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 NANCY TUANA, GENERAL EDITOR
This series consists of edited collections of essays, some original and some previously
published, offering feminist re-interpretations of the writings of major figures in the
. Western philosophical tradition. Devoted to the work of a single philosopher, each
volume contains essays covering the full range of the philosopher's thought and
representing the diversity of approaches now being used by feminist critics.

Already published:
Nancy Tuana, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Plato (1994)
Margaret Simons, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir (1995)
Bonnie Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (1995)
Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, ed., Feminist Interpretations of G. W. F. Hegel (1996)
Maria J. Falco, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft (1996)
Susan J. Hekman, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault (1996)
Nancy J. Holland, ed., Feminist Interpretations ofjacques Derrida (1997)
Robin May Schott, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant (1997)
Ce!eine Leon and Sylvia Walsh, eds., Feminist Interpretations of SIJren Kierkegaard (1997)
Cynthia Freeland, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle (1998)
Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche
(1998) ,
Mimi Reise! Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Ayn
Rand (1999)
Susan Bordo, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Rene Descartes (1999)
Julien S. Murphy, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre (1999)
Anne Jaap Jacobson, -ed., Feminist Interpretations of David Hume (2000)
Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly (2000)
Tina Chanter, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (2001)
Nancy J. Holland and Patricia Huntington, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Martin
Heidegger (2001)
Charlene Haddock Seigfried, ed., Feminist Interpretations of John Dewey (2001)
Naomi Scheman and Peg O'Connor, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein
(2002)
Lynda Lange, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2002)
Lorraine Code, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer (2002)
Lynn Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson, eds., Feminist Interpretations of W.V. Quine
(2003)
Maria J. Falco, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Niccow Machiavelli (2004)
Renee Heberle, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno (2006)
Penny A. Weiss and Loretta Kensinger, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman
(2006)
Nancy J. Hirschmann and Kirstie M. McClure, eds., Feminist Interpretations of John Locke
(2006)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feminist interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty / edited by Dorothea Olkowski

and Gail Weiss.
p. cm.-(Re-reading the canon)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-271-02917-X (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 0-271-02918-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Merleau-Ponty, MauriCe, 1908-1961.
2. Feminist theory.
\. Olkowski, Dorothea.
II. Weiss, Gail, 1959- .
III. Title.
IV. Series.

B2430.M3764F462006
194-dc22
2006018172

Copyright © 2006 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802-1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American

University Presses.

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper.
This book is printed on Natures Natural, containing 50% post-consumer waste, and
meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Chapter 5 originally appeared in Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics,

Agency, Culture, ed. Laura Doyle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001),
59-77; Chapter 7 originally appeared in Philosophy Today 49 (2005); Chapter 9 originally
appeared in Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, Culture, ed.
Laura Doyle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 79-99.
 Contents

Preface vii
Nancy Tuana
Introduction: The Situated Subject 1
Dorothea Olkowski
1 Merleau-Panty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 25
Sonia Kruks
2 Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 49
Dorothea Olkowski
3 White Logic and the Constancy of Color 71
Helen A. Fielding
4 From the Body Proper to Flesh: Merleau-Panty on
Intersubjectivity 91
Beata Stawarska
5 Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics: Alterities of the
Flesh in Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty 107
Judith Butler
6 Culpability and the Double Cross: Irigaray with Merleau-
Panty 127
Vicki Kirby
7 Urban Flesh 147
Gail Weiss
8 Vision, Violence, and the Other: A Merleau-Pontean Ethics 167
Jorella Andrews
vi Contents

9 Bodies Inside/O~t: Violation and Resistance from the Prison

Cell to The Bluest Eye 183
Laura Doyle
10 Female Freedom: Can the Lived Body Be Emancipated? 209
Johanna Oksaia
11 Care for the Flesh: Gilligan, Merleau-Ponty, and Corporeal
Styles 229
David Brubaker
12 Language in the Flesh: The Politics of Discourse in Merleau-
Ponty, Levinas, and Irigaray 257
Ann V. Murphy
Bibliography 273
Contributors 279
Index 283
 Preface
Nancy Tuana

Take into your hands any history of philosophy text. You will find com~
piled therein the "classics" of modem philosophy. Since these texts are
often designed for use in undergraduate classes, the editor is likely to offer
an introduction in which the reader is informed that these selections
represent the perennial questions of philosophy. The student is to assume
that she or he is about to explore the timeless wisdom of the greatest
minds of Western philosophy. No one calls attention to the fact that the
philosophers are all men.
Though women are omitted from the canons of philosophy, these texts
inscribe the nature of woman. Sometimes the philosopher speaks directly
about woman, delineating her proper role, her abilities and inabilities,
her desires. Other times the message is indirect-a passing remark hint~
ing at women's emotionality, irrationality, unreliability.
This process of definition occurs in far more subtle ways when the
central concepts of philosophy-reason and justice, those characteristics
that are taken to define us as human-are associated with traits histori~
cally identified with masculinity. If the "man" of reason must learn to
control or overcome traits identified as feminine-the body, the emo~
tions, the passions-then the realm of rationality will be one reserved
primarily for men,l with grudging entrance to those few women who are
capable of transcending their femininity.
Feminist philosophers have begun to look critically at the canonized
texts of philosophy and have concluded that the discourses of philosophy
are not gender~neutral. Philosophical narratives do not offer a universal
perspective, but rather privilege some experiences and beliefs over others.
These experiences and beliefs permeate all philosophical theories
whether they be aesthetic or epistemological, moral or metaphysical. Yet
viii Preface

this fact has often ~en neglected by those studying the traditions of
philosophy. Given the history of canon formation in Western philosophy,
the perspective most likely to be privileged is that of upper-class white
males. Thus, to be fully aware of the impact of gender biases, it is impera-
tive that we re-read .the canon with attention to the ways in which phi-
losophers' assumptions concerning gender are embedded within their
theories.
This new series, Re-Reading the CanOn, is designed to foster this process
of reevaluation. Each volume will offer feminist analyses of the theories
of a selected philosopher. Since feminist philosophy is not monolithic in
method or content, the essays are also selected to illustrate the variety of
perspectives within feminist criticism and highlight some of the contro-
versies within feminist scholarship.
In this series, feminist lenses will be focused on the canonical texts of
Western philosophy, both those authors who have been part of the tradi-
tional canon, and those philosophers whose writings have more recently
gained attention within the philosophical community. A glance at the
list of volumes in the series will reveal an immediate gender bias 'of the
canon: Arendt, Aristotle, Beauvoir, Derrida, Descartes, Foucault, Hegel,
Hume, Kant, Locke, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Plato, R!=lusseau, Witt-
genstein, Wollstonecraft. There are all too few women included, and
those few who do appear have been added only recently. In creating this
series, it is liot my intention to rectify the current canon of philosophical
thought. What is and· is not included within the canon during a particu-
a
lar historical period is result of many factors. Although no canonization
of texts will include all philosophers, no canonization of texts that ex-
cludes all but a few women can offer an accurate representation of the
history of the discipline, as women have been philosophers since the
ancient period. 2
I share with many feminist philosophers and other philosophers writ-
ing from the margins of philosophy the concern that the current canon-
ization of philosophy be transformed. Although I do not accept the
position that the current canon has been formed exclusively by power
relations, I do believe that this canon represents only a selective history
of the tradition. I share the view of Michael Berube that "canons are at
once the location, the index, and the record of the struggle for cultural
representation; like any other hegemonic formation, they must be con-
tinually reproduced anew and are continually contested."3
The process of canon transformation will require the recovery of "lost"
 Preface ix

texts and a careful examination of the reasons such voices have been
silenced. Along with the process of uncovering women's philosophical
history, we must also begin to analyze the impact of gender ideologies
upon the process of canonization. This process of recovery and examina-
tion must occur in conjunction with careful attention to the concept of
a canon of authorized texts. Are we to dispense with the notion of a
tradition of excellence embodied in a canon of authorized texts? Or,
rather than abandon the whole idea of a canon, do we instead encourage
a reconstruction of a canon of those texts that inform a common culture?
This series is designed to contribute to this process of canon transfor-
mation by offering a re-reading of the current philosophical canon. Such
a re-reading shifts our attention to the ways in which woman and the
role of the feminine are constructed within the texts of philosophy. A
question we must keep in front of us during this process of re-reading is
whether a philosopher's socially inherited prejudices concerning woman's
nature and role are independent of her or his larger philosophical frame-
work. In asking this question attention must be paid to the ways in which
the definitions of central philosophical concepts implicitly include or
exclude gendered traits.
This type of reading strategy is not limited to the canon, but can be
applied to all texts. It is my desire that this series reveal the importance
of this type of critical reading. Paying attention to the workings of gender
within the texts of philosophy will make visible the complexities of the
inscription of gender ideologies.

Notes

1. More properly, it is a realm reserved for a group of privileged males, since the texts also
inscribe race and class biases that thereby omit certain males from participation.
2. Mary Ellen Waithe's multivolume series, A History of Women Philosophers (Boston: M. Nijoff,
1987), attests to this presence of women.
3. Michael Berube, Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992),4-5.
 Introduction: The Situated Subject
Dorothea Olkowski

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61) came to philosophy in an era that

encompassed both intense social and political upheaval, as well as rich
and diverse philosophical developments. Edmund Husserl, Martin Hei-
degger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir were prominent among
those thinkers preoccupied with conceptualizing the contemporary situa-
tion of human beings. Phenomenology and existentialism were the prod-
ucts of these reflections. For Husser!, phenomenology is the study of
phenomena, of things as they appear to us in experience and not as they
are either in themselves or in reality. Thus Husserl was able to focus on
2 Introduction

the sense or meaning'of phenomena for a pure human consciousness

rather than become entangled in mundane debates about reference.
Nonetheless, Heidegger, along with most phenomenologists of the fol-
lowing generation, demanded a return to "being-in-the-world," begin-
ning with our own insertion into the everyday world of useful things and
proceeding from there to the reflective acts of "Dasein," a being who is
aware of and brings into question the meaning of its own existence as
well as that of the world as a whole. Greatly influenced by Heidegger's
conception of human Dasein in the world, Sartre situates human beings
in relation to their modes of temporalization in order to differentiate
between Being-in-itself (nonconscious being), Being-for-itself (a tran-
scendence that nihilates any particular being), and Being-for-others (the
self as an object for .others). For Sartre, every transcendent being is a
flight toward its projects, which it can only achieve through the nihila-
tion of its own immanence and the objectification of other beings,
thereby denying them their transcendence in order to achieve its own.
Unsatisfied with the knowing subject of a pure phenomenology, as well
as with the conflicts of.Sartre's transcendent subject, Beauvoir posits an
embodied subject who fully expresses the ambiguity of lived experience.
This subject has been described as one whose intentionality is imbued
with joy and delight'at her awareness of the intersubjective world as the
site of freedom, a freedom that does not entail objectification of others. 1
Thus, the subject's delight exceeds and overcomes the feeling of anxiety
that arises in the encol!nter with the other who may threaten the sub-
ject's own tran&.cendence. This calls for an ethics in which the subject
recognizes that the ethical will to liberate the other and to delight in the
other's existence can and must undermine any desire to control them.
Although frequently associated with Sartre, through the journal Les
Temps Modemes, Merleau-Ponty maintained a critical distance from Sar-
tre's subject-object structure with its attendant intersubjective conflicts.
Instead, he turned to empirical psychology to articulate a novel theory of
the relation between embodied consciousness and nature, defined as the
organic, the psychological, and the social worlds. Critical of the philo-
sophical presuppositions of both" 'objectivism,' understood as naturalism
in philosophy, behaviorism in psychology, and mechanism in biology;
[and] on the other hand, what he calls 'intellectualism,'" a form of neo-
Kantianism, Merleau-Ponty reinterprets Gestalt psychology to develop
his own analysis of the structure bf experience insofar as it is given to us
phenomenologkally,2 Hence, the title of his first book, The Structure of
 Introduction 3

Behavior.3 After repeated excursions to the Husserl archives at the Uni-

versity of Louvain, Belgium, Merleau-Ponty also began to incorporate
Husserl's terminology and concepts into his complex account of percep-
tual experience. This inclusion opened Merleau-Ponty's thinking to phe-
nomenology as the study of phenomena, that is, to things as they appear
to our experience, as well as to the meanings things have in our experi-
ence. No doubt, as Sonia Kruks has argued, this view appeared as a claim
against the tradition of epistemology. Rather than positing a knower
"who can come to have real knowledge of objects that are independent
of his or her own existence," Merleau-Ponty insists that "the relation of
knower to known, of subject to object, always takes place in situation. "4
This leads to the necessity of showing that situated knowledge is not
uniquely private but shared, a necessity all the more urgent if we take
phenomenology to be the description of experience from the point of
view of an individual subjectivity. Thus, while phenomenology in general
must pay great attention to the ontological question of what it is to be a
"being-in-situation," given his grounding in empirical psychology,
Merleau-Ponty's particular view of this is that a being-in-situation is an
embodied, perceptual being. 5
The feminist encounter with Maurice Merleau-Ponty can be said to
have started with Simone de Beauvoir's 1945 review of Merleau-Ponty's
Phenomenologie de la perception, in which Beauvoir expresses her agree-
ment with the idea of the situated, embodied subject. 6 Our body, she
argues, is our manner of being at the world (etre au monde) and it iFlvolves
itself in the sensible world by taking up and assuming spatial existence.
This occurs, according to Merleau-Ponty, when we do not treat space as
merely a container in which objects and persons appear, nor understand
it as a system unified by a subject who acts, but instead reflect on our
situated experience as a third spatiality. What we discover, he argues, is
a system of possible actions and a body whose place is defined according
to its tasks or interests in the world and according to how it is situated
because, for such a body, space is an open field of corporeal possibilities.
In order to clarify his point, Merleau-Ponty proposes a spatial experiment.
Place a subject in a situation in which she sees a room only through a
mirror that reflects it at a forty-five-degree angle, and the subject will at
first see the room as slanted. Anyone walking through the room appears
to be leaning and any object falling in the room falls obliquely. Over-
whelmingly, the subject feels herself not at home with the room and its
activities. But after a few minutes something strange and miraculous oc-
4 Introduction

curs: the room, the pe~son walking through the room, and the falling
object become vertical. This "miracle" can take place because the body
is not some thing in an objectively held space but is located where there
is something to be done, an activity to be carried out, no matter how
rudimentary. Walking; sitting, opening a door, using an object, all resitu-
ate the embodied subject so she feels that she can inhabit the room. As
Merleau-Ponty claims, "It is then, a certain possession of the world by
my body, a certain gearing of my body to the world."?
This account of the spatial realignment of an embodied, situated sub-
ject reflects the body's potential for certain movements such as sitting,
standing, and reaching, and also the demand for vertical rather than
oblique planes. Likewise it reflects the spatial environment as something
that calls for certain kinds of movements and certain kinds of actions so
that not only does the embodied subject inhabit and enjoy space, but she
is also open to the influence and power over herself of things and spaces
and, also, of other embodied beings. The integration that the embodied
subject experiences between herself and her environment takes place
when the subject's motor'" intentions unfold as the world responds in ac-
cordance with the subject's expectations. Such a perceptual ground is
fundamentally "a basis of my life, a general setting in which my body can
coexist with the world," and so with others. B The connection to other
living beings arises because every conceivable being, Merleau-Ponty
maintains, is related directly or indirectly to this general setting, this
perceived world, making it the horizon of all our perceptions, each of
which passes on. its spatial orientation to whatever perception follows it.
In order for this not to result in an infinite regress, Merleau-Pontyopts
for a prepersonal orientation for the experiencing subject, a prepersonal,
anonymous life that can only be located in the body, a communication
with the world that he declares is ~ore ancient than thought, saturating
consciousness, yet impenetrable to reflection. 9 These considerations are
at the basis of the feminist invocation and feminist critique of Merleau-
Ponty. Beauvoir voices no fundamental disagreement with Merleau-
Ponty's conception of the situated subject, and Merleau-Ponty even ar-
gues that it is Beauvoir who laid the foundations for existential phenome-
nology in her novel She Came to Stay .10 There, in her account of a woman
on the edge of a love triangle, Beauvoir creates a character who discovers
that her fundamental cO!llmunications with others occur less in relation
to her intentional consciousness than in her bodily situatedness, her spa-
a
tial location in world in which other beings and things are integrated
 Introduction 5

with her own environment. Beauvoir affirms Merleau-Ponty's conception

when she argues that situated existence must be expressed by both the
history and the prehistory that is our body, a previously given or preper-
sonal spatiality characterizing each body; a milieu that must remain
somewhat opaque but is also the background of our embodied intercon-
nections. 11
Following Beauvoir, it is probably Luce Irigaray who has had the great-
est impact on feminist interpretations of Merleau-Ponty. Not only does
she rethink Merleau-Ponty's conception of spatiality, introducing the
concept of the interval and rethinking that of the chiasm, but she also
addresses the privilege Merleau-Ponty accords to visibility. For Merleau-
Ponty, the chiasmatic relation entails the double and crossed situating of
the visible and the tangible and the tangible in the visible, as well as the
relation between seer and seen, touching and being touched, such that
the seer is looked at by the things she sees and touched by the things she
touches. 12 The chiasmatic relation implies, as well, a new ontological
conceptualization, that of the flesh, a connective tissue or intertwining
constituting both world and body on a prepersonal level. Although she
embraces the concept of the chiasmus, Irigaray is concerned that chias-
matically, "woman always tends towards something else without ever
turning to herself as site of a positive element," and so the positive and
negative poles always divide themselves between the two sexes.13 In place
of this Irigaray proposes a double loop in which each sex moves out
toward the other then back to itself. This, in turn, makes possible the
concept of the interval, the intermediate, the space between each double
loop in which entirely new relations between subject and object, woman
and man, are possible. For Irigaray, without such an interval, no subject
can even enter the world, for there would be no spacing for the freedom
of questioning between two. Moreover, two sentient beings would have
to inhabit the same world in the same way in order to even encounter
each other, and the risk that one would overwhelm the other is always
present. 14 Following her reformulation of the chiasmatic relation, and to
the extent that Merleau-Ponty's conception does seem to privilege vi-
sion, Irigaray asserts not simply that the visible and the tactile are revers-
ible, but that intrauterine tactile experience is the primal sensibility,
followed by the sound of the mother's voice. As such, the prepersonal
realm is much less anonymous than Merleau-Ponty postulates and much
more the realm of the maternal-feminine.
Merleau-Ponty's descriptions of the prepersonal structures of existence
6 Introduction

that are prior to and the ground of any intellectual relations with the
world have been subject to extensive critique for their masculinist bias.
Iris Marion Young points out that Merleau-Ponty has attracted the inter-
est of feminist philosophers by locating subjectivity in the body, thereby
giving the lived body ontological status as the first locus of intentionality,
a pure presence to the world and an openness to its possibilities.1 5 Never-
theless, she echoes Irigaray's concerns by stating that an epistemology
emerging from a feminine subjectivity might well privilege touch over
sight and that Merleau-Ponty only occasionally offers a concept of the
lived body specific to women, a bodily comportment typical of both femi-
nine existence and of the modes and structures in the world that condi-
tion that existence. 16 Others, among them Judith Butler, have praised
some aspects of Metleau-Ponty's work while at the same time voicing
skepticism. Butler commends Merleau-Ponty for his recognition of social
and historical factors that are intrinsic to any theory of the body, which
is not, for him, coextensive with mere existence. Nevertheless, Butler,
more forcefully than Young, has argued that Merleau-Ponty privileges the
gaze in matters of sexua.1ity, which he describes in unremittingly hetero-
sexual terms, a perspective that he tends to naturalize, forgetting his pre-
vious commitment to historical and cultural life. 17 Michel Le Doeuff is
even more explicit in her critique of Merleau-Ponty, arguing that the
visible body, perceived by the so-called normal subject, is a woman's body
seen by the gaze of the man, who will soon move from gaze to gesture,
from vision to touch, remaking what he sees, accenting his own eroge-
nous tastes. IS The disturbing implication of this position is that each
woman seen by-a man is seen from within the framework of what Le
Doeuff takes to be a generalized structure of power, the power of each
man to redraw or remake anything he sees no matter how idiosyncrati-
cally this is done. She finds this particularly disturbing in the intellectual
realm, where male scholars still publish books about women making use
only of the work of other male scholars and implying-using reasoning
very much like that used by Merleau-Ponty-that a man has the right to
represent women as he wishes. 19
More recently, feminist philosophers have begun a reassessment of the
value of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy for feminism. Although they do not
deny the masculine bias of his thinking, there is, nevertheless, a con-
certed attempt to take up what is most useful in his work. Sonia Kruks
and Gail Weiss, who have both contributed essays to this volume, are
significant in this new effort. Kruks traces Merleau-Ponty's usefulness to
 Introduction 7

feminist philosophy to the obvious affinities between the ideas of Beau-

voir and those of Merleau-Ponty. Kruks argues that "although Merleau-
Ponty is ... well aware that objectifying and alienating relations are not
only possible but often central to human existence, his account of the
lived experience of 'the' body-the body that perceives, moves, touches,
and acts in this world-is not that of a body that is pervasively cast as
other."20 Instead, she argues, Merleau-Ponty's notion of the body is that
it is a generality; in other words, as embodied, subjects inhabit an anony-
mous or prepersonal realm, which he later called flesh, and which in-
cludes both the flesh of bodies and the flesh of the world. It is flesh
that provides human beings with a general atmosphere of intersubjective
communication prior to cognition and therefore prior to social or gender
stratification. For her part, Weiss finds much of value in Merleau-Ponty's
conception of the body image, the corporeal schema that plays an indis-
pensable stabilizing role in the perceptual process and makes it possible
for the perceiver to come into possession of a world. 21 Although the body
might be subject to oppression from others or from society, insofar as it is
a style of being, a body image, embodied being, is also the condition
of the possibility of transformation and openness to possibilities. Most
important for Weiss is the idea that, alteady for Merleau-Ponty, there are
a plurality of body images for every embodied being that change in rela-
tion to the intercorporeal world that each being inhabits. Intercorporeal-
ity, in Weiss's account, arises as an originary openness to others, who, in
tum, contribute to the constitution of each self by means of the differen-
tial or diacritical structure that organizes both perception and language
and that makes it possible to articulate the extent to which the social
and the bodily realm intertwine without the latter becoming the cause
of the former.
Given the importance of Merleau-Ponty's contribution to the phe-
nomenological idea of situated embodiment, every chapter in this vol-
ume, in some significant manner, reflects on what it means to be a
spatially situated and embodied subject and how it is either possible or
necessary to make this the basis of both our individual and our intersub-
jective lives. If Merleau-Ponty's claims can be upheld, then the spatial
situatedness of prepersonal existence not only grounds and resituates our
experience of the environment and things, but more important, also
grounds the experience of other human beings as other and resituates
them as related to the perceiving subject in the midst of their multiple
differences, their profound otherness and separateness. It does this be-
8 Introduction

cause, if, as we claim~d above, the body's place is defined according to its
tasks or interests in the world, this will be the case not only with respect
to the world of things but also with respect to other human beings. As
human beings, our tasks and interests situate our experience. Thus, in
this volume, the question will often arise of whether Merleau-Ponty has
solved the problematic of sexual difference, especially with respect to the
question of the gender of the pre personal as well as the intentional sub-
ject. Many of the chapters in this volume address whether, or the extent
to which, the ethics of sexual difference can be successfully formulated
by his phenomenology. The answer may well lie in how each of the au-
thors takes up the question of Merleau-Ponty's as well as her or his own
tasks and interests, for on Merleau-Ponty's account, what interests us is
what we will seek to ground and situate with respect to our experience
and knowledge.
The tasks and interests with which this volume begins are those of the
relation of intersubjeotivity to embodiment as they encourage or discour-
age sexual difference in Merleau-Ponty's work. In the opening chapter,
"Merleau-Ponty and. the Problem of Difference in Feminism," Sonia
Kruks lays out the framework for an ethics of sexual difference from the
perspective of an intersubjective interpretation of Merleau-Ponty. Al-
though Kruks admits that Merleau-Ponty does mostly conceive of the
body as masculine, she argues that embodiment alone is not necessarily a
guarantee of intersubjectivity, since embodiment is a site of antagonisms
and conflicts as much as it offers positive potentialities for communica-
tion and harmonious'intersubjectivity. Kruks maintains that feminism
has a need t~ acknowledge both situated know ledges and objective or
shared and public knowledges, and she argues that Merleau-Ponty's exis-
tential phenomenology performs precisely this task. He does this, she
thinks, because his philosophical arguments are dialectical, so that his
abstract accounts of embodiment must be interpreted through the lens of
his later, more complex ideas on culture, language, politics, and history.
Merleau-Ponty thus places the perceiver in a situated world that she can-
not wholly control where perceiver and perceived form a whole, a gestalt
in which each interacts with the other in order to be what it is. For
Kruks, this is the basis of Merleau-Ponty's conception of an anonymous
and prepersonal embodiment, but it is also the basis of anyone's particular
point of view insofar as having a body and being able to look gives one a
spatial location and so' a view of the world. Thus the prepersonal is always
also particular and suffused with social Significations, and the relation
 Introduction 9

between self and world can thereby be understood to involve both affir,
mation and negation and so is dialectical. However, the existence of oth,
ers presents difficulties, and solipsism affirms the extent to which it is
possible, on Merleau,Ponty's account, for others to exist only as objects
for the subject. Kruks proposes that, in the end, what brings us together
is our affective bond with others, by which we participate in acts of soli,
darity with those whose social identities are different from our own. This
is the basis of feminist solidarity: since women's bodies and lives are
highly differentiated with respect to one another, only the generic nature
of feminine embodiment is adequate to account for solidarity and possible
positive intersubjective relations. Yet Kruks seems to acknowledge that
intersubjective relations will of necessity be partial, for the dialectical
nature of embodiment incorporates a negative moment as well as a posi,
tive one so that it is up to us to choose which aspect of our embodiment
to live.
The felt, affective bond with others that Kruks proposes as the basis of
intersubjective relations is precisely the problem taken up in Dorothea
Olkowski's chapter, "Only Nature Is Mother to the Child." Beginning
with Merleau,Ponty's claim that understanding an experience, as op,
posed to living through it, tends to produce distortions that never quite
capture the authenticity of the lived, through moment and that the
child's experience of authenticity and immediacy is an indispensable ac,
quisition underlying maturity, the question Olkowski raises is, Why does
Merleau,Ponty insist on the primacy of nature so as to exclude any traces
of the child's relation to a mother? Nowhere in the human cultural world
does the child appear to find positive affective relations between human
beings; thus, without an originary experience of coexistence or reciproc'
ity, intersubjective attachments appear to be impossible. Even though
Merleau,Ponty recognizes that the child's world is originally a world of
feeling, he is led to give up the idea of the psyche, the feeling one has of
one's own existence, and to replace it with the concept of behavior. In
other words, Merleau,Ponty trades off what is felt-including the felt
relation to the mother, who nurtures and cares for the child, for behavior,
which can be seen and so is predominantly visual. This move resolves
certain crucial problems, such as how the child comes to have an experi,
ence of the other. But in dismissing a fundamental tactile or felt experi,
ence of the child, Merleau,Ponty gives up the child's felt relation, not
just with an other, but with a mother, proposing instead that the child
begins in a state in which she is unaware of any self,other differences at
10 Introduction

all, and then by means' of the specular image, comes to see herself and
others as separate beings.
Olkowski then asks, If the child truly begins in an undifferentiated
world, what could possibly introduce differentiation? Intersubjectivity
may well commence with the felt experience of the child, which begins
in the body of the woman who gives birth, who carries the child to term,
and who then nurtures and cares for the child. Without this felt, inter~
subjective life, vision alone does not guarantee that what is seen is under~
stood by the child to be an other or a separate being. This is affirmed
in Merleau~Ponty's own account by his acknowledgment that specular
knowledge of oneself is also alienation, that in gazing into the mirror the
child is no longer what she felt herself to be but is only that image in the
mirror; Since the feeling component of lived experience has been dis~
missed by Merleau~Ponty as being too chaotic to offer any meaningful
information to the child, the child can only experience herself, the world,
and others through the specular image. However, caught up in this image,
the child is alienated from herself, from the world, and from others to the
point where intersubjec~ivity becomes alienation. Confronted with this
empty human world, Merleau~ Ponty falls back upon the hypothesis of an
originary experience of harmonized nature. Yet, as Olkowski concludes,
if the child's felt experience of birth and being nurtured by the mother is
nothing but undifferentiated chaos, there appears to be an unbridgeable
gap between the experience of the child and the experience of the adult,
which vision does not close.
In "White Logic and the Constancy of Color," Helen Fielding ad~
dresses intersubj~ctivity by means of what she calls an underlying theme
for Merleau~Ponty, that is, the suppression of lived corporeal creativity
and its submission to the mind's unifying representational activity. She
asks, How does an embodied subject both encounter a sedimented, thus
familiarly significant, world and also remain open to new forms of sedi~
mentation? How can we use our cognition to make sense of what we
experience even while remaining alive to the possibilities that our corpo~
real interactions generate? One the one hand, Fielding argues that phe~
nomenological description can be used to reveal the invisible operations
of the suppression of corporeal creativity, but on the other, she finds that
phenomenology also neutralizes its own activities and so obscures the
relations of dominance that it creates. Exemplary, in this regard, accord~
ing to Fielding, are the invisible operations of the phenomenal structures
that privilege white skin in Western culture, structures that obscure the
 Introduction 11

privilege they make possible behind a screen of neutrality and normality.

Fielding supports the position that the apparent cultural invisibility of
white skin is oriented by racially and sexually specific understandings of a
mind/body dualism linking mind to a white male and inherently rational
European model, while it links the body to a feminine "colored" emo,
tional embodiment. Given that white as a hue is taken to be no color
because it is all colors, it is easily made to designate the human norm as
well as social norms in which white symbolizes the good.
Yet perception demands difference and only color allows differentia,
tion. Because white light best illuminates the structure of objects, uni,
formly reflecting the varied surfaces of objects, it is almost always favored
over colored lighting, even as it neutralizes difference. Thus color percep'
tion provides an important clue to the apprehension of cognitive ele,
ments such as concepts. Like a color, a concept can affect the way in
which things appear. A concept, such as "humanity," has a horizon of
being that precedes and overlaps with its cognitive dimension. In this
manner, both concepts and colors exceed what they signify and repre,
sent; thus, focusing on racism and sexism as they are represented and
signified fails to comprehend the ontological foundations that dictate
how things and people appear in a racist and sexist horizon. This and
other horizons cancel out any stray data that do not conform to their
logic. Such tension between creative thinking and adherence to sedi,
mented structures is embedded in Merleau,Ponty's work, and Fielding
suggests that he did not realize the implications of his perceptual theory
for an understanding of creativity. Fielding recognizes and embraces the
need for a thought that opens up the potential of the body for disman,
tling sedimented structures in order to create new ways of relating and
signifying and she continues to interrogate Merleau,Ponty's phenome,
nology to find the lived basis of these modes of being.
In the final chapter addressed specifically to intersubjectivity, a critical
view of the concept of flesh is proposed by Beata Stawarska. In "From the
Body Proper to Flesh: Merleau,Ponty on Intersubjectivity," she argues for
the importance of maintaining a self/other distinction in relation to
Merleau,Ponty's conception of flesh. The concept of flesh has been criti,
cized by feminists for articulating human experience in terms of universal
categories and so failing to acknowledge the gender,specific experience of
the body. Stawarska is concerned also with an analogous effect of univer,
salizing, that is, the massive reduction of the intersubjective experience of
the body to the body proper as manifested in the encounter with other
12 Introduction

embodied persons. She notes how Merleau~ Ponty describes the intrasub~
jective bodily experience of touching one's own hand in which touching
and being touched are reversible. He claims that the same principle oper~
ates between bodies, since active touching can always be reversed into
passive being touche<;l, or the seer can become the seen. The problem,
according to Stawarska, is that in making the move from intracorporeality
to intercorporeality, the very difference between these two modes of being
is erased and the sensible difference between what is mine and what is
other disappears. As a result, the concrete specificity of any corporeal dy~
namic gets submerged in a collapse into the universal model of reversible
self~touching. This is a result, she argues, of the masculine frame of mind
that continually misrepresents the structures of intersubjectivity as well as
gender in its tendency to reduce the other to the same. Thus the male
regards his body as a direct and normal connection to the world and sees
himself as the essential and sovereign subject for whom the other recedes
to the status of an inessential and dependent object. The latter tendency
makes it impossible to account for an authentic relation with the other.
Stawarska acknowledges that Merleau~Ponty conceived of flesh as a
prototype of being, thtis as apersonal and anonymous, the generality of
incarnate being, not of the personal experience of the body. The personal
perspective was the focus of Merleau~Ponty's earlier work and the ques~
tion raised here is whether he successfully abandoned the perspective of
the body proper or merely generalized it in his ontology of flesh. The
intercorporeal encounter with an other is understood through analogy
with one's intracorporeal reversibility, insofar as in a handshake, for ex~
ample, the other's body is annexed by one's own. However, as Merleau~
Ponty makes clear, only touching one's own body yields the double sensa~
tion of toucher~touching; that is, I cannot be an other, since I have my
own place. No actual reversal is possible except from the point of view of
a detached spectator who could incorporate both the hand touching and
the hand being touched in a single act. Stawarska concludes that if only
an impersonal spectator could uphold the thesis of intracorporeal revers~
ibility, its characterization in terms of world flesh must be universalization
of the experience of a unique "body proper," which serves as a norm for
Merleau~Ponty's ontology.· But this universalisalizing tendency has a
larger scope than has previously been identified in the feminist interpre~
tations ofMerleau~Ponty, in that it leads both to the bracketing of gender
and the self/other specifi'city. Stawarska argues that this failure to develop
an authentic relation to the other is an inherent trait of the masculinist
 Introduction 13

frame of mind and that it is most prominent in the oppression of women

by men, insofar as men have consistently reduced women to the category
of secondary and subordinate beings, devoid of free subjectivity.
Judith Butler's subtle exploration of ethics and sexual difference offers
an introduction to the intertwining of recent feminist approaches with
that of Merleau,Ponty. In "Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics:
Alterities of the Flesh in lrigaray and Merleau,Ponty," Butler begins by
arguing for Luce Irigaray's subordination to the philosophical texts she
reads, insofar as lrigary attributes to them a power that she also seeks to
undo. In the case of Merleau,Ponty, in particular, Irigaray engages in an
"intertwining," which enacts the theory of flesh that it also interrogates,
thereby installing itself willingly within that text. The ethical question,
raised by Butler, is whether Irigaray's method works to confirm and en,
hance the power of the text it seeks to counter. Butler proposes that
lrigaray enacts an intertwining that suggests a mutually constitutive rela,
tion in which the feminine is the negative condition of the possibility of
the masculine. This exposes the vulnerability of Merleau,Ponty's con,
cepts in particular, and the philosophical tradition in general, to what
they exclude, an exclusion that in its tum is radically dependent upon
what it refuses. As Butler reads him, Merleau,Ponty is concerned with
how the dominant relation between understanding and vision has elided
the role of tactility. So he suggests that there is a primary intertwining of
language, vision, and touch that might best be understood on the level
of aesthetic experience and ontology rather than through epistemology,
whose subject,object distinction arises out of and so is secondary to that
intertwining. For lrigaray, however, Merleau,Ponty's intertwining already
presupposes a set of established relations that forecloses the open future,
the never yet known, which is open to the paradigmatic ethical question
"Who are you?" She would reformulate the intertwining as constitutive
in the sense that through it feminine and masculine each admits its own
internal impossibility through its relation to the Other, a dynamic differ,
entiation in proximity. What unfolds, for Butler, is a textual "intertwin,
ing" between lrigaray and Merleau, Ponty; each is engaged in a primary
complicity with the Other without which no subject or author can
emerge. The ethical question now becomes one of how to treat the Other
well when that other is never fully Other, when the difference between
self and Other is originally equivocal.
For lrigaray, Merleau,Ponty's intertwining is solipsistic, while for But,
ler, Merleau,Ponty's embodied "I" implicates this "I" in the world outside
14 Introduction

itself in which it is n0 longer the center or ground. This, in tum, makes

possible Irigaray's identification of the maternal body as prior to this "I"
and its embodied objects. But this, Butler argues, is to reduce a complex
set of constituting interrelations to "oneself," that is, to the maternal
body. Furthermore, it appears that what makes the refusal of alterity a
masculinist enterprise, for Irigaray, is her use of the psychoanalytic model
in which the mother is nothing but the site of a narcissistic reflection for
the masculine subject. In her eyes, Merleau-Ponty has first repudiated
the maternal, then reappropriated it in the form of intertwining or flesh
occasioned by the masculine subject. Butler's response to this is to inquire
if it is not the case that the maternal body is also situated in relations of
alterity without which it could not exist. If so, does not Merleau-Ponty's
insistence upon a prior world, which he calls flesh, offer a way out of the
controlling figure of the maternal and out of the binary trap of both
mothers and men? Similarly with language, Irigaray claims that insofar as
language emerges dire~tly from bodily life, it is subject to the same solip-
sism as is vision and touch. Again, Butler asks if lrigaray is not assuming
that the same structurQ of narcissism is operating here when the fact
that she is implicated" in Merleau-Ponty's text, that it is the site of her
expropriation, indicates something quite different. If Merleau-Ponty is
implicated in the world of flesh, to disavow it would be to disavow himself
as well, likewise with the experience of the Other. As Butler argues, "To
have one's being implicated in the Other is thus to be intertwined from
the start but not for that reason to be reducible t~r exchangeable
with--one another." H.owever, Butler immediately adds that none of this
would have come to light without lrigaray's intervention. Only by work-
ing through Irigaray's reworking of Merleau-Ponty's text can Butler read
his text in this manner. And likewise, only by appropriating Merleau-
Ponty's text does lrigaray go on ·to derive a feminist philosophy both
continuous with and other than the tradition she inherits.
In her chapter, "Culpability and the Double Cross: lrigaray with
Merleau-Ponty," Vicki Kirby explains that the attraction of feminist phi-
losophy for her has always been the promise that ideas and values associ-
ated with women, which had formerly been conceived almost entirely in
negative terms, might be able to be reconceived in a positive manner.
She finds that Luce lrigaray, in particular, is able to begin her analyses
with philosophy's own positions and self-definitions in order to disclose
the value of what is repressed or disavowed in the logic of these philoso-
phies. Kirby is particularly interested in Irigaray's critique of the Western
 Introduction 15

philosophical concept of the subject, especially insofar as this concept is

caught up with particular ideas about the feminine and the maternal.
Kirby argues that, for Irigaray, although any examination of the maternal
will inevitably take us to our history and origins, we must guard against
nostalgia, which works to "block the threshold of the ethical world," by
hiding "man's" anxieties about the carnality of his own history, allowing
him to commodify and control his origins by replacing his fleshly origins
by building a world that is largely uninhabitable. Chiefly, it is the techno-
logical world guided by instrumental knowledge that dismembers the
world and cuts it up into usable and manageable parts. Kirby suggests that
for lrigaray, rather than managing the world, we might consider staying
attuned to it and to our own bodies through perception, which neither
closes women off nor manages them. Kirby points out that this solution
is deliberately elusive with respect to defining women, for Irigaray is not
interested in establishing an alternative representation of women; rather,
she merely seeks to question the constraints already in place.
Kirby finds in Merleau-Ponty a formidable ally for lrigaray, particularly
because he confounds traditional dichotomous divisions with the notion
of the flesh as the world's becoming itself and, in its "reversibility," em-
bracing itself. So when lrigaray criticizes Merleau-Ponty for displacing
the feminine by reconceiving of the maternal in terms of flesh, Kirby is
prepared to defend the notion of the maternal as the world (re)conceiv-
ing itself, invaginating itself and so perceiving itself by opening itself up
to the experience of its own difference, its noncoincidence, in a manner
that is unashamedly lacking in reserve. Thus the generative nature of the
sensible undoes the so-called spatial and temporal exclusivity of mater-
nity insofar as perception allows the world to seize its own alienness and
in the wonder of this encounter to reconceive itself. This is not only
possible but necessary, because nothing is preexistent in nature and ev-
erything is in the process of becoming itself. This is not, Kirby cautions,
a return to a prediscursive moment, but rather the ability of flesh to
perceive and center itself in its dispersion. It is maternity in the sense of
the issuing forth of an identity across space and time in a world in which
the senses become the "measurants for Being." Kirby argues that
Merleau-Ponty grounds language in difference and that Merleau-Ponty's
conception of "visibility" can be read as Jacques Derrida's "textuality"
such that when flesh diverges from itself, it fractures the separate sensory
modalities in each body as well as between bodies so that, as Merleau-
Ponty argues, there is a kind of presence of other people within each
16 Introduction

person. For Kirby, Irigaray erases this extraordinary reading of carnality

when she reads it as a symptom of masculinist theft, and Kirby accuses
Irigaray of resorting to a notion of duration as linear time by making
tactility the perceptual ground of nurturing and support and so of visibil-
ity. Likewise, Irigaray.places maternity at the origin of giving, so it is not
itself subject to birth. The continual insistence on purity of origins that
Kirby finds everywhere in Irigaray's work is, she argues, found nowhere in
Merleau-Ponty, for whom violation is impossible because everything is
always already given and, in this givenness, intertwined with everything
else-visible and tactile, self and other, self and world, body and lan-
guage. Given this "generosity," as Kirby calls it, the male subject becomes
as unstable as the female, and reversibility rather than violation becomes
the foundation of a radical new ethics because the condition of reversibil-
ity constrains us to be responsible insofar as all human beings issue from
the flesh of sexual difference, the flesh of the world.
Gail Weiss wishes to .explore the intersubjective value of Merleau-Pon-
ty's concept of flesh by extending it to the materiality of the urban in her
chapter, "Urban Flesh." -If we have succeeded in overcoming or at least
addressing the mind/body dualism of Cartesianism, then it may be time,
she argues, to tum to the nature/city divide and to give it adequate theo-
retical attention. It is, Weiss maintains, a distinction no less gendered,
racist, and classist than that of mind/body dualism. This claim is all the
more important in light of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center
towers in New York City. Witnessed by thousands around the world, the
images of human pain and suffering as well as those of the collapsing
buildings igniteJ a worldwide visceral sense of vulnerability. This disrup-
tion of the so-called natural attitude reawakens our awareness of those
countries recently as well as continually ravaged by war or natural disas-
ters. Rather than seeking a fast return to the natural attitude, Weiss sug-
gests that we take up Merleau-Ponty's claim that for us, as incarnate
beings, violence is our lot. To this Weiss adds that even the prospect of
reconstruction following violent incidents may call for the violence of
justice to rectify the situation, for even a nominally liberal society may,
in reality, be oppressive. What is needed, Weiss suggests, is some recogni-
tion and understanding of the manner in which bodies exceed the bound-
aries of their own skin to participate in the "flesh of the world," insofar
as the relation between them is, as Merleau-Ponty might argue, "chias-
matic." Given the realirsr that many inhabitants of cities and towns liter-
ally have no place to dwell leads Weiss to caution those who would put
 Introduction 17

too much emphasis on the need for a home in which to cultivate one's
individual identity and those who ignore the often profound alienation
that cities may evoke for their inhabitants, not to mention those for
whom even a beautiful home is a prison. In the end, Weiss argues for a
much more nuanced picture of the flesh of dwelling, one that does not
gloss its violence any more than it romanticizes its possibilities, which
may include peace and joy but also discord and disorder.
The complex relation between intersubjectivity and ethics, perception
and the other, is explored in Jorella Andrews's "Vision, Violence, and
the Other: A Merleau-Pontean Ethics." She grants that for Merleau-
Ponty, perception opens up the intersubjective world to human beings,
but in so doing, it also opens up an ethical world and a metaethics.
Merleau-Ponty claims that perception is in some sense violent, but it is a
violence that is not connected to any sort of objectification. Vision, in
particular, although strongly associated with fixing things in their place
as objects, need not objectify. Instead, Andrews argues, the gaze is pre-
cisely antiocular, a refusal to see and to engage in seeing, since seeing
does not fix objects in place but opens up the possibility for ongoing
interaction in our perceptual relations. Therefore, Andrews argues, per-
ception makes and unmakes worlds, selves, and others. To deny this open-
ness and vulnerability would be to flee the intersubjective world, where
all bodies are marked with the traces of mortality, for the stable but
limited realm of the rational and the willful. To refuse to acknowledge
the instability of perception is to refuse the experience of another kind
of permanence, one found only among bodies, and to enter a solipsistic
realm. Any failure to recognize others implies the failure to experience
ourselves as seen by them, which is not the same as merely assigning
others a place in our world through our conceptions of them.
Andrews hypothesizes that it is precisely these notions of intersubjec-
tive life that form the basis of Merleau-Ponty's ethics. A truly ethical
situation, she argues, is a truly intersubjective one in which human beings
reveal themselves by generously meeting others whose perspectives are
juxtaposed to their own. Rather than suppressing others' perspectives,
Andrews maintains that Merleau-Ponty argues for their expression so
that differences may be negotiated. This is evidenced in Merleau-Ponty's
account of Simone de Beauvoir's novel L'inviree, which he finds contains
numerous descriptions pointing to this kind of ethics, one that arises
within a situation rather than being externally imposed. In such descrip-
tions of situated ethical connections, freedom, according to Merleau-
18 Introduction

Ponty, is a matter of accepting all one's involvements and going beyond

them to examine the means by which one becomes involved in the first
place. This brings Andrews back to her original thesis regarding the in-
stability of perception. For she concludes that the means by which one
becomes involved with others in a flexible and nonobjectivizing manner
is through the lived body with all its vulnerabilities and concrete modes
of being, which precedes all thought about the world and, presumably,
all action as well.
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body is put to the test by Laura
Doyle in her moving chapter, "Bodies Inside/Out: Violation and Resis-
tance from the Prison Cell to The Bluest Eye," in which Doyle proposes
to examine the paradoxical carnal logic where bodily vulnerability founds
resistance, and weakness forms the ground of defiance. The torture of
IRA prisoners held in the Long Kesh prison involved the penetration of
their bodily orifices by means of fists and metal tools. This is no mere
display of mastery over,the prisoners' bodies, cautions Doyle; it is a display
of mastery over the space contained within the body; what Merleau-
Ponty refers to as the ckiasmus, the ontological center that is the space
of possibility. Insofar as there is always a hiatus between self-touching
bodily parts, the part of the body touched and the part touching never
coincide. This hiatus is the space of possibility as well as the space of
vulnerability, spanned by the total being of the body and by that of the
world. The point of torture and humiliation is not only to inflict pain but
to divide the person from her own possibilities by invading and occupying
the space of the body's chiasmatic relations. Moreover, the use or threat
of invasive means such as rape reveals that the geopolitical landscape is
an extension of the bodily interior, in the intercorporeal sense that
Merleau-Ponty theorizes, and so to enter one is to signal one's intention
to enter the other. Yet the very attempt at invasion opens up resistance
in the form of an internal breathing space that cannot be penetrated,
since it is nonmaterial.
In spite of the initial accounts given by prisoners describing how they
defended themselves mentally against their torture by dissociating mind
from body, Doyle argues that more careful attention to their accounts
reveals that the prisoners preserved themselves by means of their twoness,
the joining of interior to exterior, lived-inside to lived-outside. For
women prisoners in particular, "it is the hands" that came to the rescue,
the very hands that exemplify the chiasmatic relation between touching
and touched. Thus when all the prisoner's handworked objects were
 Introduction 19

taken away, it left them without the anticipation and promise of things
and shut down the chiasm, reducing their life. Doyle asserts that it is the
very doubleness of the chiasm that allows this to happen, that turns one's
own things, once taken away or stolen, against oneself. So the prisoner
learns to hoard and to hide even the most trivial things, using the folds
of the world to reaccess space, to revivify time. In this manner, the inside
of the isolated prison cell where things from the outside world are
hoarded and hidden maintains the prisoner in the chiasm where inside/
outside and isolation/connection are still lived. This same interpretation
of the chiasm guides Doyle's reading of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye,
whose protagonist suffers immeasurably from a life in which the very
persons, objects, and events that open the world to her also make possible
her abject condition. This intercorporeality epitomizes the gap between
the protected reader of these accounts and the prisoners/sufferers, a read-
ing that does not merely inform but that brings the reader to witness
events both alienating and involving, focusing on the disparity between
the sufferings of the subjects and the safety of the witness, yet not allow-
ing for a closure of the chiasm, leaving open the gap, the wound.
The relation between embodiment and freedom is the subject of Jo-
hanna Oksala's chapter, "Female Freedom: Can the Lived Body Be Eman-
cipated?" Against those who criticize Merleau-Ponty for universalizing
intracorporeality into intercorporeality, Oksala argues that Iris Young's
adaptation and Jean Grimshaw's and Judith Butler's earlier criticisms of
Merleau-Ponty each presuppose a foundationalist reading of Merleau-
Ponty, that is, an analysis of the body's structures as a universal and stable
foundation for subjectivity. Oksala opposes this understanding of the
body-subject as an existential constant whose universal structures are the
foundation for all forms of subjectivity. Rather, she maintains, subjectiv-
ity is always historically constituted, even for the anonymous body, and
this makes it possible to suggest new and interesting ways to think about
the freedom of the female body. Oks ala focuses on the operative inten-
tionality of the body, which is directed to the world and places one in
situations in the world. This intentionality is prior to or beneath the
intentionality of acts directed toward particular objects; it is the inter-
twining of body and world and is expressed in the idea of the prepersonal
or anonymous tacit cogito, a prereflective subjectivity as yet unaware of
itself because it is inseparable from the world with which it is intertwined.
Oksala wishes to articulate a more radical reading of Merleau-Ponty,
one that rejects the anonymous body as foundational by emphasizing the
20 Introduction

reciprocity of all constitutive processes. She argues that for Merleau-

Ponty, as for Husserl before him, other people are the precondition for
the objectivity of perceptions because in order for something to be an
object for one perceiver, it must carry the possibility of being simultane-
ously perceived from other points of view. Therefore, intersubjectivity,
not the anonymous hody, is the condition of the possibility of perception
and it constitutes objective reality out of the threefold structure of sub-
jectivity-intersubjectivity-world. Social nonnality is intersubjectively
constituted for Merleau-Ponty, because the anonymous body is also inter-
subjectively generated; it is a dynamic and developing structure and not
merely a naturalized foundation. Oksala argues that Merleau-Ponty trans-
forms the nature/culture dichotomy into an intersubjectively constituted
order constrained by our cultural environment. The historical constitu-
tion of the body remains essentially ambiguous and dynamic. Thus,
although "female" embodiment is culturally constituted, it is never com-
pletely so, never a mere mechanical repetition, because intersubjective
nonns are not merely copied, they are taken up and lived, providing an
ontological freedom without which political freedom is impossible.
In "Care for the Flesh: Gilligan,·Merleau-Ponty, and Corporeal Styles,"
David Brubaker directly addresses and defends the ethics of care, making
use of the concept of embodiment as flesh to justify it. Carol Gilligan's
care ethics is well known for its empirically gendered "different voice,"
which moves away from the frameworks of disinterested reason and im-
partial justice and towa,rd the concreteness of noticing the personal needs
of unique individuals. This leads to the question of whether the perspec-
tive of care is logically incompatible with a rational moral framework.
Brubaker argues that the ethics of care demands a personal principle that
nevertheless specifies a repeatable context associated with the concrete
individuality of each moral agent. 'Thus perceivers are aware of both per-
spectives but tend to prefer only one. Brubaker adds that such choices
might be guided by a supporting context of visibility that allows for a
feeling of attachment and the desire to care for the concrete needs of
persons. Flesh, it is argued, entails many of the characteristics and rela-
tions of care insofar as it first serves as a subjective or personal principle
of the self-affinnation of one's own unique existence, which is then uni-
versalized to the flesh of the hand grasping one's own and so to alL Fol-
lowing from this, the subjective .injunction to care for the material basis
of one's own unique existence may then be universalized as well, making
 Introouction 21

possible the transfer of care for self to care for others, within the realm of
visibility and tactility.
But what if gender is suppressed in considering the moral perspective
of care? In such circumstances, the evidence of a different voice, a self
attached to others, and a new ethic will all also be suppressed. If gender
and care are causally connected either to the social milieu or to biological
factors, then care cannot be a general principle of morality upholding
personal autonomy. If every person has the capacity to alternate between
justice and care, then it is possible that a gender difference might be
associated at this particular moment in history with one or the other
choice. Ultimately, Brubaker concludes, the moral perspective of care for
the flesh is not the same as an empirical understanding of the structural
relations that cause social and economic inequality in society. If a corpo-
real ethics can contribute to the desire to change the world, then the
concreteness of subjectivity is of the greatest importance and the voices
of women may indeed lead to a more interconnected existence that does
not exclude sexual difference. This would be an existence in which the
subjective contexts of visibility and touch bind each thing to every other
and constitute zones of indeterminacy that enable body-images, self
concepts and conceptions of sex, gender, race, and class to inhere within
the realm of the individual person's own unique and practical existence.
Ann Murphy captures this same tension in her examination of the
desire to unveil a "wild" or originary experience and the sedimentation
of language and culture in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. In "Lan-
guage in the Flesh: The Disturbance of Discourse in Merleau-Ponty,
Levinas, and Irigaray," she explores the split between our collective im-
mersion in a primordial historicity that prereflectively informs our judg-
ments and the political need for difference or alterity. What is at stake
here is the concern that if Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology cannot suf-
ficiently theorize alterity, it is neither politically nor ethically viable.
Such, at least, she maintains, is the critique aimed at Merleau-Ponty by
Emmanual Levinas and Luce Irigaray. Murphy argues that Irigaray assents
to Merleau-Ponty's return to prediscursive experience in order to con-
struct language differently. However, Merleau-Ponty's description of this
world, where all the possibilities of language are pregiven, provokes the
accusation that language must remain tied to patterns of patriarchal ex-
clusion. Moreover, Levinas, whose idea of ethics requires the Other's
transcendence of history and irreducibility to a common material soil,
suggests that lacking this sort of ethics, Merleau-Ponty has none at all.
22 Introduction

It is Levinas, first of all, who originally applauds Merleau-Ponty's free-

ing of expressive language from its subordination to thought, particularly
with respect to transcendental idealism. However, for Levinas, Merleau-
Ponty continues to ground signification in intentionality, a consciousness
of its object that recovers all the rights of subjectivism and interiority.
Whereas, for Levimis, the prelinguistic orientation of language must
come from outside any historical context, so that the call to ethics can
disrupt the politicohistoricallandscape in the face of humanity, which
overflows every idea of it. Thus language, in order to be ethical rather
than political, can neither represent nor assimilate but must imply a radi-
cal separation between interlocutors. Murphy's reply is to inquire of Levi-
nas how it is possible to conceive of bodies beyond history, since if
conditions such as sex and race influence the body's interactions with
the ~orld, then the consequences of the failure to take history into ac-
count may be enormous. However, if Levinas and lrigaray are right, then
Merleau-Ponty reduces spe~ch to an encounter that fails to exceed the
duplication of one's o~n experience and is, therefore, is not open to
novelty. If so, Murphy argues, this is a critique of phenomenology itself,
of the extent to which" it is haunted by subjectivism. Yet Merleau-Ponty,
she believes, is not the proper target of such a critique insofar as in his
descriptions, the relation between self and other is always rendered in
terms of alterity and'dispersion. And insofar as this is the case, this brings
him closer to lrigaray's position that symbolic discourse does indeed sup-
press sexual difference and it is just this suppression that Merleau-Ponty
strives to overcome.
The scope of these chapters confirms that numerous aspects of Merleau-
Ponty's philosophy are valued by feminist theory. As Shannon Sullivan
has noted, these include "the primacy given to bodily existence; the at-
tention paid to the pre-reflective aspects of human life, including its inde-
terminacy and ambiguity; the importance of situation and situatedness
for understanding our engagement with/in the world; and the crucial role
that habit plays in corporeal existence," all within the context of making
sense of lived experience in an intersubjective world of shared meaning. 22
Nevertheless, if there is much here for feminist theories to build on, there
may also be controversies giving rise to a call for new conceptions of
human existence. Certainly, as has been stated above, Merleau-Ponty's
notion of the body is that as embodied, subjects inhabit an anonymous
or prepersonal realm, later called flesh, which includes both the flesh of
bodies and the flesh of the world. Several of the contributors to this
 Introduction 23

volume argue that the concept of flesh describes the general atmosphere
of intersubjective communication prior to cognition and so prior to social
or gender stratification. Yet, as Sullivan has also claimed, echoing several
other authors in this volume, we must take care not to overestimate the
usefulness of bodily commonalities and shared structures for philosophy.
The social and cultural milieu are powerful determinants, influencing the
direction and meaning of human acts, diminishing and redirecting the
embodied intentionality of any being who thereby expects the acts of
others to echo her own. It may be the case, then, that the future of
feminist interpretations of Merleau~Ponty as well as the working out of
feminist questions regarding embodiment will be located precisely here
in this nexus between generality and specificity, between the structure
of anonymous, prepersonal, embodied existence and that of gendered,
personal life in order to discover some structure that might account for
both while privileging neither.

