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Merleau-Ponty and the Sense of Sexual

Difference
a
Lisa Guent her
a
Depart ment of Philosophy, Vanderbilt Universit y, 229 Furman
Hall, Nashville, TN 37240, USA

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 ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 16 number 2 june 2011

hat is the sense of sexual difference?

W What is its meaning, and what is its
direction or orientation? Popular understandings
of sexual difference tend to locate its sense in
either ‘‘nature’’ or ‘‘nurture’’; either the meaning
and orientation of sex is determined by chromo-
somes, hormones and patterns of brain activity,
or it is constructed through social norms, parental
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guidance, and media. In either case, the sense

of sexual difference is invariably defined in
relation to ‘‘normal’’ men and women; exceptions
are admitted, and may even be celebrated, but the
duality of male and female nevertheless outlines
the terrain of sexual difference. However radically
certain bodies depart from the norm, whether as
androgynous, intersexed or transsexual subjects,
they are still thought to gain their sense from
that norm; they are conceived as mixtures or
combinations of male and female, tending
towards one or the other side of the duality.
Whether one takes the side of nature or of
nurture, it is difficult to avoid borrowing the
sense of sexual difference from current gender
norms. A masculine woman appears as an
exception to the rule precisely because women
are presumed to be normally feminine. Similarly,
intersexed bodies seem abnormal to the extent
that we normally expect either males or females;
these bodies seem to require surgical disambigua-
tion at birth because we can’t imagine what it
would be like to live as (or with) someone who is
both male and female, or neither male nor female.
Transsexual bodies make the most sense to the
popular imagination in drag performances where
gender is exaggerated, allowing us to see the man
as a woman, or the woman as a man; they make
less sense when the gender performance is more
ambiguous, or not clearly oriented towards male
lisa guenther
MERLEAU-PONTY AND
THE SENSE OF SEXUAL
DIFFERENCE
or female norms. No matter how inclusive these
popular conceptions of sex try to be, they tend to
reinscribe current gender norms at the level of
sex, reading gender back into sex in order to then
discover that sex was already moving in the
direction of gender. To the extent that theories of
nurture or social construction avoid this circular-
ity, they posit the sexed infant as a blank slate
upon which social meanings are inscribed
through the giving or withholding of Barbie
dolls and toy guns. But whenever these social
inscriptions fail to take hold, the nurture theorist
falls back into nature’s vicious circle, often
producing the confession: ‘‘I thought that
gender was socially constructed – until I had

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/11/020019^15 ß 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2011.591583

19
 sexual difference
kids of my own!’’ Likewise, when the nature
theorist is faced with exceptions to the rule of
biological determination, she is forced to admit
weakly that ‘‘society also plays a role.’’
The philosophical mistake common to both
nature and nurture arguments is that they both
locate the sense of sexual difference in a
substance which is presumed to hold the secret
of its meaning and to determine the direction of
its unfolding. Both approach the body and the
mind as different substances, only one of which
‘‘makes sense’’ and therefore determines the
sense of the other. They may disagree about
where to locate the origin of sense, but they
nevertheless agree that it must be localized on one
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or the other side of a duality. In doing so, they
fall into the trap of what David Morris has called
‘‘ontological localism’’ (69); they locate sense in
a determinate thing or part of a thing, for
example in male or female bodies, in the
hormones running through these bodies, or in
the social messages to which young minds are
exposed. What this approach misses is the whole
field of being out of which meaningful determi-
nations arise, the ontological background in
relation to which things and parts may be
distinguished in the first place, and the process
of mutual differentiation which gives rise to
recognizably different beings. For Morris, follow-
ing Merleau-Ponty, the origin of sense is not in
things or parts, but in ‘‘the global dynamics and
directions of a field of being’’ (70). To shift our
attention from local substances to the field of
being is, in effect, to move from the natural
attitude into phenomenological reflection. In this
paper, I propose to reflect on the ontological field
which gives sense to sexual difference, without
locating this sense on the side of either nature or
nurture, bodies or minds. In so doing, I hope to
clarify some of the confusions about sexual
difference that arise in the natural attitude, and
to suggest a more critical approach to everyday
assumptions about sexed bodies. My central aim
in this analysis is to raise possibilities for thinking
the logic of sexual difference beyond the duality
of male and female in relation to which certain
bodies can only appear as deviations from the
norm. As I will argue, the sense of sexual
difference – its meaning and its direction – is
produced not in spite of deviations, nor through
their exclusion, but rather through a process of
mutual divergence which both produces and
destabilizes the norm.
In what follows, I approach the sense of sexual
difference from two directions, firstly in relation
to Merleau-Ponty’s ontological concept of the
flesh as developed in his last work, The Visible
and the Invisible, and secondly in relation to the
concept of institution as developed in his lecture
course at the Collège de France (1954–55).
In both approaches, the question of sexual
difference emerges in relation to pregnancy,
birth and gestation, firstly in an ontological
sense, and secondly in the biological sense of
embryological development. Birth is a privileged
site for the interrogation of sexual difference
because it both engenders and is engendered by
sexed bodies; but what often remains uninterro-
gated in both ontological and biological discus-
sions of birth are the intersubjective relations
between these sexed bodies, the alterity which
both separates them and orients them towards
one another. By analyzing ontological and
biological accounts of birth alongside one
another, and in relation to questions of inter-
subjectivity, I hope to demonstrate the non-
opposition or mutual entwinement of domains
that are often regarded as mutually exclusive,
even by theorists who otherwise seek to challenge
the dualisms of body and mind, biology and
culture, nature and nurture.
I sexual difference in the flesh
In many of his engagements with the question
of intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty compares the
relation between self and other to a pregnancy.
But it is not clear who – or what – occupies the
place of the mother in this comparison, nor is it
clear that the comparison works the same way
in different texts. In ‘‘The Philosopher and his
Shadow,’’ it seems that we are all mothers,
regardless of sexual difference: ‘‘each one of us is
pregnant with the others and confirmed by them
in his body’’ (181). Likewise, in ‘‘Dialogue
and the Perception of the Other,’’ the other is
‘‘reproduced from me’’ through ‘‘that strange
filiation which makes the other forever my
20

second, even when I prefer him to myself’’ (135).
