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MARC RICHIR

DEFENESTRATION

“if by chance I did not look from a window at men passing in the street, at the sight of
whom I do not fail to say that I see men, (...), and yet what do I see from this window
otherwise hats and coats, which can cover specters or pretended men who only
move by springs, but I judge that they are real men; and thus I understand by the
sole power of judging which resides in my mind what I thought I saw with my eyes. "
HAS

Descartes, the philosopher: holed up in the tranquility of his room,

away from the world and its clamor, he analyses, dissects, inspects, meditates. Try
to distinguish truth from falsehood, and lose yourself. He looks out the window,
contemplates the picture outside from the calm intimacy of the room, sees men
passing in the street. What if these were only simulacra of men, if the scene offered
in the window frame was only a puppet theater? But no, the power to judge which
resides in his mind tells him that they are real men.
His mind is sovereign: it allows him to think as true what his eyes only allow him to
believe.
To judge, however, to leave the mind to decide alone, in complete sovereignty, the
philosopher must no longer look, must turn his gaze away from the spectacle: "I will
now close my eyes, I will stop my ears, I will turn away all my sense, I will even
erase from my thoughts all images of corporeal
things”2. The secret of Cartesianism and modern philosophies of consciousness up
to Husserl is in Rembrandt's painting entitled The Philosopher in
Meditation: he is seated, facing the window through which only diffuse and oblique
light enters. He looks away, lowers his eyes, his forehead heavy with thoughts. The
world is outside, invisible. At his side, in the left corner of the room, a strange spiral
staircase leads to the darkness from which a disturbing figure descends, just
emerging from the shadows. Is this a specter, the ghost of the philosopher? while in
the foreground, still on the left, a servant tends a fire, the very heart of intimacy. The
philosopher is therefore located between
the window from which the light comes and the tendril whose degrees lead to
darkness. But for the moment, he has no choice since he remains seated. And we
are

1. Descartes, 2nd Metaphysical Meditation. I underline. I owe the idea of

defenestration to reading Max Loreau's book: Jean Dubuffet. Crimes, deportations,
places of high gambling, Paris, Weber, 1971, 2. Descartes, 3rd Metaphysical
Meditation,
beginning,

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I am in another room, facing another window from which we contemplate the

painting. We, that is to say again the philosopher. The philosopher sees himself
meditating, he thinks himself thinking. Thanks to the light that comes from outside,
obliquely. God is the guarantor of truth.
The framework of representation is planted there, with its congenital correlate,
reflexivity. And for a long time. It is in the same situation that the philosopher still
fundamentally finds himself, as Husserl conceives him.
We know the Husserlian doctrine of perception "by sketches": of the thing, the seer
only ever sees a silhouette (Abschattung), and yet, whether he walks around it or
closes his eyes, whether the silhouette comes to change, it It's always the #same
thing he perceives. While it is located in a place in space, the silhouette is
non-spatial: it is of the order of experience, a “hyletic datum of sensation”. The
paradox is that a flow of non- spatial silhouettes, residing in the lived current of the
seer, can give rise to the perception of a spatial thing: this is the whole enigma of
intentionality, and it is up to the philosopher and phenomenologist to decipher its
meaning.

If we pay attention, such a seer is far from being innocent: he is a seer represented
by the philosopher, in other words, he is a seer who is already a philosopher. For
him,
the world is a fable that stands out in the window frame. And his room is, so to
speak, a dark room: of the thing, he only receives an impression, on the film of his
experience which unfolds, carried away by the wheel of time. This impression (the
“hyletic datum of sensation”) lacks the dimension that makes up space; it is a sort of
pure image without depth, the only element of the thing that the consciousness of the
seer can receive on its sensitive plate. A shadow, a reflection. For the philosopher,
who watches the life of the seer thus represented, the world is seen through a
window and only touches the seer through sensitive impressions, leaving a flow of
silhouettes. The world would therefore be nothing if there was not, in the seer, a
certain life to animate it. For the world to be, for things to have consistency outside
the darkroom, we need the tension of intentionality. If the philosopher manages to
understand this, he will have remade the world without even leaving his room,
explained everything in perfect security, found the absolute point of view by letting
others, those he looks at and whom he imagines, suffer to his will. place.