Notes

1. See Debra B. Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies,

Erotic Generosities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997),62-65.
2. See Bernard Flynn's excellent detailed account of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy in the Stan-
ford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2003 ed., s.v. "Merleau-Ponty, Maurice,"
online, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2003/entries/mauricemerleau-ponty.
3. The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963); originally
published as La structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942).
4. Sonia Kruks, Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity, and Society (London:
Unwin Hyman, 1990), 12. Kruks makes this claim for existentialism, but I think it holds for phe-
nomenology as well, since it may be what forges the link between them.
5. Kruks, Situation and Human Existence, 12-13.
6. Simone de Beauvoir, "La Phenomenologie de la perception de Maurice Merleau-Ponty," Les
Temps Modemes 1, no. 2 (1945): 363-67. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans.
Colin Smith, Forrest Williams, and David Guerriere (New York: Routledge Press, 1962),346; origi-
nally published as Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). In references that follow,
the first page numbers given are from the English edition and the second from the French.
7. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 248-50/287-89.
8. Ibid., 250/290.
9. Ibid., 254/294. "Space and perception generally represent, at the core of the subject, the fact
of his birth, the perpetual contribution of his bodily being, a communication with the world more
ancient than thought."
10. Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay, trans. Y. Moyse and R. Senhouse (Cleveland: World,
1954); originally published as L'inviree (Paris: Gallimard, 1943).
11. Beauvoir, "La Phenomenologie de la perception," 363-67.
12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwest-
24 Introduction

ern University Press, 1968); ]34; originally published as Le visible et l'invisible (Paris: Gallimard,
1964).
13. Luce Irigaray, "The Politics of Difference," trans. Sean Hand, in French Feminist Thought,
ed. Toril Moi (London: Blackwell, 1987), 121.
14. For a fuller account of Irigary's use of the concept of the interval in the context of Merleau-
Ponty's phenomenology, see Dorothea E. Olkowski, "The End of Phenomenology: Bergson's Interval
in Irigaray," Hypatia IS, no. 3 (2000): 73-91.
15. Iris MarionYoung, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social
Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 147, 148.
16. See, for example, Young's unique essay on "breasted experience," in Throwing Like a Girl,
189-209. What matters most to women about the breasts, Young states, is their feeling and sensitiv-
ity, not their looks (194).
17. Judith Butler, "Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of
Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modem French
Philosophy, ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989),
85-100.
18 .. Michel Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing, trans. Kathryn Hamer and Lorraine Code (New York:
Routledge Press, 2003); originally published as Le sexe du savoir (Paris: Aubier, 1998). See especially
the section titled "Knowing by Dreaming? Object Versus Objectification," 79-85.
19. Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing, 83. The book Le Doeuff cites is Ian Maclean, The Renaissance
Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1983).
20. Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2001), 49; emphasis added. In this chapter, Kruks subtly weaves together
and separates the ideas of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty.
21. Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York and London: Routledge
Press, 1999), 17-19.
22. Shannon Sullivan, "Feminism and Phenomenology: A Reply to Silvia Stoller," Hypatia IS,
no. 1 (2000): 183-88, 184 ..
 1
Merleau,Ponty and the Problem of
Difference in Feminism
Sonia Kruks

For some time now feminists have been more concerned with what di-
vides women than with what they may have in common. Critics of essen-
tialism have demonstrated the dangers of universal characterizations of
"woman" or of "women's experience." Likewise, epistemological discus-
sions have focused our attention on-variously-the multiplicity of di-

Some passages in this chapter are based on material previously published in "Identity Politics
and Dialectical Reason: Beyond an Epistemology of Provenence," Hypatia, A Journal of Feminist
Philosophy 10, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 1-22 and Retrie"ing Experience: Subjecti"ity and Recognition in
Feminist Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
26 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

vergent standpoints, e>r of discursive locations, from which women come

to know, or to represent, the world. The arguments about the inadequacy
of the notions of "sisterhood" that marked much early second-wave femi-
nism no longer need rehearsing. But the pendulum has now swung to an
opposite extreme: to the point where an excessive preoccupation with
differences among women also has debilitating effects on feminism.
Without advocating a return to earlier, naive claims of automatic sister-
hood, I believe it is time to speculate on what might be areas of common-
ality as well as on differences among women, and to ask whether we
cannot know enough about the worlds of others to be able to develop a
feminist politics that is respectful of our multiple differences while pursu-
ing broad agendas of emancipation that go beyond them.
Those forms of feminism that emphasize women's radically different
social locations and identities, what I shall refer to as multiple-difference
feminism, are indubitably valid as political critiques of earlier "sister-
hood" feminism. Since women are never women tout court, but are always
situated also as members of a social class, a race, an ethnic grouping, a
sexual orientation, an age-grade, and so on, it is dangerous to assume that
the inequities and power relations that pertain to those other dimensions
of social situation will not play out also between women. However, in
their attempts to refute falsely universalizing knowledge claims, those
advancing such difference-oriented forms of feminism may often tend
toward an excessive particularization and partitioning of knowledge, but
now along the lines of race or ethnicity, for example, as well as gender.
They usually posit, be [t explicitly or implicitly, what I call an epistemol-
ogy of provenance. That is, they presuppose that knowledge arises so
exclusively from the specific experience or location of a group that others,
who are "outside" it, do not have access to what they know. As a corol-
lary, the further argument is frequently made that outsiders have no basis
from which legitimately to evaluate a particular group's claims about its
knowledge, or those political or moral positions that it takes on the basis
of that knowledge. Only those who live a particular reality may know
and speak.
Groups that practice multiple-difference feminism often also advocate
a politics of alliance or coalition with others, invoking the ideal of "bridg-
ing" differences once they are recognized and respected. Commitments
to coalition work, to alliance, to solidarity across group differences, are
vital for an effective feminist politics. However, the implications of an
epistemology of provenance, when consistently pursued, threaten to
 Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 27

undercut coalition politics or other forms of solidarity among women. For

the (often unintended) end point of an epistemology of provenance may
be an acute and politically debilitating subjectivism. It results in a ten-
dency to what we might call group solipsism, which belies the possibility
of communication and effective common action. Because each of us lives
a plurality of identities, multiple-difference feminism has tended to move
toward ever-shrinking identity groups, for which the logical terminus
would have to be not merely group but individual solipsism, since no one
person's set of experiences is identical to another's.l
Given the group-solipsistic tendencies of multiple-difference femi-
nism, it threatens to leave us without sufficient communication and com-
mon knowledge, or without even the minimum of shared concerns
necessary for the development of broadly organized, feminist coalition
politics. Thus the problem is to find a way of acknowledging the claims
to the specificity of knowledge of particular groups of women, without
thereby denying the possibility that there is also a more general basis for
knowledge, or that more general visions and projects of emancipation are
also possible. It is with these issues in mind that I tum to Merleau-Ponty
for help in this chapter, and particularly to his account of embodied
subjectivity in the Phenomenology of Perception. 2
Merleau-Ponty has, of course, been accused by his feminist critics of
expunging gender differences. It has been pointed out that his theory of
embodied subjectivity, of the "body-subject," presupposes a generic body
that is male, and that it excludes consideration of the way different social
identities mark our bodies. Merleau-Ponty is said to offer an account of
"human" existence in which embodiment may provide the ground for a
"primordial" intersubjectivity only because he has, from the very start,
erased differences. 3 Merleau-Ponty does indeed present "the" body as
masculine (this becomes most apparent, of course, in his discussion of
the body in its "sexual being"). However, I shall argue that the sexism is
not so constitutive of his theory as to preclude his work from being cre-
atively taken up for feminist ends. On the contrary, I argue, his account
of embodiment may accommodate, and indeed illuminate, gender (and
other) differences that he does not dwell on himself.
Moreover, I do not accept the claim of Merleau-Ponty's critics that he
introduces, through his account of embodiment, an automatic guarantee
of universal, harmonious intersubjectivity. For such interpretations are
based on a one-sided, nondialectical reading of his work. As I read
Merleau-Ponty, embodied experience (and I will come later to the ques-
 28 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

tions of its genders) -does indeed offer potentialities for communication

and harmonious intersubjectivity, but it is also a site of antagonisms and
conflicts. Thus, by exploring the tensions of general and particular experi-
ence, of communication and conflict in Merleau-Ponty's accounts of em-
bodied subjects, their intersubjective relations, and the wider social,
political and historical worlds in which they are situated, we may find
some important guides to thinking about the lives of women. Merleau-
Ponty's explorations of what he refers to as "the discordant functioning
of human intersubjectivity"4 may help us to examine women's lives as at
once radically different and yet as sufficiently similar to allow a degree of
mutual comprehension, and perhaps some bonds of solidarity, to emerge.

In her highly influential article "Situated Knowledges," Donna Haraway

wrestles with the antinomies of difference and connectedness among
women. S She argues that it is important for feminism to acknowledge that
there exists a multiplicity of different social and epistemological locations
among women. However, she also recognizes feminism's need for what
she calls "objective knowledge"-by which I take her to mean knowledge
that is at least partially shareable, publicly communicable and transmissi-
ble, about a world that is in some sense "real." Her question, and mine,
is whether both a re5pect for different and divergent know ledges and some
kind of account of objective-thus communicable-knowledge can be
sustained at the same time. She also asks whether forms of feminist "soli-
. darity," informed by such knowledge, may be possible.
Haraway suggests that both objective knowledge and solidarity may be
sustained, but-only if we reconceptualize our notions of objectivity to
take account, as feminism~and I will argue Merleau-Ponty's existential
phenomenology-has taught us we should, of the embodied and situated
nature of all knowing subjects. Objectivity for Haraway, as for Merleau-
Ponty, is not to be confused with the traditional "god-trick" of "promis-
ing vision from everywhere and nowhere equally and fully."6 Haraway
does not indicate any familiarity with Merleau-Ponty's work. But, like
him, she insists that objectivity is not about detachment (a dangerous
and impossible goal) but must emerge through the recognition of "partic-
ular and specific embodiment." It is "definitely not about the false vision
promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility."7 Thus for Hara-
way, as for Merleau-Ponty, to privilege embodied standpoints is not to
embrace relativism or subjectivism. On the contrary, Haraway suggests,
"the alternative to relativism is partial, locatable critical knowledges sus-
 Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 29

taining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics

and shared conversations in epistemology."8
Haraway proposes that if we cease to conceive of selves as unitary and
stable and consider them instead as split and partial, and if we view gen-
der as a "field of structured and structuring differences" in which selves
are situated, then such alternatives may become possible. 9 For it is only
from "partial perspectives" and "partial connections," she claims, that
"webs of connections" and "shared conversations"-that is, forms of ob-
jective or partially shareable knowledge, may emerge. Haraway is correct
to insist that we need to seek ways of formulating objective-that is com-
municable-knowledge that originates from, rather than obscures, differ-
ences and multiple standpoints; and to do so we must recognize the
necessarily embodied and situated qualities of selves.
But Haraway's account never makes sufficiently clear how it is that
such connections and communications across difference may become
possible. What is it that may be shared among viewers with different
"partial perspectives"? If we are able to make partial connections, then
what are the connecting "parts," and why and how do they connect us?
Haraway takes for granted here exactly what needs to be explained! As
she writes: "We do need an earth-wide network of connections, including
the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different-and
power-differentiated--communities."lo But what is it that enables knowl-
edges to be even "partially" translatable across the differences that divide
women's lives? What, in short, enables exit from the solipsistic implica-
tions of an epistemology of provenance? "Webs of connections" may be
woven among our differences, I argue, only if "we" share sufficient com-
monalities to be able to recognize a minimum area of overlap between
our own and others' lives. While it is not the only one, the human body
is certainly a crucial site at which such overlaps may emerge. 11 But here
we must tum to Merleau-Ponty. In what follows, I shall draw primarily
(but not exclusively) on the Phenomenology of Perception.
In the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty's narrative begins with an ac-
count of discrete bodies and individual perceptions of things, and then
proceeds to an account of social relations as ones of complex interdepen-
dence that may involve both connectedness and conflict. However, this
account should not be read as implying that individual life is "founda-
tional" for the social. Far from advocating social atomism, Merleau-
Ponty's argument is dialectical. Thus the more abstract account of indi-
vidual embodiment, located in the earlier parts of the book (which is
30 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

where feminists have-tended to focus their critique that Merleau-Ponty's

generic body is masculine), must be interpreted through the more com-
plex lenses of the later sections. In these later sections, culture, language,
politics, and history are shown always and already to imbue the body-
subject, and even the simplest and apparently most isolated acts of per-
ception are, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates, profoundly social. Thus, even
though he does not do so himself, one may fruitfully address concerns
about (for example) the gendering or ethnicizing of bodies within
Merleau-Ponty's descriptive frame.

For Merleau-Ponty, human existence is first and foremost embodied exis-

tence. To exist is to be one's body; and this is to be a "body-subject," or
a "sentient" subject·, and not the rational, autonomous consciousness so
central to the Western tradition. But his concept of the body-subject
does not presuppose, as some commentators have argued, our mysterious
harmony with being. Rather it presupposes a paradoxical and ambiguous
relationship, in which consciousness and materiality, subjectivity and the
world of "things" are co~xtensive and co-constitutive. Such a relationship
may be experienced as supportive and affirming of the self, but also as
threatening and negating. As a body-subject one is not a consciousness
"in" a material thing called a body, but rather another kind of being,
neither (in Hegelian or Sartrean terms) "for-itself" nor "in-itself." The
body, says Merleau-Ponty, "forms between the pure subject and the object
a third genus of being," in which "the subject loses its purity and its trans-
parency" (PP, 350; emphasis added). Thus, it is illusory to believe we can
engage in what Merleau-Ponty calls a pensee de survol (usually translated
as "high-altitude thinking"), or what Haraway calls the "god-trick."
To explore our existence as such a "third genus," Merleau-Ponty begins
from our perception of the sensible world, or the "natural world." He
initially suspends, or "brackets," its social qualities, but he does so only
later to reveal the impossibility of doing so. IZ Perception is not, as empiri-
cist theory would have it, merely a passive reception of external stimuli.
But neither is it, as Cartesianism or other forms of intellectualism would
hold, an act of judgment (PP, 9). Rather, perception itself (and sensation
more generally) is what he calls a "third" or intermediate experience. In
our everyday perceptual experience of the world, perceiver and perceived
are not a subject and an object. Blurring, they form a kind of "gestalt" or
a "system" in which each calls the other into being (PP, 238-39).
Because I am immersed, situated, in what I perceive, I cannot wholly
 Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 31

control the field that "my" perception organizes around me. What I per-
ceive has always a certain autonomy, a "generality," which escapes me.
There is an "anonymity" to perception and to other sensory experiences,
which means that they never are completely "mine." Rather, in the expe-
rience of sensation, I discover "a modality of general existence ... which
runs through me without my being its author" (PP, 216). I am a subject,
as Merleau-Ponty later put it, "ex-centric" (excentrique) to myself. 13 In
Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty uses the term "the One"
(l'On) to describe this anonymous, or prepersonal, embodiment that runs
through my own embodied being and so decenters me. Strictly speaking,
he tells us, "I ought to say that one perceives in me, and not that I per-
ceive" (PP, 215). The perceiving self, he insists, "is not myself as an
autonomous subject, but myself in so far as I have a body and am able to
'look'" (PP, 240).
It is my situation, in even this most minimal sense of the spatial loca-
tion of my body, that gives me my particular viewpoint on things-a
viewpoint that, as Haraway :;llso observes, gains its reality from its very
lack of completeness. 14 But situated perception also involves more than
spatial qualities. For the things that we perceive also have such qualities
as color, texture, weight-all of which we "perceive" together in the
thing. For example, "a colour is never merely a colour, but the colour of
a certain object" (PP, 313); and, in seeing the "woolly colour" of the
carpet, I will also see it as "soft." Here, we quickly discover that my
perceptual situation will already include a world of both personal and
social meanings. The "woolly" softness of the carpet will carry personal
and social significations for me. It may signify comfort, and perhaps lux-
ury. It may recall other occasions or places to me, inciting memories or
desires.
In addition, temporal dimensions inform even the simplest acts of per-
ception. "Recollections" and "sediments," habitual ways of perceiving
that originate in my prior perceptual experience and my general social
existence-habits that may be imbued with my gender, for example-are
part of what I bring to any situation. I also bring a future. For my percep-
tion involves my own movement towards a future, that is, my"project."IS
Merleau-Ponty describes the drawing together of these multiple dimen-
sions of a perceptual situation in the notion of an "intentional arc" that
"subtends" perception, as well as desire and cognition. It is such an arc,
he says, "which projects round about us our past, our future, our human
setting, our physical situation, our ideological situation, and moral situa-
32 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

tion, or rather whicb. results in our being situated in all these respects"
(PP, 136). Here we see how the prepersonal is always also particular; and
how, in its particularities, it is always suffused with social significations.
The arc metaphor suggests, moreover, that situations are not stable,
but are always open and in flux. Forming and re,forming, each is in part
structured by the "sediments" of prior situations, while also merging into
and partly structuring future ones. Situated actions involve complex rela,
tions of freedom and necessity, in which situations impose their own
significations on us, even as we transcend them. Merleau,Ponty remarks
at one point that "ambiguity is of the essence of human existence and
everything we live or think has always several meanings" (PP, 169). Be,
cause it synthesizes past and future, perceiver and perceived, self and so'
cial ,World, there can be no one determinate meaning-or sens-to a
situation. 16 But "ambiguity" can also mean more than the presence of
multiple or indeterminate meanings. In the French original of the above
passage Merleau,Ponty. uses the word equivoque to denote ambiguity. Else'
where, however, he uses the term ambiguiti, and this term implies not
merely multiple but con~adictory meanings.
It is this latter kind"of ambiguity that leads Merleau,Ponty to talk also
of the "tension" of human existence and of dialectic; and it leads him to
recognize the potentially antagonistic dimensions of human life. To be
human is to be a place where being ceases wholly to coincide with itself.
"Man [sic]" is, as Merleau,Ponty had put it in his essay on Hegel, "a place
of unrest."17 It is symptomatic of Merleau,Ponty's sexism that he often
uses the term man when the referent of his statement is not necessarily
male. However~ I will leave other such uses stand without further com,
ment, while using more gender, inclusive language myself when appro'
priate. We-both men and women-outstrip the world, and yet we are
outstripped by it. For existence outstrips, or transcends, us insofar as the
world around us perpetually creates meanings or takes up our meanings in
ways beyond our controL "We shall give the name transcendence to this
act in which existence takes up, for its own purposes and transforms [a
de facto] situation," Merleau,Ponty tells us (PP, 169). He adds: "Precisely
because it is transcendence, existence never utterly outruns anything, for
in this case the tension which is essential to it would disappear." Such a
movement of transcendence perpetually delimits individual existence
and reveals its finitude. But this delimitation is not necessarily a loss, for
it may be experienced in one of .two ways: either as an enrichment and
prolongation of individual existence, or as a threat and its negation.
 Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 33

"My life," says Merleau-Ponty, considering the first of the possibilities,

"is constantly thrown headlong into transcendent things and passes wholly
outside me." Discussing his own project-writing the Phenomenology-he
continues: "This book, once begun, is not a certain set of ideas; it consti-
tutes for me an open situation ... in which I struggle blindly on until, as
if miraculously, thought and words become organised by themselves" (PP,
369; emphasis added). In such a case, far from being a problem, our fini-
tude is the source of our inherence in a world that in transcending us
continues to further our projects. However, the possibility is always also
present that we will encounter the transcendence of the world, or even
of particular objects, very differently-as an alienating threat or negation.
This possibility comes into play, Merleau-Ponty notes, particularly when
I suspend my daily, preretlective, and unmediated contact with the world
and make it the object of my consciousness. Then, "the thing holds itself
aloof from us and remains self-sufficient.... It is then hostile and alien,
no longer an interlocutor, but a resolutely silent Other" (PP, 322). The
more I endeavor to define myself as a pure consciousness, as disembodied
subjectivity, to play what Haraway calls the "god-trick," the more I be-
come threatened by the objectivity of the world, which confronts me as
distinct from myself.
Since the relation of self and world is one of reciprocal affirmation and
negation, it is then a relation that we may call not only ambiguous or
paradoxical, but also dialectical-because it involyes a movement of con-
tradictory yet mutually supporting transcendences. "The dialectic,"
Merleau-Ponty writes, "is the striving [La tension] of an existence towards
another existence which denies it, and yet without which it is not sus-
tained [sans laquelle pourtant elle ne se soutient pas]" (PP, 167-68; transla-
tion altered). What is at issue here is not a mere identity of opposites or
an equilibrium, but a movement whose source lies in simultaneous rela-
tions of interdependence and opposition. Moreover, since there is no
rupture between our being in the natural and our being in the social
world, we might expect similar tensions also to inform our relations with
other people. This is indeed the case, both in our relations with particular
individuals and with regard to wider social groups. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty
suggests, the problem becomes greater in the social world: "We easily
escape from transcendence [as threat] as long as we are dealing only with
things: the transcendence of other people is more resistant. "18
* * *
34 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

Since, as body-subjects, we each inhere in the generality and anonymity

of "the One," of prepersonal embodiment, it does indeed follow for
Merleau-Ponty that some kind of primordial relation between us is a
"given" of human existence-but it does not follow that this relation
must be a harmonious one! Social existence is par excellence the realm
of dialectic for Merleau-Ponty: human beings cannot but always have the
possibility both to "deny" and to "sustain" one another. In encountering
another person I may experience an existence that affirms my own and a
negating other.
A mutually affirming intersubjectivity (which I will discuss first) exists
insofar as I and another are both situated in, perceive, and can communi-
cate about the same "natural" and "social" world. Even then we cannot
ever have the identical perception, since we are separate existences, each
a body-subject with its own unique situation. Yet there can be sufficient
overlap between our perceptions to create between us an "interworld,"
a "primordial communication." Merleau-Ponty summed up these ideas,
shortly after the Phenomenology was published, as follows: "I will never
know how you see red/and you will never know how I see it; but this
separation of consciousness is recognised only after a failure of communi-
cation, and our first move is to believe in an undivided being between us.
There is no reason to treat this primordial communication as an illusion. . ..
[I]n the perception of another, I find myself in relation with another
'myself,' who is, in principle, open to the same truths as I am, in relation
to the same being as I am."19
Merleau-Ponty exemplifies this notion of affirmative and unproblem-
atic intersubje~tivity in a discussion of two friends looking at a landscape.
When my friend, Paul, and I look at the landscape, "must it be said," he
asks, "that each of us has private sensations, a subject matter of knowl-
edge that is for ever incommunitable?" (PP, 405; translation altered).
Merleau-Ponty replies that our experience is not so solipsistic. We are
able to communicate; and the basis for our communication is not only
our speech, our gestures, but is a prereflective, shared vision of the land-
scape. Paul is "some-one who has a living experience of the same world as
mine, as well as the same history, and with whom I am in communication
through that world and that history." The commonality we experience is
not intellectually constructed. The point is, "It is precisely because ...
[it] is my own view of the landscape, that I enjoy possession of the land-
scape itself, and the landscape for Paul as well as me. Both universality
and the world lie at the core of individuality and the subject" (PP, 406).
 Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 35

Thus, in this account, far from the other person threatening to make my
situation disintegrate around me, he (or she, as it could be in this exam-
ple) enriches it. This other is not, for me, a negating or objectifying
transcendence, but an equal who shares with me, through our common
participation in embodiment and sensation, and through our common
world and history, a common perceptual experience.

Merleau-Ponty's account of the prepersonal or anonymous body as that

which enables intersubjective experience to arise has been the topic of
feminist criticism. In her essay "Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-
Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception," Shannon Sullivan has argued that
Merleau-Ponty's account of the anonymous body is not merely tacitly
masculinist but is, moreover, solipsistic and dominating in import. She
claims that by assuming, like Merleau-Ponty, that the body is neutral or
generic, and that my perception is thus the same as another's, I effectively
privilege myself as the site of perception and entitle myself to impose my
perception on others:

Because the body is an anonymous body that has no particular-

ity-such as that provided by gender, sexuality, class, race, age,
culture, nationality, individual experiences, upbringing, and
more-Merleau-Ponty's intersubjective dialogue often turns out
to be a solipsistic subject's monologue that includes an elimina-
tion of others in its very "communication" with them. Because
the particularities have been overlooked, Merleau-Ponty's ac-
count of intersubjectivity is built upon the domination of
others. 2D

Against Merleau-Ponty, as she reads him, Sullivan argues that a "com-

mon ground" cannot be pregiven but is something we must strive for,
especially through dialogue; for "there are no shortcuts provided by the
body."2l Thus, if dialogue is to be achieved, we need to rid ourselves of
Merleau-Ponty's anonymous body and instead recognize embodied selves
in their particularities and differences. Sullivan's critique of Merleau-
Ponty raises, for me, two issues. First, in spite of his sexism, may not
Merleau-Ponty's account of the prepersonal body in fact help us to grasp
significant aspects of human existence that span such distinctions as
class, race, and gender? Second, does the overall import of his argument
really require the erasure of particularities, thus normalizing a "neutral"
36 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

body that is male (and probably also young, white, heterosexual, and
middle class)? I will respond, with some caveats, yes to the first question,
and no to the second.
There are, self,evidently, certain dimensions to embodiment that most
(though not all) human beings share irrespective of such differentia as
sex, gender, race, or nationality. The specificities of the human body that
distinguish us from other animal species, what Merleau, Ponty following
Husserl refers to as the "I cans" (PP, 137) of human embodiment, do
offer us certain commonalities of perception, spatiality, and motilityP
These are, at their most general, common to men and women alike. Un,
like dogs, we see in color, for example, while the forward placement of
our eyes precludes us from seeing as far behind us as most birds do. Our
senses of scale and speed are a function of our size and the speed of the
human gait-the latter being much faster than that of a tortoise, but slow
in comparison to a rabbit.23 We cannot navigate by smell as some species
can, have limited night vision, and so on.
Such differentia are not merely biological "facts." Nor are they trivial.
These invariants of hl!man embodiment structure our experiences such
that we may recognize other human beings as sharing similar (though not
identical) experiences to our own. If I see somebody running for a bus,
struggling under a heavy load, or reaching to remove an object from a
high shelf, for example, I will "know" roughly what it feels like. I will
do so not through a process of rational construction, but prereflectively,
through the immediacy of anonymous embodiment, through the preper,
sonal body as it runs through me. Since we are each particular as well as
general, I will not of course know exactly how another feels, but my grasp
will be sufficient immediately to understand the action and what it en,
tails. Likewise, I may immediately recognize another's most basic emo'
tions as expressed in her or his body: if I see somebody weeping, that
person's body will immediately communicate her or his grief to me. 24
Although the general characteristics of the prepersonal body are not
in themselves gendered, Merleau,Ponty's account allows for the possibil,
ity that our styles of embodiment may be so. Carol Bigwood describes the
body for Merleau,Ponty as "an indeterminate constancy," and I find this
phrase a helpful way of describing the possibilities for variation that
Merleau,Ponty finds always run through the general aspects of embodi,
ment. 25 For example, although as I have suggested the human gait is a
distinctive way of traversing space and is different from that of any other
species, our styles of walking will be encultured in ways that may be gen,
 Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 37

dered. A gait may be perceived as "manly" or "feminine" within a partic-

ular culture; and among "feminine" styles of walking in modem Western
society we may yet further discriminate: what we regard as a "sexy" walk
will, for example, be different for men and women.
Furthermore (and here I move beyond Merleau-Ponty, though not in
a way to which I think he would have objected) sexual dimorphism pres-
ents the only set of "I cans" that are not generally given in the preper-
sonal body. Since men cannot gestate, give birth, or lactate, and do not
menstruate, and since genitalia and secondary characteristics are differ-
ent in the two sexes, we need to talk of the prepersonal body as having
both general and sex-specific qualities. 26 This dimorphism, of course, al-
ways acquires its meanings only within specific cultures and situations.
But there do seem to be some "constant indeterminacies" of feminine
embodiment within Western culture that offer similar experiences to
women whose lives are also very different. For example, norms of privacy
operate to present menstruation as a problem for women in Western socie-
ties, irrespective of their social class or their race. Moreover, the embodied
temporality of menstruation is generally experienced as incommensurable
with the temporal regime of the "normal" working and school day.27 I will
later consider the likelihood that such constancies of feminine embodied
experience may facilitate the development of immediate affective bonds
among women, and I will suggest that this may assist (though never as-
sure) the development of feminist solidarity among groups whose lives
are in other ways very different.
It should be noted that, in the above discussion, I have been using
conditional rather than declarative constructions. For such forms of
shared embodied "knowing" are not, as Sullivan claims, assured in
Merleau-Ponty's view. The body is not, for him, a "short cut" to commu-
nication but only a source of its possibility. Here, I address the second
issue raised by Sullivan's critique. Merleau-Ponty does indeed talk of our
inherence in the anonymity of "the One," of the body as a "modality of
general existence," and he appears initially to describe "the" body as
generic. However, this is not the sum total of his account and he does
not demand the erasure of particularities. On the contrary, embodied
subjectivity is for Merleau-Ponty always at once general and particular.
The intentional arc that draws together my past and future is always
specifically mine. To recall, it is formed in a situation that is not merely
spatial or physical but that includes my history, my culture, my social
location, and so on. It ensures that the particularities of my life will shape
38 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

my projects and inform the general properties of my perceptions, bodily

comportment, and actions.
Let us return to Merleau-Ponty's example of sharing the view of a
landscape with Paul. Not any two people will share a common view of
the landscape in the way he describes. We should note that Merleau-
Ponty specifies certain prerequisites that enable his and Paul's mutually
enriching sharing of the landscape to take place: first, they are "friends";
that is to say, they are already in a freely chosen relationship of equals in
which there is an affective bond between them; second, Merleau-Ponty
tells us they share not only a perceptual world but also a "history" {PP,
405-6}. But what if they are not friends and equals, and what if they do
not share a history?
Let us suppose that Paul is a tenant farmer and that Maurice is his
landlord. They are looking at the landscape while discussing Maurice's
proposal to increase Paul's rent for the use of the fields they view before
them. What each br~ngs to the perception of the "same" landscape will
then be very different. They may well still stand side by side, looking, but
Paul will look with the-eye of a tenant-farmer. He will perhaps notice the
degree of slope as indicative of the danger of soil erosion; the presence of
shade-giving trees along one edge as cutting out necessary sunlight. Both
signify that the land will not yield as much for his labor as would an acre
elsewhere. Maurice, the landlord, will probably be unaware of these de-
tails. For him the land perhaps signifies his family's history and the inher-
itance that he will pass on to his children {who will also stand here and
appreciate the magnificence of the very same row of shade-producing
trees}. Above all, it surely signifies his economic privilege, his ability to
derive a steady income from renting it to one such as Paul.
If their perceptions are organized by such different and even opposed
sets of practical goals, and if they bring to their perceptions such different
life histories and class locations as {we might surmise} Paul and Maurice
have, then probably the degree of overlap between them is no longer
sufficient to ground a mutually affirming experience of intersubjectivity.
Indeed, how each perceives this landscape will be integral to the conflict
between them about how much rent Paul should pay. Should Paul and
Maurice engage in a "dialogue" over the higher level of rent that Maurice
is demanding, this will not be a dialogue of equals but one structured by
Maurice's privilege and Paul's dependency; and Maurice will probably
not understand that the "small" {and in his eyes "reasonable"} increase
in rent that he is demanding is not, to Paul, at all small. In this instance
 Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 39

Maurice does indeed impose his view on Paul in a dominating manner.

He constitutes the landscape through his own project and in a way that
forecloses recognition of Paul's perceptions and needs. Centered in his
own world, Maurice does not think about how hard Paul's life is, nor
consider why Paul might see the "same" landscape differently. Instead,
Maurice affirms himself to be the indubitable center of his own world and
constitutes Paul as an object exterior to his consciousness. Thus Maurice
takes up the position not only of a self-interested landowner, but also of
a dominating and solipsistic consciousness.
As the two different accounts of Paul and Maurice "together" seeing
a landscape indicate, two radically different and contradictory kinds of
experience of other people (as well as of things) are possible. We can
indeed both "deny" and "sustain" one another. One kind of experience
is that of harmonious, mutually affirming intersubjectivity. But for it to
take place spontaneously requires the presence of equality, affective
bonds, and freedom in our relationship. The second kind of experience,
in which I cast myself as a pure, desituated subject and the other as an
object that I desire to dominate, is, however, no less significant. For situa-
tions of inequality, oppression, or exploitation, which invite us to cast
others as objects while withdrawing into self-referential and absolutist
modes of consciousness, are all too common.

Merleau-Ponty sees this second kind of experience, in which we objectify

others, as by far the more pervasive in modem society. Indeed, many of
Merleau-Ponty's essays of the late 1940s are above all focused on prob-
lems of objectification, conflict, and even violence. As he engages with
the aftermath of Nazism, explores the possibilities and perils of Soviet-
style communism, and asks whether Marxism might not offer the best
available tools for grasping human "ways of existing and co-existing" (PP,
171), Merleau-Ponty's questions are above all about whether communica-
tion might be possible in a world of endemic conflict. In a world of large-
scale conflicts, in which meaning so easily tips into its opposite and hu-
manism breeds terror, can one, he asks, still hope for mutually affirming
relations of intersubjectivity?
Indeed, in Humanism and Terror, his book of essays on the problem of
violence in postrevolutionary Russia, Merleau-Ponty insists that antago-
nistic, as well as affirmative, intersubjectivity is a fundamental possibility
of all human relations. 28 Here, he takes up, as accurate but one-sided,
Hegel's characterization of the struggle between consciousnesses that is
40 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty

often referred to as,the "master~slave dialectic." Merleau~Ponty begins

from Hegel's statement that "each self~consciousness aims at the destruc~
tion and death of the other," and he observes that "it is a permanent
temptation for it to assert itself at the expense of other consciousnesses
who dispute its privilege. "29 Faced with the ubiquity of conflict in social
relations, Merleau~Ponty turns to Marxism and asks whether it may offer
any solutions to what he describes as "the problem of human coexistence
beyond the oppression of absolute subjectivity and absolute objectivity."3o
I do not want to follow Merleau~Ponty into his extended explorations
of Marxism here, but rather to consider the more general import of his
characterization of conflictual subjectivities. For without effecting any
neat final "synthesis" of communication and conflict, or offering any
guarantees of a harmonious realm "beyond" conflict, Merleau~Ponty sug~
gests that there are forms of more affirmative embodied intersubjectivity
implicit in conflict. Hegel's struggle between consciousnesses initiates a
dynamic that cannot remain at the level of pure consciousnesses but leads
back to their erribodi~ent, and so to the possibilities of communication.
Consciousness, MerlealJ~Ponty points out, "can do nothing without its
body and can only acr upon others by acting on their bodies."3l Domina~
tion is a material relationship and it cannot stay at the level of the look.32
Rather, it involves the use of my own body (directly or indirectly) as an
instrument through which I may endeavor to subordinate others; and I
do this not merely by refusing to recognize them as subjectivities but
rather by harnessing their embodied existence to my own ends. 33 But if
domination and oppression are conflictual relations among embodied
selves, they are" not only that. They also carry the potential that we may
come to realize that we participate in a common interworld.
This possibility becomes very clear in another essay, "A Note on
Machiavelli." Machiavelli viewed politics as always a bitter, even violent,
struggle. But Merleau-Ponty argues that he shows us that something other
than antagonism may also emerge from its conflicts. When I do violence
to another I realize that I do violence also to myself. For my victim is
not, I discover, just an object, but is like me a sentient being: " The evil
that I do I do to myself, and in struggling against others I struggle equally
against my self. After all, a face is only shadows, lights and colors; and yet
suddenly, because this face has grimaced in a certain way, the executioner
mysteriously experiences a slackening-another's anguish has passed over
to his."34 Were I a disembodied and absolute subject, capable of sustaining
what Haraway calls the "god~tri~k," my violence against another would
 Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 41

not return to haunt me, for I would not feel another's suffering. My victim
would indeed remain a mere surface in front of me, her or his face only
shadows, light, and colors-an object. But as soon as I engage in action,
it becomes difficult to maintain this distance. Thus if violence begins
from a solipsistic withdrawal into a dominating subjectivity from whence
the other is only an object, it can complete -its trajectory only by aban-
doning that initial stance. For in doing violence to another I must engage
with her or him in a relation of embodied existences, in which I discover
in my victim a body that suffers like my own.3 5
Yet the initial solipsistic moment of this encounter is not to be dis-
missed as simply mistaken. On the contrary, in Phenomenology of Percep-
tion Merleau-Ponty argues that solipsism is a pervasive and significant
aspect of our experience of others. I do tend, even prereflectively, to
constitute another as merely a figure in my field of vision-until a sudden
recognition of "reciprocity" decenters that perception (PP, 356-57). But
even before such a decentering, the existence of other people presents
me with difficulties. In solipsism I initially seem to transcend other peo-
ple: they only exist for me as objects of my experience. But the problem
is that I still cannot avoid recognizing them as "people"-that is, as be-
ings "like myself." Less dramatically than the executioner's sudden dis-
covery of himself in his victim, I still discover that people do not stand
before me like other objects of perception, such as rocks or buildings. But
recognizing them as people, even antagonistically so, then presents me
with "the absurdity of a multiple solipsism" (le ridicule d'un solipsisme a
plusieurs) (PP, 359).
A way out of this paradox that may be chosen-but that may also be
refused; there are no guarantees-is to recognize that solipsism is but one
"moment" of our relation to the world, and of the dialectic in which we
may both deny and sustain one another. "Solitude and communication
cannot be the two horns of a dilemma," Merleau-Ponty writes, but are
rather "two 'moments' of one phenomenon, since in fact other people do
exist for me" (PP, 359). For, finally, as we may realize, "the refusal to
communicate is still a form of communication" (PP, 361).
Of course, after hesitating, the executioner my well suppress his mo-
mentary recognition of his victim and carryon with his grizzly task; and
contrary to romanticized notions of sisterhood, women may be horribly
cruel to one another instead of acknowledging the mutuality that their
shared embodiment invites. We may refuse the potential for affirmative
intersubjectivity offered by another's body for many reasons: perhaps from
42 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

a sense of professiona.l duty in the executioner's case, but also perhaps

because of fear or hatred, or from self-righteousness or plain indiffer-
ence. 36 But while solipsism is a general tendency of human existence, we
are especially likely to objectify others and to retreat into forms of solip-
sism when we are not equals and do not share a social world. And it is
easiest to disregard the suffering of those who are the most different from
ourselves. Thus, even though it disrupts my solipsism, the sudden discov-
ery of myself in others does not necessarily produce in me a concern for
their well-being on which I will act. To repeat, the body is not, for
Merleau-Pontya "short cut" to a common ground.

However, if as feminists we actively endeavor to create a common ground

(to create Haraway's "webs of connections"), and so must search for ways
beyond the group-solipsistic tendencies of multiple-difference feminism
and an epistemology of provenance, then, I want to argue, Merleau-
Ponty's account of embodied subjectivities is a good place to begin. As I
have shown, in spite of his own sexism the import of Merleau-Ponty's
account of embodied existence is not to obscure or deny differences.
Rather, it is to point to the tensions of difference and commonality and
to suggest that embodiment offers a site of potential communication and
affirmative intersubjectivity.
It is precisely because women's lives are often so radically different that
I argue that it is helpful to focus on what Bigwood calls the indeterminate
constancies of feminine embodiment. For women's interests are often so
fragmented that a feminist movement based solely on common interests
will not be adequate to its tasks. Issues of reproductive rights, for example,
are not of direct interest to postmenopausal women; nor are cuts in wel-
fare of interest to middle-class women, or research on diabetes of as much
matter to white as to African American women. 37 Thus, feminist politics
requires a willingness to act with and on behalf of others where one's
own interests are not directly at stake, and in situations where an injury
to others does not directly injure oneself or one's own group. This, surely, .
is the meaning of the term solidarity.
Moral principles (a commitment to justice, for example) certainly may
persuade us to engage in acts of solidarity. Yet a politics grounded in
principles alone often lacks sufficiently strong commitment to endure.
For us to act with and for others who are unlike ourselves, we need pas-
sion. Although principtes or mGral beliefs may inspire passion, it arises
far more intensely when we' share an affective bond with others. Feelings
 Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 43

of involvement with others are needed; and the forms of intersubjective

embodied experience that Merleau-Ponty describes-immediate, prere-
flective, and prediscursive-may (though with no assurances here) pro-
vide us with what I will call an affective predisposition to choose to act in
solidarity with others whose social identities are different from our own.
In particular, we are likely more immediately to feel with others in
their suffering when we see (or otherwise know about) the bodily pain
they endure. Although we cannot actually feel the pain another suffers,
our immediate sentience often induces in us pain at another's pain,38
Given the specificities of feminine embodiment, we might plausibly ex-
pect this to happen more intensely when I see another whose body is
sexed and gendered like my own. Thus it is not surprising that it has
been easiest to mobilize women and to build feminist organizations in the
United States in opposition to actions that inflict pain specifically on
women's bodies, such as male-on-female rape and domestic violence. Nor
is it surprising that the practice of clitoridectomy arouses such horror in
Western women who will never undergo it.39
What such examples suggest is that, although women's bodies are also
significantly different from one another's-imbued with the lived partic-
ularities of cultural, racial, ethnic, and class differences; with age; with
the particularities of their physiques; and so on-the indeterminate
constancies of lived feminine embodiment may still facilitate the arising
of forms of immediate, affective recognition among women. 40 Feminine
embodiment is, we could say, general or generic enough to enable inter-
subjectivity to arise among women, irrespective of our different social
identities. We do not, of course, necessarily engage in solidarity with other
women on the basis of such experiences of immediate recognition. In-
stead, (as in the example of the executioner who continues with his task
after a momentary hesitation) we may withdraw into pure consciousness
and reconstitute them as objects for us. But if, as feminists, we are actively
looking for ways to form "webs of connection" with other women, then
the commonalities of feminine embodiment, and the affective opening
to the suffering of other women to which they predispose us, are an im-
portant place to begin.
Such affective connections do not in themselves constitute a feminist
politics, and there are risks that we may act on them in ways that are
counterproductive. Lorraine Code has rightly warned of the "imperialist
potential of declared empathy," and Elizabeth Spelman has also alerted
us to the risks of appropriating the pain of others,4l They both wisely urge
44 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

that we pay attentidn to serious dangers. Yet the dangers of failing to

pay attention to the kinds of immediate affective relations I have been
discussing are also strong, and so I think we need to take some risks. Yes,
the worlds of different women are significantly different. But instead of
retreating into forms of group solipsism because of these differences, our
strategy rather should be to seek out our points of common connection.
No, I cannot as a white woman know what it feels like for my black
woman colleague to be subjected to racist abuse as she walks down the
street in our predominantly white town. But as she tells me about having
somebody punch her breasts or spit in her face, I do have an immediate
affective response to her suffering. I cannot claim to share my colleague's
experience fully, but neither is it absolutely closed to me. And, insofar as
our mutual embodiment enables me partially to grasp her experience of
racist abuse, I surely will be more strongly predisposed to act against the
racism that she suffers.
I will end by repeating Merleau-Ponty's remark, that "solitude and
communication cannot be the two horns of a dilemma, but two 'mo-
ments' of one phenoll;u!non" (PP, 359). The commonalities of feminine
embodiment certainly do not abolish our differences-for indeed, "there
are no short cuts provided by the body." But they do offer us experiences
of immediate, affective, intersubjective connection with other women. If
we choose-but only if we so choose-these experiences may enable us
to move beyond the solipsistic tendencies of an epistemology of prove-
nance. For they offer us a site from where we may begin to generate those
fuller "webs of connections" that Haraway calls "solidarity in politics and
shared conver~ations in epistemology."

