indeed, it would seem that the blurring of the images is integral to this
attempt to unanchor established spatial and lighting levels and to un-
hinge representational thinking that categorizes and shapes our encoun-
ters with others. Riggs connects these images to the images that hold
together his own self-identity, "images of the woods, the rivers, the
steamboats, the shacks" of his own living memory. This living memory
is not, however, representational; rather, it is a gathering of that which
has affected him, of that which is meaningful to his sense of self. It is
White Logic and the Constancy of Color 83
about living life intensely even as he was himself dying in hospital as the
film was being completed.
Although it would seem paradoxical that Riggs connects blurred im-
ages with the "naked truth" of who is he is, this connection does not
seem so strange in light of Merleau-Ponty's intuition into the constancy
of lived perception that establishes representational values from within a
horizon that takes its field of meaning from preestablished equivalences.
If we return to Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the experiments with
screens, what becomes evident is that the perceiver perceives from within
a field. For when the subject "looks through the window of a screen, [she]
can no longer 'dominate' (ubershauen) the relationships introduced by
lighting" (PP, 308/355). The subject cannot perceive objects in relation
to one another from within the structures with which she is familiar. The
screen unanchors the field establishing a "fictional plane," which does
not support objects but rather detached color patches (PP, 307/354). The
screen dislocates the structures of the viewer's perception. If one half-
closes one's eyes, Merleau-Ponty writes, then one no longer perceives
determinate things-their object status is suspended, colors are liberated,
and anything is possible. He concludes that "the phenomenon of con-
stancy" seems to occur "only in things and not [for example] in the dif-
fuse space of after-images" (PP, 308/356). Accordingly, it would seem
that the blurred images of himself, which Riggs tells his unseen colleague
that he hopes she will use in abundance, provide this unanchoring from
set spatial and lighting levels. They unanchor our preconceived represen-
tations of who he is and what we expect of him because they unanchor
his image from the expected field of relations.
The paradox of phenomenal perception, then, is that we perceive ob-
jects and people from within the horizon of a "certain atmosphere,"
which sets out in advance how things and people will appear in relation
to one another and in relation to the perceiver, even as it is perception
that opens us to otherness as well (PP, 305/352). Each perceiving subject
brings with her the sedimented levels that shape the way she encounters
each new situation. There is, then, an inherent conservatism to percep-
tion that denies the appearance of stray data. 19 At the same time, how-
ever, our corporeal ability to move into new situations and to take them
up still leaves us open to creative sedimentation, to seeing anew. It is,
Merleau-Ponty tells us, the "instability of levels [thad produces not only
the intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddi-
84 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
ness and nausea, w'hich is the awareness of our contingency, and the
horror with which it fills us" (PP, 254/294).
Merleau-Ponty, as a phenomenologist, reveals our contact with the
things themselves, challenging Cartesian certainty, the belief that-we can
only be certain of-that which we represent to ourselves. Still, Merleau-
Ponty's own descriptions reveal the extent to which we apply previously
sedimented representations and significations to the world we encounter,
and which we can then encounter with certainty, since we have encoun-
tered the same world before. If we return to his example of the picture in
the art gallery, the picture, seen at an ideal distance, "confers upon each
patch of colours not only its colour value, but also a certain representative
value" (PP, 313/361). These representative values allow us to make sense
ot'the world we e~counter. "The prejudices arising from objective think-
ing," however, obsque the recognition that perception is a communica-
tion, or a communion "of our body with things" (PP, 320/370). That is
to say, Cartesian thinking reduces the world to objects in themselves and
subjects to pureconsciousnesses, denying the "links which unite the
thing and the embedied subject, leaving only sensible qualities to make
up our world." Visual qualities, in particular, lend themselves to this way
of thinking, since these qualities "give the impression of being autono-
mous, and ... less directly linked to our body." Visual qualities appear to
"present us with an object rather than introducing us into an atmo-
sphere" (PP, 320/370). But what Merleau-Ponty phenomenally describes
is that when we dO r in fact, engage with the world and with others, this
objectlike status of color recedes. For Merleau-Ponty, this indicates that
perception goes straight to the things, bypassing color as a representative
value, "just as it is able to fasten upon the expression of a gaze without
noting the colour of the eyes" (PP, 305/352). What this means is that
phenomenologically to go straight to the thing itself is exactly to perceive
the thing from within an atmosphere that confers specific equivalences.
However, in Bruce Nauman's films, to which I want to return, it is
impossible to go straight to the thing, to a humanist notion of the artist
himself, bypassing the color of his skin, since the films are about the
encoloring of his body and the significations these colors confer. Impor-
tantly, these meditations on the repetitive gestures of the body do not
hold the gaze. Viewers wander by each film but few linger; for the repeti-
tive habitual gestur~s that gather an identity are presented in these works
spread out over time just as'they are in the mundaneness of daily exis-
tence, or the temporal process of creating an artwork. What is revealed,
White Logic and the Constancy of Color 85
Notes
1. Bruce Nauman, Art Make-Up, No.1, White (1967); Art Make-Up, No.2, Pink (1967-68);
Art Make-Up, No.3, Green (1967-68); Art Make-Up, No.4, Black (1967-68), films, 16 mm, color,
silent.
2. See Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 45-46. This work is hereafter cited
asW.
3. For further discussion, see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Con-
sciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 132; Le visible et I'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 174-75.
This work is hereafter cited .lis VI, with two sets of page numbers, the first referring to the English
edition, the second to the French.
5. Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," in The Primacy of Perception, trans. Carleton Dallery (Ev-
White Logic and the Constancy of Color 89
anston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 174; L'oeil et l'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964),50. This
work is hereafter cited as EM, with two sets of page numbers, the first referring to the English edition
and the second to the French.
6. Colette Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power, and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1995),
139-40.
7. Ibid., 140-41.
8. Evan Thompson points out that for Newton, "whiteness is the usual color of light," since
"no ray ever exhibits this colour, and it requires proportions of all the primary colours." Colour
Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception (London: Routledge, 1995), 11.
9. See Aristotle, De Anima, trans. Hugh Lawson-Trangred (London: Penguin Books, 1986),
174-75.
10. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1962),5; Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 10-11. This work is
hereafter cited as PP, with two sets of page numbers, the first referring to the English edition and
the second to the French.
11. See, for example, Luce Irigaray, "Flesh Colors," in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C.
Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); originally published as "Les couleurs de la chair,"
in Sexes et parentes (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1987).
12. For further discussion, see Samuel B. Mallin, Art Line Thought (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic,
1996), 284-90.
13. I explore this transposition between the perceptual world and ideality more thoroughly in
my article" 'The Sum of What She is Saying': Bringing Essentials Back to the Body," in Resistance
Flight Creation: Feminist Enactments of French Philosophy, ed. Dorothea Olkowski (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2000).
14. Kristin Bumiller, "Fallen Angels: The Representation ofYiolence Against Women in Legal
Culture," in At the Boundaries of Law, ed. M. A. Fineman and N. S. Thomadsen (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 97. Quoted in Sherene H. Razack, Looking White People in the Eye (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1998),68.
15. Razack, Looking White People in the Eye, 69.
16. Collins, Black Feminist Thought.
17. Judith Butler, "Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of
Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception," in The Thinking Muse, ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Mar-
ion Young (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
18. Marlon T. Riggs with Nicole Atkinson, Christiane Badgley, and Bob Paris, Black Is ...
Black Ain't: A Personal}oumey Through Black Identity (San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1995).
19. For a detailed critique of Merleau-Ponty's intuition of spacial levels, see Olkowski, Gilles
Deleute, 59-88. Olkowski clearly demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty does not recognize the inherent
conservatism apparent in his own phenomenological descriptions.
20. Coosje van Bruggen, Bruce Nauman (New York: Rizzoli International, 1988), 196.
21. Jane Livingston, "Bruce Nauman," in Bruce Nauman: Work from 1965 to 1972 (New York:
Praeger), 27.
22. Indeed, this questioning of "how to proceed," indeed even "how to proceed correctly," has
been attributed to Nauman. See Heinz Peter Schwerfel, Make Me Think: Bruce Nauman (U.K.:
Artcore Production for the Arts Council of England, 1997).
4
From the Body Proper to Flesh:
Merleau . . Ponty on Intersubjectivity
Beata Stawarska
When feminists talk about the discipline of the body involved in the construction of femininity, it
is read as having implications only for women and the "peculiarities" of their bodies. When Foucault
... talks about the discipline of the body involved in the construction of the soldier, it is read as
gender-neutral and broadly applicable. The soldier-body is no less gendered a norm, of course, than
the body-as-decorative-object. But this is obscured because we view the woman's body under the
sign of her Otherness while regarding the male body ... as in "direct and normal relation to the
world." The ironies engendered by this are dizzying. The male body becomes "The Body" proper
while the female body remains marked by its difference. At the same time, however, the male body
as male disappears completely, its concrete specificity submerged in its collapse into the universal.
Thus, while men are the cultural theorists of the body, only women have bodies. Meanwhile, of
course, the absent male body continues to operate illicitly as the (scientific, philosophical, medical)
norm for all.
---Susan Bordo, "The Feminist as Other"
This passage impresses with its succinct and yet exhaustive formulation
of the general effacement of gender "peculiarity" effectuated within a
universalistic approach, of which female as well as male bodies are sub-
jects and victims. It addresses therefore not only the gender-neutral posi-
tion of Foucault on the body soldier, but also can be applied equally well
to other generalized conceptions of the body, such as the one formulated
My warm thanks to Bonnie Mann for her helpful advice on the early draft of this chapter. I also
appreciate the useful comments of the volume editors, Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss.
92 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
I
Merleau;Ponty's late philosophy is centered on what he came to term
"the flesh." The flesh gets defined in the course of his fine descriptions
included in The Visible and the Invisible as a prototype of Being, the origi-
nal and ultimate component of all there is (VI, 185/140). It is therefore
an ontological notion and not an anthropological concept onto which to
found a "Philosophy of Man." Its starting point is not a particular being,
such as a human being, and human experience, but Being in general,
inclusive of all things there are. Hence the apersonal and anonymous
character Merleau-Ponty attributed to the flesh in his later work, cen-
tered on the generality of incarnate being and not on the specificity of
personal experience of the body. This general ontological stance is said
to have opened up Merleau-Ponty's inquiry beyond the predominant per-
spective of the corps propre from the Phenomenology of Perception. In this
earlier work, the starting point for analysis is situated within the body of
the subject and is distinguished from the sphere of mundane beings that
this subject can have an experience of. This 'anthropocentric' perspec-
tive, dominant in the early stages of Merleau-Ponty's philosophical proj-
ect, was argued by numerous commentators to have been weighed down
by a subjectivistic or idealistic heritage ultimately incapable of transcend-
ing traditional binarisms, such as subject-object and intelligibility-
sensibility.5 When Merleau-Ponty moves away from the incarnate subject
or body-subject to the esthesiological body, that is, the body defined pri-
marily in terms of a dynamic pertaining to the flesh as a whole and not
as a privileged vantage point onto "objects" of perception, he is said, by
contrast, to have successfully resolved the tension between these un-
96 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty
If we first examine the case of one hand touching the other [the
hand of the other], the touching hand ... has a series of sensa-
tions which are objectified and interpreted as being properties of
the touched hand.... When I touch my hand, however, the
touched hand is not given as a mere object, since it feels the
touch itself, and this sensing does not belong to the touched
98 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
II
Let me now examine the structural character of a handshake in order to
bring to light its difference from touching oneself, and further question
Merleau-Ponty's extension of the intrabodily experience onto the do-
main of the interbody. Recall that Merleau-Ponty states that when I
shake hands with someone, that person's hand is simply "substituted" for
my hand and that his or her activity "substitutes" the activity of my
touching hand. Yet there are valid reasons for putting forward the con-
trary claim that the bodily relation I hold with myself is significantly
different from the relation I hold with another embodied person.
Surely I can touch myself just as I can touch and be touched by the
other; Yet even though I can align my hands to make the sign of an
"amen" or appraise a performance by clapping my hands together, I can-
not shake hands with myself, no matter how I would twist and tum my
arms. My left hand is a mirror image of the right one, just as the left side
of my visible body mirrors, imperfectly to be sure, the right side. My body
certainly is a "mirror phenomenon": it forms an open diptych in which
one volet is a more or less accurate reflection of the other one; the mirror
facing my body provides a reflection of the entire bodily diptych. My body
mirrors itself "before" it has been faced with the instrument of the mirror;
it is a seat of living reflection independent of the reflection appearing on
a smooth surface of a speculum. Now that means that shaking hands with
100 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
III
Let me not create a false impression that touching oneself is a solitary
event devoid of any intersubjective significance. On the contrary, it re-
veals to me my body as a tactile thing given both to my activity and to
the activity of the other. The tactile body that I am is a public thing,
taking me right from the start into the realm of public relations, that is,
relations with other touching and tactile subjects. Yet insofar as I am the
public body that the other can touch, I remain, as Merleau-Ponty put it,
always "on the same side of my body" (VI, 194/148). I remain on the
same side of the hand that greets the other but cannot greet itself, for it
cannot go to "the other side" of the body, the side of the body of the
other with whom I shake hands. It is this inalterable situation in my body
that prevents the reversibility I experience when my co-present hands
touch themselves from fusing with the reversibility I live when I touch
and am touched by another person. It is the unique vantage point of my
body that prevents me from adopting the vantage point of the other and
grasping the passivity of my hand being touched as the activity of the
other touching hand. What distinguishes the intercorporeal relation from
the intracorporeal one is that the passivity of my hand touched by the
other-unlike the passivity of my hand that I touch-cannot reverse into
an activity (of touching) for me, even though I can respond to the other
touching me by touching them in turn. The break between my body (the
body proper) and the body of the other separates two irreducible forms of
bodily experience and makes it impossible to theorize reversibility as a
uniform category applicable to the flesh as a whole.
Still, for Merleau-Ponty, the reversibility of the flesh is one, whether
considered in the midst of the bodily being that I am or in my relations
to an embodied other. Merleau-Ponty exemplifies the category of revers-
ibility with a case of a return to the self, such as touching the body that
palpates something. This specific example might have led him to theorize
reversibility in terms of a deflection or reflection of activity exerted upon
the world back onto the body, and to subsume the activity of the other
person exerted upon me under this preexistent autoreflective relation.
102 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
own body, and declare that the reversibility of activity and passivity at
work in intercorporeal life is indistinguishable from the reversibility of
active and passive roles played by one body sensing itself.
This impersonal spectator could therefore arrive at the thesis of uni-
form reversibility of the flesh that Merleau-Ponty upheld. It seems, how-
ever, that the uniform character of this thesis is its drawback rather than
its advantage in that it conflates a variety of nonidentical phenomena for
the sake of producing a single explanatory theory of carnal life. We wit-
ness here a "collapse into the universal" of both subjective and intersub-
jective body-to-body situations, wherein the "particularity" of each is
effaced but for which it is the lived experience of the body proper in the
tactile reversibility of double-sensations and in the reflexivity of specular
symmetrism that continues to provide the norm and the paradigm. At
the same time, the normative character of the body proper gets obscured
within the context of fleshly anonymity: the principle of reversibility/
reflexivity survives but it gets dislodged from its locus naturalis and ceases
to apply to subjective body experience only.
It appears therefore that the argument for anonymous reversibility op-
erative within the flesh and described in The Visible and the Invisible is
inspired primarily-and for good reasons!-by the first-person lived ex-
perience of the body and that, even though prevalent interpretations
suggest the contrary, it remains indebted to the "anthropocentric" per-
spective espoused in The Phenomenology of Perception. The ontological
thesis developed by Merleau-Ponty dqes not therefore abandon the per-
spective of the body proper but generalizes and universalizes it. Neverthe-
less, as I have argued throughout this chapter, bodily reflexivity applies
solely to a specifically subjective experience of the body and the "logic of
the mirror" cannot govern intra- and intercorporeal relations at once.
Neglecting those differences (between intra- and intercorporeal rela-
tions) makes it impossible to imagine an other who is not ultimately
reducible to the same, who appears differently from an extension or a
replica of the self.
This brings me back to the starting point of this critical reading of
Merleau-Ponty, the feminist critique of the universalistic theories of the
body, expressed succinctly in the opening passage from Bordo. Whereas
Bordo's critique focuses on the problematic "norm" provided by the mas-
culine body, which fails to give due weight to feminine corporeity in
universalistic philosophies of embodiment, I focused on the "norm" pro-
vided by the intracorporeal experience of the body, which fails to give
104 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
Notes
1. See Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
2. The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), xxi.
Consider also this passage: "The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a
matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that
of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by
the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only
the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity" (ibid).
3. "Now, what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she-a free and autono-
mous being like all human creatures-nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men
compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilize h~r as object and to
doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended
by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign." The Second Sex, xxxv.
4. Le visible et I'invisible, (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alpho-
nso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 184/139. Hereafter this work is
cited as VI; the first page numbers given refer to the French text, the second to the English
translation.
5. See, for example, articles included in "Recherches sur la phenomenologie de Merleau-
Ponty," Notes de Cours sur l'Origine de fa geomitTie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1998). See especially Isabelle M. Dias, "Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Une esthesiologie onto-
logique" and Renaud Barbaras, "Le dedoublement de l'originaire." Barbaras notes that "[Clon-
formement au mouvement amorce des la Phenomenologie de fa perception, la chair est
generalement abordee apartir du corps propre.... Or, il nous semble que cette approche echappe
difficilement aux categories---sensation, mouvement, sujet, objet, etc.--que l'analyse de Ill. per-
ception vise pourtant a' depasser, de sorte qu'il est particulierement malaise d'aborder Ie concept
ontologique de chair a partir de l'etude du corps propre, voue a disparaitre comme tel au profit
de la Chair comme etre d'indivision" (289).
106 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
6. La Nature; Note~, cours de College de France (Paris; Seuil, 1994), 109. Nature; Course
Notes from the CoUege de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston; Northwestern University Press,
2003).
7. "The Philosopher and His Shadow," in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), 166. Hereafter cited as PS.
8. From the chapter "The Lived Body," in Self-Awareness and Alterity (Evanston: North-
western University PresS, 1999), 107.
9. For that reason Donn Welton uses reflexivity to rethink and em-body self-awareness. See,
for example, the article "Touching Hands" (forthcoming).
10. Merleau-Ponty stipulates that "l'homme est miroir pour l'homme" ("man is a mirror for
a man"). L'oeil et l'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964),34.
11. Merleau-Ponty speaks of the body sensible and the body sentient as "two segments of
one singular course ... , one sole movement in its two phases" (VI, 182/138; emphasis added).
12. In Renee Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1989), §1. It is also present in Saint Thomas and Suarez. See Etienne Gilson, Index scolastico-
carresien (Paris, 1913).
13. "Woman thus ·seems to be the inessential who never goes back to being the essential, to
be the absolute Other, without reciprocity. This conviction is dear to the male, and every creation
myth has expressed it, among others the legend of Genesis." The Second Sex, 141; emphasis
added.
14. Ibid., 185.
15. Following Irigaray, this "primary maternal-feminine" has remained unthought in
Merleau-Ponty's writing on ilesh. Ethics of Sexual Difference, 162. The project of rethinking the
specifically feminine experience of embodiment along the lines of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy
has been taken up with admirable skill and rigor by Iris Marion Young in her numerous essays,
recently compiled in On Female Body Experience; "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays (New
York: Oxford Universlty Press, 2005). Apart from her classic essay on girls' sense of space and
mobility manifest in their throwing activity, Young examined also such typically feminine expe-
riences as pregnant embodiment, the sexuality of breasts, and how menstruation punctuates the
history of a woman's life.
