MERLEAU-PONTY IN CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE

PHAENOMENOLOGICA

COLLECTION FONDEE PAR H.L. VAN BREDA ET PUBLIEE SOUS LE PATRONAGE DES CENTRES D'ARCHIVES-HUSSERL

129

MERLEAU-PONTY IN CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE

Edited by PATRICK BURKE and

JAN VAN DER VEKEN

Comite de redaction de la collection: President: S. IJsseling (Leuven)

Membres: W. Marx (Freiburg i. Br.), J.N. Mohanty (Philadelphia), P. Ricreur (Paris), E. Straker (KOln), J. Taminiaux (Louvain-Ia-Neuve),

Secretaire: J. Taminiaux

MERLEAU-PONTY

IN

CONTEMPORARY

PERSPECTIVES

Edited by PATRICK BURKE and

lAN VAN DER VEKEN

.....

" SPRlNGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B. V.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Merleau-Ponty in contemporary perspective! edited by Patrick Burke and Jan Van der Veken.

p. cm. -- IPhaenomenologica ; v. 129) Papers presented at the internatIonal sympasium on Merleau-Ponty.

held in Nov. 1991 by the Institute of Philosophy and the Husserl Archives at the Kathol ieke Universiteit te Leuven.

rncludes bibl iographical references and index. ISBN 978·94·010-4768·5 ISBN 978·94·011·1751·7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978·94·011·1751·7

1. Merleau-Ponty. Maurice. 1908-1961--Congresses. r. Burke. Patrick. II. Veken. Jan van der. III. Series, Phaenomenologica 129. B2430.M3764M4695 1993 194--dc20 92-38343

ISBN 978-94-010-4768-5

printed an acid-free paper

AII Rights Reserved © 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Oordrecht

Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1993 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover lst edition 1993

No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

To the memory of Joseph Van de Wiele and Louis Van Haecht

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCES xi

JAN VAN DER VEKEN / Preface xiii

PATRICK BURKE / Introduction xvii

PART I: INTERROGATION AND THINKING

BERNHARD WALDENFELS / Interrogative Thinking: Reflections 3 on Merleau-Ponty's Later Philosophy

BURKHARD LIEBSCH / Archeological Questioning: Merleau-Ponty 13 and Ricoeur

FRAN<;OISE DASTUR / Merleau-Ponty and Thinking from Within 25

MARC RICHIR / Merleau-Ponty and the Question of Pheno- 37 menological Architectonics

PART II: NATURE, THE UNCONSCIOUS, AND DESIRE

RUDOLF BERNET / The Subject in Nature: Reflections on Merleau- 53 Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception

M. C. DILLON / The Unconscious: Language and World 69

GALEN A. JOHNSON / Desire and Invisibility in "Eye and Mind": 85 Some Remarks on Merleau-Ponty's Spirituality

vii

viii T ABLE OF CONTENTS

PART III: EXPRESSION, CREATION, AND INTERPRETATION

EDWIN WEIHE / Merleau-Ponty's Doubt: The Wild of Nothing 99

RUDI VISKER / Raw Being and Violent Discourse: Foucault, 109 Merleau-Ponty and the (Dis-)Order of Things

JAMES RISSER / Communication and the Prose of the World: The 131 Question of Language in Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer

PART IV: POLITICS, ETHICS, AND ONTOLOGY

STEPHEN WATSON / Merleau-Ponty, the Ethics of Ambiguity, and 147 the Dialectics of Virtue

LAURA BOELLA / Phenomenology and Ontology: Hannah Arendt 171 and Maurice Merleau-Ponty

PART V: EPILOGUE

G. B. MADISON / Merleau-Ponty in Retrospect 183

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 197

NAME INDEX 201

Acknowledgements

A significant debt of gratitude is owed to Professor Samuel IJsseling, Director of the Husserl-Archives at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven for his kind support and encouragement in bringing forth this volume in the Phaenomenologica series. Gestures of thanks and deep appreciation are offered to Ms. Ingrid Lombaerts and Mr. Steven Spileers for their professional assis­tance in final manuscript preparation. Permission from Professor Marc Richir, co-editor of Merleau-Ponty, phenomenologie et experiences (Jerome Millon, 1992), to publish the English translations of the essays of Professors Bernet and Dastur is gratefully acknowledged. Words of gratitude are extended to the contributing authors and translators whose scholarship and expertise have made this collection possible, and in particular to Professors Boella, Dastur, and Richir for permission to publish their essays in English.

ix

Abbreviations and References

Detailed references (edition, translator, publisher, date of publication, etc.) to the particular texts of Merleau-Ponty are given in each essay, usually on first mention of the text; thereafter, a standard form of shorter citation may be used, depending upon the author. For frequently cited works of Merleau­Ponty, the following abbreviations are employed volume-wide, wherever an author has elected to use abbreviations.

English

AD Adventures of the Dialectic CR "Christianity and Ressentiment" EM "Eye and Mind" HT Humanism and Terror IPP In Praise of Philosophy PhP Phenomenology of Perception PNP "Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel" PriP The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological

Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics PW The Prose of the World S Signs SB The Structure of Behavior SNS Sense and Non-Sense TLC Themes from the Lectures at the College de France 1952-1960 UP "An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of

His Work" VI The Visible and the Invisible

French

EP Eloge de la philosophie

xi

xii ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCES

OE L'Oeil et L'esprit PP PhenomenoLogie de la perception PriP Le Primat de la perception et ses consequences philosophiques PM La Prose du monde RC Resumes de cours. College de France 1952-1960 S Signes SNS Sens et non-sens SO Merleau-Ponty it La Sorbonne - resume de cours 1949-1952 VI Le Visible et l'invisible

JAN VAN DER VEKEN

Preface

Merleau-Ponty in contemporary perspective: this was the theme of the conference at the Institute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.L.) from 29 November to 1 December 1991. Thirty years after Merleau­Ponty's untimely death, it seemed appropriate to bring together scholars from Europe and from the United States of America to reappraise his philosophy. In fact, a significant body of scholarship has emerged which would seem to attest to the continuing importance of his thought for a variety of disciplines within the humanities, the social sciences, and the philosophy of nature.