Notes

1. An alternative strategy has been to shift toward a postmodern emphasis on the fragmen-
tary, unstable, or split nature of the self. Although such postmodern notions capture some of the
complexities of multiple identity well, they also present difficulties. For they frequently tend to
beg the question of how to characterize a "self" that experiences itself as multiple and unstable.
Against their own grain, postmodern feminist celebrations of multiple identities and mobile
subjectivities often implicitly posit an autonomous subject, which is the site of a disembodied
and self-reflexive metaexperience of its own existence; one that can contemplate and consciously
shift between its multiple identities. For example, in "U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory
and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World," Genders 10 (Spring
1991): 1-24, Chela Sandoval characterizes the "differential consciousness" of U.S. Third World
 Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 45

feminists as enabling them deliberately to switch between identities, "self-consciously choosing

and adopting the ideological forms best suited to push against [power'sl configurations." Using
the analogy of the driver of a car, she continues: "As the clutch of a car provides the driver the
ability to shift gears, differential consciousness permits the practitioner to choose tactical posi-
tions, that is, to self-consciously break and reform ties to ideology" (15; emphases added). Such a
model of the self presupposes not only a transcendental but a neo-Cartesian consciousness! For
this is a consciousness that contemplates its options and chooses when and how to switch be-
tween the various identities that it can, apparently, cast on and off at will. I think similar
difficulties attend Marfa Lugones's celebration of "the multiplicitous person" in Pilgrimagesl
Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Little-
field, 2003).
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962); original French publication 1945. Cited hereafter in the text
as PP.
3. The critical feminist literature on Merleau-Ponty is now quite extensive. However, much
of it engages with his posthumously published book The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), and it most frequently takes its cue
from Luce Irigaray's discussion of The Visible and the Invisible in An Ethics of Sexual Difference,
trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Important
discussions that do address the Phenomenology include Judith Butler, "Sexual Ideology and Phe-
nomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Percep-
tion," in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modem French Philosophy, ed. J. Allen and I. M. Young
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989): 85-100; Iris M. Young, Throwing Like a Girl and
Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1990); Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1994); Shannon Sullivan, "Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty's Phenome-
nology of Perception," Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 12, no. 1 (1997): 1-19; and Living
Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2001), esp. chap. 3; Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality
(New York: Routledge, 1999).
4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense, trans. H. L. Dreyfus and P. A. Dreyfus
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964),97; original French publication 1948.
5. Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the
Privilege of Partial Perspective," in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
(Routledge: New York, 1991), 183-202.
6. "Situated Knowledges," 191. Interestingly, "Everywhere and Nowhere" is the title of an
essay Merleau-Ponty initially published in 1956 as the preface to a philosophy anthology. It was
republished in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. R. C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1964), 126-58; original French publication 1960.
7. "Situated Knowledges," 190.
8. Ibid., 191.
9. Ibid., 195.
10. Ibid., 187.
11. Elsewhere, in Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2001), I have suggested that the fact that we all necessarily act in what
Jean-Paul Sartre calls a "practical material field" may also offer such us such areas of overlap. For
practical fields may give ri~e to material relations that mediate among our otherwise diverse
activities. Others, in more Habermasian vein, have focused on discourse as a possible site for the
emergence of such overlaps. See, for example, Jodi Dean, Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism After
Identity Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).
46 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

12. "The most importan"'t lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a
complete reduction" (PP, xiv).
13. Signs, 123.
14. Lived, situated perspective, for example, does not conform to the rules of geometry, but
involves my perception of the thing within my particular field of vision. Thus, for example, a
church steeple in the distance will seem larger or smaller depending on what, in the foreground
of the view, attracts my att~ntion (PP, 48).
15. Some feminists have argued that the very concept of a "project," with its resonances of
thrust and assertiveness, is phallocentric. Certainly, its metaphorical connotations are so. But it
is the term that Merleau-Ponty uses to describe any intentional action and one could, I think,
talk of feminine (and feminist) projects without any major contradiction.
16. The term sens, which Merleau-Ponty uses frequently, connotes direction or sense, as well
as meaning. Since no one English word carries all these connotations, I retain the French.
17. Sense and Non-sense, 65-66.
18. Ibid., 29.
19. Maurice Merleau,Ponty, "The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Conse-
quences," in The Primac:y of Perception and Other Essays, ed. J. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1964), 17; original French publication of this essay 1947.
20. Sullivan, "Domination and Dialogue," 1.
21. Ibid., 8. Sullivan eXp'ands on this critical point in her treatment of Merleau-Ponty in
Living Across and Through Skins; "when one rejects the anonymous body . . . it does mean,
however, that one cannot assume that bodily habits, behaviors, and structures automatically
provide a common ground fqr ~ommunication and community that has not yet been inscribed
by differences and particularities. There are no short cuts prOVided by 'the body'" (74).
22. Some of these commonalities may, of course, be absent in cases of disability. In what
follows, then, my claims will be about what is generally, but not universally, the case. As
Merleau-Ponty himself notes, "generality and probability are not fictions but real phenomena,"
so that statistical thought may have a "phenomenological basis" (PP, 442).
Susan Stocker has persuasively made the case that disability does not pose a problem for
claims that embodiment may be a site of relations of human mutuality. Drawing on Maxine
Sheets-johnstone's argument,in The Roots of Thinking (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1990), that we may have a primordial concern for others engendered through "analogical percep-
tion" of bodies, Stocker pointS out that disabled bodies are not always a source of stigma; nor do
they always invoke the hostility of others. On the contrary, disabled bodies may also arouse our
concern and invite the development of mutuality. See Stocker, "Problems of Embodiment and
Problematic Embodiment," Hypatia; A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 16, no. 3 (2001): 30-55.
23. In the context of the interspecies comparisons I am making here, variability within
human walking speeds is not significant. But, of course, when we come to look at different styles
of walking as expressions of particular human ways of being in the world differences will be
significant.
24. Of course, in a particular instance, I might be mistaken: somebody could be weeping not
from grief but for joy. But again, such exceptions are perfectly compatible with the claim that
generally somebody weeping will express grief to another.
25. Carol Bigwood, "Renaturalizing the Body (with a Little Help from Merleau-Ponty},"
Hypatia; A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 6, no. 3 (1991): 54-73.
26. Again, it should be clear here that my statements are only generally-that is, statisti-
cally-accurate. I am not claiming that full sexual dimorphism is present in every human being,
for obviously it is not a universal phenomenon.
27. See Emily Martin, The Woman in' the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1987), esp. chap. 6.
 Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Difference in Feminism 47

28. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essa.y on the Communist Problem,
trans. J. O'Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969); original French publication 1947.
29. Ibid., 102.
30. Ibid., 103.
31. Ibid., 102.
32. Herein lies one of Merleau-Ponty's most Significant divergences from the early Sartre. In
Being and Nothingness it is "the look," pure and simple, that has the power to objectify the other.
33. Although Merleau-Ponty mainly has class relations and capitalist exploitation of labor
in mind here, his observations also fit the long history of Western gender relations, in which
men have tried to control women's bodies for their own purposes.
34. Signs, 212, translation altered.
35. Of course, a factor that makes the conduct of warfare by aerial bombardment so easy is
that the killers do not ever have to encounter their victims as vulnerable and suffering bodies.
36. Sadism is, I think, a different relationship. For the sadist does recognize another's body
in pain-but takes pleasure in it. However, sadism is not my concern here.
37. Mortality rates from diabetes for African American women are two and a half times
those of white women. See Catherine F. Collins, ed., African-American Women's Health and Social
Issues (Westport, Conn: Auburn House, 1996),7.
38. In The Psychology of Sympathy (New York: Plenum Books, 1991), Lauren Wispe reviews
a body of psychology experiments and concludes that "sympathy"--defined as both a heightened
awareness of another's suffering and a desire to alleviate it--does involve forms of immediate
embodied response to others (68). Indeed, there is evidence that we undergo physical responses,
such as a change in heart rate, when we see or know about another's pain. We also engage in a
process of "muscle mimicry," in which we contract our own muscles as if in pain, and in so doing
induce a change of mood and shift of affect in ourselves (135-55).
39. The politics of Western feminist attitudes to clitoridectomy, or "female genital mutila-
tion," are complex. Many Western feminists refuse to take an evaluative stance, since in doing
so they risk imposing their own judgments on "third world" women who may desire the proce-
dure. Stanlie James provides a good overview of the debates on this issue in "Shades of Othering:
Reflections on Female Circumcision/Genital Mutilation," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 23, no. 1 (1998): 103-48. But irrespective of one's political stance, it is impossible to
avoid an upsetting "gut" reaction on hearing about or seeing pictures of the procedure. On
this point, see also Sandra Bartky, "Sympathy and Solidarity: On a Tightrope with Scheler,"
in "Sympathy and Solidarity" and Other Essays (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002),
chap. 4.
40. I discuss this and subsequent points at considerably more length in Retrieving Experience:
Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), chaps. 5
and 6.
41. Lorraine Code, Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations (New York: Routledge,
1995); Elizabeth V. Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1997).
 2
Only Nature Is Mother
to the Child
Dorothea Olkowski

"Theoretical and practical decisions of personal life may well lay hold,
from a distance, upon my past and my future, and bestow upon my past,
with all its fortuitous events, a definite significance, by following it up
with a future which will be seen after the event as foreshadowed by it,
thus introducing historicity into my life. Yet these sequences always have
something artificial about them."! With these words, Merleau-Ponty
makes a strong claim for the phenomenology of lived experience, that is,
that we will never be more sure of our past than we were when it was our
present and we were living through it. This takes on particular impor-
50 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

tance in light of his' concern that our current understanding of our past
and therefore of ourselves is a reconstruction, an interpretation that itself
is interpreted with the mistaken aim of determining the truth-value of
both the interpretation of the original event and of the interpretation of
the interpretation in an endless chain of signifiers that never quite seems
to capture the authenticity of the moment when we lived through it,
when "the world itself was more beautiful, [and] things were more fasci-
nating."2
This appears to happen, for Merleau-Ponty, because what he refers to
as "natural time" transcends; it leaps beyond the moment in which I may
willfully and rationally understand anything. What is lived and what is
"understood" are pever on the same plane and so appear to be incom-
mensurate. Every 'time we try to understand an experience, Merleau-
Ponty argues, we understand it in opposition to living it in the natural
time that is at the center of our history. What is inaccessible to our lived
experience, such as the time of our prenatal existence, is inaccessible
because the fetus does not yet perceive and it is perception alone that
gives access to the r~al world of our lived experience. These ideas and
others that follow from them are, at first, wholly confusing, burying us in
an avalanche of seemingly contradictory or irreconcilable concepts. If we
accept, for the moment, the thesis that there exists an intimate relation
between perception and lived experience, then we still might ask, When
and how does this intimacy begin? What does a fetus undergo in the
realm of the senses' and how does the preperceptual life of the human
organism differ from -its perceptual and cognitive lives? That is, is there
such an ano~ymous and impersonal preperceptuallife at the basis of per-
ception and cognition? And if so, is this life impersonal and anonymous,
as emptied of human contact as Merleau-Ponty claims it to be? And
finally, in the time of our prenatal and infantile experience, why does
whatever intimacy we are capable of flow from the natural world and not
from the infant's relation to the mother?
Although the newborn baby may be characterized as a mostly passive
beneficiary of its own experience, human beings have not long to wait for
initiation into the wonders of the "real" world, since already, by its fif-
teenth month, the baby actively perceives. The baby will open its mouth
in response to an adult who playfully places one of the baby's fingers
between "his" teeth pretending to bite it. This observation allows
Merleau-Ponty to conclude that the lived experience of the baby must
take place in an environment rich with intersubjective significance. The
 Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 51

baby "perceives its intentions in its body, and my body with its own, and
thereby my intentions in its own body."3 That is, embedded in a human
form of behavior, the fifteen-month-old baby, who is not yet capable of
interpretive reflection, must be able to experience in the body of the
adult a "miraculous prolongation" of its own intentions, "a familiar way
of dealing with the world, "which is to say that a fifteen month old baby
acts intentionally," but what is the nature of those intentions?4 It is a
strange sort of intentionality in which the baby's body and the playful
adult's body are two sides of a structure of behavior and so form a behav-
ioral whole. Thus, the baby and the adult embody a single system of
intentional behavior. But is this behavior an effect of intentional con-
sciousness or is it possible to imagine that it is organized in terms of some
other formation, some other imperative? As it turns out, Merleau-Ponty
does have something else in mind, something that is not an intentional
consciousness at all but is bound up with the child's and the father's
involvement in the intersection of the natural and the cultural world. It
is largely this intersection that will be explored in this chapter insofar as
it is an intersection from which all signs of the female, the woman who
gives birth, who cradles, caresses, nurses, and cares for the infant, are
erased. As such, in place of the personal, intimate relation with this fully
human woman, the infant comes to itself from out of the prepersonal and
anonymous realm of nature.
Although baby and adult embody a behavioral whole, this does not
yet constitute the baby as an other human being for the adult, nor does
it make the adult an other human being for the baby. At fifteen months
the baby has, at most, a limited and partial experience of human being.
To the extent that such experience is possible, it is a result of what the
baby feels. As Merleau-Ponty acknowledges, the baby responds to the
father's playful gesture because it feels, but what it feels is only its own
mouth and teeth as an apparatus with which to bite; its feeling is highly
self-reflexive. This leaves a lot in question. The organization of this be-
havioral whole, the relation between feeling and perceptual intentions in
particular, might need to be more fully articulated in order to determine
how it is that a baby becomes fully human, how it comes to constitute
the adult as a human being. This, we are advised, is where cultural objects
and cultural life first come into play. Before this, there has been nothing,
no feeling of being born from out of the intimacy of another body, no
feeling of being cared for, held, nursed by a mother, nothing but the
preperceptual natural life, which as unperceived is largely lost. The ca-
52 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

resses and care that the infant receives prior to fifteen months are lost to
it forever, since they are not perceived, since they are not produced by
an activity like biting, an act that the infant itself carries out, a playful
self-assertion. Nonetheless, insofar as we are thrown into the natural
world at birth, a world more beautiful and fascinating than any that
comes after, all our perceptions and thoughts will stand out against this
background of anonymous natural life. Each perceptual field (sight,
touch, sound, taste, and smell) will contribute a little perceptual "con-
sciousness" to the total field that embraces these "absent-minded and
dispersed" consciousnesses. It is as if the natural objects are prior to and
outside one's personal existence but enter into that personal existence
once they are able to be perceived. Then, certain behavior patterns settle
into "that nature;J in the form of a cultural world and cultural objects.
But the cultural world is enigmatic; like the natural world, it lacks con-
crete persons who caress and care for the child, but unlike the natural
world, it is not beautjful and is no longer a realm of harmony. Its objects,
each of which "spreads round it an atmosphere of humanity," appear as
mysterious relics of all existence, strange and empty traces of habitual
human ways of life >that stand in service to those ways of life.5 These
empty traces of human life appear as footprints in the sand, fragile and
fleeting, or as a deserted house, empty and unlit. Such traces are the
anonymous residue of the acts of human beings, yielding even fewer clues
than archeological sites, where along with physical remains, traces of the
everyday appurtenances of life may still be found. But for Merleau-Ponty,
human traces are oddly deserted and impersonal, the abandoned and des-
olate remains of life, with few clues of the nature or character of the
humans who inhabited those terrains. Although they remain as indica-
tions of the existence of human intentions, acts, or projects, these traces
linger on in their isolation, strangely dissociated from anything ordinarily
related to the feeling of one's own existence and the specificity of female
or male, mother or father. It is as if every child becomes an orphan; as if
the infant wanders alone in an idealized natural world, offspring of a
generous natural, physical world, never having been enfolded in the arms
and against the breast of a flesh-and-blood mother who cradles, nurses,
comforts, and loves.
In Merleau-Ponty's account of the coming into being of the human
world, the originally splendid natural world is suddenly emptied of all its
charm, >even as the 'cultural .world is introduced through its own ex-
hausted, anonymous remains. The child soon abandons the purely lived
 Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 53

world, resorting to annexing its natural objects by "diverting them from

their immediate significance," so as to tum them into useful objects, fore-
going their mystery and fascinating appearance. This makes it possible
for the child to discover the world of cultural objects that were "around
him at birth like meteorites from another planet," and in spite of their
unfamiliar if not hostile quality, nonetheless, the child appropriates them
in order to learn to use them as others do. 6 With the enigmatic natural
world impoverished by the act of making its contents useful and the cul-
tural world indifferent and alien, Merleau-Ponty's thesis that the natural
time of the child who was once immersed in the beautiful and fascinating
immediacy of the lived world that is the "indispensable acquisition un-
derlying that of maturity" might be seen as paramount in his thinking.
The original and immediate, indispensable acquisition must not be able
to be lost or relinquished, otherwise we succumb utterly to the voluntary
and rational life that sends us on an endless journey through artificial
climates, through the endless spiral of interpretations, spitting us out at
the end in a paranoiac chain. 7 Before the dispersed consciousness of frag-
mented perceptual fields, before the alien world with its strange relics,
before the struggle between consciousnesses, before sexual differentia-
tion, before even the conflict between perceptions, lies the peaceful coex-
istence of the world of childhood, a single self-evident world where
everything that occurs is accessible to everyone, but where every child is
born into the world alone. Born into the natural world, the infant has no
perception of specific human attention, no perception of human love,
affection, warmth, intimacy, or care. Unable to perceive or think what it
feels, infancy is irretrievable and nature is mother to the child.
Yet given how readily and inevitably the natural world is stripped of
its immediacy and beauty, and given the alien character of the cultural
world, where individuals are differentiated by sex, race, class, as well as
mental and physical capacities, the child's original experience is more
than important, it is a necessity. The peaceful coexistence and reciproc-
ity of preculturallived experience are absolutely essential, since strangely
enough, nowhere in the human, cultural world does the child appear to
find any trace of these positive, affective relations between human beings,
and without some experience of coexistence or reciprocity, intersubjec-
tive attachments, including and especially love, are doomed. Lacking co-
existence and reciprocity, we would find ourselves faced with nothing but
conflicting perceptions between persons, even on the level of a nonpos-
iting "consciousness." Even if we attempted to involve ourselves in recip-
54 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

rocal emotional attachments, the best situation possible might be that in

which one person throws her- or himself into what is not so much love
as self-sacrifice, while the other finds in this love no more than an inter-
esting but contingent manner of living, maintaining her- or himself in
her or his freedom while remaining formally committed. This is a cruel
way to live, both for the one who sacrifices and for the one who remains
nominally free. Since the attachment involves little more than adherence
to certain habitual or cultural behaviors, neither party is acting freely and
neither feels either her or his own existence or that of the other. What,
we may ask, has become of the feeling that the infant originally experi-
enced in its own body and in relation to the other? It appears that en-
trance into the cultural world substitutes certain culturally inscribed
behaviors for the child's own feeling. But this solution begs the question,
a question that must be posed. "Co-existence must in all cases be experi-
enced [lived]on both sides. If neither of the persons is a constituting
consciousness at the mornent they are about to communicate and dis-
cover a common wo~ld, the question is: who communicates, and for
whom does this world .exist?"8 If coexistence must be experienced on
both sides, how can there be communication and attachment without
consciousness? If, however, there are two consciousnesses present, then
are not the world's that each posits mutually exclusive? Is not each per-
ceiver an insatiabl~ being,. appropriating the entire natural and cultural
world of her or his perception?
In following Merleau-Ponty's thinking about other selves and the
human world, it appears that we are led to a somewhat disconcerting
conclusion. Although the natural world of the child is a beautiful and
fascinating place, human beings are largely if not altogether absent from
it. The mother who carries the fetus to maturity in her body, who gives
birth, who nurses and cares for it, who holds it in her arms, comforting,
soothing, calming this tiny, not yet fully human being is either absent or
supplanted by the natural, physical world. It is a fascinating and beautiful
world, but one devoid of mothers and mothering, one whose objects will
later be tom from it and used for profit, for industry, for expediency.
When human beings do finally appear, they do so first as empty, affectless
traces, anonymous beings, foreshadowed in the enigmatic footsteps and
vacant, silent rooms of abandoned spaces, both natural and cultural.
Moreover, both the natural and the cultural perceptual self operate as a
limit on coexistence. Given this picture, we might ask if there is an alter-
native to resignification of the n~tural world. What if, rather than resigni-
 Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 55

fying the objects in the natural world in terms of their usefulness, we

simply revert to the natural existence of a purely sensory being? We can
of course close our eyes and stop up our ears, but in so doing we live as a
stranger in society treating other people along with all institutions and
conventions as nothing more than splendid perceptual fields of color and
light, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Truly a fascinating and beautiful
world but not a human world. To retreat to peaceful coexistence is to strip
human beings of their human significance, just as formerly, in order to
enter the human world, we stripped natural objects of their immediacy.
To deny human significance to human beings is in fact a travesty, ac-
cording to Merleau-Ponty, but one that, in accordance with his own de-
scription, is easily accomplished, since the cultural world is represented
to us by little more than the detritus of human lives, the abandoned
beach, the empty rooms. This is why recourse to thinking within the
cultural world of leftover signifiers appears to offer a no beneficial alterna-
tive. In addition to opening up the cycle of Cartesian doubt with regard
to the veracity of perception, positioning oneself in the world of signs
initiates the leap from sign to sign in search of some ultimate primary
Signified. So we leap from nature to society and perhaps back to nature,
and from the real to the imaginary, waiting for this primary thing to
reemerge, the peacefully coexisting community of "men," this time
endowed with speech, with gesture, with perception. Nevertheless,
Merleau-Ponty argues, only by falling back upon the peaceful coexistence
of childhood, that of a single self-evident world, the world within which
we are, each one of us, nobody, where everything that occurs is accessible
to everyone, only here can our feeling somehow provide us with an expe-
rience of others, the unreflected horizon of our self- reflection.
Beginning with childhood We are given to ourselves, which is to say, we
are situated in a natural and a social world and eventually, our situated-
ness is revealed to us. The actions we choose in response to the world are
inseparable from our insertion in that world. "The physical and social
world always functions as a stimulus to my reactions, whether these be
positive or negative."9 This statement appears undeniably true. That is,
we develop as human beings in response to our environment, which is
the natural and cultural milieu. Yet does this entail the conclusion that
we call each perception into question only in the name of a truer percep-
tion, one that corrects the first one? Moreover, is it the case that what
makes it possible to deny the truth of any particular perception is the
assertion of some generality, some single system or order that, in spite of
56 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

the apparent absence of human mothers amid the signs of either the
natural or the cultural world, nonetheless calls for action adeux (coupling
or pairing)? Is it the case that the physical and social world functions as
a stimulus to which human beings respond but that they do so only be-
cause there is an originary generality, a single system of peaceful, anony,
mous coexistence in which two otherwise separate consciousnesses
couple? And why, if the originary natural world is a generality, why is it
that it calls for pairs, couples?
To reach these conclusions, Merleau-Ponty, first of all, evades the
question of mothers and mothering or nurturers and nurturing. This, in
turn, may well be related to the decision to give up the idea of the psyche,
which he defines as the feeling one has of one's own existence, and to
replace it with the hotion of behavior. The feeling of one's own existence
characterized by the psyche is not primarily visual. It is clear from
Merleau-Ponty's account that the world of the perceiver is primarily a
visual world and that, for him, intersubjective relations arise primarily if
not wholly from visual stimuli. When we abandon the idea of a psyche
that feels its existence'" and put behavior in its place, the dominance of
the visual becomes a given. From this point of view, the relation of con-
sciousness to the body is "postural"; it is consciousness of the body as an
organized totality with respect to its different sensory domains and of the
body's position in relation to its vertical and horizontal axes in space. IO It
appears as such to be a body ready to act in that space on the basis of
its perceptual interests. When I perceive the other as another corporeal
schema, this perception appears to be overwhelmingly visual. The visual
perception of the other's corporeal schema stands in contrast to Merleau-
Ponty's initial account of the psyche, especially the psyche of the child
as it opens out upon the world. For the child, as for the adult, the "prob-
lem" of experiencing the other is 'described as involving four components:
first, one's own psyche defined as the feeling of one's own existence;
second, the "interoceptive image," the image one has of one's own body
by means of the sense of touch; third, the "visual body," the other as seen
by me; and fourth, the reconstitution of the psyche of the other, that is,
the feeling of her or his existence. ll
Even Merleau-Ponty admits that problematized in this manner, the
relation to the other raises numerous difficulties. Notably, the child's own
body is given to itself as felt, while, on this model, the body of the other
is given as seen. Experiencing -the other would be an indirect process at
best wherein the child would have, for example, to compare the visible
 Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 57

smile of the other with its own primarily felt smile. This model is all the
more questionable, since "the child's visual experience of his own body
is altogether insignificant in relation to the kinesthetic, cenesthesic, or
tactile feeling he can have of it."12 By what means would a child systemat-
ically compare the body felt with the body seen? In spite of the hypothesis
that the child is given to itself as felt, Merleau-Ponty is forced to forego
the idea of the psyche, the feeling of one's own existence, for the idea of
behavior or comportment, since the latter can be characterized in primar-
ily visual terms, for both the self and the other, while the former necessi-
tates recognition of the primary role played by tactility and even, I would
suggest, by what is entirely imperceptible. That is, although Merleau-
Ponty acknowledges that we respond to the stimuli that the world pres-
ents to us and he acknowledges that for the child, vision is insignificant
in comparison to what is felt, he nonetheless overlooks the conclusion
that for the child, the world and others might therefore be given through
, what is felt as well as what is seen. Is it not possible that in existing one's
own body, one is not just seeing but also sensing all the things and beings
in the world whose motions directly and indirectly affect one's own body
whether one can cognitively recognize them or not? To set aside these
conclusions, Merleau-Ponty turns to psychoanalysis, whose arduous con-
struction of a visible self also conceals the primary role and importance
of what is felt and for which feeling arrives through consciousness rather
than through pleasure or pain localized on the body.
We can understand how the visual perception of others is possible,
according to Merleau-Ponty, not by taking into account our real and
evident feeling of the world, but by postulating an initial precommunica-
tive state, a state that evokes that fascinating and beautiful natural world
prior to reflection, the world of prepersonal life that mysteriously does
not include any feelings arising from the infant's relation to the very
person who gave it life. The initial state is characterized variously as
anonymous, undifferentiated, or indistinct. So it is somewhat surprising
when Merleau-Ponty goes on to designate this state; as a "group life" (vie
aplusieurs) , a necessarily anonymous community, a community neverthe-
less. It seems, however, that the recognition of an identifiable group or a
community would require the recognition of individuals constituting a
group, something that the incapacity to differentiate or distinguish would
clearly preclude. The existence of an anonymous and impersonal but
nonetheless group' life would make it possible for the child to begin in a
state in which she or he is unaware that there are differences between
58 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

her- or himself and ~ther beings yet without being isolated. The anony-
mous community precludes solipsism. As Merleau-Ponty will later state,
the child is nobody, the anonymous, the unknown, the one to whom all
will be given to see or to think, that to whom all will appeal, but whose
origin is negativity, ungraspable, nothing. But really, nobody to whom?
While it is certainly the case that many children are born into the world
unwanted, abandoned, or cruelly treated, this is not universal. To the
woman who has chosen to give birth and who has carried the maturing
fetus in her body for nine months; to the man who sought to mix his
body with that of the woman in order for her to give birth to a child, that
child is not nobody, and the feelings passing between these persons and
their infant begin before birth, already in the prenatal stage.
But for Merleau-Ponty, each newborn baby is born into a contradic-
tion, a group life in which it remains unable to differentiate or distinguish
anything. And somehow, gradually, what the child starts to see is not
others. The child sees that her body is closed in on itself and was all
along. Yet if the child begins in a truly undifferentiated world, what could
possibly bring it to differentiate or distinguish between itself and any
other thing? Merlea~-Ponty argues that this occurs long after birth and
only when the child looks into a mirror, which, according to Lacanian
theory, discloses once and for all that each body exists in isolation from
the other. "I can perceive, across the visual image 0/ the other, that the
other is an organism, that that organism is inhabited by a 'psyche,' be-
cause the visual image of the other is interpreted by the notion 1 myself
have of my own boefy and thus appears as the visible envelopment of
another 'corPoreal schema.' "13 Does the arrival of the mirror stage beg
the question, which is, How does one arrive at the notion of one's own
body if the child begins its existence in an undifferentiated world? Vision,
in and of itself, does not guarantee that what is seen is understood to be
a separate being. This is reinforced by the claim that consciousness of
oneself as a unique individual comes later and is not primitive. Not even
the gestalt perception guarantees that we see separate beings, since a
figure on a ground is merely the minimum perceptible, not the necessary
perceptible, and may not be interpreted as an individual figure. So what
can this so-called me possibly be and how can it live in others of whom
it is not yet conscious as well as in itself when it is entirely unaware of
both itself and others as separate beings? How does the child orient itself
starting from the mere feeling of its own body, which it does not yet
realize is its own, so as to arrive first at the perception of its body, which
 Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 59

would give it to itself as a unique being, and finally.at the perception of

the other?
At birth, Merleau,Ponty argues, the feeling of one's own existence is
separate from perception of the external world. He takes this to mean
that the tactile body is totally isolated because up to the age of three
months, the child has no external perception of others and merely feels
differences in his [sic] body. 14 But to feel differences is to feel something, to
have an experience of differences even though it may not correspond to
a perception of differences spatialized in the world or to a concept of
differences. There is nothing preventing an initial experience of differ,
entiation from arising from what is felt. There may be no visual differen,
tiation, but there could be auditory differentiation, as when we hear
different notes in a melody or different tones of voice, and there are
certainly differentiations of smell and touch. The voice, the touch, the
smell of the mother who cradles and cares for the infant are there from
birth, if not earlier. There is no reason why there might not be other felt
differences, such as temperature changes or intense or relaxed pressure
on the skin. The quality of light, the texture of clothing or a blanket, the
breeze flowing from a window, all are mere feelings, yet all contribute to
the infant's sense of itself and its world. Although the child responds to
these differences in an immediate and nonreflective manner, nonetheless
they exist. Luce Irigaray has observed that differentiation takes place on
the fetal level well before it is given meaning by language. In her concep,
tualization, the image of interuterine differentiation operates outside the
cultural imaginary rather than as its effect. The image she develops is
that of intersubjective life, in which the female body tolerates the growth
of the other within without incurring either illness or death for either of
the living organisms. IS
For Merleau,Ponty, perhaps unlike Irigaray, the issue is not, how does
the image of differentiation arise, but, rather, how does the feeling of
differences in the body get connected to the world? Insofar as Merleau,
Ponty does not connect these bodily influences, these feelings, to the
world, the body remains isolated. What serves as the first stimulus to
perception of the external world? Surprisingly, it is not sight but sound;
the sound of the human voice provokes definite reactions. But the human
voice is much closer to what· is felt than to vision. Although it is not as
definitively localized on the body as tactile sensations or perhaps even
smell, sound invades the body. Even a fetus can feel the vibrations of
certain pitches reverberating through its body. So for an infant whose
60 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

organs are far more otganized than those of a fetus, the sound of a familiar
voice further differentiates the many influences felt in its own body from
their sources in the world. Taking advantage of the stimulus that the
voice provides, Merleau-Ponty quickly elides what is heard with what is
seen. When a baby is two months old, the sound of a human voice (pre-
sumably one the infant has felt and heard over and over already) provokes
smiles, and likewise, although for unknown reasons, since it is initially
not linked to feeling, looking at the child makes her smile; that is, sud-
denly the child perceives. Is not the sound of a voice that evokes a smile
a perception? Is this not a voice that has been with the infant since it
first became viable? This child perceives, but Merleau-Ponty claims that
there is "at least one perception of a look as of something that makes
him complete."l6 The perception of a look that completes the child is
that of the father. It is the father whom the child recognizes visually
and who makes the child complete. Nonetheless, Merleau-Ponty reports,
when anyone at all leaves the room, the child starts to cry, and at three
months, the child cries out when anyone at all enters the room. Who is
this mysterious anyo~e? Does the child feel the presence or absence of
the one who gave birth, who caresses and cares for it? Does the child see
this or does the child feel the change in the room? And what happens if
the father enters in an unfamiliar setting, a strange room? There is no
recognition, we are told. Does the child see the father and perceive itself
as complete or does the child feel, smell, and hear what has already be-
come familiar? Perhaps the recognition of the father, who may not be
close enough to the child to evoke recognition through feeling alone,
requires the security of a familiar setting? A clue that this last might be
the case comes with the acknowledgment that according to the observer,
who finds it "intuitively quite noticeable," what the child sees first are
not persons at all but parts of the' body. The child looks at hands, fingers,
feet, the mouth, but not at a person. It "does not seek to grasp the other
as such."l? That is, what the intuitive observer actually observes is that
the child does not see the other as a whole but reaches out its hands and
tries to grasp the other, feeling its way through the world. What the child
learns about the other's body then, may not arise at all from the look but
from touch, from grasping fingers, mouth, hair, and ears, just as it grasps
its own fingers, mouth, hair, ears, and toes. So at six months when the
child looks at the face of another child, is it a sign of the visual recogni-
tion of an other or is it primarily an effect of tactility and motion, of
reaching and' grasping, touching and being touched, crying and hearing
 Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 61

voices, in the now familiar atmosphere of warm bodies, habitual smells,

and comfortable rooms?
It is at this point that the child gazes into the mirror. Here Merleau-
Ponty treats feeling, perception, and intentional consciousness as one
and the same. Consciousness of one's own body is the effect, he states, of
consciousness of the visual image, particularly the mirror image, the
image of the symbolic world. The child does not first see itself in the
mirror; it first sees the father. The child smiles in a mirror at the image
of the father. At this moment, the father speaks to the child, who appears
surprised and turns toward the father. As a result, it is at this moment
that the child (who is always designated by Merleau-Ponty as "he") learns
something. What exactly does "he" learn? He is surprised, because at the
moment before his father spoke, he did not have a precise awareness of
the relation of image to model. He is surprised that the voice comes from
another direction than that of the visible image in the mirror.18 The
experience of the child is described in this way because the perception of
the child is taken to be primarily visual. Thus, the first other in the world
is the representation of the father; the second is the father himself; this
in spite of the evidence that the father is first given through the voice.
And if the father is first given to the child through the voice, what of the
mother, inside whose body the child grew from fetus to human? It seems
strange that the voice of the mother and the mother's smell and touch as
well as those of the father are not acknowledged to have been felt and
heard before the father is recognized visually. All the more so, since even
after this learning experience, Merleau-Ponty notes that the child still
tries to grasp the image in the mirror with its hand. So, can we really say
that the child is only perceiving the visible world, that the child has
consciousness of the other as other, thus of the symbolic world? Since the
child turns toward the father because that is where the voice comes from,
can we really claim that the child recognizes that the specular image is
the image of the father? Or is it possible that the body and voice of the
mother that are felt and heard before all else are the condition of the
possibility or at least precede visual recognition of anyone? What, after
all, is recognized, which is to say, detected, with the senses and perceived
to be the same, the same as someone who is already known by other
means?
Later, at about eight months, the child will apparently recognize the
specular image of itself. Yet again, what is it that the child does, how does
the child act? It attempts to grasp the image, to feel it, but encounters
62 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

only the smooth surface of the mirror with its hand. Although, according
to Merleau-Ponty, there are no recognizable felt experiences in relation
to the mother or the father, the child has two visual experiences of the
father, one when the child looks at him and one when he looks into the
mirror. This may be.why, in the case of the child's own body, there is one
and only one experience, that of the mirror. "Thus for him it is a problem
first of understanding that the visual image of his body which he sees
over ther.e in the mirror is not himself, since he is not in the mirror but
here, where he feels himself."19 If vision dominates all the senses and if
felt experience really amounts to nothing, as is implied here, then' this
answer makes perfect sense, but what happens when we rethink this ques-
tion from the point of view of what the child recognizes through its
feeling? From this' point of view the problem for the child is knowing
that the visual image of its own body is in fact the image of its own body
precisely because the child is here where she feels herself and not in the
mirror. The image in the mirror is the problem that has to be worked
out, much more than the feeling one has of one's own body or even the
feeling of the world, since heat and cold, loud and soft, as well as modula-
tions of these extremes, are felt by the infant as soon as the sensory-
motor body awakens to the world and it awakens to the world through its
mother. Still, the 'question remains, How does the child, come to know
that the image in the mirror is itself or its father? How is what the child
feels related to what the child sees and finally, what the child knows?
The elevation of sp~cular behavior over the child's grasping and touch-
ing may well. be the reason why Merleau-Ponty must be so concerned
about solipsism. The beautiful and fascinating natural world has been
resignified as valuable for its useful objects but thereby depleted of its
fascination. The cultural world consists of empty artifacts. The child's
felt connection to the mother and through her to the world is interpreted
away as nothing but confusion. Merleau-Ponty does recognize his own
implicit claim that the child first feels its body as a center of action and
that it is this that makes perception and specular differentiation, as well
as the natural and social worlds, tenable. In an empty world, the world
where no mothers give birth to and care for their infants, where human
beings are signified by their relics and representations, not even the real,
felt presence of the father connected with the sight of him brings the
child into the intersubjective, cultural world. The child finds itself, ac-
cording to Merleau-Ponty, not with and through the other, but alone,
completely alone. No mother caresses and cares for her, tickles her and
 Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 63

makes her laugh. No father lifts her into the air and hugs her close. She
does not first feel and then see the mother, the father, or both looking at
her; she sees herself. She only discovers that she is visible and a self
when she finds herself completely alone in the world. Surely it is an
understatement to make a claim like the one Merleau-Ponty makes in
this context. "At the same time that the image of-oneself makes possible
knowledge of oneself, it makes possible a sort of alienation. I am no
longer what I felt myself immediately to be; I am that image of myself
that is offered by the mirror. To use Dr. Lacan's terms, I am 'captured,
caught up: by my spatial image.' "20 Likewise, as the child now has only
an exterior image of herself, others will also have only an exterior image
of her and she of them. The entire tactile (including auditory and olfac-
tory) realm is dismissed as merely confused feeling; its inhabitants are
unrecognizable, so that, in this view, the child is forced into the signify-
ing chain, forced to resignify again and again and to wait for primal coex-
istence to reemerge. To call this "reciprocity" is to obfuscate, since there
are nothing but exterior images available to the child, images that alien-
ate so cannot connect.
It has been argued that rather than originating in the specular self of
the mirror, the body image must be taken to arise out of sexually pleasur-
able sensations associated with different body parts, so that knowledge of
oneself implies a complex series of interactions between the infant and
others in a dynamic, ongoing situation. This alternative thesis offered by
Gail Weiss would make way for admitting feeling into the constitution of
the self, but only if Merleau-Ponty were not so ready to repudiate feeling
as mostly chaos and confusion. 21 The tum to the primacy of the specular
perception with its accompanying shift away from psyche, defined as the
feeling of one's existence, to behavior bears a significant relation to
Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of the character of the child's ego and
superego. The child looks in the mirror and identifies with the visual
image, thereby passing from one form of behavior to another. Freud iden-
tifies the ego as that aspect of the self that has been modified by the
direct influence of the external world and is differentiated from the id in
the context of reality testing. Furthermore, according to Freud, the ego,
which represents reason and common sense, arises out of and as a differen-
tiation of the id, which is felt as passion. Thus it is surprising that Merleau-
Ponty here reduces the ego to nothing more than "the collection of con-
fusedly felt impulses" and that only the ideal image of the superego pro-
vides the child with a sense of self. For Freud even feelings playa role in
64 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

the learning process'in that pleasure and pain teach us much about our
own body, and so even Freud affirms the priority of touch over sight. "A
person's own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both
external and internal perceptions may spring. It is seen like any other
object, but to the touch it yields two kinds of sensation, one of which
may be equivalent to an internal perception. Psychophysiology has fully
discussed the manner in which a person's own body attains its special
position among other objects in the world of perception."22 Freud argues
that for sight, the body is simply another object, but for touch it is the
source of orientation for the ego, which is always a bodily ego.
But when human existence and the recognition of others is identified
solely with the vis\,lal point of view, not only is the child's feeling of itself
secondary to its representation of self; more important, the child never
obtains a sense of self in relation to touch, smell, and taste, the elements
of felt existence. Moreover, when Merleau-Ponty identifies lived experi-
ence with the visuals it becomes impossible to make sense of how the
visible image of the self can be both pure experience and knowledge. The
image in the mirror i~ deemed, as has been noted above, to be knowledge,
and as we saw reflected in Merleau-Ponty's comments cited at the begin-
ning of this chapter, such knowledge is, when compared to lived, felt life,
always alienated. Caught up in the spatial image, we are no more what
we felt ourselves to be, but we are not related to the world that we see
either. This is because in perceiving the self-image, we are thrice alien-
ated. First, we are alienated from what we feel ourselves and the world to
be, thus from feelings that begin in the body of the mother; second, we
are alienated 'from what we visually perceive the world to be; and finally,
we are alienated from what we recognize and so know by means of the
mirror. Insofar as there are others in the world, we are unable to either
feel or see them except by meanS of the mirror. Thus intersubjectivity is
more like extreme alienation. Separated from itself by the mirror image,
the child is left to imagine that the other is like the self it is separated
from, that other human beings are like the mirror image, that they sepa-
rate the child from itself and that it separates them from themselves.
There cannot even be room for conflict in the child between these differ-
ent interpretations of itself, because the felt self and world and the seen
self and world are completely overridden by the ideal image in the mirror.
The constructed self is everything and all. 23
Merleau-Ponty argues that the gaze of the other objectifies me and my
gaze objectifies the other and that when this occurs it signifies that we
 Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 65

have withdrawn into our thinking nature. In thinking, he implies, we

become inhuman. In thinking, we do not take up and understand the
other but merely observe her as if she were an insect. In fact, such think-
ing is precisely what takes the place of communication and so presumably
a
of action deux, of coupling and pairing, as well as of the generality
within which such pairing supposedly takes place. Perhaps this is how the
felt relation to the mother was lost in the first place. Nevertheless, if the
child were to utter even a single word, it would be an act, it would be
adequate to return the self as other from its transcendence. Thus it is
reflective inactivity that separates the self from the other and gives one
transcendent status. But in the same breath, Merleau-Ponty obliterates
this distance with the claim that the social sphere, which provides us
with a language with which to reflect and ideas to reflect upon, exists and
is carried about by us before any objectification. 24 Surely there can be no
a
action deux, no coupling, prior to objectification, since in the world
of peaceful coexistence there is no awareness of oneself or of others as
subjectivities (Merleau-Ponty says "private subjectivities," but this is re-
dundant) thus certainly no awareness of different points of view. All
this is reiterated when Merleau-Ponty turns explicitly to the relationship
between language and the perception of others.
The empty relics of human existence and the cultural world that first
appear to the perceiving child are, not surprisingly, reflections of some-
thing much more fundamental. This is that the other as a subjectivity is
herself nothing but an empty sign. First of all, it is claimed, the other
appears as an adversary, violent faced and grimacing. Moreover, the other
is never localized; that is, voice and gestures are merely staged effects,
ceremonies acted out by a producer who is so well masked that it is
shocking to discover the other responding in any manner to one's own
voice and face. One must believe that someone is over there but not in
the voice or face, which are mere objects, and not behind that setup
that hides only "darkness crammed with organs."25 Little wonder that the
phantomlike apparition of an other troubles my surroundings, disturbs
the calm of my totality, impinges on my cogito, and my cogitations, and
that the entire cultural and human world feels impoverished and forlorn.
Once again, as with lived experience, the isolation of the thinker is so
complete that it is impossible for Merleau-Ponty to write about this world
in anything but the first person singular, since literally nothing and no
one else is present except as a masked player who deprives me of my cen-
trality and who can only live with me as a reproduction of myself, not as a
66 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

unique and indepenqent self, not as a being with whom one shares a felt
relation, but as an object.
But once again it is "my fundamental capacity for selffeeling" that
Merleau-Ponty initially appeals to in his attempt to pull himself out of
his isolation. Visually the other is a replica; and following this model, on
the level of self-feeling, the other would be nothing but a response. Yet if
self-feeling remains a fundamental capacity, the remnant of the idea of
a psyche, it is nonetheless immediately dissembled by a reflection that
abandons self-feeling and orients itself largely in terms of behavior. I
observe the other protect herself from the sun. Her comportment con-
vinces me that the other must have the same perception as I. I perceive
the hot sun; I generalize from my experience to that of all the phantoms
in my view. Even though they are nowhere in being, they slip into my
field and behave as I might. This is how language functions among us as
well. If the movements of other's bodies are nothing so much as patterns
of gestures and actions and if sounds are words arranged in propositions
that signify, this is because, like the body of the other, the language of
the other is enacted Cl;s'a behavior, a general outline that replicates one's
own. The words of the other do not break the isolation of the self; they
do not comfort or console. They are behaviors, gestures such as putting
on one's hat in the- sun, which likewise are part of a general outline. The
words of the other are a behavior whose Significations are like the foot-
prints in the sand or the empty rooms of the vacant house, Significations
that belong to the cultural world and that are found there every bit as
arbitrarily. Ye~ with perception and with language, Merleau-Ponty wants
something more. He wants to "awaken a carnal relation" that would also
be our "first insertion into the world" and, more important, "into
truth."26 Not surprisingly, this can only be the lived-through truth of our
childhood, but what can this mean?27 Is not our first insertion into the
world, our carnal relation, one with our birth, one with the intimacy of
feeling between mother and child? And yet, just as Merleau-Ponty
claimed primacy for perception, he will likewise claim primacy for
speech, in the sense that there is nothing separating being and speech.
Speech is both action and feeling but does not even require that we hear
the sound of the mother's words or the volume and tone of her voice
because speech somehow already pronounces itself in us as we speak. The
speaking "I" is in the body, inhabiting the speaker so that its impossible
to say what comes from the sp~aker and what comes from language, al-
 Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 67

though it is certain that nothing comes from the voice of the mother, her
breath, her tone, her cadence, her use of words or sounds, her sighs.2s
In his later work, Merleau-Ponty refers to "reversibility" to try to
ground the description of the relation between the speaker and language
as well as between speakers. Linguistic reversibility has been described as
"the expression I share with the other," or "two sides of the same
Being."29 Linguistic reversibility is, as we have seen, modeled on percep-
tual reversibility. Reflecting on this, Helen Fielding argues that "as corpo-
real beings our bodies are both sensed and sentient, visible and invisible,
our perceptions arise from the midst of our relations and not from the
periphery," and she adds that such perception is not experienced as con-
sciousness but it is the latency in which visible and invisible are simulta-
neous and simultaneously pervade our being. 30 But as we have already
seen, such reciprocity is predicated not on an original feeling of the rela-
tion to the mother, but on the conflict between oneself and oneself, the
self that is felt but passed over as confused feeling and the self who sees
itself or who speaks. Either way, the subject is no longer a psyche born
into a felt world, a world of sound, smell, touch, and taste, but now a
behavior, a generalized outline. With the idea of reversibility, Merleau-
Ponty seems to want to collapse the two dimensions (the felt and the
seen/spoken) into one another even while claiming that what is felt and
what is seen or spoken are two different structures of behavior. He does
this by insisting that they are not unrelated, since they form a continuum.
"The child's problem is not so much one of understanding that the visual
and the tactile images of the body-both located at two points in space-in
reality compromise only one, as it is of understanding that the image of
the mirror is his image, that it is what others see of him ... [yet] the
conquest of the image is only one aspect in the total continuum made up
of all the lived relations with others and the world."3! Thus, the adult
regresses to childish states without actually having the perceptions and
language of a child. And, as Merleau-Ponty imagines it, the adult can also
slide back down this continuum in order to reconnect with the peaceful
coexistence of undifferentiated, lived experience without ever acknowl-
edging the mother who gave birth. Yet, as I have tried to argue, insofar as
the child's felt experience has been described as undifferentiated and
chaotic and does not contribute to either perception or language, there
appears to be an unbridgeable gap between the child and the adult, a gap
that no perceptions and no words can explain. This is a confusing situa-
tion, making it seem as if the child is born alone, without a mother or at
68 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

least a caregiver to nurture and sooth the child, to be the child's felt
connection to the world. Nevertheless, it appears that this is what is
posited.
The reasons for this enigma may only be guessed at. Merleau-Ponty
himself has given us some indication of his reason for this strange situa-
tion from the very beginning. Apparently reflecting on his own experi-
ence, Merleau-Ponty writes that "it is at the present time that I realize
that the first twenty-five years of my life were a prolonged childhood,
destined to be followed by a painful break leading eventually to indepen-
dence."3z A prolonged childhood indeed, followed by a painful break-
little wonder that the existence of other people and of the cultural world
are an outrage for thought or that the actions and thoughts of others have
to be grasped from the outside. Although I can only speculate on this,
these few comments lead me at least to wonder if the difficulties and
contradictions reflected in Merleau-Ponty's attempts to make sense of
others and the human world do not arise from the shock of his own
break from a prolonged childhood and the manner in which this break is
formulated by him OJ: for him by others. Let us ask ourselves, structurally,
does the break from childhood to the voluntary and rational life of inde-
pendence really require a break with feeling and a denial of mothering?
Does it require that we renounce the feeling of the mother who gives
birth, nurtures, and cares for the infant so as to replace it with reflection?
Or may it not be the case that Merleau-Ponty's commitment to intellec-
tual independence brought him to the point where that commitment
came to ovefshadow felt life, just as in his work, perception overruns
subtle sensibility and behavior overruns a psyche that feels its existence?

Notes

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, Forrest Williams,

and David Guerriere (New York: Routledge Press, 1962),346; originally published as Phenomenologie
de Ia perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945).
2. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 346.
3. Ibid., 352.
4. Ibid., 354. The capacity to tum natural objects into useful ones is already a kind of learning,
an adaptation to an actual environment by means of "amovable forms" that are, however, purely
conventional. See The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963),
120; originally published as La structure' du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1942). .
 Only Nature Is Mother to the Child 69

5. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 347, 348. It is interesting to see Merleau-Ponty

on both sides of the equation with respect to habituation. On the one hand, he insists that the
perceptual body must be a habitual body obeying perceptual norms, but on the other hand, he often
derides habituation particularly with respect to language. See, for example, my essay "A Psychoanal-
ysis of Nature?" in Merleau-Ponry: From Nature to Ontology (Milan: Mimesis; Paris: Vrin; Memphis:
University of Memphis, 2000), 185-205 and "Merleau-Ponty: The Demand for Mystery in Lan-
guage," Philosophy Today 31, no. 4 (1987): 352-58.
6. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 354.
7. Ibid., 355. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue that the structure of the signifying chain
does away with designation and replaces it with purely formal relation of sign to sign in a limitless
movement of referral. Thus a sign refers to another sign, which refers it to other signs, so that
everything becomes connected and a social disturbance or personal crisis calls into question the
entire system of the universe. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Mas-
sumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 112-13; originally published as MiUes
plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrenie (Paris: Minuit, 1980), 141-43.
8. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 357. Although it is Merleau-Ponty who raises
this question, he does not appear to have examined its implications in detail, so he continues to
construct a reciprocity consisting entirely of external, that is, behavioral, relations.
9. Ibid., 360. Statements such as this are an indication of Merleau-Ponty's empiricism, not a
blind tabula rasa but an empiricism that seeks a carnal relation to the world.
10. "The Child's Relation with Others," in The Primacy of Perception, trans. William Cobb
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 118, 119; originally published as Les relations avec
autrui chez l'enfant" (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire).
11. "Child's Relation with Others," 115. It is precisely this schema that Merleau-Ponty is seek-
ing to eliminate, based as it is on awkward assumptions about the child's learning through imitation.
12. Ibid., 116. See, for example, my essay "Merleau-Ponty's Freudianism: From the Body of
Consciousness to the Body of Flesh," Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 18, nos. 1, 2, and
3 (1985): 97-116. I have argued extensively in my book Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: Universiw of California Press, 1999) that in addition to perception,
which is directed toward what interests us in the world, we are also and first connected to the entire
world through affectivity, the feeling of pleasure and pain localized on the body.
13. "Child's Relation with Others," 118. I am suggesting that the concept of the undifferentiated
origin is developed in later work in the idea of the anonymous being, the nobody at the heart of every
so-called self. See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 246.
14. "Child's Relation with Others," 124.
15. Luce lrigaray, je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York:
Routledge Press, 1993); originally published in French as je, tu, nous (Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle,
1990). Irigaray is unwilling to propose this as a model, since such a move would in fact subvert it to
culture. Instead, she proposes maternal economy and intrauterine existence as an image for thought
out of which concepts can be constructed at least provisionally.
16. "Child's Relation with Others," 124. This view accords perfectly with the Lacanian position
that entrance into the symbolic cultural world occurs by means of the father, whether the actual
father or the symbolic father.
17. Ibid., 125.
18. Ibid., 127. Merleau-Ponty unquestioningly attributes a high level of intentionality to the
child who does not merely look into the mirror but who also is expected to respond to what she/he
sees in certain prescribed ways, notably surprise or shock.
19. Ibid., 129.
20. Ibid., 136.
70 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

21. Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge Press, 2000),
13-20. Weiss, following ~aul Schilder, emphasizes the extent to which human interactions produce
the body image. Thus, to the point where even when our body image binds us to the past or to our
physical, psychical, or social situation, we resist this binding by transforming the body image through
clothes, decoration, jewelry, tatoos, and so on. However, she is also cognizant of the limits of this
kind of activity, since the body image is for her implicated in a psyche and not merely in forms of
behavior.
22. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962),
15-16. See also "Child's Relation with Others," 136, where Merleau-Ponty dismisses the ego as a
confused and chaotic state without further comment.
23. "Child's Relation with Others," 137.
24. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 361,362.
25. Merleau-Ponty, "Dialogue and the Perception of the Other," in The Prose of the World, trans.
John O'Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 133; originally published as La prose
du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
26. Merleau-Ponty, "Dialogue and the Perception of the Other," 139. This cannot be the artifi-
cial truth of our histo~icity, a truth that Merleau-Ponty clearly disdains as a mere reconstruction of
the fundamental life that we have lived through.
27. See, for example, G. B. Madison, "Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: La difference," in Ecart et
difference, ed. M. C. Dillon (Atlantic Highlands, N.].: Humanities Press, 1997), 103-4. Madison
invokes William James and Henri Bergson to make the claim that lived experience follows from or
is properly interpreted through language, but in these texts Merleau-Ponty seems to be making a
very different claim. The claim is that speech becomes possible on the basis of a more fundamental
carnal experience. .
28. Merleau-Ponty, "Science and the Experience of Expression," in Prose of the World, 15, 19.
29. Duane H. Davis, "Reversible Subjectivity," in Merleau-Ponty Viwnt, ed. M. C. Dillon (Al-
bany: State University of New York Press, 1991): 31-45, 35. Davis argues that language is one with
Being insofar as it is :I. human creation.
30. Helen Fielding, "Envisioning the Other: Lacan and Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity," in
Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life, and the World, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and
James Morley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 185-99, 191.
31. Merleau-Ponty, "Child's Relations with Others," 140-41.
32. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 346. Even in France and even in the period
between two world wars, twenty-five seems to be an extended childhood. Perhaps I have exaggerated
the import of the painful break and the move to independence; there is no way of knowing. However,
I am stressing that this way of speaking and thinking may imply the feeling that there must be a
break.
 3
White Logic and the
Constancy of Color
Helen A. Fielding

In a series of ten-minute films titled Art Make-Up,l made between 1967

and 1968, Bruce Nauman phenomenologically draws the viewer's atten-
tion to the inherent relation between color as hue, color as skin color,

This chapter was originally a paper presented at the "Merleau-Ponry Circle" conference, Wash-
ington, D.C., September 13, 2000. I am indebted to the philosophical challenge offered by
Dorothea Olkowski to think Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology against itself. See Olkowski, Gilles
Deleute and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Universiry of California Press,
1999); I am also indebted to Grace Jantzen for guiding my work on color in this direction and to
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for financial support.
72 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau,Ponty

and color as symbol~in Western culture. z In each of the four films, named
after the color with which he respectively smears his own body, White,
Pink, Green, and Black, Nauman reveals the relations involved in the
perception of the body as a lived, moving, sinuous center of specific ca~
pacities, and in the perception of color as hue, skin color, and symbol.
What is revealed are the ways that color, according to specific lighting,
shapes and defines the contours of flesh and how color is deeply linked
to racialized symbolization in Western culture. The power of these films
is that they do not directly state the obvious; rather, they draw the viewer
who tarries with the films into each film's lighting and spatial level, and
thus invite complicity with what the films as a whole reveal. Indeed,
what was disturbingly revealed to this viewer was her complicity in the
symbolization belonging to the dominant lighting level of Western cul~
ture that cuts whites off from their bodies even as it identifies blacks with
bodies tied to nature and to an animality that is inherently raced and
sexed. 3
What I would like to argue is that in Western culture there is a devalu~
ing of color that is linked not only to an epochal repression of embodi~
ment, but also to a collapse of difference and multiplicity into sameness
and unity. The intensity of color, moreover, is diffused in our readings of
representations that shut out in advance our encounters with otherness
and our openness to creative change. While Merleau~Ponty's observa~
tions about color help to reveal its participatory and vital aspects, they
also reveal the prope,nsity to maintain constancy that is inherent to the
phenomenal, body he describes. This propensity to depend upon an estab~
lished corporeal schema, and yet at the same time to see anew, allows us
contact with being that is open to creative sedimentation. What, then,
is phenomenologically revealed in Nauman's films is the tenacity of dom~
inant ideological spatial and lighting levels and the focus on representa~
tion to the detriment of our lived corporeal creativity, which allows for
and is open to otherness as well as to multiple, embodied meanings.
This suppression of lived corporeal creativity under the rubric of the
cognitive and its unifying representational activity is an enduring theme
for Merleau~Ponty. How does the embodied subject rely on structures
that allow her to encounter the world as meaningful even as she remains
open to the creative sedimentations of new structures? And how can
our thinking become more open to the creative possibilities engendered
through our corporeal engagement with the world even as our cognitive
systems of meaning help us to make sense of what we see? Both are ques~
 White Logic and the Constancy of Color 73

tions that have also been raised in the context of feminist theorizing
where creative change of existing social relations is an abiding goal. In
turning to Merleau-Ponty, I want to show how phenomenological de-
scription can reveal the invisible operations of the dominant illumination
that privileges as neutral white skin as white race in Western culture.
These operations allow for a relation between phenomenally perceived
colors, their representative values, and the phenomenon whereby the
color white illuminates a field of relations in accordance with its repre-
sentative values. Not only do things and people appear according to this
illumination, but there is also an obscuring of these relations behind a
screen of neutrality and normality. This screen prevents Merleau-Ponty
from fully realizing the potential of his own insights into spatial levels
and the phenomenal body, for he is clearly unaware of the extent to
which this screen of supposed neutrality haunts his own work.
If our perceptual capacities provide our opening to the world that in-
deed allows us to encounter it at all, then it is vision, Merleau-Ponty
explains, that allows us to have a sense of a situation, of the relations
within a field. The ways we observe objects and people bending into
one another, reflecting, deflecting, absorbing, and obscuring are not, for
Merleau-Ponty, barriers to objective vision. Rather, they reveal a field
of relations that challenges conceptual and causational thinking, which
operates at a level removed from the lived world. Our perception of color,
in particular, defies conceptual thinking, since it cannot be reduced to
abstract knowledge; it is experienced more in the mode of participation
and of mediation. 4 And yet color is so often reduced to representation
and linked to specific significations, although in fact, what is particular
to color is that it exceeds the cognitive; it exceeds delineated lines of
concrete fact. This is perhaps why Western philosophers have tended to
devalue color, assigning to it the status of a secondary quality.
Although reversing the devaluation of the body in Western metaphys-
ics was central to Merleau-Ponty's project, he did not make the connec-
tion between the devaluation of the body and that of the feminine, which
is closely associated with the body in Western culture. Significantly, the
logic of binary thinking, inherent in metaphysics, that underlies this de-
valuation also aligns people, whose skin is understood as having color,
with the feminine and with the body, in opposition to white, male, and
mind. Indeed, the feminist term women of color, which is meant to denote
women whose skin color is not white, would seem to subtly reenact this
devaluation through the connections it makes with these existing equiva-
74 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

lences. As Richard Dyer points out in his book White (207), white people
of course have a color; but in keeping with binary alignments, this color
also "signifies the absence of colour" even as, paradoxically, color itself is
a "characteristic of life" and of bodily presence.
These devaluations, then, also make life itself subservient to the petri-
fying demands of a cognitive unity that is produced through the imposi-
tion of racial markers on the body, signifying in advance how that body
is to be understood and read. Logic is not open to incompossibles, to
contradictions, to that which exceeds or does not fit into the equation.
However, bodily being, as Merleau-Ponty reveals, is open to incompossi-
bles, for example, the separate touches of the two hands bound together
in one being. But even more important, perception altows one to move
beyond the self, to be open to otherness. As he explains, the perspectival
representation of depth in Renaissance painting that is mathematically
calculated along disappearing lines does not present the world as it is; "it
refers back, on the, contrary, to our own vantage point."s It does not
reveal to the viewer the otherness of that which is viewed.
Accordingly, when we tum to Nauman's films, what becomes apparent
is that they displace the subject position of the viewer by opening her
gaze to an otherness that goes beyond the assumed logic of representa-
tion, challenging existing equivalences. Indeed, what is revealed in the
film White, where Nauman first smears his body with white art makeup,
is that his body is not actmilly white. As he repeatedly dips his fingers
into the paint, in a delicate gesture, and slowly massages the color white
into his skin, the difference between the color of his skin and the color
white becomes apparent. As he touches the end of his nose with paint,
as he slowly brushes his arm, spreading the color along his body's sinuous
contours, he shows up the enormity of the surface of the skin of his slight
body, thereby also emphasizing' its sheer presence as a body. At the same
time, the white paint seems to flatten his flesh, reflecting light so that the
fleshy curves of his muscles recede. His body almost begins to take on the
appearance of a blank page. If, as Dyer proposes, in Western culture "it is
spirit not body that makes a person white, then where does this leave the
white body which is the vehicle for the reproduction of whiteness, of
white power and possession, here on earth?" (w, 207). How is it that the
white body can appear as not appearing while simultaneously confirming
the ways in which we see? Nauman's film, in fact, seems to visually chal-
lenge the viewer to consider the status of white skin as a bodily lived
presence, introducing otherness and challenging cognitive unity.
 White Logic and the Constancy of Color 75