5
Sexual Difference as a
Question of Ethics: Alterities of the
Flesh in Irigaray and Merleau .. Panty
Judith Butler
primary difference. from which all other kinds of social differences are
derivable. Regarded as an ethical question, the relation of sexual differ-
ence presumes that it is only the masculine and the feminine who come
into an ethical encounter with the Other. Would one, within this vocab-
ulary, be able to account for an ethical relation, an ethical question,
between those of· the same sex? Can there even be a relation of funda-
mental alterity between those of the same sex? I would of course answer
yes, but I think that the peculiar nexus of psychoanalysis and structural-
ism within which Irigaray operates would be compelled to figure relations
among women and among men as either overly identificatory or narcissis-
tic and, in that sense, not yet of the order of the ethical. Must there be a
difference between the sexes in order for there to be true alterity? Simi-
larly, there are other sorts of social difference that distinguish interlocu-
tors in language, and why is it that these social differences are considered
somehow as less fundamental to the articulation of alterity in general,
and to the scene qf the ethical in particular? Finally, is it not the case
that Irigaray portrays the masculine, and Merleau-Ponty in particular, in
ways that do not do. justice to the ethical dimension of his own philo-
sophical explorations in The Visible and the Invisible?
Rather than take these questions on their own terms, I suggest that we
consider how the textual production of intertwinement calls into ques-
tion the ethical framework that Irigaray defends. For what emerges be-
tween Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty is not "difference" per se, but a
founding implication in the Other, a primary complicity with the Other
without which no 'subject, no author, can emerge. And this situation
poses an even more difficult "ethical" question than the one that Irigaray
articulates: how to treat the Other well when the Other is never fully
other, when one's own separateness is a function of one's dependency on
the Other, when the difference between the Other and myself is, from
the start, equivocal.
Taking this last question first, let us consider Merleau-Ponty's text in
relation to lrigaray's "reading" and consider what in that text might resist
the interpretation that she brings to it. Merleau-Ponty will be accused by
Irigaray of a "labyrinthine solipsism." In support of this characterization,
she calls attention to the following kind of argument that he makes. In
relation to the phenomenological description of touch, Merleau-Ponty
argues that one cannot touch without in some sense being. touched by
what one touches,' and one, cannot see without entering into a field of
visibility in which the seer is also potentially, if not actually, seen. In
Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics 117
It is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the
tangible upon the touching body, which is attested in particular
when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the
things, such that, simultaneously, as tangible it descends among
them, as touching it dominates them all and draws this relation-
ship and even this double relationship from itself, by dehiscence
or fission of its own mass. 3
through its sight and touch, is implicated in and by the very world it
explores, for Irigaray the effect of his formulation is that the subject him-
self becomes extolled as that to which all worldly relations return. And
yet, is her assessment fair? Consider that the phenomenological counter
to Cartesianism .that Merleau-Ponty articulates is, in part, a refusal of
that perceptual distance postulated between the reflecting subject and
the world of objects. In breaking apart this distinction, the perceiving "I"
acquires a flesh that implicates him or her in a world of flesh. Hence, for
Merleau-Ponty, the embodied status of the "I" is precisely that which
implicates the "I" in a fleshly world outside of itself, that is, in a world in
which the "I" is no longer its own center or ground. Indeed, only upon
the condition of this philosophical move toward a more embodied "I"
does lrigaray's intervention becomes possible. Underscoring the depen-
dency of that embodied "I" on a body prior to itself, Irigaray identifies
the maternal body as the literal condition of possibility for the epistemic
relation that holds between the embodied "I" and its embodied objects.
Although Irigaray reads this primary and constituting "world of flesh" as
a diffusion of the ma.ternal, a deflection or refusal of the maternal, what
is to secure the primacy of the maternal? But why reduce the world of
flesh, the world of sensuously related significations, to the maternal body?
Is that not an "appropriation" and "reduction" of a complex set of consti-
tuting interrelations that raises the counterquestion of whether Irigaray
seeks to have "the maternal body" stand in for that more complex field?
If one is "implicated" in the world that one sees, that does not mean that
the world that one sees is reducible to oneself. It may mean quite the
opposite, namely, that the "I" who sees is in some sense abandoned to
the visible world, decentered in that world; that the "I" who touches is
in some sense lost to the tactile world, never to regain itself completely;
that the "I" who writes is possessed by a language whose meanings and
effects are not originated in oneself.
Although Irigaray might be read as having "lost" herself to Merleau-
Ponty's text in a similar way, it remains curious that the "ethical" model
she invokes for understanding this relation appears to obscure this rela-
tion of primary implicatedness and the consequently equivocal status of
sexual identity. The masculinism of this subject is never put into question
by lrigaray. She will claim that it is the mark of the masculine to assimi-
late all alterity to the preexisting subject. But what makes this refusal of
alterity, a refusal which takes the form of incorporating the Other as the
same, a specifically masculine or masculinist enterprise? Here is where
Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics 119
Irigaray accepts the psychoanalytic account which argues that the indi-
viduation of the masculine subject takes place through a repudiation of
his maternal origins, a repudiation of the in utero bodily connection to
the mother as well as the vital dependency on the mother in infancy.
This break with the maternal is thus the condition of his becoming a
masculine subject, and the condition of his narcissism, which is, as it
were, an appreciation of himself as a separated and bounded ego. In what
is perhaps the least persuasive of Irigaray's arguments, she suggests that
Merleau-Ponty not only repudiates this "connection" with the maternal
in classic masculine fashion, but that he then reappropriates this "con-
nection" for his own solipsistic theory of the flesh, which he describes as
the "medium" or "connective tissue." In a sense, she reads his theory of
the flesh as a philosophical transposition of the infant's connection with
the maternal body, a repudiation of that connection and a return of the
repudiated within his own philosophical text. She reads him as taking
this "connective tissue" as what he, the masculine subject, occasions, and
which, far from connecting him with anything, returns him to a solipsis-
tic circle of his own making. On the basis of this argument Irigaray then
concludes that for Merleau-Ponty, there is no connection with what is
not the subject, with what is different, with the feminine, and, hence,
with alterity in general.
But if one refuses to accept Irigaray's account of the formation of mas-
culine narcissism through the repudiation of the maternal, her argument
becomes more difficult to support. If one refuses as well the thesis that
sexual difference is the key or decisive index by which relations of alterity
are established and known and, further, refuses to accept the easy trans-
position of a psychoanalytic account of masculine narcissism into a philo-
sophical account of solipsism, then her position becomes increasingly
untenable.
But let us consider what is, after all, most important about Irigaray's
contribution to the thinking of the ethical relation here, namely, the
claim that a relation of substitutability between masculine and feminine
120 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
constitutes a kind- of appropriation and erasure, and the call for some
other kind of ethical relation, interrogative in structure and tone, which
marks an open relation to an Other who is not yet known. Irigaray con-
siders the complex interrelations in Merleau-Ponty's account oflanguage,
sight, and touch to amount to a masculine solipsism. We will follow her
reading here, but not merely to show what she means and how she comes
to support what she means. For it will be shown, I hope, that Irigaray is
more implicated in the text she criticizes than she herself concedes, and
that, considered rhetorically, her text avows the availability of Merleau-
Ponty's text to a feminist appropriation and, hence, stands in an unin-
tended dialogic relation to Irigaray, even as she accuses that text of being
closed to dialogue.
. The argument Irigaray makes against Merleau-Ponty proceeds in the
following way: to claim, as he does, that the relation of touch or sight is
reversible is to claim that the one who touches can be touched, the one
who sees can be s~en,· and that the subject and object poles of these
experiences are bound together by a connective "flesh of things." This
reversibility presuppeses the substitutability of the subject pole with the
object pole, and this substitutability, she argues, establishes the identity of
both toucher and touched, seer and seen. ("The reversibility of the world
and I suggests," she writes, "some repetition of a prenatal sojourn where
the universe and I forma closed economy" [ESD, 173].)
But remember that there is a relationship between these two reversible
relations, between touch and sight, and that that relationship is not fully
reversible. Of this relation, Irigaray reiterates Merleau-Ponty's position
with some measure of apparent sympathy:
we would see that."all the possibilities of language are given in it" (VI,
155).
If language then emerges from and directly reflects these prior move-
ments of bodily life, then it would seem that language is as subject to the
charge of solipsism as were these prior relations. And part of what he
writes seems to support this point. In a lyrical and unfinished set of notes
that constitute the closing paragraphs of his essay, he recalls the circular-
ity of the interrogative in Heidegger: "[I]n opening the horizon of the
nameable and of the sayable; ... speech acknowledge[s] that it has its
place in that horizon ... with one sole gesture [the speaker] closes the
circuit of his relation to himself and that of his relations to the others"
(VI, 154) .
. The closing of this circuit Irigaray will read as a sign of a pervasive
solipsism. As a caricature of his position, she writes, "Speech is not used
to communicate, to encounter, but to talk to oneself, to duplicate and
reduplicate oneself"to surround, even to inter oneself" (ESD, 178). This
is speech that closes off the addressee, which is not properly allocutory,
or which can only figure the addressee on the model of the speaker him-
self. This presumption of the substitutability of the speaker and the ad-
dressed is, for Irigaray, the denial of sexual difference, which she will
argue always set~ a limit to relations of linguistic substitutability. Of
Merleau-Ponty's final remarks, she writes:
This language, then; is not yet ethical, for it cannot yet pose a question
the answer to which it does not already possess: "In a certain way, this
subject never enters the world. He never emerges from an osmosis that
allows him to say to the other, "Who art Thou?" But also, "Who am E"
. . . The phenomenology of the flesh that Merleau-Ponty attempts is
without question(s)'! (ESD, 1,83).
But is this right? Does lrigaray's critique not rest on the faulty presump-
Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics 123
tion that to be implicated in the Other, or in the world that one seeks to
know, is to, have that Other and that world be nothing more than a
narcissistic reflection of oneself? Does Irigaray's own textual implication
in Merleau-Ponty's text not refute the very thesis that she explicitly de-
fends? For she finds herself "implicated" there but she is not, for that
reason, the source or origin of that text; it is, rather, the site of her
expropriation. One might well conclude that for Merleau-Ponty, as well,
to be implicated in the world of flesh of which he is a part is to realize
precisely that he cannot disavow such a world without disavowing him-
self, that he is abandoned to a world that is not his to own. Similarly, if
the "Other" is so fundamentally and ontologically foreign, then the ethi-
cal relation must be one of sanctimonious apprehension from a distance.
On· the contrary, if Merleau-Ponty "is" the Other, without the Other
being reducible to him, then he meets the Other not in an encounter
with the outside, but with a discovery of his own internal impossibility,
of the Other who constitutes him internally. To have one's being impli-
cated in the Other is thus to be intertwined from the start, but not for
that reason to be reducible to-or exchangeable with-one another.
Moreover, to be implicated elsewhere from the start suggests that the
subject, as flesh, is primarily an intersubjective being, finding itself as
Other, finding its primary sociality in a set of relations that are never
fully recoverable or traceable. This view stands in stark contrast both to
the Freudian conception of the "ego" understood as the site of a primary
narcissism and to the various forms of atomistic individualism derived
from Cartesian and liberal philosophical traditions. Indeed, the flesh, un-
derstood to reflect the narcissism of the subject, establishes the limits of
that narcissism in a strong way.
Finally, let me draw attention to one dimension of Merleau-Ponty's
philosophical writing which seems to me to resist closure and to resist
the circularity of solipsism that Irigaray describes. Let us return to the
relation between touch and sight. Is there something which underlies or
connects these relations? And can it be described at all? Merleau-Ponty
writes, "My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand
touching the things, but I never reach coincidence; the coincidence
eclipses at the moment of realization." "[T]he incessant escaping"-as he
calls it-"is not a failure ... is not an ontological void ... it is spanned
by the total being of my body, and by that of the world" (VI, 147-48).
But here it seems the phenomenological experience of not being able
to close this circuit, of being as it were in a perpetual relationship of
124 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty
that Merleau~Ponty could not have intended. Does this not signify a life
of the text that exceeds whatever solipsism afflicts its inception, and
which makes itself available for an Irigarayan appropriation, one in
which, in substituting herself for him, she derives a feminist contribution
to philosophy which is continuous with and a break from what has come
before?
Notes
1. This chapter was originally written in 1990. The publication of the translation of Luce Irigaray's
An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and
Gillian C. Gill [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Henceforth cited as ESD) offers the opportu-
nity for English-speaking readers to consider her most sustained considerations of the history of
philosophy. The text is composed of a set of lectures, ranging from chapters on Plato's Symposium
and Aristotle's Physics to Descartes on The Passions of the Soul, Spinoza on God, and a final set of
reflections on Merleau-Ponty's posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible and Emmanuel
Levinas's Totality and Infinity.
2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson {New York:
Harper and Row, 1962),24; henceforth cited as BT.
3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 146; henceforth cited as VI.
6
Culpability and the Double Cross:
Irigaray with Merleau .. Ponty
Vicki Kirby
Take others at the moment they appear in the world's flesh. They
would not exist for me, it is said, unless I recognized them, deci-
phering in -them some sign of the presence to self whose sole
model I hold within me. But though my thought is indeed only
Culpability and the Double Cross 135
with all its perceptual styles and modalities, as "the Visible?" lrigaray is
understandably. critical of this apparent privileging of the eye, with its
phallogocentric thematizations. However, this "touch~vision system," as
Merleau~Ponty calls it, is intricacy itself. Perception becomes a relational
enfolding where, for example, "a certain blue of the sea is so blue that
only blood would be more red" (V, 132). Thus, Merleau~Ponty imbues
Vision with a sort of wild synesthetic dialogue within and across all per~
ceptual modalities, such that we hear visually, taste aurally, and so on.
This reconfigured expansiveness means that "Visibility" can be read
in much the same way as Jacques Derrida's "textuality," or "general writ~
ing." It is important to recall that Derrida does not delineate between
writing and speech, or privilege the former over the latter when he de~
scribes speech as writing. Yet his intervention does destabilize what is
taken as an anchor for the difference between these two modes of expres~
sion. Derrida's reversal effects an interrogation of why speech and writing
are interpreted through the bipolar template of origin to supplement,
simple to complex, corporeal truth and purity to the contagious retrovirus
of intellectual corruption. We could add here (as it is this founding divi~
sion that informs the nostalgic imperative in Irigaray's own argument),
Nature to Culture, with the feminine as primordial and generative and
the masculine as secondary and instrumental. Interestingly, and despite
Merleau~Ponty's complex elaboration of what he means by "Visibility,"
Irigaray seems intent on diagnosing the curious ambiguities in his posi~
tion as simply erroneous.
Merleau~Ponty's corporeal semiosis, this diverging of "the flesh" from
itself, completely fractures the self~presence of separate sensory modal~
ities within one body, as well as the self~presence of separate, individual
bodies within the body of the world. This amplification, which is also a
form of condensation, is like a grammatology writ large. The ontological
implications are apparent in a quite remarkable phrase from "The Experi~
ence of Others" (hereafter cited as 0), where Merleau~Ponty says that
"there is already a kind of presence of other people within me" (0, 56).
And again, from the same text, he remarks, "Everything transpires as if
the other person's intuitions and motor realizations existed in a sort of
relation of internal encroachment, as if my body and the body of the
other person together formed a system" (0, 52). This grammatological
intertwining of the flesh involves a fold that must continue to touch itself
even as it opens itself up. And here we sense why Merleau~Ponty might
140 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
generalize the fold ·of invagination right across the flesh of the world in
order to evoke the contemporary nature of this coordination.
Irigaray erases what is utterly extraordinary in this reading of carnal
speech, this generalized porosity of the "two lips," when she interprets it
as a symptom of masculinist theft, correcting Merleau-Ponty's confusion
between flesh and language by way of an excavation that promises to
restore hierarchical order to the relationship. According to Irigaray, con-
tact with the ur-ground of existence is no longer possible, as it is lost
beneath an archaeology of time. However, Irigaray advises against bury-
ing maternity in its original wrappings underneath the unfolding of his-
tory, as if it has no strings to the present. Indeed, for Irigaray it is precisely
this style of thinking that explains the denigration of maternity as an
expendable moment whose value is quickly exhausted; as if the gift of life
is dead and gone. This conclusion causes Irigaray to mount her interven-
tion on two fronts. First, she argues that the past is a present that we
continue to receive'. And second, she insists that attempts to recuperate
the originary moment of debt to maternity through its reification in the
present actually bury and repress its specificity even more deeply. Her
strategy, then, is to explore the differences between these apparently sim-
ilar positions in order to acknowledge the need for a sexual ethics.
Nevertheless,'this doubled strategy, although it strives to enliven our
appreciation of time's implications, is unable to disrupt our understanding of
duration as a linear development of separate moments-an archaeology.
Ironically, perhapsr Irigaray's criticisms of Merleau-Ponty's synesthetic
melding of.the senses presume this same logic when it uncovers tactility
at the origin, in a space and time that identifies its precedence in the
evolution of different sense modalities. Thus, her conclusion that "Merleau-
Ponty accords an exorbitant privilege to vision" (E, 174) is an inevitable
one, given her premise that she is witnessing a "[r]eduction of the tactile
into the visible" (E, 175). Already present at the origin, then, tactility
becomes a perceptual ground and nurturing support, its difference femi-
nized and isolated from what it bears. "[T]he tangible is the matter and
memory for all of the sensible. Which remembers without remembering
thematically? It constitutes the very flesh of all things that will be sculp-
ted, sketched, painted, felt, and so on, out of it" (E, 164; emphasis added).
In sum, Irigaray's understanding of maternity is that it gives but is not
itself given becaust; it is the given: it is not parented or constituted by
anything other than itself. A pure virgin birth.
Merleau-Ponty's Vision of maternity is wildly different from this be-
Culpability and the Double Cross 141
cause it does more than acknowledge an ongoing debt that was given,
even as its effects are still being lived and felt. More than this, it seriously
confounds the conventions of space and time that excavate an elemen-
tary transfer in an original place of inevitable demarcation. It grants that
maternity is a gift that involves and revalues the future as well as the past,
the generative capacities of men as well as women, and even the notions
of vitality and efficacy that conventionally separate the animate from the
inanimate. Whereas Merleau-Ponty's Vision is tactility, Irigaray's clarifi-
cation marks a return to identity that assumes a primordial segregation.
lrigarayexplains:
In this notion of the law as the distortion, and even erasure, of the
voice, we witness an appeal to the self-presence of the origin in its pure
immediacy; speech before writing. For Irigaray, then, the voice (nature,
the body) is ruptured and violated from the outside, that is, by culture
and the language of the symbolic in its thematizations. Although flesh is
engendering (maternal), it does not appear to be engendered (parented)
in Irigaray's argument. It is as if flesh precedes the rupture of copula-tion
(becomings), as if, in simple terms, it just is. Irigaray does acknowledge
that there is an internal movement, or differential, at work within origin-
ary substance, yet its nature appears to be qualitatively different in that
it remains wholesome even when it touches (others) itself.
lrigaray's presumption that the origin is sealed within itself such that
it can only be broken open from the outside is a scene of sexual encounter
that must define man as violating perpetrator. Perhaps men can violate
one another, and they can certainly violate women, but according to this
142 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty
in the ordinary sense. But the realization that culpability is not simply
attributed or explained brings a more forgiving sense of generosity, albeit
one that continues to concern us. We will remember that Irigaray's call
to action in the beginning of this essay reads, "We need to reinterpret
everything concerning the relations between the subject and discourse,
the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic
and the macrocosmic" (E, 6). If we take this call seriously, then it is not
only the ground of the male subject that becomes unstable as his friable
identity is acknowledged. The collective subject of Mankind also suffers
a shock wave because our shared humanity and its unique capacities can-
not be defined or enclosed against a nonhuman world of comparative
insufficiency. Importantly, the resulting instability of these identities is
not resolved with the corrective, from Mankind to Humankind.