So what is intentionality according to Husserl? The seer only receives a non- spatial
impression of the thing, and yet, it is indeed a thing, located in the world that he
perceives. He will never be able to simultaneously receive all the possible profiles of
the thing and see it fully in all its faces, and never the sum, even infinite, of all the
impressions will be equivalent to the thing as it is in itself; and yet he knows that this
one-sided view taken in the present is a view of this thing. I therefore know, at the
same time that he
sees this unique side, that he can see others and that all these sensitive impressions
will unify as impressions of the same thing. There is no true grasp (Wabr-nebmung)
of worldly objects; there is only the impression which shows itself as it is in the living
present of the cogito. Perception is, as Husserl says, apperception (Apperzeption),
that is to say anticipation of a grasp

true, impossible in principle but solely responsible for the unification of impressions
as impressions of things. The adequate perception of Wabr nehmung in the strict
sense of the objects of the world is an “Idea in the Kantian sense” which gives them
a “style” of appearance, a certain logos regulating the temporal sequence of their
silhouettes. In other words, the perfect datum of the thing is prescribed as a
repulsive Idea, outside the window of current impression, to the endlessly deferred
infinity of all finite experience. It
is the Same of the thing, like the indefinitely determinable X which gathers (/egein)
around itself all its possible profiles. Invisible in itself, it is the opening of seeing as
such, it is the determinability of the object as the horizon of all its possible
impressions in the experience of the seer. Riveted to the actuality of its living
present, it anticipates only as pure form without content, as pure concept unifying the
course of experience. The Idea is therefore the pole of a pure intention, empty of any
determined object; from its inaccessible place, perceived as such by the perceiving
subject, it opens up the horizon under which the experience, the uninterrupted flow
of impressions, takes on meaning. The tension between this infinity and the finitude
of the silhouette, seen in the present, reveals the being of intention. Intentionality is
only this leap made suddenly in perception, between the actual present and the
forever potential infinity conceived, in the present, as a formal possibility, always
realizable although doomed, in fact, to inaccomplishment 3, As Husserl writes ,
“every experience has its horizon of experience” 4 However, the seer never
perceives an isolated thing. This is at the same time a thing of the world, it is
perceived among other things which all turn out to belong to the same world. And if
there is no real grasp of
a worldly thing, still less is there of the world itself. Just as there is a horizon of all
possible impressions of the same thing, there is therefore a horizon of the world,
opened by the Idea (in the Kantian sense) that the world constitutes an indefinitely
explorable and determinable totality, although unknowable by principle. in the news
of a living present.
This regulatory Idea prescribes to all worldly objects a certain global style of
appearance, and makes possible the perception of several things located in the
same space and the same time.

There is therefore also an apperception of the world (Wels-apperzeption) which

grounds all other apperceptions of distinct objects insofar as it is constitutive of the
single ground on which all worldly things stand or rest. From this perspective, the
problem of the distribution of objects in space and time becomes a problem of the
articulation between the interior horizon and the exterior horizon. Each experience of
an isolated thing has its interior horizon, insofar as to each impression of this thing
belongs in the intentional leap
the anticipation of possible future impressions, which will act as subsequent
determinations of this same thing, and the gathering of all the past impressions of
that same thing. around her. But this experience also has an external horizon to the
extent that, in the moment when he receives this impression of this #same thing, the
seer also anticipates the other things that are shown.

3. For all this, see the remarkable commentary by J. Derrida, in his {Introduction to
The origin of geometry (PUF, coll. “Epimetheus”, 1962, pp. 147-155).
&. EBusserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, Clausen, Hamburg, 1964, p. 27.