This image echoes Husserl’s account of inter-
subjectivity in the Cartesian Meditations,
in which the ego’s experience of the other is
constituted on the basis of a coordination or
‘‘pairing’’ which always begins on the side
of consciousness (108–20). It is open to the
criticism, made by Levinas and others, that the
other is thereby reduced to an alter ego or
‘‘another me’’ whose alterity is limited or even
foreclosed by the consciousness that (re)produces
it.1 As if to confirm this suspicion, Merleau-Ponty
sometimes presents the other as a kind of clone
or ‘‘replica of myself,’’ ‘‘a wandering double,’’
even a sprout:
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To the infinity that was me something else still
adds itself; a sprout shoots forth, I grow; I give
birth, this other is made from my flesh and
blood and yet is no longer me. How is that
possible? How can the cogito emigrate beyond
me, since it is me? (‘‘Dialogue’’ 134)
A response to this question – and, indeed,
a reformulation of the question itself – may be
found in Merleau-Ponty’s late reflections on the
flesh as ‘‘the mother’’2 from which apparent
oppositions such as vision and visibility, touch
and tangibility, or self and other are ‘‘born by
segregation’’ (VI 136). Images of fecundity and
birth in The Visible and Invisible suggest not a
miraculous parturition of the other from the self,
but rather a mutual fecundation of self and other,
a divergence from one common flesh, such that
neither I nor the other can be designated as first
or second, active or passive. Rather than the self
giving birth to the other, both emerge from an
anonymous, impersonal flesh that generates
differences within itself by folding or coiling
over itself – ‘‘by dehiscence or fission of its own
mass’’ (VI 146) – such that differences do not
emerge through opposition, but rather through
intensive self-relation and self-divergence.
Merleau-Ponty calls flesh ‘‘a pregnancy of
possibles’’ (VI 250), where the possibilities
brought forth are not extinguished in their
actualization, but remain generative of new
possibilities. What sustains the flesh as a
‘‘pregnancy of possibles’’ is a concept of
negativity which refers neither to a pure void
21
guenther
or nothingness nor to a determinate negation of
something that is, but rather to a temporalization,
a delay whereby reversibility is ‘‘always imminent
and never realized in fact’’ (VI 147). My right
hand touches my left hand, and in so touching
becomes touched, just as the touched hand begins
to touch; but touching and touched never
absolutely coincide. They are rather always on
the verge of one another, diverging and encroach-
ing upon one another, with an endless reversi-
bility which hollows out a space into which the
other is received. The temporalization of the flesh
thus implies a spatialization: the hollowing-out
of a place for possible emergence, or for the
emergence of the possible. In resistance to
Sartre’s ontology, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘‘The
soul, the for itself is a hollow [un creux] and not
a void, not absolute non-being with respect to
a Being that would be plenitude and hard core’’
(VI 233).3
This concept of a ‘‘hollow’’ formed through
the mutual divergence of reversible sides of one
sole flesh helps to explain the sense in which the
other may be ‘‘born’’ from my own embodied
experience, without for that reason being con-
stituted by consciousness. Already in my ordin-
ary experience of the world there are different
perspectives from which to view an object. I can
walk around the table, look under it, stand on top
of it . . . From each one of these perspectives,
certain aspects of the world become visible while
others are hidden; I cannot see the whole world
at once; indeed, I cannot even see the whole of a
simple object like a table all at once. And yet,
without this variability of perspectives, through
which one vantage point is lost, yet retained,
while another is anticipated, I would not have an
experience of the object as a whole. Even the
simplest experience already implies a multiplicity
of possible perspectives, each of which is a variant
of the others, and each of which could potentially
be filled by someone other than myself. This
simple experience implies a process of tempor-
alization – successive profiles lost and gained,
retained and anticipated – and a process of
spatialization of the object as one and the same
throughout all its successive profiles. But if this is
the case, then my experience of the world ‘‘hooks
into’’ the experience of others, whether or not
 sexual difference
other viewers are factually there. Even when I am
utterly alone, my perception is already brimming
or ‘‘pregnant’’ with other possible viewers.
This account of experience demonstrates
the implication of virtual others in one’s own
perceptual experience, but it does not yet offer an
account that could stand up to the charge that
the phenomenological sense of ‘‘the other’’ is
anything more than a variation on myself, the
‘‘sprout’’ of a consciousness which remains firmly
centered in its own experience. The late work of
Merleau-Ponty diverges from standard phenom-
enological accounts by articulating vision as a
reflective structure of seeing and being seen
which cannot be completed by a single individual
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subject: ‘‘Here there is no problem of the alter
ego because it is not I who sees, not he who sees,
because an anonymous visibility inhabits both of
us, a vision in general’’ (VI 142). To see and be
seen is to be immersed in an anonymous structure
of divergence and encroachment, where I am
always on the verge of catching up with the other
I might become, but never able to collapse the
distance in between. Even when I look at myself
in the mirror, I can never quite see myself seeing.
I can see how a passing bird catches the eye of my
friend, without thereby knowing how it looks to
her, but I cannot quite catch myself in the act of
perception. As in the example of the two hands
touching, there is a delay and divergence within
my own self-relation. The seeing–seen and
touching–touched bodies of others hook into
this hinge within myself, not by filling an empty
gap but by prolonging my gaze and reflecting
it back to me. The other who looks at me is
therefore already prefigured in the reflective
structure of my own perception, not only because
I spontaneously anticipate other ‘‘me’s’’ but
because even my own self-relation implies a
relation to others who can see me in ways I cannot
see myself.
Myself and the other, seeing and seen,
touching and being touched, exist as mutually
implicative possibilities of a structure that
belongs to neither of us: the chiasmatic structure
of the flesh. To be pregnant with the other in this
sense is not to project her perspective as one that
might have been my own, had I only bothered to
walk around the table, but rather to bear within
myself the possibility of becoming-other, altered
by a perspective that did not begin with me, but
which implicates me as one who is seen and
touched as well as seeing and touching. Precisely
because my body is reversible flesh, and because
no body contains the full sense of flesh within its
own localized being, my body bears the alterity of
the other, not as a pure void, nor as a mystery
which resists my full comprehension, but as the
hollow that shapes my own existence. The sense
of the other emerges here ‘‘not as what contests
my life but what forms it, not as another universe
in which I would be alienated but as the preferred
variant of a life that has never been my own’’
(VI 82 fn. 14).4 From this perspective, myself and
the other are ‘‘extreme divergences of one same
something’’ (VI 84). We are neither identical
nor opposed, but rather variations of a common
flesh which articulates itself through the move-
ment of mutual divergence and co-implication.