I want to close with what for me is one of the most destabilizing and,
literally, wonderful passages in "The Intertwining." As I read it, it does
not repeat the conventional negative moves of either a humanist or an
antihumanist critique. And yet it does not dismiss them as simply mis-
taken:
Works Cited
Burke, Carolyn. "Irigaray Through the Looking Glass." Feminist Studies 7 (Summer 1981):
288-306.
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by C. Burke and O. Gill. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993.
- - . Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by G. C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1985.
- - . This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by C. Porter with C. Burke. Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press, 1985.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "The Experience of Others." Translated by F. Evans and H. J.
Silverman. Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 28 (1982-83): 1-3.
- - . The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1962.
- - . Signs. Translated by R. C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1995.
- - . The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968.
7
Urban Flesh
Gail Weiss
The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term
"element," in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a
general thing, midway between the spatia-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate
principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being.
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Intertwining-The Chiasm"
Flesh, the flesh of each one is not substitutable for the other.
-Luce Irigaray, "The Invisible of the Flesh"
Ponty merely hints at when he suggests that the flesh stylizes being,
namely, the differentiations of the flesh, how the flesh of one cannot be
exchanged for the flesh of another. Irigaray is especially concerned with
a very particular form of fleshly differentiation, namely, sexual difference,
and she takes Merleau-Ponty to task for failing to acknowledge its irre-
versibility. Most notably, she argues that women's flesh has historically
been understood as a (deficient) mirror of men's flesh, a specular surface
that, far from revealing genuine difference, reveals only what men want
to see. The danger, on her account, of understanding the flesh as a "gen-
eral thing" is that the flesh is not pure generality; rather, the flesh is
always already differentiated, and some forms of differentiation, most no-
tably sexual differentiation, are misrecognized if they are understood
through the model of reversibility that Merleau-Ponty famously illustrates
through the example of one hand touching the other. In this example,
the hand touched tn tum becomes the hand touching, and while these
two experiences are distinct, the capacity of either hand to have either
experience implies a sameness in difference, a narcissistic cycle that Iri-
garay identifies with>a masculine desire to encompass and master genuine
difference. Opposing Merleau-Ponty's "elemental" logic of generality, a
generality that she claims is at odds with the ongoing, polymorphous sex-
speCific differentiation that distinguishes feminine flesh, the sex "which
is not one," Irigaray is nonetheless clearly indebted to Merleau-Ponty's
insight that the flesh functions as an "incarnate principle that brings a
style of being wherever there is a fragment of being." Indeed, I would
argue, MerJeau-Ponty's provocative understanding of how the flesh sty-
lizes being suggests an ongoing process of differentiation that cannot be
reduced to sameness. And yet, insofar as it stylizes, the flesh also unifies,
weaving together disparate gestures, movements, bodies, and situations
into a dynamic fabric of meaning that must be continually reworked,
made, and unmade.
The city is itself an excellent example of such a richly textured fabric
of meaning. We need only look to the checkered racist and sexist histor-
ies of so many American cities to recognize both the fragility as well as
the strength of the ties that collectively produce the varied stylizations
(liberatory as well as oppressive) of urban flesh. By emphasizing the cor-
philosophical colleagues, ipcluding most notably Ellen Feder and Eduardo Mendieta, as well as
the anonymous comments I received from the reviewer for this volume, have led to the continued
evolution of uiy thoughts on the possibilities and limitations of urban flesh.
Urban Flesh . 149
of the city and culture. Both Bigwood and Vogel seek the elimination of
arbitrary distinctions between nature and culture; however, they ap-
proach this project through opposite paths: Bigwood by reminding us that
nature is everywhere, even in the heart of the city; and Vogel, that nature
is nowhere: it is culture that is ubiquitous and that has posited nature as
its alter ego and legitimizing origin. Whether nature is indeed "every-
where" or "nowhere," it is clear that it functions as an overdetermined,
regulative ideal in our very thoughts about culture more generally and
urban existence more particularly.
South Towers, shbwn around the world, followed the vertical trajectory
of falling bodies as person after person chose to jump to their deaths
rather than succumb to an equally certain but slower and more painful
death inside the burning buildings. Footage from that day has shown us
scores of people hanging out of the North Tower from its uppermost
floors, frantically breaking through the skin of the building to signal their
distress and their hope for assistance that never came from the outside
world. As witnesses to their pain and suffering, however, we find that
our own relationship to those monumental buildings in which they were
trapped has become transformed. These victims, and the buildings them-
selves, have produced a sense of personal, communal, national, and even
international vulnerability that is visceral.
"Ground Zero," that nonplace where the twin towers once stood, is a
reminder of the fragility of our own emplacement in the world. Although
the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., was quickly rebuilt, no longer reveal-
ing the black scars- along one of its five faces that put the lie to its alleged
impregnability, Ground Zero continues to present the destructive power
of terrorism for all to see. 6 The collapse of the towers' own bodies was as
shocking for many as were the deaths of the thousands of people who
were trapped inside. Indeed, although the World Trade Center has always
been a controversial presence in New York City-a source of civic and
national pride for some as well as an icon to American cultural imperial-
ism for others-its symbolic and material significance has only grown,
becoming more complex and even more contradictory, since its destruc-
tion. Correspondingly, the bodily identities of those who have been asso-
ciated with it, including victims, bystanders, residents of New York City
and the surrounding metropolitan area, other Americans, allies, enemies,
and the terrorists and their supporters themselves, have also been compli-
cated and problematized in unforeseeable ways.
In Edmund Husserl's language, the destruction of the World Trade
Center towers has disrupted the "natural attitude," the "taken-for-
granted" perspective toward our bodily surroundings that Americans have
had the luxury of holding onto in a country that escaped the severe
physical devastation Europe and Asia suffered in World Wars I and II and
other wars of this past century. 7 Indeed, the seeming permanence of a
city's building, and of the city itself, has been materially and symbolically
significant in anchoring its citizens' own sense of security and stability
throughout history: For those in or from countries that have been contin-
ually ravaged by war and natural disasters, for those who have been dis-
Urban Flesh 153
placed and who have no homes to (re}turn to, including those whose
corporeal existence has always been marked by a sense of impermanence,
the previous complacency many United States citizens experienced in
relation to our own emplacement in the world must truly be incompre-
hensible. Indeed, ever since the famous fall of Troy, there have been
warnings that the city, and therefore its inhabitants, are not as impregna-
ble as they may seem.
If, as Casey suggests, bodies, cities, and nature cannot be understood
apart from one another, it should not be surprising that the violent at-
tacks on two of the United States' most symbolically charged sites (the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon) in two of our most symbolically
charged American cities (New York City and Washington, D.C.), was
registered by many as a violent attack on their corporeality, that is, on
their bodily sense of well-being-in-the-world. While the horrific violence
of these attacks should not be forgotten, there is also the danger that
focusing too heavily on their exceptional character, and buying into offi-
cial U.S. propagandistic rhetoric that all we have to do is stamp out ter-
rorism in order to live without fear of violence in the future, will lead us
right back into a dangerous natural attitude, namely, the belief that
dwelling can be accomplished in peace, without violence.
Merleau-Ponty's 1947 volume Humanism and Terror, in its serious at-
tempt to grapple with the violence of the cataclysmic geographical, so-
cial, political, and emotional upheavals of World War II, is surprisingly
relevant to our own unstable and violent times. Regarding the omnipres-
ence of violence, Merleau-Ponty maintains, "We do not have a choice
between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence.
Inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot" (109). Al-
though Merleau-Ponty's perspective on the inevitability of violence is
hardly surprising given the severe economic deprivation and political un-
rest that marked post-World War II France as it emerged from years of
German occupation, he clearly is making a statement here that extends
beyond his own country and his own time, to encompass human (and
perhaps nonhuman) existence more generally. Why, we may ask, does
Merleau-Ponty posit a seemingly necessary connection between violence
and life as an incarnate being? Is violence characteristic of all incarnate
life or just human existence?
At times, Merleau-Ponty implies, like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de
Beauvoir, and Hannah Arendt, that violence emerges out of human rela-
tionships, specifically from what they all see as the unavoidable conflicts
154 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
that mark the interactions between different subjects with different prof-
ects and a limited amount of resources to pursue them. In the preface to
Humanism and Terror, however, Merleau-Ponty suggests that it may be
possible for societies to at least hope for a time without violence:
Is the hope for a life without violence merely a regulative ideal? Would
such a society, in,which all citizens presumably acquiesced to follow the
established law of a particular political regime, even be an ideal? What if
the laws themselves did violence to particular individuals or groups of
individuals within that society? More importantly, if, as Merleau~Ponty
suggests, violence is our lot as incarnate beings, then how can a life with-
out violence ever function as an ideal· in the first place?
did not live through it, the epochal period of World War II often seems
restricted to the actual war years themselves, including at most the years
just preceding the war, when Hitler came to power in Nazi Germany.
Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror reminds us that the cold war be-
tween the United States and the Soviet Union was just as terrifying in
its potential consequences for many Europeans as was the prospect of
Hitler taking over the Continent. The threat that either the United
States or the Soviet Union would resort to nuclear bombs as both sought
to gain control over postwar Germany was very real to countries that
were still suffering from enormous ecological, economic, and psychologi-
cal devastation. Both the United States and the Soviet Union possessed
the requisite nuclear technology, and the United States had already re-
vealed its willingness to use the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in response
to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Suspicious of the United States'
claim to be the champion of democracy fighting against a repressive Sta-
linist regime in the name of freedom, Merleau-Ponty makes the following
observation, one that is uncannily timely as once again the United States
leads the fray in a wat against an enemy whose very omnipresence makes
it seem larger than life, namely, a war on terrorism: "Whatever one's
philosophical or even theological position, a society is not the temple of
value-idols that .figure on the front of its monuments or in its constitu-
tional scrolls; the value of a society is the value it places upon man's
relation to man. It is not just a question of knowing what the liberals
have in mind but what in reality is done by the liberal state within and
beyond its frontiers" (Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, xiv). "To
understancl'and judge a society," he adds, "one has to penetrate its basic
structure to the human bond upon which it is built; this undoubtedly
depends upon legal relations, but also upon forms of labor, ways of loving,
living, and dying" (xiv).
Our forms of labor, and our ways of loving, living, and dying, undoubtedly
reveal much more than the state of a particular society. They reveal also
our ongoing corporeal relations with everyone and everything that com-
prises our situation: This includes the inanimate as well as the animate;
indeed, the visceral responses of so many Americans and non-Americans
Urban Flesh 157
to the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and on the Pentagon
poignantly illustrate that our relations with the inanimate can be just as
powerful, just as violent, and just as disturbing as our relations with our
fellow human beings. The material destruction of our world, whether it
occurs deliberately or spontaneously, forces us to contend with the spe-
cific but usually invisible ways in which our surrounding environment
actively shapes the intercorporeal interactions that help to construct our
own sense of bodily agency. And as beings in and of the world, our sense
of bodily agency provides the parameters that delimit the very nature of
our emplacement within the world, that is, our ability to dwell within it.
In his classic essay "Building Dwelling Thinking," Martin Heidegger
maintains: "The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which
we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling. To be a human being
means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell" (147). A few
pages later he states, "To say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they
persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations"
(157). According to Heidegger, our sense of bodily continuity, or in his
words, our "persistence" through spaces, is achieved and reinforced
through the continuity of the locations in which we are immersed and
the things that surround us with which we are engaged. That is, it is not
merely the physical persistence of the body across time and space but,
rather, the persistence of the situation as such that gives rise to the funda-
mental experience of dwelling in the world. In a passage that sounds more
Merleau-Pontian than Heideggerian, Heidegger observes, "When I go
toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not
go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as
this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the
room, and only thus can I go through it" (157). In its ek-static projection
toward its future projects, the body exceeds its epidermal boundaries to
participate in what Merleau-Ponty refers to, in his final works, as the
"flesh of the world." Although the body is conventionally understood as
occupying discrete coordinates that demarcate it from the place it inhab-
its, both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger encourage us to rethink the body's
relationship to its immediate environment. Approaching the lecture hall,
anticipating my presence within it, my body is neither "here" nor
"there." Indeed, the body, in its chiasmatic, interdependent relationship
with its surroundings, inhabits what Elizabeth Grosz, following Jacques
Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, identifies as the space of the "in-between."
For Grosz, the space of the in-between is a space of possibility, the
158 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
The transformative possibilities that emerge from the body's dynamic in-
teractions with its environment, Grosz suggests, are only experienced as
threatening if we resist our own futurity, that is, if we resist the openness
to new experiences that is the very mark of the future as the domain of
the "not yet." Edward Casey also affirms the chiasmatic relationship be-
tween alterations in the built environment and self-alteration when he
states, "In creating built places, we transform not only the local landscape
but ourselves as subjects: body subjects become fabricating agents" (111).
For both Grosz and Casey, our inability to stay in one place and our
corresponding lack of a fixed identity are positive phenomena because we
are continually free to explore new ways of being and, more precisely,
new ways of dwelling in the world. To the extent that, as Casey claims,
"we tend to identify ourselves by-and with-the places in which we
reside," our ability to freely and comfortably navigate within our own
built environment has the potential of enlarging "our already existing
embodiment into an entire Ufe-world of dwelling" (120).
have, what type of mailboxes they could put up, and where their laundry
could and could not be hung. Rather than leading us to conclude that
home ownership is not a good thing, or that homes do not supply bodies
with a sense of comfort and security that can facilitate the development
of a positive sense of self, the lessons of Levittown and Young's own
experience warn us not to uncritically embrace the benefits of home in
such a way that the failure to have a home or even be at home becomes
the fault of the individual rather than a collective failure on the part of
the larger community in which she resides (or fails to reside).
Casey's, Young's, and Feder's work remind us not only of the fragility
of dwelling but also of the privileges and responsibilities that accompany
it. The violence of being ejected from one's dwelling, the violence of
being dis~placed from one's home and one's country of origin, may be the
very type of experiences Merleau~ Ponty had in mind when he wrote that
oppressive forms of violence may require violent solutions. Violent solu~
tions need not, of course, involve actual physical violence. Rather, what
I believe Merleau~Ponty is suggesting is that the transformation of conser~
vative belief structures that tolerate and legitimize violence requires a
genuine upheaval. This upheaval is violent precisely because it seeks to
eradicate not only the experiences of oppression but also the societal
structures that support them.
In the final pages of Humanism and Terror, Merleau~ Ponty affirms that
"[t]he human world is an open or unfinished system and the same radical
contingency which threatens it with discord also rescues it from the inevi~
tability of disorder and prevents us from despairing of it" (188). "Such a
philosophy," he tells us, "awakens us to the importance of daily events and
action. For it is a philosophy which arouses in us a love for our times which
are not the simple repetition of human eternity nor merely the conclusion
to premises already postulated.' It is a view which like the most fragile
object of perception-a soap bubble, or a wave--or like the most simple
dialogue, embraces indivisibly all the order and all the disorder of the
world" (188-89). Ushering in a new epoch in which the violence of
social justice is able to transform the conditions, and therefore the possi~
bilities, of our own urban flesh, is itself a collective project whose fragility
and volatility guarantee that it is always unfinished, always in the making.
Such a project requires that we remain open to the possibility that our
established patterns of living, our institutionalized means of "producing
order" might well haVe to undergo radical, even violent change.
As Grosz suggests, not only does such a project undercut reductive
Urban Flesh 163
binaries, it also undercuts our very sense of identity and thereby holds
out the promise of new identities that resist the oppressive structures of
the past and the present that seek to constrain them. To realize this
promise is to embrace the openness that flows from the contingency of
the future:
sey refused to stop weaving the fabric that, once finished, was supposed
to define her identity once and for all as the wife of one of her unwanted
suitors, the aim of the weavings enacted in this particular text is to pro-
duce new openings, new spaces for change, movement, and growth that
can be taken up and woven afresh by others. Thus, expanding the possi-
bilities for stylizing urban flesh requires new ways of understanding the
dynamic relationship between bodies and cities, and therefore new ways
of doing philosophy.
Notes
1. Similarly, as Toni Morrison has powerfully shown in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination, one cannot invoke whiteness without either implicitly or explicitly contrasting
it with blackness. Moreover, as Frantz Fanon has also demonstrated in Black Skin, White Masks, the
more phantasmatically blacl~ness is conceived, the more mythically entrenched the status of white-
ness becomes.
2. Steven Vogel offers an extended critical discussion of this traditional binary approach in
Against Nature: The Concept.o{Nature in Critical Theory. He advocates a social constructionist view
of nature whereby nature is itself an ongoing product of cultural interpretation. See Mary Douglas's
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo for one of the most influential
accounts of the significance of the cultural distinction between purity and pollution.
3. There are many excellent resources to tum to for a discussion of the gendered dimensions of .
nature and culture, though less work has been done on how the city is gendered. Elizabeth Grosz's
work is a notable exception in this regard. See "Bodies-Cities," in Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays
on the Politics of Bodies and Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Sherry
Ortner's classic essay "Is Mal\! to Female as Nature Is to Culture?" in Making Gender: The Politics and
Erotics of Culture offers one of the best-known feminist accounts of the engendering of nature and
culture respectively as feminine and masculine. Carol Bigwood's Earth Muse: Feminist, Nature, and
Art offers a specifically phenomenological analysis that supports Ortner's critique of the patriarchal
identification of nature with an ideali~ed feminine "earth mother" and culture with an idealized
masculine master of techne.
Although urban analyses often concenttate on the racial and class implications of what Ruth
Frankenberg has called a "racial social geography" in White Women Race Matters: The Social Con-
struction of Whiteness, less work has been done on how nature is itself racialized. For excellent and
disturbing accounts of the consequences of failing to acknowledge the racism inherent in our under-
standings of "urban flesh," see Robert Gooding-Williams's edited collection Reading Rodney King
Reading Urban Uprising.
4. I am indebted to Eduardo Mendieta for suggesting that I introduce Hannah Arendt's account
of violence into this discussion.
5. Although Arendt's account of violence, and particularly racial violence, in On Violence, can
certainly be mobilized for feminist and antiracist politics, it would be remiss not to call attention to
her unfortunate linkage of emasculation and dehumanization to describe a human being who is
incapable of experiencing or presumably expressing feelings of violence. Her account reminds us
that violence itself is a gend~red phenomenon. This is not to deny that women as well as men may
act violently, bunhat the very expression of violence itself tends to be associated with masculinity.
Urban Flesh 165
This has historically had deleterious consequences for women who have behaved violently because
their violation of gendered expectations has furthered their own dehumanization at the hands of
others.
6. Of course, this is only temporary. Master plans for this exceptionally large piece of prime New
York City real estate were solicited very soon after 9/11 from top international architecture firms and
Ground Zero will soon be a memory, albeit one that is materially incorporated in virtually all the
designs for the site.