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at the same time, if only in the background, and thereby opens up the field of their
possible experience. As Husserl says, this second degree horizon is “related to the
first degree horizon (sc. the interior horizon), while implying it” 5. The experience of a
worldly thing is therefore inscribed at the intersection of two horizons, the articulation
of which is eminently paradoxical: the exterior horizon (the horizon of the world) is
related to the interior horizon, that is to say, it is inseparable from it and in a certain
way implied by it , and yet, it implies it, insofar as it founds it, as its immovable
ground, insofar as there is no horizon of the world without things of the world. It will
be necessary to carefully identify the consequences of this double implication. But to
take these to the end, we must first question the scope of Husserlian's doctrine of
horizons, ask ourselves if it does not put the philosopher in an unfortunate position.

face (die Urtatsache, der ich standbalten musz), from which as a philosopher I must
not look away for a single moment. For child philosophers, this may well be the dark
corner where the ghosts of solipsism, or also of psychologism, of relativism return.
The true philosopher will prefer, instead of fleeing from these ghosts, to illuminate the
dark corner.”6

As Heidegger tried to tell Husserl in 19277, the grasp of the ego is not a true grasp
either, but an apperception. Because the cogito takes place in time, with its horizon
of past and future. The unity of the self is never quantified: it is only an infinite Idea
(in the Kantian sense), which opens the infinite and
unitary horizon of time. The view of the self in the present only makes sense within
this horizon. There
is no pure life of the transcendental subject, except on the horizon of worldly life. Just
like the perception of things in the world, the cogito contains the fact of perception.
Just like the world, the self is anticipated, it is outside, at infinity, on the horizon. The
self is defenestrated. The self, that is to say the seer.

Husserl seems to have remade the world from his tower. Yet something always
eludes him. For him, who constantly reduced the facts to discover the essence, the
world remains an inexplicable fact.
And also intentionality. Why does the seer make this leap between his finite present
and the purely formal infinite? Where do this apparent irreducibility of horizons come
from, and this instantaneous leap that is perception? Husserl's response is simple,
and it was to be expected: what establishes the leap of the seer out of the cutting
edge of the thinking philosopher is his original belief (Urdoxa) in the being of things
and the world. The perception of the world is the position of the being of the world
(Weltthesis). Through it, the seer believes he sees wohuat tohf
ecosgeietos,naeswws as the case with Descartes. But while the latter still had the
sovereignty of his mind, ensured in the last instance by divine power, Husserl found
himself helpless: he was left with the hidden life of transcendental consciousness.
While Descartes still relied on the light which penetrates obliquely through the
window, Husserl can no longer believe in it: this light comes from within, from that
which makes the intentional leap; he must close himself within himself, descend into
the depths of his life to find his own light, and who knows if this might not lead him to
climb the stairs, to follow the helix that leads him to darkness?

Defenestration involves a profound rearrangement of philosophical concepts. It

opens up another world, another time, another horizon. With the abolition of the
concept of infinity as an extrapolation of the finite, it allows a nothing to occur, which
is neither presence (being) nor absence (nothingness) and which carries within itself
the very enigma of the horizon. Once the room is empty, the
philosopher can no longer see himself as absolutely clairvoyant; he too is
defencestrated; he sets off on an adventure, finally awakens to the tumults of the
world, is torn from his reverie and finds himself
challenged to understand, instead of remaking in thought what his retirement had
taken away from him. But there is no longer a single path, a royal road.

Except for the case of Hegel 8, Heidegger was the first to accomplish defenestration.
For Heidegger, man is being-there (Dasein), where the there is the world, that is to
say the clearing of being (die Lichtung des Seins), and he unfolds in such a way that
he is that “there” . In this deployment, he stands ek-statically inside the truth (of
detection, of the clearing) of being 9. As he is ek-sistant, he inhabits the clearing of
“there” 10, which is opening of being.
Husserl will nevertheless prevail until the end of this last experience, even if, in the
indefinite proliferation of his writings (forty-five thousand pages), he will have
escapes. These will never be pushed to the limit. Despite all his efforts to reduce the
thesis of the world, to reveal the profound life in which this thesis is based, he will
always remain “stuck” on a fact, which is, in truth, only the correlate of the worldly
fact. He will even go so far as to write:

Although there is no question here of going into the details of a difficult thought, the
difficulty of which undoubtedly comes from the fact that we never read it literally
enough, we can nevertheless risk this: the being of man, being-the-there, resides in
habitation, whose meaning is very far from common sense, since what is inhabited is
the clearing of “there”, which is a non-spatial “place” “locality” (Ortschaft), from which
space itself is determined as a gathering of spaces. But whether in Sein und Zeit
there