In contrast with the passages where others
appear as offspring and/or replicas of the
individual subject, Merleau-Ponty writes:
Take others at the moment they appear in the
world’s flesh . . . Before others are or can be
subjected to my conditions of possibility and
reconstructed in my image, they must already
exist as outlines, deviations, and variants of a
single Vision in which I too participate.
For they are not fictions with which I might
people my desert – offspring of my spirit
and forever unactualized possibilities – but my
twins or the flesh of my flesh. (VI 33)
The other is ‘‘flesh of my flesh,’’ but only in the
sense that ‘‘my’’ flesh is not mine alone, but
already a divergent articulation of the anonymous
flesh of the world. Elsewhere, in ‘‘The
Philosopher and his Shadow,’’ Merleau-Ponty
writes:
If there is a break, it is not between me and the
other person; it is between a primordial
generality we are intermingled in and the
precise system, myself–the others. What
‘‘precedes’’ intersubjective life cannot be
numerically distinguished from it, precisely
because at this level there is neither individua-
tion nor numerical distinction. The constitu-
tion of others does not come after that of the
22

body; others and my body are born together
from the original ecstasy. (174)
This ‘‘original ecstasy’’ of the flesh involves a
‘‘transitivity and confusion of self and other’’
(174) in relation to which it is impossible to say
which comes first; like the seer and the seen,
self and other emerge as mutually implicating
variants of a single reversible structure.
While this radical reversibility complicates the
Husserlian account of intersubjectivity in inter-
esting ways, it also draws Luce Irigaray’s
criticism – albeit for different reasons – in her
reading of the chiasm (127–53). If flesh is ‘‘the
mother,’’ and if it is an impersonal, anonymous
dimension, then where has the specifically
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feminine mother disappeared to? Irigaray argues
that the logic of the chiasm appropriates the
language of birth while distorting its irreversible
trajectory from mother to child, and neutralizing
the maternal-feminine into an unsexed, inexhaus-
tible, and fully reversible flesh. This logic
excludes the mother by including her in a
closed circuit where she can only appear as the
primordial condition for man’s self-relation, and
never emerge on her own terms as a subject or an
other. Irigaray’s critique raises an important
issue, and yet her resistance to the depersonaliza-
tion of the feminine mother seems to block an
exploration of the feminist possibilities raised by
Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh. In her paper on
ethics and sexual difference in Merleau-Ponty and
Irigaray, Judith Butler writes:
In [Irigaray’s] view, there is no masculine
without a prior implication in the terms of the
feminine, and there is no feminine without a
prior implication in the terms of the mascu-
line; each term admits to its own internal
impossibility through its relation to the Other.
The relation is not primarily that of an
encounter, but, rather, of a constitutive
intertwining, a dynamic differentiation in
proximity. (115)
In what remains of this section, I argue that
Merleau-Ponty’s (admittedly brief) remarks on
sexual difference in The Visible and the Invisible
suggest a similar reciprocity of masculine and
feminine, even though he develops this recipro-
city in terms of an impersonal, anonymous, yet
23
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generative flesh. While the concept of flesh
cannot be coherently understood as a ‘‘mother,’’
and while it should not be signified as feminine,
it nevertheless raises the possibility of an exciting
account of sexual difference, and it does so
precisely to the extent that the flesh remains
impersonal and anonymous.
Merleau-Ponty gives no clear indication of
whether he thinks sexual difference plays a part
in the ‘‘birth’’ of self and other, but he does rely
on the logic of sexual difference to explicate the
relation between self and other. In a working note
for The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty
writes:
The I–other relation to be conceived (like
the intersexual relation, with its indefinite
substitutions . . .) as complementary roles one
of which cannot be occupied without the other
being also: masculinity implies femininity, etc.
Fundamental polymorphism by reason of
which I do not have to constitute the other
in face of the Ego: he is already there, and the
Ego is conquered from him. Describe the
pre-egology, the ‘‘syncretism,’’ indivision or
transitivism. What is it that there is at this
level? There is the vertical or carnal universe
and its polymorphic matrix. Absurdity of the
tabula rasa on which cognitions would be
arranged: not that there be cognitions before
cognitions, but because there is the field.
The I–other problem: a Western problem.
(VI 220–21)
Just as masculinity implies femininity, the self
implies the other; neither side of these mutually
implicative relations can be properly understood
on its own. Rather, both must be understood
in relation to the field, or ‘‘polymorphic matrix,’’
or ‘‘vertical or carnal universe’’ which gives rise
to the relation. Confusions arise when we attempt
to take one side of the relation as a starting point
for explaining the other, as when classical
phenomenology attempts to explain the genesis
of the other in consciousness, rather than the
mutual divergence of self and other within the
reflective structure of flesh. In this working note,
Merleau-Ponty seems to assume that the mascu-
line–feminine relation is straightforward enough
to explain the I–other relation without requiring
any special explanation of its own. But given that
 sexual difference
he has described the I–other relation at greater
length throughout his work, we may be able to
work backwards from the relation that Merleau-
Ponty finds necessary to explain towards the
relation he invokes without explanation.
In what sense does masculinity imply femi-
ninity? If sexual difference marks a basic cleavage
within humanity, such that all human beings are
either men or women (bracketing for the moment
all the various exceptions and complications of
this rule), then it is impossible to conceive of one
without the other. One could no more posit men
without women than left without right, inside
without outside, since these are relational terms
which only make sense in pairs.5 Throughout all
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the ‘‘indefinite substitutions’’ of what Merleau-
Ponty calls ‘‘the intersexual relation’’ – all the
different ways in which men and women relate to
one another across the threshold of sexual
difference – the terms masculine and feminine
remain irreducible to each another, emerging
through mutual divergence from a polymorphous
field of being which is itself neither masculine nor
feminine. Already, this analysis provides the basis
for a critique of ontological localism with respect
to sexual difference; the sense of masculinity or
femininity must be found in the relation, rather
than in bodies or parts of bodies from one side or
the other. But what can we say about the genesis
of this relation? Merleau-Ponty traces the relation
of I–other, and presumably of masculine–
feminine, to a ‘‘fundamental polymorphism,’’ an
‘‘indivision or transitivity’’ from which both sides
of the dual structure arise in tandem, mutually
shaping each other. One need not explain how the
ego ‘‘constitutes’’ the other – indeed, it is a false
question to pose – because one does not exist
without the other; I become myself through my
encounters with others, and vice versa. Both sides
emerge as mutual divergences within a flesh that
is impersonal and anonymous, that is neither a
self nor an other, but a matrix of possibilities. To
the extent that Western ontologies overlook this
radical transitivity of the flesh in order to posit
self and other as discrete beings, the I–other
problem may be, as Merleau-Ponty suggests,
‘‘a Western problem.’’