7. Indeed, to Iraqis and many others today, it is the willingness of the current u.s. government
to endorse the displacement of others in order to ensure its own secure emplacement in the world
that helps to fuel charges of U.S. imperialism.
8. Notably, one of the reasons Kant's justification for political quiescence in the face of an unjust
ruler in his political essay "On the Relationship of Theory to Practice in Political Right" is so
dissatisfying is because the universality of the law that demands obedience to the ruler does violence
to a legitimate sense of outrage about the ruler's abuse of his or her power in determining the scope
and application of the law. Kant unequivocally states his position as follows:
It thus follows that all resistance against the supreme legislative power, all incitement of
the subjects to violent expressions of discontent, all defiance which breaks out into rebel-
lion, is the greatest and most punishable crime in a commonwealth, for it destroys its very
foundations. This prohibition is absolute. And even if the power of the state or its agent,
the head of state, has violated the original contract by authorizing the government to act
tyrannically, and has thereby, in the eyes of the subject, forfeited the right to legislate,
the subject is still not entitled to offer counter-resistance. The reason for this is that the
people, under an existing civil constitution, has no longer any right to judge how the
constitution should be administered. (Kant, Political Writings, 81; emphasis in the orig-
inal)
What Kant is advocating here is precisely that we tolerate injustices in order to preserve the author-
ity of the ruler and the universality of the law, a position that is in direct contrast with later political
thinkers such as Arendt, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty.
9. In a more recent conversation with Casey, he has stated that his own new experience as a
city dweller (in New York City) has led him to reject his earlier belief that the city could not be a
home.
8
Vision, Violence, and the Other:
A Merleau .. Ponte an Ethics
Jorella Andrews
I
Perception ... asserts more things than it grasps: when I say that
I see the ash-tray over there, I suppose as completed an unfolding
of experience which could go on ad infinitum, and I commit a
whole perceptual future. Similarly, when I say that I know and
like someone, I aim, beyond his qualities, at an inexhaustible
ground which may one day shatter the image that I have formed
of him. This is the price for there being things and "other peo-
168 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
pIe" for us, not as the result of some illusion, but as the result of
a violent act which is perception itself.
is available to sight'has, in effect, already been fixed in place for us, made
static, and objectified, by means of reductive representational strategies
and nonreciprocal viewing structures. As Laura Mulvey pointed out many
years ago in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), again
within the broader_ context of feminist discourses on vision and visuality,
such procedures and structures are consistently embedded even within
visual works of a time-based nature. Concerning the problematic repre-
sentation of woman in the mainstream cinema of the period, she writes,
for instance, that her presence "is an indispensable element of spectacle
in normal narrative film, yet her presence tends to work against the devel-
opment of a story line, to freeze the /low of action in moments of erotic
contemplation."5 _This observation connects with a second point I wish
to make. It concerns the fundamentally different perceptual situations
that distinguish Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the relationship be-
tween vision and intersubjectivity from those alternative evaluations.
In the extract from the Phenomenology, the triad of vision, violence,
and the other would seem to be explored within contexts of face-to-face
engagement. Howeyef, the distinctiveness of these encounters is not that
they are somehow unmediated in nature. Rather, they offer a particular
quality and scope of negotiation in which the possibility for ongoing
interaction (exchange, disagreement, conversion, rearticulation) remains
in play. Here, our understanding and expectations of others are open to
interruptions and challenges that are not derived from us. In the example
cited by Merleau-Ponty, it is particularly significant that the potential
shattering of existing perceptions and preconceptions arises within the
context of a relationship with someone "known and liked." The point is
that in all our committed perceptual relations with others, those others
inevitably remain what Julia Kristeva has called "open systems."6 And so
do we.
As already indicated, where vision tends to be treated as problematic
to intersubjectivity, and where the violence of vision is associated with
objectification, the perceptual situations generally under discussion are
those in which, largely by means of one or other technology of represen-
tation, others are given to us in ways that are definitive and reductive.
They are presented as already "spoken for." However, although a persua-
sive antirepresentational discourse has emerged within postphenomeno-
logical critical thought, theorists have not necessarily identified practices
and technologies of visual representation per se as problematic. Instead,
as in Mulvey's seminal text, much critical attention has been directed
Vision, Violence, and the Other 171
selves, toward a r~ason which contains its own origins."? As I will show,
Merleau-Ponty's discussions of L'inviree are interesting in this respect
also. As with other novels by Beauvoir (Les mandarins, for instance),
L'invitee may be described as representational in that it is an account of
an actual state of affairs-the near disruption of the author's relationship
with Jean-Paul Sartre when she and Sartre (Fran~oise and Pierre, respec-
tively, in the novel) open up their partnership, emotionally and eroti-
cally, to a younger woman, Olga Kosakiewicz (Xaviere). But if the novel
draws upon this situation, it does not reduplicate it. At issue is the
unraveling of a lived situation, the fictionalized articulation of other pos-
sibilities, an act of radical questioning and of speculation. Thus in "Meta-
physics and the Novel," Merleau-Ponty does not only attend to the
intricacies and tensions of the narrated menage a trois. He also attends
to the ethical possibilities accompanying Beauvoir's approach to repre-
senting herself and, others
.
within this novel. To this point I will return.
II
So far I have tried to establish what Merleau-Ponty's understanding of
perception as a violent act is not. I have also attempted to account,
briefly, for the differences of position that are at issue between Merleau-
Ponty's thought and that of other commentators for whom visual prac-
tices are t;heorized. as ethically problematic. But what are we to make of
the triad "vision, violence and the other" as Merleau-Ponty treats it?
What of this "violent act which is perception itself" but which is none-
theless ethical?
In "Other Selves and the Human World," to reiterate, Merleau-Ponty
makes clear that the violence in question is not that of objectifying the
other. It might be more to the point to describe it as a violence enacted
upon the seer, but this is not quite accurate either. For from the immedi-
ate context in which this phrase is to be found, it appears not merely that
the agent of violence is perception itself but also that this violence is first
and foremost enacted upon itself. As noted earlier, perception is de-
scribed by Merleau-Ponty as having a doubled aspect: it makes certain
assertions about the world while at the same time aiming at, and opening
onto, phenomena that may later shatter them. Perception, then, would
seem to be so structured as to be continually exceeding and. undermining
Vision, Violence, and the Other 173
itself. Here, the point is not only that perceptual engagement amounts
to immersion within (confident) "makings" and (violent) "undoings" of
worlds, and inevitably also of self and other. Crucially, perception is un-
derstood here less as that which a seer does, and more as that in which
both seer and seen are already embedded. Indeed, perception both pre-
cedes and produces different configurations of seeing and being seen. In
"Cezanne's Doubt," Merleau-Ponty proposes that it is precisely to per-
ception in its unstable, prepersonal modes that the work of Cezanne
exposes us:
in The Structure 01' Behavior (1942), it is here that we first discover its
articulations and learn to accommodate ourselves to its uncertainties.
Paradoxically, acceptance of the body as organ of instability also provides
us with entrance into the experience of a particular, and in his words,
"peculiar" permanence that is to be found convincingly only within
bodily existence-an issue discussed earlier in the Phenomenology, where
Merleau-Ponty defines bodily existence as a "middle term between pres-
ence and absence."l0 Crucially for Merleau-Ponty, it is to the extent that
we enjoy bodily knowledge in terms of this "peculiar" permanence that
we discover the resources needed to take part in those situations and
those lives that appear to us to be marked with indeterminacy or finitude.
A second consequence of disavowal is the entry into an initially com-
fotting solipsism that lived experience-that is, our actual immersion
in a shared world that always exceeds assertion and expectation-must
inevitably destroy. Indeed, in "Other Selves and the Human World"
Merleau-Ponty's "violent act," because of its doubled aspect, shatters so-
lipsism. "In reality," he writes, "the other is not shut up inside my per-
spective of the worlc:i;because this perspective itself has no definite limits,
because it slips into the other's and because both are brought together
in the one single world in which we all participate as anonymous subjects of
perception" (emphasis added).l1 These words-which again make comple-
mentary two apparently contradictory concepts, anonymity and social-
ity-indicate that intersubjectivity, for Merleau-Ponty, is not a condition
that somehow must be achieved. It already is. The challenge is to keep it
open and it} play. I~deed, it is a commitment to this very project that forms
the basis for his ethics. It is to such an orientation that an ethics of
representation would arguably also be tied: "We must therefore redis-
cover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of
objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence: I may well
tum away from it, but not cease to be situated relatively to it.... We
must return to the social with which we are in contact by the mere fact
of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us before any
objectification.... The social is already there when we come to know or
judge it."IZ
A third consequence of disavowing lived perception is an illusory sense
of our relationship to others caused by the failure, within certain situations,
to experience ourselves as seen. As Merleau-Ponty puts it in "Metaphysics
and the Novel," here the experience of the other has been surmounted or
sublimated~13 By refusing the other in this way, we avoid coming to terms
Vision, Violence, and the Other 175
with ourselves as, for instance, possibly no more than objects in that other's
world, or as figuring only on its peripheries, or as present within it in an
unfamiliar, even "deformed" guise. "Once we are aware of the existence of
others," he writes, "we commit ourselves to being, among other things,
what they think of US."14 We also avoid coming to terms with the other's
power to resist us by his or her refusal (or inability) to slip compliantly
into the world that we have built, and in which we have already assigned
him or her a particular place, a particular role, and a particular future.
And this brings me to Merleau-Ponty's discussions of L'invitee. For as
Merleau-Ponty observes, the novel opens with descriptions of Fran~oise
as someone who has, for a long time, managed to live out all these dis-
avowals, and has created an orderly life for herself. Having withdrawn
from the reality of her embodiedness, she has been able to convince
herself not only that her being is without limitation, but also that people
and situations are given to her transparently and absolutely, even that
they depend on her for their very existence: "[H]ere I am, at the very
heart of the dance-hall, impersonal and free. I am watching all these lives
and all these faces. If I were to turn away from them, they would dis-
integrate at once like a deserted landscape."15 Merleau-Ponty writes, re-
vealingly, that "what strengthens Fran~oise's conviction is that, by an
extraordinary piece of luck, even love [that is, her long-standing relation-
ship with Pierre, which she takes to be one of transparent oneness] has
not made her realize her limits."16 For Fran~oise, Pierre is not other; she
does not recognize the possibility of his existing in ways that are unavail-
able or unknown to her. And, in careful collaboration with him, she has
maintained this fiction so effectively that even Pierre's many affairs find
easy accommodation. "They thought they had overcome jealousy by the
omnipotence of language," writes Merleau-Ponty,17 The crisis for
Fran~oise comes when the existence of the duo (or from her perspective,
her own existence as I/we) becomes entangled with that of Xaviere,
whose unpredictability, evasiveness, and egoism prevent Fran~oise from
integrating her into her already constructed world. Rather, Xaviere's atti-
tudes, and the relationship that develops between Xaviere and Pierre
(over which Fran~oise has no control, and which remains beyond her
reach because Xaviere will not make it sharable through speech) force
Fran~oise to acknowledge that the world of things and people does not,
after all, depend upon her for its existence. In Merleau-Ponty's words,
"[T]he world [now] has a center from which she is excluded.... With
the others, things retreat beyond her grasp and become the strange debris
176 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
of a world to which she no longer holds the key. The future ceases to be
the natural extension of the present, time is fragmented, and Fran~oise is
no more than an anonymous being, a creature without a history, a mass
of chilled flesh." Crucially, from this decentered position, she also experi-
ences her own bejng in unanticipated ways, as she is seen by others. The
positive outcome of this is that Fran~oise "now knows there are situations
which cannot be communicated and which can only be understood by
living them."18 But she cannot live them. Instead she erroneously reinter-
prets her situation as one of utter objectification ("she can no longer
doubt that, under the glance of that couple [Pierre and Xaviere], she is
truly an object"),19 of utter separation from Pierre, and of utter aloneness.
In consequence, her carefully arranged, artificial world shatters. This was,
of course, inevitable. As Merleau-Ponty puts it: "We easily escape from
transcendence as long as we are dealing only with things: the transcen-
dence of other people is more resistant."20 Also at issue here, incidentally,
is a misunderstanding on Fran~oise's part concerning the nature of verbal
language. She fails to acknowledge its opacity and ambiguities, and thus
its affinities with the-perceptual as Merleau-Ponty understands it-a sub-
ject he would expiore some years later in his essay "Indirect Language
and the Voices of Silence."21
So, how will. this point of crisis in Fran~oise's life be resolved? Will
she adjust to the painful transformation of the duo (this "two-headed
wonder")22 into a threesome with its opacities and rivalries? Fran~oise
tries. Merleau-Ponty writes of the "good faith, the loyalty to promises, the
respect for others, the generosity and the seriousness of the two principals
[Fran~oise and Pierre]."23 But it is not to be managed. Fran~oise must at
all costs restore her old, familiar world. She retreats first into illness where
she finds temporary relief, but finally resorts to the murder of Xaviere,
disguised as a suicide.
What are we to make of this? On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty insists
in this essay on the futility of attempting to assign definitive meanings to
human actions, including those narrated here. "The truth is that our
actions do not admit of anyone motivation or explanation; they are
'over-determined,'" he writes. 24 On the other hand, he states that
"Fran~oise wanted to shatter the image of herself she had seen in Xa-
viere's eyes" and, a little later, that "[a]s long as Xaviere exists, Fran~oise
cannot help being what Xaviere thinks she is. From this there follows the
crime."25 However,'it is by no means the collapse of Fran~oise's artificial
world that is responsible for her downfall. Nor is Fran~oise destroyed by
Vision, Violence, and the Other 177
III
Merleau-Ponty's insistence that intersubjectivity occurs only where the
challenges (the violences) of embodied, perceptual existence are actively
taken up inevitably gives rise to an ethics modeled after the doubled
structures of perception as discussed earlier, rather than the certainties
and closures of rule-governed thought. "True morality does not consist
in following exterior rules," he writes in "Metaphysics and the Novel,"
"or in respecting objective values: there are no ways to be just or to be
saved."27
The point here is not that all already existent moral laws must be
jettisoned, automatically and indiscriminately, but rather that such laws
must not be administered into given situations, automatically and indis-
criminately, from the outside. First, then, a truly ethical situation for
Merleau-Ponty can only emerge when participants understand that they
are internally related to each other in ways that are as yet indeterminate,
and that they are profoundly together in their respective differences.
Second, it is a situation in which others, rather than have meanings im-
posed upon them, are able to reveal themselves. Third, as he put it in
"The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences" (a
summary and defense of the Phenomenology delivered in 1946 and pub-
lished in 1947), it consists in "generously meeting the other in the very
particularity of a given situation."28 Since, in such encounters, irreconcil-
J 78 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
within the world of her novel the existences of Pierre and Xaviere exceed
her purview and grasp, and does she therefore refuse to take advantage of
her position as author to impute thoughts and feelings to them? Is it a
further demonstration of generosity? Or (taking seriously the assertion
that the novel was written "as an act of revenge"), does her silence mark
the extent of her alienation from them? Is she presenting them to us as if
they exist for her, now, as no more than mere objects? The nature of her
orientation toward them is unclear. Equally uncertain is the degree of
congruence between Beauvoir as writer and Beauvoir as the subject of her
writing: the fictional Fran~oise. Have both, in the end, refused immersion
in that "violent act which is perception itself," or just the latter? I am
not sure. The important point, however, is that Beauvoir's narrational
style provokes such self-exposure and such questions.
Merleau-Ponty, writing in "Metaphysics and the Novel," takes Beau-
voir's approach to be one in which generosity and vulnerability are key.
And at the root of both, he identifies a radical commitment to the risks
of embodied, perceptual engagement with self and others, discovering its
submerged but sustained presence throughout the noveL And so, al-
though his discussions of Fran~oise revolve around her attempts to dis-
avow her embodiedness, he prefaces his essay with the following extract
from L'invitee:
Notes
Breathing Space
The forms of domination practiced on Irish prisoners in the Long Kesh
prison in the early 1980s make dear that gender inflects the violence of
many prison situations. As in the 2004 abuses by American soldiers at
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the guards and wardens at Long Kesh explic-
itly pursued practices that exposed inmates' bodily privacy, ranging from
nudity to forced anal entry. Long Kesh inmates in tum resisted exactly
through their willingness to risk this exposure and to use orifices as hiding
places for contraband. Given that these maneuvers unfolded as part of
the long colonial/anticolonial battle between Britain and Ireland {just as
the Abu Ghraib abuses arose from a struggle over territory and oil}, they
give us a first glimpse of the way that bodily orifices and interiors serve as
sites of struggle for the exterior, geopolitical competition over space-the
Bodies Inside/Out 185
nation's land. While the prison dynamics themselves are not explicitly
gendered, it is important to keep in mind that they occur within a situa-
tion in which victims of violence are regularly feminized, as indicated,
for instance, by the paramilitary, street language, documented by Feld-
man, in which to beat or kill someone was to "knock his cunt in" or
"give him the message," the latter phrase being slang for intercourse (FV,
69). More broadly, of course, insofar as such nationalist and imperial
struggles have formed historically within discourses of manhood, the
abuse and resistance of political prisoners becomes a gendered drama.
At Long Kesh, the world-riveting 1981 hunger strikes were preceded
by a series of protests, starting with the "Blanket Protest," whereby the
prisoners wore only blankets because they refused to wear prison garb
after their change in status from political prisoners to common criminals.
On shower day they were given two towels, one to wear to the showers
and one to dry with while there. When this policy changed, and they
were denied towels for the walk to the shower, the prisoners refused to
shower-a decision perhaps also influenced by the fact that it was during
showers that guards conducted invasive body searches.
Thus the "Dirty Protest" began-and so too a cycle of resistance and
abuse that ultimately involved the bodies of the guards as well as of the
prisoners. The prisoners' refusal to shower led the warden to deny them
bathroom privileges, which led the prisoners to shit in the comers of
their cells, which led the guards "mistakenly" to throw the prisoners'
sheets and mattresses into the piles of shit while searching for contra-
band, which led the prisoners to throw the excrement out the window,
which led the guards to board up the windows, which led the prisoners
to spread the shit on the cell walls, which led the guards each day to
move the prisoners and clean and whitewash the cells-until in the end
the guards, smelling nearly as badly as did the prisoners, spent hours
ridding themselves of the stench before going home.
In this cycle, dirt and shit invasively permeated the home lives of the
guards just as it did the cell lives of the prisoners. Guards and prisoners
entered a body deadlock in an extreme instance of what Sara Suleri calls
"colonial intimacy."z As one prisoner put it, "From the moment we hit
the H-block we had used our bodies as a protest weapon. It came from
the understanding that the Brits were using our bodies to break us" (FV,
179). If the guards turned the prisoners' bodies inside out by making
them squat over mirrors while they searched their anuses with metal in-
struments, the prisoners carried this logic further by turning their cells
186 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
into anuses replet~ with shit-covered walls. A guard entering the prison-
er's cell in effect was forcibly made to enter the hole he had forcibly
probed. The body had been turned inside out, the body's reversibility
made both abject and empowering. In such a situation, far from being the
essentialist ground of identity, the body is instead "a cumulative effect of
exchanges between agonistic forces .... [The] exchange historicizes the
subject, fixing it and unfixing it into determinate but manifold forms"
(FV, 177). The body is metamorphic, most especially under duress.