“The primitive intentional foundation (der intentionale Urgrund) is the “I am”, not only
for “the” world which I consider to be the real world, but also for any “ideal world”
which is valid for me, and even in general for everything that without exception, in
any sense that is understandable or valid for me, I have present to consciousness as
existing. including myself, my life, my thought activity, all this being conscious.
Whether it is appropriate or not, whether it may seem monstrous to me (through
whatever prejudices) or not, this is the primitive fact to which I must

G. Formal logic and transcendental logic, trans. S. Bachelard, PUF,, coll.

“Epimetheus”,
1965, p. 317-318.
7. In 1927, the two philosophers collaborated on the article Phenomenology for
the Encyclopedia Britannica. This was the opportunity for Heidegger to send a very
instructive letter to Husserl, which was published in Phänomenologische
Psychologie, Husserliana, Bd IX, Den Haag, 1962, pp. 600-602.

8. We know that Hegel's philosophy, to the extent that it finds a completely new
meaning for the concept of "Reason", means the abolition of the framework of
representation, and that this abolition is even its "point of departure". ". This
breakthrough, however, is far too complex for me to examine here.

9. Letter on Humanism, trans. R. Munier, Aubier-Montaigne, Paris, 1964, pp.

60-61 10. Zbid, pp. 96-97.

26-36.

34

5. Erfahrung und Urteil, p. pp.

28.

I underline. For all this, see Erfahrung und Urteil,

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or in more recent texts (for example in Bauen Wobnen Denken), the starting point of
the analysis which must reveal this “ there ” is always a universe that is already
human, cultivated and “ inhabited ” in the narrow sense of the word . This is
moreover in which Heideggerian thought is essentially hermeneutic !!, the journey of
an apparent (ontic) circle which discovers, in its double movement of back and forth,
the “ locality ” of being ( Orrschaft des Seins) formulated by on which the later
Heidegger comments on the expression " truth of being ", and which implies an
understanding of being-place of the place as a clearing in which what is (the being)
manifests itself . Once this “ locality ” is reached, thinking is reversed, since it is now
from being , that is to say from nothing , neither absence
(nothingness) nor presence (being in the classical sense ) , of a double movement
which is become being itself, that being takes appearance and is phenomenalized.
The “ famous ” turning point ( Kebre) made after Sein und Zeit is therefore only the
conversion of the double movement of hermeneutic explication into the double
movement of phenomenalization 12 .

man in a wild universe which he does not previously inhabit , which he did not make,
even if he transforms it once it appears ; therefore this implies a thought of
phenomenalization which is, according to the expression of Merleau-Ponty, a “
cosmology of the visible ” 15, which , one will have guessed, obliges to rework what ,
thanks to it, appears as certain traditional residues in Heideggerian “ ontology ” .

THE RUINS OF BEING

In his last writings, Merleau - Ponty also accomplished defenestration :

“ Our
soul has no windows : that means [ 7 der Welt Sein ” (NI, 276 ) .
“ World and Being: their relationship is that of the visible and the invisible
( latency ) the invisible is not another visible (“ possible ” in the logical sense ) a
positive only absent. It is Verborgenheit in principle, ze. invisible of the