Dyer argues that the logic of whiteness produces a seemingly neutral,

universal position supported by Enlightenment thinking. But at second
glance, what becomes apparent is that this logic is supported by racially
and sexually specific understandings of a mind/body dualism that links
mind to a white, male, inher~ntly rational, European model and the body
to a feminine, colored, emotional embodiment. Colette Guillaumin
points out that although marking bodies to display social or religiOUS
status has a long history, for example, the "yarmulke (varying according
to regions and period) of the Jews, [or] the yellow cross for the Cathars,"
the "idea of classifying according to somatic/morphological criteria is re-
cent," dating back only to the eighteenth century.6 The marking of color
emerged out of what was then a "circumstantial association between eco-
nomic relations and physical traits," which was then justified and en-
trenched through appeal to natural grounds. Hence, the "idea of
'reducing "the blacks" to slavery' is a modern idea"; before this move,
skin color was not a factor in determining who became slaves. What
changed under the rule of Enlightenment thinking was the need to pro-
vide rational grounds supported by scientific evidence derived from na-
ture; accordingly, what emerged as a justification for slavery was the
designation of a natural inferiority linked to skin color and arranged hier-
archically in terms of categories of race. 7
Bolstering this hierarchical arrangement, as Dyer explains, is the deci-
sive but unstable link between white designated as hue, white as skin
color, and white as signification; this link between the three helps to
support structurally enforced, although often invisible, concepts of white
racial normality and superiority (w, 45-46). For example, white as hue is
considered an objective aspect of color. Still, it shapes how we encounter
the other aspects of white. 8 Since white as hue is commonly understood
to be "no colour because it is all colours," it allows for the representa-
tional "slippage between white as a colour and white as colourlessness."
This slippage, according to Dyer, contributes to "a habit of perception"
and to "a system of thought and affect whereby white people are both
particular and nothing in particular, are both something and non-exis-
tent" (w, 47). Indeed, this conception of white as being neutral, exempli-
fied by its common absence from paint color charts, "already suggests its
usefulness for designating a social group that is to be taken for the human
ordinary" (w, 48). However, the variation and potential for alteration in
white skin reveals that whiteness is not so much given as ascribed (w,
50). For example, it is deemed socially acceptable for people with white
76 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

skin to tan, whereas' people with black skin who use skin whiteners are
viewed negatively. Although both are harmful to the skin, they carry
diverse social meanings. As Dyer points out, these attitudes provide a
"terrible warning to black people who try to be various" (w, 49-50).
Moreover, white as a category has historically undergone slippage; for
example, both the Irish and the Jews have been considered both white
and nonwhite, depending upon the social and political situation of the
time and place (w, 52-57). Hence, although white in terms of skin color
"is just as unstable, unbounded a category as white as a hue," its strength
is that, in its instability, it allows white to be "presented as an apparently
attainable, flexible, varied category" even as the criteria according to
which who can be included as white continually shifts (w, 57). White
and black as symbols, however, do not exhibit such slippage or variation.
Embedded in the everyday language we use is a binary understanding of
black and white that marks white as good and black as bad: "'everything
has its darker side,' 'it's just a little white lie' and 'that's a black mark
against you'" (w, 60).
If we phenomenoklgically investigate color as hue, however, we learn
that what is particular to color is that it allows us to see the differences
between things, to see difference at all. While light is necessary to vision,
so too is color, which allows things to become differentiated. 9 For where
there is pure sensation without background or foreground, there is no
sensation. 1O Hence, we can only perceive where there is difference. Yet
for Merleau-Ponty, what is important is not only that we perceive color,
but that we perceive objects in the world, because inherent in this percep-
tion is a certain constancy about the way the objects appear in a range of
situations. Paradoxically, this constancy is not caused by the detached
objectness of the thing; in fact, he intuits that objects always appear
within a field, which means that constancy always emerges in the objects'
relations within that field. Significantly, this constancy is linked to color
and to light. He describes an experiment in which one looks first through
a hole in a box that is painted black and brightly illuminated, and then
through a hole in a box that is painted white and only faintly lit; both
appear to be grey. But when a piece of white paper is introduced into
the black box and a piece of black paper into the white, the two boxes
immediately appear as a black box strongly illuminated and a white one
faintly illuminated. He concludes, then, that "for the structure lighting-
object lighted to be presented, '9.t least two surfaces of different reflecting
power are needed" (PP, 307/355). In other words, in order for the lighting
 White Logic and the Constancy of Color 77

itself to become apparent as well as allowing for the appearance of ob-

jects, at least two surfaces of different color, of different reflecting power,
are needed. Perception, as Luce Irigaray has also argued, requires differ-
enceY But significantly, what Merleau-Ponty wants to reveal in this sec-
tion is that the constancy of objects, of colors, appears within the
"articulation of the totality of the field, the wealth and subtlety of its
structures" (PP, 308/355). Thus constancy applies to our apprehension
of the book as red under varying shades of illumination. In addition, the
book's function as a book remains constant because the book always ap-
pears within a field, in relation to other objects that provide a structure
for our apprehension of the thing as that thing. The red book remains a
red book in different lighting levels and our perception of the book in a
"neutral" light, which is the dominant lighting, is the one that carries
over into other lighting levels.
In short, Merleau-Ponty intuits that lighting and reflection are effec-
tive only when they remain in the "background as discrete intermediar-
ies, and lead our gaze instead of arresting it." In photographs, for example,
lighting takes on an objectlike status and hence loses its capacity as inter-
mediary (PP, 310/357). While a lighted object confronts our gaze, light-
ing itself is "what we assume, what we take as the norm" (PP, 308/355).
For lighting has its own level; it projects its own logic. When we first
switch on an electric light, the yellow lamp casts its yellow glare upon
the room. But as the "level is laid down, and with it all the colour values
dependent upon it," as our eyes become used to the new lighting level,
the glare recedes and the objects take on their own color again. We see
according to the new lighting level, which now appears neutral (PP, 311/
359). Moreover, white lighting is favored, since, Merleau-Ponty writes,
the constancy of perception "is less perfect in coloured lighting, which
cancels out the superficial structure of objects, and brings the reflecting
potentialities of different surfaces to a common level, than in colourless
lighting which leaves these structural differences intact" (PP, 308/355).
It is not, then, coincidental that thought and enlightenment are
connected to metaphors of lighting and to sight. Light, white light in
particular, allows us to see. It illuminates. This relation is more than
metaphorical; it is also corporeal. As Merleau-Ponty writes, "Taking up
our abode in a certain setting of colour, with the transposition which it
entails, is a bodily operation, and I cannot effect it otherwise than by
entering into the new atmosphere, because my body is my general power
of inhabiting all the environments which the world contains, the key to
78 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

all those transpositiems and equivalences which keep it constant" (PP,

311/359). If perception is primary and hence precedes and intertwines
with the cognitive, then our bodily ability to move into new lighting
levels, new spatial levels, has corporeal effects that simultaneously affect
and intertwine with the cognitive. For if we keep in mind Merleau-
Ponty's insight into the logic of lighting, as well as Oyer's linking of
hue, skin color, and signification, it follows that the light of Western
metaphysics sets a particular level by which we see the world according
to a seemingly neutral and universal en-light-enment. "My gaze 'knows'
the significance of a certain patch of light in a certain context; it under-
stands the logic of lighting" and conforms to it (PP, 326/377). Hence, a
thing is never perceived outside a field of relations, outside a certain logic
that my body understands as a type of synergy. A thing is "not actually
given in perception, it is internally taken up by us, reconstituted and
experienced by us in so far as it is bound up with a world" (PP, 326/377).
The logic of lighting is one, then, that we come to understand, that
helps to confirm the world in which we live. Hence, it "always tends to
become 'neutral' for uS" (PP, 311/359). Merleau-Ponty writes in The Visi-
ble and the Invisible that a color, yellow, for instance, can take on an
ontological function when it ceases to be a' specific color and instead
becomes the "color of the illumination, the dominant color of the field"
(VI, 217/271). Indeed, as' the yellow light assumes "the function of light-
ing, [it] tends to become anterior to any colour, [it] tends towards absence
of colour" (PP, 311/359; emphasis added). Correspondingly, he writes,
"objects distFibute the colours of the spectrum among themselves accord-
ing to the degree and mode of their resistance to this new atmosphere"
(PP, 311/359). Each of our senses is in itself a world that is "absolutely
incommunicable for the other ,senses." Still, each sense opens or en-
croaches upon the same world shared by the other senses, a world that is
itself "Sensorality." Hence, the color yellow, when it illuminates the
field, takes on an ontological function because it imposes its particularity
of yellow upon the whole field even as it "ceases to be visible as particu-
lar" (VI, 217-18/270). Each sense opens onto this yellow world, the color
yellow becoming a dimension of being through which "every possible
being" is expressed. A sensible object can then be "representative of the
whole," although not in terms of a "sign-signification" relation. This
means that the laying down pf a spatial and bodily level whereby the
cognitive or mind is privileged over the body is perceptually taken up,
 White Logic and the Constancy of Color 79

paradoxically not in terms of representation, but rather in terms of privi-

leging the representational itself as a bodily level.
Like the color yellow, which can set up a level or a horizon, a concept
too can set up a level that is itself invisible. For example, a concept such
as humanity (Menschheit) can itself be taken up as a "horizonal generality,
a generality of style" (VI, 237/290) that affects the ways that things ap-
pearP Since perception is primary, even the most abstract concepts in
some way relate back to the world we have seen, heard, touched, and
tasted and in which we have moved. Just as the sensible is invisible, a
concept, such as humanity, has a style or a horizon of being that precedes
its conceptual formulation. For Merleau-Ponty, every concept must in
some way be preceded by a style or generality of being that hence overlaps
with the cognitive in its formulation as a concept. 13 Moreover, because
the color yellow can become an ideality, an essence, or a style of being,
it exceeds signification and representation. Hence, merely focusing only
on how racism is perpetuated through representation and signification
will not lead us to inquire into the ontological foundations that dictate
how things and people appear according to a racist and sexist lighting
level.
For example, according to a white lighting level that has taken on the
atmosphere of neutrality and normality, white is associated with purity
and disembodiment. These equivalences that accompany white logic can
affect how victim and accused appear according to the classic rape script.
Although according to the Enlightenment lighting level to which the
justice system belongs, the courtroom should be the exemplary site of
neutral judgment. Sherene Razak, quoting Kristin Bumiller, describes
how the classic rape trial, which emphasizes the "victim's purity," rein-
forces the "'presumption that punishing violent men is justified to the
extent that women are worthy of trust and protection.' "14 As Razak
points out, this means that aboriginal women and "women of color" are
"considered inherently less innocent and less worthy than white women
... [since] the classic rape in legal discourse is the rape of a white
woman." White women, in this light, are distanced from their bodies and
hence their sexuality and desire; this distancing is necessary to uphold
their purity as having been violated, even as this purity itself stands as a
racial symbol. However, the rape of "Black women either by Black men
or white men" is taken less seriously.15 As Patricia Hill Collins points
out, from this perspective of the history of slavery, black women are seen,
according to this script, as sexual and animal-like because they have been
80 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

closely associated with nature, the body, and sexuality as a justification

for the violent exploitation of their sexuality and labor under slavery.16
According to the lighting level of eighteenth-century Enlightenment
thinking that justified slavery according to an assumed hierarchy of na-
ture, black women,were not raped, for they were not subjects who could
be raped. In extending Razak's analysis, then, we can begin to see how,
according to the logic of a white lighting level, people and objects appear
in a field of relations, and according to a certain constancy that spills
over from one situation to the next.
Merleau-Ponty's intuitions, then, help to reveal how racism, sexism,
and heterosexism, as examples, can become levels, invisible in and of
themselves. These levels cast rays of illumination and shift the ways that
things and people appear within a field of relations. They also help to
reveal how white logic can set up certain equivalences that contribute to
a level that is in itself invisible, and yet casts its seemingly neutral light
upon the field of relations of all possible skin colors. For example, Dyer
reveals in his study of film and lighting that the norm for cinema lighting
is that which is produced according to the appearance of white skin color.
Accordingly, in shots that include both black and white actors, black
skin is almost always underlit (w, 89-103). White is considered the color
of neutrality and universality, which does not show itself, but illuminates
the field. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty's own work demonstrates that despite or
perhaps even because of his meticulous phenomenological descriptions,
he himself could n9t see beyond the cultural level of a Eurocentered
heterosexual male perspective. This claim is exemplified in Judith Butler's
early critique of Merleau-Ponty's chapter on sexuality in the Phenomenol-
og;y of Perception, in which he assumes a normal subject who is European,
heterosexual, and maleY
Importantly, whiteness is a s'tatus that is precarious, that is always in
danger of being lost, as exemplified by Dyer's description of the slippage
of the category of white skin color to both include and exclude the Jews
and the Irish at different historical and geographical junctures (w, 52-
57). At the same time, it has a certain constancy that has little to do
with literal whiteness and everything to do with "racial" signification as
exemplified by the effects of skin tanning and skin bleaching; despite the
actual changing of skin color, one remains respectively black or white.
Marlon Riggs shows, in his last film, "Black Is ... Black Ain't," completed
after his death from AIDS, how this logic of constancy can so effectively
operate. IS African Americans, he argues, have in some sense been neces-
 White Logic and the Constancy of Color 81

sarily made complicit in a white logic that has, in the past, made them
appear according to the logic of white naming. Although, as he argues,
reversing this logic through self-naming was crucial to the civil rights
movement and to black identity, the tendency to tdentify with white
logic persists under the banner of an exclusionary identity that rigidly
demarcates who counts as black. Riggs's own bodily status in the film as
a black, gay man dying of AIDS is a reminder of how bodies, and some
bodies in particular, have been devalued in the light of Western culture.
Thus crucial in this film is a challenge to homophobia and sexism in the
context of its being destructive to black community. This film, as an
exploration of the color "black" as a category used to justify suppression,
violation, and exclusion, is offered by Riggs as a plea for an expansive
community rather than a unity based on the inherited violence of exclu-
sion, a unity, I would argue, that is only logical according to a white
lighting level in which color status is determined in advance from within
a field of relations.
Merleau-Ponty explains how color constancy can be upheld despite
apparent discrepancies, for constancy inheres in the objects themselves.
Color persists even when it is not visually apparent, as in the case of, for
example, his black fountain pen, which he still sees as black "under the
sun's rays." He continues: "But this blackness is less the sensible quality
of blackness than a sombre power which radiates from the object, even
when it is overlaid with reflected light, and is visible only in the sense in
which moral blackness is visible. The real colour persists beneath appear-
ances as the background persists beneath the figure, that is, not as a seen
or thought-of-quality, but through a non-sensory presence" (PP, 305/
352; emphasis added). Similarly, then, despite tanning, skin bleaching,
or other such superficial attempts to alter skin color, as Dyer argues, in
this white lighting level the "real color" of skin persists, since it is not,
in fact, so much about color as about its equivalences within a particular
spatial level. These equivalences, he notes, are linked to a dualistic sys-
tem that sees black as the opposite of white within a color system in
which no two other colors are seen as having opposites (w, 48). As
Merleau-Ponty himself writes, "We now begin to see a deeper meaning
in the organization of a field: it is not only colours, but also geometrical
forms, all sense-data and the significance of objects which go to form a
system. Our perception in its entirety is animated by a logic which assigns
to each object its determinate features in virtue of those of the rest, and
which 'cancel out' as unreal all stray data; it is entirely sustained by the
82 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty

certainty of the w6rld" (PP, 313/362; emphasis added). Thus stray data
that do not conform to the logic of lighting are canceled out by the
certainty of a world that exists; it is not merely the other side of the
visible, but is that which does not even appear as absence according to
this particular lighting level.
As Merleau-Ponty explains it, each sense opens out onto the same
world, providing a unity of the senses. Indeed, Cezanne, he writes, "de-
clared that a picture contains within itself even the smell of the
landscape .... [A] thing would not have this colour had it not also this
shape, these tactile properties, this resonance, this odour" (PP, 318-19/
368). The question is whether this unity is one that erases differences to
maintain the whole, or whether it allows for a coexistence of differences.
It we expect that which we hear to confirm that which we see, and that
which is not confirmed appears as a stray datum because it does not fit
into the unity, then this unity is open to exclusion. According to
Merleau-Ponty, it would seem that the "true significance of perceptual
constancies . . . is grounded in the primordial constancy of the world as
the horizon of all o~r experiences" (PP, 313/362). A picture hanging in
an art gallery must be viewed from the appropriate distance so that a
horizon of significance allows us to determine both the internal lighting
level of the pict~re itself as well as the representative values of the daubs
of color. If one stands too close, isolating a "part of the field, then the
colour itself changes, and this green, which was meadow green, when
taken out of its context, loses its thickness and its colour." The represen-
tative valu"es are disturbed, as is the internal logic of the lighting of the
painting (PP, 313/361).
Black Is ... Black Ain't opens with blurred images of Riggs running
naked through a forest. These .images, his voiceover later narrates, are his
attempt to search through the clutter, through the attempts to confine
him to some space where he is not seen for the "naked truth" of who he
is. Indeed, it would seem that the blurring of the images is integral to this
attempt to unanchor established spatial and lighting levels and to un-
hinge representational thinking that categorizes and shapes our encoun-
ters with others. Riggs connects these images to the images that hold
together his own self-identity, "images of the woods, the rivers, the
steamboats, the shacks" of his own living memory. This living memory
is not, however, representational; rather, it is a gathering of that which
has affected him, of that which is meaningful to his sense of self. It is
 White Logic and the Constancy of Color 83

about living life intensely even as he was himself dying in hospital as the
film was being completed.
Although it would seem paradoxical that Riggs connects blurred im-
ages with the "naked truth" of who is he is, this connection does not
seem so strange in light of Merleau-Ponty's intuition into the constancy
of lived perception that establishes representational values from within a
horizon that takes its field of meaning from preestablished equivalences.
If we return to Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the experiments with
screens, what becomes evident is that the perceiver perceives from within
a field. For when the subject "looks through the window of a screen, [she]
can no longer 'dominate' (ubershauen) the relationships introduced by
lighting" (PP, 308/355). The subject cannot perceive objects in relation
to one another from within the structures with which she is familiar. The
screen unanchors the field establishing a "fictional plane," which does
not support objects but rather detached color patches (PP, 307/354). The
screen dislocates the structures of the viewer's perception. If one half-
closes one's eyes, Merleau-Ponty writes, then one no longer perceives
determinate things-their object status is suspended, colors are liberated,
and anything is possible. He concludes that "the phenomenon of con-
stancy" seems to occur "only in things and not [for example] in the dif-
fuse space of after-images" (PP, 308/356). Accordingly, it would seem
that the blurred images of himself, which Riggs tells his unseen colleague
that he hopes she will use in abundance, provide this unanchoring from
set spatial and lighting levels. They unanchor our preconceived represen-
tations of who he is and what we expect of him because they unanchor
his image from the expected field of relations.
The paradox of phenomenal perception, then, is that we perceive ob-
jects and people from within the horizon of a "certain atmosphere,"
which sets out in advance how things and people will appear in relation
to one another and in relation to the perceiver, even as it is perception
that opens us to otherness as well (PP, 305/352). Each perceiving subject
brings with her the sedimented levels that shape the way she encounters
each new situation. There is, then, an inherent conservatism to percep-
tion that denies the appearance of stray data. 19 At the same time, how-
ever, our corporeal ability to move into new situations and to take them
up still leaves us open to creative sedimentation, to seeing anew. It is,
Merleau-Ponty tells us, the "instability of levels [thad produces not only
the intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddi-
84 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

ness and nausea, w'hich is the awareness of our contingency, and the
horror with which it fills us" (PP, 254/294).
Merleau-Ponty, as a phenomenologist, reveals our contact with the
things themselves, challenging Cartesian certainty, the belief that-we can
only be certain of-that which we represent to ourselves. Still, Merleau-
Ponty's own descriptions reveal the extent to which we apply previously
sedimented representations and significations to the world we encounter,
and which we can then encounter with certainty, since we have encoun-
tered the same world before. If we return to his example of the picture in
the art gallery, the picture, seen at an ideal distance, "confers upon each
patch of colours not only its colour value, but also a certain representative
value" (PP, 313/361). These representative values allow us to make sense
ot'the world we e~counter. "The prejudices arising from objective think-
ing," however, obsque the recognition that perception is a communica-
tion, or a communion "of our body with things" (PP, 320/370). That is
to say, Cartesian thinking reduces the world to objects in themselves and
subjects to pureconsciousnesses, denying the "links which unite the
thing and the embedied subject, leaving only sensible qualities to make
up our world." Visual qualities, in particular, lend themselves to this way
of thinking, since these qualities "give the impression of being autono-
mous, and ... less directly linked to our body." Visual qualities appear to
"present us with an object rather than introducing us into an atmo-
sphere" (PP, 320/370). But what Merleau-Ponty phenomenally describes
is that when we dO r in fact, engage with the world and with others, this
objectlike status of color recedes. For Merleau-Ponty, this indicates that
perception goes straight to the things, bypassing color as a representative
value, "just as it is able to fasten upon the expression of a gaze without
noting the colour of the eyes" (PP, 305/352). What this means is that
phenomenologically to go straight to the thing itself is exactly to perceive
the thing from within an atmosphere that confers specific equivalences.
However, in Bruce Nauman's films, to which I want to return, it is
impossible to go straight to the thing, to a humanist notion of the artist
himself, bypassing the color of his skin, since the films are about the
encoloring of his body and the significations these colors confer. Impor-
tantly, these meditations on the repetitive gestures of the body do not
hold the gaze. Viewers wander by each film but few linger; for the repeti-
tive habitual gestur~s that gather an identity are presented in these works
spread out over time just as'they are in the mundaneness of daily exis-
tence, or the temporal process of creating an artwork. What is revealed,
 White Logic and the Constancy of Color 85

then, is precisely that the mundaneness of these corporeal gestures enacts

a process of signification-in color and at the surface-and that this re-
petitive process that maintains a certain constancy is that which is at
stake. Still, we do learn something about the artist, not in the humanistic
terms of an interior subject, but rather phenomenally in terms of what is
perceived at the surface that outlines the artist's commitment to chal-
lenge the viewer to question how she sees herself in relation to everything
and everyone else around her.
In challenging existing equivalences, a phenomenological encounter
with these films also reveals how color exceeds representation. The sec-
ond and third films, Pink and Green, named after the colors that are
painted consecutively over the white, reveal the fleshiness of Nauman's
body in contrast to its receding in white. Emerging in pink, his muscles
and his face seem more alive; the shapes and contours of his muscles and
bone structure emerge in the light. Painted pink, the very fleshiness of
his body seems to undulate, to come alive, and the movements of his
hands seem somehow more sensuous. The body is revealed as subject. But
in the film Green, his gaze, which was previously always directed beyond
the camera, perhaps toward a mirror, suddenly looks directly into the lens
of the camera. This happens twice and only in Green. These moments
are powerful because they expose the viewer's complicity, my complicity,
in the system as a disengaged onlooker. For, in being recognized as a
viewer, I must simultaneously recognize my own engagement. I become
aware of wanting him to look again, to acknowledge my look; the previ-
ous absence of his recognition is an absence I had not even noticed until
that moment.
It is in the last film, Black, however, that the full implications. of the
symbolization of color that invade or intertwine with our phenomenal
perception emerge. As Nauman paints his body black, the color seems to
absorb light under the particular lighting used for this film; his body
seems fleshy and larger than it did when painted white. In this film, he
wraps his arms around his body, a seemingly protective gesture. As a
viewer, I find myself again wanting his eyes to recognize me, to gaze at
the camera, to complete the circuit. They do not. It would seem that he
has Simultaneously reminded the viewer of interiority even as he refuses
to engage with it. But the disturbing realization of the extent of Western
color signification and my own complicity in this system, in particular as
someone who is white, is revealed by his simple gestures of opening his
mouth, blowing out his cheeks and showing his teeth. His face seems
86 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

suddenly, disturbingly, "baboonlike." It is a gesture that can only become

significant and significantly disturbing from within the long historical
chain of representation with which I am complicit, which connects black
skin with animality, and which is simultaneously reactivated and broken
open in these last simple gestures of the film series.
These films are an exploration of the surface, of the habitual, phenom~
enal, corporeal surface, that is never exactly what it seems. Nauman him~
self is quoted as saying that "make~up is not necessarily anonymous but
it's distorted in some way, it's something to hide behind. It's not quite
giving, not quite exposing.... You're not going to get what you're not
getting."20 There is, then, a revealing through a concealing, through the
application of art makeup. What is revealed is not the inner qualities of
th~ artist but rather the reversibility between the viewer and the surface
viewed. This surface reflects the viewer back to herself, allowing for an
uncomfortable self~recognition that implicates the viewer in the epochal
systems of represent~tion even as it shows what it means to break them
up. For it is irri.portant that Nauman chose to make four separate films,
each proceeding from.the level of the last, the level provided by the color
painted on his body'. Apparently, it was Nauman's intention that these
films were to be projected simultaneously on four walls in life~size propor~
tions. 21 Although, this is not how I viewed them myself, I can imagine
that the effect of asserting four levels at once would be effectively discon~
certing, drawing attention to the existence of the level itself. Impor~
tantly, while these films show up the sensuality of color as it exceeds
representation, they 'simultaneously reveal the tenacity of the dominant
level of Western lighting, which representationally reveals white bodies
and black bodies according to its equivalences and significations.
In "Eye and Mind," Merleau~Ponty criticizes Descartes for understand~
ing color as mere ornament, since color too presents us with "things,
forests, storms-in short the world" (EM, 172/43). And yet Merleau~
Ponty remains critical of abstract art, which he sees as a move "toward
multiplying the systems of equivalences, [by] ... severing their adherence
to the envelope of things." Although he maintains that this effort might
involve creating "new materials or new means of expression," he still
questions why it could not be attained through reexamining and rein~
vesting "those which existed already" (EM, 182/71-71). In making this
claim, he thus reveals this tension in his own work, and in the phenome~
nal body itself, between thinkJng creatively and adhering to sedimented
structures. Merleau~Ponty's critique of abstract art hence exhibits his un~
 White Logic and the Constancy of Color 87

willingness to sever our connection to the world of objects that appear

within a horizon of meaning and a logic of lighting, to sever the represen-
tational structure that gives form and contour to the phenomenal world.
I would suggest, moreover, that he did not fully realize the implications
of his own intuitions about the strength and tenacity of the spatial and
lighting levels that bind us to a world of equivalences. The question then
remains whether a new system of equivalences, of new meanings, could
be created if the lighting level itself were not shifted or challenged in
itself as a unifying power. What is needed, it seems, is an opening for the
existence of multiple lighting and spatial levels to coexist, thereby show-
ing up the contingency of the level itself, a contingency we tend to avoid
for the instability and the nausea that can accompany the experience of
it (PP, 254/294). For what the shifting of levels itself reveals is that these
levels are not neutral or universal even as the belief that they are tends
to adhere to the level itself. It is just that which Nauman accomplishes
in his films; he reveals the contingency of the level itself through expos-
ing his viewers to different lighting and color levels; as contingent they
are open to change.
Marlon Riggs's film "Black Is ... Black Ain't" similarly challenges the
existence of a singular lighting level. Just as Nauman's films demand that
the viewer reflect upon her complicity with what is viewed, Riggs's film
tries to unsettle the equivalences themselves by exposing the relation
between hue, skin color, and symbol that Dyer outlines. These relations,
Riggs shows, provide a shaky foundation upon which to build a commu-
nity, which could only be one of exclusion. Just as Dyer reveals the slip-
page incurred in the designation of white skin color, Riggs similarly shows
how the color black shifts according to historical and geographical cir-
cumstance. Near the start of the film, the actors chant, "Black is blue,
black is red, black is high, black is low," at once exposing the viewer to
her preconceptions of the meaning of black even as they begin to multiply
the possibilities for the creation of meaning and structuring equivalences.
Riggs's aim, however, to reveal the naked truth of who he is, I take to be
the attempt to release his own sense of self from the net of significations
imposed upon him and to open this sense to his own creative remember-
ing. In recounting his experience of hospitalization with AIDS, he re-
marks that at first he kept track of his T-cell counts to help him take
stock of the state of his health. As these counts dipped to dangerously
low levels, he tells us, he stopped counting, and instead began to attend
to how he felt. It is not that Riggs wants to sever the bonds of community
88 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

that link us together. Rather, he wants to multiply the possibilities of

what counts as community, of how we understand ourselves. He draws
upon his mother's gumbo as a helpful metaphor for a community of inclu-
sion; for the gumbo included everything one could imagine along with
the secret ingredients that made it his mother's gumbo. But were the
gumbo to be made too thick, the ingredients would lose their individual
flavors and the taste of the gumbo itself would be diminished.
This, then, is the heart of the paradox that Merleau-Ponty presents to
us: how to achieve creative expression and new meanings from our con-
tact with a world that has an established lighting level. If the world ap-
pears within a particular logic to which the phenomenal body responds,
how can this logic be revealed in a way that opens up the potential of the
body for dismantling structures, for creating new ways of relating and
meaning? For the strength of phenomenological description is that it
shows us where we are and hence how to proceed. 22 Indeed, if we become
phenomenologically, aware of the ways that things and people appear ac-
cording to a particular lighting level or way of thinking, even as we begin
to recognize the inherent contingency of the level itself, the possibilities
for changing what p~eviously seemed neutral and universal begin to mul-
tiply. I would maintain that creations such as Nauman's and Riggs's have
this capacity to r€veal and perhaps to break open the tendency toward a
unity of our senses, to make the lighting level visible in a way that allows
for new equivalences, that allows for that which has been canceled out
to appear as absence or, more importantly, as that which breaks open a
unitary logic:: -

Notes

1. Bruce Nauman, Art Make-Up, No.1, White (1967); Art Make-Up, No.2, Pink (1967-68);
Art Make-Up, No.3, Green (1967-68); Art Make-Up, No.4, Black (1967-68), films, 16 mm, color,
silent.
2. See Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 45-46. This work is hereafter cited
asW.
3. For further discussion, see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Con-
sciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 132; Le visible et I'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 174-75.
This work is hereafter cited .lis VI, with two sets of page numbers, the first referring to the English
edition, the second to the French.
5. Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," in The Primacy of Perception, trans. Carleton Dallery (Ev-
 White Logic and the Constancy of Color 89

anston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 174; L'oeil et l'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964),50. This
work is hereafter cited as EM, with two sets of page numbers, the first referring to the English edition
and the second to the French.
6. Colette Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power, and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1995),
139-40.
7. Ibid., 140-41.
8. Evan Thompson points out that for Newton, "whiteness is the usual color of light," since
"no ray ever exhibits this colour, and it requires proportions of all the primary colours." Colour
Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception (London: Routledge, 1995), 11.
9. See Aristotle, De Anima, trans. Hugh Lawson-Trangred (London: Penguin Books, 1986),
174-75.
10. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1962),5; Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 10-11. This work is
hereafter cited as PP, with two sets of page numbers, the first referring to the English edition and
the second to the French.
11. See, for example, Luce Irigaray, "Flesh Colors," in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C.
Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); originally published as "Les couleurs de la chair,"
in Sexes et parentes (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1987).
12. For further discussion, see Samuel B. Mallin, Art Line Thought (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic,
1996), 284-90.
13. I explore this transposition between the perceptual world and ideality more thoroughly in
my article" 'The Sum of What She is Saying': Bringing Essentials Back to the Body," in Resistance
Flight Creation: Feminist Enactments of French Philosophy, ed. Dorothea Olkowski (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2000).
14. Kristin Bumiller, "Fallen Angels: The Representation ofYiolence Against Women in Legal
Culture," in At the Boundaries of Law, ed. M. A. Fineman and N. S. Thomadsen (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 97. Quoted in Sherene H. Razack, Looking White People in the Eye (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1998),68.
15. Razack, Looking White People in the Eye, 69.
16. Collins, Black Feminist Thought.
17. Judith Butler, "Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of
Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception," in The Thinking Muse, ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Mar-
ion Young (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
18. Marlon T. Riggs with Nicole Atkinson, Christiane Badgley, and Bob Paris, Black Is ...
Black Ain't: A Personal}oumey Through Black Identity (San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1995).
19. For a detailed critique of Merleau-Ponty's intuition of spacial levels, see Olkowski, Gilles
Deleute, 59-88. Olkowski clearly demonstrates how Merleau-Ponty does not recognize the inherent
conservatism apparent in his own phenomenological descriptions.
20. Coosje van Bruggen, Bruce Nauman (New York: Rizzoli International, 1988), 196.
21. Jane Livingston, "Bruce Nauman," in Bruce Nauman: Work from 1965 to 1972 (New York:
Praeger), 27.
22. Indeed, this questioning of "how to proceed," indeed even "how to proceed correctly," has
been attributed to Nauman. See Heinz Peter Schwerfel, Make Me Think: Bruce Nauman (U.K.:
Artcore Production for the Arts Council of England, 1997).
 4
From the Body Proper to Flesh:
Merleau . . Ponty on Intersubjectivity
Beata Stawarska
When feminists talk about the discipline of the body involved in the construction of femininity, it
is read as having implications only for women and the "peculiarities" of their bodies. When Foucault
... talks about the discipline of the body involved in the construction of the soldier, it is read as
gender-neutral and broadly applicable. The soldier-body is no less gendered a norm, of course, than
the body-as-decorative-object. But this is obscured because we view the woman's body under the
sign of her Otherness while regarding the male body ... as in "direct and normal relation to the
world." The ironies engendered by this are dizzying. The male body becomes "The Body" proper
while the female body remains marked by its difference. At the same time, however, the male body
as male disappears completely, its concrete specificity submerged in its collapse into the universal.
Thus, while men are the cultural theorists of the body, only women have bodies. Meanwhile, of
course, the absent male body continues to operate illicitly as the (scientific, philosophical, medical)
norm for all.
---Susan Bordo, "The Feminist as Other"

This passage impresses with its succinct and yet exhaustive formulation
of the general effacement of gender "peculiarity" effectuated within a
universalistic approach, of which female as well as male bodies are sub-
jects and victims. It addresses therefore not only the gender-neutral posi-
tion of Foucault on the body soldier, but also can be applied equally well
to other generalized conceptions of the body, such as the one formulated

My warm thanks to Bonnie Mann for her helpful advice on the early draft of this chapter. I also
appreciate the useful comments of the volume editors, Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss.
92 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

in the later work of Merleau,Ponty. Merleau,Ponty's philosophy of the

flesh (fa chair), however innovative and careful it may have been in ex,
ploring numerous facets of our embodiment, articulates human experi,
ence in terms of universal categories and so falls under the charge of total
neglect of the gender,specific experience of the body. Feminist writers
have therefore subjected Merleau,Ponty's later thought to a critical analy,
sis.l It is my contention, to be developed in this chapter, that gender
neutrality is not the sole problematic outcome of the universalistic ten'
dency manifest in Merleau,Ponty's thoughtj rather, it b~ars witness to a
larger series of effacements effectuated within his monolithic ontology.
The problems engendered by Merleau,Ponty's universalistic approach are
not limited to his. neglect of the specificity of male or female experience
of embodiment, at the risk of constructing a general theory of embodi,
ment on the basis of the "standard norm" provided by the male body and
treating the female body as a special case. Another difficulty resulting
from Merleau,Pontyls universalistic approach is a massive reduction of
the specifically intersubjective experience of the body manifest in an en,
counter with another'embodied person to the corporeal dynamic opera'
tive within the body proper (Ie corps propre). Following Beavoir's lead, I
am led to argue that the masculine frame of mind continuously misrepre,
sents the structures of intersubjectivity (and not only gender), in its ten'
dency to reduce the other to the same. Henceforth, not only does the
male regard his body as in "a direct and normal connection to the world,"
as Bordo notes after Beauvoirj 2 the male thinks of himself also as the
essential ang sovereign subject, for whom the other recedes to the status
of an inessential and d~pendent object.3 The latter tendency makes it
impossible to account for an authentic relation with the other in Beau,
voir's view.
I shall revisit Beauvoir's position on the reduction of the other to the
same in the conclusion of this chapter and point to its direct application
to Merleau,Ponty's account of intersubjectivity therein. I begin my argu,
ment by adopting Bordo's comments about the wiping out of the gen,
dered character of embodiment quoted above as a direct model for
spelling out how the intersubjective experience of the body gets effaced
in Merleau,Ponty's philosophy. Let me briefly and schematically articu,
late the mechanics of this process of effacement, before I proceed to ana,
lyze it in more detail in reference to relevant passages from Merleau,
Ponty's writings, where the questions of embodiment and intersubjective
relations are directly addressed. Merleau,Ponty takes a specific, intrasub,
 From the Body Proper to Flesh 93

jective experience of the body, as in my right hand touching my other

hand, to be a paradigm for relations to other embodied subjects, as in my
right hand touching the hand of the other when we greet each other by
shaking hands. Following Merleau~Ponty, in both cases there is a co~
presence of touching and of being touched, a possible reversal between
active and passive modes of tactility. A reversal of activity and passivity
is played out within the limits of a single body, whose conjoined hands
can both touch and be touched one by the other-it is always possible
that the hand that actively explores the other turns into an object being
touched by the other hand; either hand can be both touched and
touching.
The same reversal of tactile activity and passivity is appa,rently played
out across two discrete bodies, when I touch the other and am touched
by the other in the movement of shaking hands. These shifts between
active (touching) and passive (being touched) modes in touching oneself
and touching the other are said to be structurally identical. This struc~
tural identity provides the ground for viewing the phenomenon of touch
exercised within the limits of the body proper on a par with the phenom~
enon of touch exercised between the body proper and the body of the
other. In both cases the same principle of sensible reversibility is said to
operate: the active form (touching) can always reverse into the passive
mode (being touched), whether it is one or two sensing and sentient
bodies that relate through touch.
This sensible reversibility applies not only to the sense of touch but
also to vision, where a similar co~presence between activity (seeing) and
passivity (being seen) occurs. Following Merleau~Ponty, the seer must be
visible in order to have access to the visible world; she must be made of
the same visible stuff that the world she sees is made of. Vision is a form
of participation in the world because of a continuum between the "sub~
ject" who can be seen in the manner of the "objects" given to her view,
notwithstanding the necessary distance that separates the body of the
onlooker from the body of the thing seen. Seeing can therefore always
reverse into being seen in Merleau~Ponty's theory of incarnate vision. For
vision originates in the body, which is itself visible, which has an exterior
that is open to view. The double~sided character of the visual sense fol~
lows from the double~sided character of the sensible body, which both
emits the gaze and is an object available to a plurality of gazes. The dou~
ble~sided character of the visual-or tactile-sense suggests constant pos~
sibility of a shift between sensing and sentient modes. This sensible
94 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

reversibility between activity and passivity serves as the defining dynamic

principle for Merleau~Ponty's philosophy of embodiment; in this incar~
nate principle the "ultimate truth" of his ontology of flesh is located. 4
This uniform reversibility principle does, however, leave out an impor~
tant feature of bodily existence. To illustrate that, I return to the example
of touch as exercised within the limits of the body proper and between
bodies, and to the tactile reversibility of active and passive modes that
they supposedly share. Notice, however, that touching oneself provides
the feedback from one's sensible body that is de jure missing in the case
of touching the body of another person. This presence or absence of
feedback distinguishes an intracorporeal tactile experience from an inter~
corporeal one. This point will be explained more thoroughly later on, but
for the sake of introducing the argument to come, let me note that there
is a form of corporeal self~referencing present when I touch the hand
belonging to my sensible body and identified as mine, but that is absent
when I shake hands'with someone whose hand is experienced as other, as
belonging to the body of the other. Now, the fact that the exercise of
touch exhibits this. 15asic distinction between sensible self and other is
disregarded or regarded as a secondary phenomenon by Merleau~Ponty.
The difference between intracorporeity and intercorporeity does not
challenge the vety possibility of building a general all~encompassing the~
ory of flesh in his view; The distinction self/other thus gets effaced in
Merleau~Ponty's philosophical project for the sake of singling out a para~
digm case of sensible/sentient reversal on which a uniform explanatory
theory of carnal life, defined through a uniform incarnate principle of
reversibility, can be built.
It follows that when Merleau~Ponty employs the example of selrtouch~
ing as the norm for any corporeal dynamic, "its concrete specificity [gets]
submerged in its collapse into the universal," to employ Bordo's apt
phrase for our purposes. Deprived of its concrete specificity of self~
referencing and defined solely through the possible reversal of active and
passive modes, the experience of one's own body comes to provide the
matrix for intersubjective or intercorporeal relations. These body~to~body
encounters appear as a mere variant of the general schema, a "special
case" contained in the universal dynamic of the flesh and subsumed under
the heading of sensible reversibility. As a result of this schematization,
the "peculiarities" of intersubjective as well as intrasubjective lived expe~
riences of the body get bracketed within a universalistic perspective on
embodiment. I conclude that the implications of adopting the universal~
 From the Body Proper to Flesh 95

istic perspective in the philosophy of embodiment are not limited to the

bracketing of the peculiarities of male and female bodily experience in
"gender-neutral and broadly applicable" theories of the body, as ex-
plicated in the opening passage from Bordo, even though this gender
effacement has, understandably so, been at the center of feminist inter-
pretations of Merleau-Ponty up to now. The universalistic tendency re-
sults also in a neglect of the specifically social dimension of embodiment,
irreducible to the dynamics of the solitary body, within Merleau-Ponty's
ontology of the flesh. I now tum to examine this point in more detail.

I
Merleau;Ponty's late philosophy is centered on what he came to term
"the flesh." The flesh gets defined in the course of his fine descriptions
included in The Visible and the Invisible as a prototype of Being, the origi-
nal and ultimate component of all there is (VI, 185/140). It is therefore
an ontological notion and not an anthropological concept onto which to
found a "Philosophy of Man." Its starting point is not a particular being,
such as a human being, and human experience, but Being in general,
inclusive of all things there are. Hence the apersonal and anonymous
character Merleau-Ponty attributed to the flesh in his later work, cen-
tered on the generality of incarnate being and not on the specificity of
personal experience of the body. This general ontological stance is said
to have opened up Merleau-Ponty's inquiry beyond the predominant per-
spective of the corps propre from the Phenomenology of Perception. In this
earlier work, the starting point for analysis is situated within the body of
the subject and is distinguished from the sphere of mundane beings that
this subject can have an experience of. This 'anthropocentric' perspec-
tive, dominant in the early stages of Merleau-Ponty's philosophical proj-
ect, was argued by numerous commentators to have been weighed down
by a subjectivistic or idealistic heritage ultimately incapable of transcend-
ing traditional binarisms, such as subject-object and intelligibility-
sensibility.5 When Merleau-Ponty moves away from the incarnate subject
or body-subject to the esthesiological body, that is, the body defined pri-
marily in terms of a dynamic pertaining to the flesh as a whole and not
as a privileged vantage point onto "objects" of perception, he is said, by
contrast, to have successfully resolved the tension between these un-
96 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty

founded dualisms haunting the Western philosophical tradition. The

status of the body proper is significantly redefined in the process: it no
longer provides the matrix but is turned into an "exemplar" of general
sensibility and an instance of the anonymous movement of reversibility
running in multiple vectors throughout the flesh. It remains to be seen,
however, whether the perspective of the body proper was definitely aban-
doned or simply generalized in Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh.
Consider first the often-cited case of the body proper relating or re-
turning to itself, as in the example of touching the hand that palpates
environing objects with the other hand (VI, 176/133). When my right
hand comes into contact with the left hand palpating something, its
activity easily reverses into the passivity of an organ being touched by the
other hand. At die crossroads of touching and of being touched, my sensi-
ble body manifests itself both as a tactile "agent" and a "patient," distrib-
uting active and passive roles among different bodily parts.
The same co-presence of tactile activity and passivity is unveiled in a
body-to-body encounter with another person, in shaking hands, for ex-
ample. When my bodily organ touches an organ belonging to the body
of another person, or more specifically, when the other returns my hand-
shake, my shaking hand is being shaken as well and the activity of touch-
ing is present together with the passivity of being touched. It follows,
in Merleau-Ponty's view, that the handshake exhibits the same kind of
reversibility that is manifest within the sensible dynamics of my own
body, and that the, latter provides a ready model for the former. "The
hand of the other that I shake is to be understood on the mode of the
touching-touched hand."6 "The handshake too is reversible, I can feel
myself touched as well and at the same time as touching." (VI, 187/142).
The handshake seems to extend the sentient sensibility of a carnal
autorelation onto a relation with another incarnated self. The other per-
son appears to tum the intracorporeal reversibility of my right hand
touching the left hand into an intercorporeal exchange, playing out the
reversal of touching and being touched between two bodies. In a direct
reference to the Husserl of Ideas II, Merleau-Ponty notes that my body
accomplishes "a sort of reflection" when I touch myself touching. "When
my right hand touches my left, I am aware of it as a 'physical thing.' But
at the same moment, if I wish, an extraordinary event takes place: here
is my left hand as well starting to perceive my right. . . . Thus I touch
myself touching."7' Now, when I shake the hand of another man, "his
hand is substituted for my left hand" (PS, 168; emphasis added) and his
 From the Body Proper to Flesh 97

touch is substituted for the exploratory potential of my left hand. The

hand of the other takes the place of the organ belonging to my body
and leaves unaffected the nature of the reflexive or bidirectional relation
between touching and being touched. In a handshake, my body merely
"annexes the body of another person in that 'sort of reflection' it is para-
doxically the seat of" (ibid.). The paradox of reflection applies therefore
to contacts of skin surface within the limits of the body proper and to
contacts with other tactile bodies.
Thus, the natural divide between the body of the other and my own
does not prevent the "annexing" or functional incorporation of foreign
organs into my sensible system from taking place. For there is no need to
assume that there is "some huge animal whose organs our bodies would
be" (VI, 187/142) in order to account for the reversal of touch across
discrete bodily beings. We need not be one body in order to be of one flesh;
reversibility is a carnal autorelation operative within the flesh as a whole,
where my body and the body of the other "are like organs of one single
intercorporeality" (PS, 168).
Focusing on the category of intercorporeality, of which the body proper
is an element but not a privileged point of departure, Merleau-Ponty
follows here the aforementioned general line of renouncing the anthro-
pological or psychological perspective in favor of an ontological one. Re-
flexivity applies to the entire domain of the Flesh, where my own and
other bodies (whether celestial or of other persons, plants, vehicles) are
included. As stated in a working nbte, "the flesh is a mirror phenome-
non" (VI, 309/255) and the phenomenon of reflecting, doubling, mirror-
ing, is an ontological and not a psychological category. At the same time,
reflexivity or mirroring gets derived from the autorelation at work in the
body proper nevertheless: "the mirror is an extension of my relation with
my body" (ibid.). One may wonder, however, whether the procedure of
unqualified extending of the reversibility of a body or the body proper
onto the flesh and its intercorporeality is valid and justified. A passage
from Zahavi's reading of Husserl will help to develop this point.

If we first examine the case of one hand touching the other [the
hand of the other], the touching hand ... has a series of sensa-
tions which are objectified and interpreted as being properties of
the touched hand.... When I touch my hand, however, the
touched hand is not given as a mere object, since it feels the
touch itself, and this sensing does not belong to the touched
98 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

hand as an objective property, but is localized in it as an Empfin~

dnis. The decisive difference between touching one's own body
and everything else, be it inanimate objects or the bodies of oth~
ers, is that it implies a double~sensation. The relation between
the touching and the touched is reversible, since the touching is
touched, and the touched is touching. It is this reversibility that
testifies that the interiority [the body felt from inside] and the
exteriority [the body surface] are different manifestations of the
same [body].8

These remarks certify that the reversibility of tactile sensations applies

exclusively to the sensible dynamic of a unique body and that it can be
witnessed in the body proper only. The tactile sensation can be double,
that is, coinvolve active (touching) and passive (touched) aspects within
the same living body only since, negatively stated, it does not suffice that
the passivity be experienced as an "objective property" of the hand being
touched (namely, the hand of the other), which one does not feel within
one's sensible body.ln that case, the duplicity of tactile sensations would
have to be read as a split between subjectivity and objectivity and not as
an essential interrelation of two distinguishable yet nonopposable sides
of one sensible phenomenon. Activity and passivity would be co~present
yet the tactile sensation would not be double. For the same reasons, pas~
sivity cannot be a mere effect of the activity exerted upon my body by
the other with whogt I shake hands, even though in this case "I feel
myself touch,ed as well and at the same time as touching." The simultane~
ity of the touching and touched moments alone does not guarantee that
touch is experienced under its double or reversible character.
The sensation is double/reversible because of its anchOring in bodily
organs of sense, from which the' sensible movement originates (touching
hand) and to which it can return (hand being touched}. It is through the
localization of the bodily organ within the totality of the sensible body,
gained through the feedback from the hand being touched (and missing
in the case of touching the hand of somebody else where the touch does
not localize the touched as the same [body] but as other), that the tactile
sensation is experienced as double/reversible. Put more generally, senses
are bound to organs, even though they cannot be identified with them.
Tactile duplicity is situated within the bodily organ~ization; it is localized
in bodily organs of sense, themselves double or reflexive, sensible and
sentient. The duplicity of activity/passivity is the attribute of a body and
 From the Body Proper to Flesh 99

its sensibility. As localized in the (reflexive) body, sensations can be iden-

tified as mine. The reflexivity of sensations means that the activity of
sensing is referred back to the organ and that the organ is aware of itself
as it palpates something other. A hand, and generally a body, is esthesio-
logically given both under a genitive and a dative form; that is, it can be
given to itself in touch and in sensibility. Double sensation is a form of
self-awareness on the part of the sensing body, which guarantees that the
sensing is experienced under the form of mineness and not as an anony-
mous event. Reversibility is both the principle of reflexivity of the senses
and of self-reference of the individual sensing body.9 Henceforth, it can
be experienced and belongs to the sensibility of the body proper and does
not extend in an automatic and unmodified fashion onto intercorporeal-
ity at large.

II
Let me now examine the structural character of a handshake in order to
bring to light its difference from touching oneself, and further question
Merleau-Ponty's extension of the intrabodily experience onto the do-
main of the interbody. Recall that Merleau-Ponty states that when I
shake hands with someone, that person's hand is simply "substituted" for
my hand and that his or her activity "substitutes" the activity of my
touching hand. Yet there are valid reasons for putting forward the con-
trary claim that the bodily relation I hold with myself is significantly
different from the relation I hold with another embodied person.
Surely I can touch myself just as I can touch and be touched by the
other; Yet even though I can align my hands to make the sign of an
"amen" or appraise a performance by clapping my hands together, I can-
not shake hands with myself, no matter how I would twist and tum my
arms. My left hand is a mirror image of the right one, just as the left side
of my visible body mirrors, imperfectly to be sure, the right side. My body
certainly is a "mirror phenomenon": it forms an open diptych in which
one volet is a more or less accurate reflection of the other one; the mirror
facing my body provides a reflection of the entire bodily diptych. My body
mirrors itself "before" it has been faced with the instrument of the mirror;
it is a seat of living reflection independent of the reflection appearing on
a smooth surface of a speculum. Now that means that shaking hands with
100 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

myself is structuralfy as "impossible" as shaking hands with my mirror

image, assuming that the phantom I see in front of me could turn to flesh
and blood one day.
The phenomenon of mirroring taking place between the sides of my
body is certainly not identical to the mirroring of the body in the instru-
ment of the mirror. Even though my left hand is a "mirror image" of the
right one, still-unlike the phantom organ reflecting my right hand in
the mirror-it is an organ with a reality of its own. My left hand is
determined as being on the left side of my body; the (reflection of my)
right hand in the mirror remains determined as right. My right hand
reflected in the mirror remains right even though for the phantom that I
see in front of me, the position of the hand would have to be reversed.
From the phantom's point of view-if there was to be one-the hand would
be determined as (belonging to the) left (volet of the body). Yet when I
look at myself in the mirror, it is my bodily perspective that determines
what is right and what is left. If the idea of shaking hands with the
phantom does not even "cross my mind," it is because my bodily perspec-
tive is monopolisti<; in this case and I do not allow for an independent
bodily perspective for which bodily organs could be determined as left or
right. The phantom does not have a right hand that I could embrace with
my right hand in a handshake. In an analogous way, my right hand can-
not embrace my other real hand in a handshake. For my left hand, en-
locked in the internal mirror of my body-diptych and subject to its
specular logic of sy~metrical parallelism is ~ living reflection but not a
living duplicate of the right hand. Only the other person can transcend
this internal bodily reflection, breaking the mirror of my body with her
hand. It follows that the other cannot be "annexed" in the mirror play
enacted already within the spectacle of my body; or, to inverse the famous
slogan, that l'homme n'est pas ritiroir pour l'homme. 1o
I cannot, in the manner of the biblical Adam, make another embodied
human grow out of a part of my body and so I cannot produce a hand-
shake from within my corporeal existence. For even though the organs of
the "small animal" that I am can touch themselves, they cannot greet
themselves. To greet (shake hands, but also embrace or kiss) is to welcome
another "animal," to send out my organ (hands, lips) toward them and
to meet the organ sent out from their alter body. A handshake does more
than merely enlarge the field of my autoreflecting body: it involves an
exchange across two bodies that could not be realized independently in
either of them, a new event of intercorporeal "reversal" of greeting and
 From the Body Proper to Flesh 101

being greeted unknown to the intracorporeal reversibility of a body

touching itself.