- Strangely, the capacity for metamorphosis resides in an interior space
that is also the opening to violation. In effect, prisoners and guards battle
over the body's politically loaded and elusive inside/out ontology.
To put it more precisely, in violating the prisoners' interiority, the
guards were forCing and displaying their access not only to the body's
invisible interiors but also to its primary spatiality-the openness within
the body that upholds and nourishes its exterior presence. One can rip
into a body anywh~re with a knife. To enter the body via given passages,
passageways by which a body lives and which also create its vulnerability
to entry and .lead _to the spaces it contains and which in fact are its
inscape, this is something quite different. To shove a fist or instrument
into the anus against the will of the prisoner: this is not merely to display
mastery over the body (as mass) of the prisoner: it is to come between
the parts of the fleshly person, to display mastery over the space con-
tained and occupied by the body.
In these acts, I suggest, the aggressor forces himself into what Merleau-
Ponty calls the chi~smus, the very ontological center which is nonethe-
less also th~ space of noncenter, of fission, of multiplicity, therefore of
possibility, of parts touching to make something which is not merely
them. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the productive effects of this chiasmatic
noncenter of the person, casting it as that which brings the person into
active, intercorporeal relation to her surround. For Merleau-Ponty, the
experience of one-hand-touching-the-other-touching-it epitomizes the
chiasmatic nature of our bodily being and relation to ourselves. In this
experience, "[t]here is a circle of the touched and the touching, the
touched takes hold of the touching,"3 and yet this meeting of the touch-
ing hand and the touched hand is
Being Double
As evinced, that is, in the testimonies of human prisoners, and in novels
such as Morrison's 'The Bluest Eye, the body is a reserve as well as an
inescapable site of torture-exactly both at once in its doubleness. Both
Lena Constante, inThe Silent Escape, and Jacobo Timerman, in Prisoner
Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, describe this vexed, doubled
condition. My discussion of their memoirs in the following few sections
of this essay will focus not on sexual violation (which for the most part
they did not suffer) but instead on the nature of the "breathing space"
that domination attempts to control (a space that includes but is not
limited to sexuality) -and through which the person survives.
Lena Constante spent eight years in solitary confinement in Romania
(before and after a puppet trial performed under Soviet rule, and before
serving six more in group cells) and has titled her narrative of these years
The Silent Escape. "In this dungeon of a cell for unending hours I became
aware of my duality. I was two. For I was here and I saw myself here. I was
twO."4 As becomes clear, her silent escape is not strictly from the cell,
but from herself-in-the-cell.
As she awakens one winter morning to her unheated cement cubicle,
on a thin straw mattress with no blanket, Constante comes to conscious-
ness "[p]aralyzed by the cold. Aching all over. Reality holds me in its grip.
A pincers. Breaking my bones." And yet she also awakens "[rlesisting the
urge to give way. To give up. To give up even oneself.... The most
difficult struggle. Against the '1lost treacherous enemy. And the subtlest.
Oneself" (SB, 17). Instead of giving up all of herself to her subtler self,
Bodies Inside/Out 189
under this pressure from the other of herself, she struggles to "repudiate
my body's 'me'" (SE, 9). Sometimes she apparently makes this duality a
familiar, Cartesian mind-body one, with the "I" or "me" aligned with
mind or spirit against body: "My body could only be here. Me, I could be
elsewhere. My body didn't have the space to move its aching feet. But, I
would grow wings. The wings of a bird. The wings of the wind. The wings
of a star. And I would get away" (SE, 9). To pass the "86400 seconds a
day that slowly twist all over [her] body" (SE, 15), she "escapes into" her
"mind": in her eight years of solitary confinement she mentally "writes"
several plays for the marionette stage (part of her work in normal life) .
and composes and memorizes countless lines of poetry. Thus far her expe-
rience would seem to conform to a simple dualistic metaphysics.
At first glance, the same seems true for Jacobo Timerman in his ac-
count of his experiences in clandestine Argentinean prisons, especially
as reflected in what he calls his "withdrawal technique." On the one
hand he "developed an attitude of absolute passivity" especially during
interrogation and torture sessions: "I was told to undress. And I did so,
passively. I was told, when I sat on a bed, to lie down. And, passively I
did SO."5 He apparently, in the full phenomenal sense of that word, gives
his seeable body over to his torturers and meanwhile, like Constante, he
engages in tenacious "mental labor": imagining newspaper tasks, plan-
ning a bookstore run by himself and his wife, and writing essays or books
in detail (PWN, 35). "I tried," he says, "through every available means,
while inside my solitary cell, during interrogations, long torture sessions,
and after sessions, when only time remained, all of time, time on all sides
and in every cranny of the cell, time suspended on the walls, on the
ground, in my hands, only time, I tried to maintain some professional
activity, disconnected from the events around me" (PWN, 37). Timer-
man dissociates from his surroundings and from the body that inhabits
them. Yet this "with-drawal" is, like Constante's, a leaving-behind that I
would point out is deeply structured by or rooted in the material world
he faces. The very word with-drawal indicates a pulling-with, a struggle
with that assumes the countervailing presence of his body-a presence
that must remain in order for him to return or, in other words, to survive
the electric shocks and the blows. That is, to live through the torture he
escapes into a mental elsewhere, but he does so to keep alive the body he
must return to and on which his mental activity depends for its life. This
splitting of himself from himself is the action of both his defeat and his
victory. What first seems a triumphant and reductive dualism emerges
190 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty
before she knows what to do with it. On one of her changes of cell, she
writes, "[T]he first thing I noticed was a sheet of paper stuck to the wall"
listing an inventory of the contents of the room. "I was rich! I immedi-
ately took down the paper and, folding it eight times, hid it under the
board of the bench, fitting it into a groove. Why? For no particular rea-
son. A prisoner's reflex" (SE, 183). She later has the idea of pilfering
some cigarette butts from the trash bin she passes when she is let out to
empty her chamber pot and of using the paper to roll herself some new
cigarettes. This instinct to seize a thing and hide it in a "groove" of the
world expresses the importance for the prisoner of its nooks and crannies,
or what Merleau-Ponty would call the folds of the world-its layered
three-dimensionality into which we step as one more doubling three-
dimensional presence. This perhaps explains what Constante discovers
after she is given fabric to sew in a new lining for her coat and uses the
leftover to make "a large bag full of pockets and compartments for each
of my [sewing] things" {SE, 225). She tells us she later heard that "bags
with many pockets are one of the prisoner's characteristic obsessions"
(SE, 225)-as if the-folds in the fabric provided covert ontological pock-
ets for the being of the prisoner.
Constante's activities get woven, moreover, into a whole prison com-
munity's subver.sive efforts to create intra- and intercorporeal relation.
This dimension of her experience points to the powerful potential of
community-that is, of capacity for intercorporeal exchange to revive and
protect the intracorporeal self-relation and so to set once more in motion
the processes of active being. Constante eventually spends a number of
years in a' women's prison in which the inmates create a clandestine
Morse code system by which they communicate through the walls-thus
frustrating the surprise searches and other harassing activities of the.
guards as well as sharing information about families, friends, and fellow
prisoners. They become so adept at communicating ever more precise
messages that "the solidarity of our penitentiary was the staff's night-
mare," since it was "primarily against the solidarity that the commandant
and all the militia had to struggle" (SE, 213). The prisoners in effect
seize power from the very material barriers of their imprisonment-the
cell walls-turning them into portals of communication. In phenomeno-
logical terms, they make a virtue of the chiasmatic structure of the walls,
playing on the walls' simultaneous construction of inside/outside and iso-
lation/connection:Finally, it is by working this intercorporeal doubleness
of the walls that they also protect and foster their intracorporeal acts of
Bodies Inside/Out 195
that we match the'world, belong in it and to it. The invisible beyond our
view can be apprehended as a threat and yet the horizon that signals
toward that beyond is also lived as the welcome limit of our view, wel-
come because it assures us of our positionality in the world, of a place
within its limits and contours, of a dimensionality equal to that of things.
The ability to hide things rests on this dimensional, horizonal world, and
this partly explains the "prisoner's reflex" that Constante describes.
Yet this horizon, too, the guards and torturers aim to close. They
work-it is literally sometimes part of their job-to strip the prisoner of
any horizon within which to place him- or herself. The guards' attempts
to contain the women's covert communication is one instance of this
work. In an earlier instance, the guards cut down two acacia trees outside
Constante's window to which she has become attached; her physical col-
lapse and broken feeling on this occasion registers the effects of this hori-
zon-closing work. Timerman experiences a more radical shutdown of the
horizon as well as a more singular, if fleeting, reopening of it. His depic-
tion of this experience gives further insight into the interdependence of
the within and the 1)etween, or intracorporeal chiasm and intercorporeal
world-and into the simultaneous vulnerability and power created by
this interdependence.
At the opening of his book, Timerman the prisoner, and therefore we
the readers, have no idea where he is. He was blindfolded, his hands tied
behind his back, his body shoved to the floor of a car for the transport to
this place. The roqm into which he has been deposited has no light, no
window. l:.le has discovered its dimensions by holding out his arms, find-
ing he cannot stretch out his legs when he lies down on the cot. There
is only a peephole in the door, through which the guards speak roughly
or mockingly and which is usually kept shut. A narrow outline of light
marks its edges, dispersing a 'shadowy grayness into the dark cell. This
prisoner has no visible surround. His "thrownness," in Heideggerian
terms, is into a "being-alongside" without a horizon. His cell exists in a
vacuous space of fear.
One day the peephole inexplicably is left open against the rules. Tim-
erman the prisoner is drawn powerfully to the bright square of light and
presses his forehead against the cold steel door. He peers out at a hall
blasted with light and at two doors facing his. The effect is ontological:
"What a sensation of freedom! An entire universe added to my Time,
that elongated time which hovers over me oppressively in the cell, Time,
that dangerous enemy of man [sic], when its existence, duration, and
Bodies Inside/Out 197
eternity are virtually palpable. . . . I try to fill myself with the visible
space. So long have I been deprived of a sense of distance and proportion
that I feel suddenly unleashed" (PWN, 5).
In the lightless cell~world, "Time" had become dimensionless, obliter~
ating. The shadowless lack of an "open" in the surround of Timerman's
cell had accomplished a shutness and flatness within, so that when a
horizon takes shape around him in the hallway, his interior suddenly
opens up as well, providing a space within which he can see and position
himself. The prisoner is "unleashed" into a world of "distance and pro~
portion." Timerman tries to fill himself with space, to eat it hungrily, as
if to refill the yawning emptiness of spaceless Time. So fully intertwined
is the body with its surround that collapsing the external surround closes
off the body, and an opening of the surround likewise relaunches the
body.
And so, as we can begin to imagine, a friendly human figure appearing
within that hallway would extend the drama, add another fold to the
"visible space" of the hall, which is already now intertwined with the
interior of the prisoner. Timerman looks out trembling, wondering if the
guards will at any moment poke his eyes or punish his "hungry" look~
ing-and in this way intrude on this extension of his interior into that
hallway. But instead Timerman registers in a flash that "[h]e is doing the
same. I suddenly realize that the peephole in the door facing mine is also
open and that there's an eye behind it" (PWN, 5). He fears that even
this is a setup of the guards and pulls back. He waits "for some Time,
more Time, and again more Time. And then return to the peephole. He
is doing the same" (PWN, 5).
Meeting another's eye-meeting it in that exterior space that has been
revealed as a crucial holding~structure for Timerman's interior relation to
himself-now ramifies his self~relation into an other~relation. Accord~
ingly, at this point the narrative pauses, the page holds an extra white
space, and the text then pivots from implicitly addressing the reader to
openly addressing, for the following four pages, the person in the cell
across the hall, as if revisiting a lover: "And now I must talk about you,
about that long night we spent together, during which you were my
brother, my father, my son, my friend. Or, are you a woman? If so, we
passed that night as lovers" (PWN, 5-6). Timerman's heteronormative
assumptions aside, it is fitting that he compares this meeting to an en~
counter between lovers.
Timerman admits that "only one possible outgoing act would have
198 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
calls the making and unmaking of the world. Within a fascist prison,
inmates strive to sustain dimensionality and the chiasmatic hiatus other-
wise generated by a "tender" dialectic of the within and the between.
Meanwhile, the sawing down of trees and stealing of lighters and locking
up in unlighted cells all aim to foreclose this "defense of the intimate
being" and to replace it with a totalitarian law without referents, depriv-
ing the prisoner of a legitimating external world other than that created
by the torturer in the prison.
Timerman is prompted by his experience to see how the making of the
world extends even to the scope of nationhood. He perceives what Bene-
dict Anderson would later write a book about-that the nation itself, the
cause for which all these acts are supposedly performed, is on the contrary
constituted by these acts. In suggesting that the course of history in Ar-
gentina is being made at this very moment and could be made differently,
Timerman comments, "Argentina as an entity does not yet exist: it must
be created" (PWN, 17). Meanwhile he deftly reveals how bodies and
the accustomed things through which we construct our world bear the
potentially body-breaking weight of history. In his account of the watch
and lighter confiscated from him, he mentions that "[g]old Rolex watches
and Dupont cigarette lighters were almost an obsession with the Argen-
tine forces during that year of 1977" (PWN, 5). He gestures here toward
the surrounding economy of "brand names" in which these commodities
circulate, revealing how the prison activities of confiscation and world-
unmaking emerge within the uneven and American-dominated market
and the competitive flaunting of American brand names and prestige.
This is the political-intercorporeal drama of persons and things, nations
and watches. Timerman quickly traverses, through these things, the
whole terrain they map out, signify, and sustain, from the wife's hand to
the resource-seizing, geopolitical contests that have created "Argentina"
and its fascism in the first place.
Thus, the unmaking and remaking of a person, by the guard and the
prisoner, is the making of history. In light of Judith Butler's work on the
ways that genders are likewise constituted by continuous acts rather than
essences, we can begin to see the implications of these prisoners' insights
for the making of the sexual order of things. And, as Toni Morrison
makes clear, the larger political processes of (un}making and the local or
domestic dynamics of sexual (un}making are not just parallel processes,
they are interdependent processes.
200 Feminisr"Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
soon the "shame wells up again, its muddy rivulets seeping into her eyes"
(50). Morrison's language captures the permeating bodily effects, from
the inside out, of this denial of intercorporeal exchange.
The refusing gaze of racism might seem simply excluding rather than
invasive. But because of the chiasmatic condition of existence, this rejec-
tion accomplishes an inner collapse. Morrison traces how it destroys
Pecola's entry into her external world and in tum cripples an interior
self-relation. Before her arrival at Mr. Yacobowski's store, Pecola feels
pleasurable sensations of emplacement and anticipation. These are cata-
lyzed, first of all, by touch-that is, the sensation of the "three pennies
in her shoe-slipping back and forth between the sock and the inner sole
... a sweet endurable even cherished irritation, full of promise and deli-
cate security" (47). The pennies' rhythmic and shifting pressure not only
registers her weight and movement in ~he world (captured in the narra-
tive's description of an exchange between "sock" and "inner sole"), but
it also heralds a future. The pennies create a sense of "promise" and
temporal "security" as well as the promise of an economic "purchase" on
the world. Further, like Constante's attachment to the acacia trees, Peco-
la's situatedness issues from her relation to the "inanimate things she saw
and experienced," such as the "sidewalk crack shaped like a Y" and "the
dandelions at the base of the telephone pole" that she looks forward to
seeing on her walk to the store. These things, as the narrator explains,
"were real to her. She knew them. They were the codes and touchstones
of the world, capable of translation and possession. She owned the crack
that made her stumble; she owned the clumps of dandelions. . . . And
owning them made her part of the world, and the world a part of her"
(48-49).
This dialectic of world and self falls apart, however, in the aftermath
of her encounter with Mr. Yacobowski. The closed door of his eyes now
shutters the entire world. As she passes the dandelions on her return
home, "[a] dart of affection leaps out from her to them. But they do not
look at her and do not send her love back" (50). So Pecola settles for
eating the candies with the wrapper picture of the little girl with blonde
hair and blue eyes, since "to eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes,
eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane" (50). Her agency has been
reduced to this slipping of a candy into the mouth, a small, fraught deci-
sion to imbibe the world that rejects her.
The culminating scene of Pecola's unmaking is of course the moment
when her father, Cholly Breedlove, rapes her. Before we turn to this
202 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
scene, however, it'is crucial to see how Morrison leads up to it. She
narrates how Cholly himself has been undone by a racialized gaze, pre-
cisely in his moment of entry into the world of embraces, of sexuality.
And in the process she draws the reader into both sides of this excruciat-
ing encounter between father and daughter. She calls readers to extend
ourselves, intercorporeally, across the violated space where father and
daughter meet, and at the same time, across the space we might wish to
install between ourselves and such violations.
Abandoned at birth by his mother, rescued from the junk heap near
the railroad tracks by his Aunt Jimmy, and raised by her until he is a
teenager, Cholly's symbolic moment of entry into the adult world occurs
on the day of Aunt Jimmy's funeral. While the adults are drinking and
eating, Cholly a~d a girl named Darlene wander off to a wild-muscadine
vineyard nearby. Their budding intimacy is teased forward by their eating
of the "too new, too tight" grapes. The grapes themselves embody the
pleasures of anticipatory time insofar as "the restraint, the holding off,
the promise of sweetness [in the grapes] that had yet to unfold, excited
them more than fult ripeness would have done" (145). They begin to
fling grapes at each other, finally falling down in the grass to catch their
breath. As Darlene begins to worry about her grape-stained dress and
disheveled hair, Cholly "rose to his knees facing her" to retie the ribbon
in her hair. Darleen "put her hands under his open shirt and rubbed the
damp tight skin" (147). Soon they are making love and Cholly finds that
"their bodies began to make sense to him." He feels "the excitement
collecting inside him" until":-'-"just as he felt an explosion threaten"-
Darlene cries out in fear. For two white men have discovered them and
are standing behind Cholly with guns and flashlights. Cholly leaps up,
pulling on his trousers, but the men laugh and order him to "[g]et on wid
it, nigger," as they watch. '
Both Cholly's and Darlene's bodies shut down in what follows, now
blocked from encountering each other with any desire or kindness. Their
lovemaking becomes a bitter mockery and their gazes cannot alight. As
he drops back to his knees and the men snigger and shine their flashlights
on his backside, "[tlhere was no place for Cholly's eyes to go" (148).
Likewise, Darlene "had her head averted, her eyes staring out of the
lamplight into the surrounding darkness and looking almost uncon-
cerned, as though tp.ey had no part in the drama taking place around
them" (148). Their dissociatiVe responses recall Constante's and Timer-
man's withdrawal techniques: Darlene "put her hands over her eyes as
Bodies Inside/Out 203
Crawling on all fours toward her, he raised his hand and caught
the foot in ~n upward stroke. Pecola lost her balance and was
about to careen to the floor. Cholly raised his other hand to her
Bodies Inside/Out 205
hips to save her from falling. He put his head down and nibbled
at the back of her leg. . . . The rigidness of her shocked body,
the silence of her stunned throat, was better than Pauline's easy
laughter had been. The confused mixture of his memories of Pau-
line and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him,
and a bolt of desire ran down his genitals, giving it length, and
softening the lips of his anus. Surrounding all of this lust was a
border of politeness. He wanted to fuck her-tenderly. But the
tenderness would not hold. The tightness of her vagina was more
than he could bear. His soul seemed to slip down into his guts
and fly out into her, and the gigantic thrust he made into her
then provoked the only sound she made-a hollow suck of air in
the back of her throat. Like the rapid loss of air from a circus
balloon. (162-63)
reach of human consideration" (18). Cholly and Pecola enter this state
more irrevocably when, after the rape, Cholly disappears into an un-
known outdoors and, after she gives birth to a baby who soon dies, Pecola
spends her days in a state of madness roaming the neighborhood, "pluck-
ing her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers," lost among the
things of the world (205).