In the present volume, Gary Brent Madison addresses the issue whether Merleau-Ponty can be considered to be a classical philosopher. The fact that his work is one of the highlights of the phenomenological tradition and is of continuing inspiration for researchers in various domains seems to justify that claim. Yet, it is the feeling of many of the contributors to this volume that the so-called "second Merleau-Ponty" is still not really known. The unfinished state of The Visible and the Invisible and the cryptic condition of many of the "Working Notes" may be responsible for that. More research should be done, to uncover "the unsaid" of Merleau-Ponty. lowe to a remark of Paul Ricoeur in his introduction to the work of G. B. Madison, La Phenomenologie de Merleau-Ponty. Une recherche des limites de la conscience (Paris, Klincksieck, 1973, p. 14) the insight that, in order to under­stand the ontology of the "second" Merleau-Ponty, we should look to (the later) Schelling. In reading the Themes from the Lectures, one cannot help but to be impressed by the fact that Merleau-Ponty addresses now, in search for a new ontology, such unfathomable issues as The Concept of Nature.

Should we talk about a serious shift in Merleau-Ponty's thought? The majority of the papers in this volume stresses the continuity rather than the discontinuity. The tone, however, of the way in which Merleau-Ponty addressed the main themes of philosophy had deepened. In preparing his candidature for the chair of philosophy at the College de France, Merleau-Ponty expressed his intention tq reconsider the whole of his philosophical enterprise in a more fundamental way: "reprendre toute la demarche philosophique en pensee fondamentale". It is my conviction that this "ontological turn", looking for

xiv PREFACE

the "Ineinander" of subject and object, is the real contribution of "Eye and Mind" and of The Visible and the Invisible. The papers of the conference and the Panel Discussion between Samuel IJsseling, Jacques Taminiaux and Jan Van der Veken on "Transcending Phenomenology?" tackled this issue. Merleau-Ponty was at the same time fully aware of the historicity and finitude of all philosophizing, and nevertheless he addresses in a new and searching way "the eternal problems of philosophy".

The symposium was organized under the auspices of the Center of Metaphysics (K.U.L.), The Husserl-Archives, and the Merleau-Ponty Circle of North America. It was made possible with generous donations from the Joseph Van de Wiele Foundation, the National Foundation for Scientific Research (Belgium), the French Embassy in Belgium, and the Institute of Philosophy. The planning committee for the conference was comprised of John Patrick Burke from Seattle University in Washington, Jacques Taminiaux (Universite Catholique Louvain), Rudolf Bernet and Samuel IJsseling (Husserl-Archives), Galen Johnson (University of Rhode Island) and Jan Van der Veken (K.U.L.).

The Institute of Philosophy owed this gesture of gratitude "after thirty years". Merleau-Ponty had a long association with Leuven and, most of all, with the founder of the Husserl-Archives and of this series, H. L. Van Breda, and with Alphonse De Waelhens, who wrote the introduction to his La struc­ture du comportement and devoted an important book to his "philosophy of ambiguity". Van Breda's article on "Maurice Merleau-Ponty et les Archives­Husserl a Louvain" (Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 67 (1962), pp. 410-430 has recently been translated into English and has appeared in Merleau-Ponty Vivant, edited by Martin Dillon (SUNY Press).

Participants at the conference had a chance to examine a number of historical documents concerning Merleau-Ponty's relation to the Institute of Philosophy. These included the first editions of several books sent by Merleau­Ponty to Herman Van Breda. Several letters from the correspondence between Merleau-Ponty and Van Breda were also on display, together with a number of important doctoral dissertations on Merleau-Ponty written at the Institute. Permit me to draw special attention to one of those dissertations, Beyond Phenomenology. Toward an Ontology of Presence: Self-Critique and Transfiguration in the Thought of the Later Merleau-Ponty by John Patrick Burke. He started it under the direction of the late Alden Fisher and finished it in Leuven, where he defended it successfully in 1978, in the presence of Charles Hartshorne, who was at that time a guest professor at the Institute. Without that thesis, which opened the research of 1. P. Burke into the "unsaid" of the later Merleau-Ponty, the conference bringing together scholars from both sides of the Atlantic would never have happened. He deserves our gratitude for bearing the "heat of the day" in inviting all the speakers. This, in turn, was made possible by a scholarship from the Board of Research of the K.U. Leuven, and a special grant from the National Foundation for Scientific Research.

A conference, however, comes from the ground only, because many persons

PREFACE xv

devote time and care to the daily tasks of organization. They are the obvious proofs of what Sartre has called "l'indepassabilite de l'organisme pratique". Ingrid Lombaerts and Daniel Vande Veire shouldered the burdens of the Local Program Committee. They, as well as the members of the Planning Committee and the supporting institutions deserve our heartfelt gratitude.

As a result of the Conference, an International Merleau-Ponty Society has been founded, with Martin Dillon and John Patrick Burke as his "European" counterpart.

May the new society prosper, and may this volume be the first of a new international series of studies to keep "Merleau-Ponty vivant"!

PATRICK BURKE

Introduction

To Laura, ... da lei ti ven l'amoroso pensero ...

Petrarch

That silence still engulfs his name, that his arguments have not factored significantly in the mainstream philosophical conversations of the last twenty years, that he has been skirted, ignored, or repressed, is to have been expected, given the very style which was the thought of this philosopher of ambiguity. Merleau-Ponty said more by what he did not say and by the way in which he did not say, almost disappearing even in his own texts as he has in the texts of others who have learned and taken so much from him. His thought was naturally generous, poignant, and allusive. The ampersand and the question, and the maelstrom they create, were his native dwelling. He was never the disjunctive thinker designing V-2 rockets with all the force and authority of declarative sentences, not this writer for whom perspective was a function of the hidden logos of the line, of the competing vortices and vectors which let a thing appear, and for whom placing his own thought into critical perspective was an incessant challenge and obligation. This challenge and obligation are now taken up by the present volume which purports to illumi­nate the contribution of Merleau-Ponty's thought to various philosophical problematics, from the culminative point of view of more than thirty years of continental philosophy since his untimely death.

The occasion for the present volume was the International Symposium on Merleau-Ponty, hosted in late November 1991 by the Institute of Philosophy and the Husserl-Archives at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. The papers presented here under the title, Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Perspective, were prepared for the Symposium which bore the same title. Yet the present volume is not a mere proceedings of a conference, not a generally loose confederation of essays lacking a pervasive theme or an over-arching question that would internally bind the various contributions into a single work. The integrative focus of this volume is achieved by its underlying issue, that of deciding whether the work of Merleau-Ponty is to

xviii INTRODUCTION

be relegated to the status of a classic of the French phenomenological tradition, or whether it is still a compellingly genuine contemporary work, or somehow both. As the various essays gathered under it confirm, the title of this volume risks a certain irony, that which is involved in trying to place into contemporary perspective what may well still open and focus our vision (albeit now in only a too silent and invisible manner), namely an original thought whose creative unfolding still awaits its future.