III
Let me not create a false impression that touching oneself is a solitary
event devoid of any intersubjective significance. On the contrary, it re-
veals to me my body as a tactile thing given both to my activity and to
the activity of the other. The tactile body that I am is a public thing,
taking me right from the start into the realm of public relations, that is,
relations with other touching and tactile subjects. Yet insofar as I am the
public body that the other can touch, I remain, as Merleau-Ponty put it,
always "on the same side of my body" (VI, 194/148). I remain on the
same side of the hand that greets the other but cannot greet itself, for it
cannot go to "the other side" of the body, the side of the body of the
other with whom I shake hands. It is this inalterable situation in my body
that prevents the reversibility I experience when my co-present hands
touch themselves from fusing with the reversibility I live when I touch
and am touched by another person. It is the unique vantage point of my
body that prevents me from adopting the vantage point of the other and
grasping the passivity of my hand being touched as the activity of the
other touching hand. What distinguishes the intercorporeal relation from
the intracorporeal one is that the passivity of my hand touched by the
other-unlike the passivity of my hand that I touch-cannot reverse into
an activity (of touching) for me, even though I can respond to the other
touching me by touching them in turn. The break between my body (the
body proper) and the body of the other separates two irreducible forms of
bodily experience and makes it impossible to theorize reversibility as a
uniform category applicable to the flesh as a whole.
Still, for Merleau-Ponty, the reversibility of the flesh is one, whether
considered in the midst of the bodily being that I am or in my relations
to an embodied other. Merleau-Ponty exemplifies the category of revers-
ibility with a case of a return to the self, such as touching the body that
palpates something. This specific example might have led him to theorize
reversibility in terms of a deflection or reflection of activity exerted upon
the world back onto the body, and to subsume the activity of the other
person exerted upon me under this preexistent autoreflective relation.
102 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

Whether I act ort my own body (touching the palpitating hand) or

whether it is the other person that acts upon me (handshake), in both
cases the passivity of being touched stands for the obverse or the reverse
of the activity of touching (of my other hand or the hand of the other).
The reversibility of the senses, for example, touch, can be argued there-
fore to implicate a unique sensible "movement" running through the
body and the flesh. I I Passivity of the sentient body equals sensible activity
"moving in the opposite direction"; henceforth, passivity can always be
reversed into activity, even if its source were other than my (reversible)
body. Reversibility between activity and passivity can therefore be ap-
plied to interpersonal relations and to autorelations alike.
Yet the identification of bodily autorelations and relations between
bodies both runs the risk of forgetting that I am situated in a concrete
body that constitutes my unique point of view and is reductive of the
alterity of another person, whose point of view is by definition cut off
from me. The uniform notion of reversibility is based on the presupposi-
tion that passivity is by definition the reverse of activity whether or not the
reversal can actuaUytake place. We witness here an imperceptible shift
from the phenomenologically valid account of reversibility in intracorpor-
eal life to the metaphysical principle stipulating that a reversal between
activity and passivity must de jure be possible. The resulting general cate-
gory of sensible reversible movement rejoins a scholastic principle of
identity between actions and passions, espoused by, for example, Des-
cartes. According to this principle, actions and passions are ultimately
one, in that their movement involves a unique trajectory to be traversed
from the side of the motor (the source/origin of movement) to the mobile
(the moved body) or in the inverse or reverse direction. Depending on
whether the viewpoint of the motor or the mobile is adopted, the same
movement appears as active or passive. 12 Note that this definition of ac-
tions and passions adopts the point of view of an impersonal (or anony-
mous) spectator, not situated in a unique and unchanging bodily
perspective but able to move freely between the two poles of the move-
ment. This detached spectator could regard, for example, a handshake
both from the point of view of the other person with whom I shake hands
and from my side, and thus would, hypothetically at least, be able to view
the passivity of my hand being touched by the other as an activity of
touching for the other. This detached spectator could subsume the
unique movement' of sentient sensibility operative in a body-to-body en-
counter with another person under the phenomenon of touching one's
 From the Body Proper to Flesh l03

own body, and declare that the reversibility of activity and passivity at
work in intercorporeal life is indistinguishable from the reversibility of
active and passive roles played by one body sensing itself.
This impersonal spectator could therefore arrive at the thesis of uni-
form reversibility of the flesh that Merleau-Ponty upheld. It seems, how-
ever, that the uniform character of this thesis is its drawback rather than
its advantage in that it conflates a variety of nonidentical phenomena for
the sake of producing a single explanatory theory of carnal life. We wit-
ness here a "collapse into the universal" of both subjective and intersub-
jective body-to-body situations, wherein the "particularity" of each is
effaced but for which it is the lived experience of the body proper in the
tactile reversibility of double-sensations and in the reflexivity of specular
symmetrism that continues to provide the norm and the paradigm. At
the same time, the normative character of the body proper gets obscured
within the context of fleshly anonymity: the principle of reversibility/
reflexivity survives but it gets dislodged from its locus naturalis and ceases
to apply to subjective body experience only.
It appears therefore that the argument for anonymous reversibility op-
erative within the flesh and described in The Visible and the Invisible is
inspired primarily-and for good reasons!-by the first-person lived ex-
perience of the body and that, even though prevalent interpretations
suggest the contrary, it remains indebted to the "anthropocentric" per-
spective espoused in The Phenomenology of Perception. The ontological
thesis developed by Merleau-Ponty dqes not therefore abandon the per-
spective of the body proper but generalizes and universalizes it. Neverthe-
less, as I have argued throughout this chapter, bodily reflexivity applies
solely to a specifically subjective experience of the body and the "logic of
the mirror" cannot govern intra- and intercorporeal relations at once.
Neglecting those differences (between intra- and intercorporeal rela-
tions) makes it impossible to imagine an other who is not ultimately
reducible to the same, who appears differently from an extension or a
replica of the self.
This brings me back to the starting point of this critical reading of
Merleau-Ponty, the feminist critique of the universalistic theories of the
body, expressed succinctly in the opening passage from Bordo. Whereas
Bordo's critique focuses on the problematic "norm" provided by the mas-
culine body, which fails to give due weight to feminine corporeity in
universalistic philosophies of embodiment, I focused on the "norm" pro-
vided by the intracorporeal experience of the body, which fails to give
104 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

due weight to intercorporeity in Merleau-Ponty's universalistic philoso-

phy of embodiment. I hope that my analysis helps to substantiate the
claim that the universalistic tendency has a larger scope than has pre-
viously been identified in the feminist interpretations of Merleau-Ponty,
in that it leads to the bracketing not only of gender but also of self/other
specificity in Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the flesh. Following Beavoir,
this failure to develop an authentic relation to the other is an inherent
trait of the masculinist frame of mind. Even though this failure can be
traced in any case of oppression of one group/class/race by another, it is
most prominent in the oppression of women by men. In Beauvoir's view,
men have consistently reduced women to the category of secondary and
subordinate beings, devoid of free subjectivity. This dominating and op-
pressing tendency precludes the possibility of developing an authentic
relation with the other based on reciprocity.u It is instructive to find
Beauvoir compare the woman as an inessential/subordinate other to a
mirror that reflects the male and facilitates the stance of narcissistic self-
contemplation. 14 This other-as-mirror or complement of the self bears
striking resemblance-- to Merleau-Ponty's conception of the other dis-
cussed here and, following Beauvoir's lead, is indicative of a failure to
account for a relation between self and other where the other's free sub-
jectivity and autonomy are fully preserved.
My critical analysis rejoins also Irigaray's critique of Merleau-Ponty's
urge to gloss over differences for the sake of establishing a homogenous
enclosed philosophical system, which threatens to reduce alterity to
sameness. lrigaray challenged the oblivion of the feminine maternal body
in the supposedly sexually neutral flesh, which makes the two sexes col-
lapse into a one-sex model. The other of sexual difference is left out of
the account in this monism of sex. Hence the need to theorize sexual
alterity in the feminine experience of embodiment, such as pregnant em-
bodiment and maternity, in positive terms, in order to break with the
tradition of using the masculine sex as a model and bring femininity into
prominence. 15 My critical reading of Merleau-Ponty completes Irigaray's
by showing that it is not only one sex (masculine) but also one body
(body proper) that serve as the "norm" for the monistic ontology of flesh
developed by Merleau-Ponty. Insofar as this monism of flesh is reductive
of the alterity of another embodied person, it calls for the need to theorize
the social dimension of embodiment in its positivity as well. This social
dimension of embodiment may be saturated by a lived experience of sex-
ual difference, notably even though not exclusively in the case of physical
 From the Body Proper to Flesh 105

intimacy between a woman and a man. However, the experience of the

embodied other exceeds both the erotic and the heterosexual encounters
and includes a wide array of intercorporeal situations, such as parenting,
friendship, and companionship. This social dimension covers the expres-
sive potential of the body, which makes nonverbal as well as verbal com-
munication with others possible. The engagement with others through
gesture, facial expression, eye contact, touch, and language circumscribes
the field of study for such a theory of social embodiment. This theory
examines the body specifically in its role of a medium, as a vehicle for
interpersonal communication. Needless to say, this theory of the commu-
nicative body can only be concrete and avoid sweeping generalizations if
its focus remains gender specific, and if race and class differences are
preserved within it as well.

Notes

1. See Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
2. The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), xxi.
Consider also this passage: "The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a
matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that
of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by
the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only
the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity" (ibid).
3. "Now, what peculiarly signalizes the situation of woman is that she-a free and autono-
mous being like all human creatures-nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men
compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilize h~r as object and to
doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended
by another ego (conscience) which is essential and sovereign." The Second Sex, xxxv.
4. Le visible et I'invisible, (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alpho-
nso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 184/139. Hereafter this work is
cited as VI; the first page numbers given refer to the French text, the second to the English
translation.
5. See, for example, articles included in "Recherches sur la phenomenologie de Merleau-
Ponty," Notes de Cours sur l'Origine de fa geomitTie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1998). See especially Isabelle M. Dias, "Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Une esthesiologie onto-
logique" and Renaud Barbaras, "Le dedoublement de l'originaire." Barbaras notes that "[Clon-
formement au mouvement amorce des la Phenomenologie de fa perception, la chair est
generalement abordee apartir du corps propre.... Or, il nous semble que cette approche echappe
difficilement aux categories---sensation, mouvement, sujet, objet, etc.--que l'analyse de Ill. per-
ception vise pourtant a' depasser, de sorte qu'il est particulierement malaise d'aborder Ie concept
ontologique de chair a partir de l'etude du corps propre, voue a disparaitre comme tel au profit
de la Chair comme etre d'indivision" (289).
106 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

6. La Nature; Note~, cours de College de France (Paris; Seuil, 1994), 109. Nature; Course
Notes from the CoUege de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston; Northwestern University Press,
2003).
7. "The Philosopher and His Shadow," in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), 166. Hereafter cited as PS.
8. From the chapter "The Lived Body," in Self-Awareness and Alterity (Evanston: North-
western University PresS, 1999), 107.
9. For that reason Donn Welton uses reflexivity to rethink and em-body self-awareness. See,
for example, the article "Touching Hands" (forthcoming).
10. Merleau-Ponty stipulates that "l'homme est miroir pour l'homme" ("man is a mirror for
a man"). L'oeil et l'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964),34.
11. Merleau-Ponty speaks of the body sensible and the body sentient as "two segments of
one singular course ... , one sole movement in its two phases" (VI, 182/138; emphasis added).
12. In Renee Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1989), §1. It is also present in Saint Thomas and Suarez. See Etienne Gilson, Index scolastico-
carresien (Paris, 1913).
13. "Woman thus ·seems to be the inessential who never goes back to being the essential, to
be the absolute Other, without reciprocity. This conviction is dear to the male, and every creation
myth has expressed it, among others the legend of Genesis." The Second Sex, 141; emphasis
added.
14. Ibid., 185.
15. Following Irigaray, this "primary maternal-feminine" has remained unthought in
Merleau-Ponty's writing on ilesh. Ethics of Sexual Difference, 162. The project of rethinking the
specifically feminine experience of embodiment along the lines of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy
has been taken up with admirable skill and rigor by Iris Marion Young in her numerous essays,
recently compiled in On Female Body Experience; "Throwing Like a Girl" and Other Essays (New
York: Oxford Universlty Press, 2005). Apart from her classic essay on girls' sense of space and
mobility manifest in their throwing activity, Young examined also such typically feminine expe-
riences as pregnant embodiment, the sexuality of breasts, and how menstruation punctuates the
history of a woman's life.
 5
Sexual Difference as a
Question of Ethics: Alterities of the
Flesh in Irigaray and Merleau .. Panty
Judith Butler

Although Lucy Irigaray's An Ethics of Sexual Difference is a feminist read-

ing of selected philosophical works, we should perhaps not be so clear
about what that means. l Feminist in an unfamiliar sense, her text is not
primarily a criticism of how various philosophers have represented
women, and it is not a philosophy offered from a feminist or a feminine
point of view. It is, I would suggest, a complex engagement with philo-
sophical texts, one which in the first instance appears to accept the terms
of the texts, as evidenced by the lengthy and elaborated citations from
those texts. In this sense, then, one might at first glance conclude that
108 Feminist Interpretations of MerIeau-Ponty

by virtue of these profuse citations, Irigaray seeks to make herself ac-

countable to the texts that she reads; indeed, one might even conclude
that there is a certain self-subordination in the way that she foregrounds
again and again passages from the male philosophers that she reads.
But the way in which she cites from these texts suggests a different
kind of relation, neither a simple subordination nor a simple practice of
mockery or derision. Indeed, I want to suggest that in her very practice
of citation, Irigaray enacts an ambivalent relation to the power attributed
to these texts, a power that she at once attributes to them but also seeks
to undo. What is perhaps most paradoxical and enigmatic about her tex-
tual entanglement with these texts, and with Merleau-Ponty's in particu-
lar, is that it enacts and allegorizes the kind of entanglement-or
intertwining-that characterizes relations of flesh. In this sense, then,
the text enacts the theory of flesh that it also interrogates, installing itself
in a hermeneutic circularity from which it cannot break free and in
whose hold it appears quite willfully to stay.
Irigaray's reading of Merleau-Ponty's "The Intertwining" is in many
ways quite dismissive and contemptuous, attributing to him an arrested
development, a maternal fixation, even an intrauterine fantasy. And yet,
her dependency on his theorization of tactile, visual, and linguistic rela-
tions seems absolute. There is no thinking outside his terms and, hence,
there is always an attempt to think about his terms. This involves her in
a spectacular double-bind: thinking against him within his terms, at-
tempting, that is, to exploit the terms that she also seeks to tum against
him in an_effort to open the space of sexual difference that she believes
his text seeks to erase.
Consider the implication of her strategy of writing for both the im-
plicit relations of power that hold between the two writers and the theory
of the flesh that appears to be'both thematized and enacted in the inter-
twined reading that lrigaray performs. First, her presumption is that his
discourse sets the terms by which the critique of that discourse becomes
possible; second, the terms of his work also have, in her view, the power
to constitute the intelligibility of bodies and the flesh; third, that consti-
tutive power is based. in a refusal of the feminine, in her terms, or an
erasure and covering over of sexual difference; fourth, that lrigaray's mim-
ing and citing of his work are the exclusive ways in which his terms are
exposed to failure; which means, fifth, that the power to counter his work
is derived from th~ very work that is countered.
Whereas it might be plausible to conclude from the above that Iri-
 Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics 109

garay, in countering the presumed power of Merleau-Ponty's essay, can

only and always confirm and enhance that power, is it not possible to
read that doubled reflection of his work in hers in a different way?
Whereas one might be tempted to conclude that for Irigaray the feminine
is radically outside of dominant philosophical discourse and, hence,
Merleau-Ponty's reflection on the flesh, or that, perhaps equivalently,
power is exclusively located in that dominant discourse, the textual en-
gagement that characterizes her reading suggests a more conflicted and
ambivalent deployment of power, radically implicated in what it opposes,
opposing the Other through a strange participation and consumption of
his terms. Her position is distinct from a view in which the feminine is
radically other and from phallogocentrism, which, radically itself, appro-
priates sexual difference. lrigaray textually enacts a kind of entanglement
that suggests that the "outside" to phallogocentrism is to be found
"within" its own terms, that the feminine is insinuated into the terms
of phallogocentrism, rendering equivocal the question, whose voice is it,
masculine or feminine? Significantly, then, the relation of power and the
relation of the flesh, understood as allegorized by the textual relations
that Irigaray draws from his text to hers, is not one of opposition, rallying
the feminine against the masculine, but of exposing and producing a
mutually constitutive relation. On the one hand, this means that the
masculine is not being able to "be" without the "Other," that the repudi-
ation of the feminine from phallogocentrism turns out to be the exclusion
without which no phallogocentrism can survive, that is, the negative
condition of possibility for the masculine. Conversely, Irigaray's miming
of Merleau-Ponty's prose, her insinuation into his terms, not only proves
the vulnerability of his terms to what they exclude, but exposes that
vulnerability to what they exclude as a constitutive vulnerability. His
text is disclosed as having her text intertwined within his terms, at which
point his text is centered outside itself, implicated in what it excludes,
and her text is nothing without his, radically dependent upon that which
it refuses.
In fact, I would suggest, in citing the texts as she does, she quite liter-
ally dislocates the philosophical tradition by relocating it within her own
text; she does not refuse this tradition, but incorporates it, in some odd
way, making it her own. But what, we might ask, happens to these texts
by virtue of this strategy of citational appropriation? Do they remain the
same, and if not, what is Irigaray telling us, what is she exemplifying,
about how feminist philosophy should proceed in relation to the masculi-
110 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

nism of the canon-from which it is spawned? Can it be that her reading

exemplifies an appropriation and refusal at once?
Before I propose what her answer to this question might be, I would
like to underscore that one purpose which unifies this text, which recurs
throughout these lectures, is the elaboration of what lrigaray will call the
ethical relation between the sexes. The ethical relation between the
sexes, she will argue, cannot be understood as an example of ethical rela-
tions in general; the generalized or universal account of ethical relations
presumes that men and women encounter each other as subjects who are
symmetrically positioned within language. This language, she argues, is
not, however, neutral or indifferent to the question of sex; it is masculi-
nist, not in the sense that it represents the contingent interests of men,
but in the sense· that it consistently disavows the identification of the
universal with the masculine that it nevertheless performs. If language
asserts. its universality, then every specific disposition of language is sub-
sumed under this P9stulated universality. Language becomes that which
nbt only unifies all specific dispositions, but, in Irigaray's view, refuses to
consider the salient .distinction between the sexes as a difference that
establishes different kinds of languages, a difference which contests the
very notion of universality' or, rather, reveals that what has passed as
universality is a tacit or unmarked masculinity. We might want to learn
more about what lrigaray thinks is the characteristic mark of a masculi-
nist use of language, and what, a feminine, but there are no "empirical
languages" which correspond to the sexes; oddly, it seems, it is only this
very pretension to be universal which characterizes the masculine, and it
is this very 'contestation of the universal which characterizes the femi-
nine. In other words, it is not that certain masculine values yet to be
named are elevated to the status of the universal, but rather that whatever
those values might be, their very elevation to the status of the universal,
this tendency to universalization itself, is what constitutes the character-
istically masculine. Conversely, this rupture or unassimilable difference
which calls into question this universalizing movement is what consti-
tutes the feminine in language; it exists, as it were, as a rupturing of the
universal or what might be understood as a protest within the universal,
the internal dissent of the feminine.

What precisely is meant by "the universal" in the above characterization?

And what is its bearing on the ethical relation between the sexes that
lrigaray imagines and promotes and which she understands to be central
 Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics 111

to the 'project of feminist philosophy? Let us remember that, for lrigaray,

to universalize a norm, or to substitute oneself for another, would be
examples of an ethical procedure which presumes the symmetrical posi-
tioning of men and women within language. Indeed, if women and men
were symmetrically or reciprocally positioned within language, then eth-
ical reflection might well consist in imagining oneself in the place of the
other and deriving a set of rules or practices on the basis of that imagined
and imaginable substitution. But in the case that men and women are
positioned asymmetrically, the act by which a man substitutes himself for
a woman in the effort to achieve an imagined equality becomes an act by
which a man extrapolates his own experience at the expense of that very
woman. In this scenario, for Irigaray, the act by which a man substitutes
himself for a woman becomes an act of appropriation and erasure; the
ethical procedure of substitution thus reduces paradoxically to an act of
domination. On the other hand, if from a subordinate position within
language, a woman substitutes herself for a man, she imagines herself into
a dominant position, and sacrifices her sense of difference from the norm;
in such a case, the act of substitution becomes an act of self-erasure or
self-sacrifice.
One might well conclude that for lrigaray, given her view of the asym-
metrical position of men and women in language, there can be no ethical
relation. But here is where she offers a way of thinking about the ethical
relation which marks an original contribution to ethical thinking, one
which takes sexual difference as its point of departure. In her view, the
ethical relation cannot be one of substantiality or reversibility. On the
contrary, the ethical relation might be said to emerge between the sexes
precisely at the moment in which a certain incommensurability between
these two positions is recognized. I am not the same as the Other: I
cannot use myself as the model by which to apprehend the Other: the
Other is in a fundamental sense beyond me and in this sense the other
represents the limiting condition of myself. And further, this Other, who
is not me, nevertheless defines me essentially by representing precisely
what I cannot assimilate to myself, to what is already familiar to me.
What Irigaray will term masculinist will be this effort to return all
Otherness to the self, to make sense of the Other only as a reflection of
myself. This is what she will call the closed circuit of the subject, a rela-
tion to alterity which turns out to be no more than a reduction of alterity
to the self. It is important to note that it is not only men whose relations
are characterized by this closed circuit, by this foreclosure of alterity. The
112 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Poncy

difference between "men" and masculinism is here at stake: when and

where such a foreclosure takes place, it will be called "masculinist." Para-
doxically, and we shall see, consequentially, Irigaray will herself manifest
the ability to identify with this position, to substitute herself for the mas-
culinist position in which alterity is consistently refused, and she will
mime that universal voice in which every enunciatory position within
language is presumed to be equivalent, exchangeable, reversible. We
might read the profusion of citations in her text as sympathetic efforts to
put herself in the place of the Other, where the Other this time is a
masculinist subject who seeks and finds in all alterity only himself. Oddly,
in miming the masculinist texts of philosophy, she puts herself in the place
of the masculine, and thereby performs a kind of substitution, one she
appears to criticize when it is performed by men. Is her substitution differ-
ent from the one she criticizes?
Although readers who know lrigaray from Speculum of the Other
Woman might expect that she will now turn and destroy this position,
this masculinism, with a cutting edge, indeed, with a threatened castra-
tion, I would like t<;> Suggest that the exchange that she performs with the
masculinist texts of philosophy in An Ethics of Sexual Difference is more
ambivalent and less cutting than in that earlier text. Whereas the earlier
text tended to underscore the way in which the feminine was always and
relentlessly both excluded and presupposed in the theoretical construc-
tions of both Plato and Freud, this later text does that, but also does
something more. Here she seems, paradoxically, to acknowledge her debt
to those philosophical texts she reads, and to engage them in a critical
dialogue i~ which the very terms she uses to engage these texts critically
are borrowed from these texts, or one might say, borrowed against them.
She is, as it were, locked in dialogue with these texts. The model for
understanding this dialogic relation will not be one which presupposes
simple equality and substitutability, nor will it be one which presupposes
radical opposition. For let us remember that Luce Irigaray is a philosopher
and is, thus, part of the enterprise she will subject to criticism; but she is
also a feminist, and, according to her view, that means that she represents
precisely that which has been excluded from philosophical discourse and
its presumptions of universality.
Irigaray reads the final chapter of Merleau-Ponty's posthumously pub-
lished The Visible and the Invisible, called "The Intertwining-the Chi-
asm," as an examp1e of this- monologic masculinism, even as it is a text
from which she also clearly draws the philosophical means to offer an
 Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics 113

alternative way of approaching the ethical relation. Merleau-Ponty's text

is one in which he considers how the philosophical effort to understand
knowledge on the model of vision has underestimated the importance of
tactility. Indeed, he will suggest that seeing might be understood as a
kind of touching, and he also suggests that in the touch, we might be said
to be "perceiving," and further, that touching or seeing something has a
reflexive dimension, and that the realm of the visible and the realm of
the tactile imply each other logically, overlapping with each other, onto-
logically. His writing is filled with purposefully mixed metaphors in order
to suggest that language, vision, and touch intertwine with each other
and that aesthetic experience may be the place in which to investigate
that synaesthetic dimension of human knowledge. In the place of an
epistemological model in which a knowing subject confronts a counter-
vailing world, Merleau-Ponty calls into question that division between
subject and world that conditions the questions characteristic of the epis-
temological enterprise. He seeks to understand what, if anything, brings
the subject and its object into relation such that the epistemological
question might first be posed.
In an argument which can be seen to extend Heidegger's effort in
Being and Time to establish the priority of ontology to epistemology,
Merleau-Ponty seeks to return to a relation that binds subject and object
prior to their division, prior to their formation as oppositional and dis-
tinct terms. Heidegger insisted that every interrogative relation that we
take toward an object presupposes that we are already in relation to that
object, that we would not know what to ask about a given object if we
were not already in a relation of affinity or knowingness about the object.
In the "Introduction" to Being and Time, Heidegger considers not only
what it might mean to pose the question of the meaning of Being, but
what might be derived, more generally, from an explanation of "what
belongs to any question whatsoever."z He prefigures for us what will come
to be called the hermeneutic circle when he writes,

all inquiry about something is somehow a questioning of some-

thing ... so, in addition to what is asked about, an inquiry has
that which is interrogated [ein Befrateges] ... [and] what is asked
about is determined and conceptualized. Furthermore, in what is
asked about there lies also that which is to be found out by the asking
[das Erfragte] . ... Inquiry, as a kind of seeking, must be guided
114 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty

beforehand by what is sought. So the meaning of Being must

already be available to us in some way. (BT, 24-25)

In this move whereby the question, the interrogative, is referred back

to an already established, and already available set of ontological interre-
lations, Heidegger seeks to show that the questions we pose as a subject
of an object are themselves a sign that we have lost or forgotten some
prior ontological connection to the object which now appears to us as
foreign and unknown. In Merleau-Ponty, a similar move takes place, but
unlike the Heidegger of Being and Time, Merleau-Ponty will argue in The
Visible and the Invisible that the web of relations which conditions every
interrogative, and which every interrogative might be said to forget or
conceal, is a linguistic web; sometimes he will use the term "mesh" or
"weave" or even "interconnective tissue," but the implication is clear
that it is a binding set of relations, in which all apparent differences are
superseded by the, totality of language itself. Here one might say that
Merleau-Ponty has transposed the problematic introduced by Heidegger
as one in which ont~logy is shown to precede epistemology to the frame-
work of structuralist linguistics in which language is said to precede epis-
temology in a restricted sense. By "epistemology" here, we mean only a
set of questions which seek to know something which is not yet properly
or adequately known. Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty's point is to try to
overcome a subject-object distinction that he understands to be presup-
posed and reinforced by the epistemol9gical tradition. The subject-object
distinction presupposed and instituted through this tradition presupposes
that the subject is ontologically distinct from its object, but it does not
ask whether there might be some common substrate or genesis from
which both subject and object emerge, and which join them in some
original way.
Irigaray will enter this discussion with the following question: if every
question presupposes a totality of already established relations, ones which
are temporarily forgotten or concealed in the asking about something
apparently unknown, what place is left for the asking of a question about
what is not already known? The presumption of an already established
totality of relations, whether they are conceived as ontological or linguis-
tic, is symptomatic, in her view, of the self-circuit of the subject according
to which every moment of alterity turns out to be presupposed by the
subject, to be alwaV"s already, this subject and, hence, not to constitute a
moment of alterity at all. Indeed, the much touted "always already"
 Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics 115

which, in phenomenology, designates the prejudicative realm of taken-

for-granted meanings would be paradigmatic of this kind of masculinist
monologism in which alterity and the not yet known, and not yet know-
able, are refused.
What, Irigaray effectively asks, do we make of the never yet known, the
open future, the one that cannot be assimilated to a knowledge that is
always and already presupposed? For Irigaray, the ethical relation will be
represented by the question as an act of speech, the open question, the
one which does not claim to know in advance the one to whom it is
addressed, but seeks to know who that addressee is for the first time in
the articulation of the question itself. In her words, the ethical relation
consists in the question: "Who are you?" This is the question that seeks
to cross the difference that divides masculine from feminine, but not to
cross that difference through a substitution which presupposes the equiv-
alence and interchangeability of masculine and feminine. "Who are
you?" is the paradigmatic ethical question, for her, in the sense that it
seeks to cross the divide of sexual difference, to know what is different,
but to know it in such a way that what is different is not, through being
known, assimilated or reduced to the one who seeks to know.
And yet, this "ethical" dimension appears in some conflict with the
textual strategy elucidated at the beginning of this chapter. In the "ethi-
cal" view, sexual difference is precisely an unfathomable and irretraversi-
ble difference, constitutive of masculine and feminine in relation to one
another. Their relation is considered on the model of the encounter, and
the ethical problem they face is how best to approach, without assimilat-
ing, the Other. In her view, there is no masculine without a prior impli-
caiton in the terms of the feminine, and there is no feminine without a
prior implication in the terms of the masculine; 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 inter-
twining, a dynamic differentiation in proximity.
A few difficulties emerge in relation to this way of circumscribing the
ethical relation. It makes sense to ask whether Irigaray's focus on the
ethical deflects her critical attention from the prior and constitutive rela-
tions of power by which ethical subjects and their encounters are pro-
duced. Open to challenge is the presumption that the question of alterity
as it arises for ethics can be fully identified with the question of sexual
difference. Clearly, problematic dimensions of alterity take a number of
forms, and sexual difference-though distinct in some ways-is not the
116 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

primary difference. from which all other kinds of social differences are
derivable. Regarded as an ethical question, the relation of sexual differ-
ence presumes that it is only the masculine and the feminine who come
into an ethical encounter with the Other. Would one, within this vocab-
ulary, be able to account for an ethical relation, an ethical question,
between those of· the same sex? Can there even be a relation of funda-
mental alterity between those of the same sex? I would of course answer
yes, but I think that the peculiar nexus of psychoanalysis and structural-
ism within which Irigaray operates would be compelled to figure relations
among women and among men as either overly identificatory or narcissis-
tic and, in that sense, not yet of the order of the ethical. Must there be a
difference between the sexes in order for there to be true alterity? Simi-
larly, there are other sorts of social difference that distinguish interlocu-
tors in language, and why is it that these social differences are considered
somehow as less fundamental to the articulation of alterity in general,
and to the scene qf the ethical in particular? Finally, is it not the case
that Irigaray portrays the masculine, and Merleau-Ponty in particular, in
ways that do not do. justice to the ethical dimension of his own philo-
sophical explorations in The Visible and the Invisible?
Rather than take these questions on their own terms, I suggest that we
consider how the textual production of intertwinement calls into ques-
tion the ethical framework that Irigaray defends. For what emerges be-
tween Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty is not "difference" per se, but a
founding implication in the Other, a primary complicity with the Other
without which no 'subject, no author, can emerge. And this situation
poses an even more difficult "ethical" question than the one that Irigaray
articulates: how to treat the Other well when the Other is never fully
other, when one's own separateness is a function of one's dependency on
the Other, when the difference between the Other and myself is, from
the start, equivocal.
Taking this last question first, let us consider Merleau-Ponty's text in
relation to lrigaray's "reading" and consider what in that text might resist
the interpretation that she brings to it. Merleau-Ponty will be accused by
Irigaray of a "labyrinthine solipsism." In support of this characterization,
she calls attention to the following kind of argument that he makes. In
relation to the phenomenological description of touch, Merleau-Ponty
argues that one cannot touch without in some sense being. touched by
what one touches,' and one, cannot see without entering into a field of
visibility in which the seer is also potentially, if not actually, seen. In
 Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics 117

both cases, there persists a relation of reversibility between what might

be called the subject and object poles of experience. But there is, in
addition to these two reversible relations, the one of touch, and the one
of sight, a criss-crossing of the two reversible relations. Consider the fol-
lowing citation from "The Intertwining-The Chiasm" in The Visible
and the Invisible:

It is the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the
tangible upon the touching body, which is attested in particular
when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the
things, such that, simultaneously, as tangible it descends among
them, as touching it dominates them all and draws this relation-
ship and even this double relationship from itself, by dehiscence
or fission of its own mass. 3

Merleau-Ponty is describing something like the unfolding and differentia-

tion of the lived world of flesh, where flesh is understood not only as both
agent and object of touch, but also as the ground or condition of seeing
and the seen. In an important sense, this term "flesh" is what is being
described by both the reversibility of touch and the reversibility of seeing,
and it is what conditions, and what is articulated by, both reversibilities.
But what is this "flesh," and can it be said to be other than the articu-
lations, differentiations, and reversibilities by which it is described? Is it
the same as this set of reversible relations, or is it that with which
Merleau-Ponty cannot finally come to terms? Irigaray will argue that in
Merleau-Ponty's account, there is nothing outside the selfsame touching
and touched body, seeing and seen, and that this closure attributed to
the reversible relation constitutes its solipsism. Although this "flesh of
the world" or "flesh of things" appears to designate some domain which
encompasses and exceeds either pole of that reversible relation, the term
remains obscure, and, for Irigaray, the term works as a sign of that closure
and, hence, in the service of a solipsism. For Irigaray, this is a central
problem with Merleau-Ponty. She writes of such passages that "the sub-
tlety of what is said of the visible and its relation to the flesh does not
rule out the solipsistic character of this touch(ing) between the world
and the subject, of this touch(ing) of the visible and the seer in the
subject itself" (ESD, 157).
Although Merleau-Ponty's formulation is meant to overcome the iso-
lation of the seeing and touching subject, and to argue that the subject,
118 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

through its sight and touch, is implicated in and by the very world it
explores, for Irigaray the effect of his formulation is that the subject him-
self becomes extolled as that to which all worldly relations return. And
yet, is her assessment fair? Consider that the phenomenological counter
to Cartesianism .that Merleau-Ponty articulates is, in part, a refusal of
that perceptual distance postulated between the reflecting subject and
the world of objects. In breaking apart this distinction, the perceiving "I"
acquires a flesh that implicates him or her in a world of flesh. Hence, for
Merleau-Ponty, the embodied status of the "I" is precisely that which
implicates the "I" in a fleshly world outside of itself, that is, in a world in
which the "I" is no longer its own center or ground. Indeed, only upon
the condition of this philosophical move toward a more embodied "I"
does lrigaray's intervention becomes possible. Underscoring the depen-
dency of that embodied "I" on a body prior to itself, Irigaray identifies
the maternal body as the literal condition of possibility for the epistemic
relation that holds between the embodied "I" and its embodied objects.
Although Irigaray reads this primary and constituting "world of flesh" as
a diffusion of the ma.ternal, a deflection or refusal of the maternal, what
is to secure the primacy of the maternal? But why reduce the world of
flesh, the world of sensuously related significations, to the maternal body?
Is that not an "appropriation" and "reduction" of a complex set of consti-
tuting interrelations that raises the counterquestion of whether Irigaray
seeks to have "the maternal body" stand in for that more complex field?
If one is "implicated" in the world that one sees, that does not mean that
the world that one sees is reducible to oneself. It may mean quite the
opposite, namely, that the "I" who sees is in some sense abandoned to
the visible world, decentered in that world; that the "I" who touches is
in some sense lost to the tactile world, never to regain itself completely;
that the "I" who writes is possessed by a language whose meanings and
effects are not originated in oneself.
Although Irigaray might be read as having "lost" herself to Merleau-
Ponty's text in a similar way, it remains curious that the "ethical" model
she invokes for understanding this relation appears to obscure this rela-
tion of primary implicatedness and the consequently equivocal status of
sexual identity. The masculinism of this subject is never put into question
by lrigaray. She will claim that it is the mark of the masculine to assimi-
late all alterity to the preexisting subject. But what makes this refusal of
alterity, a refusal which takes the form of incorporating the Other as the
same, a specifically masculine or masculinist enterprise? Here is where
 Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics 119

Irigaray's philosophical argument rests on a use of psychoanalytic theory

in which the masculine is understood to be defined in a less than fully
differentiated relationship to a maternal origin. The mother becomes for
him the site of a narcissistic reflection of himself, and she is thus eclipsed
as a site of alterity, and reduced to the occasion for a narcissistic mir-
roring.

Irigaray accepts the psychoanalytic account which argues that the indi-
viduation of the masculine subject takes place through a repudiation of
his maternal origins, a repudiation of the in utero bodily connection to
the mother as well as the vital dependency on the mother in infancy.
This break with the maternal is thus the condition of his becoming a
masculine subject, and the condition of his narcissism, which is, as it
were, an appreciation of himself as a separated and bounded ego. In what
is perhaps the least persuasive of Irigaray's arguments, she suggests that
Merleau-Ponty not only repudiates this "connection" with the maternal
in classic masculine fashion, but that he then reappropriates this "con-
nection" for his own solipsistic theory of the flesh, which he describes as
the "medium" or "connective tissue." In a sense, she reads his theory of
the flesh as a philosophical transposition of the infant's connection with
the maternal body, a repudiation of that connection and a return of the
repudiated within his own philosophical text. She reads him as taking
this "connective tissue" as what he, the masculine subject, occasions, and
which, far from connecting him with anything, returns him to a solipsis-
tic circle of his own making. On the basis of this argument Irigaray then
concludes that for Merleau-Ponty, there is no connection with what is
not the subject, with what is different, with the feminine, and, hence,
with alterity in general.
But if one refuses to accept Irigaray's account of the formation of mas-
culine narcissism through the repudiation of the maternal, her argument
becomes more difficult to support. If one refuses as well the thesis that
sexual difference is the key or decisive index by which relations of alterity
are established and known and, further, refuses to accept the easy trans-
position of a psychoanalytic account of masculine narcissism into a philo-
sophical account of solipsism, then her position becomes increasingly
untenable.
But let us consider what is, after all, most important about Irigaray's
contribution to the thinking of the ethical relation here, namely, the
claim that a relation of substitutability between masculine and feminine
120 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

constitutes a kind- of appropriation and erasure, and the call for some
other kind of ethical relation, interrogative in structure and tone, which
marks an open relation to an Other who is not yet known. Irigaray con-
siders the complex interrelations in Merleau-Ponty's account oflanguage,
sight, and touch to amount to a masculine solipsism. We will follow her
reading here, but not merely to show what she means and how she comes
to support what she means. For it will be shown, I hope, that Irigaray is
more implicated in the text she criticizes than she herself concedes, and
that, considered rhetorically, her text avows the availability of Merleau-
Ponty's text to a feminist appropriation and, hence, stands in an unin-
tended dialogic relation to Irigaray, even as she accuses that text of being
closed to dialogue.
. The argument Irigaray makes against Merleau-Ponty proceeds in the
following way: to claim, as he does, that the relation of touch or sight is
reversible is to claim that the one who touches can be touched, the one
who sees can be s~en,· and that the subject and object poles of these
experiences are bound together by a connective "flesh of things." This
reversibility presuppeses the substitutability of the subject pole with the
object pole, and this substitutability, she argues, establishes the identity of
both toucher and touched, seer and seen. ("The reversibility of the world
and I suggests," she writes, "some repetition of a prenatal sojourn where
the universe and I forma closed economy" [ESD, 173].)
But remember that there is a relationship between these two reversible
relations, between touch and sight, and that that relationship is not fully
reversible. Of this relation, Irigaray reiterates Merleau-Ponty's position
with some measure of apparent sympathy:

Of course there is a relation of the visible and the tangible. Is the

doubling redoubled an.d crisscrossed? This is less certain. The
look cannot take up the tangible. Thus I never see that in which
I touch or am touched. What is at play in the caress does not see
itself. The in-between, the middle, the medium of the caress does
not see itself. In the same way and differently, I do not see what
allows me to see .... This is perhaps, as far as I am concerned,
what Merleau-Ponty calls the site of flesh in which things bathe?
(ESD, 161-62)

Hence, there is something .which conditions the reversibility of these

relations, which is itself not reversible, an enabling condition that persists
 Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics 121

as a kind of substratum, indeed, a hypokeimenon, without which no visi-

bility or tactility would exist. And it seems to be the selfsame substratum
which conditions the reversibility of tactile relations and visible ones,
and which, in neither case, can be fully touched or fully seen.
Of what is this substratum composed? Irigaray will, in a predictably
psychoanalytic way, read this flesh out of which all sensate experience is
composed as the flesh of the maternal, and, as in her reading of the
Timaeus, she will suggest that this unnameable substrate is the repudiated
maternal itself. In this sense, the feminine might be said to condition
masculine solipsism, understood as the closed circuit of those reversible
relations; but what conditions them is what must be excluded from them,
their defining limit, their constitutive outside. Excluded, unnameable,
but a necessary precondition, the feminine resides metaphysically as the
diffuse "flesh of things." But here as before, it seems crucial to ask
whether it is appropriate to "correct" this diffusion and to reassert the
primacy of the maternal or to question instead this putative primacy.
After all, the maternal body is situated in relations of alterity without
which it could not exist, and these relations, strictly speaking, precede
and condition the maternal body {indeed, often, such relations, under-
stood as norms, restrict certain bodies from becoming "maternal" bodies
altogether}. The "flesh of the world" in its very generality refuses the
synecdochal collapse by which all sensuousness becomes reduced to the
maternal as the sign of its origin. Why does the maternal figure that origina-
tion, when the maternal itself must be produced from a larger world of sensuous
relations? To what extent does Merleau-Ponty's insistence on this prior
world of flesh offer a way to disjoin the feminine from the controlling
figuration of the maternal, and offer bodies a way to signify outside the
binary trap of mothers and men?
Significantly, for Merleau-Ponty, this fleshly substrate of things cannot
be named (and cannot be reduced to any of the names by which it is
approached, thus signifying the limits of the indexical function of the
name). For Merleau-Ponty, language enters this scene as precisely what
can trace and encode the peregrinations of reversible relations, trace and
encode substitutions, but which cannot itself reveal that conditioning
"flesh" which constitutes the medium in which these relations occur, a
medium which would include the flesh of language itself. Indeed, lan-
guage is secondary to this ontological notion of the "flesh" and Merleau-
Ponty will describe it as the second life of this flesh. At the same time he
will claim that if we were to give a full account of the body and its senses,
122 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

we would see that."all the possibilities of language are given in it" (VI,
155).
If language then emerges from and directly reflects these prior move-
ments of bodily life, then it would seem that language is as subject to the
charge of solipsism as were these prior relations. And part of what he
writes seems to support this point. In a lyrical and unfinished set of notes
that constitute the closing paragraphs of his essay, he recalls the circular-
ity of the interrogative in Heidegger: "[I]n opening the horizon of the
nameable and of the sayable; ... speech acknowledge[s] that it has its
place in that horizon ... with one sole gesture [the speaker] closes the
circuit of his relation to himself and that of his relations to the others"
(VI, 154) .
. The closing of this circuit Irigaray will read as a sign of a pervasive
solipsism. As a caricature of his position, she writes, "Speech is not used
to communicate, to encounter, but to talk to oneself, to duplicate and
reduplicate oneself"to surround, even to inter oneself" (ESD, 178). This
is speech that closes off the addressee, which is not properly allocutory,
or which can only figure the addressee on the model of the speaker him-
self. This presumption of the substitutability of the speaker and the ad-
dressed is, for Irigaray, the denial of sexual difference, which she will
argue always set~ a limit to relations of linguistic substitutability. Of
Merleau-Ponty's final remarks, she writes:

No new speech is possible here .... A Word that no longer has

an open future and consequently shuts out certain enunciatory
practices: cries for help, announcements, demands, expressions
of gratitude, prophecy, poetry.... Necessarily, an other is present
in these practices, but not that allocutor for whom I can substi-
tute myself, whom I can anticipate. The circuit is open. Meaning
does not function like the circularity of someething given and
received. It is still in the process of making itself. (ESD, 178)

This language, then; is not yet ethical, for it cannot yet pose a question
the answer to which it does not already possess: "In a certain way, this
subject never enters the world. He never emerges from an osmosis that
allows him to say to the other, "Who art Thou?" But also, "Who am E"
. . . The phenomenology of the flesh that Merleau-Ponty attempts is
without question(s)'! (ESD, 1,83).
But is this right? Does lrigaray's critique not rest on the faulty presump-
 Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics 123

tion that to be implicated in the Other, or in the world that one seeks to
know, is to, have that Other and that world be nothing more than a
narcissistic reflection of oneself? Does Irigaray's own textual implication
in Merleau-Ponty's text not refute the very thesis that she explicitly de-
fends? For she finds herself "implicated" there but she is not, for that
reason, the source or origin of that text; it is, rather, the site of her
expropriation. One might well conclude that for Merleau-Ponty, as well,
to be implicated in the world of flesh of which he is a part is to realize
precisely that he cannot disavow such a world without disavowing him-
self, that he is abandoned to a world that is not his to own. Similarly, if
the "Other" is so fundamentally and ontologically foreign, then the ethi-
cal relation must be one of sanctimonious apprehension from a distance.
On· the contrary, if Merleau-Ponty "is" the Other, without the Other
being reducible to him, then he meets the Other not in an encounter
with the outside, but with a discovery of his own internal impossibility,
of the Other who constitutes him internally. To have one's being impli-
cated in the Other is thus to be intertwined from the start, but not for
that reason to be reducible to-or exchangeable with-one another.
Moreover, to be implicated elsewhere from the start suggests that the
subject, as flesh, is primarily an intersubjective being, finding itself as
Other, finding its primary sociality in a set of relations that are never
fully recoverable or traceable. This view stands in stark contrast both to
the Freudian conception of the "ego" understood as the site of a primary
narcissism and to the various forms of atomistic individualism derived
from Cartesian and liberal philosophical traditions. Indeed, the flesh, un-
derstood to reflect the narcissism of the subject, establishes the limits of
that narcissism in a strong way.
Finally, let me draw attention to one dimension of Merleau-Ponty's
philosophical writing which seems to me to resist closure and to resist
the circularity of solipsism that Irigaray describes. Let us return to the
relation between touch and sight. Is there something which underlies or
connects these relations? And can it be described at all? Merleau-Ponty
writes, "My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand
touching the things, but I never reach coincidence; the coincidence
eclipses at the moment of realization." "[T]he incessant escaping"-as he
calls it-"is not a failure ... is not an ontological void ... it is spanned
by the total being of my body, and by that of the world" (VI, 147-48).
But here it seems the phenomenological experience of not being able
to close this circuit, of being as it were in a perpetual relationship of
124 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty

noncoincidence with oneself, is asserted only then to be retracted

through the postulation of a body and world which overcomes all such
appearances of noncoincidence. Can Merleau-Ponty's own description
hold? Or does he give signs that he cannot describe what holds these
relations together, that the criss~crossing between touch and sight and
language is not al~ays reducible to a continuous and self~referential body?
Remember that he describes this "chasse~crosse" as a chiasm, and that
the rhetorical figure of the chiasm is such that two different relations are
asserted which are not altogether commutative. A chiasm or chiasmus is
defined by Webster's as "an inverted relationship between the syntactic
elements of parallel phrases," but in the OED it is specified as "a gram~
matical figure by which the order of words in one of two parallel clauses
is. inverted in the other." But note tliat while there is a formal symmetry
in the figure of the chiasm, there is no semantic equivalence between the
two phrases symmetrically so paired. For when we say, "when the going
gets tough, the tough get going" we actually use two different meanings
for "going" and two different meanings for "touch" so that the statements
appear to be commutative without, in fact, expressing a relationship of
semantic equivalence. What is it that escapes substitutability or equiva~
lence here? I think it is the very capacity of language to mean more and
differently than .it appears, a certain possibility for semantic excess that
exceeds the formal or syntactic appearance of symmetry. For the hand
that touches is not identical to the hand that is touched, even if it is
the same hand, and this noncoincidence is a function of the temporally
noncoincident ontology of the flesh. And the "tough" who get going are
not quite the same as the "tough" that adjectivally qualified a certain
kind of going. Here meaning is displaced in the course of the claim, as a
kind of metonymic effect of writing itself. And this might be understood
as precisely the kind of "exceeding of itself" or "escaping of itself" of
language that cannot be quite closed up or closed down by the putative
project of solipsism that Irigaray claims governs Merleau~Ponty's text.
In this way, we might ask whether Merleau~Ponty's own writing, a
writing which, important in this chapter, did not have closure, remained
open~ended, and finally failed to make peace with its burgeoning set of
claims, whether this excessive text did not in the end need its editor and
its reader-shall we call this its allocutory "Other," its Irigaray-in order
to exist for us at all?
After all, it will be this text from which Irigaray cites and derives her
own notion of the "two lips," and which she mimes into a feminist usage
 Sexual Difference as a Question of Ethics 125

that Merleau~Ponty could not have intended. Does this not signify a life
of the text that exceeds whatever solipsism afflicts its inception, and
which makes itself available for an Irigarayan appropriation, one in
which, in substituting herself for him, she derives a feminist contribution
to philosophy which is continuous with and a break from what has come
before?