Then, too, in a sort of negative intercorporeality, Pecola's exile from
the world of places and things provides her community's leverage for a
sense of security. By contrast to her outdoor placelessness, they occupy a
safe, inside position. She becomes the enabling pariah of the community.
As Claudia explains retrospectively: "All of us-all who knew her-felt
so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were beautiful when
we stood astrid~ her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sancti-
fied us, her pain made us glow with health.... Even her waking dreams
we used-to silence our own nightmares. And she let us-and thereby
deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters
with her, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength" (205). If the mo-
ment when a guard lights the cigarette of a tortured inmate with the
inmate's wife's lighter epitomizes the way that the ontological stripping
of a prisoner accrues toward the making of a fascist nation, then Mor-
rison's novel r~veals how the rape of a girl can provide the absent yet
organizing center of a community-and so remake a racist nation.
Both Morrison's novel and Timerman's narrative end with scenes of wit-
nessing that, ultimately, beckon to readers.ll Calling us into their tor-
tured worlds even as they register our safe distance from them, they
implicate us in these national, fascist, race-d, and gendered economies of
domination. At the end of his narrative, Timerman stands witness in an
excruciating way: by being present at the event of someone else's torture
and imminent death. He is that involuntary agent whose very presence
to himself is a kind of uncalled-for being that he must nonetheless ac-
knowledge. He describes this experience as the ultimate one that makes
his past in the cell ever present, even now as he writes. Cunningly
Bodies Inside/Out 207
Have you ever looked into the eyes of another person, on the
floor of a cell, who knows that he's about to die though no one
has told him so? ...
I have many such gazes imprinted upon me ....
Those gazes, which I encountered in the clandestine prisons
of Argentina and which I've retained one by one, were the culmi-
nating point, the purest moment of my tragedy.
They are here with me today. And although I might wish to
do so, I could not and would not know how to share them with
you. (PWN, 164)
The gap between the protected reader and Timerman, which makes those
gazes unshareable, is paradoxically our only connection to him: to see
that gap is, in another way, to be witness to the rupturability of being,
the shutdown of the within and the between that he has so absolutely
experienced. In fact, it is exactly this gap between us and him that Timer-
man calls us to witness. Because if another person, a reader, witnesses
that gap, then, with its dependence on the within and between, the chi-
asm again opens out and begins to move, to reinhabit time and space,
moving Timerman toward a place with a future. This witnessing to which
we are called engages us once more in the operations of ontopolitical
making, of gender, race, and nation-by the very act of reading.
The Bluest Eye closes with a similar gesture. In doing so it implicitly
addresses itself to U.S. readers, asking us to recognize this legacy of viola-
tion at the center of the nation. In the novel's penultimate concluding
sentence, Claudia remarks that "[ilt's too late" to do anything about the
conditions that created Pecola's madness. Yet she adds one more, quietly
qualifying sentence: "At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage
and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late" (206).
In counterpoint to the emphasis on "much" too late, the repetition of
"my town" implicitly invites readers to reflect on theirs, to notice the
difference, and to ask if it is too late altogether. Accordingly, Claudia's
comment reopens the question of the future, registering the lapse of time
and the difference of position that, if acknowledged, could, paradoxically,
lift us, together, back into the open-ended and intercorporeal motions of
tender, mutual making. Morrison's Pecola fails to recover, Timerman
208 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
never forgets, and -Constante only partially escapes. Yet in naming these
failures, Morrison, Timerman, and Constante leave us thrown open and
called out. They arouse the desire for another future, another nation, and
another surround for intimacy.
Notes
1. Allen Feldman, Fonnations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Ncrrth-
em Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 229. This work is hereafter cited as FV.
2. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23.
3. Maurice MerIeau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 143. Hereafter cited as VI.
4. Lena Constante, The Silent Escape: Three Thousand DlI'Js in Romanian Prisons, trans. Franklin
Philip (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 9. Hereafter cited as SE.
5. Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, trans. Tony Talbot (New
York: Knopf, 1981), 34. Hereafter cited as PWN.
6. See, for instance, the last words of "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences," in Writi~ and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978),293.
7. Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1985), 11-12. Hereafter cited as SA.
8. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialagic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Aus-
tin: University ofTex~s Press, 1981),276-77.
9. The Man Inside: An Anthology of Writing and Conversational Comment by Men in Prison, ed.
Tony Parker (London: Joseph, 1973),35. Hereafter cited as MI.
10. Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New French Feminisms, ed. Isabelle de Cour-
trivon and Elaine Marks (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 254.
11. For this discussion I am indebted to Emmanuel Levinas's meditations on witnessing in Other-
wise Than Being, or Beyorui Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991),54.
10
Female Freedom:
Can the Lived Body Be Emancipated?
Johanna Oksala
Notes
1. Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social
Theory (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990). It can be argued that Simone de Beauvoir
already presents a phenomenological description of female embodiment in The Second Sex. See, for
example, Sonia Kruks, Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity, and Society (New York:
Routledge, 1990); Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (Indianap-
olis: Indiana University Press, 1992); Sara Heinamaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Differ-
ence:Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, BeaullOir (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
2. Young, ThrOWing Like a Girl, 148.
3. Ibid., 150.
4. Jean Grimshaw, "Werking Out with MerIeau-Ponty," in Women's Bodies: Discipline and
TransgTession, ed. Jane Arthurs and Jean Grimshaw (London: Cassell, 1999), 103.
5. Ibid., 115.
· Female Freedom 227
6. See Judith Butler, "Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description," in The Thinking
Muse: Feminism and Modem French Philosophy, ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1989), 85-100. For a more recent criticism charging Merleau-Ponty
of bodily fundamentalism, see Shannon Sullivan, "Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty's
Phenomenology of Perception," Hypatia 12, no. 1 (1997): 1-19. For an alternative reading, see Silvia
Stoller's reply to Sullivan, "Reflections of Feminist Merleau-Ponty Scepticism," Hypatia 15, no. 1
(2000): 173-82. For criticisms of Butler's reading of Merleau-Ponty, see Sara Heinamaa, "What Is a
Woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the Foundations of Sexual Difference," Hypatia 12, no. 1 (1997):
20-39; Bernhard Waldenfels, Grenzen der Normalisierung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998).
7. Butler, "Sexual Ideology," 92.
8. Ibid., 89.
9. Ibid., 90-91.
10. Young, Throwing Like a Girl, 153.
11. Butler, "Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description," 90-91.
12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1994).
13. See, for example, Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies (London: Routledge, 1996),12,69-70.
14. See Sara Heinamaa, "From Decisions to Passions: Merleau-Ponty's Interpretation of Hus-
serl's Reduction," in Merleau-Ponty's Reading of Husserl, ed. Ted Toadvine and Lester Embree (Dor-
drecht: Kluwer, 2002).
15. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 429. Page references to this work are cited par-
enthetically in the text.
16. Martin Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988),
105-8.
17. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 408.
18. Ibid., 431.
19. Ibid., 404.
20. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, 103.
21. Ibid., 105.
22. See Anthony Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generatille Phenomenology After Husserl (Evans-
ton: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 138-43. Steinbock argues that when Husserl refers to
normal as optimal the optimal as norm is instituted and generated from within experience.
23. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 302. See also 318.
24. Merleau-Ponty also emphasizes that the subject is able to transcend the normal as optimal
for the living body. He discusses the example of anorexia. The person with anorexia denies the norm
of the living body-the norm of "life." The normativity of an individual body is thus not deter-
mined, but always open and capable of transcending its situation. See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology
of Perception, 164.
25. Elmar Holenstein, "The Zero-Point of Orientation: The Placement of the I in Perceived
Space," in The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Don Welton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999),
87.
26. Butler, "Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description," 90-91.
27. See Johanna Oksala, "A Phenomenology of Gender," Continental Philosophy Relliew, forth-
coming; also Oksala, "The Birth of Man," in Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation, ed. Dan Zahavi,
Sara Heinamaa, and Hans Ruin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003),139-63.
28. See, for example, Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 361-62.
29. Dan Zahavi, "Husserl's Intersubjective Transformation of Transcendental Philosophy," Jour-
nal of the British Society for Phenomenology 27, no. 3 (1996): 228-45. See also Dan Zahavi, Husserl
und die transzendentale' Intersubjektillitiit: Eina Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic, 1996).
30. Zahavi refers to, for example, Ideen II, Erste Philosophie II, ET{ahrung und Urteil, Analyzen zur
228 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
passive Synthesis, Zur Phiinqmenologie der Intersubjektivitiit I-III. See also, for example, Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception, 92-93; "The Philosopher and His Shadow," in Signs (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1964).
31. Zahavi, "Husserl's 1ntersubjective Transformation," 233.
32. Dan Zahavi, "Anonymity and Intersubjectivity," paper presented at the FAU/CARP Re-
search Symposium "Merleau-Ponty Reading Husser!," Florida Atlantic University, Delray Beach,
Florida, October 19-20, 1999.
33. Zahavi, "Husserl's Intersubjective Transformation," 239-41.
34. Steinbock, Home and Beyond, 267.
35. Zahavi, "Husserl's Intersubjective Transformation," 239.
36. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 170.
37. Cf. Rudi Visker, "Raw Being and Violent Discourse: Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, and the (Dis-)
Order of Things," in Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Pe1'spectives, ed. Patrick Burke and Jan Van Der
Veken (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1995), 120.
38. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Child's Relations with Others," in The Primacy of Perception
and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics (Evanston:
Nor.thwestern University Press, 1964),96-155.
39. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 139.
40. Ibid., 93.
41. Carol Bigwood, among others, argued that Butler's "Foucauldian attempt to avoid metaphysi-
cal foundationalism leaves us with a disembodied body and a free-floating gender artifice in a sea of
cultural meaning production." Bigwood, "Renaturalizing the Body," Hypatia 6, no. 3 (1991): 59.
42. See, for example, Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New
York: Routledge, 1993), xii. S;tler argues that to defend a culturally contructed body does not mean
that one understands cultural construction as a single, deterministic act or as a causal process initi-
ated by the subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects. In place of these conceptions of construc-
tion, Butler suggests a return to the notion of matter as "a process of materialization that stabilizes
over time to produce the effect of boundaty, fixity, and surface we call matter." See ibid., 9.
43. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997), 2-3.
44. Ibid., 86.
45. Ibid., 99.
46. Ibid., 94.
47. Ibid., 95.
48. Visker, "Raw Being and Violent Discourse," 119. In his effort to relate Merleau-Ponty's and
Foucault's thought on the question of experience/discourse, Rudi Visker also argues that we do not
have to choose between them. He writes that "what is at stake here is not the attempt to reduce
discourse to existence, or existence to discourse, but to find in their mutual intrication some indica-
tion of what it could mean for us to be those subjects who take up positions we did not ourselves
generate." See ibid., 126.
49. Sara Heinamaa presents a phenomenological description of sexual difference based on the
notion of style in Merleau-Ponty's and Simone de Beauvoir's thought. Heinamaa describes the conse-
quences that Merleau-Ponty's conceptualization of the body has for our conceptions of sexual differ-
ence: it is theorized as two different modes or styles of being-male and female. See Heinamaa,
Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference.
50. Merleau-Ponty notes that sensation can be anonymous only because it is incomplete. See
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 216.
51. Ibid., 363.
52. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1994), xi. •
53. Cf. Butler,Psychic Life of Power, 89.
11
Care for the Flesh: Gilligan,
Merleau .. Ponty, and Corporeal Styles
David Brubaker
This chapter is dedicated to Dorothy Hosford Brubaker, a pioneer in the field of medical social
work, whose spirit of firm optimism and enjoyment; experiences from the settlement house move-
ment; and caring practices of friendship, listening, leadership, presence, and social commitment
have inspired and guided the words here.
230 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
allows that the current absence of a justification for proper care does not
necessarily entail that there is no desire or interest arising within the
concrete carer/cared-for dyad that might furnish guidance.
So advocates of the moral orientation of care must search for a per-
sonal principle that will specify some repeatable context associated with
the concrete individuality of each moral agent. If this morally relevant
context is not to be abstracted to a realm of pure intellect, then it must
remain concrete and available as a ground for some need, inclination, or
desire. If it is to be a context that is different and less abstract than the
many physical contexts perceived and selectively determined by rational
understanding and cognition, then we must not think of it in the form of
a material object of empirical knowledge. Some cultural traditions already
support such ari idea; there are existing texts that link care and compas-
~ion to noticing a dimension of the senses that is not experienced in the
form of any particular appearance, as Peter Hershock indicates.lZ But as
Sher points out (0, 623), what we still require is a philosophical story
capable of describi~g how a principle of morality can be reconciled with
the idea of care for 1,lnique persons.
For Merleau-Ponty, each Gestalt requires that the body lend a pivotal
context by which one witnesses the Gestalt for oneself. This sensible
pivot of flesh is a center or core of concrete self-embodiment, a latent
terminus ad quem for forms of perception; it is the context that makes it
possible to witness the instantiation of innumerable particular features
(duck or rabbit) within the actuality of one's own life. Merleau-Ponty
suggests that if psychologists try to locate the context for a Gestalt figure
merely within some framework of cognition, then they will'miss a sig-
nificant point about cases of ambiguous figure perception. It is the task of
philosophy to describe how a Gestalt comes into being for the person
who witnesses it. There is work to be done: he asserts that Gestalt quali-
ties emerge within a sensible ground that is "a lake of non being" or "an
open register" ready for inscription, and "not a pure agile nothingness"
(V, 206).
Merleau-Ponty develops his language for the corporeal pivot co-
present in a Gestalt in "The Intertwining-the Chiasm," the fourth
chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, where he describes the central
pivot of flesh in terms of such separate portions as visibility and touch.
The red that I see before my own eyes is not merely a quality or an
appearance that one knows, or a being for perception; it is the result of
my gaze focusing and briefly fixing a form to a thickness or "a certain
wooly, metallic, or porous [?] configuration or texture" (V, 132). My
sense-perception of red is a concretion within a woolly visibility, a dimen-
sion of the body that is between what we perceive as an external object
and what is regarded as internal thinking. A visible color is "less a color
or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors, a mo-
mentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility." The visibility of
a particular color is the tissue that lines, sustains, and nourishes the com-
ing-to-be of particular objects in perceptual experience; and this lining
"for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things
(V, 132-33). The gaze of the perceiving subject must wander within the
more general openness of visibility, a dimension of the subject's own
flesh, before it contributes to the emergence of a precise form or color as
242 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
self. The hand cla~ped together with mine probably possesses a precogni-
tive interior of flesh (that is, tactility) that is similar to my own instance.
Merleau-Ponty does think this way about wholes of visibility, for he refers
explicitly to a "universal visibility" that would presumably consist of the
community of all. individuals who possess their own fragments of flesh (V,
145). He suggests that innate contexts of flesh-the dimension of stable
and sensible pivots for the emergence of transient experiences-may be
sublimated into an idea sufficient for the formulation of a general princi-
ple (V, 145). Yet this idea of flesh corresponds neither to any material
object of empirical knowledge nor to any appearance sublimated as an
object of some concept, for this idea cannot be abstracted from the secret
contexts of sensibility proper to its own mode of existence (V, 149).16 If
the fragment of one's own flesh generates an idea of embodiment that
can be generalized to others, then an imperative to care for all such in-
stances of concrete uniqueness may be generalized as well. If I am to
remain consistent,. I must infer that the hand or eye of another person is
associated with internal exemplars of flesh that deserve equal consider-
ation. More work !s"needed to assess the role of the imagination in prac-
tices of care that depend on generalizing the idea of innate samples of
interior flesh to members of the class of persons; the idea of an interior
look at one's own secret context of visibility may be relevant to the proc-
ess of "vicarious visualization" that Sandra Bartky discusses in connec-
tion with sympathy, Max Scheler, and the term "feeling-with."17
Merleau-Ponty's general principle of the interior flesh of the body is of
practical v,alue, sin'ce it gives health-care profeSSionals some guidance in
how to treat others in a morally appropriate way. The carer's empathy for
the person cared for does not arise merely from an understanding of the
overall physical condition of the cared-for; it stems also from an aware-
ness that such a physical condition is accompanied by the possession of
an irreplacable, interior corporeality, which Merleau-Ponty denotes with
the term flesh. Thus, ethical medical care requires more than acting from
an understanding of the physical condition of a patient; it also requires
an affirmation of the wholes of flesh (for example, the pivots of visibility
and touch), which are the patient's own evidence for the intrinsic worth
and actuality of the self within nature. Programs of treatment may be
more effective, after staff members consider that the individual patient's
incentives for self-care may depend on noticing the sensuous contexts of
visibility and tactifity. For example, a factual and intellectually conceived
discussion of a physical condition or outcome may not give the individual
Care for the Flesh 245
by critics are persuasive. Elizabeth Grosz, for example, raises at least four
objections to Merleau-Ponty's account that may still be questioned. First,
she holds that his language of flesh is a neutral discourse that cannot
explain how different kinds of perceptions and sexual desires result from
the particularity or concreteness of the subject. As Grosz notes, Merleau-
Ponty never explicitly asks if his account stems from the experiences of
one type of subject, or if the relations between owning and being a body,
or between one subject and another, are different for women and men
(VB, 110). Yet it seems that Merleau-Ponty's idea of the reversibility of
the flesh implies that each moral agent has two modes of thinking with
which to interpret the relation between self and embodiment; so feminist
theorists may perhaps be able to use these two ways to explain how inter-
ests, feelings, and desires differ for women and men.
Grosz argues that Merleau-Ponty's account also fails in a second way:
the corporeal principle of flesh is inadequate, because it cannot describe
the preontological, ungraspable, unrecognizable, and indeterminate cor-
poreal zones associated with sexual difference (VB, 11 0-11 ). According
to Grosz, the "pre-epistemological" terrain of sexual difference preexists
what we know, since it is a ground that explains how the making of
sexual identities and external relations are possible (VB, 208-9). The
insistence here on a ground that is prior to what we know is needed
and beneficial; however, on Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy of flesh, the
bodily contexts of visibility and touch are zones beneath the level of
cognitive experience associated with a Gestalt. So they are ungraspable
and indeterminate from the standpoint of knowledge and traditional phi-
losophy (V, 139). Each pivotal context of flesh is a self-evident texture
or terrain of nonbeing, a "thickness of the flesh" between perceptual
thinking and the things themselves (V, 135). Since each sensible pivot is
a wholeness or unity, indivisible by perception, Merleau-Ponty's language
may perhaps cohere with two descriptions that Grosz uses in connection
with sexual difference: it seems that visibility, as sensible ground and
pivot, does bind "each thing to every other" within carnal life as a person
actually lives it. It is also a medium that does bind each perceptible thing
"to the whole of existence"; for when perceptible objects and appear-
ances arise visibly, for oneself, within one's own element of interior flesh,
this gives rise to the idea that the context of visibility is the inside lining
of another dimension beyond (VB, 209). Therefore, both visibility and
touch, as wholes that perception cannot divide, may qualify as candidates
for the zones of indeterminacy mentioned by Grosz. Each innate portion
252 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
ings on flesh can still be lifted, since he often distinguishes between vi-
sion as perceptual thinking and visibility as flesh. The two mingle but
never blend (V, 131). It follows that any painter who actually perceives
an instance of the color red in the distance is inevitably implicated in
the color seen; for the particulars of visual perception are always exempli-
fied within the corporeal context of visibility that is, no less than touch,
a self-evident sample of the painter's own body (E, 127-28). This result
is beneficial; for it enables us to value ornamentation and practices of
painting as instruments that reacquaint persons with their own corporeal
roots in natura1.life.