In the Epilogue to this volume, Gary Madison argues the case for reading Merleau-Ponty as a classic. What does this mean? If we follow Merleau-Ponty's own understanding of the principal characteristics of a classic, this would mean that his works have a methodological or heuristic value, that on the whole they constitute a kind of academic laboratory through which our thinking must pass in order to advance, within which our analyses can be checked or redirected, affirmed or reinspired, but that their theoretical framework is obsolete, and, as Merleau-Ponty said of the works of Marx and, perhaps, of his own earlier work, especially the Phenomenology of Perception, they have the status of a "secondary truth" and, consequently, are not to be understood literally as a contemporary work might be. Certainly the papers in the present volume can be read as meditations on a classic, and the attention they devote to Merleau­Ponty can be seen as a commemoration, a tribute, a homage, even a kind of iconography, or a belated requiem, made possible by significant develop­ments in philosophy subsequent to his death and which provide a relatively stable vantage point from which his works come definitively into view, allowing for that scholarly, critical look backward to a classic. But Madison offers more in his essay, and reveals a tension in his and Merleau-Ponty's understanding of a classic. The guiding question of Madison's essay is: in what way does Merleau-Ponty's work anticipate themes developed more explicitly by Gadamer, Derrida, and Habermas, and in what way does his work exceed theirs in terms of its significance for our own times? The key word here is 'exceed'. Merleau-Ponty also used it in his description of the classics: "they retain an expressive power which exceeds their statements and propo­sitions.,,1 What is this excess, and does it really succeed in setting-off a classic from a contemporary work?

Certainly the great work, whether it be a classic or a contemporary, is characterized by an abundance of meaning, a generosity of expression, a spaciousness of imagination; the great work is a kind of spiraling axis which draws into its weave the dense and colorful jumble of threads which it spawns in its turnings and which can continually sustain new weavings and reweav­ings. This capacity to sustain the new, this abundance, generosity, and spaciousness, all mark the excess of a work, that is to say, its overlapping into, its generating of, its own future. It is precisely this relation to the future which marks-off a classic from a banal work. Classics are creative, banal works are not. Classics inaugurate traditions, banal works do not. But great con­temporary works as well have that surplus of creative power which may inaugurate new traditions. Should we then speak of a contemporary classic?

INTRODUCTION xix

Or do classics and contemporary works have a different relation to the future? Neither Madison nor Merleau-Ponty are helpful here. Madison says that Merleau-Ponty's work exceeds that of living contemporaries in terms of its significance for our times. Is this not to say that Merleau-Ponty is more contemporary than they are, that he is our true contemporary, or is at least on par with them as contemporaries? What does Merleau-Ponty say to this? We cite three statements from "Eye and Mind":

1. "the figurations of literature and philosophy are no more settled than those of painting and are not more capable of being accumulated into a stable treasure,,,2

2. "if no work is ever absolutely completed or done with, still each creates, changes, alters, enlightens, deepens, confirms, exalts, re-creates, or creates in advance all the other,,,3

3. "if creations are not a possession, it is not only that, like all things, they pass away; it is also that they have almost all their life still before them."4

Here, it would seem, Merleau-Ponty makes the case for assigning to a classical thinker the quality of being a contemporary. For instance, "Kant, our contemporary"! It is true that Kant's thought continues to structure the tensions we find in our questions about the world, our lives, and our history, questions which inversely make visible the rich and unresolved tensions in his works which he could only partially see and by virtue of which a distinct Kantian tradition of meditation was born and is still being worked through. Embedded and operative in the above citations is Merleau-Ponty's notion of l'impensee, i.e., the circumscribed but 'unthought of' dimension secretly polarizing and creatively animating the great work of art, of literature, of philosophy, its excess, the principle of its future. On this basis, then, the great artists, writers, and thinkers of the past are our contemporaries. If Merleau-Ponty belongs among the great, then he too is our contemporary. But does this sense of 'contemporary' allow us to say at this very moment that Raphael is lifting his brush, or Merleau-Ponty his pen? Does it allow us to go further and say that they may be more contemporary than currently living artists and thinkers?

Certainly it is counter-intuitive to say that Raphael or Merleau-Ponty are contemporaries in the sense that living persons are. After all, such a contemporary is one who still speaks, still writes, and one to whom we listen, and for whom we wait, for her next book, his next essay, always for the new, and not yet. He or she is one who offers us a new language, or a new way of looking at language, of appropriating our own language, who thus opens in a fresh manner the space of discourse, and who is still perhaps searching for better words, for a more refined style, who is still pursuing the illusion of coming into possession of his or her own thought, who lives thus toward the future and delineates and creates the contours and stylistics and metaphors for our approach to the future, who listens to us and who interrogates us in provocatively new ways, teaching us how to read, to interpret, to question, and

xx INTRODUCTION

to write, who is thus face to face with us in the living present, in the flesh. In this light, if a classic is characterized by a certain 'excess', as described above, should we not say that a contemporary is characterized by a different kind of excess, that of being pregnant with the future as future, a future never future enough, with what it has not said yet, but which it is just now in the process of saying relative to an open and indeterminate horizon, now, in the flesh? Such a differentiation of the notion of excess appears to settle the question.

But perhaps we must go further, perhaps we must tum to this notion of being in the flesh, if we are to appreciate a certain fecundity of sense in the apparent blur of the distinction between the classic and the contemporary. Is there some way that Merleau-Ponty's notion of the flesh would allow us to assign to a writer, now dead for more than thirty years, the qualities of a contem­porary as delineated in the above paragraph, even if we were to do so by an analogy marked more by difference than similarity?

Merleau-Ponty describes the flesh as connective tissue, as an interweaving and overlapping of internal and external horizons, of the invisible and the visible, the seeing and the seen, subject and world, person and other person, such that he can say that they are ineinander, in one another. Is there not also, by extension, an intertwining, an overlapping, between reader and writer creating a more rarified kind of flesh, a 'texture', such that the reader is interwoven with the text, that he or she enters the very act of writing itself by making himself or herself available for the living meaning of the word, and that this entering is not an act of interpretation, which too often protects a speculative distance, but an act upon which all interpretation rests, a kind of surrender, a dispossession, a tenderness? Here the notion of 'excess' is important; as we have said above, the great work, the great text, is charac­terized by the magnitude of its generosity, of its abundance, of its excess, and, might we not add to this description, the excess it creates in the act of reading which prolongs its being written over and over again afresh, not a mere repetition and more than a repetition with a difference, but, in a very real sense of the term, a metamorphosis, a creation.