However , it does not seem that Heidegger carried this conversion

visible, Offenbeit d'Urrwelt

The Unendlichkeit is basically the ex- self , the object

through to the end. Because it implies a profound rearrangement of the starting point
: it poses the question of the phenomenalization of man, from nothing , that is to say
from what Merleau - Ponty calls “ raw and wild being ” : While being ek-sistant, man
is not necessarily dedicated to the truth of being or to error only understood as " ontic
obnubilation " 13. Man is not only inhabited by the clearing of being, he is also
barbaric, outside of “ his ” essence : He also inhabits a universe of dreams , myths ,
fantasies , which are not beings and
yet are not non - beings either . _ _
He inhabits appearances which are ( not ) laughed at and which nevertheless exert
an enigmatic influence on him . Error or wandering is not only forgetting of being , it
is also a certain way that being, not of hiding itself in the detection of what is , but of
turning into the emergence of that which, strictly speaking , is not : man can put out
his eyes and burn his senses , he can “ be ” outside himself , that is to say outside
the “ place ” which assigns his being to him , outside any “ place ”, without place. Not
only can it , but it always “ is ” in a certain way . He has in him someone other than
himself, who overflows into him , encroaches on him, is hidden in him and at the
same time needs him , ends in him , anchors in him : this other is barbarism , or it is
savagery, the uninhabited nature which smolders in man and which inhabits him, this
nature which is always on the first day without being of the past, this sea from which
we all come and on which we sail as best we can , through storms and deviations ;
this sea which rolls our buildings , our most certain thoughts and the floor of our
ships, is also “ the flesh , the mother ” has14.
Accomplishing the conversion , thinking of the phenomenalization
from nothing , this also implies that the question of the phenomenalization of _

and not Urendlichkeit The infinity of Being which can be a question for me is
operative, militant finitude : the opening of Urrwelt . » (VI, 305)16.
For Husserl, the currently perceptible visible only has meaning as the profile or face
of a thing closed around its center, invisible as such in the living present , but intuited
in perception as a completed form , empty and indefinitely fillable by other potential
visible ones . Except in the case of the perception of others, there is , in Husserl, no
invisible principle .
For him , things being surfaces encompassing a centered volume , it is always
possible , ideally , to go around it to see the currently hidden side . It
is up to time to synthesize all the fragmentary faces in the total thing . To time : that
is to say to the infinity of the continuous river of the present.

By accomplishing defenestration , Merleau-Ponty abolishes the Idea of infinity.

The first consequence which will lead, as we will see , to a series of cascading
payments is that there is now in everything visible a principle invisible .
Perception . is “ that which assures me of being unnoticed ” (VI, 274); there is always
an invisible part of the visible. And this invisible is “ opening of Umiwvelt ”.
In what ? In this that the invisible “ is not only non-visible (what has been or will be
seen and is not , or what is seen by someone other than me, not by me), but (that)
its absence matters in the world ( it is " behind " the visible, imminent or eminent
visibility , it is Urpräsentiert precisely as Nichtur präsentierbar, like another
dimension)... (that) the gap which marks its place is one of the crossing points of the
" world " " ( VI, 281).
To say of the invisible that its absence matters in the world is to say that it is
something other than pure nothingness or a void which can be absolutely neglected :
it is

15. The visible and the invisible, p. 318 (I will now cite in the body of the text : VI,
318).
11. Cf. Unterwegs on Sprache, Neske, Pfullingen, 1959, pp. 120-155. The full
sentence is : " I call into question the evolutionary perspective , I replace it with a
cosmology of the visible in the

12. See my article entitled Le rien coiled, published in Textures, n° 7/8, 1970, pp.
3-24.
13. Cf. Wom Wesen der Wahrheit, the paragraphs entitled “ Die Unwarhrheit als
die Verber gung ”, “ Die Un- Wahrheit als die Irre ”, as well as the Anmerkung
published in Wegmaricen, Kloster mann, 1967, pp. 96-97.

14. The visible and the invisible, Gallimard, 1964, p. 321.

sense that, considering endotime and endocspace, for me there is no longer any
question of origins, nor of limits, nl of series of events going towards first cause , but
a single burst of Being which is forever . » (Emphasis added).

16. See also VI, 223 : “ The true infinity. it must be what surpasses us ; _ _
infinite of Offcnheit and not Unendlichkeit ” .