Luce Irigaray gives a different reason for doubting that visibility works
as well as touch as an exemplar of self-embodiment. To take up lrigaray's
own terms, the earliest relations between mother and child remain in
darkness; hence, Irigaray concludes there is no seeing and thus "neither
visible nor visibility in that place."25 By contrast, tactility is present in
darkness and precedes the light and colors of subsequent life. But if Iri-
garay's argument is to persuade, then it needs reinforcement; for darkness
or a nocturnal state does not necessarily entail an absence of visibility.
Even darkness would seem to depend on the presence of the context of
visibility that belongs to the flesh of one's own body. Indeed, this is
suggested implicitly by Merleau-Ponty himself: "With each flutter of my
eyelashes a curtain lowers and rises, though I do not think for an instant
of imputing this eclipse to the things themselves" (V, 7). In short, if there
is darkness, then there is a sensible-sentient in possession of a pivotal
context of visibility. Therefore, the context of the visible might still ex-
emplify embodiment in a manner that is similar to that of touch. If this
is correct, then Merleau-Ponty's account of visibility does not simply
make use of metaphors that merely hint at the feminine, which remains
unspoken. We may even begin to ask whether visibility is another source
of the feminine jouissance that is associated with touch. To put this in
Eleanor Godway's terms, the question is whether sight depends on an
element that can become the source for "an awareness of a region of
sensuality involving a primordial orientation. "26
In conclusion, the three hypotheses associated with Gilligan's ethic of
care find support in Merleau-Ponty's late writings on the flesh of the
body. This result helps to dispel suspicions that Merleau-Ponty's idea of
flesh is the product of a phenomenological method that distorts. I suggest
that he notices distortions in his earlier work and begins to describe the
lived body anew, with a notion of flesh as a radical element-perhaps the
254 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
inner body of a living soul-that mingles but never merges with intellect.
Merleau-Ponty's late writings are beneficial, since they add to the credi-
bility of Gilligan's claim that there is a moral principle of care already in
use that is not mentioned in European traditions of moral philosophy.
Finally, it follows that Gilligan is correct: our willingness to notice the
differences in the lives and voices of women could indeed lead to a wider
acceptance of the idea of a self in connection with others, to a reduction
of alienation and violence, and to a more generative way of living to-
gether.
Notes
1. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Pr.ess, 1993), 1-2. This work is hereafter cited as D.
2. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James Ellington (Indianapo-
lis: Hackett, 1993),59-61. Hereafter cited as MM.
3. See George Sher, "o.th'er Voices, Qther Rooms? Women's Psychology and Moral Theory,"
in Moral Theory (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace, 1996), hereafter cited as 0.; and Alison Jagger,
"Caring as a Feminist Practice of Moral Reason," in Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist
Ethics, ed. Virginia Held (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), hereafter cited as C.
4. Gail Weiss, Body Images (London: Routledge, 1999), hereafter cited as BI.
5. Marilyn Friedman, "Beyond Caring: The De-moralization of Gender," in Justice and Care,
70, hereafter cited as B.
6. Carol Gilligan, "Moral Qrientation and Moral Development," in Justice and Care, 31-33,
hereafter cited as M.
7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 204-7, hereafter cited as V.
8. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), hereafter
cited as VB.
9. Maurice Hamington, Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Feminist Eth-
ics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 14-15, hereafter cited as EC.
10. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodemism in Contemporary
Ethics (London: Routledge, 1992), 158-59, hereafter cited as S.
11. This is to say that a philosophical defense of the moral orientation of care must specify some
sensible sample of concrete uniqueness that is of intrinsic worth, without naming some natural object
and committing what G. E. Moore describes as the "naturalistic fallacy"; see G. E. Moore, Ethica
Principia (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988),38-41. Maurice Hamington makes the suggestive
comment that Moore's "naturalistic fallacy is an example of an artificial philosophical boundary on
morality that care breaches" (EC, 32). However, the problem with Moore's account is not his claim
that a natural property or object of experience can never serve as a sensible ground for a general
principle of morality; instead, the problem is Moore's adherence to the restrictive modem doctrine
that defines nature and naturali~m in terms of the subject matter of the natural sciences and psychol-
ogy. Hamington is right that it is benefic1al to cross disciplinary boundaries, so that pragmatist
descriptions of care in terms of particular physical habits can be combined with Merleau-Ponty's
Care for the Flesh 255
account of the body as one lives it for oneself. Yet if we are to formulate a moral principle of
embodied care for better guidance, then we must go beyond the limits of Moore's definition of
natuTe, and also beyond the factual understanding of physical bodies that still seems to be the basis
of Hamington's excellent description of caring habits. Advocates of an ethic of care must describe
some concrete ground of intrinsic value evident within one's own unique body that provides a
personal motive for the launching of habits. Hamington's account of embodied care emphasizes
physical habits-active listening, friendly and reciprocal participation, leadership and social activism
in connection with community-that characterize the social ethic of Jane Addams and participants
in the settlement movement (EC, 97-121).
12. Peter Hershock, Chan Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005), 100, 106,
150. See Hershock's account of Huineng.
13. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of PUTe Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1929),60,65, 144.
14. Mauro Carbone, The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2004), 46-47. Carbone's interpretation seems to conflict with that
of Hamington, who often states that Merleau-Ponty gives a central role to bodily perception (EC,
48). But the difference here results from changes of emphasis in Merleau-Ponty's account. Carbone
emphasizes the late writings contained in the manuscript and working notes for The Visible and the
Invisible, whereas Hamington often cites earlier writings from The Phenomenology of Perception.
15. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," trans. Michael Smith, in The Merleau-Ponty Aes-
thetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1993), 125-26, hereafter cited as E.
16. To differentiate the idea of flesh from a mere sensible intuition of an object (that is, from a
form of mind that is "the contrary of the sensible"), Merleau-Ponty refers us to Proust's description
of the "little phrase," or musical idea, and to his notion of sound, light, and relief, as rich possessions
that adorn our own inward domains: the musical idea, the dialectic of love, the articulation of light,
and the modes of sound and touch all owe their authority or power to their attachment to the heart
of the sensible, that is, to the interior contexts of negativity or nonbeing, which retreat from personal
awareness in proportion to our attempts to "get at" or circumscribe them with the marks of musical
notation, or with particular colors (V, 150-52).
17. See Sandra Bartky, "Sympathy and Solidarity" and Other Essays (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2002), 77, 84-86. Empirical knowledge would contribute to the inference that another
physical body possesses an internal exemplar of flesh that deserves equal care; but this would not
weaken the idea that contexts of interior flesh are ends of intrinsic worth that cannot be expressed
in the cognitive terms of rational knowledge.
18. Sally Bailey, "Comprehensive Spiritual Care," in Principles and Practices of Supportive Oncol-
ogy (Philadelphia: Lippincott-Raven, 1998),724. I wish to thank Mary P. Carney for helpful conver-
sations about nursing and hospice care, and for sharing her unpublished paper, "Being Present in the
Midst of Confusion," which describes the living person's own dimension, the choosing of a posture
of presence in order to be with those who are here now, and the importance of keeping wonderment
alive.
19. See, for example, Thomas V. Merluzzi and Mary Ann Martinez Sanchez, "Assessment of
Self-Efficacy and Coping with Cancer: Development and Validation of the Cancer Behavior Inven-
tory," Health Psychology 16, no. 2 (1997): 163-70. The philosophy of flesh gives new meaning to the
claim that adequate medical practice requires concern for the treatment of a disease as it is lived from
within by the individual patient; see Abby Wilkerson, Diagnosis: Difference: The Moral Authority of
Medicine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 108.
20. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Rout-
ledge, 1962),99-100.
21. For more discussion concerning this circular course or the reversibility of the flesh, see my
"Merleau-Ponty's Three lntertwinings," Journal of Value Inquiry 34 (2000): 89-101.
256 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
22. Judith Bulter, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
1990), 256. •
23. For a related discussion of gender difference, the late writings of Merleau-Ponty, and the
value of favoring the capacity to witness space intimately as a ground provided by the flesh of one's
own body, see Susan Best, "Driving Like a Boy: Sexual Difference, Embodiment, and Space," in
Imagining Australian Space: Cultural Studies and Spatial Inquiry, ed. Ruth Barcan and Ian Buchanan
(University of Western Australia Press, 1999), 100: "[W)e could argue that rather than 'failing' to
distinguish figure from ground, women have a heightened capacity for seeing interconnections and
continuities, for intertwining text and context, and for the appreciation of embeddedness." As Best
suggests, an openness to intimate connection with the "ground" of one's own corporeality implies
the awareness of some context that is not merely seen in the form of another perceptible figure.
Perhaps a heightened capacity to appreciate one's own embeddedness within nature and the land
results from noticing the pivot of visibility as a first dimension of depth that precedes the emergence
of physical spaces and objects through perception.
24. Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks
and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 247.
25. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (ith-
aca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 154.
26. See Eleanor M. Godway, "Phenomenology and the Frontiers of Experience: Merleau-Ponty
and Irigaray," Historical Reflections/Reflections Hysterics 19, no. 1 (1993): 28. After suspending the
cognition of visual propertie;s, one may find secretly for oneself what is usually overlooked in silence:
a Visibility that is before seeing and any distinction between subject and object. "Primary speech"
must be created for this shimmering texture and atmosphere of the self that puts personal experiences
into question. •
12
Language in the Flesh:
The Politics of Discourse in
Merleau .. Ponty, Levinas, and Irigaray
Ann V. Murphy
An earlier draft of this chapter was presented at the twenty-fifth annual meeting of the Interna-
tional Merleau-Ponty Circle at George Washington University, Washington D.C., September
2000. I thank the audience there for their insight and criticism. Thanks to Len Lawlor, Robert
Bernasconi, and Tina Chanter for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks also to Gail Weiss
and Dorothea Olkowski for their careful reading and commentary.
258 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
to the loss of a limb, the horizon of one's affective world having been
forever altered. Our bodies remain haunted by the rhythms that mark our
lives with others. To be with another, in the world and in language, is to
acknowledge another's presence within oneself; one's haunting by an-
other. 3 In the Phenomenology of Perception, we find that this affective tie
extends well beyond the purview of our most intimate relations, and
binds us to a history that predates our own existence, but continues to
prereflectively inform our experience. It is precisely this sense of historic-
ity that worries Levinas and Luce Irigaray, as it seems to provide no space
for the transcendence of the Other, but rather inaugurates a hermeneutic
that renders alterity invisible by assimilating difference within the grasp
of an allegedly common or universal history.4
The concern w.ith Merleau-Ponty's success or failure in the elaboration
of alterity and its relation to contemporary feminism is at the heart of
Irigaray's critique. In her Ethics of Sexual Difference (hereafter ESD), Iri-
garay assents to Merleau~Ponty's effort to return to prediscursive experi-
ence, to locate ben~ath the language of culture a preformal moment on
the basis of which o~ might construct a different language. 5 Allegedly,
she finds this dimension of the phenomenological project amenable to
her own. But for Irigaray, this new language must be one that enables the
expression of the ,maternal-feminine that has thus far been barred entry,
even as it serves precisely as the originary or preformal ground for the
linguistic order of phallocentric culture. Merleau-Ponty's depiction of the
mute world where "all the possibilities of language are already given"
(The Visible and the Invisible [hereafter VI]; 155/200)6 provokes Irigaray's
accusation that the prediscursive meaning that Merleau-Ponty hopes to
excavate is not "wild" at all, but implicated, rather, in patterns of patriar-
chal exclusion with which we are all too familiar, particularly the impos-
sibility of articulating a feminine imaginary in the face of a masculinist
culture that requires the erasure and cooption of that very imaginary for
its own survival. On her account, philosophy's search for this wild mean-
ing must be accomplished on more radical terrain than that afforded by
Merleau-Ponty's ontology-a different terrain where the very founda-
tions of language have changed. How, Irigaray laments, are we to con-
struct a new philosophy or a new ethics from an historical (albeit
prereflective) world where all linguistic potential is already presumed and
given?
In lrigaray's engagement wjth Merleau-Ponty in An Ethics of Sexual
Diff?rence, her elaboration of the difference between the sexes clearly
Language in the Flesh 261
style that is raced, sexed, aged, and marked by the specific manner in
which one's body gr~ets the world. The production of meaning is a func-
tion of a finite cultural moment and of a highly stylized body that greets
this moment. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty's description of the problem of
sociality as a problem of transcendence (PP, 363/417) seems to under-
mine the accusation, put forth by both lrigaray and Levinas, that, for
Merleau-Ponty, intersubjective life is immanent. This critique seems
somewhat dubious, especially given Merleau-Ponty's insistence that the
experience of discourse is disruptive, involving a mutual transfiguration
of the way our bodies interact with the world (PP, 184/214). When
Merleau-Ponty speaks of the "fecundity of expression" he gestures to the
surplus, and difference, of expression in discourse as opposed to the ho-
mogenizing force of representation: "Speech . . . is that moment when
the significative int~ntion proves itself capable of incorporating itself int~
my culture and the culture of others-of shaping me and others by trans-
forming the meaning of cultural instruments. It becomes 'available' in
tum because in retrospect it gives the illusion that it was contained in
the already available Significations, whereas by a sort of ruse it espoused
them only in order to "'infuse them with new life" (Signs [hereafter S],
92).8
In the Phenomenology of Perception, one's understanding of the other is
made possible by the other's intermingling within a certain linguistic
horizon, a horizon bound to a carnal schema, or body image. Comprehen-
sion may indeed result from the reciprocal overlap and concurrence of
the other's gestures and the intentional powers of one's own body. Yet
this overlap inJanguage is disruptive (PP, 184/215-16).9 In dialogue with
another, my own existence changes, is disturbed by difference; the body
of another presents me with a question, and calls for a transformation
of my being (PP, 183-84/214). Communication is not an intellectual
interpretation, but a reciprocal disturbance (PP, 185/215). Hence for
Merleau-Ponty, discourse with another consists in nothing less than a
synchronized change in existence (PP, 184/214). Given these descrip-
tions of the discursive experience, it seems clear that our being with oth-
ers in language is not a peaceful coexistence in all ways. For if language
were simply a symptom of an anonymous and collective sensibility, its
characterization as disruptive and disturbing would be strange indeed.
Moreover, this reciprocal disturbance of one by another in discourse is
not a representational4isruption. As a "modulation" of the body, speech
is not an intellectualist endeavor, but an expressive one (PP, 185/216).
Language in the Flesh 263
like our engagemen~ with the past: mutable, subject to change, and differ-
ent with each new moment. Merleau-Ponty, like Levinas, insists upon
the deficient and incomplete nature of representation in language. For
them both, one's manifestation in language is a symbolic paralysis whose
finitude necessarily gestures to an excess that lies well beyond the discur-
sive moment itself.·
At the heart of Levinas's critique is the distinction between the ethical
and the political. While Levinas's invocation of the ethical is never far
removed from his consideration of justice, the division between the two
remains salient. Presumably, then, the worry behind Levinas's critique of
Merleau-Ponty relates to Levinas's hesitation regarding how an ontology
so mired in the soil of history might ever be reconciled with the transcen-
dence of ethics. In short, the accusation seems to be that there could
never be a palatable ethics derived from Merleau-Ponty's notion of funda-
mental historicity, for that notion itself is too fraught with immanence
to provide for the difference of others, a difference that must be honored
a
if we are to establish politics that is ethical.
But here we might ask Levinas how we might ever conceive of bodies
that are beyond history. And if our concern is to articulate an ethics that
has political promise, ought this not be an ethics that can account for
how history is marked in politically important ways on all bodies, some-
times in ways that we fail to recognize? If sex, race, ablism, and ethnicity,
among other things, influence the way one's body interacts with the
world, should we not take very seriously Merleau-Ponty's reluctance to
depart from history's soil? In a world where horror, trouble, and political
abjection are ..the frequent consequence of a body's failure to abide by
history's limitations and the logic of the past, it seems as though Merleau-
Ponty's attempts to address the body's historicity should be applauded.
Must an ethics be rendered ineffeGtual should it refuse to depart from the
soil of the sensible? And what sort of ethics do we inherit from Merleau-
Ponty's ontology?
Whereas Levinas locates the disruption of intersubjectivity in the in-
terminable accusation of the self that is accomplished in dialogue with
the other, Luce lrigaray finds this "never-finished differentiation" to be
symptomatic of the irreducibility of sexual difference. The affinity be-
tween Levinas and lrigaray stands, then, regarding the irreducible alterity
of the Other, but for Irigaray this irreducible difference is explicitly sexu-
alized. The ceaseless disruption ,of the self that is accomplished in lan-
Language in the Flesh 267
guage may well be the recollection of the differences that have been
rendered inarticulate and unrepresentable; for Irigaray, however, this dif,
ference is always and only sexual difference, whose specter continues to
haunt language even as it fails to be achieved within it (ESD, 167/157}.15
If the best we can hope for is a return to the "soil of the sensible," or
"primordial historicity," which is already scarred by the exclusion of the
feminine, then what hope has Merleau,Ponty left for the articulation of
this constitutive outside? At the heart of Irigaray's criticism is the claim
that such an ontology cannot accommodate "an other whose body's on,
tological status is different than my own," an other who is irreducible to
the self (ESD, 157/148). The rendering of the relationship between the
subject and language as circular prompts Irigaray's accusation that
Merleau,Ponty's discourse is "monosexual," to the extent that it fails to
leave a place for the articulation of a differently sexed subjectivity (ESD,
177/165).
For Irigaray, Merleau,Ponty's universalism is the result of a conception
of language in which reversibility and reciprocity are not disrupted or
problematized. Language can speak of nothing new so long as it traffics in
this "universal word which amounts to the most solipsistic construction,"
words that allow for none other than the "perpetual repetition" of the
same, the totalization of history, the incarceration of novelty in language
and history alike (ESD, 178/166). A language of difference that can ges,
ture toward the truly other is not conceivable within the bounds of
Merleau,Ponty's discourse, as Irigaray understands it. She laments the
exclusion of the maternal,feminine, calling for the generation of another
discourse, "one that is put together differently" (ESD, 177/165). Thus
Irigaray calls for a change in the very foundations of language and for the
birth of a language that can interrogate the alleged "truth" of reciprocity
and reversibility, a "truth" that confounds the vicissitudes of history and
language and that silences-indeed erases-its aberrations, deviations,
and events.
Presumably, a primary deficiency in Merleau,Ponty's account of lan,
guage is its rendering of speech as an encounter with oneself, an encoun,
ter that fails to exceed the duplication and reduplication of one's own
experience. Discourse appears less devoted to change and the surpassing
of history than it is to the survival of the past, more concerned with
sedimentation and permanence than with invention, novelty, or promise.