By this standard, the text of Merleau-Ponty may well be the text of a contemporary, of Merleau-Ponty vivant. No doubt the argument can be made that his work can be read as a classic and thus belongs to the order of the "heuristic", but also, by virtue of its flesh, it may well be read as a contem­porary text and thus in the order of the "creative" and, consequently, of the not-yet-said, of the "new". Accordingly, the papers which appear in this volume entail not only a reading of Merleau-Ponty but, it can be argued, a writing of Merleau-Ponty; they live at the edge of an interrogation which he left for us to resume, not only by the fact of his early death, but also because he could not do it alone, because the question is communal and futuristic by nature, awakened to be sure in a unique voice which knew itself to be fundamentally interrogative and, therefore, fundamentally intersubjective and intergenerational.

INTRODUCTION xxi

But can this not be said of every great work, that it exists in the flesh, in the overlapping of reader and writer, producing always a fresh texture? Is there something about Merleau-Ponty's text that especially invites this description, this analysis? Is there a quality in his work which permits us to conclude that, like Nietzsche, he deserves the title of 'posthumous writer', one whose language is still in the state of becoming language, one whose thought calls for and comes to fruition in the words of others?

The answer is to be found in Merleau-Ponty's claim that "the world exists in the interrogative mode," and the function of the philosopher is not to offer sphincter-tight solutions to its problems but to create the space of interroga­tion, that hollow around which the vault of language is built and within which things are free to be born on their own and to question us who would "hold them as with forceps". 5 In Part I of this volume, "Interrogation and Thinking", this thematic is taken up. The inaugural essay of Part I and the foundational essay for the entire volume is offered by Bernhard Waldenfels under the title "Interrogative Thinking: Reflections on Merleau-Ponty's Later Thought".

Embedded in and motivating Waldenfels' essay is the following 'interrog­ative ensemble' (a phrase we borrow from him and Merleau-Ponty). In what way, for Merleau-Ponty, is the primacy of perception already the primacy of questioning? What is the difference between 'asked' and 'asking' questions, between 'interrogation interrogated' and 'interrogation interrogating'? What kind of questioning arises from 'wild Being', that intermediate zone of questions where the world exists in the interrogative mode? What does the self-reference of questioning mean? Does interrogation ultimately point only to itself or does it always maintain a reference to what is other than itself which is, nonetheless, inherent to questioning itself? In other words, is interroga­tive thinking fundamentally responsive to questions posed to us and which arise only in the process of our responding to them? How would this indicate that questioning is a sort of ontological organ? How does the chiasm between the questioned and the questioning reveal that we are called into question by what we experience, and thus what precedes questioning is questioning? In what way, therefore, is questioning a kind of responding such that interroga­tive thinking turns into responsive thinking? Finally, in what way does an ethical impulse arise in the heart of the alternative of question and response?

In response to these questions, Waldenfels reveals the remarkably poignant changes which Merleau-Ponty's thought is capable of introducing relative to traditional conceptions of question and response deeply rooted in traditional views of rationality and subjectivity. With great resourcefulness, Waldenfels demonstrates how we are caught in the chiasm between questioning and responding, between responsive interrogation and interrogative responding, such that our element is the question. The papers in this volume occur in this interrogative space which Waldenfels thus opens; they are a kind of question-writing, interrogating Merleau-Ponty's interrogation by being taken up by it, by responding to it interrogatively and thus prolonging its life as interrogation interrogating, in contemporary life, in the flesh of texts, an

xxii INTRODUCTION

interrogation not belonging only to Merleau-Ponty or, perhaps, belonging to no one, seeming as if to emanate from things.

In Waldenfels' essay, the distinct thematics of interrogative thinking making­up the four parts of this volume are delineated:

1. his concern for the nature of interrogation and thinking leads, in the remainder of Part I, to asking about archeological questioning, about thinking from within Being, and about interrogative thinking as architec­tonic;

2. his concern for interrogation's other is formally examined in Part II within the problematic of nature and the unconscious;

3. in showing that the event of questioning can be understood through the event of speaking, Waldenfels invites the thematics of expression and interpretation taken-up in Part III;

4. in showing that interrogative thinking is primarily responsive thinking, he opens the space of ethics and politics and an ontology which would include them, themes which focus the work of Part IV.

In the spirit of Merleau-Ponty, the essays within each of the four major parts of the volume can be best summarized by the questions which they uniquely and explicitly address, which will allow us to show how the response of each author sets forth a new direction for Merleau-Ponty scholarship and, perhaps, for continental philosophy today.

In the second essay of Part I, Burkhard Liebsch explores 'archeological questioning' as a specific form of interrogative thinking. As the central focus of his work, he questions how Ricoeur's archeological-teleological model of hermeneutics stands-up against Merleau-Ponty's claim that archeological questioning necessarily casts into doubt the conception of a progressive constitutive teleology as the inverse counterpart of archeology, that such a conception suffers from a 'retrospective fallacy' . He argues that, if it is to avoid the 'retrospective fallacy', what Ricoeur designates as 'narrative order' must be cognizant of the 'wild contingency' of past futures, that, as Merleau-Ponty would say, this 'wild contingency' renders every story provisional and never a matter of 'fate' or of a progressive genesis, that the story can be told in other ways starting from a different past-future which we may have thought was excluded but which nonetheless has been at work and has been realized in perhaps the subtlest manner, requiring within the story drastic revisions.

In the course of his discussion, Liebsch stakes out fertile ground for future research by reminding us of the following ensemble of questions which constitute, in part, Merleau-Ponty's response to the archeological methodology. In what way might archeological questioning invalidate well-proven phenomenological tools such as the concepts of 'noema', 'noesis', and 'inten­tionality'? To what extent might an archeological phenomenology undermine the seemingly self-evident presupposition that the 'original structures' of experience will present themselves in terms of modalities of being present to consciousness? To what extent might an archeological phenomenology

INTRODUCTION xxiii

open-up dimensions of 'irrevocable absences' intruding even into the seeming self-givenness of things and which belong thus to the original dimension of our experience? What are the implications of these possibilities for the 'backward questioning' of psychoanalysis?