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to say that its absence is constitutive of the visible, it even has a certain presence, in
the sense in which we say of an absence that it is “noticed”. This therefore means
that the invisible is originally presented as such as not originally presentable, as a
deficiency of the visible, making it an irremediably unaccomplished, corroded,
eroded being. Always on the verge of being seen as an eminence, an
extension or “back” of the visible, the invisible is nevertheless there as a gap. And
this is one of the points of passage of the world: it is the “place” into which the gaze
rushes, the “membership” which joins the seer to what he sees and to what he does
not see 17. “Invisible is / to without being an object, it is pure transcendence, without
ontic mask. » (VI, 282-283). The visible is not a screen which completely hides the
invisible: or again, the invisible is not simply behind the visible as if it were eclipsed
by it. If the invisible manifests itself as a certain absence, presents itself as
"Verborgenheit of principle", it is because it does not entirely adhere to the visible, is
something other than a visible potential located on the other side of the facade of
things. The visible allows us to guess the invisible “laterally” or obliquely, through a
detour; “the “visible” themselves, in the end, are only centered on a core of absence
too” (VI, 283): they are decayed down to their roots, and this decay, which is their
core, their intimacy , however, is exposed to the outside as outside (without which
this absence would be visible presence, hole). There is in everything visible a
strange distortion which prevents the surfaces from closing on themselves since the
core on which they are centered presents itself as a core of absence. Appearance
must be understood not as the skin of a bag enclosing its inside and thus hiding it
from the outside, but as a rwine whose interior and exterior communicate without
solution of continuity. If the visible is “centered” on a core of absence, this core is a
whirlwind that aspires within while pushing outward, in a single movement.
Defenestration implies that “beings” are no longer fortresses protecting their wealth
against the gaze of
the world, but that they are nothing which each time expands while exploding, rolls
up while unwinding, and which stabilizes when it comes into contact with oneself,
finds there its connective tissue which is phenomenalized like the appearance itself
18. This is no longer the visible face of a thing accomplished in itself and currently
invisible, but it is the ruin left by the invisible which swells while hollowing out and
eroding itself, just as the mountain is only the ruin resulting from the double action of
upheavals and erosion. Far from hiding the true reality behind it, appearance is
nothing other than itself. Distorted surface of contact between nothing and nothing, it
is forever unfinished and forever false, pseudo-reality since distortion is said in
Greek: pseudos 19. Appearances are the ruins of being and the ruin of truth.
Compared to phenomenalization, to the appearance of nothing, truth is only a
“secondary” effect, a distortion of distortion, an accomplishment of the
unaccomplished, whose status becomes enigmatic to the highest degree.

In any case, distortion is more “general” than distortion, because there is fantasy,
dream, hallucination, just as much as there is being and being. If Heidegger had not
also accomplished defenestration, we would be tempted to believe that truth is linked
to the full and isotropic space of representation, to the concept of the instantaneous
union of the finite and the infinite, to the dream of the philosopher enclosed in his
room. But this “generality” of the distortion requires us to re-examine Heidegger’s
thought in a completely new way and only gives greater relief to the fact that
Heidegger never addresses for itself the question posed by the “status” of the “false”
appearance.

We can wonder if the questioning of being as being has reached the end of itself, if it
has not, despite everything, remained secretly linked to being (what is), therefore if,
carried out to a certain point , this question is not necessarily led to the “raw and wild
being” rehashed by Merleau-Ponty in his last work.

THE HORIZONS, THE FLESH

In classical thought of the form accomplished in the Helian doctrine of intentionality,

the center of things is given at the same time as their periphery. Space being
isotropic, no distortion is conceivable, except in the imaginary, disordered and
fantastic universe of the seer. A closed surface enclosing its volume implies its
center as its principle. But what is remarkable in such a world is that an embodied
gaze can only take in things as a flat vision, a picture without relief (we remember
that, for Husserl, Abschattung is non-spatial), from which depth is expelled. .

Sensitive vision only makes sense in relation to a vision of this Idea which is the form
closed on itself and therefore centered. Sensitivity obstructs intelligibility, it only deals
with simulacra of reality; if the seer nevertheless has a relationship with the world, it
is because he makes a leap outside of himself into ideality. There is no principle of
the invisible since the invisible is only an “ultra-visible” which can only be seen by a
“third eye”, the eye of the mind. To close and center the forms is therefore to
condemn the vision to a sort of diplopia: an eye on the visible factual, sensitive and
present, an eye on the visible essential, ideal and “super-present”, a look on the
surface of the. things and a look at their center. It is through the instantaneous
superposition of these two gazes that appearances are constituted as superficial
fragments of a thing in itself. This is the only true "reality", while the sensible
appearance is only a kind of "sub-reality", a simulacrum of reality which only makes
sense in relation to "reality in itself", the only one that exists. In itself, appearance
does not allow us to decide what is and what is not: for that we need the eye of the
mind. An appearance is said to be misleading when it does not correspond to any
center, when it is a pure phantom (a pure surface), when the two views are not
superimposable.
17. Invisible is not “a visible “possible” other or a “possible” visible for a
other”, because “it would destroy the frame which joins us to him. » (VI, 282).
13. “The very pulp of the sensible, its indefinable, is nothing other than the union in it
of the “inside” and the “outside”, the thick contact of oneself with oneself. The
absolute of the “sensitive” is this stabilized explosion involving return. » (VI, 321).