It cannot, according to Irigaray, celebrate creation, invention, and nov,
268 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
elty. In this respect,. her account resonates with the Levinasian critique
from Totality and Infinity. This seems to be as much a critique of phenom-
enology generally as it is of Merleau-Ponty himself. Indeed, one may be
justified in reading Levinas's and Irigaray's ambivalence toward Merleau-
Ponty as symptomatic of their ambivalence toward phenomenology more
generally. If phenomenology remains haunted, however tentatively, by a
residual subjectivism, then the political or ethical worry of how this
model of the self might ever be truly disrupted by the alterity of the
Other seems legitimate. How could it ever help but iterate the violent
foreclosure of difference? At stake, it seems, is nothing less than the role
that experience should play in our theorization of politics, and, indeed,
the degree to which this experience might be bound to, or depart from,
the symbolic structures of the past.
The Irigarayan critique, however, elides the disruptive force that char-
acterizes the reciprocity of discourse for Merleau-Ponty, as she accuses
one of subjectivism's greatest critics of subjectivism. Merleau-Ponty was
not one to fall readily to one side of the notorious binary between self
and world, interiority apd exterioritYi indeed, few were more adept at its
undoing than he. To acknowledge the disruptive component of Merleau-
Ponty's descriptions of linguistic experience would surely not redress his
problematic dismissal of sexual difference, but it would seem to problema-
tize Irigaray's claiu{ that the reciprocity of dialogue in Merleau-Ponty is
not an accusatory or disruptive reciprocity, but rather a reciprocity of the
self. Indeed, when Merleau-Ponty speaks, in the Visible and the Invisible,
of a negation, or nonpresence, that makes possible the "being in tran-
scendence" of-the Other, he renders the relation between self and other
as one of alterity and dispersion (VI, 228/277). Sexual difference is itself
located in this transcendence: "[i]t is this negative that makes possible
the vertical world, the union of incompossibles, the being in transcen-
dence ... and the male-female relation" (VI, 228/277). Merleau-Ponty's
identification of sexual difference as a transcendental difference would
seem, counter to Irigaray's protests, to bring the two in striking proximity
to each other. This strange kinship is magnified with Merleau-Ponty's
note in The Visible and the Invisible: "Do a psychoanalysis of nature: it is
the flesh, the mother" (VI; 267/315). This fragment that would seem to
confirm that the nature or flesh that was being suppressed in discourse
was indeed sexed, as Irigaray would have it.
In "Eye and Mind," Merleau-Ponty states that "it is no more possible
to make a restrictive inventory 'of the visible than it is to catalog the
Language in the Flesh 269
Notes
5. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill {Ith-
aca: Cornell University Pre;s, 1984);·Ethique de la cJjfference sexuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1984). In paren-
thetical references, English pagination precedes the French.
6. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973); Le visible et l'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
7. For Merleau-Ponty, the contingency in speech descends to the heart of the intersubjective
world. "Feelings," he writes, "are invented like words" (PP, 189). Hence Merleau-Ponty's claim that
the divergent expressions of emotion that may be witnessed in different cultures (e.g., smiling in
anger), are not simply behavioral differences, but differences in the way the body interacts with the
world. Merleau-Ponty's commitment to the contingent and culturally specific nature of speech and
expression is tempered somewhat by his insistence that there is no behavioral or linguistic event
that escapes indebtedness to "purely biological being"-although Merleau-Ponty insists also that
there is no nature that is not modified by culture. Humanity is defined as this "genius for ambiguity,"
the ceaseless interplay of nature and culture. While it remains unclear which side of this ambiguity
Merleau-Ponty privileges, he does state that cultural life "borrows its structure" from nature and that
thought has the corporeal as its basis (PP, 193). This is not to question, however, the existence of
problematic universalizing tendencies that inform his analysis. Judith Butler, for example, has noted
that while Merleau-Ponty might be credited with the notion that sexuality is a mode of existence,
his analysis of the body and. its sexual being betrays a heterosexist male bias. See Judith Butler,
"Phenomenology and Sexual Description," in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modem French Phi-
losophy, ed. Jeffner Allen and,Iris Marion Young (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1964),85; Signes V'aris: Gallimard, 1960).
9. This chapter is specifically concerned with the expressive function of language, as opposed
to its more instrumental usage. As a means of expression, speech may cease to be instrumental; it
rather becomes a medium for the "revelation" of the "psychic link" that unites us with others (PP,
196/229).
10. Emmanuel Levin~s, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne Uni-
versity Press, 1969); Totalite et infini (Paris: Martinus Nyhoff, 1960). English pagination precedes the
French.
11. Emmanuel Levinas, "Meaning and Sense," in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T.
Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
12. For a detailed discussion of this tension between Merleau-Ponty's thought and the thought
of Levinas in this regard, see Robert Bernasconi, "One-Way Traffic: The Ontology of Decolonization
and Its Ethics," in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B.
Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990),67-80.
13. Thus Levinas espouses a return to PI~tonism in a sense, even as he distances himself from
the politicS with which he understands Platonism to be implicated. The celebration of the particu-
larity of expression over the universalism of idealism is tempered by Levinas's reintroduction of an
ethical sense that universally orients language (BPW; 46-47). It is crucial to note, however, that
Levinas's return to Platonism is far from benign. Levinas privileges the Greek language and the
cultures of the West at the expense of an appreciation of other cultures, so there is a more ominous
dimension of Levinas's rejection of Merleau-Ponty's cultural pluralism.
14. Speech does remain a privileged medium for Levinas. Space, the medium of vision, provides
the condition for the "lateral signification of things within the same," the subsumption of difference
to universality (TI, 191/209). Thus the dimension of height that accomplishes the revelation bf the
Other is not preserved in vision; it is speech alone that accommodates the transcendence of the
Other. As expression, language maintains the Other insofar as it calls upon and invokes the Other's
presence. If language is a gesture, a beckolling, then it must presuppose an Other to whom it is
addressed. "Language," writes Levinas, "presupposes interlocutors, a plurality" (TI, 73/ 70). Lan-
Language in the Flesh 271
guage thus institutes a relation that defies objectivity and signification: the Other's revelation. The
revelation of the Other in linguistic expression is a properly ethical phenomenon for Levinas. "All
recourse to words takes place already within the primordial face to face of language" (TI, 206{227).
15. lrigaray's contention that men and women are irreducibly different from each other is not
unproblematic, as this claim is readily implicated in lrigaray's privileging of sexual difference over
other differences.
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Contributors
rent project studies the transatlantic, English-language novel as it has unfolded within
discourses of race and liberty since the seventeenth century.
VICKI KIRBY is a senior lecturer in the School of Sociology and Anthropology at the
University of New South Wales. She is the author of Telling Flesh: The Substance of the
Corporeal (Routledge, 1997) and Judith Butler: Uve Theory (Continuum, forthcoming).
She has an enduring interest in the question of language and its relevance for contempo-
rary criticism. She is currently working on a manuscript, provisionally titled "Quantum
Anthropologies," which explores posthuman concerns. .
SONIA KRUKS is the Robert S. Danforth Professor of Politics at Oberlin College. She
teaches political theory, including feminist theory, and has served as director of the wom-
en's studies program. She is the author of numerous works on French existential phenom-
enology. Her most recent book is Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in
Feminist Politics (Cornell t}niversity Press, 2001), and she is currently working on a book
about Simone de Beauvoir's political thought.
GAIL WEISS is director of the human sciences graduate program and associate professor
of philosophy at The George Washington University. She is the author of Body Images:
Embodiment as Intercorporeality (Routledge, 1999) and coeditor of Thinking the Umits of
the Body (State University of New York Press, 2003) and Perspectives on Embodiment: The
Intersections of Nature and Culture (Routledge, 1999). She has published numerous articles
and book chapters on phenomenology, philosophy and literature, and feminist theory.
She has completed "Indeterminate Horizons: Figuring the Grounds of 'Ordinary' Experi-
ence," and is working on a monograph, "Beauvoir's Ambiguities: Philosophy, Literature,
and Feminism."
Index
Gilligan, Carol, 20-21; care ethic of, 229-32; Husserl, Edmund: intercorporeality and, 97-98;
distinctness hypothesit of, 231-38; gender- intersubjectiviry in work of, 219-22; on nor-
difference hypothesis of, 246-50 maliry, 217, 227n.22; operative intentional-
"god-trick," Haraway's discussion of, 30-33, iry of, 214-18; phenomenology of, 1-3,20,
40-41 36,219; violence of emplacement and,
Godway, Eleanor, 253, 256n.26 152-53
Green (film), 72, 85 hypokeimenon, Irigaray's discussion of perception
Grimshaw, Jean, 19, 210~11 and, 121
Grosz, Elizabeth, 157-59, 162-64, 225, 249,
251-53 "I cans" of human embodiment (Husserl),
"group life," Merleau-Ponry's discussion of, 36-37
57-58 identity: lrigaray's discussion of, 141-45;
group-solipsism, multiple-difference feminism Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 13 7-45; re-
and,27 duction of, in prison, 192-93; role of touch
Guattari, Felix, 69n.7 in, 93; violence of emplacement and,
Guillaumin, Colette, 75 152-54
habituation, Merleau-Panty's discussion of, image-producing cultures, ethics of perception
69n.5 in, 171-81
Hamington, Maurice, 233, 254n.l, 255n.14 In a Different Voice, 229, 238; gender-difference
handiwork, as resistance, 190-93 hypothesis in, 246-50
handshake, Merleau-Ponty's embodied subject "in-between," space of, material destruction
and,96-105 and, 157-59
Haraway, Donna, 28-29, 31,.H "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,"
Hegel, G. F. w., Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 176
39-40 individual: care ethics and role of, 233-38; piv-
Heidegger, Martin: "Building Dwelling Think- otal context of flesh and, 242-46
ing" essay, 157-59; :'dinge" concept of, intentional arc, body subjectivity of, 213-18
191-92; Merleau-Ponry and, 113-14, 122; intentionality: Levinas on, 263-69; lived expe-
on nature and place, 151; phenomenology rience and, 51, 69n.18
of, 1-2; "thrownrtess" concept of, 196 intercorporeality: context of flesh in, 244-46;
Heiniimaa, Sara, 228n.50 horizontal space and, 195-99; Merleau-
hermeneutic circle, Heidegger's discussion of, Ponry's embodied subject and, 97-99; pris-
113-14 oner resistance and, 194-95
Hershock, Peter, 238 "interoceptive image," Merleau-Ponty's concept
heterosexualiry: ethics of, 142-45; invisibility of, 56, 69n.ll
of,80 interrogative, Heidegger's discussion of, 114
historicity: constitution of the body and, intersubjectivity: antagonistic aspects of, 39-42;
218-22; ethics of violence and, 155-56; distinctness hypothesis and care ethics,
Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 67-68, 237-38; embodied subject and, 8-13, 16-17,
70n.26, 211-12; phenomenologyand, 27-28; equality and, 38-39; ethics and, 17-
21-22; politics of discourse and, 259-69 18, 177-81; historical constitution of the
Holenstein, Elmar, 218 body, 219-22; Merleau-Ponry's philosophy
Homeworld, 110 of flesh and, 91-105; perception and, 34-35;
"House and Home," 161 of visual perception, 170-71
Humanism and Terror, 39-42, 1H-56; fragility "Intertwining-The Chasm, The," 108, 112-
of dwelling in, 162-64 13,132-45, 198-99; pivotal context for
humanity: Merleau-Ponty's "genius for ambigu- flesh in, 241-46
iry" of, 270n.7; perception of, 79-88; reci- intra/intercorporeal resistance: horizontal space
prociry in language and, 165-69 and, 195-99; of prisoners, 194-95
hunger strikes as resistance, I, 185 Iraq war, violence of emplacement and, 166n.7
Index 287
lrigaray, Luce: ethics of sexual difference, 107- maternal: Irigaray's discussion of, 119-25, 129-
25, 128-45; Merleau-Ponty and, 5, 13-16, 32,253-54; Merleau-Ponty's view of, 15-16,
21, 45n.3, 59, 69n.l5; on perception, 77, 132-45
139-45, 253; politics of discourse and, meaning, Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 138-45
257-69; "primary maternal-feminine" of, "Meaning and Sense," 264
104-5, 106n.15; on violence of binaries, medical care, ethics of, 244-46, 255nn.18-19
147-51; on visual perception, 168-19 Mendieta, Eduardo, 166nA
"Irigaray Through the Looking Glass," 128 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: ethics of violence and,
irreversibility, violence of binaries and, 148-51 154-56; Heidegger and, 113-14; on paradox
of violence, 183-205; Same and, 2-3
Jagger, Alison, 230-38, 250, 252 metaphysics, Merleau-Ponty on, 73-88
"just" encounter, lrigaray's discussion of, 142-45 "Metaphysics and the Novel," 172; ethics of vio-
lence and, 168, 174-75; intersubjectivity
Kant, Immanuel, 166n.8, 230, 234 and, 177-81
Kirby, Vicki, 14-16, 127-45 Mill, John Stuart, 236
Kosakiewicz, Olga, 172 mind/body dualism: concealment strategies of
Kristeva, Julia, 170 prisoners and, 193-95; Merleau-Ponty and,
Kruks, Sonia, 3, 6-9, 23nA, 25-44 16-17,96-99; torture and violence and,
188-91; urban flesh and, 149-51
Lacan, Jacques, symbolic cultural world of, mirror phenomenon, body image and, 63-68,
69n.16 70n.21,99-105
language: Irigaray's discussion of, 110-25, 128- Moi, Toril, 179-80
29, 142-45; Levinas' discussion of, 263-69; Moore, G. E., 254n.11
Merleau-Ponty on, 143-45, 270n.7; politics morality: distinctness hypothesis concerning,
of discourse and, 258-69, 270n.9 233-38; ethic of care and, 229-31; feminist
"Laugh of the Medusa," 195 solidarity and, 42-43; freedom, 19-20;
learning, lived experience and, 51, 68n.4 gender-difference hypothesis and, 247-50
Le Temps Modemes, 2 Morrison, Toni, 19, 165n.1, 184, 188, 199-207
Levinas, Emmanual, 21-22, 258-69, multiple-difference feminism, characteristics of,
270nn.13-14 26-27,44n.l
lighting, perception and, 77-88 Mulvey, Laura, 170
linguistics: Levinas' discussion of, 264-69; re- Murphy, Ann, 21-22, 257-69
versibility of, 67-68, 70n.29
L'invicee, 17-18, 168, 171-72, 175-81 nationalism: Timerman's vision of, 199; vio-
lived experience: feminist emancipation and, lence of emplacement and, 152-54
209-26; Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology naturalistic fallacy, care ethics and, 254n.l1
of,49-68 natural time, Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 50
Living Across and Through Skins, 46n.21 natural world, lived-experience and, 51-68
logic, of lighting; Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, nature: culture and, 149-51, 165n.3; violence of
77-88 emplacement and, 151-54
Long Kesh prison, violence in, 183-88 Nature: Course Notes from teh College de France,
"Love of the Other," 136-45 163-64
Lugones, Marfa, 44n.l Naumann, Bruce, 71-75, 84-86, 87-88
Nazism: ethics of violence and, 155-56;
Machiavelli, Merleau-Ponty's view of, 40-41 Merleau-Ponty and, 39-42
Marxism, Merleau-Ponty on, 39-42 neutrality, constancy of color and, 79-88
masculinism: Irigaray's ethics of sexual differ- normality: constancy of color and, 79-88; inter-
ence and, 110-25; Merleau-Ponty on, 130- subjectivity and, 220-22; lived body concept
32, 143-45 and,217-18,222-23,227n.24
"master-slave dialectic," Merleau-Ponty's discus- nostalgia, Irigaray's discussion of, 130-32
sion of, 40 nuclear weapons, ethics of violence and, 156
288 Index
objectitication: ethics of visual perception and, bodied subject in, 29-43; ethics of violence
169-81; Merleau-Ponty's ~oncept of, 39-42, and, 168-81; politics of discourse and,
64-68 258-69; solipsism in, 41-42; violence of em-
objective knowledge: Haraway's discussion of, placement and, 151-54
28-29; historical constitution of the body "Philosophy of Man," 95
and,219-22 physical routines, as resistance to prison,
O'Brien, William, 149 190-91
Odyssey, 163-64 Pink (tilm), 72, 85
Oksala, Johanna, 19-20, 209-26 Platonism, Merleau-Ponty and, 264, 27On.13
Olkowski, Dorothea, 1-23,49-68 Playing in the Dark: Whitness and the Uterary
"On the Relationship fo Theory to Practice in Imagination, 165n.l
Political Right," 166n.8 pleasure and pain: intrinsic value in, 236; lived
ontology: Heidegger's discussion of, 113-14; experience of, 63-64, 70n.21
Merleau-Ponty's concept of, 138-45; politics politics of discourse, Merleau-Ponty on, 257-69
of discourse and, 260-69 poststructuralism, cultural construction of body
On Violence, 150-51, 166n.5 and,224
operative intentionality, Husserl's concept of, power: Butler's discussion of, 223-24; domi-
214-18 nated and gendered body as locus of,
"Origin of the Work of Art, Th~," 151 183-84; Irigaray's discussion of, 108-25
Ortner, Sherry, 150-51, 165n.3 prepersonal body, Merleau-Ponty's concept of,
Other: lrigaray's discussion of, ~09; Merleau- 35-39,242-46
Ponty's discussion cif, 14,59-68; politics of "Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical
discourse, 258-69; uniform reversibility and, Consequences, The," 177-81
94 I-
Prime of Life, The, 179-80
"Other Selves and the Human World," 169-81 primordial communication, Merleau-Ponty's
concept of, 34-35
passivity, as resistance, 189-91
"prisoner's reflex," Constante's description of,
perception: ambiguous tigure hypothesis and,
196-99
247-50; care ethics and role of, 238-46;
Prisoner Without a Name, CeU Without a Number,
color constancy and, 72-88; deprivation of,
184, 188-208
in prisons, 196-99; of flesh, 252-54; gener-
prison narratives: contiscation of things in,
ality in, 55-56; of inhabited horizon,
191-93; paradox of violence in, 183-208
195-99; Irigaray's discussion of, 117-25,
"project," feminist concept of, 31-32, 46n.l5
131-45; Merlea1!-Ponty's discussion of, 11,
Proust, Marcel, 255n.l6
30-35,57-68, 69n.12; objectivity of,
psyche, Merleau-Ponty's concept of, 56-68
219-22; of prepersonal body, 36-39, 46n.24
Psychic Life of Power, 223
phallocentrism, lrigaray's discussion of, 128
psychoanalytic theory~ Irigaray's use of, 119-25;
phantom, Merleau-Ponty's embodied subject
Merleau-Ponty's concept of sexuality and,
and, 100-101
phenomenology: feminist emancipation and, 214-18
209-26; historical constitution of the body,
218-22; intercorporeal activities and, 195; racism: context of flesh in, 252; feminism and,
Merleau-Ponty's concept of, 2-3, 133-45; 42,44, 47n.37; Merleau-Ponty's concept of
paradox of violence and, 184-208; politics color and, 73-88; seizure sexuality and,
of discourse and, 258-69; white logic and 200-206; social geography of, urban flesh
color constancy, 72-88; Young's discussion concept and, 165n.3; urban flesh concept
of,210-11 and, 149-51; violence of binaries and,
Phenomenology of Perception (Phenombwlogie de 148-51
la perception), 3, 27, 45n.3; anonymous sub- rape: seizure of sexuality through, 202-6; as vio-
jectivity of body and, 213-18; constancy of lent touch, 187-88
color in, 80-88; corps propre of, 95-99; em- Razak, Sherene, 79-80
Index 289