Archeological questioning challenges the "God's eye" view of the Being process, and requires that interrogative thinking be a "thinking from within" Being, which is the theme developed in the third essay of Part I by Fran~oise Dastur. She examines afresh Merleau-Ponty's project of an Intra-ontology by taking up the questions which follow. In what way is "thinking from within" the interrogative experience of pre-objective Being, of the opening of Being from the inside according to a difference which is in no way exclusive of an identity? In what way is it an asubjective thinking of the non-exteriority of the seer and the visible, and not a thinking of the interiority of the subject? In what way is it a thinking by virtue of horizon, of a proximity which is distance, of a durational thickness and depth which is an obstacle only for a non-promiscuous "thought from the outside"? How does this imply that Being is pregnant with its own utterance, its own word? In what way does Being demand creation of us in order for us to experience it?

As her essay unfolds, Dastur reveals new dimensions in Merleau-Ponty's interrogating of Being which still demand our attention, namely:

(a) that the "thinking from within" of Being, like vision itself, is a metamor­phosis of Being, that it is part of the creative process of Being by which Being makes itself consciousness and history, a process which is never finished but always in the making (here she makes sense of Merleau-Ponty's proposal of a "cosmology of the visible" and opens up future dialogue with contemporaries in the tradition of process philosophy);

(b) that the "thinking from within" of Being calls for the rethinking of the notion of "presence", neither as 'objective presence' nor 'presence of self', but as an enigma, as the exploded presence of beings, the mystery of their simultaneity and co-existence in and through distance and difference (here she stakes out the rudiments of Merleau-Ponty's proposal for a "tran­scendental geology"); and

(c) that the "thinking from within" of Being calls for a rethinking of "reflec­tion", not as the presence of the mind to its own self-generated internal operations, but as a "reflection by Ec-stasy", rooted in the reflexivity of the flesh, in the reversibility, the metamorphosis of an inside into an outside and of an outside into an inside, an 'eminent' reflectivity on the model of which our concept of the work of the mind as reflection should be based.

In the final essay of Part I, Marc Richir discloses the fundamentally architectonic nature of interrogative thinking by addressing the following questions. In what manner and to what extent do we find in the Vlth Meditation of the young Eugen Fink the origins of the thought of the later Merleau­Ponty regarding the transcendental eidetic of "wild essences"? Why must this transcendental eidetic of wild essences be understood on the model of

xxiv INTRODUCTION

aesthetic contemplation as delineated by Kant in the third Critique? If, according to the most fundamental exigencies of Kantian architectonics, we conceive essences as truly 'wild' and their significations and concepts as truly 'our own', then why must we admit that between the wild phenomenal field and the instituted symbolic field no relation of 'derivation', much less 'deduction', is possible? How is the division which ought to be thought between the phenomenological and the symbolic a division which is archi­tectonic and nowise ontological?

In the course of a dense but brilliantly subtle analysis, Richir projects some arenas in which Merleau-Ponty's thinking can still conduct vigorous interrogation:

(a) he calls for a rewriting of the 'transcendental doctrine of method' that Fink contemplated in the Vlth Meditation, but now from a different perspective, that of the problem of the phenomenological encounter between the symbolic and phenomenological dimensions of experience, between concepts and the wild essences or 'incarnate existentials' which are their respondents (not correspondents), an encounter which Merleau­Ponty had only begun to measure;

(b) he proposes that aesthetic reflection, which proceeds as in Kant 'without prior concept' and which brings us back to an entirely different con­ception of the 'disinterested spectator' and which alone is properly 'phenomenological reflection', that this aesthetic reflection be general­ized into phenomenology, into what is required by phenomena as 'nothing but phenomena', namely their phenomenological reflection as devoid of prior concept; Richir asserts that only this can preserve phenomeno­logical thinking from the transcendental illusion of a simultaneously intuitive and archetypal understanding.

In Part II, interrogative thinking turns toward its inherent 'other' and the creative transformations entailed by their reversibility, hence the topical heading Nature, the Unconscious, and Desire. The inaugural essay is contributed by Rudolf Bernet who approaches in a new and provocative way a problem not sufficiently probed by Merleau-Ponty scholars, a theme whose rich and complex dimensions, discovered surprisingly in a rereading of the Phenomenology of Perception, foreshadow an arena for future research, namely the intersubjective relation of the symbolics of nature to the corporeality of the body and the symbolics of the body to the corporeal life of nature. Bernet's remarkably incisive analyses proceed along the following interrogative axes. In what way does the philosophy of nature developed in the Phenomenology of Perception, a philosophy which surmounts the opposition between nature and the subject, give birth to a new conception of the subject as well as of nature? In what way is the structure of the subject encountered exactly where it was least expected, that is, in the life of things in the world? In other words, in what way can a subjective capacity be attributed to things and the world such that they interrogate our gaze and invite the human subject to

INTRODUCTION xxv

dialogue and, consequently, stand in an intersubjective relation to the human subject? In what way do the answers to these questions point to a new form of phenomenological reduction? To what extent is 'nature' in the Phenomenology of Perception transformed into 'savage spirit' in The Visible and the Invisible?

In addition to the themes in interrogative thinking mentioned above, Bernet offers this valuable agenda for subsequent research in the philosophy and psychoanalysis of nature proposed by Merleau-Ponty in the "Working Notes", an agenda which augments proposals made by Waldenfels and Dastur:

(a) in what way is nature both a primordial form of transcendence which supports and permeates the human body and a finely articulated symbolic system, a diacritical system of differences, an expressive capacity which animates, traverses, and unites things to each other and to the gaze that wanders among them, this universal life of meaning that precedes human constitution and to which it must necessarily return as sedimentation?

(b) in what way is nature an 'unfinished unity', a unity in 'becoming' an essentially 'temporal unity', to be understood as 'savage spirit' animating the universal corporeity of the flesh?

(c) how does the turn to Scheler and to Cassirer, rather than to Husserl, offer the better path for understanding Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of nature?

The body-subject emerges from and is nourished in the depths of nature, that vast and varied field of pre-reflective life, which sustains and permeates conscious projects, and allows us to speak meaningfully of the 'unconscious', the theme which Martin Dillon takes up in the second essay of Part II. This essay is the respondent to the following interrogative set. How is the 'uncon­scious' to be conceived, as a blind causal mechanism, or a self-effacing grammarian which a self-constructing lexicon, or an absolute absence discernible only in its self-dissembling effects and, in all cases, radically discontinuous with consciousness? How does Merleau-Ponty's notion of corporeal reflexivity overcome the trenchant dualism between the conscious and the unconscious dictated by these notions of the unconscious? How does it provide a common ground for the thematic reflexivity designated as consciousness and the horizontal reflexivity designated as the unconscious? In what way did the thesis of the primacy of perception, maintained in the corpus of Merleau-Ponty's writings, have clear implications for his under­standing of the unconscious and the process of symbolization? How is corporeal reflexivity the manner in which the world presents itself to itself through that part of itself that we are? How does this show that the logos of language is grounded in the 'nascent logos of the perceptual world' such that if the unconscious is structured like a language, this is doubtlessly because language is structured like the world?