It is tempting to transfer these insights
immediately from the I–other relation to the
masculine–feminine relation. The sense of mas-
culinity and femininity would arise equiprimor-
dially through a mutual divergence from one
another, in the wake of whose double movement
we discover a polymorphous flesh which both
connects and distinguishes between different
forms of humanity. Like self and other, masculine
and feminine would be different but mutually
implicated articulations of the flesh, where
neither can be posited as the first or generic
form of the human. Rather, humanity would exist
only as a zone of mutual divergence, a ‘‘poly-
morphous matrix’’ which enables multiple forms
of intersubjective and ‘‘intersexual’’ life. This
zone would not be a blank slate or empty interval,
but rather a thickness of flesh which articulates
difference within the sameness of a ‘‘block
of common life’’ (VI 12), a ‘‘common tissue’’
(VI 203). Just as flesh cannot be separated from
the movement of mutual divergence which gives
birth to its various articulations, so too humanity
exists only through its variously sexed forms. The
‘‘indivision or transitivism’’ that Merleau-Ponty
locates at the level of the flesh allows us to
imagine a proliferation of different relations
between and among masculine and feminine
articulations of humanity, while still confirming
that both must be in circulation, since (thus far,
at least) sexual reproduction requires both sexes.
This account seems promising to me, but
before we can run ahead with it we must note the
ways in which the analogy between self–other
and masculine–feminine threatens to fall apart.
The relation of self and other is fully reversible,
while masculine and feminine do not seem to be.
In conversation, as in mutual looking and
touching, the positions of self and other are
traded back and forth, sometimes so quickly that
the two become indistinguishable. Furthermore,
there is never just one self and one other, but
rather a multiplicity of seeing–seen or touching–
touched beings who occupy different shifting
positions in relation to one another. How could
we explain the full complexity of sexual differ-
ence, or of intersubjectivity for that matter,
beginning from a notion of ‘‘complementary
roles,’’ as if men and women were interlocking
pieces in the puzzle of humanity? Does not
the duality of these terms already foreclose the
24

possibility of articulating the full range of human
sexuation – androgynous, intersexed, transsexual
bodies – as well as the different ways in which
this sexuation is lived in relation to gender and
sexuality? Merleau-Ponty may affirm a ‘‘funda-
mental polymorphism’’ at the level of the flesh,
but the flesh is not a being; it is an ontological
concept. Must polymorphic beings, like inter-
sexed subjects, be understood in relation to the
basic duality of male and female? And if so,
has our phenomenological analysis come much
further than the popular imagination, which
circumscribes the sense of sexual difference
within a male–female duality?
In another working note from The Visible and
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the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty further complicates
the issues I have raised by taking us a step back,
and then a leap forward, within the same sentence.
In this passage, Merleau-Ponty relates ‘‘the male–
female relation’’ to ‘‘two pieces of wood that
children see fitting together of themselves,
irresistibly, because each is the possible of the
other’’ (VI 228). On one hand, we are brought
back to the puzzle-piece theory of humanity, where
male and female bodies are destined for one
another like a lock and key.6 But on the other
hand, the phrase ‘‘each is the possible of the
other’’ suggests a way of developing our account of
sexual difference in terms of a mutual divergence
of the flesh. On this reading, feminine and
masculine would not be the two basic forms of a
more general human ‘‘type’’; rather, the feminine
would exist as the possible of the masculine,
and the masculine as the possible of the feminine.
The mutual divergence of these possibilities would
create a porous zone of interpenetrating possibi-
lities in relation to which no single being could
posit itself as purely masculine or purely feminine,
since it also bears the possibility of the other.
This idea might fecundate a notion of humanity
which does not base itself on one (apparently
universal) standard, but rather facilitates a break-
ing-forth of many different polymorphous forms
of sexuate life. If masculinity and femininity are
considered not as separate terms but rather
as bearers of the ‘‘possible of the other,’’ then
one might say that they are ‘‘pregnant’’ with
each other, already anticipating and enabling
the difference of the other.
25
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And yet this brings us back to the question of
irreversibility raised by Irigaray in her reading
of Merleau-Ponty. Is it really anything more than
a fantasy to imagine the masculine as ‘‘pregnant’’
with the possibility of the feminine? In practice
and in historical memory, isn’t it always the
feminine which is made to bear the masculine,
along with the full weight of sexuate life?
Merleau-Ponty’s image of the two pieces
of wood that fit into each other as if by
‘‘destination’’ seems to confirm this suspicion
by reducing the possibility of double divergence
to a complementary pairing in which two
mutually exclusive forms fit neatly together,
to the exclusion of all other possibilities.7
In addition to reinforcing a normative duality
of male and female, this view seems to sanction
heterosexual pairing as an inevitable outcome,
as the only way for human beings to complete
themselves.8
How might we make sense of Merleau-Ponty’s
provocative suggestion that ‘‘each [sex] is the
possible of the other’’ without falling into the trap
of restricting the sense of sexual difference to
a two-way street where male and female are
destined to fit together like pieces of a puzzle?
The challenge for my project of developing a non-
reductive, non-oppositional account of sexual
difference beginning from Merleau-Ponty’s onto-
logical account of the flesh as a ‘‘pregnancy
of possibles’’ is to show how a polymorphous
plurality – and not just a duality – may emerge
through the mutual divergence of masculine and
feminine. To develop this account, I draw on
Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on embryology in
his Collège de France Lectures on Institution
(1954–55) and Nature (1956–60).