Notes

1. This chapter was originally written in 1990. The publication of the translation of Luce Irigaray's
An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and
Gillian C. Gill [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Henceforth cited as ESD) offers the opportu-
nity for English-speaking readers to consider her most sustained considerations of the history of
philosophy. The text is composed of a set of lectures, ranging from chapters on Plato's Symposium
and Aristotle's Physics to Descartes on The Passions of the Soul, Spinoza on God, and a final set of
reflections on Merleau-Ponty's posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible and Emmanuel
Levinas's Totality and Infinity.
2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson {New York:
Harper and Row, 1962),24; henceforth cited as BT.
3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 146; henceforth cited as VI.
 6
Culpability and the Double Cross:
Irigaray with Merleau .. Ponty
Vicki Kirby

By way of introduction I would like to say something about feminism's

formative importance to my argument's overall sensibility, yet in a way
that might illustrate why the accepted protocols that have come to define
feminism's identity, authority, and authorship might be in need of recon~
sideration.
When 1 first began reading continental criticism and philosophy some
twenty years ago I consumed it as if I had been waiting all my life for its
special form of nourishment. Perhaps it was the implication of revaluing
"the negative"-the supposedly useless, primordial, superfluous, or deni~
128 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty

grated-that felt so-intellectually invigorating and politically and personally

transformative. The promise, put simply, was that we could reconceive
ourselves by contesting the negative's presumed deficiency. It seemed un-
canny, the way that the political inequities that separate and define peo-
ple should be mirrored in the binary structuration of language, a structure
whose hidden system of accounting always equated "otherness" with a
feminized incapacity. What fascinated me most was an apparent connec-
tive tissue that bound representation to corporeal perception. Indeed, it
was the conviction that there was a productive enfolding of language
with life that gave discursive analysis a much broader political legitimacy.
At the time, I found Luce Irigaray's two major works, This Sex Which Is
Not One and Speculum of the Other Woman, quite inspiring in their explo-
ration of language's resonating impact on existential possibilities. Iri-
garay's argument was unusual because it was able to take its shape from
the very contours of philosophy's phallocentric self-definition. However,
this loving "espousal of the philosophers," as Carolyn Burke described it
in "Irigaray Through the Looking Glass," was a perverse form of fidelity
because in its close attention to the openings and folds of these logics it
disclosed the value of their repressed and disavowed interiorities. Iri-
garay's painstaking care with these discourses was especially instructive
because her ability to find transgressive leverage within them achieved
two very important things. First, her discovery of a difference "on the
inside" of phallocentrism effectively shifted our understanding of its deni-
grating energies and oppositional agonistics: it contested the very possi-
bility of an identical self-sameness. Apparently, it was not just woman
who was incoherent. And second, if man was no longer intact as the solid
reference point against which woman's insufficiency could be measured,
then "this sex which is not one" could not be ascribed to just one sex and
one name-"Woman." In sum; then, lrigaray's nuanced interrogation of
subject formation and identity persuaded me that although all conceptual
bifurcations articulate with, and reinforce, a normative sexual diacritics,
the stability of their identifying coordinates and cross-referencing is pro-
foundly compromised. What I hope to offer in the following interchange
between Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty is an illustration of how feminism's
own identity is similarly fragile and why its promiscuous appearance in
unexpected places and forms might be something we seek to encourage
rather than defend against.
Luce Irigaray's An Ethics of Sexual Difference (hereafter cited as E) is
an ambitious project that explores this subject's feminine morphology.
 Culpability and the Double Cross 129

Irigaray explains the difficulty in reconceiving justice as well as the rea-

sons why the enormity of the undertaking underlines its urgency. If our
sense of "right" rests on a natural devaluation and erasure of the feminine
and the female subject, as Irigaray suggests, and if it is through this deni-
gration that we determine what is true, logical, and just, then how are we
to acknowledge the priority of this grounding injustice? Given the reach
of the problem, Irigaray opens her discussion of sexual difference by em-
phasizing the necessity of a thorough overhaul in how we think this issue:
"We need to reinterpret everything concerning the relations between the
subject and discourse, the subject and the world, the subject and the
cosmic, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic. Everything, beginning
with the way in which the subject has always been written in the mascu-
line form, as man, even when it claimed to be universal or neutral" (E,
6). For lrigaray, then, the identity of the subject as well as the identity of
every Western subject and discourse is "always masculine and paternal" (E,
6-7). Thus, lrigaray's conviction that the coordinates of our existence
are organized around "[t]he subject, the master of time, [as] the axis of
the world's ordering" (E, 7), makes her call for a global rearrangement of
things an imperative one.
Given its pivotal importance for her argument as well as for a consider-
able amount of contemporary analysis, I want to focus on Irigaray's cri-
tique of the subject, especially her understanding of the relationship
between the subject and discourse, and the subject and the maternal.
Maurice Merleau-Panty also offers a revisioning of the feminine and the
maternal and lrigaray devotes a chapter to its analysis in the Ethics. How-
ever, although both writers appear to be exploring the same subject, there
are significant differences between them. Irigaray differentiates the femi-
nine against masculinity yet within the identity of humanity proper, at-
tempting to wrest the maternal from its patriarchal confinement. In
contrast to this, Merleau-Ponty conjures the feminine and the maternal
in order to reconceive the subject of humanity itself, the Human no less,
through the body of Nature. Merleau-Ponty refers to the productive con-
text of humanity's delivery as "the flesh of the world," and clearly, this
process of conception cannot be confined to woman. Nevertheless, Iri-
garay regards Merleau-Ponty's global and implicated dispersal of the sub-
ject as an appropriation of feminine attributes, such that the double cross
that corrupts and divides the identity of the maternal from itself, thereby
lending it to everything, becomes a sign of moral failure and culpability
for Irigaray, a barrier that prevents an ethics of sexual difference from
130 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

being articulated. Given the censoriousness of Irigaray's criticisms, I want

to explain why I regard Merleau-Ponty's double cross as an essential in-
gredient in the very possibility of a sexual ethics. In the argument that
follows I will explore some of the implications of Irigaray's circumscrip-
tion of the feminine and the maternal and try to suggest how the "issue"
of conception might be given quite differently.
For Irigaray, the question of the maternal orients us toward questions
about history and origins. It recalls a time in which the gift of life as well
as its nurturing maintenance was first received in tha.t original dwelling
place. And yet it involves much more than this scene of debt and nostal-
gia conventionally concedes. Irigaray warns that nostalgia is a major ob-
stacle to any significant reconsideration of an ethics of sexual difference
because it "blocks the threshold of the ethical world" (E, 142). At first
glance this may seem a curious judgment given Irigaray's own attempts to
articulate a return that will acknowledge the importance of the past and
our ongoing debt to it. And yet it makes sense that this temporal reflex,
or going back, will not be straightforward if, as she suggests, "we must
reconsider the whol& problematic of space and time" (E, 7). In view of
this larger requirement, how might the temporality of nostalgic return
and the place it has conventionally come to occupy for us actually ham-
per or block this .possibility?
lrigaray compares the structure of nostalgia to an edifice. It is a build-
ing whose architecture witnesses man's rather fretful compulsion to dis-
cover and reconnect with his "living roots" (E, 142). The frenzied tempo
and obsessive pathos of its construction is, however, evidence of some-
thing else tnat remains hidden behind its outward facade, namely, man's
anxieties about the carnality of his own history. Man's need to grasp and
commodify the origin, his need to render it accessible and controllable
while nevertheless maintaining it safely in the past, is a protective ma-
neuver that denies the origin in the very act of an apparent recognition.
As man circles around himself in a repeated attempt to return to the
maternal and again recover that original space, "he surrounds himself
with envelopes, containers, 'houses' which prevent him from finding ei-
ther the other or himself" (E, 142). Irigaray generalizes this observation,
epitomizing man as "forever searching for, building, creating homes for
himself everywhere: caves, huts, women, cities, language, concepts, the-
ory, and so on." Thus culture itself is diagnosed as an inherently mascu-
line set of endeavors'and attributes, where "[t]o inhabit is the fundamental
trait of man's being" (E, 141).
 Culpability and the Double Cross 131

Nostalgia works to protect the masculine subject by burying his true

foundations, re-membering his world by cutting it off from "the thresh-
old, the flesh" (E, 141). As a consequence, "[m]an has built himself a
world that is largely uninhabitable. A world in his image? An uninhabi-
table functional body? Like the technical world and all its sciences. Or
like the scientific world and all its techniques" (E, 143). Scientific in-
quiry becomes an instrumental form of knowledge in this account, a
mode of cutting up and dismembering the world into usable and manage-
able parts. And Irigaray insists that such modes of inquiry are a direct
reflection of a very particular way of being in the world, a way of being
that has forgotten its indebtedness to history and to the connectivity of
existence. It seems that man's very style of reflection and the way he
engages and manages his place in the world recapitulate the alienated
relationship he has to his own flesh. "[C]ut into parts like a mechanical
body" (E, 143), he removes himself from himself in order to maintain a
semblance of control. With no "organic rhythm" (E, 143) to unite him,
both the body of man and the body of his world are severed from them-
selves. The inevitable result is that the nature of corporeal substance can
only be recognized at a distance, in the triumphant guise of scientific
mastery and machinic usefulness.
But there is a way out of this alienated space that is perhaps, at the
same time, a more interesting way into it (the spatial metaphorics are
increasingly ambiguous). Irigaray wonders if perhaps a different sense of
space might be offered through "the usual dimension of the feminine"
(E, 141). "[S]taying out in the open, always attuned to the outside, to
the world" (E, 141), the sensate body of perception offers Irigaray a way
back that is not an archaeology of return. Instead of the rather consti-
pated and closed scene of controlled production that is culture, percep-
tion is read as mobile, active, and generous by nature. "Senses always
alert" (E, 141), perception both opens and gives itself without qualifica-
tion. "To perceive, to remain within the perception of the world without
closing it off or closing off the self, amounts to forming or watching over
the threshold of the world" (E, 141). Irigaray aligns this corporeal capacity
for generosity, receptivity, and caring with the subject position of woman
and the feminine, "women, who, it seems, remain within perception
without need of name or concept. Without closure" (E, 141). The inter-
rogative mood of Irigaray's writing is clearly sympathetic to this rather
enigmatic description, for it allows the female subject to remain elusive
in the face of an intense examination of the nature of her being. Irigaray
132 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

is not concerned to' provide a more accurate representation of woman,

but rather to question the definitional constraints that normally find her
lacking. It would appear that an ethics of sexual difference will only be
possible if the syllogism that equates woman with negativity and passivity
is thoroughly reconstrued and revalued.
Irigaray's discussion of Merleau-Ponty's quite remarkable essay "The
Intertwining-The Chiasm," provides a more detailed sense of why this
revaluation of the feminine is needed and how the process might unfold.
Merleau-Ponty is an especially fitting philosopher to think with here be-
cause many of his concerns share an apparent resonance with Irigaray's.
The Visible and the Invisible (hereafter cited as V), for example, a posthu-
mous collection of writings that includes "The Intertwining," represents
Merleau-Ponty's most suggestive meditation on the phenomenology of
perception, a sort of phenomenology of phenomenology. His radical rein-
vention of the terms of this approach signal a major assault on our most
routine notions about subjectivity, as well as the frame within which an
antihumanist critique of the subject is usually mounted. Merleau-Ponty
confounds the division between ideality and materiality, Culture and Na-
ture, and even the Clear separation of the human from its "other," when
he describes the world itself as "the flesh," thus imbuing it with the subtle
intelligence usually reserved for human subjectivity. The flesh of the
world can be regarded as sensible in every possible way because its percep-
tion of itself is an experience of the will to self-knowledge. By recasting
the question of subjectivity as "the flesh," that is, as the world's becoming
itself, Merleau-Ponty is suggesting that there can be no final arrival any
more than there can be a single beginning. This would mean, for exam-
ple, that "human-ness" is not an entity in the world, as if in a container
that is ontologically separate from it: human-ness would not be a separa-
ble site of intellection in an inchoate universe. Rather, the world, by
implication, would always have been in the process of discovering, explor-
ing, redefining, and reinventing the nature of its humanity.
By beginning with the global capacity of "the flesh" to embrace itself,
a reflex that Merleau-Ponty calls "reversibility," we can understand why
the very process of perception for Merleau-Ponty must be a form of self-
encounter. But how are we to understand this comprehensive and com-
prehending "Self"? The philosopher explains that within the expansive
corporeal personification of the "the Sensible," the difference between
birth and thought, substance, and form, body and mind, and origin and
outcome takes on a transitive collapse. A sense of the maternal is cer-
 Culpability and the Double Cross 133

tainly at the heart of the issue, as Merleau~Ponty acknowledges when he

comments in the "Working Notes," "Nature: it is the flesh, the mother"
(V, 267). However, Merleau~Ponty's attempt to read the maternal as the
world's "intertwining," or (re}conceiving (of) itself, represents a com~
plete dislocation of the temporal and spatial coordinates through which
maternity is properly identified.
As we saw above, Irigaray predicates the possibility of an ethics of
sexual difference on the need for this reexamination, suggesting that "we
must reconsider the whole problematic of space and time" (E, 7). Yet
despite the apparent commonality in their arguments, Irigaray finds
Merleau~Ponty's notional disruption along these very lines to be quite
misguided. lrigaray regards the philosopher's rampant dispersal of mater~
nity into the generalized and generative capacity of "the flesh" as a dis~
placement of the feminine, and one that inevitably discounts maternity
in the conventional sense. But does it? As we have seen, Irigaray aligns
perception with the feminine and confirms this morphological connec~
tion through metaphors of "open~ness." Merleau~Ponty also figures per~
ception through the feminine, as is evident in his quite specific use of the
term invagination to describe how the flesh of the world folds back upon
itself in an interrogative reflex. For Merleau~Ponty, then, the world per~
ceives itself by opening itself to the experience of its own difference-the
energies, torsions, contrasts, and tensions of its noncoincidence. In its
very directness, the intention of this global embrace (invagination) is to
seize the essential fullness of Being in all its expressions. And in its desire
for carnal knowledge "the flesh" is unashamedly lacking in reserve: the
wantonness of its desire is so diverse, so perverse, that even when it holds
back from itself it remains in touch with itself.
It is important to appreciate that the generosity of Merleau~Ponty's
reworking of phenomenology is so thoroughly comprehensive in its un~
qualified open~ness to the world that even closure is intrinsic to its
makeup. In other words, the relation of the flesh to itself is such that it
incorporates all the dualities and negations that would conventionally be
assumed to either fall outside it, or to operate as independent entities or
forces against it. Put simply, the flesh cannot be defined· against closure,
for closing, sealing, and separating are intrinsic to its desire for itself; the
differentiation or individuation of itself from itself. In this regard, closure
is not so much a denial as an internal movement, or differential within
"the flesh."
Merleau~Ponty's re~vision of the Sensible tries to acknowledge some~
134 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Pomy

thing of this intel"Il.il1 divergence of the flesh, a divergence, or ecart, as he

calls it, where perception becomes self-interrogation. His notion of the
maternal, and by implication, his understanding of the feminine, should
be read in terms of this generalized scene of corporeal inquiry. The debt
to the maternal opens the question of becoming and is clearly of crucial
importance to Merleau-Ponty's project. However, for Merleau-Ponty, the
generative nature of the Sensible is such that it undoes maternity's spatial
and temporal location as straightforwardly in the past, in a single, identi-
fiable place and moment of time, and given by only one body, one gender,
and through one sexual act. Perception is instead likened to an ontologi-
cal organ of conception. It is a desiring organ that seizes upon its own
alien-ness and, in the wonder of the encounter, is reconceived. The dou-
bled sense of conception that couples knowledge with birth is therefore
inextricably alive in this perverse intercourse whose subject is "a question
consonant with the porous being which it questions and from which it
obtains not an answer, but a confirmation of its astonishment" (V, 102).
For Merleau-Ponty, then, existence is gestation, where this "new type of
being" is "a being .b~ porosity, pregnancy, or generality, and he before
whom the horizon opens is caught up, included within it. His body and
the distances participate in one same corporeity or visibility in general,
which reigns between them and it, and even beyond the horizon, beneath
his skin, unto the depths of being" (V, 149). The volubility of "the flesh"
in its turning back upon itself, in its chiasmic reversibility, is not an act
of nostalgic mourning for one origin, now irretrievably lost. Rather, it is
the dehiscence, or -bursting open, of the origin itself in its infinite re-
productio~. This explains why Merleau-Ponty's elaboration of percep-
tion is not dependent upon a notion of the subject or self that, however
primordial, must preexist in some foundational way the capacity to en-
gage the world. Although this assumption is evident in his earlier work,
in, for example, The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty's radical
reflection on the notion of subjectivity leads to its remarkable rearticula-
tion. A passage from Signs (hereafter cited as S) that tentatively muses
about different directions, illustrates the general intention his work began
to realize and is suggestive for how we might read "The Intertwining":

Take others at the moment they appear in the world's flesh. They
would not exist for me, it is said, unless I recognized them, deci-
phering in -them some sign of the presence to self whose sole
model I hold within me. But though my thought is indeed only
 Culpability and the Double Cross 135

the other side of my times, of my passive and perceptible being,

whenever I try to understand myself the whole fabric of the per-
ceptible world comes too, and with it come the others who are
caught in it. Before others are or can be subjected to my condi-
tions of possibility and reconstructed in my image, they must
already exist as outlines, deviations, and variants of a single 'Vi-
sion in which I too participate. For they are not fictions with
which I might people my desert-offspring of my spirit and for-
ever unactualized possibilities~but my twins or the flesh of my
flesh. Certainly I do not live their life; they are definitively absent
from me and I from them. But that distance becomes a strange
proximity as soon as one comes back home to the perceptible
world, since the perceptible is precisely that which can haunt
more than one body without budging from its place. No one will
see that table which now meets my eye; only I can do that. And
yet I know that at the same moment it presses upon every glance
in exactly the same way. For I see these other glances too. Within
the same field with things they sketch out a dis-position of the
table, linking its parts together for a new compresence. (S,
15-16)

There is something profoundly moving in the intimacy of this shared

horizon of emergence; this semiosis of ontological differentiation through
which the flesh of the world experiences and understands itself. The im-
plosion of space-time that the vitalism of this chiasmic contagion repre-
sents is extraordinary because whatever we might posit as preexistent in
nature is, still, in the process of becoming itself. For Merleau-Ponty, this
insight is not the ideality of philosophical abstraction as it is convention-
ally understood. Indeed, the importance of what he is trying to articulate
here is also acknowledged by lrigaray herself when she opens her discus-
sion of "The Intertwining-The Chiasm" with the philosopher's own
words:

If it is true that as soon as philosophy declares itself to be reflec-

tion or coincidence it prejudges what it will find, then once again
it must recommence everything, reject the instruments reflection
and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a
locus where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences
that have not yet been 'worked over,' that offer us all at once,
136 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

pell-mell, 'both 'subject' and 'object,' both existence and essence,

and hence give philosophy resources to redefine them. (E, 151)

Despite the acknowledgment that immediately follows this quotation,

namely, that "[u]p to this point, my reading and my interpretation of the
history of philosophy agree with Merleau-Ponty" (E, 151), Irigaray is also
signaling that she will soon part company with him. One example of the
tensions between their arguments can be seen in Irigaray's need to define
this "locus" where oppositional determinations and their political bag-
gage "have not yet been distinguished." Irigaray's gloss on these words
turns into the imperative, "we must go back to a moment of prediscursive
experience" (E, 151). However, Merleau-Ponty's sense of a return that
will nevertheless acknowledge these contraries "all at once, pell-mell," is
not at all a straightforward appeal to a prediscursive. His argument is not
reliant on an unfcilding sense of linear time that necessarily installs a
prelapsarian "before," with the inevitable nostalgia and morallamenta-
tion that such an appeal evokes. And this makes sense if we remember
that Merleau- Pon~is notion of the feminine, and maternity too, is an
interrogative one, where identity is both opened and dispersed through
the question of existence and becoming. Quite clearly, Merleau-Ponty is
not at all interested in resolving the identity of what is proper to a subjec-
tive locus of sexual difference, "as if one already knew what to exist is
and as if the whole question were to apply this concept appropriately"
(V, 6).
The philosophe~s' quite different intentions are again made apparent
in Irigaray'~ "Love cif the Other," the essay that immediately precedes her
discussion of "The Intertwining" in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. There
she evokes what is positive and somehow necessary for all of us in recov-
ering this originary space of "the before." It is a "zone of calm and respite
from the race toward productivity.... Something that resists dispersion,
diaspora, the explosion of the flesh or of the incarnation" (E, 143-44).
More telling still, Irigaray's sense of what is vital, well, and good is elided
with the ability, first of all, to cohere, and then to connect, an ability that
she identifies with tactility. Iftactility joins and remembers it seems that
vision dissects and forgets. For Irigaray, then, splitting as such is equated
with a sense of violence against an originary integrity, a position that can
be explained by her commitment, however critical, to a psychoanalytic
understanding of subject formation. Put simply, the child's birth, or en-
trance into culture, is achieved through the loss and then the denigration
 Culpability and the Double Cross 13 7

of that (m)othered part of itself. The moral tenor in Irigaray's argument

rests on an urgent attempt to stall what she regards as the rapidly ap-
proaching cataclysm that will be realized by man's love of technological
and scientific dissection. Warning against this dissolution into the machi-
nic, Irigaray comments, "Nietzsche thought of the subject as an atom.
This atom will be split if it fails to find some life-enhancing rhythm" (E,
144).
Yet Merleau-Ponty finds this "life-enhancing rhythm" in the very abil-
ity of "the flesh" to perceive and center itself in its dispersion. Dispersion
can be read as maternity here because the issuing forth of any identity is
an involvement that is present across space and time: it must incorporate
the (w)hole of "the flesh." This need not mean, however, that we are
unable to acknowledge a particular location, or " condensation" of con-
ception and emergence. What is so remarkable in Merleau-Ponty's rev-
erie that "[n]o one will see that table which now meets my eye; only I
can do that," is that the very "here and nowness" of his singular experi-
ence can only be actualized, or validated, because "at the same moment it
presses upon every glance in exactly the same way" (emphasis added).
For Merleau-Ponty then, difference within unity, or particularity within
the universality of space/time enmeshment, is not made up of opposi-
tional moments but of coordinates through which "the flesh" takes mea-
sure of itself. The body's senses are suggestively described as "measurants
(mesurants) for Being, dimensions to which we can refer it, but not a
relation of adequation or of immanence" (V, 103). Interestingly, Merleau-
Ponty's quantum understanding of perception, with its splitting of the
atom and dispersed emergence of the subject, is positioned against the
feminine in Irigaray's argument, as if the integrity of the feminine should
be maintained and defended against its improper use.
However, if the radical interiority of the Sensible is utterly referential
then we can understand why Merleau-Ponty's notion of identity, or self-
possession, has a quite peculiar dimensional density. He posits the work-
ings of perceptual registration as an implicated weave, or language, that
"holds with all its fibers onto the fabric of the visible, and thereby onto
a fabric of invisible being" (V, 132). Whether in the instance of a percep-
tual moment or in the existence of a perceiving being, identity for
Merleau-Ponty is "a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and
the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom" (V, 132).
Merleau-Ponty therefore corporealizes semiosis such that "the flesh" is
articulate in its perceptions and in contact with itself through autodisper-
138 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

sion. However, it 1s precisely here, in this collapse and dispersal of both

the subject and language in/as "the flesh," that Irigaray discovers a mas-
culinist reductionism. I want to focus on the reasoning behind this charge
in order to suggest why Irigaray's critique might be misguided and why
the importance of her own efforts might be furthered rather than hin-
dered by Merleau-Ponty's quite exquisite feel for language. Ironically, per-
haps, I will argue that Irigaray's critique of Merleau-Ponty comes to rest
on the same nostalgic desire for self-presence that elsewhere she describes
as "block[ing] the threshold of the ethical world" (E, 142).
The following comment by Merleau-Ponty provides us with some ap-
preciation of how he conceives an ontological discourse, a becoming sen-
sible: "[I]f we were to make completely explicit the architectonics of the
human body, its ontological framework, and how it sees itself and hears
itself, we would see that the structure of its mute world is such that all
the possibilities oflanguage are already given in it" (V, 155). Accordingly,
the nature of the phenomenological world is neither prior to the technol-
ogy of the word, nor subsumed to its supposed abstractions. Rather, it is
the implicate ord~r~of an intertwining whose carnal semiosis expresses
these definitive divisions. The material ground of the senses (nature)
according to Merleau-Ponty does not constitute a realm that can be vio-
lated by its imperfect translation into the separate linguistic register of
the ideal (culture). His reworking of language therefore shares the Derri-
dean conviction that what grounds, and indeed is, language, is difference
itself. Importantly then, what we understand by "language" significantly
departs from conve~tion when we acknowledge that the ground of refer-
ence and s~bstance are included in its systematicities: "The meaning is
not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of
'psychic reality' spread over the sound: it is the totality of what is said,
the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with
the words for those who have ears to hear. And conversely the whole
landscape is overrun with words" (V, 155). Merleau-Ponty concludes his
thesis by recalling Paul Valery's insight that language is a sort of conta-
gion: "[L]anguage is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is
the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests" (V, 155).
For Merleau-Ponty, meaning involves disjunction, as it is "something"
that emerges as the global subject learns "to hear what it says (l'entendre)"
(V, 155). The phrase evokes a sort of narcissistic focus wherein the world
attends to itself, as if fascinated by its own variation. But why should
Merleau-Ponty describe the whole of this corporeal tissue of the Sensible,
 Culpability and the Double Cross 139

with all its perceptual styles and modalities, as "the Visible?" lrigaray is
understandably. critical of this apparent privileging of the eye, with its
phallogocentric thematizations. However, this "touch~vision system," as
Merleau~Ponty calls it, is intricacy itself. Perception becomes a relational
enfolding where, for example, "a certain blue of the sea is so blue that
only blood would be more red" (V, 132). Thus, Merleau~Ponty imbues
Vision with a sort of wild synesthetic dialogue within and across all per~
ceptual modalities, such that we hear visually, taste aurally, and so on.
This reconfigured expansiveness means that "Visibility" can be read
in much the same way as Jacques Derrida's "textuality," or "general writ~
ing." It is important to recall that Derrida does not delineate between
writing and speech, or privilege the former over the latter when he de~
scribes speech as writing. Yet his intervention does destabilize what is
taken as an anchor for the difference between these two modes of expres~
sion. Derrida's reversal effects an interrogation of why speech and writing
are interpreted through the bipolar template of origin to supplement,
simple to complex, corporeal truth and purity to the contagious retrovirus
of intellectual corruption. We could add here (as it is this founding divi~
sion that informs the nostalgic imperative in Irigaray's own argument),
Nature to Culture, with the feminine as primordial and generative and
the masculine as secondary and instrumental. Interestingly, and despite
Merleau~Ponty's complex elaboration of what he means by "Visibility,"
Irigaray seems intent on diagnosing the curious ambiguities in his posi~
tion as simply erroneous.
Merleau~Ponty's corporeal semiosis, this diverging of "the flesh" from
itself, completely fractures the self~presence of separate sensory modal~
ities within one body, as well as the self~presence of separate, individual
bodies within the body of the world. This amplification, which is also a
form of condensation, is like a grammatology writ large. The ontological
implications are apparent in a quite remarkable phrase from "The Experi~
ence of Others" (hereafter cited as 0), where Merleau~Ponty says that
"there is already a kind of presence of other people within me" (0, 56).
And again, from the same text, he remarks, "Everything transpires as if
the other person's intuitions and motor realizations existed in a sort of
relation of internal encroachment, as if my body and the body of the
other person together formed a system" (0, 52). This grammatological
intertwining of the flesh involves a fold that must continue to touch itself
even as it opens itself up. And here we sense why Merleau~Ponty might
140 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

generalize the fold ·of invagination right across the flesh of the world in
order to evoke the contemporary nature of this coordination.
Irigaray erases what is utterly extraordinary in this reading of carnal
speech, this generalized porosity of the "two lips," when she interprets it
as a symptom of masculinist theft, correcting Merleau-Ponty's confusion
between flesh and language by way of an excavation that promises to
restore hierarchical order to the relationship. According to Irigaray, con-
tact with the ur-ground of existence is no longer possible, as it is lost
beneath an archaeology of time. However, Irigaray advises against bury-
ing maternity in its original wrappings underneath the unfolding of his-
tory, as if it has no strings to the present. Indeed, for Irigaray it is precisely
this style of thinking that explains the denigration of maternity as an
expendable moment whose value is quickly exhausted; as if the gift of life
is dead and gone. This conclusion causes Irigaray to mount her interven-
tion on two fronts. First, she argues that the past is a present that we
continue to receive'. And second, she insists that attempts to recuperate
the originary moment of debt to maternity through its reification in the
present actually bury and repress its specificity even more deeply. Her
strategy, then, is to explore the differences between these apparently sim-
ilar positions in order to acknowledge the need for a sexual ethics.
Nevertheless,'this doubled strategy, although it strives to enliven our
appreciation of time's implications, is unable to disrupt our understanding of
duration as a linear development of separate moments-an archaeology.
Ironically, perhapsr Irigaray's criticisms of Merleau-Ponty's synesthetic
melding of.the senses presume this same logic when it uncovers tactility
at the origin, in a space and time that identifies its precedence in the
evolution of different sense modalities. Thus, her conclusion that "Merleau-
Ponty accords an exorbitant privilege to vision" (E, 174) is an inevitable
one, given her premise that she is witnessing a "[r]eduction of the tactile
into the visible" (E, 175). Already present at the origin, then, tactility
becomes a perceptual ground and nurturing support, its difference femi-
nized and isolated from what it bears. "[T]he tangible is the matter and
memory for all of the sensible. Which remembers without remembering
thematically? It constitutes the very flesh of all things that will be sculp-
ted, sketched, painted, felt, and so on, out of it" (E, 164; emphasis added).
In sum, Irigaray's understanding of maternity is that it gives but is not
itself given becaust; it is the given: it is not parented or constituted by
anything other than itself. A pure virgin birth.
Merleau-Ponty's Vision of maternity is wildly different from this be-
 Culpability and the Double Cross 141

cause it does more than acknowledge an ongoing debt that was given,
even as its effects are still being lived and felt. More than this, it seriously
confounds the conventions of space and time that excavate an elemen-
tary transfer in an original place of inevitable demarcation. It grants that
maternity is a gift that involves and revalues the future as well as the past,
the generative capacities of men as well as women, and even the notions
of vitality and efficacy that conventionally separate the animate from the
inanimate. Whereas Merleau-Ponty's Vision is tactility, Irigaray's clarifi-
cation marks a return to identity that assumes a primordial segregation.
lrigarayexplains:

In our language, we are always basically idealists. Cut off from

mother nature, where, whence, we are born, from our archaic
state, our archives of flesh. Twisted "upon ourselves," but starting
from a primary part of the self that is abandoned "with the
other"-another feminine for both sexes. A part of the self does
not come back to us in its primary-perception-reception. A part
of our vitality that is buried, forgotten with the other, sometimes
in the other, and which we receive with an other "voice," that
of an ideal order (?) which covers us over. And which lacks voice,
moreover. The text of the law, of codes, no longer has a voice.
Even if it is in some way built upon the "model" of the voice. (E,
169)

In this notion of the law as the distortion, and even erasure, of the
voice, we witness an appeal to the self-presence of the origin in its pure
immediacy; speech before writing. For Irigaray, then, the voice (nature,
the body) is ruptured and violated from the outside, that is, by culture
and the language of the symbolic in its thematizations. Although flesh is
engendering (maternal), it does not appear to be engendered (parented)
in Irigaray's argument. It is as if flesh precedes the rupture of copula-tion
(becomings), as if, in simple terms, it just is. Irigaray does acknowledge
that there is an internal movement, or differential, at work within origin-
ary substance, yet its nature appears to be qualitatively different in that
it remains wholesome even when it touches (others) itself.
lrigaray's presumption that the origin is sealed within itself such that
it can only be broken open from the outside is a scene of sexual encounter
that must define man as violating perpetrator. Perhaps men can violate
one another, and they can certainly violate women, but according to this
142 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty

perspective it see~s that women are simply incapable of such involved

intercourse; a constitutional incapacity. It is as if the question of an ethics
of sexual difference only arises in the heterosexual encounter, at the abyss
that falls in between two already separate identities; and as if the very
determination of an identity and the presumption of its integrity is not
already a scene of ethical consideration. For Irigaray, an ethics of sexual
difference questions how we encounter someone radically alien, someone
whose existence is not just an inverted apparition of our own. But who
are they, for themselves, in their own right? And why must we ground an
ethics on the determination of a sexual priority, assuming we know what
that is? If ontological difference involves thinking through the copula in
its most generat sense, then the natu.re of sexual difference must remain
a question to be explored rather than a matter to be adjudicated.
In order to open the possibility of a "just" encounter, Irigaray argues
that provision will have to be made for the maternal-feminine that has
been secreted away, entombed, and silenced. For if the difference of the
feminine is not guarded against masculine appropriation (penetration),
then the threshold of the ethical cannot be safely broached. If not, then
the inevitable outcome, as Irigaray sees it, is that the feminine will again
appear in the guise of the same. But if we return to Merleau,Ponty at this
point, asking how he might proceed in the face of this possible impasse,
we discover that Irigaray's metaphorics of purity and danger have been
significantly reconceptualized. It is no longer a question of how the touch
of alterity will behandled and kept on the "outside," as if penetration is
improper. .for Merleau,Ponty, the ability of "the flesh" to touch itself on
the outside is at the same time a penetration/investigation of itself from
the inside. In other words, the very notion of violation is completely
refigured in this inside/outside, space/time conversion/inversion.
I want to explicate this po"int further by returning to the question of
language. As witnessed above, these thinkers understand the identity and
ontology of language very differently, and that difference permeates their
entire conceptual project. Irigaray, for example, assumes that language
(culture) is in the world, as if it replaces the maternal origin of nature
from which it is now severed. It is "[a] kind of duplication or stand, in for
the constitution of the flesh? A reversal of the maternal gift of flesh, in
the autarchy of the subject of and in language" (E, 179). Irigaray's de'
scription of "the gereliction of the lack in language" (E, 180) would be
apposite if it is indeed true that language is an "organism" or "system"
that substitutes for something now lost to us, namely, our carnal begin,
 Culpability and the Double Cross 143

nings. However, as Irigaray acknowledges, Merleau-Ponty understands

carnality as thoroughly garrulous; as an originary vociferousness wherein
"all the possibilities of language are already given" (E, 180).
And here is the rub. Irigaray expresses a disapproving frustration with
the fact that "[t}here is no silence for Merleau-Ponty (E, 180) because
she regards this internal dialogue of the flesh as a denial and repression
of difference, as if the reversibility of language must remain a solipsism of
sameness because it is no longer in touch with its carnal foundations.
Interestingly, there is a momentary hesitation in Irigaray's judgment at
this point when she acknowledges something puzzling in Merleau-Ponty's
notion of an origin that could be pregnant with language (E, 180). Nev-
ertheless, because Irigaray is bound to defend the circumscription of femi-
nine identity and its corollaries, she is forced to conclude that Merleau-
Ponty's framework of constitutive and gestatory reversibility is a topsy-
turvy erasure of the feminine where "[n}othing new can be said" (E,
180).
For Merleau-Ponty, however, language does not bear a severed rela-
tionship to the world because it is an expression of the world in its self-
violation. Quite clearly, violation is not a term to be simply condemned
in this reading, any more than "corruption" can be interpreted as a moral
flaw. In Merleau-Ponty's argument, where identity is utterly violated, it
becomes clear that corruption engenders. Masculinism mothers femi-
nism. And appropriation is not simply theft but also birth. Although
Merleau-Ponty undoes identity, this is no haphazard dissolution. Rather,
he offers us a sense of how identity emerges through structured moments
and rhythms of intercourse, where every act is generally born, and yet
never in the same way. "Sameness," then, is no longer a burden, blocking
the possibility of how we might think a sexual ethics in its radical differ-
ence, for it is already differentiated, and at work, in reconceiving its own
critique. Irigaray reads the cut that culture (masculinity) inflicts upon
itself in an attempt to severe its relations with nature (the feminine) in
moral terms, as a wounding that is essentially masculine because it comes
from outside. However, if this fault line is itself fractured, if it reappears
ubiquitously and across the scale like a Mandelbrot filigree of repetitive
transformation that is integral to all identity, then the entire universe is
essentially at fault.
My reading ofMerleau-Ponty's posthumous essay and its implications
for the question of ethics starts and ends here, where no one is to blame.
That is the difficulty. An ethics does not preclude blame or deny violence
144 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty

in the ordinary sense. But the realization that culpability is not simply
attributed or explained brings a more forgiving sense of generosity, albeit
one that continues to concern us. We will remember that Irigaray's call
to action in the beginning of this essay reads, "We need to reinterpret
everything concerning the relations between the subject and discourse,
the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic
and the macrocosmic" (E, 6). If we take this call seriously, then it is not
only the ground of the male subject that becomes unstable as his friable
identity is acknowledged. The collective subject of Mankind also suffers
a shock wave because our shared humanity and its unique capacities can-
not be defined or enclosed against a nonhuman world of comparative
insufficiency. Importantly, the resulting instability of these identities is
not resolved with the corrective, from Mankind to Humankind.
I want to close with what for me is one of the most destabilizing and,
literally, wonderful passages in "The Intertwining." As I read it, it does
not repeat the conventional negative moves of either a humanist or an
antihumanist critique. And yet it does not dismiss them as simply mis-
taken:

When we speak of the flesh of the visible, we do not mean to do

anthropology, to describe a world covered over with all our own
projections, leaving aside what it can be under the human mask.
Rather, we mean that carnal being, as a being of depths, of sev-
eralleaves or several faces, a being in latency, and a presentation
of a certain absence, is a prototype of Being, of which our body,
the sensible sentient, is a very remarkable variant, but whose
constitutive paradox already lies in every visible. (V, 136)

The challenge and charge in these words cannot be enlisted, at least in

any straightforward way, to resolve the injustices of sexual discrimination,
or racism, or even the long and ongoing histories of global exploitation.
Indeed, the apportioning of culpability, however pragmatically necessary,
if simply left at that will actually elide the complications in Merleau-
Ponty's Vision. It will fail to acknowledge that behaviors, even when
individual, are enabled by a community. There are no true isolates. Thus,
if the reversibility of the flesh is read as responsibility, then, as suggested
earlier, no one is to blame. All individuals and acts issue from "the flesh"
of sexual difference~the constant process of realignment. "The Inter-
twining" explores the intricate nature of this involvement: "And what
 Culpability and the Double Cross 145

we have to understand is that there is no dialectical reversal from one of

these views to the other; we do not have to reassemble them into a syn-
thesis: they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate
truth" (V, 155).
In sum, the negative associations that attend "the feminine," "the
corporeal," and "woman" make much less sense if they cannot be con-
tained as the primordial "other" of what comes next (Man, instrumental
reason, Culture). And if we cannot identify woman as the impaired inver-
sion of man, then woman is not the origin/mother, a vessel to be broken
into and out of, a figure whose fragility, violation, and comparative
worthlessness are inevitable. Similarly, the identity of "man" will not
locate the culprit who is driven to capitalize, denigrate, and destroy, for
the political theater is complicitous. Given this, the quiet provocation in
Merleau-Ponty's Vision is the invitation to practice politics differently:
how to effectively instrumentalize a critique of instrumentality, how to
explain inequity and oppression without reinforcing their terms of refer-
ence, how to appreciate that puzzles about "the enigma of woman" have
universal application? Feminism certainly forfeits its coherence in this
reVisioning, but is not feminism's identity always fraught with its own
undoing, its own impropriety and willful curiosity about things it has
come to accept?

Works Cited

Burke, Carolyn. "Irigaray Through the Looking Glass." Feminist Studies 7 (Summer 1981):
288-306.
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by C. Burke and O. Gill. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1993.
- - . Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by G. C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1985.
- - . This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by C. Porter with C. Burke. Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press, 1985.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "The Experience of Others." Translated by F. Evans and H. J.
Silverman. Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 28 (1982-83): 1-3.
- - . The Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by C. Smith. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1962.
- - . Signs. Translated by R. C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1995.
- - . The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968.
 7
Urban Flesh
Gail Weiss
The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term
"element," in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a
general thing, midway between the spatia-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate
principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being.
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Intertwining-The Chiasm"

Flesh, the flesh of each one is not substitutable for the other.
-Luce Irigaray, "The Invisible of the Flesh"

The Violence of Binaries

Through a critical appropriation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception
of flesh, Luce lrigaray stresses those aspects of the flesh that Merleau-
This chapter has itself been a dynamic construction, one that many others have participated in
and helped along. I am especially grateful to members of the International Merleau-Panty Circle,
my first philosophical home, for their instructive comments on the earliest version of Urban
Flesh. A later incarnation of the original paper benefited enormously from the insights of mem-
bers of the Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and was later published in
Philosophy Today 49 (2005). And finally, the excellent, detailed recommendations of wonderful
148 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty

Ponty merely hints at when he suggests that the flesh stylizes being,
namely, the differentiations of the flesh, how the flesh of one cannot be
exchanged for the flesh of another. Irigaray is especially concerned with
a very particular form of fleshly differentiation, namely, sexual difference,
and she takes Merleau-Ponty to task for failing to acknowledge its irre-
versibility. Most notably, she argues that women's flesh has historically
been understood as a (deficient) mirror of men's flesh, a specular surface
that, far from revealing genuine difference, reveals only what men want
to see. The danger, on her account, of understanding the flesh as a "gen-
eral thing" is that the flesh is not pure generality; rather, the flesh is
always already differentiated, and some forms of differentiation, most no-
tably sexual differentiation, are misrecognized if they are understood
through the model of reversibility that Merleau-Ponty famously illustrates
through the example of one hand touching the other. In this example,
the hand touched tn tum becomes the hand touching, and while these
two experiences are distinct, the capacity of either hand to have either
experience implies a sameness in difference, a narcissistic cycle that Iri-
garay identifies with>a masculine desire to encompass and master genuine
difference. Opposing Merleau-Ponty's "elemental" logic of generality, a
generality that she claims is at odds with the ongoing, polymorphous sex-
speCific differentiation that distinguishes feminine flesh, the sex "which
is not one," Irigaray is nonetheless clearly indebted to Merleau-Ponty's
insight that the flesh functions as an "incarnate principle that brings a
style of being wherever there is a fragment of being." Indeed, I would
argue, MerJeau-Ponty's provocative understanding of how the flesh sty-
lizes being suggests an ongoing process of differentiation that cannot be
reduced to sameness. And yet, insofar as it stylizes, the flesh also unifies,
weaving together disparate gestures, movements, bodies, and situations
into a dynamic fabric of meaning that must be continually reworked,
made, and unmade.
The city is itself an excellent example of such a richly textured fabric
of meaning. We need only look to the checkered racist and sexist histor-
ies of so many American cities to recognize both the fragility as well as
the strength of the ties that collectively produce the varied stylizations
(liberatory as well as oppressive) of urban flesh. By emphasizing the cor-

philosophical colleagues, ipcluding most notably Ellen Feder and Eduardo Mendieta, as well as
the anonymous comments I received from the reviewer for this volume, have led to the continued
evolution of uiy thoughts on the possibilities and limitations of urban flesh.
 Urban Flesh . 149

poreal connections and disconnections that differentiate what I am

calling urban flesh, in this chapter I seek to support the work of contem-
porary feminist theorists, critical race theorists, disability theorists, and
others who refuse the reductive violence of the binary logic that would
have us privilege unity over difference or difference over unity. As we
shall see, however, such a position should not be construed as an escape
from the violence of limitation, for this latter is encountered outside, as
well as within, binary systems.
The focus for this particular discussion, then, is on the differentiations
that produce and are produced by the materiality of the urban, that is, by
urban flesh. The very expression urban flesh invokes the specter of that
which allegedly escapes the urban, namely, nature or natural flesh. To
speak of urban flesh, then, requir~s that we come to terms in some way
with the role that nature and the concept of the natural play in circum-
scribing the possibilities and limits of urban existence.! Just as it is no
longer fashionable to embrace a Cartesian mind/body dualism, the na-
ture/city divide is also held by many theorists to be passe, an artificial
distinction that has traditionally taken the form of reifying the "purity"
of nature in contrast to the "polluting" features of urban life. 2 Moreover,
just as the gendered connotations of the mind/body distinction have been
rendered visible by feminist theorists, so too has the nature/urban distinc-
tion been recognized as genderedj even more obviously it is racialized. 3
As a result of the important critical analyses provided by feminist theo-
rists, critical race theorists, and others, romantic invocations of the purity
and peacefulness of nature versus the pollution and violence of urban
existence appear naive at best and run the danger of supporting sexist,
racist, and classist political agendas. Exploring Merleau-Ponty's emphasis
on the necessary violence of incarnate existence, the violence of the
flesh, is the strategy I employ here in order to arrive at an understanding
of urban flesh that does not accept the conventional nature/culture, pure/
polluting, feminine/masculine binaries.
Insofar as these binaries themselves help to reinforce social and politi-
cal inequities that result in violence, violence may seem an unlikely ally
in the deconstruction of oppressive binaries that fail to capture the com-
plex realities they seek to circumscribe and contain. However, as Hannah
Arendt, quoting William O'Brien, observes, "Sometimes 'violence is the
only way of ensuring a hearing for moderation'" (Arendt, On Vio-
lence,79).4 Arendt, like Merleau-Ponty, has no intention of glorifying
violence. In her words, "[T]he danger of violence, even if it moves con-
150 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

sciously within a I}onextremist framework of short-term goals, will always

be that the means overwhelm the end. If goals are not achieved rapidly,
the result will be not merely defeat but the introduction of the practice
of violence into the whole body politic" (80). Violence, for Arendt, is a
human creation; it is introduced into the world through human activity:
"Neither violence nor power is a natural phenomenon, that is, a manifes-
tation of the life process; they belong to the political realm of human
affairs whose essentially human quality is guaranteed by man's faculty of
action, the ability to begin something new" (82). Yet Arendt also asserts
that violence is a natural human emotion, and that violence can be the
very vehicle through which we "set the scales of justice right again ....
In this sense, rage and the violence that sometimes-not always-goes
with it belong among the 'natural' human emotions, and to cure man of
them would mean nothing less than to dehumanize or emasculate him"
(64).
Arendt's claim that violence is not natural because it stems from
human rather than: nonhuman activity, but that it is nonetheless a "natu-
ral" human emotioQ. whose absence would dehumanize and emasculate
us, is striking. 5 Her appeal to human nature seems to imply that violence,
as a "natural" emotion that helps to define us as human beings, is ethi-
cally justifiable, at least on some occasions. And yet, as feminist theorists
such as Sherry Ortner and others have shown us, we must be suspicious
of even such well-intentioned invocations of nature (especially when
they lead to a further conflation of the human and the masculine) be-
cause of the sexist and racist practices that have used the concept of the
natural to legitimize oppression.
Turning our attention to the urban/nature dichotomy complicates'
these matters further, given the fact that the violence of the city, con-
ceived of as a wholly human cr:eation, has often been contrasted with the
peacefulness of the natural, that is, nonhuman, world. And, while hard-
and-fast distinctions between the world of nature and the urban world
have often been challenged, the challenges themselves have taken differ-
ent forms depending on the individual social, historical, and ideological
commitments of the theorists themselves. Ecofeminists such as Carol Big-
wood advocate that we embrace and celebrate our primordial relationship
to a "world-earth-home" that restores nature (and the feminine) to its
rightful primacy as the very foundation of our world. Others, such as
critical theorist Steven Vogel, argue that there is no such thing as nature
insofar as it is romantically c'Onceived of as a "pure" domain independent
 Urban Flesh 151

of the city and culture. Both Bigwood and Vogel seek the elimination of
arbitrary distinctions between nature and culture; however, they ap-
proach this project through opposite paths: Bigwood by reminding us that
nature is everywhere, even in the heart of the city; and Vogel, that nature
is nowhere: it is culture that is ubiquitous and that has posited nature as
its alter ego and legitimizing origin. Whether nature is indeed "every-
where" or "nowhere," it is clear that it functions as an overdetermined,
regulative ideal in our very thoughts about culture more generally and
urban existence more particularly.

The Violence of Emplacement

The inescapability of nature and the crucial role it plays in establishing
our sense of place is also explored by Edward Casey in Getting Back into
Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Here Casey
argues: "Once our bodies are comfortably ensconced in buildings, we sim-
ply tend to close out the larger world of nature. Yet the natural world
surrounds every body and every building, finally if not immediately. Even
if this wider world seems independent of human beings' cherished aims
and interests, it remains around us as a mute presence tacitly waiting to
be acknowledged" (147-48). Reinforcing Heidegger's discussion in "The
Origin of the Work of Art" of the earth that sustains and supports the
world, concealing its active, constitutive presence in the process, Casey
affirms that in our relations with cities, nature is always present, yet is
rarely registered as such. Rather than remaining within the confines of
the Heideggerian tension between a self-concealing earth and a self-
revealing world, Casey, in a Merleau-Pontian vein, turns his attention to
the lived body that is the very site of this tension, that which grounds
our own sense of "emplacement" within the world. For if, as Merleau-
Panty suggests in the Phenomenology of Perception, the body is itself a
horizon for all possible and actual experience, it is imperative that we
arrive at a better understanding of how our own bodies are themselves
situated, or "emplaced" within the world in which we dwell.
The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York
City on September 11, 2001, offer one of the most vivid contemporary
examples of the powerful role the city plays in our very sense of our own
corporeality. Searing images of the flame- and smoke-engulfed North and
152 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

South Towers, shbwn around the world, followed the vertical trajectory
of falling bodies as person after person chose to jump to their deaths
rather than succumb to an equally certain but slower and more painful
death inside the burning buildings. Footage from that day has shown us
scores of people hanging out of the North Tower from its uppermost
floors, frantically breaking through the skin of the building to signal their
distress and their hope for assistance that never came from the outside
world. As witnesses to their pain and suffering, however, we find that
our own relationship to those monumental buildings in which they were
trapped has become transformed. These victims, and the buildings them-
selves, have produced a sense of personal, communal, national, and even
international vulnerability that is visceral.
"Ground Zero," that nonplace where the twin towers once stood, is a
reminder of the fragility of our own emplacement in the world. Although
the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., was quickly rebuilt, no longer reveal-
ing the black scars- along one of its five faces that put the lie to its alleged
impregnability, Ground Zero continues to present the destructive power
of terrorism for all to see. 6 The collapse of the towers' own bodies was as
shocking for many as were the deaths of the thousands of people who
were trapped inside. Indeed, although the World Trade Center has always
been a controversial presence in New York City-a source of civic and
national pride for some as well as an icon to American cultural imperial-
ism for others-its symbolic and material significance has only grown,
becoming more complex and even more contradictory, since its destruc-
tion. Correspondingly, the bodily identities of those who have been asso-
ciated with it, including victims, bystanders, residents of New York City
and the surrounding metropolitan area, other Americans, allies, enemies,
and the terrorists and their supporters themselves, have also been compli-
cated and problematized in unforeseeable ways.
In Edmund Husserl's language, the destruction of the World Trade
Center towers has disrupted the "natural attitude," the "taken-for-
granted" perspective toward our bodily surroundings that Americans have
had the luxury of holding onto in a country that escaped the severe
physical devastation Europe and Asia suffered in World Wars I and II and
other wars of this past century. 7 Indeed, the seeming permanence of a
city's building, and of the city itself, has been materially and symbolically
significant in anchoring its citizens' own sense of security and stability
throughout history: For those in or from countries that have been contin-
ually ravaged by war and natural disasters, for those who have been dis-
 Urban Flesh 153

placed and who have no homes to (re}turn to, including those whose
corporeal existence has always been marked by a sense of impermanence,
the previous complacency many United States citizens experienced in
relation to our own emplacement in the world must truly be incompre-
hensible. Indeed, ever since the famous fall of Troy, there have been
warnings that the city, and therefore its inhabitants, are not as impregna-
ble as they may seem.
If, as Casey suggests, bodies, cities, and nature cannot be understood
apart from one another, it should not be surprising that the violent at-
tacks on two of the United States' most symbolically charged sites (the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon) in two of our most symbolically
charged American cities (New York City and Washington, D.C.), was
registered by many as a violent attack on their corporeality, that is, on
their bodily sense of well-being-in-the-world. While the horrific violence
of these attacks should not be forgotten, there is also the danger that
focusing too heavily on their exceptional character, and buying into offi-
cial U.S. propagandistic rhetoric that all we have to do is stamp out ter-
rorism in order to live without fear of violence in the future, will lead us
right back into a dangerous natural attitude, namely, the belief that
dwelling can be accomplished in peace, without violence.
Merleau-Ponty's 1947 volume Humanism and Terror, in its serious at-
tempt to grapple with the violence of the cataclysmic geographical, so-
cial, political, and emotional upheavals of World War II, is surprisingly
relevant to our own unstable and violent times. Regarding the omnipres-
ence of violence, Merleau-Ponty maintains, "We do not have a choice
between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence.
Inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot" (109). Al-
though Merleau-Ponty's perspective on the inevitability of violence is
hardly surprising given the severe economic deprivation and political un-
rest that marked post-World War II France as it emerged from years of
German occupation, he clearly is making a statement here that extends
beyond his own country and his own time, to encompass human (and
perhaps nonhuman) existence more generally. Why, we may ask, does
Merleau-Ponty posit a seemingly necessary connection between violence
and life as an incarnate being? Is violence characteristic of all incarnate
life or just human existence?
At times, Merleau-Ponty implies, like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de
Beauvoir, and Hannah Arendt, that violence emerges out of human rela-
tionships, specifically from what they all see as the unavoidable conflicts
154 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

that mark the interactions between different subjects with different prof-
ects and a limited amount of resources to pursue them. In the preface to
Humanism and Terror, however, Merleau-Ponty suggests that it may be
possible for societies to at least hope for a time without violence:

When one is living in what Peguy called an historical period,

in which political man is content to administer a regime or an
established law, one can hope for a history without violence.
When one has the misfortune or the luck to live in an epoch, or
one of those moments where the traditional ground of a nation
or a society crumbles and where, for better or worse, man himself
must reconstruct human relations, then the liberty of each man
is a mortal threat to the others and violence reappears. (xvii)

Is the hope for a life without violence merely a regulative ideal? Would
such a society, in,which all citizens presumably acquiesced to follow the
established law of a particular political regime, even be an ideal? What if
the laws themselves did violence to particular individuals or groups of
individuals within that society? More importantly, if, as Merleau~Ponty
suggests, violence is our lot as incarnate beings, then how can a life with-
out violence ever function as an ideal· in the first place?

The Ethics of Violence

Simone de Beauvoir, writing at the same time and in the same post-
World War II context as Merleau-Ponty, attempts to specify more pre~
cisely when violence is morally permissible. Above all, she emphasizes
that violence is always enacted in and must be judged through an inter-
subjective context. In her words:

[V]iolence is justified only if it opens concrete possibilities to the

freedom which I am trying to save; by practicing it I am willy-
nilly assuming an engagement in relation to others and to myself;
a man whom I snatch from the death he has chosen has the right
to come and ask me for means and reasons for living; the tyranny
practiced' against an invalid can be justified only by his getting
better; whatever the purity of the intention which animates me,
 Urban Flesh 155

any dictatorship is a fault for which I have to get myself par-

doned. {Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 137}

Beauvoir's remarks make us wonder whether the brief sketch of a nonvio-

lent historical period offered by Merleau-Ponty limits possibilities and
leads to a false sense of complacency. Merleau-Ponty himself suggests
that the individual living in an epoch may be regarded as luckier rather
than more unfortunate than the individual who lives in a nonviolent
regime in which the rule of law is laid down and followed without dissent.
The danger of invoking {even if only hypothetically} a historical period
in which violence is absent is that the violence of law itself as an abstract
universal whose meaning comes from its forcible application to the par-
ticular case runs the risk of being covered over and thereby disavowed. 8
For, insofar as the power of the law derives its authority performatively to
the extent that it is promulgated and enforced by a legislating body, too
much emphasis on respect for the law itself qua law, can lead to a failure
to recognize the disrespectful ways in which the law is interpreted and
administered.
Even if it is possible (if only theoretically) to live nonviolently in a
historical period in which the rule -of law applies to and is acquiesced to
by one and all, Merleau-Ponty's account implies that living in an epoch
when life is volatile and the tom fabric of human relations must continu-
ally be mended presents more possibilities for social and political transfor-
mation. However, with this mending comes violence; the activity of
reconstruction, whether it takes the form of rebuilding the environment
after a period of destruction, or involves repairing fragmented relation-
ships between one individual or even one nation and another, produces
violent changes that can serve the cause of liberation as readily as that of
oppression. Above all, the prospect of reconstruction carries with it the
possibility of a new and different future, a future that may well usher in
new violence and may even require new violence to avoid the tragic
mistakes of the immediate and distant past. In a particularly prescient
passage that seems especially relevant to the United States today,
Merleau-Ponty suggests that the violence of injustice must be countered
with the violence of justice. In his words: "A regime which is nominally
liberal can be oppressive in reality. A regime which acknowledges its
violence might have in it more genuine humanity" (Merleau-Ponty, Hu-
manism and Terror, xv).
From the distance of more than a half century, and for those of us who
156 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

did not live through it, the epochal period of World War II often seems
restricted to the actual war years themselves, including at most the years
just preceding the war, when Hitler came to power in Nazi Germany.
Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror reminds us that the cold war be-
tween the United States and the Soviet Union was just as terrifying in
its potential consequences for many Europeans as was the prospect of
Hitler taking over the Continent. The threat that either the United
States or the Soviet Union would resort to nuclear bombs as both sought
to gain control over postwar Germany was very real to countries that
were still suffering from enormous ecological, economic, and psychologi-
cal devastation. Both the United States and the Soviet Union possessed
the requisite nuclear technology, and the United States had already re-
vealed its willingness to use the atomic bomb in Hiroshima in response
to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Suspicious of the United States'
claim to be the champion of democracy fighting against a repressive Sta-
linist regime in the name of freedom, Merleau-Ponty makes the following
observation, one that is uncannily timely as once again the United States
leads the fray in a wat against an enemy whose very omnipresence makes
it seem larger than life, namely, a war on terrorism: "Whatever one's
philosophical or even theological position, a society is not the temple of
value-idols that .figure on the front of its monuments or in its constitu-
tional scrolls; the value of a society is the value it places upon man's
relation to man. It is not just a question of knowing what the liberals
have in mind but what in reality is done by the liberal state within and
beyond its frontiers" (Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, xiv). "To
understancl'and judge a society," he adds, "one has to penetrate its basic
structure to the human bond upon which it is built; this undoubtedly
depends upon legal relations, but also upon forms of labor, ways of loving,
living, and dying" (xiv).

