The Visible and the Invisible

 The Visible and the Invisible (1964 V&I) is a posthumous manuscript and working notes by Jean
Merleau-Ponty, which is considered the best presentation of his later ontology. The main text,
drafted in 1959 and 1960, develops an account of “philosophical interrogation” in critical
dialogue with scientism, philosophies of reflection (Descartes and Kant), Sartrean negation, and
the intuitionisms of Bergson and Husserl. Merleau-Ponty frames the investigation with a
description of “perceptual faith,” our shared pre-reflective conviction that perception presents
us with the world as it actually is, even though this perception is mediated by our bodily senses.
This paradox creates no difficulties in our everyday lives but becomes incomprehensible when
thematized by reflection.
 For Merleau-Ponty, this “unjustifiable certitude of a sensible world” is the starting point for
developing an alternative account of perception, the world, intersubjective relations, and
ultimately being as such. Neither natural sciences nor psychology provide an adequate
clarification of this perceptual faith, as they rely on it without acknowledgment even as their
theoretical constructions rule out its possibility.
 Philosophies of reflection, exemplified by Descartes and Kant, also fail in their account of
perception, as they reduce the perceived world to an idea, equate the subject with thought, and
undermine any understanding of intersubjectivity or a world shared in common.

Sartre

 Sartre’s dialectic of being and nothingness makes progress over philosophies of reflection by
acknowledging the ecceity of the world, where the subject engages as a nothingness rather than
a being alongside others. However, pure nothingness and pure being remain mutually exclusive,
causing their movement to halt. This “bad” dialectic must give way to a “hyperdialectic” that
remains self-critical about its tendency to reify into fixed and opposed theses.
 The philosophy of intuition takes two forms: Husserl’s Wesenschau, which converts lived
experience into ideal essences before a pure spectator, and Bergsonian intuition, which seeks
to coincide with its object by experiencing it from within.
 Merleau-Ponty argues that the world’s givenness is more primordial than the ideal essence, as
essences are not ultimately detachable from the sensible but are its “invisible” or latent
structure of differentiation.

Chiasm

 In his final chapter, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” Merleau-Ponty turns to the positive project
of describing his ontology of “flesh.” Chiasm has two senses in French and English:
 a physiological sense referring to anatomical or genetic structures with crossed
arrangements, and;
 a literary sense referring to figures of speech repeating structures in reverse order.
 For Merleau-Ponty, the chiasm is a structure of mediation that combines the unity-in-difference
of its physiological sense with the reversal and circularity of its literary usage.
  A paradigmatic example of chiasmic structure is the body’s doubling into sensible and sentient
aspects during self-touch. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes three consequences:
 the body as sensible-sentient is an “exemplar sensible” that demonstrates the ontological
continuity between subject and object among sensible things in general, this relationship is
reversible,
 the sentient and sensible never strictly coincide but are always separated by a gap or
divergence that defers their unity.
 Chiasm is therefore a crisscrossing or bi-directional becoming or exchange between the body
and things, justifying speaking of a “flesh” of things. Flesh is a “general thing” between the
individual and the idea, closest to the notion of an “element” in the classical sense.

Flesh

 The generality of flesh encompasses an intercorporeity, an anonymous sensibility shared among

distinct bodies. This intercorporeity allows for the touch of sensibility, as seen in the handshake.
However, flesh also “sublimates” itself into an “invisible” dimension, the “rarified” or “glorified”
flesh of ideas.
 Merleau-Ponty describes literature, music, and passions as exploring an invisible and the
disclosure of a universe of ideas. Creative language carries its meaning in a similarly embodied
fashion, and the sediments of such expression result in language as a system of formalized
relations.
 What we treat as “pure ideas” are nothing more than a divergence and ongoing process of
differentiation, now occurring within language rather than sensible things. Ultimately, we find a
relation of reversibility within language like that holding within sensibility. While all possibilities
of language are already outlined or promised within the sensible world, reciprocally the sensible
world itself is unavoidably inscribed with language.
 The final chapter of The Visible and the Invisible illustrates chiasmic mediation across a range of
relations, including sentient and sensed, touch and vision, body and world, self and other, fact
and essence, perception and language. There is not one chiasm but rather various chiasmic
structures at different levels. The ultimate ontological chiasm between the sensible and the
intelligible is matched by an ultimate epistemological chiasm, that of philosophy itself.

The Prose of the World

• The phrase “The Prose of the World” is to describe the mode in which the world is given
to us as experience. It’s not an orderly universe of things or classes but rather a fluid
world of fluxes and changes, an uncertain and mysterious one.
• Merleau-ponty argues that we perceive the world with our body. And while it’s true that
we have a material body, they’re not just things that exist within an environment — our
bodies are how we relate to the world around us. We experience the universe via our
senses and execute in our body.
• The prose are given to us in our pre-linguistic perception (embodied experience). It’s a
world always in flux, rich with significance at every turn.
• Merleau-Ponty’s philosophye of History provides an alternative way of conceiving the
historiality of rationality. He views reason as a form of lived experience that’s embodied
 in a social and historical reality. And he understands rationality as an ongoing process of
developing from the conflict of the individual and the universal.

The Prose of the World is for the most part another version of Merleau-Ponty’s essay, “Le langage
indirect et les voix du silence,” published in 1952 (in Les Temps moderes and later in Signs) at about the
time the present work was abandoned, never to be completed. Despite its incompleteness, this
posthumous edition, in an excellent translation, is of considerable interest.

The ideas of “Le langage indirect” are more fully elaborated here, with the result that Merleau-Ponty’s
thought is more easily accessible.

• The fundamental problem he poses is this: how do I use the institutions coming to me
from history, as I necessarily do, without becoming a slave to their exigencies?

Merleau-Ponty is interested in showing how individual freedom functions in a world where all
institutions work to deny it. In order to cope with this dilemma, he returns to the “parole parlee/parole
parlante” distinction made in the Phenomenology of Perception.

• The terms used are “sedimented language” and “speech”, roughly “language as an
institution” and the creative use of language.
• Merleau-Ponty borrows the term “coherent deformation” from Malraux, with whose art
criticism he is in constant dialogue, to designate this process.

The concept of coherent deformation of sedimented paradigms may be applied to all areas of human
activity painting, mathematics and science, politics-and thus allow the individual to live in two
apparently contradictory frameworks, that of positivistic mechanism and that of existential freedom.
But Merleau-Ponty is aware of the built-in failure of his solution. Insofar as sedimented language
remains intact, individual expression fails, and insofar as individual expression succeeds, the sedimented
language needed for communication is deformed beyond meaning.

• “To express oneself is, therefore, a paradoxical enterprise. … It is an operation which

tends towards its own destruction, since it suppresses itself to the extent that it
ingratiates itself and annuls itself if it fails to do so”.

At this point, the interest of these meditations becomes more general. Students of literature will
understand that Merleau-Ponty is struggling with the problem of literary communication as it has
developed at least since Mallarme. This work shows to what extent he was working within the tradition
of such artists and thinkers as Hegel, Mallarme, Cezanne, Bergson, Valery, Claudel, Paulhan, Malraux,
and the Sartre of “What is Literature?” to all of whom he refers.

 It also shows how distant he was from what might be called the “Nietzsche-Artaud-Bataille”
movement of modern thought. At one point, he refers with some contempt to “certain
contemporary figures whose neurosis is their sole talents”.