II the institution of sexual difference
The silliest notion has just crossed my
mind . . . Perhaps men are nothing but a
freakish variety of women, or women only a
freakish variety of men . . . (Diderot,
‘‘D’Alembert’s Dream’’ qtd in Laqueur 26)
It may seem odd to discuss embryology in a
phenomenological account of sexual difference.
After all, we do not experience our own
embryological development as consciousness,
 sexual difference
so what could an inquiry into embryology
possibly contribute to our sense of ourselves, or
to the sense of sexual difference? But Merleau-
Ponty’s distinctive approach to phenomenology,
starting from the anonymous flesh rather than
from consciousness, and his late account of the
institution of a sense rather than its constitution
in consciousness, suggest that we may reflect on
biological patterns such as embryological devel-
opment without leaving the realm of phenomen-
ological ontology. We could reformulate this
claim in stronger terms: precisely because the
reflective structure of flesh is more fundamental
than consciousness, our phenomenological reflec-
tion on sexual difference should not confine itself
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to conscious experience, but should look to more
fundamental patterns that cross the apparent line
between body and mind, nature and culture.
This is precisely what the concept of institu-
tion seeks to do. Rather than developing two
different vocabularies for the discussion of
biological and cultural phenomena – and without
reducing one realm to the other, as if culture
could be understood in biological terms or vice
versa – Merleau-Ponty develops a flexible concept
of the temporal process whereby a sense is
instituted in general:
[B]y institution we were intending those
events of an experience which endow the
experience with durable dimensions, in rela-
tion to which a whole series of other
experiences will make sense, and will form a
thinkable sequel or a history – or again the
events which deposit in me a sense, not as
something surviving or as a residue, but as a
call to follow, the demand of a future. (IP 77)
While in classical phenomenology the constitu-
tion of sense is the work of intentional conscious-
ness (such that the sense of the other, for
example, arises within consciousness as the
result of its own apperception, pairing and so
forth), in Merleau-Ponty’s late lecture notes the
institution of sense establishes the ‘‘durable
dimensions’’ of a field within which both self
and other (to continue the same example) emerge
in relation to each other. This field is not a static
set of parameters, but rather a pattern which
is both repeatable and open to modifications,
both rooted in a material past and oriented
towards a future that calls and demands a
response. Merleau-Ponty explains the temporality
of institution in enigmatic, but suggestive, detail:
Time is the very model of institution:9
passivity–activity, it continues, because it has
been instituted, it fuses, it cannot stop being,
it is total because it is partial, it is a field. One
can speak of a quasi-eternity not by the
escaping of instants towards the non-being of
the future, but by the exchange of my times
lived between the instants, the identification
between them, the interference and static of
the relations of filiation (cf. Guérin) (neither
an objective filiation nor the choice of the
ancestors). Lateral kinship of all the ‘‘nows’’
which makes for their confusion, their ‘‘gen-
erality,’’ a ‘‘transtemporality’’ of decline and
decadence . . . Originary time is neither deca-
dence (delay back upon itself) nor anticipation
(advance forward upon itself), but is on time,
the time that it is. (IP 7)
Like the flesh, institution involves a ‘‘pregnancy
of possibles’’ (VI 250); it engenders a ‘‘lateral
kinship’’ of instants which are not simply
arranged in a linear order from past to present
to future, but rather communicate with one
another to the point of confusion, generality or
‘‘transtemporality.’’10 This lateral kinship is not
a cause/effect relation whereby a parent-instant
produces a child-instant; rather, as a pattern of
transtemporality, it involves the cross-fertilization
of different possibilities, in exchanges which are
neither active nor passive but passive–active.
Through these exchanges, a meaningful pattern –
the ‘‘durable dimensions’’ of a sense – gradually
emerges, but this pattern remains open to
alteration, not only by future developments but
also by the pressure of past moments which retain
their kinship with the present and future. When
Merleau-Ponty says that originary time is ‘‘on
time, the time that it is,’’ I take him to be saying,
contra Heidegger, that time is not ecstatic, that
the present is not merely an ‘‘Augenblick’’
between future and past, anticipation and repeti-
tion. Rather, time spreads itself out like a tissue
or field through which all moments are related
and may cross-fertilize one another in patterned,
but also in unexpected, ways. Time is now;
26

its dynamism does not depend on a leap into
the abyss, but rather on the fecundity of
interconnections which hollow out a place for
the emergence of both the familiar and the new.
Each emergence has the potential to make the
entire past light up differently; near-forgotten
elements may be brought forward to contribute to
a sense which never existed before. This is not
to say that time is a free-for-all, but rather
that there is a plasticity of originary time which
both linear and ecstatic accounts of time fail
to grasp.
The sense of time emerges for Merleau-Ponty
through transverse connections which gather and
repeat particulars in partially new, partially old
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ways. This approach to time suggests interesting
implications for our understanding of embryolo-
gical development, and in particular embryologi-
cal sexuation. As an embryo develops in the
womb, it gradually transforms from a fertilized
egg into a cluster of cells, and eventually into an
organism with increasingly distinct and complex
structures. How and why does this development
happen? Is the sense of the mature organism
already contained in the fertilized egg cell, like a
blueprint or a Platonic Form, such that it need
only be unfolded or materialized? If so, then it
would hardly matter if the developing embryo
were exposed to alcohol, cigarette smoke or
radiation in the womb; we would not expect
contingent influences to alter the course of
development. In his Nature: Course Notes,
Merleau-Ponty argues against the view that the
sense of the organism is merely unpacked from a
ready-made ‘‘sack of possibles’’ (Nature 234),
suggesting rather that the organism develops
in space and time through the elimination of
concrete alternatives (see Morris 71–75 for a more
detailed discussion).
In his discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s notes on
ontogenesis, David Morris explains that, while the
embryological growth of legs or antennae may be
genetically prescribed, their precise locations do
not come already mapped out in extensive space;
rather, these locations emerge gradually through
an overlapping of genetic signals which restrict
the growth of legs in one place and so allow it
in another. The growth of legs does not merely
happen ‘‘in’’ space and ‘‘in’’ time; rather, it
27
guenther
is instituted through the temporal rhythms
of genetic signals which spatialize their growth.