Dwelling in the World

Our forms of labor, and our ways of loving, living, and dying, undoubtedly
reveal much more than the state of a particular society. They reveal also
our ongoing corporeal relations with everyone and everything that com-
prises our situation: This includes the inanimate as well as the animate;
indeed, the visceral responses of so many Americans and non-Americans
 Urban Flesh 157

to the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and on the Pentagon
poignantly illustrate that our relations with the inanimate can be just as
powerful, just as violent, and just as disturbing as our relations with our
fellow human beings. The material destruction of our world, whether it
occurs deliberately or spontaneously, forces us to contend with the spe-
cific but usually invisible ways in which our surrounding environment
actively shapes the intercorporeal interactions that help to construct our
own sense of bodily agency. And as beings in and of the world, our sense
of bodily agency provides the parameters that delimit the very nature of
our emplacement within the world, that is, our ability to dwell within it.
In his classic essay "Building Dwelling Thinking," Martin Heidegger
maintains: "The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which
we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling. To be a human being
means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell" (147). A few
pages later he states, "To say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they
persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations"
(157). According to Heidegger, our sense of bodily continuity, or in his
words, our "persistence" through spaces, is achieved and reinforced
through the continuity of the locations in which we are immersed and
the things that surround us with which we are engaged. That is, it is not
merely the physical persistence of the body across time and space but,
rather, the persistence of the situation as such that gives rise to the funda-
mental experience of dwelling in the world. In a passage that sounds more
Merleau-Pontian than Heideggerian, Heidegger observes, "When I go
toward the door of the lecture hall, I am already there, and I could not
go to it at all if I were not such that I am there. I am never here only, as
this encapsulated body; rather, I am there, that is, I already pervade the
room, and only thus can I go through it" (157). In its ek-static projection
toward its future projects, the body exceeds its epidermal boundaries to
participate in what Merleau-Ponty refers to, in his final works, as the
"flesh of the world." Although the body is conventionally understood as
occupying discrete coordinates that demarcate it from the place it inhab-
its, both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger encourage us to rethink the body's
relationship to its immediate environment. Approaching the lecture hall,
anticipating my presence within it, my body is neither "here" nor
"there." Indeed, the body, in its chiasmatic, interdependent relationship
with its surroundings, inhabits what Elizabeth Grosz, following Jacques
Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, identifies as the space of the "in-between."
For Grosz, the space of the in-between is a space of possibility, the
158 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

space in which identities are both constructed and deconstructed. In her

words, "The space in between things is the space in which things are
undone, the space to the side and around, which is the space of subver-
sion and fraying, the edges of any identity's limits. In short, it is the space
of the bounding and undoing of the identities which constit~te it"
(Grosz, Architecture from the Outside, 93). While psychoanalytic theory
has focused our attention on the ways in which identities are undone
from the "inside," that is, through the unconscious processes that contin-
ually undermine the ego's attempts to establish its own "proper" bound-
aries, Grosz turns our attention to the outside, to the dynamic interfaces
that indissolubly link bodies with the places they inhabit. Just as psycho-
analysis has brought us to a greater understanding of the rich psychical
subsoil that informs and is often in tension with our conscious thought
processes, our bodily activities, and the idiosyncratic identities we are
continually constructing both for ourselves and for others, Grosz main-
tains that the space 'of the in-between "threatens to open itself up as new,
to facilitate transformations in the identities that constitute it" (94).
This liminal space foils attempts to fix the parameters of any given iden-
tity, and, Grosz suggests, the very instability it produces can be used cre-
atively to promote a new and different future, a future that is always in
the making. This future, she argues, cannot be imagined as a utopia, for
"[t]he utopian mode seeks a future that itself has no future, a future in
which time will cease to be a relevant factor, and movement, change,
and becoming remain impossible" (143). Rather than cling to utopian
fantasies wttose ahistoric character reifies one particular vision of the
future at the expense of others, Grosz implies that the space of the in-
between is precisely what keeps identity mobile and fluid, responsive to
the changing interactions between bodies and environments. That this
space of possibility can never be taken for granted but must continually
be affirmed and protected is poignantly illustrated by the work of femi-
nists and disability activists who have demanded access to spaces from
which women and the disabled were previously excluded. Access to these
previously forbidden spaces (buildings, men's clubs, and so on), has in-
deed been transformative, helping to reveal and dismantle the shaky
foundations of fixed identities (such as the disabled) that seek to con-
strain the horizons of some in order to expand the horizons of others.
Grosz's earlier work on bodies and cities is relevant here because she
emphasizes again and again the power of cities to structure our own cor-
poreality. In her words,
 Urban Flesh 159

The city is one of the crucial factors in the social production of

(sexed) corporeality: the built environment provides the context
and coordinates for contemporary forms of body. The city pro-
vides the order and organization that automatically links other-
wise unrelated bodies: it is the condition and milieu in which
corporeality is socially, sexually, and discursively produced. But
if the city is a significant context and frame for the body, the
relations between bodies and cities are more complex than may
have been realized. (Grosz, "Bodies-Cities," 104)

The transformative possibilities that emerge from the body's dynamic in-
teractions with its environment, Grosz suggests, are only experienced as
threatening if we resist our own futurity, that is, if we resist the openness
to new experiences that is the very mark of the future as the domain of
the "not yet." Edward Casey also affirms the chiasmatic relationship be-
tween alterations in the built environment and self-alteration when he
states, "In creating built places, we transform not only the local landscape
but ourselves as subjects: body subjects become fabricating agents" (111).
For both Grosz and Casey, our inability to stay in one place and our
corresponding lack of a fixed identity are positive phenomena because we
are continually free to explore new ways of being and, more precisely,
new ways of dwelling in the world. To the extent that, as Casey claims,
"we tend to identify ourselves by-and with-the places in which we
reside," our ability to freely and comfortably navigate within our own
built environment has the potential of enlarging "our already existing
embodiment into an entire Ufe-world of dwelling" (120).

The Fragility of Dwelling

In contrast to the expansive possibilities that are often associated with
city life, however, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on New
York City and Washington, D.C., and the daily attacks occurring in cities
and villages in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, the Sudan,
and other war-tom countries forcibly remind us that the restrictions
placed on our bodies by the places in which we reside can diminish and,
in extreme cases, even destroy a positive experience of futurity and, as a
result, radically curtail our sense of bodily agency. Casey maintains that
160 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

the body itself is a "proto-place" constituting my "corporeal here." "But,"

he tells us, "precisely in its action of proto-placement, my body takes me
up against counter-places, including conflictual places, at every moment.
In this countering (and being encountered), the body constitutes the
crossroads between architecture and landscape, the built and the given,
the artificial and the natural" (131). While Grosz and Casey tend to
valorize the productive dimensions of the tensions between the body and
its surrounding environment, homeless activists continually remind us
that we can never take the body's emplacement for granted. Some people,
quite simply, have no place to dwell. And without a dwelling, without a
fixed address, their very identity is indeed at risk.
Casey, in par~icular, lauds the benefits of dwelling both for the individ-
ual and for the cherished place in which she dwells: "To dwell is to exer-
cise patience-of-place; it requires willingness to cultivate, often seemingly
endlessly, the inhabitational possibilities of a particular residence. Such
willingness shows that we care about how we live in that residence and
that we care about it as a place for living well, not merely as a 'machine
for living' (in Le Cotbusier's revealing phrase)" (174). And he goes on to
add, "To cultivate its [a domicile's] interior we must cultivate our interior;
it is a matter of letting one interior speak to another" (I 74). But what if
we live in a slum with limited inhabitational possibilities? What if we
don't have a home at all? What if our own psychic health even requires
that a neighborhood park or a rat-infested apartment be viewed merely
as a "machine for living?" A danger of overemphasizing the necessity of
home for the cultivation of the individual's own identity is that those
who lack homes rtin the risk of having their very humanity placed in
question.
For many homeless men, women, and children in urban areas today,
the city itself takes the place' of home. In one of his few references to
homelessness, Casey warns us about the threat the larger city poses to the
domesticity of the home: "Moving about in a city draws us away from the
interior depth of a home and into the exterior breadth of a wider urban
world. It is hardly surprising that we find homelessness mainly located in
cities, which are in many respects the antipodes of homes. Cities certainly
contain homes, but in their capacity to demand and distract they are
continually luring us into the streets. They take us out of our homes
and into a more precarious and sometimes hostile extra-domestic world"
(180).
While Grosz views the city as a space of possibility that can enhance
 Urban Flesh 161

our sense of being at-home-in-the-world, a view that runs the danger of

failing to acknowledge the ways in which the city can produce profound
feelings of alienation and disidentification, Casey sets up a problematic
dichotomy between the city and the home that unintentionally rein-
forces the stigmatization of those who are homeless. He acknowledges
that a home need not be a house and that it is bodily engagement with a
given place rather than the length of time one spends in that place that
gives rise to the experience of dwelling, but he also implies that it is up
to the individual to transform her environment into a home, and he rules
out the possibility of the city itself serving such a function. 9
In her essay "House and Home," Iris Young chronicles in painful detail
the tragedy that followed her family's move from apartment life in the
city to her parents' "dream house" in the suburbs when she was a young
girl. The sudden, unexpected death of her father shortly after the move
left her mother completely alone with two children to raise in the midst
of strangers without the comfort and support of her urban community.
As Young tersely observes, obtaining her dream house in the suburbs
became her mother's worst nightmare, since her depression in the face of
her husband's death led to her failure to "keep up" the home, a failure
duly reported to the police by intolerant neighbors, which resulted in the
removal of Iris and her brother to foster homes and to her mother's own
incarceration. Thus, the powerful images of Descartes in his study medi-
tating in the privacy of his home, Virginia Woolf's call for each woman
to have "a room of one's own," and even Casey's own description of his
book-lined study in which he is peaceful and productive, must be bal-
anced by Ibsen's equally powerful image of the home as a prison for Nora
in A Doll's House, and of Young's chilling description of the home as the
site of social judgment and condemnation.
In her unpublished paper "From Front Stoop to Backyard Barbecue:
The Triumph of Levittown and the Production of Whiteness," Ellen
Feder, like Young, leads us to question overly positive views of a "home
of one's own" by drawing our attention to the exclusionary racist and
classist strategies operative in Levittown, the first model suburban com-
munity in the United States. A "no-blacks policy"-unofficial yet rigidly
enforced-prevented (and still prevents today) many families from being
able to find safe and affordable housing. Moreover, the families that were
able to enjoy the "privileges" of home ownership in Levittown found
themselves subject to a stringent, Foucaultian disciplinary regime that
dictated how often their lawns were to be cut, how many pets they could
162 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

have, what type of mailboxes they could put up, and where their laundry
could and could not be hung. Rather than leading us to conclude that
home ownership is not a good thing, or that homes do not supply bodies
with a sense of comfort and security that can facilitate the development
of a positive sense of self, the lessons of Levittown and Young's own
experience warn us not to uncritically embrace the benefits of home in
such a way that the failure to have a home or even be at home becomes
the fault of the individual rather than a collective failure on the part of
the larger community in which she resides (or fails to reside).
Casey's, Young's, and Feder's work remind us not only of the fragility
of dwelling but also of the privileges and responsibilities that accompany
it. The violence of being ejected from one's dwelling, the violence of
being dis~placed from one's home and one's country of origin, may be the
very type of experiences Merleau~ Ponty had in mind when he wrote that
oppressive forms of violence may require violent solutions. Violent solu~
tions need not, of course, involve actual physical violence. Rather, what
I believe Merleau~Ponty is suggesting is that the transformation of conser~
vative belief structures that tolerate and legitimize violence requires a
genuine upheaval. This upheaval is violent precisely because it seeks to
eradicate not only the experiences of oppression but also the societal
structures that support them.
In the final pages of Humanism and Terror, Merleau~ Ponty affirms that
"[t]he human world is an open or unfinished system and the same radical
contingency which threatens it with discord also rescues it from the inevi~
tability of disorder and prevents us from despairing of it" (188). "Such a
philosophy," he tells us, "awakens us to the importance of daily events and
action. For it is a philosophy which arouses in us a love for our times which
are not the simple repetition of human eternity nor merely the conclusion
to premises already postulated.' It is a view which like the most fragile
object of perception-a soap bubble, or a wave--or like the most simple
dialogue, embraces indivisibly all the order and all the disorder of the
world" (188-89). Ushering in a new epoch in which the violence of
social justice is able to transform the conditions, and therefore the possi~
bilities, of our own urban flesh, is itself a collective project whose fragility
and volatility guarantee that it is always unfinished, always in the making.
Such a project requires that we remain open to the possibility that our
established patterns of living, our institutionalized means of "producing
order" might well haVe to undergo radical, even violent change.
As Grosz suggests, not only does such a project undercut reductive
 Urban Flesh 163

binaries, it also undercuts our very sense of identity and thereby holds
out the promise of new identities that resist the oppressive structures of
the past and the present that seek to constrain them. To realize this
promise is to embrace the openness that flows from the contingency of
the future:

An openness to futurity is a challenge facing all of the arts, sci-

ences, and humanities; the degree of openness is an index of
one's political alignments and orientations, of the readiness to
transform. Unless we put into question architectural and cultural
identities-the identities of men and women, of different races
and classes, and of different religious, sexual, and political affilia-
tions, as well as the identities of cities, urban regions, buildings,
and houses-this openness to the future, the promise of time
unfolding through innovation rather than prediction, is muted
rather than welcomed. (Grosz, Architecture from the Outside, 91)

Ironically, the refusal to be open has historically produced more oppres-

sive and longer-lasting violence than the refusal of closure, the refusal to
inhabit the space of the "in-between." However, to remain open to the
future does not mean that we fail to commit ourselves to a definite path
of action. Rather, it involves seizing upon and taking responsibility for
that "incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a
fragment of being" (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 139).
And this requires that we recognize, with lrigaray, that "the flesh of each
one is not substitutable for the other," that we must always be attentive
to the unique and changing demands that arise out of the stylized differ-
entiations of incarnate existence (lrigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference,
167). Thus, to maintain openness through the affirmation {rather than
the denial} of difference, does not mean embracing an "anything goes"
perspective but, rather, necessitates that we acknowledge limit as the very
condition of possibility. For, as Merleau-Ponty observes in Nature: Course
Notes from the College de France, "Matter means that at any given mo-
ment, not everything is possible" (69).
By bringing Merleau-Ponty into a conversation with his future inter-
locutors, including contemporary phenomenologists, and feminist theo-
rists whose interests and commitments are not only different but also
often at odds with his own, new spaces of possibility emerge, and new
limitations must continually be confronted. Just as Penelope in the Odys-
164 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

sey refused to stop weaving the fabric that, once finished, was supposed
to define her identity once and for all as the wife of one of her unwanted
suitors, the aim of the weavings enacted in this particular text is to pro-
duce new openings, new spaces for change, movement, and growth that
can be taken up and woven afresh by others. Thus, expanding the possi-
bilities for stylizing urban flesh requires new ways of understanding the
dynamic relationship between bodies and cities, and therefore new ways
of doing philosophy.

Notes

1. Similarly, as Toni Morrison has powerfully shown in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination, one cannot invoke whiteness without either implicitly or explicitly contrasting
it with blackness. Moreover, as Frantz Fanon has also demonstrated in Black Skin, White Masks, the
more phantasmatically blacl~ness is conceived, the more mythically entrenched the status of white-
ness becomes.
2. Steven Vogel offers an extended critical discussion of this traditional binary approach in
Against Nature: The Concept.o{Nature in Critical Theory. He advocates a social constructionist view
of nature whereby nature is itself an ongoing product of cultural interpretation. See Mary Douglas's
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo for one of the most influential
accounts of the significance of the cultural distinction between purity and pollution.
3. There are many excellent resources to tum to for a discussion of the gendered dimensions of .
nature and culture, though less work has been done on how the city is gendered. Elizabeth Grosz's
work is a notable exception in this regard. See "Bodies-Cities," in Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays
on the Politics of Bodies and Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Sherry
Ortner's classic essay "Is Mal\! to Female as Nature Is to Culture?" in Making Gender: The Politics and
Erotics of Culture offers one of the best-known feminist accounts of the engendering of nature and
culture respectively as feminine and masculine. Carol Bigwood's Earth Muse: Feminist, Nature, and
Art offers a specifically phenomenological analysis that supports Ortner's critique of the patriarchal
identification of nature with an ideali~ed feminine "earth mother" and culture with an idealized
masculine master of techne.
Although urban analyses often concenttate on the racial and class implications of what Ruth
Frankenberg has called a "racial social geography" in White Women Race Matters: The Social Con-
struction of Whiteness, less work has been done on how nature is itself racialized. For excellent and
disturbing accounts of the consequences of failing to acknowledge the racism inherent in our under-
standings of "urban flesh," see Robert Gooding-Williams's edited collection Reading Rodney King
Reading Urban Uprising.
4. I am indebted to Eduardo Mendieta for suggesting that I introduce Hannah Arendt's account
of violence into this discussion.
5. Although Arendt's account of violence, and particularly racial violence, in On Violence, can
certainly be mobilized for feminist and antiracist politics, it would be remiss not to call attention to
her unfortunate linkage of emasculation and dehumanization to describe a human being who is
incapable of experiencing or presumably expressing feelings of violence. Her account reminds us
that violence itself is a gend~red phenomenon. This is not to deny that women as well as men may
act violently, bunhat the very expression of violence itself tends to be associated with masculinity.
 Urban Flesh 165

This has historically had deleterious consequences for women who have behaved violently because
their violation of gendered expectations has furthered their own dehumanization at the hands of
others.
6. Of course, this is only temporary. Master plans for this exceptionally large piece of prime New
York City real estate were solicited very soon after 9/11 from top international architecture firms and
Ground Zero will soon be a memory, albeit one that is materially incorporated in virtually all the
designs for the site.
7. Indeed, to Iraqis and many others today, it is the willingness of the current u.s. government
to endorse the displacement of others in order to ensure its own secure emplacement in the world
that helps to fuel charges of U.S. imperialism.
8. Notably, one of the reasons Kant's justification for political quiescence in the face of an unjust
ruler in his political essay "On the Relationship of Theory to Practice in Political Right" is so
dissatisfying is because the universality of the law that demands obedience to the ruler does violence
to a legitimate sense of outrage about the ruler's abuse of his or her power in determining the scope
and application of the law. Kant unequivocally states his position as follows:

It thus follows that all resistance against the supreme legislative power, all incitement of
the subjects to violent expressions of discontent, all defiance which breaks out into rebel-
lion, is the greatest and most punishable crime in a commonwealth, for it destroys its very
foundations. This prohibition is absolute. And even if the power of the state or its agent,
the head of state, has violated the original contract by authorizing the government to act
tyrannically, and has thereby, in the eyes of the subject, forfeited the right to legislate,
the subject is still not entitled to offer counter-resistance. The reason for this is that the
people, under an existing civil constitution, has no longer any right to judge how the
constitution should be administered. (Kant, Political Writings, 81; emphasis in the orig-
inal)

What Kant is advocating here is precisely that we tolerate injustices in order to preserve the author-
ity of the ruler and the universality of the law, a position that is in direct contrast with later political
thinkers such as Arendt, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty.
9. In a more recent conversation with Casey, he has stated that his own new experience as a
city dweller (in New York City) has led him to reject his earlier belief that the city could not be a
home.
 8
Vision, Violence, and the Other:
A Merleau .. Ponte an Ethics
Jorella Andrews

I
Perception ... asserts more things than it grasps: when I say that
I see the ash-tray over there, I suppose as completed an unfolding
of experience which could go on ad infinitum, and I commit a
whole perceptual future. Similarly, when I say that I know and
like someone, I aim, beyond his qualities, at an inexhaustible
ground which may one day shatter the image that I have formed
of him. This is the price for there being things and "other peo-
168 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

pIe" for us, not as the result of some illusion, but as the result of
a violent act which is perception itself.

So writes Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception.! But what

are we to understand by his final statement-his reference to that "vio-
lent act which is perception itself"? Clearly, for Merleau-Ponty, it is only
by means of this act that the truly intersubjective nature of the world can
be opened up to us, and we to it. This implies that perception as he
defines it here is also ethically productive. Indeed, one may extrapolate
from his position not only an ethics but also a metaethics. For signifi-
cantly, the ethics in question challenges traditional positions in that it is
not the discovery and application of "universally valid" rules, principles,
or rights that are presented as foundational, but involvement in percep-
tual acts experienced as ongoing and unstable.
In this chapter I explore Merleau-Ponty's thought (as exemplified
here) in two ways.,One approach is exegetical. To this end, I tum to the
chapter of the Phenomenology in which the words cited above occur:
"Other Selves and the Human World." I also search for clues in Merleau-
Ponty's essay "Metaphysics and the Novel."2 Published, like the Phenome-
nology, in 1945, this essay addresses questions of an ethical nature
through a sustained discussion of Simone de Beauvoir's novel L'invitee
(1943), a work that had met with censure from the critics for being,
purportedly, immoral. A second kind of engagement with Merleau-
Ponty's thought is to reflect on its relation to more recent debates around
intersubjectivity. Iris with this question that I begin.
In the text from the Phenomenology just cited, it is specifically visual
perception that Merleau-Ponty presents as ethically productive. At issue,
therefore, is a negotiation of vision, violence, and the other, markedly
dissimilar to those that would become dominant within much of the post-
Merleau-Pontean, indeed postphenomenological, critical thought that
was produced from the late 1960s onward. In the latter-and particularly
within the important work that emerged concerning identity politics and
the politics of representation-vision would frequently be defined as ob-
jectifying, denigrating, and alienating in effect, and as antagonistic to
productive intersubjectivity. Within the context of 1970s feminist dis-
course, for instance, Luce Irigaray claimed that "the eye objectifies ...
masters ... sets at a distance, and maintains a distance," thus bringing
about an "impovedshment of bodily relations." Furthermore, emphasiz-
ing that gender and sexual differences are always played out here, she also
 Vision, Violence, and the Other 169

insisted that "investment in the look is not as privileged in women as in

men."3
Two interconnected factors would seem to account for the difference
between Merleau-Ponty's position and those other, antiocular ones. In
the first place, different modes of address are associated with vision in
each case. Thus, in contrast to what would become a more or less conven-
tional position later on, the "violence" of perception as Merleau-Ponty
understands it is precisely not connected with the objectification of oth-
ers. He is emphatic in "Other Selves and the Human World" that such
objectification could only be a product of thinking and judging that have
relinquished their primordial embeddedness in perception: "[T]he other's
gaze transforms me into an object and mine him," he states, "only if
both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking."4 Neither does visual
engagement fix things in place; it does not close things down. Rather, it
"asserts more things than it grasps." In other words, while the aspect of
perception that "asserts" finds parallels in the operations of propositional
thought, perception itself always occurs within situations marked by ex-
cess. This is because perception as it is lived-and not as it has frequently
been conceptualized-is a temporal as well as a spatial phenomenon. It
remains irreducibly open to the "unfolding of experience," aiming, as
Merleau-Ponty has written, at that "inexhaustible ground" that has the
power to shatter truth claims. In so doing, it also teaches us that our
statements about the world, and our lived experiences of it, cannot coin-
cide. Thus Merleau-Ponty's position asks us to regard as perfidious those
arguments in which either literal or metaphorical connections are made
between practices of objectifying, mastering, or denigrating others and
specifically visual modes of address. What are in fact enacted in such
situations of objectification, mastery, or denigration are varying degrees
of refusal to remain within the visible. The processes at issue here are
antivisual in orientation, having started in vision, admittedly, but having
swiftly retreated from the distinctively open and, as I will show, produc-
tively destructive patterns that are intrinsic to visual engagement-those
aspects of perception to which Merleau-Ponty's notion of violence is tied.
To reiterate, then, Merleau-Ponty claims that visual perception in its
lived and thus temporal being is precisely that which does not fix in
place, and does not objectify. However, an issue with which he does not
seem to engage (and with which, by contrast, those other, antiocular
positions have tended to be deeply concerned) is the fact that we live in
increasingly media-driven, image-saturated cultures in which much that
170 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

is available to sight'has, in effect, already been fixed in place for us, made
static, and objectified, by means of reductive representational strategies
and nonreciprocal viewing structures. As Laura Mulvey pointed out many
years ago in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), again
within the broader_ context of feminist discourses on vision and visuality,
such procedures and structures are consistently embedded even within
visual works of a time-based nature. Concerning the problematic repre-
sentation of woman in the mainstream cinema of the period, she writes,
for instance, that her presence "is an indispensable element of spectacle
in normal narrative film, yet her presence tends to work against the devel-
opment of a story line, to freeze the /low of action in moments of erotic
contemplation."5 _This observation connects with a second point I wish
to make. It concerns the fundamentally different perceptual situations
that distinguish Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the relationship be-
tween vision and intersubjectivity from those alternative evaluations.
In the extract from the Phenomenology, the triad of vision, violence,
and the other would seem to be explored within contexts of face-to-face
engagement. Howeyef, the distinctiveness of these encounters is not that
they are somehow unmediated in nature. Rather, they offer a particular
quality and scope of negotiation in which the possibility for ongoing
interaction (exchange, disagreement, conversion, rearticulation) remains
in play. Here, our understanding and expectations of others are open to
interruptions and challenges that are not derived from us. In the example
cited by Merleau-Ponty, it is particularly significant that the potential
shattering of existing perceptions and preconceptions arises within the
context of a relationship with someone "known and liked." The point is
that in all our committed perceptual relations with others, those others
inevitably remain what Julia Kristeva has called "open systems."6 And so
do we.
As already indicated, where vision tends to be treated as problematic
to intersubjectivity, and where the violence of vision is associated with
objectification, the perceptual situations generally under discussion are
those in which, largely by means of one or other technology of represen-
tation, others are given to us in ways that are definitive and reductive.
They are presented as already "spoken for." However, although a persua-
sive antirepresentational discourse has emerged within postphenomeno-
logical critical thought, theorists have not necessarily identified practices
and technologies of visual representation per se as problematic. Instead,
as in Mulvey's seminal text, much critical attention has been directed
 Vision, Violence, and the Other 171

toward the analysis of specific dominant, reductive instances of image

production, display, and reception, and toward the search for alternatives.
Neither in the portion of the Phenomenology under discussion, nor else-
where in his writings (as far as I am aware), does Merleau-Ponty concern
himself with visual representation in its reductive aspects. But in his writ-
ing on visual perception, art, and art making, he produces a body of
critical material that may be usefully brought to bear upon such matters.
For example, where questions of image production, display, and reception
are concerned, his thought asks us to consider the degree to which our
engagements here are truly perceptual in orientation-perceptual, as he
has defined it, and as outlined above-and if not, how they might become
so. This is an important point, since, as already noted, within image-
saturated cultures most images circulate within abbreviated viewing situ-
ations. They are displayed, even made, as if merely to be registered and
consumed. As such they tend to escape visibility, as Merleau-Ponty un-
derstands it. But particularly Significant, given our present discussions, is
the fact that the artistic practices and projects to which Merleau-Ponty
is drawn are precisely those that may be described, broadly, as "represen-
tational" in orientation. That is, he is interested in artists (Cezanne,
Matisse, Renoir) who attempt to look at the world and bring what they
see to expression, and he refers, frequently, to their verbal reports con-
cerning these matters. Their experiences of looking and making are of
philosophical importance to him. He treats them as paradigmatic, since
they illuminate, for him, those crucial aspects of lived perception to
which we rarely attend, but upon which philosophy must, nonetheless,
be founded if it is to be valid and effective.
Importantly, for Merleau-Ponty, what these practices of committed
and extended looking do not do is reduplicate already existent realities.
Instead, they bring to our attention, with particular force, the produc-
tively violent articulations intrinsic to all engaged acts of perceiving. For
at issue here is above all the immersion of artists and viewers into inter-
worlds that may throw already perceived realities into question. Thus,
such attempts at representation do not close down meaning. Rather, they
are found to move in quite another direction, toward the creation of new
structures. "The meaning of what the artist is going to say does not exist
anywhere," writes Merleau-Ponty in the essay "Cezanne's Doubt" (again
1945), "-not in things, which as yet have no meaning, nor in the artist
himself, in his unformulated life. It summons one away from the already
constituted reason in which 'cultured men' are content to shut them-
172 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

selves, toward a r~ason which contains its own origins."? As I will show,
Merleau-Ponty's discussions of L'inviree are interesting in this respect
also. As with other novels by Beauvoir (Les mandarins, for instance),
L'invitee may be described as representational in that it is an account of
an actual state of affairs-the near disruption of the author's relationship
with Jean-Paul Sartre when she and Sartre (Fran~oise and Pierre, respec-
tively, in the novel) open up their partnership, emotionally and eroti-
cally, to a younger woman, Olga Kosakiewicz (Xaviere). But if the novel
draws upon this situation, it does not reduplicate it. At issue is the
unraveling of a lived situation, the fictionalized articulation of other pos-
sibilities, an act of radical questioning and of speculation. Thus in "Meta-
physics and the Novel," Merleau-Ponty does not only attend to the
intricacies and tensions of the narrated menage a trois. He also attends
to the ethical possibilities accompanying Beauvoir's approach to repre-
senting herself and, others
.
within this novel. To this point I will return.

II
So far I have tried to establish what Merleau-Ponty's understanding of
perception as a violent act is not. I have also attempted to account,
briefly, for the differences of position that are at issue between Merleau-
Ponty's thought and that of other commentators for whom visual prac-
tices are t;heorized. as ethically problematic. But what are we to make of
the triad "vision, violence and the other" as Merleau-Ponty treats it?
What of this "violent act which is perception itself" but which is none-
theless ethical?
In "Other Selves and the Human World," to reiterate, Merleau-Ponty
makes clear that the violence in question is not that of objectifying the
other. It might be more to the point to describe it as a violence enacted
upon the seer, but this is not quite accurate either. For from the immedi-
ate context in which this phrase is to be found, it appears not merely that
the agent of violence is perception itself but also that this violence is first
and foremost enacted upon itself. As noted earlier, perception is de-
scribed by Merleau-Ponty as having a doubled aspect: it makes certain
assertions about the world while at the same time aiming at, and opening
onto, phenomena that may later shatter them. Perception, then, would
seem to be so structured as to be continually exceeding and. undermining
 Vision, Violence, and the Other 173

itself. Here, the point is not only that perceptual engagement amounts
to immersion within (confident) "makings" and (violent) "undoings" of
worlds, and inevitably also of self and other. Crucially, perception is un-
derstood here less as that which a seer does, and more as that in which
both seer and seen are already embedded. Indeed, perception both pre-
cedes and produces different configurations of seeing and being seen. In
"Cezanne's Doubt," Merleau-Ponty proposes that it is precisely to per-
ception in its unstable, prepersonal modes that the work of Cezanne
exposes us:

We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in

houses, streets, cities, and most of the time we see them only
through the human actions which put them to use. We become
used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakably.
Cezanne's painting suspends all these habits of thought and re-
veals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed
himself. This is why Cezanne's people are strange, as if viewed by
a creature of another species. Nature itself is stripped of the attri-
butes which make it ready for animistic communions.... It is an
unfamiliar world in which one is uncomfortable and which for-
bids all human effusiveness. s

That such perceptual discomforts are indeed central to properly inter-

subjective and ethical relations becomes apparent (by inference) when
the negative consequences of disavowing perception thus understood are
examined.
There are at least three intertwined consequences at issue here. One
is a necessary rejection of that organ of instability, the body, which in its
perceptual openness is porous, vulnerable-and finite. Indeed, in this
connection, of importance to Merleau-Ponty in "Other Selves and the
Human World" are the particular challenges associated with an embod-
ied (rather than rationalized) relationship to the temporal. "My hold on
the past and the future is precarious," he writes, "and my possession of
my own time is always postponed.... My voluntary and rational life,
therefore, knows that it merges into another power which stands in the
way of its completion, and gives it a permanently tentative 100k."9 None-
theless (as will become apparent from my discussions of L'invitee), it is
only by means of such a body, and such embodiedness, that the intersub-
jective world is available to us. For, as Merleau-Ponty had already argued
174 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

in The Structure 01' Behavior (1942), it is here that we first discover its
articulations and learn to accommodate ourselves to its uncertainties.
Paradoxically, acceptance of the body as organ of instability also provides
us with entrance into the experience of a particular, and in his words,
"peculiar" permanence that is to be found convincingly only within
bodily existence-an issue discussed earlier in the Phenomenology, where
Merleau-Ponty defines bodily existence as a "middle term between pres-
ence and absence."l0 Crucially for Merleau-Ponty, it is to the extent that
we enjoy bodily knowledge in terms of this "peculiar" permanence that
we discover the resources needed to take part in those situations and
those lives that appear to us to be marked with indeterminacy or finitude.
A second consequence of disavowal is the entry into an initially com-
fotting solipsism that lived experience-that is, our actual immersion
in a shared world that always exceeds assertion and expectation-must
inevitably destroy. Indeed, in "Other Selves and the Human World"
Merleau-Ponty's "violent act," because of its doubled aspect, shatters so-
lipsism. "In reality," he writes, "the other is not shut up inside my per-
spective of the worlc:i;because this perspective itself has no definite limits,
because it slips into the other's and because both are brought together
in the one single world in which we all participate as anonymous subjects of
perception" (emphasis added).l1 These words-which again make comple-
mentary two apparently contradictory concepts, anonymity and social-
ity-indicate that intersubjectivity, for Merleau-Ponty, is not a condition
that somehow must be achieved. It already is. The challenge is to keep it
open and it} play. I~deed, it is a commitment to this very project that forms
the basis for his ethics. It is to such an orientation that an ethics of
representation would arguably also be tied: "We must therefore redis-
cover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of
objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence: I may well
tum away from it, but not cease to be situated relatively to it.... We
must return to the social with which we are in contact by the mere fact
of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us before any
objectification.... The social is already there when we come to know or
judge it."IZ
A third consequence of disavowing lived perception is an illusory sense
of our relationship to others caused by the failure, within certain situations,
to experience ourselves as seen. As Merleau-Ponty puts it in "Metaphysics
and the Novel," here the experience of the other has been surmounted or
sublimated~13 By refusing the other in this way, we avoid coming to terms
 Vision, Violence, and the Other 175

with ourselves as, for instance, possibly no more than objects in that other's
world, or as figuring only on its peripheries, or as present within it in an
unfamiliar, even "deformed" guise. "Once we are aware of the existence of
others," he writes, "we commit ourselves to being, among other things,
what they think of US."14 We also avoid coming to terms with the other's
power to resist us by his or her refusal (or inability) to slip compliantly
into the world that we have built, and in which we have already assigned
him or her a particular place, a particular role, and a particular future.
And this brings me to Merleau-Ponty's discussions of L'invitee. For as
Merleau-Ponty observes, the novel opens with descriptions of Fran~oise
as someone who has, for a long time, managed to live out all these dis-
avowals, and has created an orderly life for herself. Having withdrawn
from the reality of her embodiedness, she has been able to convince
herself not only that her being is without limitation, but also that people
and situations are given to her transparently and absolutely, even that
they depend on her for their very existence: "[H]ere I am, at the very
heart of the dance-hall, impersonal and free. I am watching all these lives
and all these faces. If I were to turn away from them, they would dis-
integrate at once like a deserted landscape."15 Merleau-Ponty writes, re-
vealingly, that "what strengthens Fran~oise's conviction is that, by an
extraordinary piece of luck, even love [that is, her long-standing relation-
ship with Pierre, which she takes to be one of transparent oneness] has
not made her realize her limits."16 For Fran~oise, Pierre is not other; she
does not recognize the possibility of his existing in ways that are unavail-
able or unknown to her. And, in careful collaboration with him, she has
maintained this fiction so effectively that even Pierre's many affairs find
easy accommodation. "They thought they had overcome jealousy by the
omnipotence of language," writes Merleau-Ponty,17 The crisis for
Fran~oise comes when the existence of the duo (or from her perspective,
her own existence as I/we) becomes entangled with that of Xaviere,
whose unpredictability, evasiveness, and egoism prevent Fran~oise from
integrating her into her already constructed world. Rather, Xaviere's atti-
tudes, and the relationship that develops between Xaviere and Pierre
(over which Fran~oise has no control, and which remains beyond her
reach because Xaviere will not make it sharable through speech) force
Fran~oise to acknowledge that the world of things and people does not,
after all, depend upon her for its existence. In Merleau-Ponty's words,
"[T]he world [now] has a center from which she is excluded.... With
the others, things retreat beyond her grasp and become the strange debris
176 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

of a world to which she no longer holds the key. The future ceases to be
the natural extension of the present, time is fragmented, and Fran~oise is
no more than an anonymous being, a creature without a history, a mass
of chilled flesh." Crucially, from this decentered position, she also experi-
ences her own bejng in unanticipated ways, as she is seen by others. The
positive outcome of this is that Fran~oise "now knows there are situations
which cannot be communicated and which can only be understood by
living them."18 But she cannot live them. Instead she erroneously reinter-
prets her situation as one of utter objectification ("she can no longer
doubt that, under the glance of that couple [Pierre and Xaviere], she is
truly an object"),19 of utter separation from Pierre, and of utter aloneness.
In consequence, her carefully arranged, artificial world shatters. This was,
of course, inevitable. As Merleau-Ponty puts it: "We easily escape from
transcendence as long as we are dealing only with things: the transcen-
dence of other people is more resistant."20 Also at issue here, incidentally,
is a misunderstanding on Fran~oise's part concerning the nature of verbal
language. She fails to acknowledge its opacity and ambiguities, and thus
its affinities with the-perceptual as Merleau-Ponty understands it-a sub-
ject he would expiore some years later in his essay "Indirect Language
and the Voices of Silence."21
So, how will. this point of crisis in Fran~oise's life be resolved? Will
she adjust to the painful transformation of the duo (this "two-headed
wonder")22 into a threesome with its opacities and rivalries? Fran~oise
tries. Merleau-Ponty writes of the "good faith, the loyalty to promises, the
respect for others, the generosity and the seriousness of the two principals
[Fran~oise and Pierre]."23 But it is not to be managed. Fran~oise must at
all costs restore her old, familiar world. She retreats first into illness where
she finds temporary relief, but finally resorts to the murder of Xaviere,
disguised as a suicide.
What are we to make of this? On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty insists
in this essay on the futility of attempting to assign definitive meanings to
human actions, including those narrated here. "The truth is that our
actions do not admit of anyone motivation or explanation; they are
'over-determined,'" he writes. 24 On the other hand, he states that
"Fran~oise wanted to shatter the image of herself she had seen in Xa-
viere's eyes" and, a little later, that "[a]s long as Xaviere exists, Fran~oise
cannot help being what Xaviere thinks she is. From this there follows the
crime."25 However,'it is by no means the collapse of Fran~oise's artificial
world that is responsible for her downfall. Nor is Fran~oise destroyed by
 Vision, Violence, and the Other 177

that defamiliarizing, and purportedly objectifying, gaze that she feels is

directed at her by those others-by Pierre, and specifically by Xaviere.
Earlier, I referred to Merleau-Ponty's words in the Phenomenology: "[T]he
other's gaze transforms me into an object and mine him only if both of
us withdraw into the core of our thinking." If Fran~oise is destroyed it is
because she cannot accept, with creativity, the "disquieting existence of
others."26 Nor can she accept the disquieting view she has obtained of
herself as seen through other eyes. Certainly, the "good faith, loyalty to
promises," and so forth enumerated by Merleau-Ponty are not in them-
selves able to save her. Ultimately, she cannot bear the violences that are
part of the embodied, perceptual existence to which she has been ex-
posed, and of real intersubjectivity. This leads her to find a disastrous
refuge in violence of a different order.

III
Merleau-Ponty's insistence that intersubjectivity occurs only where the
challenges (the violences) of embodied, perceptual existence are actively
taken up inevitably gives rise to an ethics modeled after the doubled
structures of perception as discussed earlier, rather than the certainties
and closures of rule-governed thought. "True morality does not consist
in following exterior rules," he writes in "Metaphysics and the Novel,"
"or in respecting objective values: there are no ways to be just or to be
saved."27
The point here is not that all already existent moral laws must be
jettisoned, automatically and indiscriminately, but rather that such laws
must not be administered into given situations, automatically and indis-
criminately, from the outside. First, then, a truly ethical situation for
Merleau-Ponty can only emerge when participants understand that they
are internally related to each other in ways that are as yet indeterminate,
and that they are profoundly together in their respective differences.
Second, it is a situation in which others, rather than have meanings im-
posed upon them, are able to reveal themselves. Third, as he put it in
"The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences" (a
summary and defense of the Phenomenology delivered in 1946 and pub-
lished in 1947), it consists in "generously meeting the other in the very
particularity of a given situation."28 Since, in such encounters, irreconcil-
J 78 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

able perspectives me inevitably juxtaposed, radical disagreement must re-

main a possible, although not necessarily permanent, factor of communal
life. This, however, he sees as preferable to a superficially less problematic
notion of community in which agreement is achieved through dogma-
tism, and the suppression of irreconcilable points of view. For as Merleau-
Ponty puts it in the near-final lines of "Metaphysics and the Novel":
"Communication exists between the moments of my personal time, as
between my time and that of other people, and in spite of the rivalry be-
tween them. It exists, that is, if I will it, if I do not shrink from it out of
bad faith, if I plunge into the time which both separates and unites us, as
the Christian plunges into God" (emphasis added).29 Clearly, the gener-
osity required to negotiate difference and rivalry, and to plunge into the
uncertainties of interrelationship, must be cultivated. But how? And
how, more specifically, within a world in which, as noted earlier, contact
with others frequently occurs in ways that are abbreviated and reductive?
Some indications may be found in Merleau-Ponty's response to L'invitee
in terms of Beauvoir's narrational style, and in terms of the way she has
positioned herself as author. For as he sees it, by setting out only to
describe the menage a trois that Fran~oise and Pierre attempt to establish
with Xaviere, that is, by refusing to subject her characters to standards
of judgment conceived as absolute or existing wholly externally to the
individuals concerned (a refusal for which she received censure from the
critics), or both, she not only displays generosity toward them, allowing
them to reveal themselves, but also, more generally, presents readers with
the challenge of rethinking issues of community and morality in terms of
present possibilities rather than inherited conventions. This also suggests
that strategies of "mere" description (with the perceptual attentiveness
and the concomitant deferral of judgment that it brings into play) are
vital in enabling "old habits" to explode.3D
In L'invitee, Beauvoir also leaves space for her readers to produce their
own thought by adopting a puzzling and inconclusive mode of narration.
Her story is told in the third person, and most of the time it is Fran~oise's
point of view and thoughts that are communicated. There are two excep-
tions, in which perspectives and thoughts belonging to two of the second-
ary characters are given voice: those of Gerbert (with whom Fran~oise
finally has a brief affair) and those of Elizabeth (Pierre's sister and the
friend of Fran~oise). However, the perspectives and thoughts of Pierre
and of Xaviere are' never re.vealed. What are we to make of this? Does
Beauvoir as author (in contrast to Beauvoir-Fran~oise) accept that even
 Vision, Violence, and the Other 179

within the world of her novel the existences of Pierre and Xaviere exceed
her purview and grasp, and does she therefore refuse to take advantage of
her position as author to impute thoughts and feelings to them? Is it a
further demonstration of generosity? Or (taking seriously the assertion
that the novel was written "as an act of revenge"), does her silence mark
the extent of her alienation from them? Is she presenting them to us as if
they exist for her, now, as no more than mere objects? The nature of her
orientation toward them is unclear. Equally uncertain is the degree of
congruence between Beauvoir as writer and Beauvoir as the subject of her
writing: the fictional Fran~oise. Have both, in the end, refused immersion
in that "violent act which is perception itself," or just the latter? I am
not sure. The important point, however, is that Beauvoir's narrational
style provokes such self-exposure and such questions.
Merleau-Ponty, writing in "Metaphysics and the Novel," takes Beau-
voir's approach to be one in which generosity and vulnerability are key.
And at the root of both, he identifies a radical commitment to the risks
of embodied, perceptual engagement with self and others, discovering its
submerged but sustained presence throughout the noveL And so, al-
though his discussions of Fran~oise revolve around her attempts to dis-
avow her embodiedness, he prefaces his essay with the following extract
from L'invitee:

"What surprises me is that you are touched in such a concrete

way by a metaphysical situation."
"But the situation is concrete," said Fran~oise, "the whole
meaning of my life is at stake."
"I'm not saying it isn't," Pierre said. "Just the same, this ability
of yours to put body and soul into living an idea is exceptionaL"3l

More recently, referring to Beauvoir's own reflections upon L'invitie as

recorded in her autobiographical novel The Prime of Life (1963), Toril
Moi, also, has observed that this author commits her own embodied being
to the process of writing in a radical way. Focusing on the fictional murder
of Xaviere, which Beauvoir later described both as an "abrupt and clumsy
conclusion of the drama" and as "the motive force and raison d'etre be-
hind the entire novel,"32 Moi writes as follows:

It is as if Simone de Beauvoir here simultaneously seeks to excuse

herself for having committed the literary crime of bad writing ...
180 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

and to affirm the utter necessity of that crime. That necessity,

however, is neither literary nor philosophical, but physical and
psychological. ... [In The Prime of Life, Beauvoir] insists on the
fantasmatic and bodily nature of this writing experience: "I must
work my fantasy through to the bitter end, embody it [lui donner
corps]" (PL 340). Writing the murder of the other woman, Beau-
voir would seem spontaneously to have felt that she was, as He-
lene Cixous might have put it, "writing the body."33

Significantly, the body that is being written in L'invitee is a woman's

body. Thus, it is a body, as a succession of feminist theorists have insisted,
that conventionally has been figured within the visual world as the object
rather than subject of vision. Nonetheless, Merleau-Ponty's reading of
L'invitee proposes that, in the end, the answer for Beauvoir lies not in
disavowing one's bodily existence, but precisely in accepting and dealing
with its perceived difficulties, limitations, and entanglements. "What if
... freedom did not consist in cutting oneself off from all earthly involve-
ments, but in accept,ing and going beyond them?" he asks. 34 In a similar
vein, but bringing specifically feminist perspectives into play, Debra Ber-
goffen has observed, "In introducing the concept of gender and examin-
ing the processe,s of gendering, Beauvoir does more than politicize the
dynamics of the look and bad faith. She discovers that though the body's
perceivability marks it as a source of alienation, its vulnerability marks it
as the source of subjective affirmation; for it is in recognizing my vulnera-
bility and assuming- it that I discover the link between risking the lived
body and my subjective and intersubjective possibilities."35
For Merleau-Ponty, at issue in Beauvoir's L'invitee-as in the passage
from the Phenomenology of Perception with which we began-are the risks
associated with sustained perceptual involvement with others. "[W]hen I
say that I know and like someone, I aim, beyond his qualities, at an
inexhaustible ground which may one day shatter the image that I have
formed of him. This is the price for there being things and 'other people'
for us, not as the result of some illusion, but as the result of a violent
act which is perception itself." I argued earlier that for Merleau-Ponty
perception is a phenomenon that occurs first and foremost at levels that
are prepersonal or "anonymous," and that individual experiences of
seeing and being seen are concrete, situated, and provisional constella-
tions emergent within it. In, the passage from the Phenomenology, the
constellation that is described prioritizes the experience of the seer, and
 Vision, Violence, and the Other 181

what is given is the collapse of that aspect of perception that, for an

instant, takes itself to be authoritative and invincible. Beauvoir, by con-
trast, immerses her readers into the other side of that phenomenon, as it
is experienced by a body for whom, recalling lrigaray's words, "investment
in the look is not as privileged ... as for men." As such, in Merleau-
Pontean terms at least, it is a body that is profoundly ethical in its orien-
tations because it struggles to accept the fact, the risks, the unfamiliarity,
and ultimately also the indeterminacy and agency, of its own visible
being.

Notes

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962),361.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Metaphysics and the Novel" (1945), in Sense and Non-sense
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964),26-40.
3. Luce Irigaray, interview in Les femmes, la pomographie et l'erotisme, ed. Marie-Franl;oise Hans
and Gilles Lapouge (Paris: 1978), 50.
4. MerIeau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 361.
5. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Visual and Other Pleasures (Basing-
stoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 1989), 14-26, 19.
6. See, for instance, Julia Kristeva, "Evenement et revelation," L'infini, no. 5 (Winter 1984),
3-11; Tales of Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 13-16; "The Adolescent Novel,"
in Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, ed. John Fletcher and Andrew Benja-
min (London and New York: Routledge, 1990),8-23.
7. Merleau-Ponty, "Cezanne's Doubt" (1945), in Sense and Non-sense (Evanston; Northwestern
University Press, 1964),9-25, 19.
8. Ibid., 16.
9. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 346-47.
10. Ibid., 80. The chapter in question is "The Experience of the Body and Classical Psychology."
11. Ibid., 353.
12. Ibid., 362.
13. Merleau-Ponty, "Metaphysics and the Novel," 29.
14. Ibid., 37.
15. Simone de Beauvoir, She Came to Stay (London: Fla!Ilingo, 1984),21.
16. Merleau-Ponty, "Metaphysics and the Novel," 30.
17. Ibid., 32.
18. Ibid., 32-33.
19. Ibid., 33.
20. Ibid., 29.
21. Merleau-Ponty, "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence" (1952), in Signs (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1960),39-83.
22. Merleau-Ponty, "Metaphysics and the Novel," 31.
23. Ibid., 40.
182 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

24. Ibid., 36.

25. Ibid., 37.
26. Ibid., 29.
27. Ibid., 40.
28. Merleau-Ponty, "The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences," in The
Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 12-42,26.
29. Merleau-Ponty, "Metaphysics and the Novel," 40.
30. Ibid., 28.
31. Cited in ibid., 26.
32. Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, 340. Cited by Toril Moi in Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an
InteUec!Ua1 Woman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994),96.
33. Moi, Simone de Beauvoir, 96.
34. Merleau-Ponty, "Metaphysics and the Novel," 34-35.
35. Debra B. Bergoffen, The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic
Generosities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997),30.
 9
Bodies Inside/Out: Violation
and Resistance from the Prison
Cell to The Bluest Eye
Laura Doyle

In Allen Feldman's study Formations of Violence, he quotes an Irish Re-

publican Army prisoner in the Long Kesh prison who explains that "[t]he
higher the beatings, the stronger we were. That was their weakness."l
This is the paradoxical carnal logic I want to explore, first as it finds
compacted expression within prisons and then as it floods out into the
sexualized and race-d circuits of everyday domination. The work of Mau-
rice Merleau-Ponty can help us to understand this paradoxical dynamic
in which bodily vulnerability forms the ground of resistance. Specifically,
Merleau-Ponty's account of the slippages and reversals in what he under-
184 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

stands as the chiasmatic intercorporeality of bodies can illuminate the

perplexing way in which the dominated and gendered body not only
marks "the terminal locus of power," as Feldman puts it, but also "defines
the place for the redirection and reversal of power" (FV, 178). Here I
bring together Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology with three narratives-
two prison memoirs and one novel about rape-in order to better describe
bodily resistance as it operates within the pressures of sexuality, race, and
nation.
Taking my initial cues from the Long Kesh prisoners' descriptions, I
will first of all consider the prison narratives of Lena Constante (The
Silent Escape) and Jacobo Timerman (Prisoner Without a Name, Cell With-
out a Number). These memoirs unfold the intercorporeal dynamics of
violation and resistance, dramatizing what Constante calls the prisoner's
"defense of the intimate being." The extreme situations endured by Tim-
erman and Constante make highly visible the intercorporeal movements
of power within wh,ich, in less extreme form, we all live. They thus pre-
pare the way for my discussion of the everyday world of racialized sexual
coercion as depicted . .in Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye. Morrison
powerfully traces the communal and corporeal effects of sexual violation
for both men and women; and at the same time, in the very act of story-
telling, she reengages a resistant, communal, and chiasmatic intercoipo-
reality.