In shaping his essay around these questions, Dillon circumscribes an arena where Merleau-Ponty's thought can contribute fruitfully, namely toward a radical renewal of the unconscious, according to the following parameters:

xxvi INTRODUCTION

(a) rather than to Lacan or to Derrida, we must turn to Merleau-Ponty who offers a radical pluralism which celebrates differences without creating a pure diacriticality, unbridgeable binary oppositions and discontinuities between the various levels of experience, between consciousness and its other;

(b) the radical renewal focuses on what Fran~oise Dastur has already delineated in her essay, namely an expanded notion of presence, beyond that of 'presence to' (presence to consciousness, consciousness present to itself, etc.), a horizontal notion of presence which encompasses both figure and background, surface and depth, and which entails a primordial accessibility to and reversibility of self and world, language and things, matter and meaning, consciousness and the unconscious, designated also by the term 'corporeal reflexivity' of the flesh inhabited by a nascent logos; it is only within this expanded notion of presence, according to Dillon, that the relation of consciousness to its 'unconscious' other can be rendered intelligible.

In his essay on nature, Bernet points to the 'desire' of the body to always see more, a desire stirred up by the world, and the ultimate locus of this desire and the source of its energy, according to Freud, is the 'unconscious'. But Dillon criticizes Freud for his proto-mechanistic analytic of desire, rebukes Lacan for having reduced desire to a play of signifiers, and articulates a different notion of the unconscious through which desire might be better understood. In the third essay of Part II, Galen Johnson situates his own formal discussion of desire within Merleau-Ponty's interrogation of the invisible in Eye and Mind, a work which Johnson considers a metaphysical experiment in fashioning a new philosophy of nature. The probative focus of Johnson's essay is manifest in the following imaginative questions he presents to this text. How does Merleau-Ponty's study of color reveal the 'flesh' as the synergic intertwining of the depth of the world with the depth of desire? In what way are visible color and line to be understood as a pregnancy, as a labor of desire, a longing for the Other which is the birthplace of expression? How is the visual a metamorphosis of desire? How is desire transubstantiated into the mystery of invisibility, of the word, of moral command and criticism, of self-comprehension, of spirit?

Along the path of his meditation, Johnson develops a promising itinerary for creatively entering, i.e., reading and writing anew, the works of Merleau­Ponty; he recommends:

(a) that the depth of the there is a function of the incarnate doubling of difference and desire, which an analysis of Merleau-Ponty's metaphoric use of fire would reveal;

(b) that the erotic synergy of desire, operative in the depths of the self and the depths of the world, does not seek 'synthesis' between the seeing and the seen, the touching and the touched, but a 'metamorphosis' in the

INTRODUCTION xxvii

strongest sense, that of 'transubstantiation', and that the 'sacramental' significance of the latter word should be taken seriously;

(c) that 'spirituality' is rooted in a primordial generosity, in a multi-voiced plurality, a porosity and openness, a wonder, all of which mark the invis­ible depth of the visible, the inversion of the movement of desire toward its Source;

(d) that the call of ethical concern is the invisible of the visible of things, that things have a 'face' that breaks through, that commands our respect or demands our repair, and to which eye and mind 'ought' to be atten­tive.

Johnson's essay reveals desire as the germinating ground of expression, and Bernet locates the most primordial expressive capacity within nature. These analyses establish the basis for Part III: Expression, Creation, and Inter­pretation, where interrogative thinking situates itself in the advent of speaking, in the creative moment of expression where simultaneously flesh becomes word and word becomes world. The first essay is presented by Edwin Weihe who exemplifies the gathering function of expression by subtly weaving together the thematics of the previous essays at those points where the thought of Merleau-Ponty and of Joseph Conrad cross. Weihe's incisive and lyrical work cuts this interrogative path into the core of expression. How does Merleau­Ponty's Cezanne bring us back to the Inner Station depicted by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness? In what way is the artist's doubt the experience of uncertainty, of irreducible contingency, at the Inner Station of primordial perception? How does it originate in and how is it sustained by an inter­rogative wonder and the 'wild words' which are anticipated but unexpressed, heard in 'savage silence' at the source of solitary experience where matter spontaneously takes on form and where the gift of expression is received? In what way are both writers struggling with the relation between the invisible idea and the expressiveness of perception, and how does this struggle constitute their shared doubt?

Within these interrogative contours, Weihe compellingly demonstrates the fecundity of interaction between the works of Merleau-Ponty and major writers in the literary tradition, a field well ripe for harvesting. We have long been aware of the importance of Proust for Merleau-Ponty's articulation of his own thought, and this century is witness to philosophy in the form of the novel, the play, the poem, the dialogue, the journal, the diary, even the postcard. What Weihe sets forth explicitly is the way in which the encounter with Conrad's theory of expression as explored and realized in Heart of Darkness can reorient our own reading of Merleau-Ponty by offering new interpretive possibilities. For instance, Conrad's description of how every expression, including the process of spontaneous organization by which form emerges from matter, is irreducibly contingent and, consequently, threatened with the possibility of chaos suggests to us that what Merleau-Ponty calls 'wild Being' is to be understood, perhaps, in the most radical sense of the term 'wild', as a sort

xxviii

of mad jumble of trajectories, lacking an internal organizing principle, and that the 'nascent logos' is a secondary and contingent phenomenon, a thesis the hints of which are to be found in his last lecture courses at the College de France. Conrad's Marlowe also anticipates many of the interpretations offered in this volume, for example his intimation of the 'wild words' which cannot be expressed, which cannot cross the boundary into the zone of our words, echoes the architectonic analysis offered by Richir, that there is not a deriva­tion but rather a 'change of register' in the move from 'wild essences' to our significations and concepts; or when Marlowe describes the 'wilderness' as Kurtz's motif, thinking itself, making itself conscious in him, what comes to mind is Bernet's arguments for the subjectivity of nature. Weihe's Conrad also anticipates the thesis of the radical creativity of expression which is explored in depth in the next essay by Rudi Visker.