In this sense, we could say that the body is made
of space and time; its material structures emerge
in response to processes of temporalization and
spatialization regulated by the patterned circula-
tion of genetic messages. Moreover, it is not
merely the content of these messages, but their
elimination from certain domains and restriction
to others, that makes possible the growth of a leg
in the appropriate place (Morris 82). Both
the direction of embryonic development and the
burgeoning sense of the organism rely on spatio-
temporal processes whereby being is neither
localized in advance nor produced all at once.
Morris comments:
[I]t is because there are intensive differences
of place and time, it is because being is not
all one that being is generative of
sense . . . Being is not a plenum, it is emptied
out by intensive place and time differences;
but these differences, we must note, are not
even yet given as such, we must not think that
being is already emptied out, for this would
reduce negative differences to a positivity.
(83–84)
Or, as Merleau-Ponty says in the Institution
Lectures:
[T]he idea as field does not contain what will
be developed in it, and yet, the idea sends a
teleology down a path. The development is not
rectilinear, but its zig-zags are [a] develop-
ment, for the rectilinear is Sinnentleerung,
and the zig-zag resumes, reactivates in
a different way what has been founded.
(IP 98–99)
Or again, in a working note for The Visible and
the Invisible dated January 1960:
[T]he vortex of the embryogenesis suddenly
centers itself upon the interior hollow it was
preparing – A certain fundamental divergence,
a certain constitutive dissonance emerges . . .
It is in the universal structure ‘‘world’’ –
encroachment of everything upon everything,
a being by promiscuity – that is found the
reservoir whence proceeds this absolute new
life.11 (VI 233–34)
 sexual difference
The unfolding of a new possibility, such as the
possibility of growing legs, does not involve a
simple transition from non-being to being,
potential to actual, or plan to execution. Rather,
future events may open up new directions in
processes that are already underway, such that
certain possibilities only appear as such in
retrospect, as details that have become significant
only in light of later developments. The possibi-
lities of the organism, then, exist as much in
the past as in the present or future; any given
possibility is constantly modified by other
emerging possibilities, which are in turn
restricted by other processes of elimination and
restriction.
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How might this approach to embryology as the
institution of a sense, or as a spatio-temporal
process of possibilization within a field, affect
our understanding of the embryological develop-
ment of sex differences? Up until its sixth week
of development, the human embryo does not yet
have sexually differentiated reproductive organs;
rather, it has what is called an ‘‘indifferent
gonad’’ with both proto-male (Wolffian) and
proto-female (Müllerian) ducts. At this point, the
embryo’s sense – its meaning and its direction –
remains open, pluripotent. Even if it has XX
chromosomes, and even if it is typical for an
embryo with XX chromosomes to develop
ovaries, a uterus, a vagina, and so forth, a
substantial increase in testosterone at this point
may orient the embryo towards the development
of testes and/or a penis. As with the development
of legs or antennae, chemical signals create
certain possibilities for the organism by eliminat-
ing others; to the extent that sexuation is taken in
one direction, the structures necessary for taking
the other direction wither away, and to the extent
that neither direction is taken more than the
other, both sets of structures may develop to an
equal extent, eventually producing an infant body
with a vagina and/or a penis, an ovary and/or
a testis, or a combined ovo-testis (see Fausto-
Sterling, Myths of Gender 77–85, for a fuller
account of this process).
Given the range of different possibilities
for human sexuation, Anne Fausto-Sterling
proposes a continuum model of sexual difference,
identifying five points or clusters along this
continuum: females, ferms (female pseudoher-
maphrodites), herms, merms (male pseudoher-
maphrodites) and males (‘‘Five Sexes’’).12 These
terms do not refer to discrete ‘‘kinds’’ but rather
to what we could now call, in the context of our
previous discussion of Merleau-Ponty, degrees
of mutual divergence. An organism with XY
chromosomes does not automatically become
phenotypically male, as if determined in advance
by a genetic blueprint; rather, it develops in a
male direction to a greater or lesser extent by
limiting the possibilities inherent in its initial
pluripotency. If a certain negativity is essential to
the process of embryonic growth – if restriction
and elimination condition the very possibility of
growth, such that these possibilities are not
merely unpacked ready-made from a sack,
but emerge in dynamic interrelation with past,
present and future events – then we might expect
to find a similar negativity also at work in the
process of sexual differentiation. When we
consider the matter more closely, we find that
this negativity is even more complicated in the
case of sexual development. A leg may or may not
grow, and it may or may not grow in the usual
place. But the process of human sexuation
regularly produces at least two, and by some
counts five or more, ways of being sexed, each of
which emerges in mutual divergence from the
others, beginning from an ‘‘indifferent gonad’’
with both proto-male and proto-female structures.
The more determinate the sex of the embryo
becomes, the more it must eliminate other
directions for growth; sexuation entails a certain
loss for the individual organism, even for the
hermaphrodite who develops both a penis and
a vagina, for example, only by not developing a
more extreme sexual determinacy in either
direction. What is the sense of this loss, and
what is its significance for sexual difference?
We could understand the loss of alternative
directions as the blockage of a possibility that was
not actualized, and has therefore ceased to be
possible. But this understanding would fall back
into the ‘‘sack of possibles’’ theory of develop-
ment, reducing possibility to a potential presence
that either remains in a state of non-being or
exhausts itself in becoming actual. It would
also commit the mistake of ontological localism,
28

as if the sense of sexual difference could be
located in a single organism or in one of its parts.
But if we want to understand sexual difference
phenomenologically, we cannot look to this or
that body or part, nor even to a collection of
bodies and parts. Rather, we must articulate the
field of being from which the sense of sexual
difference emerges, and this means articulating
the relations of mutual divergence which dis-
tribute sexual difference across differently sexed
bodies through a temporalizing and spatializing
process that begins in the womb, but does not
end there.13 Viewed from this perspective, the
loss of certain directions of sexual development
for one body does not extinguish the possibility
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of different modes of sexuation, but rather
distributes this possibility across the field of
intersubjective relations. I encounter the possibi-
lity of being sexed otherwise every day in my
exchanges with parents, friends, sexual partners,
colleagues, and even strangers who are sexed
differently from me, and I also encounter it
in those who have different ways of being the
‘‘same’’ sex. The possibility of being sexed
otherwise, a possibility that was ‘‘mine’’ before
I even had a sense of myself as consciousness, is
not lost but rather encountered across a threshold
of intersubjective difference, or alterity.