In such a universe, depth, the distance between the bottom and the surface, at the
edge of things, does not strictly speaking have a status: it is between the mental
(what is seen by the spiritual eye) and the physical ( what is seen by the sensitive
eye), it is the inexplicable difference between the

19. Cf. Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, Niemeyer 1966, p. 146.

two, what

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establishes their respective domains , what precedes them , even though it appears
to follow them , precisely in that which seems to result from their superposition .
The questioning of depth is enough to radically subvert the space of
classical thought 2, and it is undoubtedly around it that the entire work of Merleau -
Ponty is structured 21 .
That the depths of things are far from their edges must take root somewhere ,
instead of being the simple effect of a recomposition from two “ positive ” entities (
the thing in itself and the sensible appearance ) . If there is, in traditional philosophy ,
a diplopia that it never questions for itself although it secretly constitutes all its
problems , it must find its foundation in some enigma of the daily perception of the
world . Because the world never has to be
recomposed to be seen : the source of its meaning cannot be outside it , but within it
. If there is philosophy, that is to say questioning , it cannot be because some people
are victims of a strange intoxication giving them double vision , but because it is the
world itself which gives rise to its own question, because the enigma, far from being
added to it by this strange being that would be man with his aberrations, finds its
abode in him .

To access the foundation of classical diplopia , of the duality of the two elements (
sensible intelligible ) traditionally constituting the visible , to understand how the
questioning of depth leads to the subversion of this duality , it is already enough to
see that this -this is in fact based on the closure of forms on themselves, on their
constitution in centered spheres . By this, we see that the ultimate foundation of
Platonism is its cosmology , constructed from the sphere : that the true ancestor of
Western philosophies up to and including Heidegger is Parmenides ; that the
parricide invoked once remains to be consummated ; and that the discovery of depth
necessarily involves the discovery in the visible of a nonbeing whose “ ontological ”
status is at least equivalent to that of being . _
. It is along this path, as we have said, that Merleau-Ponty embarks : the visible
is invisible in principle and invisible of the visible ; it presents itself originally as such ,
that is to say as not originally presentable, as a “ lake of
non -being ”, “ a certain nothingness mired in a local and temporal openness ” (VI,
254), a “ qualified nonbeing ” (VI, 234 ) who is “ hollow and not hole
” (VI, 249), and who is not “ Nichtiges Nichts ” (ibid.). This qualified non-being is
non-being of the visible, which is a guale ; it is correlative of the being of the quale,
and is not simply non-being (hole in the being or absence of being).
Invisible core of absence, it “ is ” the hollow in the shell of appearances , which
makes it

20. It is there, very deep. the rhythm? specific to the history of painting since the
Renaissance , as Merleau-Ponty had glimpsed in L' il el l'esprit ( Gallimard, 1964)
and as M. Loreau clearly showed in his article entitled Légère cé full of red herrings
(Cahier de L'Herne dedicated to Dubuffet).