If Weihe found it useful to go to Conrad to enlarge and deepen Merleau­Ponty's discussion of expression, Rudi Visker masterfully sets up an intricate and intensive encounter between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, breaking their words open at the seams and releasing, thereby, the rich insights which otherwise would remain trapped, revealing as well the limits of their interro­gations which can also be found only at this point of rupture. In the style of a polyphonic composition the respective ideas and methods of Merleau-Ponty and Foucault are probed and contrapuntally developed in a continuous interweaving of their successively entering voices and the voice of the analyst, Rudi Visker, who structures his essay along the following interrogative parameters. In what way is discourse for Foucault a tertium quid much like perception for Merleau-Ponty which cannot be accounted for by empiricism or intellectualism? How does Foucault's genealogical approach to discourse fail both to convincingly set itself off against empiricism and to correct archeology's tendency to collapse into discursive idealism? What effect will the question of the ontological status of copulation and creation have on the efforts of Foucault and Merleau-Ponty to find a new starting point in philos­ophy. In what way does what Merleau-Ponty calls 'raw being' demand creation, and how does this involve a certain kind of violence? What difference does Merleau-Pontian 'raw being' make to the 'order of things'? What does Merleau-Ponty mean by an 'archeology'? In what way is 'raw being' a-topic and hence a dimension instead of a first archeological layer of experience? In what way does everything that relates to the perceived world have the structure of expression, and how is it that the expressive medium has a logic of its own such that expression is a translation that produces its own original? What is the desire that drives expression beyond itself, and how is it implicated in the very structure of response which produces an 'excess' or moment of 'alterity'? How does the analysis of this desire reveal a new concept of subjectivity? What is the relation of this desire to ethics?

In leading us imaginatively through this interrogative labyrinth, Visker accomplishes the following:

INTRODUCTION xxix

(a) he offers a model of reading and writing Merleau-Ponty today, by posing the questions "that we might have wished Merleau-Ponty to have addressed to Foucault," questions which provide a kind of "grillwork through which we can see his texts dislocating themselves and diverging from what we thought them to be;" in this way, he shows how Merleau-Ponty's texts can still illuminate those which came later, how they can enter into contemporary dialogue, and. as in a dialogue, say and hear things that alter the course of the conversation; for example, Foucault's notion of the operation of power would benefit from Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the act of attention as creatively developing and enriching that which awakened it, as would Merleau-Ponty's notion of 'raw being' benefit from Foucault's notion of 'discourse';

(b) with the help of Foucault, he is able to focus on the precise question, perhaps the ultimate question, for Merleau-Ponty scholarship today, the question of creation and the ontology which could make sense of how the perceptual field is a matter already pregnant with form and yet still needing to be put into form; he points us in the right direction when he suggests that 'raw being' is the creative power to restructure which is found at all levels of human experience. not merely the archetypal perceptual level, and that expression is fundamentally creative relative to an irreme­diable absence, an origin that has broken-up.

In the Epilogue to this volume, Gary Madison states that contemporary hermeneutical literature seldom, if ever, refers to Merleau-Ponty's philos­ophy of expression. In the last essay of Part III, James Risser makes it his business to fill this gap by taking up the following questions. Is there a common thread between a philosophy of ambiguity and a philosophical hermeneutics in terms of which we can decide just how hermeneutical Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of language really is? In what way does Merleau-Ponty's tum from the field of pure signification into the creative vibrancy of speaking indicate the proper hermeneutical structure of his thought such that the question of his relation to Gadamer's project arouses our interest? In what way does the vibrancy of speaking receive its sense from the way in which language is enveloped in 'excess' which, for Merleau-Ponty, is another word for 'silence'? In what way does this notion of 'silence' pertain to the notion of 'possi­bility' as articulated by Gadamer's hermeneutics? How does Merleau-Ponty's notion of difference in language open into the framework of the ontological doubling - or better, oppositional weaving - of the visible and the invisible? In other words, what is the connection between silence and 'ontological vibration', and how is this connection manifest in the 'responding speaking' in the interrogative? How does Gadamer's analysis of the 'poetic word' show his commitment to the 'excess of meaning' in the vibrancy of speaking? How do both philosophers inaugurate a 'tum toward the voice'?

The comparison with Gadamer, elaborated in reply to these questions, proves

xxx INTRODUCTION

remarkably fruitful, not only by the fact that it establishes three distinct hermeneutical moves in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of language, but also in its unfolding of a category important for Merleau-Ponty's ontology as well, namely the notion of the possible, which has not received due notice in current Merleau-Ponty research. Risser exposes the creative dimension of speech in Merleau-Ponty's analysis of how new significations emerge, how the vibrancy of speaking is enveloped in excess or silence or, to use Gadamer's word, 'possibility'. For Gadamer, the speaking event, in expressing a relation to the whole of being, brings about an increase in being. As Risser unpacks it, this is a function of the virtuality of speech (another name for Being), holding within itself possible being and by which it opens new possibilities of meaning. What still awaits exploration here is how this notion of the 'possible' as articulated by Gadamer may give us the interpretive access to what Merleau­Ponty described as "the new notion of the possible: namely, the possible conceived not as another eventual occurrence, but as an ingredient of the existing world itself, as general reality.,,6 Risser suggests a path toward such an ontological understanding of the possible when, following Bernet's lead, he attributes voice to things which call for the vibrancy of our responding speaking in the interrogative, a dialogue which leads to an increase of being, a creative infolding and unfolding, as part of Being's self-differentiation.

In Part IV, interrogation shifts to the question of ethics and politics and the ontological framework wherein they might be intelligible. We have already seen the ethical impulse surface in several of the essays, in Waldenfels' discussion of interrogative thinking as responsive thinking, in Johnson's mention of the moral 'face' of things and the earth, and in Visker's reference to the 'ethos' implied by the creative process within 'raw being'. In the Epilogue, Madison claims that an ethics is something Merleau-Ponty never even so much as outlined, but Steve Watson finds embedded in the "Preface" to Signs and in other essays the principles for an ethics. He draws them forth from their matrix by focusing on these questions. In what way, according to Merleau-Ponty, does the ambiguity affecting values neither negate their validity nor the responsibility required in the art of their interpretation? In what way does the problem of the contingency of value remain, even if there is no 'moral sense' or no demonstrable 'natural law'? In what way is politics a withdrawal from political theory and a vacillation between the world of reality and that of values, between individual judgment and common action, between the present and the future? In what way is the de-substantialized space of the political itself pluralized, and thus a space of indeterminate identity? In what way does the notion of value undergo the 'reciprocal encroachment' of institutions and intentions, necessity and contingency - virtu and fortuna, as Machiavelli put it? What prevents the consequent 'pluralization' of meaning and value from collapsing into a vacuous relativism or nihilism? How is it that ethics or politics, no more than episte­mology, can be neither a matter of return to origins nor a reduction to foundations, but must be based on the recognition that the appeal to the

INTRODUCTION xxxi

originating goes in several directions, that the originating arises in the 'expres­sive step beyond' which involves non-coincidence, differentiation, dis­continuity? How does the space of the oscillation of value and event involve the incarnate and irreducible difference of a 'transcendental between', of a new ideal of rationality? What does Merleau-Ponty mean by "virtu sans aucune resignation"? How does being condemned to meaning entail being condemned to responsibility?