Where divergent forms are possible for an
organism, where it is not just a matter of having
or lacking certain parts, but of being differently,
the sense of this difference is not contained in any
one being or form, but rather distributed across
the plurality of different beings who embody
these forms.14 As with the seeing–seen relation,
no single body can encapsulate the full sense of
sexual difference, since this sense is not deposited
in the individual body, but rather distributed
across a range of different bodies whose develop-
ment takes different directions and produces
different sexuate forms. A zone of mutual
divergence and encroachment remains between
these bodies, like a connective tissue or flesh
which both distinguishes bodies and orients them
towards one another as the site of (their own
eliminated possibilities for) sexual difference.
Precisely because there are others who embody
the other forms in whose direction I could have,
but did not, develop, I discover my ‘‘lost’’
29
guenther
possibilities for the first time outside of myself, in
the bodies of others. This suggests that these
possibilities were never really lost, because they
were never mine to begin with; they exist in the
web of relationships between bodies who differ
from one another within a field of mutual
divergence. This field forms the very texture of
our sexuate lives; it is not merely an abstract
ontological concept, but (also) the dimension
within which our sexed bodies make sense as
nodes of possibility rather than fixed points
or destinations.
To translate this into the language that
Merleau-Ponty uses in The Visible and the
Invisible, sexual difference forms a chiasm with
intersubjectivity; the masculine–feminine relation
not only mirrors the I–other relation, it forms a
double relation of mutual implication with it.
Sexuation makes sense across the terrain of
intersubjectivity, where self and other encounter
each other as ‘‘extreme divergences of one same
something’’ (VI 84), or as ‘‘the preferred variant
of a life that has never been my own’’ (VI 82 fn.
14). Likewise, intersubjectivity makes sense not
merely in relation to the duality of masculine
and feminine, but in relation to the plurality of
mutually divergent sexuate forms, each of which
bears ‘‘the possible of the other’’ (VI 228). I insist
on plurality here, and not just a duality of man
and woman, both in order to recognize the
continuum of spontaneously occurring sexuate
forms noted by Fausto-Sterling, and also in order
to emphasize the openness of sexed bodies to
resignification and, in recent years, to re-sexua-
tion through surgical and hormonal therapies.
It is not merely the empirical occurrence of
differently sexed bodies beyond the male–female
duality, but the political and cultural movements
of intersex and transsexual communities reopen
the question of sexual difference, putting pres-
sure on the presumed duality of sex.15 Like those
contingent events in the development of an
organism that alter the sense of processes already
underway, contemporary intersex and transsexual
movements create new possibilities for under-
standing the logic of sexual difference.16 In the
specific context of this paper, these movements
also open new ways of reading the texts of
Merleau-Ponty, new possibilities provoked into
 sexual difference
existence by emerging forms of sexuate identity
and community.
By approaching sexual difference in terms of
intersubjectively distributed possibilities rather
than interlocking forms or types (as in Merleau-
Ponty’s image of the two blocks of wood), we may
grasp the temporality of sexual difference as both
a developmental process in which bodies become
sexed (and sometimes re-sexed) over time, and as
a social-historical process in which patterns
of relation and exchange between sexed bodies
shift over time, altering the very sense of sexual
difference. Sex is not destiny, not because
nurture ultimately triumphs over nature, but
because even in biological development, the sense
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of sexual difference emerges within a field of
contingent intersubjective relationships, where
each of us bears ‘‘the possible of the other’’ and
(re)discovers our own history of divergences
in the bodies of others. Rather than opposing
nature to nurture, biology to culture, and so
forth, we need to grasp the temporal processes by
which bodies materialize and become meaningful
in mutual divergence from one another. The
patterns of exchange among variously sexed
bodies implicate each other in the possibility of
making sense of themselves and of others, in ways
that remain irreducible to a man–woman duality.
This possibility of making sense cannot be
actualized in the form of propositional statements
because sense is generated from an open field
where patterns emerge through elimination and
mutual divergence rather than through the
application of a rule or norm. For this reason,
the sense of sexual difference cannot be articu-
lated in relation to types of bodies that either
embody or fail to embody a norm, nor even in
relation to a continuum of differences that would
again be structured around two ideal poles.
Rather, we must take into account the way in
which divergent forms of sexuation are distrib-
uted across an intersubjective field of different
bodies, each with its own distinct but overlapping
history.
From this perspective, the trope of mutual
divergence allows us to explain both the plurality
of sexuate forms and their encroachment or
overlapping; it provides a non-oppositional logic
of difference as the effect of a temporalizing
and spatializing process which is both natural and
historical, biological and ontological. And most
importantly, it gives us a way of articulating the
sense of sexual difference in terms of a possibility
that does not extinguish itself in this or that
actual form, but rather renews itself in our
encounters with diverse others. Without shifting
our attention from bodies or parts to the field of
being which generates their sense, we would miss
the zone of mutual divergence and encroachment
which distinguishes the directionality of sexual
development from a destination where the end is
already inscribed in the beginning. If sex were
destiny, then it would make perfect sense to read
back from the part to the whole, or from the end
to the beginning, to understand being and
becoming in terms of particular beings. But
given that each of us becomes who we are through
a divergence from the possibility of the other(s),
phenomenological reflection is required to dis-
cern how these sexual differences are lived,
not just at an embryological level, but in a
complex social and historical
world. Both the meaning and
the direction, le sens, of our
sexuate lives are at stake in this
reflection.
notes
I would like to thank Bettina Bergo, David Morris,
Noah Moss Brender and Shiloh Whitney for their
comments on a draft of this paper.
1 See Levinas, Time and the Other and Totality
and Infinity.
2 ‘‘Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh,
the mother’’ (VI 267).
3 Merleau-Ponty continues: ‘‘[T]he soul is the
hollow of the body, the body is the distension
of the soul’’ (VI 233). The relation between
body and soul ‘‘is to be understood as the
bond between the convex and the concave,
between the solid vault and the hollow it forms’’
(VI 231).
4 The encounter with an other is therefore an
‘‘initiation to a symbolics and a typicality of others
of which the being for itself and the being for the
other are reflective variants and not the essential
forms’’ (VI 82 fn.14).
30

5 Indeed, we could think of men and women as
‘‘total parts’’ of humanity, where each expresses
the totality of the human, but only in its partiality,
which in turn implies a reference to the other sex.