“ sounds hollow ” is a shell that reveals a bottom. But this background is not itself a
surface or a base, it is the surroundings, the outside, the world itself. Through this
lake of non-being in it , the being of appearance opens onto depth : if appearance is
something other than a flat picture , if it shows itself in a certain place, located at a
distance , it is that it is phenomenalized in an approach which
is a retreat , that it comes from the “ background ” of the Invisible while remaining
mired in it, that there is a distortion in its skin which makes its distance a proximity.
The appearance is embedded in a certain place of the worldly fabric by the very
reason of its non-closure, of its incompleteness, of the very fact that it is a ruin
offered on all sides to the outside, a distorted surface , conjunction of an inside and
an outside which cover each other . mutually. 17 there is depth because there is
distortion in appearance, because , as Merleau-Ponty states, what is visible is “ a
sort of strait between exterior horizons and interior horizons that are always gaping ”
( VI, 175, my emphasis) .
With the distortion in appearance, the concept of horizon radically changes its
meaning : it " is no more than the sky or the earth a collection of tenuous things , or a
class title , or a logical possibility of conception , or a system of “ potentiality of
consciousness ” ( VI, 195) which it was, as we have seen, in Husserl , because “ The
actual, empirical, ontic nisible , by a sort of folding, of invagination, or of upholstery,
exhibits a visibility, a possibility which is not the shadow of the actual, which is its
principle , which is not the specific contribution of a " thought ", which is the
condition, an allusive, elliptical style , like any style, but like any inimitable,
inalienable style , #7 interior horizon and an exterior horizon , between which the
current visible is a provisional partition , and which , however, only open indefinitely
onto other visibilities
” ( VI , 199-200, emphasis added ). Thus, visibility is as much outside , on the
exterior horizon of the visible present, as within which it arouses by withdrawing , by
invaginating. Appearance communicates doubly with the world , through the invisible
background from which it comes and through the hollow that develops within it,
retains and fixes it : if the exterior horizon is " the one that everyone knows ", the
interior horizon is a “ darkness full of visibility ” (VI, 195). The appearance is padded ,
and the stuffing that fills its
padding is the very substance of the world, its flesh, as Merleau-Ponty so aptly calls
it .
As for the basis of classic diplopia , it is in the distortion itself. If the visible is “
momentary crystallization of visibility ”, the fact remains that “ all crystallization is
illusory in some respect ” (VI, 267), because “ vision is crystallization of the
impossible ” ( VT, 327 , my emphasis ), because “ the supposed positivity of the
sensible world . proves precisely to be something elusive (NT, 267-268 ) 22, The
distortion of appearance in fact represents in itself an impossibility which consists of
encroachment, the absolute covering of the inside by the outside and the outside by
the inside, the chiasm of

21. From the Phenomenology of Perception to his posthumous work (The Visible
and the Invisible) . 11 wrote , in a working note from February 1960 : “ I am looking
for nuclei of meaning in the perceived world that are invisible. but which simply are
not in the sense of absolute negation ( or of the abscluded positivity of the "
intelligible world " ), but in the sense of the other dimensionality , as depth deepens
behind height and width, as time expands . digs behind the space. To study the
insertion of all dimensionality in being, study the insertion of depth in perception ,
and that of language in the world of silence , ” (emphasis added ). (VI, 289-290).
40

interior horizons and exterior horizons , the constitution of a visible and

situated surface , which is the “ limit ” of the unlimited, the unsituable and the
invisible . The enigma is that this distortion , by bringing the nothing into contact with
itself according to the skin of a connective tissue , makes it the very appearance
which

22. See also the note of May 1959, VI 295.

41

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manifests itself as #! there are , despite everything, that there are constituted “ forms
” certainly in a completely different sense than in classical thought which are as
much of themselves, which arise by their own means, which are “ cohesion of self
with itself ”, “ identity in depth ( dynamic identity ) ”, “ transcendence ” (VI, 262), and
which, in turn , are the advent of the positive. It is in the face of the impossibility of
sticking to this encroachment that classical thought, in a slippage which founds it ,
poses this literally elusive " positive " as pure positivity, a sphere closed in itself, as
segregation of the interior and the exterior . . This slippage is the winding upon itself
of that which, in principle, can never completely wind itself , since its winding is at the
same time an unfolding. It is because appearance is untenable, it can, in the
impossibility of coming to terms with its distortion, slip into coiled nothingness . It is
because the visible always implies a squinting gaze or an oblique view ,
simultaneously lateral and frontal , that , bringing its two eyes " facing the holes " and
looking straight ahead , thought is opened to a diplopia , to which, conversely, she
has never been able to hold to the end, since she has always tried to close it by an
equally impossible superposition of her two views.

MARC RICHIR
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