Watson's essay succeeds in showing that the question of ethics in Merleau­Ponty is not to be situated in the existentialist ethics of ambiguity which may seem to characterize his earlier writings, but that we must tum to his reading of Montaigne, Pascal, and Machiavelli to find the pivotal ethical category, virtu, the dialectics of which may allow questions of right and responsibility to be reasonably approached and practically decided. Watson completes Risser's discussion of expression by showing how the ethical, for Merleau-Ponty, is rooted in the 'excess' of the signifier over the signified, that in this 'excess', in this differentiation, this non-coincidence, this discon­tinuity (which is wild Being), we find that 'good ambiguity' which is the principle of an ethics, something which was already implied in his 'humanism in extension' articulated as early as 1947. Because Merleau-Ponty shows respect for the withdrawal in which virtue would be ventured today, because he vigilantly acknowledges the complexity and risk of virtue, Watson argues that Merleau-Ponty's legacy retains prominence.

In the second essay of Part IV, Laura Boella echoes the themes of ethics and politics in her taking-up of Hannah Arendt's refusal of ontology. Boella shows how Merleau-Ponty's thinking was inscribed by Arendt who expli­citly acknowledges her debt to him, and yet offers a critique of the whole ontological project of his later writings. Boella's essay exhibits the following interrogative structure. In what way does the phenomenological approach of Hannah Arendt go clearly in the direction of the later Merleau-Ponty, and yet why does it stop short of the philosophy of the flesh and the ontological project of 'brute being'? Why does she refuse the idea of 'chiasm'? Why, according to Hannah Arendt, is the question of 'meaning' not the same as the question of man's concrete experience of the world. In what way does the autonomy of thinking stress the primary ethical significance of self­awareness and, consequently, open itself to the human condition of plurality and the political context of discourse? To what extent is Hannah Arendt's analysis of the tragic dimension of finitude and the culpability of action more existentialist and more Husserlian than Merleau-Ponty's analysis?

As did Visker and Risser, Boella reveals the remarkable fecundity of the interface between Merleau-Ponty and contemporary thinkers whose works postdate his. With great finesse, she reveals how Arendt's focus on appear­ances and the field of practical action is illuminated intensively by the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, the latter of which might also benefit from Arendt's philosophy, especially her emphasis on the ethical structure of self-awareness which would significantly augment Merleau-Ponty's theory

xxxii INTRODUCTION

of intersubjectivity. Finally, she points up the fact that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the flesh can support conflicting readings, such as those of Hannah Arendt and Steve Watson, the latter finding in Merleau-Ponty a 'grounding' of ethics in an ontology of the Abgrund and of discontinuity, the only ontology which Arendt, who denies Merleau-Ponty's ontology, can accept.

In contradistinction to Arendt's refusal to adopt Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the flesh and the ontology of brute Being as the horizon for an ethics, Gary Madison, in the Epilogue to this volume, directs future Merleau-Ponty research towards an ethics of communicative rationality committed to universal human rights and 'grounded' in the reversibility of the flesh and the primor­dial intersubjectivity which it entails. In so doing, Madison shows how Merleau-Ponty's thought compliments and exceeds that of Habermas. Likewise he shows how Derrida's neologism, dif!erance, is anticipated by Merleau­Ponty's notion of the flesh which nonetheless exceeds it in its relevance to contemporary global politics. Although he recommends that we read Merleau­Ponty as a classic, nonetheless Madison joins the other authors in this volume in affirming Merleau-Ponty as a contemporary philosopher who offers new directions for philosophical interrogation, who still frames in a fresh and provocative voice the issues which remain urgent for our time.

If to place Merleau-Ponty in contemporary perspective is a form of commemoration, it not only involves our memory of how his works have inspired our thinking, but also, in a deeper sense, celebrates his own power of memory exactly as he exercised it in his own self-criticism, always trying to say again for the first time, to gather in one bouquet all the absent roses, those impensees that originally gathered and colored his reflective and unreflective wording, and which impelled him to write that "depth is still new, and it insists on being sought, not 'once in a lifetime', but all through life.,,7 We must remember these words as we remember the texts of Merleau­Ponty. Like Cezanne, he continued to ruminate the mystery of depth, its puzzles, its secrets. As the papers in this volume intimate, he still opens for us the path into the depth of the world, which is the depth of the body and the gesture, of eye and mind, of voice and desire, of right and reason. He leaves us today as he left us more than thirty years ago with his unfinished works, and he calls us to resume his vocation, that of the philosopher, of the researcher who reveals that "the secret and the center of a philosophy does not lie in a prenatal inspiration but that it develops as the work progresses, that it is a becoming-meaning, which builds itself in accord with itself and in reaction against itself, that a philosophy is necessarily a (philosophical) history, an exchange between problems and solutions in which each partial solution transforms the initial problem in such wise that the meaning of the whole does not pre-exist it, except as a style pre-exists its works, and seems, after the fact, to announce them."g To place Merleau-Ponty in contemporary perspective as this volume purports to do means, in the last analysis, to grasp and say the 'becoming-meaning' of his works with respect to the problems

INTRODUCTION xxxiii

which polarize our thought and menace our world today. To commemorate, in the case of Merleau-Ponty, is, therefore, not only to offer a critical and interpretive look backward to his works and the meditation on depth started therein, but also to move forward to them just as we now move in an uncertain and explorative way toward the future of philosophy.

NOTES

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 11.

2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 189.

3. Ibid., p. 190. 4. Ibid., p. 190. 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston,

Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), p. 101. 6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures at the College de France, 1952-1960,

trans. John O'Neill (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 98. 7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, op. cit., pp. 179-180. 8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie

(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1963), p. 19.

II Querceto September 1992