SeeVI134, 216 ^17 for a discussion of ‘‘total parts.’’
6 There may be a more generous way of reading
this phrase in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s image of
a mutually defining surface between self and other.
This ‘‘surface of separation and of union . . . is the
invisible hinge upon which my life and the life of
the others turn to rock into one another, the
inner framework of intersubjectivity’’ (VI 234).
But even this image implies a duality ^ self and
other, male and female ^ where the only
‘‘between’’ is the hinge of their mutual relation.
For this reason, its promise remains limited for
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my project of opening up the logic of sexual differ-
ence to a plurality ^ unless the hinge is conceived
as a zone of mutual divergence rather than a
simple point.
7 This image is reminiscent of Aristophanes’comic
account of the genesis of sexual difference in
Plato’s Symposium (189C^193d), where humans
begin as double-sided beings who are then split
in half by Zeus, and so spend their whole lives
searching for the other half that will complete
their wounded being. But to the extent that
Merleau-Ponty grasps sexual difference in terms
of possibility rather than fixed forms, the encoun-
ter with the other need not be understood to fill
in a gap in my own identity, because on the account
of intersubjectivity I have given here there is no gap;
there is rather a hollow that makes determination
possible, but does not seal off the possibilities
for further development in divergent directions.
I elaborate this reading in the second section of
this paper.
8 This interpretation is supported by another
passing remark in The Visible and the Invisible: ‘‘The
other is born from my side, by a sort of propaga-
tion by cuttings or by subdivisions, as the first
other, says Genesis, was made from a part of
Adam’s body’’ (VI 59). Depending on whether one
emphasizes ‘‘from my side’’ or ‘‘from a part of
Adam’s body,’’ woman appears either as equal
or secondary. In any case, woman is aligned
with the other, and man/Adam with the self.
Note also the formulation of the passage
analyzed above: ‘‘The I^ other relation to be con-
ceived . . . as complementary roles one of which
cannot be occupied without the other being also:
masculinity implies femininity, etc.’’ (VI 220 ^21).
31
guenther
I have assumed that the ‘‘etc.’’ implies that feminin-
ity also implies masculinity, but the parallelism is
clearly between I ^ other and masculine ^ feminine.
The issues of sexual difference and temporality
raised by this biblical reference are so complex,
and yet so radically undeveloped in Merleau-
Ponty’s work, that I have bracketed them for the
purposes of this paper. I address these issues in a
different context in ‘‘Who Follows Whom?
Derrida, Animals and Women.’’
9 Merleau-Ponty adds in the margin: ‘‘that which
is and demands to be; it has to become what it is’’
(IP 80).
10 Merleau-Ponty explicitly compares institution
to birth:
[F]rom the moment of conception and still
more after birth, there is an encroachment
towards a future which is made from itself,
under certain given conditions, and which is
not the act of a Sinngebung. Birth [is not an
act] of constitution but the institution of
a future. Reciprocally, institution resides in
the same genus of Being as birth and is not,
any more than birth, an act. There will be
later decisionary institutions or contracts,
but they are to be understood on the basis
of birth and not the reverse. (IP 8)
From the perspective of institution, birth is the
emergence of someone to whom something can
happen; it is the opening of a future, not from
nothing, but from a field of possibilities which is
itself shifting as some of these possibilities are
taken up and others left behind. The future of the
one who is born encroaches; it is neither projected
nor mapped out in advance, but is made from the
one who is born and the situation into which s/he is
born. Birth is an event, an emergence of the new
from what was already there, but which will be
altered in relation to that which is born.
11 See also Merleau-Ponty’s comments on
embryonic development in the chiasm chapter of
The Visible and the Invisible:
[A]s though, through all these channels,
all these prepared but unemployed circuits,
the current that will traverse them was ren-
dered probable, in the long run inevitable:
the current making of an embryo a newborn
infant, of a visible a seer, and of a body a
mind, or at least a flesh. In spite of all our
 sexual difference
substantialist ideas, the seer is being pre-
meditated in counterpoint in the embryonic
development; through a labour upon itself
the visible body provides for the hollow
whence a vision will come, inaugurates the
long maturation at whose term suddenly
it will see, that is, will be visible for itself,
will institute the interminable gravitation,
the indefatigable metamorphosis of the
seeing and the visible whose principle is
posed and which gets underway with the
first vision. What we are calling flesh,
this interiorly worked-over mass, has no
name in any philosophy . . . (VI147)
12 In ‘‘The Five Sexes, Revisited,’’ Fausto-Sterling
complicates this model of the continuum into a
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multidimensional map which takes into account
differences at the chromosomal, hormonal,
and anatomical level, not to mention differences
in gender and sexuality. However, the concept
of sexual differences in degree rather than
kind remains in this expanded version of the
model.
13 A second period of intense sexual development
occurs at puberty, and arguably continues
throughout adult life in more or less subtle
ways. See IP 56 ^ 61 for a discussion of puberty.
Transsexuals take up the possibility of diverging
from one’s born sex through a combination of hor-
mone therapy and sex reassignment surgery, both
of which unfold over months and even years of
transitioning. See Prosser 99^134 for a discussion
of the complex role that narrative plays in
this spatio-temporal process of changing sex.
Needless to say, the transsexual does not merely
actualize the‘‘lost’’possibility of being sexed other-
wise, thus canceling out the negativity involved
in sexuation, but rather takes up this possibility
in a way that shifts the dynamics of the field,
underscoring the sense in which each body bears
its own history of sexuation, and its own particular
relation to the modes of sexuation from which
it diverges.
14 Arguably, this pertains not only to sexual
difference but to other forms of embodied differ-
ence, such as race and abilities.
15 See Laqueur for an historical account of shifts
in biological accounts of sexual difference, from
the one-sex model of Aristotle and Galen to
the two-sex model of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century biology.
16 In the present paper, I do not have room to dis-
cuss in detail the influence of trans and intersex
theory on my approach to sexual difference;
a fuller discussion will be forthcoming in the next
stage of this project. For the time being, I can only
list the authors whose work has most influenced
my thinking: Clare, Lane, Prosser, Salamon,
Shotwell, and Stone. For another component of
my own project, see ‘‘Other Fecundities.’’
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