Breathing Space
The forms of domination practiced on Irish prisoners in the Long Kesh
prison in the early 1980s make dear that gender inflects the violence of
many prison situations. As in the 2004 abuses by American soldiers at
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the guards and wardens at Long Kesh explic-
itly pursued practices that exposed inmates' bodily privacy, ranging from
nudity to forced anal entry. Long Kesh inmates in tum resisted exactly
through their willingness to risk this exposure and to use orifices as hiding
places for contraband. Given that these maneuvers unfolded as part of
the long colonial/anticolonial battle between Britain and Ireland {just as
the Abu Ghraib abuses arose from a struggle over territory and oil}, they
give us a first glimpse of the way that bodily orifices and interiors serve as
sites of struggle for the exterior, geopolitical competition over space-the
 Bodies Inside/Out 185

nation's land. While the prison dynamics themselves are not explicitly
gendered, it is important to keep in mind that they occur within a situa-
tion in which victims of violence are regularly feminized, as indicated,
for instance, by the paramilitary, street language, documented by Feld-
man, in which to beat or kill someone was to "knock his cunt in" or
"give him the message," the latter phrase being slang for intercourse (FV,
69). More broadly, of course, insofar as such nationalist and imperial
struggles have formed historically within discourses of manhood, the
abuse and resistance of political prisoners becomes a gendered drama.
At Long Kesh, the world-riveting 1981 hunger strikes were preceded
by a series of protests, starting with the "Blanket Protest," whereby the
prisoners wore only blankets because they refused to wear prison garb
after their change in status from political prisoners to common criminals.
On shower day they were given two towels, one to wear to the showers
and one to dry with while there. When this policy changed, and they
were denied towels for the walk to the shower, the prisoners refused to
shower-a decision perhaps also influenced by the fact that it was during
showers that guards conducted invasive body searches.
Thus the "Dirty Protest" began-and so too a cycle of resistance and
abuse that ultimately involved the bodies of the guards as well as of the
prisoners. The prisoners' refusal to shower led the warden to deny them
bathroom privileges, which led the prisoners to shit in the comers of
their cells, which led the guards "mistakenly" to throw the prisoners'
sheets and mattresses into the piles of shit while searching for contra-
band, which led the prisoners to throw the excrement out the window,
which led the guards to board up the windows, which led the prisoners
to spread the shit on the cell walls, which led the guards each day to
move the prisoners and clean and whitewash the cells-until in the end
the guards, smelling nearly as badly as did the prisoners, spent hours
ridding themselves of the stench before going home.
In this cycle, dirt and shit invasively permeated the home lives of the
guards just as it did the cell lives of the prisoners. Guards and prisoners
entered a body deadlock in an extreme instance of what Sara Suleri calls
"colonial intimacy."z As one prisoner put it, "From the moment we hit
the H-block we had used our bodies as a protest weapon. It came from
the understanding that the Brits were using our bodies to break us" (FV,
179). If the guards turned the prisoners' bodies inside out by making
them squat over mirrors while they searched their anuses with metal in-
struments, the prisoners carried this logic further by turning their cells
 186 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

into anuses replet~ with shit-covered walls. A guard entering the prison-
er's cell in effect was forcibly made to enter the hole he had forcibly
probed. The body had been turned inside out, the body's reversibility
made both abject and empowering. In such a situation, far from being the
essentialist ground of identity, the body is instead "a cumulative effect of
exchanges between agonistic forces .... [The] exchange historicizes the
subject, fixing it and unfixing it into determinate but manifold forms"
(FV, 177). The body is metamorphic, most especially under duress.
- Strangely, the capacity for metamorphosis resides in an interior space
that is also the opening to violation. In effect, prisoners and guards battle
over the body's politically loaded and elusive inside/out ontology.
To put it more precisely, in violating the prisoners' interiority, the
guards were forCing and displaying their access not only to the body's
invisible interiors but also to its primary spatiality-the openness within
the body that upholds and nourishes its exterior presence. One can rip
into a body anywh~re with a knife. To enter the body via given passages,
passageways by which a body lives and which also create its vulnerability
to entry and .lead _to the spaces it contains and which in fact are its
inscape, this is something quite different. To shove a fist or instrument
into the anus against the will of the prisoner: this is not merely to display
mastery over the body (as mass) of the prisoner: it is to come between
the parts of the fleshly person, to display mastery over the space con-
tained and occupied by the body.
In these acts, I suggest, the aggressor forces himself into what Merleau-
Ponty calls the chi~smus, the very ontological center which is nonethe-
less also th~ space of noncenter, of fission, of multiplicity, therefore of
possibility, of parts touching to make something which is not merely
them. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the productive effects of this chiasmatic
noncenter of the person, casting it as that which brings the person into
active, intercorporeal relation to her surround. For Merleau-Ponty, the
experience of one-hand-touching-the-other-touching-it epitomizes the
chiasmatic nature of our bodily being and relation to ourselves. In this
experience, "[t]here is a circle of the touched and the touching, the
touched takes hold of the touching,"3 and yet this meeting of the touch-
ing hand and the touched hand is

always imminent and never realized in fact. My left hand is always

on the verge of touching my right hand touching the things, but
I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the mo-
 Bodies Inside/Out 187

ment of realization, and one of two things always occurs: either

my right hand really passes over to the rank of the touched, but .
then its hold on the world is interrupted; or it retains its hold on
the world, but then I do not really touch it-my right hand
touching, I palpate with my left hand only its outer covering.
(VI, 148)

At the same time, however, this slippage, or "ecart," or "hiatus between

my right hand touched and my right hand touching," is emphatically
"not an ontological void, a non-being: it is spanned by the total being of
my body, and by that of the world ... : it is a new type of being, a being
by porosity, pregnancy, or generality, and he before whom the horizon
opens is caught up, included within it" (VI, 149). The chiasm is at once
the vulnerability and the promise of embodiment in a world in which I
come to myself from outside myself.
To forcibly enter the body's chiasmatic openings, its places of self-
touching, is therefore to simultaneously expose and usurp embodiment's
promise. As do all rapists, the Long Kesh guards forced violent touch
from without on the ontology of constant benevolent touchings, inter-
connecting tissues, within. Such violence seeks not only to inflict pain
but also to divide the person from her or his own possibilities, to seize
the primal condition of possibility. It seeks to occupy, as an invading
colonizer, the space of the chiasm-the ineffable site at which one body's
two parts touch-and-in-touching-manifest-their-joined-separateness.
And it seeks, by this intimate means, to occupy and circumscribe the
social surround of the prisoner or the colonized community. Indeed, this
view of bodily violation begins to explain the profound role that rape
plays in territorial wars. On one level, of course, the rape of women by
soldiers displays the latter's access to the attacked men's "possessions."
But perhaps more deeply, rape serves as the ontological microcosm of the
violent seizure of physical space that is war. Or, to put it differently,
the geopolitical landscape is an extension of the bodily interior, in the
intercorporeal sense that Merleau-Ponty theorizes, and so to enter one is
to signal one's intention to enter the other. What Morrison makes clear,
as we'll later see, is how battles between men over borders-in her story,
racial borders-redounds upon the bodies of women.
Yet, by the same token, as all the texts I discuss show, the condition
of chiasmatic slippage and possibility, which is space within surface,
emerges as subject to no law of mere force. These works suggest that here,
188 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

perhaps, is where. resistance lives. For, short of death, and sometimes

regardless of desire, there is always an internal space-a breathing space
quite literally as well as analogically; and while dense matter can be dom-
inated, can be forced into this or that position, penetrated with this or
that weapon, the breathing space cannot be. Paradoxically, this internal
space is the most resistant phenomenon, even involuntarily, while also
the most ethereal. In giving place to the dialectical chiasm within a body
and between bodies, in its ontology as an opening and a hiddenness, this
space both allows and eludes access. It holds the possibility of defiance
and duplicity-of survival, of evasion of invasion.

Being Double
As evinced, that is, in the testimonies of human prisoners, and in novels
such as Morrison's 'The Bluest Eye, the body is a reserve as well as an
inescapable site of torture-exactly both at once in its doubleness. Both
Lena Constante, inThe Silent Escape, and Jacobo Timerman, in Prisoner
Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, describe this vexed, doubled
condition. My discussion of their memoirs in the following few sections
of this essay will focus not on sexual violation (which for the most part
they did not suffer) but instead on the nature of the "breathing space"
that domination attempts to control (a space that includes but is not
limited to sexuality) -and through which the person survives.
Lena Constante spent eight years in solitary confinement in Romania
(before and after a puppet trial performed under Soviet rule, and before
serving six more in group cells) and has titled her narrative of these years
The Silent Escape. "In this dungeon of a cell for unending hours I became
aware of my duality. I was two. For I was here and I saw myself here. I was
twO."4 As becomes clear, her silent escape is not strictly from the cell,
but from herself-in-the-cell.
As she awakens one winter morning to her unheated cement cubicle,
on a thin straw mattress with no blanket, Constante comes to conscious-
ness "[p]aralyzed by the cold. Aching all over. Reality holds me in its grip.
A pincers. Breaking my bones." And yet she also awakens "[rlesisting the
urge to give way. To give up. To give up even oneself.... The most
difficult struggle. Against the '1lost treacherous enemy. And the subtlest.
Oneself" (SB, 17). Instead of giving up all of herself to her subtler self,
 Bodies Inside/Out 189

under this pressure from the other of herself, she struggles to "repudiate
my body's 'me'" (SE, 9). Sometimes she apparently makes this duality a
familiar, Cartesian mind-body one, with the "I" or "me" aligned with
mind or spirit against body: "My body could only be here. Me, I could be
elsewhere. My body didn't have the space to move its aching feet. But, I
would grow wings. The wings of a bird. The wings of the wind. The wings
of a star. And I would get away" (SE, 9). To pass the "86400 seconds a
day that slowly twist all over [her] body" (SE, 15), she "escapes into" her
"mind": in her eight years of solitary confinement she mentally "writes"
several plays for the marionette stage (part of her work in normal life) .
and composes and memorizes countless lines of poetry. Thus far her expe-
rience would seem to conform to a simple dualistic metaphysics.
At first glance, the same seems true for Jacobo Timerman in his ac-
count of his experiences in clandestine Argentinean prisons, especially
as reflected in what he calls his "withdrawal technique." On the one
hand he "developed an attitude of absolute passivity" especially during
interrogation and torture sessions: "I was told to undress. And I did so,
passively. I was told, when I sat on a bed, to lie down. And, passively I
did SO."5 He apparently, in the full phenomenal sense of that word, gives
his seeable body over to his torturers and meanwhile, like Constante, he
engages in tenacious "mental labor": imagining newspaper tasks, plan-
ning a bookstore run by himself and his wife, and writing essays or books
in detail (PWN, 35). "I tried," he says, "through every available means,
while inside my solitary cell, during interrogations, long torture sessions,
and after sessions, when only time remained, all of time, time on all sides
and in every cranny of the cell, time suspended on the walls, on the
ground, in my hands, only time, I tried to maintain some professional
activity, disconnected from the events around me" (PWN, 37). Timer-
man dissociates from his surroundings and from the body that inhabits
them. Yet this "with-drawal" is, like Constante's, a leaving-behind that I
would point out is deeply structured by or rooted in the material world
he faces. The very word with-drawal indicates a pulling-with, a struggle
with that assumes the countervailing presence of his body-a presence
that must remain in order for him to return or, in other words, to survive
the electric shocks and the blows. That is, to live through the torture he
escapes into a mental elsewhere, but he does so to keep alive the body he
must return to and on which his mental activity depends for its life. This
splitting of himself from himself is the action of both his defeat and his
victory. What first seems a triumphant and reductive dualism emerges
190 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty

ultimately as a mare lateral dialectic in which Timerman and Constante

repeatedly preserve themselves via their very twoness, via the two leaves
or aspects joining interior to exterior, lived-inside to lived-outside.
Constante herself admits that "[m]y body, my hand had to come to
the rescue," since "[b]y itself my mind could not fill the seventeen hours
of the day" (SE, 88). (She was not allowed to lie down or sleep between
5:00 AM and 10:00 PM) Most simply she institutes a morning routine
of calisthenics; as a result, "[m]y mind became clearer" (SE, 88). More
powerfully, she survives by way of the work she does with her hands. First,
from bits of bone in her food, broom straw from her mattress, wire from
the mattress frame, and teeth broken off her comb, she fashions a small
sewing kit. For thread, she rips out the seams of all of her clothes and
crafts spools to store it on. Then, with these handmade tools she makes
a set of miniature dolls from soap and bits of her own clothing into tiny
outfits, and she mends her years' -old clothing. Her working hands allow
a fragile cooperation, Ot twoness, within the collapsed world of the celL
It is hands that "ca~e to the rescue," which is not surprising if, indeed,
they epitomize-exe~cise-the chiasm. They are the touch that "makes,"
whether in the sense of being tools that can physically work together (via
their distinctness) or in the chiasmatic sense of continually discovering
themselves to ea~h other, knowing themselves as both object and subject,
touched and touching, almost simultaneously.
So what first appears as a mind-body duality in Constante's "twoness"
is in effect a shifting coupling, wherein one part is continually rescuing
or bolstering the other, even if through a dynamic of repulsion or distanc-
ing of one from the other: one goes away, the other stays; one pursues an
elsewhere, the other preserves, painfully, the here that the other must be
able to come back to. Similarly in Timerman's case: although he does not
describe any systematic physical routine, he tells of his habit of "moving a
hand or leg and observing the movement, fixedly, in order to experience
some sense of mobility" (PWN, 35). By this practice he too reintroduces
bodily dialogue into the constricted cell world. He purs~es a therapeutic
restoration of twoness, of the capacity to move oneself and watch oneself
moving, performed to counter the dissociation between parts that the
torturers' work imposes~ Timerman confesses his compulsion to repeat
this moving and watching, and I would suggest that it fascinates him
exactly because of the way it slips like a bike pedal on a loose chain-it
stretches him across- that "hi~tus" of being, and in that stretching and
slipping affirms an opening, a space for enactment, a condition of antici-
 Bodies Inside/Out 191

pation. A doubling and a future. Most essentially, it practices the with-

drawal that for the terrorized body is survival, is resistance. This point
seems important for the task of understanding the ways that many of us
survive abuse, in hundreds of small, dissociative moments. It sheds light
on the brave yet debilitating forms of endurance that develops within all
kinds of social situations, ranging from coercion by domestic partners to
schoolyard jostlings to street violence to anonymous rape, all the way to
fascist forms of institutional power.
It is important to stress once more that the almostness of the simultane-
ity experienced in touching oneself or watching oneself moving is as cru-
cial as the simultaneousness. For here lies the instability that is both
dangerous and productive. The chiasmatic body lives a "reversibility
[that] is always imminent and never realized in fact" (VI, 147). This
imminence or almostness might involve a deferral, as Jacques Derrida
would see it, but it is also a fullness, a pregnancy, as Derrida's own meta-
phors sometimes simultaneously hint. 6 It is a prompting that provides the
invisible "hinge" of our being. In the case of Constante's "making," the
almost is the space between hands within which combs are bent, matches
are held to the tips of bone, and materials are sewn, literally, together.

Stripping the World of Things

The other side of this, of course, is that these objects worked by hands
can be seized, and the world of the person lost within empty time. Cons-
tante's tools were all eventually confiscated, her anticipatory experience
of potential and making repeatedly stolen away. Constante recovers, re-
makes, and survives again and again, but her moments of collapse reveal
what it means to be defeated in prison or in situations of abuse: it is to
have lost sight of this sustaining premonition of simultaneousness with
oneself because the conditions for such a premonition-including the
holding and working of objects-are either absent or under constant
threat.
Here we might recall Edith Wyschogrod's reflections, in Spirit in Ashes,
on what happens to the world of things, or the Heideggerian "dinge,"
in what she calls the "death-world" of the Nazi concentration camps.
Acknowledging that "we live in the future through the accustomed series
of references constituted by things," she reminds us how, for a prisoner
192 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty

living in the "death-world" of a fascist prison, the confiscation of things

is actually a theft of the prisoner's spatial and temporal holding structures.
If it is the case that "[a]nticipation, the promise in things, constitutes the
organic tie between life and death, "7 then in the death world things are
stripped of their promise. They are reduced to their death aspect, so that
the life-death bridge they have constructed in the normal world disinte-
grates and they signify in this sense a further shutting down of the chiasm.
When this happens, instead of hands inhabiting and working in the
world of things, there is "only time" on the prisoner's "hands" and in the
prisoner's space-as Timerman says, "time on all sides and in every
cranny of the cell, time suspended on the walls, on the ground, in my
hands, only time" (PWN, 37). Hunted out and held in the hands of the
torturer, things become menacing, dangerous. They dramatize the void
lining the chiasm, into which things drain away and hands become ab-
surd, useless, relationless.
This is the crux 9f Timerman's experience when one day he notices
that "a guard has my watch," while "during an interrogation another
guard offered me a cigarette and lit it with my wife's lighter" (PWN, 4).
Especially since Tirrierman well knows the kinds of sexualized abuse these
captors are capable of (electtic shocks were applied to his testicles), this
proffering of his ~ife's lighter carries a hint of possible sexual violation,
of her or of him. Timerman says "my" watch and "my" wife's lighter, but
beneath this formulation lies a tension, a threat, a pull, a draining of that
very my-ness. In fact, his watch is not any longer his, and his wife may
be raped or dead. Both instances signify the "holding" of his intimate life
by the terrotizing other. Things and bodies, and the promise they hold,
can be confiscated, and in the process steal us away from ourselves. His
wife's lighter is turned against him-so that the gesture of lighting is
made to suggest the opposite of the tenderness it would normally involve.
As Timerman leans toward the guard with his cigarette and the guard lifts
his necessarily mocking hand toward Timerman, the "how" of history
unfolds-the embodied irony of the way Timerman and the guard live
history at odds with each other in the dinge, against each other together
in the closeness of things. Trivial things knit together the strangling,
inside-out world of tortuting guard and tortured prisoner.
What Mikhail Bakhtin says of words is shown starkly here as equally
true of things-they are at once mine and the others, vulnerable to an-
other's seizure and use, transformed by this "theft" yet deceivingly identi-
cal in aspect· across the transposition. s Things survive us but more
 Bodies Inside/Out 193

painfully they survive a seizing by a hostile other. This experience is

confirmed by all kinds of prisoners: "No matter how many times I've been
in prison the most horrible and degrading part of it is always the reception
procedures. You're entered on a form, all the things you've got that are
going to be taken off you are listed on another form, and then you have
to sign. It makes you feel like you are signing your whole personality
away. And you are toO."9 Or in the words of Ron 0, sentenced to four
years for possession of drugs: "First they write down all the details of you,
then they take your personal possessions and seal them up in a packet,
then they take your clothes off you and put them in a numbered box, and
finally you end up standing there with just a towel round your waist.
What they're doing is reducing your identity stage by stage, slowly wiping
you out as a person until you're only one more piece of flesh with a name
and a number" (MI, 26). We are as vulnerable to unmaking as this,
and in such situations we quickly if unconsciously recognize that this
"stripping" exposure of vulnerability is the beginning of domination.
Thrown as we are into the world of space and a future, normally things
anchor us. They can do so because things survive beyond us; we live from
their power of sustained presencing. Yet things also give way, they give us
away, betray us. For the prisoner, or the abused one, things mockingly
beckon while holding back the possibility of her or his world~making
through them.

Inhabiting the Folds

And yet, again, this doubleness, which makes things susceptible to sei~
zure, is what they are: things-a presencing seen in common-give out
this doubleness. Their double presencing-or rather perhaps their omni~
presencing, in the sense of presence to all and any-makes it possible for
things to be stolen back, hidden, hoarded, if one can find a "cranny" of
the world not yet claimed by the guard and not therefore lost to the
corrosive weight of prison time. Lena Constante discovers and elaborates
this "promise" in things.
In fact Constante comes to live in an economy of hiding and hoard~
ing-of living in the folds of the three~dimensional cell-and so reestab~
lishes the carnal dialectic of the chiasm. She develops the habit of taking
up any stray object that happens, rarely enough, across her path, even
194 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

before she knows what to do with it. On one of her changes of cell, she
writes, "[T]he first thing I noticed was a sheet of paper stuck to the wall"
listing an inventory of the contents of the room. "I was rich! I immedi-
ately took down the paper and, folding it eight times, hid it under the
board of the bench, fitting it into a groove. Why? For no particular rea-
son. A prisoner's reflex" (SE, 183). She later has the idea of pilfering
some cigarette butts from the trash bin she passes when she is let out to
empty her chamber pot and of using the paper to roll herself some new
cigarettes. This instinct to seize a thing and hide it in a "groove" of the
world expresses the importance for the prisoner of its nooks and crannies,
or what Merleau-Ponty would call the folds of the world-its layered
three-dimensionality into which we step as one more doubling three-
dimensional presence. This perhaps explains what Constante discovers
after she is given fabric to sew in a new lining for her coat and uses the
leftover to make "a large bag full of pockets and compartments for each
of my [sewing] things" {SE, 225). She tells us she later heard that "bags
with many pockets are one of the prisoner's characteristic obsessions"
(SE, 225)-as if the-folds in the fabric provided covert ontological pock-
ets for the being of the prisoner.
Constante's activities get woven, moreover, into a whole prison com-
munity's subver.sive efforts to create intra- and intercorporeal relation.
This dimension of her experience points to the powerful potential of
community-that is, of capacity for intercorporeal exchange to revive and
protect the intracorporeal self-relation and so to set once more in motion
the processes of active being. Constante eventually spends a number of
years in a' women's prison in which the inmates create a clandestine
Morse code system by which they communicate through the walls-thus
frustrating the surprise searches and other harassing activities of the.
guards as well as sharing information about families, friends, and fellow
prisoners. They become so adept at communicating ever more precise
messages that "the solidarity of our penitentiary was the staff's night-
mare," since it was "primarily against the solidarity that the commandant
and all the militia had to struggle" (SE, 213). The prisoners in effect
seize power from the very material barriers of their imprisonment-the
cell walls-turning them into portals of communication. In phenomeno-
logical terms, they make a virtue of the chiasmatic structure of the walls,
playing on the walls' simultaneous construction of inside/outside and iso-
lation/connection:Finally, it is by working this intercorporeal doubleness
of the walls that they also protect and foster their intracorporeal acts of
 Bodies Inside/Out 195

making and concealing. Constante explains how a "forceful fist blow on

the wall meant danger" and how it sets in motion a chain reaction of
hidings from cell to cell: "The iron wires for knitting, the needles, the
works in hand quickly vanished. The filched spoons, whose handles had
been sharpened, the pieces of glass for cutting fabric, all the thousand
little things prohibited by stupidity or spite were hidden in the straw of
the mattress, under the slats around the floor, in who knows what other
hiding place determined by ingenious necessity" (SE, 211). Thus do the
prisoners remake the cell in the image of the chiasm, gener:ating a "mak-
ing" both within and across it. If, in her last comment about "ingenious"
hiding places, Constante is discreetly referring to the body's orifices, she
signals again the interrelation between the body's inside/out ontology
and the world's bounded spaces. These wall-traversing, intercorporeal ac-
tivities extend the self-constituting work with hands that keeps flexible
and open the hinge of the prisoner's being. The prisoners resist and sur-
vive through a very precise "working (in) the in-between," participating
in "an incessant process of exchange from one subject to another," to
borrow words from Helene Cixous's "Laugh of the Medusa" that resonate
suggestively with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology.lo As Constante con-
cludes, "The walls of my cell no longer separated me from the world. On
the contrary" (SE, 246).
Here, and perhaps even more clearly in Timerman's encounter with
another prisoner, to which I will tum next, the dynamic is one in which
the chiasm of the person works together with the reversible, inside/out
space of the surround, and vice versa, in a continuous circle.

The Horizon Inside Out, and Tender

As Constante's description of intercorporeal resistance shows, and as
Merleau-Ponty emphasized, things presence themselves and we compre-
hend their presence ourselves within a multidimensional span, a horizon.
The horizon may be understood as space buttressed, held, made concrete
by the three-dimensionality in which one thing obscures another with
its fullness-the tree, a house; the house, a field-and another behind or
beyond that, on and on into a distance manifested in those things and in
the spaces between them. By this means, things "promise" a fullness,
depth, and continuity. Our perception of this inhabited horizon tells us
196 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty

that we match the'world, belong in it and to it. The invisible beyond our
view can be apprehended as a threat and yet the horizon that signals
toward that beyond is also lived as the welcome limit of our view, wel-
come because it assures us of our positionality in the world, of a place
within its limits and contours, of a dimensionality equal to that of things.
The ability to hide things rests on this dimensional, horizonal world, and
this partly explains the "prisoner's reflex" that Constante describes.
Yet this horizon, too, the guards and torturers aim to close. They
work-it is literally sometimes part of their job-to strip the prisoner of
any horizon within which to place him- or herself. The guards' attempts
to contain the women's covert communication is one instance of this
work. In an earlier instance, the guards cut down two acacia trees outside
Constante's window to which she has become attached; her physical col-
lapse and broken feeling on this occasion registers the effects of this hori-
zon-closing work. Timerman experiences a more radical shutdown of the
horizon as well as a more singular, if fleeting, reopening of it. His depic-
tion of this experience gives further insight into the interdependence of
the within and the 1)etween, or intracorporeal chiasm and intercorporeal
world-and into the simultaneous vulnerability and power created by
this interdependence.
At the opening of his book, Timerman the prisoner, and therefore we
the readers, have no idea where he is. He was blindfolded, his hands tied
behind his back, his body shoved to the floor of a car for the transport to
this place. The roqm into which he has been deposited has no light, no
window. l:.le has discovered its dimensions by holding out his arms, find-
ing he cannot stretch out his legs when he lies down on the cot. There
is only a peephole in the door, through which the guards speak roughly
or mockingly and which is usually kept shut. A narrow outline of light
marks its edges, dispersing a 'shadowy grayness into the dark cell. This
prisoner has no visible surround. His "thrownness," in Heideggerian
terms, is into a "being-alongside" without a horizon. His cell exists in a
vacuous space of fear.
One day the peephole inexplicably is left open against the rules. Tim-
erman the prisoner is drawn powerfully to the bright square of light and
presses his forehead against the cold steel door. He peers out at a hall
blasted with light and at two doors facing his. The effect is ontological:
"What a sensation of freedom! An entire universe added to my Time,
that elongated time which hovers over me oppressively in the cell, Time,
that dangerous enemy of man [sic], when its existence, duration, and
 Bodies Inside/Out 197

eternity are virtually palpable. . . . I try to fill myself with the visible
space. So long have I been deprived of a sense of distance and proportion
that I feel suddenly unleashed" (PWN, 5).
In the lightless cell~world, "Time" had become dimensionless, obliter~
ating. The shadowless lack of an "open" in the surround of Timerman's
cell had accomplished a shutness and flatness within, so that when a
horizon takes shape around him in the hallway, his interior suddenly
opens up as well, providing a space within which he can see and position
himself. The prisoner is "unleashed" into a world of "distance and pro~
portion." Timerman tries to fill himself with space, to eat it hungrily, as
if to refill the yawning emptiness of spaceless Time. So fully intertwined
is the body with its surround that collapsing the external surround closes
off the body, and an opening of the surround likewise relaunches the
body.
And so, as we can begin to imagine, a friendly human figure appearing
within that hallway would extend the drama, add another fold to the
"visible space" of the hall, which is already now intertwined with the
interior of the prisoner. Timerman looks out trembling, wondering if the
guards will at any moment poke his eyes or punish his "hungry" look~
ing-and in this way intrude on this extension of his interior into that
hallway. But instead Timerman registers in a flash that "[h]e is doing the
same. I suddenly realize that the peephole in the door facing mine is also
open and that there's an eye behind it" (PWN, 5). He fears that even
this is a setup of the guards and pulls back. He waits "for some Time,
more Time, and again more Time. And then return to the peephole. He
is doing the same" (PWN, 5).
Meeting another's eye-meeting it in that exterior space that has been
revealed as a crucial holding~structure for Timerman's interior relation to
himself-now ramifies his self~relation into an other~relation. Accord~
ingly, at this point the narrative pauses, the page holds an extra white
space, and the text then pivots from implicitly addressing the reader to
openly addressing, for the following four pages, the person in the cell
across the hall, as if revisiting a lover: "And now I must talk about you,
about that long night we spent together, during which you were my
brother, my father, my son, my friend. Or, are you a woman? If so, we
passed that night as lovers" (PWN, 5-6). Timerman's heteronormative
assumptions aside, it is fitting that he compares this meeting to an en~
counter between lovers.
Timerman admits that "only one possible outgoing act would have
198 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

occurred to me: lo-oking out, ceaselessly looking. But you unexpectedly

stuck your chin in front of the peephole. Then your mouth, or part of
your forehead" (PWN, 7). Also "[y]ou blinked. I clearly recall you blink-
ing. And that flutter of movement proved conclusively that I was not the
last human survivor on earth amid this universe of torturing custodians"
(PWN, 6). Timerman credits his friend with inventing games and so
"creating Movement in our confined world." These movements stand out
to him precisely for being "nonviolent, [different] from the ones em-
ployed when I was dragged or pushed by the guards" (PWN, 6). "You'd
suddenly move away, then return. At first I was frightened. But then
I realized you were recreating the great human adventure of lost-and-
found-and I played the game with you. Sometimes we'd return to the
peephole at the same time, and our sense of triumph was so powerful we
felt immortal. We were immortal" (PWN, 6).
Most powerfully of all, the friend recreates the tenderness of touch:
"Suddenly you put ,your nose in front of the peephole and rubbed it. It
was a caress, wasn't it? Yes, a caress. You'd already incorporated so many
levels of experience into our captivity, yet persisted in the restoration of
our humanity. At that moment you were suggesting tenderness, caressing
your nose, gazing at me. You repeated it several times. A caress, then your
eye. Another caress, and your eye" (PWN 9). This caress with the hand
comes to Timerman's "rescue" as Constante's own hands did for her. Yet
in this case the touch is a doubling of the intracorporeal and intercorpo-
real (as well as an affirmation of Merleau-Ponty's intuition about the
reversibility, or inte~twining, of the palpable and the visible). The pris-
oner touch~s her- or himself in a tender way, but here that touching is
explicitly (in Timerman's perception) performed for another, as if to
touch himself or herself tenderly under these circumstances were to touch
Timerman. Timerman's previous experience of feeling his interior awak-
ened within the horizon of the hallway sets up this poignant convergence
of the within and the between, the intra- and intercorporeal. After the
radical deprivation of existing within a lightless, collapsed chiasm, this
touch performed within a freshly opened horizon that pristinely holds
nonviolent movement might as well be a stroking of Timerman's most
intimate parts. He and the other indeed become lovers in this sense.
The prisoners' intersubjectively performed self-touching expresses what
Constante calls, in her reflections on survival in a fascist prison, "the
defense of the intimate being~' (SE, 127).
Thus do prisoners become extremely sensitive to what Elaine Scarry
 Bodies Inside/Out 199

calls the making and unmaking of the world. Within a fascist prison,
inmates strive to sustain dimensionality and the chiasmatic hiatus other-
wise generated by a "tender" dialectic of the within and the between.
Meanwhile, the sawing down of trees and stealing of lighters and locking
up in unlighted cells all aim to foreclose this "defense of the intimate
being" and to replace it with a totalitarian law without referents, depriv-
ing the prisoner of a legitimating external world other than that created
by the torturer in the prison.
Timerman is prompted by his experience to see how the making of the
world extends even to the scope of nationhood. He perceives what Bene-
dict Anderson would later write a book about-that the nation itself, the
cause for which all these acts are supposedly performed, is on the contrary
constituted by these acts. In suggesting that the course of history in Ar-
gentina is being made at this very moment and could be made differently,
Timerman comments, "Argentina as an entity does not yet exist: it must
be created" (PWN, 17). Meanwhile he deftly reveals how bodies and
the accustomed things through which we construct our world bear the
potentially body-breaking weight of history. In his account of the watch
and lighter confiscated from him, he mentions that "[g]old Rolex watches
and Dupont cigarette lighters were almost an obsession with the Argen-
tine forces during that year of 1977" (PWN, 5). He gestures here toward
the surrounding economy of "brand names" in which these commodities
circulate, revealing how the prison activities of confiscation and world-
unmaking emerge within the uneven and American-dominated market
and the competitive flaunting of American brand names and prestige.
This is the political-intercorporeal drama of persons and things, nations
and watches. Timerman quickly traverses, through these things, the
whole terrain they map out, signify, and sustain, from the wife's hand to
the resource-seizing, geopolitical contests that have created "Argentina"
and its fascism in the first place.
Thus, the unmaking and remaking of a person, by the guard and the
prisoner, is the making of history. In light of Judith Butler's work on the
ways that genders are likewise constituted by continuous acts rather than
essences, we can begin to see the implications of these prisoners' insights
for the making of the sexual order of things. And, as Toni Morrison
makes clear, the larger political processes of (un}making and the local or
domestic dynamics of sexual (un}making are not just parallel processes,
they are interdependent processes.
200 Feminisr"Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

. The Seizure of Sexuality

Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye quite explicitly unveils the way that
racial and sexual economies unfold together in homes and neighbor-
hoods. She tracks the effects of race's invasion of intimacy and sexuality.
Her story of a working-class Black family in the mid-twentieth-century
United States-framed by epigraphs about the perfect "Dick and Jane"
white family that mimics a first-grade reading primer--carries us into a
nonprison, yet still bordered, world that extends the dynamics narrated
by Constante and Timerman. She reveals the "defense of the intimate
being" forced upon the young girl named Pecola.
Thirteen-year;.old Pecola Breedlove enters the world of the United
States under the sign of "ugly." Even within her immediate African
American community, this ugliness "made her ignored or despised at
school, by teachers and .classmates alike." In school, "she was the only
member of her clas~ who sat alone at a double desk," and her teachers
never even "glance[d1at her" (45). "Thrown, in this way," as the narrator
explains, into a sense of herself as insurmountably ugly, "she would never
know her beauty." Instead "she would only see what there was to see:
the eyes of othet: people" (47). Because she does not see others-seeing-
her, Pecola cannot see herself. Closed off from others, she desires a shut-
down of herself-sometimes asking God to "[p]lease make me disappear"
(45).
The problem is magnified when Pecola moves among white people, as
when she visits Mr. Yacobowski's Fresh Vegetable Meat and Sundries
store to buy three Mary Jane candies: "Somewhere between retina and
object, vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate, and hover .... She
looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. And
something more. The total absence of human recognition-the glazed
separateness. She does not know what keeps his glance suspended. . . .
Yet this vacuum is not new to her. It has an edge; somewhere in the
bottom lid is the distaste. She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white
people." This refused visibility that Pecola faces is the cruel counterpart
to the pure tenderness of exchanged gazes between Timerman and his
fellow inmate. This refusal arouses in her an "inexplicable shame" as she
leaves the store (50). Although, for a moment "[a]nger stirs and wakes in
her; it opens its mouth and lik-e a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges
of her shame" giving her a momentary sense of "reality and presence,"
 Bodies Inside/Out 201

soon the "shame wells up again, its muddy rivulets seeping into her eyes"
(50). Morrison's language captures the permeating bodily effects, from
the inside out, of this denial of intercorporeal exchange.
The refusing gaze of racism might seem simply excluding rather than
invasive. But because of the chiasmatic condition of existence, this rejec-
tion accomplishes an inner collapse. Morrison traces how it destroys
Pecola's entry into her external world and in tum cripples an interior
self-relation. Before her arrival at Mr. Yacobowski's store, Pecola feels
pleasurable sensations of emplacement and anticipation. These are cata-
lyzed, first of all, by touch-that is, the sensation of the "three pennies
in her shoe-slipping back and forth between the sock and the inner sole
... a sweet endurable even cherished irritation, full of promise and deli-
cate security" (47). The pennies' rhythmic and shifting pressure not only
registers her weight and movement in ~he world (captured in the narra-
tive's description of an exchange between "sock" and "inner sole"), but
it also heralds a future. The pennies create a sense of "promise" and
temporal "security" as well as the promise of an economic "purchase" on
the world. Further, like Constante's attachment to the acacia trees, Peco-
la's situatedness issues from her relation to the "inanimate things she saw
and experienced," such as the "sidewalk crack shaped like a Y" and "the
dandelions at the base of the telephone pole" that she looks forward to
seeing on her walk to the store. These things, as the narrator explains,
"were real to her. She knew them. They were the codes and touchstones
of the world, capable of translation and possession. She owned the crack
that made her stumble; she owned the clumps of dandelions. . . . And
owning them made her part of the world, and the world a part of her"
(48-49).
This dialectic of world and self falls apart, however, in the aftermath
of her encounter with Mr. Yacobowski. The closed door of his eyes now
shutters the entire world. As she passes the dandelions on her return
home, "[a] dart of affection leaps out from her to them. But they do not
look at her and do not send her love back" (50). So Pecola settles for
eating the candies with the wrapper picture of the little girl with blonde
hair and blue eyes, since "to eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes,
eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane" (50). Her agency has been
reduced to this slipping of a candy into the mouth, a small, fraught deci-
sion to imbibe the world that rejects her.
The culminating scene of Pecola's unmaking is of course the moment
when her father, Cholly Breedlove, rapes her. Before we turn to this
202 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

scene, however, it'is crucial to see how Morrison leads up to it. She
narrates how Cholly himself has been undone by a racialized gaze, pre-
cisely in his moment of entry into the world of embraces, of sexuality.
And in the process she draws the reader into both sides of this excruciat-
ing encounter between father and daughter. She calls readers to extend
ourselves, intercorporeally, across the violated space where father and
daughter meet, and at the same time, across the space we might wish to
install between ourselves and such violations.
Abandoned at birth by his mother, rescued from the junk heap near
the railroad tracks by his Aunt Jimmy, and raised by her until he is a
teenager, Cholly's symbolic moment of entry into the adult world occurs
on the day of Aunt Jimmy's funeral. While the adults are drinking and
eating, Cholly a~d a girl named Darlene wander off to a wild-muscadine
vineyard nearby. Their budding intimacy is teased forward by their eating
of the "too new, too tight" grapes. The grapes themselves embody the
pleasures of anticipatory time insofar as "the restraint, the holding off,
the promise of sweetness [in the grapes] that had yet to unfold, excited
them more than fult ripeness would have done" (145). They begin to
fling grapes at each other, finally falling down in the grass to catch their
breath. As Darlene begins to worry about her grape-stained dress and
disheveled hair, Cholly "rose to his knees facing her" to retie the ribbon
in her hair. Darleen "put her hands under his open shirt and rubbed the
damp tight skin" (147). Soon they are making love and Cholly finds that
"their bodies began to make sense to him." He feels "the excitement
collecting inside him" until":-'-"just as he felt an explosion threaten"-
Darlene cries out in fear. For two white men have discovered them and
are standing behind Cholly with guns and flashlights. Cholly leaps up,
pulling on his trousers, but the men laugh and order him to "[g]et on wid
it, nigger," as they watch. '
Both Cholly's and Darlene's bodies shut down in what follows, now
blocked from encountering each other with any desire or kindness. Their
lovemaking becomes a bitter mockery and their gazes cannot alight. As
he drops back to his knees and the men snigger and shine their flashlights
on his backside, "[tlhere was no place for Cholly's eyes to go" (148).
Likewise, Darlene "had her head averted, her eyes staring out of the
lamplight into the surrounding darkness and looking almost uncon-
cerned, as though tp.ey had no part in the drama taking place around
them" (148). Their dissociatiVe responses recall Constante's and Timer-
man's withdrawal techniques: Darlene "put her hands over her eyes as
 Bodies Inside/Out 203

Cholly began to simulate what had gone on before. He could do no more

than make~believe" (148).
They are forced into a mimicry of embrace exactly at the moment
when the energy "collecting inside" presses outward. As that outward
reach collapses, the inscape of Cholly's body (in whose point of view we
remain) is colonized-or, as the narrator describes it, "The flashlight
wormed its way into his guts and turned the sweet taste of muscadine into
rotten fetid bile" (149). The next day, "the vacancy in his head was like
the space left by a newly pulled tooth still conscious of the rottenness
that had once filled it" (150). And now, too, since "directing his hatred
to the hunters ... would have destroyed him," Cholly turns his hatred
toward Darlene, "the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence
... whom he had not been able to protect, to spare, to cover from the
round moon glow of the flashlight .... The loathing [of her] that galloped
through him made him tremble" (150-51). Exposed to the mocking light
of whites, and caught up in the gender demands for male "potency,"
Cholly's impulse to reach out toward Darlene becomes a drive to purge
upon her the weakening bitterness inside of him. This invasion of Cholly
and Darlene's sexuality by white people and these gendered effects of
that invasion distill, of course, an entire Atlantic~American history.
Morrison thus narrates the racialized seizure of the intimate encounter.
In the rest of the novel, she tracks the chain reactions that follow from
this seizure, the force of its digressionary currents branching through bod~
ies over time and into the future. She reveals the dangerous mingling of
race, sex, and hatred as they move within these historical currents, espe~
dally as they shape Cholly's relations with the women in his family.
Interestingly, two key scenes of these relations-one with his wife,
Pauline, and the other with his daughter, Pecola-begin with tenderness,
a tenderness provoked by the women's own self~touching gestures. It is as
if Cholly is drawn to that experience he long ago lost, drawn to these
primal self~touchings that momentarily lift him out of his habitual state
as a grown man-in which "nothing, nothing, interested him.... Not
himself, not other people" (160). The woman who becomes his wife,
Pauline, is lame in one foot-a trait hinting at her own chiasmatic handi~
cap. When he sees her for the first time, he is walking down a country
road, approaching her from behind. She is leaning on a fence with the
lame foot raised and scratching the back of the other leg. "It was such a
small and simple gesture, but it filled him then with a wondering softness"
(162). Pauline, we learn, has been brooding on her lack of prospects for
204 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty

any kind of futureAbut as she hears a man whistling and approaching

down the road, she begins to smile and fantasize that maybe she has a
future after all. Provoking this momentary hope in Pauline, and in effect
taking up and extending Pauline's self-touching with his own touching
of her, Cholly steps up behind her and bends down to "tickl[e] her broken
foot and [kiss] her leg" (115). As Pauline is "holding fast to the break in
somber thoughts, she felt something tickling her foot" (115). Drawn to
Pauline via her intracorporeal self-relation, he supplements it with his
intercorporeal touching, carrying them into a future together, as husband
and wife.
But Cholly's own unhinged chiasm makes this future go wrong. His
tenderness "would not hold," as Morrison later puts it (163). After a few
years, he becomes a drunkard, a "dangerously free" wanderer (159), and
finally he is "rendered ... totally dysfunctional [by] the appearance of
children" (161). As the narrator explains, "[H]aving never watched any
parent raise himself, 'he could not even comprehend what such a relation-
ship should be" (160). Instead, "he reacted to [his children], and his
reactions were based on what he felt at the moment" (161).
And so Cholly repeats history, but with a difference. Arriving home
drunk one afternoon and seeing his thirteen-year-old daughter, Pecola,
standing at the sink washing dishes, he feels both revulsion and love.
Watching "her back hunched that way; her head to one side as though
crouching from a permanent and unrelieved blow," he feels a surge of
tenderness at the saqte time that "guilt and impotence rose together in a
bilious duet': (161). He anticipates that "[i]fhe looked into her face, he
would see those haunted, loving eyes" and "the hauntedness would irri-
tate him-the love would move him to fury." For "[h]ow dare she love
him? Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about
that?" (161). And so, as with Darlene, "his hatred of her slimed in his
stomach."
Then, "she shifted her weight and stood on one foot scratching the
back of her calf with her toe," mirroring Pauline's gesture nearly two
decades earlier (162). Now, "the tenderness welled up in him, and he
sank to his knees, his eyes on the foot of his daughter." Only Morrison's
words can convey the scene that follows:

Crawling on all fours toward her, he raised his hand and caught
the foot in ~n upward stroke. Pecola lost her balance and was
about to careen to the floor. Cholly raised his other hand to her
 Bodies Inside/Out 205

hips to save her from falling. He put his head down and nibbled
at the back of her leg. . . . The rigidness of her shocked body,
the silence of her stunned throat, was better than Pauline's easy
laughter had been. The confused mixture of his memories of Pau-
line and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him,
and a bolt of desire ran down his genitals, giving it length, and
softening the lips of his anus. Surrounding all of this lust was a
border of politeness. He wanted to fuck her-tenderly. But the
tenderness would not hold. The tightness of her vagina was more
than he could bear. His soul seemed to slip down into his guts
and fly out into her, and the gigantic thrust he made into her
then provoked the only sound she made-a hollow suck of air in
the back of her throat. Like the rapid loss of air from a circus
balloon. (162-63)

It is especially in her mingling of embrace and rape that Morrison's hon-

esty has the most to show us-so that we admit how the problem is not
so much that power forestalls or destroys intimacy but that power and
intimacy feed on the same fleshly foods, launch from the same chiasmatic
openings, and so confuse and destroy us by their mingling there together.
Thus in the moment when this father-rapist's "soul seemed to slip down
into his guts and fly out into her," the raped daughter is emptied of
herself, deprived of that interior breathing space which now deflates
like a punctured circus balloon ata deserted carnival. The impulses of
reaching, touching, and holding each other that arise within the open
of our-bodies-in-the-world merge here with the pressured need to invade,
collapse, and violate.
Morrison not only organizes her novel around this event in which a
"hatred mixed with tenderness" (161) implodes the chiasmatic world,
but she also suggests that this event thrusts both Cholly and Pecola "out-
doors" into a state of homelessness. Deprived of a self-constituting inte-
rior space, they can occupy no place. Earlier in the novel, the first-person
narrator and neighbor of Pecola, Claudia (the novel is narrated in first
and third person, in alternating sections, conjuring a world seen from
both within and without), has commented on the meaning of being "put
outdoors," as Cholly and his family had been when, earlier in the year,
he beat up his wife and burned the house down. "Outdoors," Claudia
explains, signifies the lack of home and marked "the end of something,
an irrevocable physical fact," by which one was "catapulted beyond the
206 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

reach of human consideration" (18). Cholly and Pecola enter this state
more irrevocably when, after the rape, Cholly disappears into an un-
known outdoors and, after she gives birth to a baby who soon dies, Pecola
spends her days in a state of madness roaming the neighborhood, "pluck-
ing her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers," lost among the
things of the world (205).
Then, too, in a sort of negative intercorporeality, Pecola's exile from
the world of places and things provides her community's leverage for a
sense of security. By contrast to her outdoor placelessness, they occupy a
safe, inside position. She becomes the enabling pariah of the community.
As Claudia explains retrospectively: "All of us-all who knew her-felt
so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were beautiful when
we stood astrid~ her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sancti-
fied us, her pain made us glow with health.... Even her waking dreams
we used-to silence our own nightmares. And she let us-and thereby
deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters
with her, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength" (205). If the mo-
ment when a guard lights the cigarette of a tortured inmate with the
inmate's wife's lighter epitomizes the way that the ontological stripping
of a prisoner accrues toward the making of a fascist nation, then Mor-
rison's novel r~veals how the rape of a girl can provide the absent yet
organizing center of a community-and so remake a racist nation.

The Reach, the Reader

Both Morrison's novel and Timerman's narrative end with scenes of wit-
nessing that, ultimately, beckon to readers.ll Calling us into their tor-
tured worlds even as they register our safe distance from them, they
implicate us in these national, fascist, race-d, and gendered economies of
domination. At the end of his narrative, Timerman stands witness in an
excruciating way: by being present at the event of someone else's torture
and imminent death. He is that involuntary agent whose very presence
to himself is a kind of uncalled-for being that he must nonetheless ac-
knowledge. He describes this experience as the ultimate one that makes
his past in the cell ever present, even now as he writes. Cunningly
 Bodies Inside/Out 207

enough, he frames his recollection as a question to the reader. As will

Morrison, he thus "unleashes" this condition, leaving it for us to carry.

Have you ever looked into the eyes of another person, on the
floor of a cell, who knows that he's about to die though no one
has told him so? ...
I have many such gazes imprinted upon me ....
Those gazes, which I encountered in the clandestine prisons
of Argentina and which I've retained one by one, were the culmi-
nating point, the purest moment of my tragedy.
They are here with me today. And although I might wish to
do so, I could not and would not know how to share them with
you. (PWN, 164)

The gap between the protected reader and Timerman, which makes those
gazes unshareable, is paradoxically our only connection to him: to see
that gap is, in another way, to be witness to the rupturability of being,
the shutdown of the within and the between that he has so absolutely
experienced. In fact, it is exactly this gap between us and him that Timer-
man calls us to witness. Because if another person, a reader, witnesses
that gap, then, with its dependence on the within and between, the chi-
asm again opens out and begins to move, to reinhabit time and space,
moving Timerman toward a place with a future. This witnessing to which
we are called engages us once more in the operations of ontopolitical
making, of gender, race, and nation-by the very act of reading.
The Bluest Eye closes with a similar gesture. In doing so it implicitly
addresses itself to U.S. readers, asking us to recognize this legacy of viola-
tion at the center of the nation. In the novel's penultimate concluding
sentence, Claudia remarks that "[ilt's too late" to do anything about the
conditions that created Pecola's madness. Yet she adds one more, quietly
qualifying sentence: "At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage
and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late" (206).
In counterpoint to the emphasis on "much" too late, the repetition of
"my town" implicitly invites readers to reflect on theirs, to notice the
difference, and to ask if it is too late altogether. Accordingly, Claudia's
comment reopens the question of the future, registering the lapse of time
and the difference of position that, if acknowledged, could, paradoxically,
lift us, together, back into the open-ended and intercorporeal motions of
tender, mutual making. Morrison's Pecola fails to recover, Timerman
208 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

never forgets, and -Constante only partially escapes. Yet in naming these
failures, Morrison, Timerman, and Constante leave us thrown open and
called out. They arouse the desire for another future, another nation, and
another surround for intimacy.

Notes

1. Allen Feldman, Fonnations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Ncrrth-
em Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 229. This work is hereafter cited as FV.
2. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23.
3. Maurice MerIeau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1968), 143. Hereafter cited as VI.
4. Lena Constante, The Silent Escape: Three Thousand DlI'Js in Romanian Prisons, trans. Franklin
Philip (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 9. Hereafter cited as SE.
5. Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, trans. Tony Talbot (New
York: Knopf, 1981), 34. Hereafter cited as PWN.
6. See, for instance, the last words of "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences," in Writi~ and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978),293.
7. Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger, and Man-Made Mass Death (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1985), 11-12. Hereafter cited as SA.
8. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialagic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Aus-
tin: University ofTex~s Press, 1981),276-77.
9. The Man Inside: An Anthology of Writing and Conversational Comment by Men in Prison, ed.
Tony Parker (London: Joseph, 1973),35. Hereafter cited as MI.
10. Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New French Feminisms, ed. Isabelle de Cour-
trivon and Elaine Marks (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 254.
11. For this discussion I am indebted to Emmanuel Levinas's meditations on witnessing in Other-
wise Than Being, or Beyorui Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991),54.
 10
Female Freedom:
Can the Lived Body Be Emancipated?
Johanna Oksala

The starting point of my chapter is the old, but by no means outdated,

idea of feminist emancipation. I want to ask what feminist emancipation
means today, for us, and try to outline one possible answer that connects
it to the body. The aim is to rethink the idea of feminist emancipation
through Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body: emancipa-
tion does not require a body pure of cultural constitution but one that is
A different version of this chapter appears as a chapter of my book Foucault on Freedom (Cam-
bridge University Press, 2005). I thank Cambridge University Press for the permission to reprint
it here.
21 a .Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty
inscribed in ways that are open to reinterpretation and multiple mean-
ings.
Iris Marion Young's book Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Femi~
nist Philosophy and Social Theory has been one the most notable efforts to
apply Merleau~Ponty's phenomenology of the body to explicitly feminist
issues.! The essay "Throwing Like a Girl" traces some of the basic modal~
ities of feminine comportment, manner of moving, and relation in space.
With the help of these modalities Young seeks to make understandable
the ways in which women in our society typically comport themselves
and move differently from the ways in which men do. She argues, with
the help ofMerleau~Ponty's phenomenology of the body, that the modal~
ities of feminine comportment, motility, and spatiality are restricted
modes of embodiment. According to Young, Merleau~ Ponty describes the
lived body as a transcendence that moves out from the body in its imma~
nence in an open and unbroken directness upon the world in action. The
lived body as transeendence is pure fluid action, the continuous calling
forth of capacities that are applied to the world. In the case of feminine
movement the most primordial intentional act-the motion of the body
orienting itself with respect to and moving within its surroundings-is
inhibited. 2 A woman "lives her body as a thing, she remains rooted in
immanence, is inhibited, and retains a distance from her body as tran~
scending movement and from engagement in the world's possibilities."3
In her article "Working out with Merleau~Ponty" Jean Grimshaw of~
fers a phenomenological analysis of fitness and exercise practices. She
criticizes Y,?ung's analysis of female embodiment of the problematic oppo~
sition of repressed female body to "free" or unrepressed male body. In her
view, Young idealizes masculine movement by assuming it unproblemati~
cally as a norm. Grimshaw points out that Merleau~ Ponty can be accused
of giving an ontological priority to certain kinds of immediate bodily
movements and actions. His analysis of embodiment fails to adequately
recognize the ways in which the meaning of all actions, however immedi~
ate, is always mediated by culture. 4 Consequently, rather than there
being, on the one hand, normal, uninhibited, or natural motility of men,
and one the other, a pathological, culturally repressed motility of women,
we should see both male and female motility as culturally mediated mo~
dalities of movement, dependent on the cultural coding of the activities
in question. According to Grimshaw, the female body cannot be simply
"freed" from repreSsive or inhibitive sexist oppression, nor can it be ade~
quately understood simply in terms of capitulation to ideological pres~
 Female Freedom 211

sures to conform to a particular norm of the feminine body. 5 Grimshaw

concludes that what Young's analysis suggests is that Merleau-Ponty's
conception of the "normal" needs problematizing: within the category of
normal there may be different "modalities" that cannot be identified sim-
ply with "disorders."
This point is also forcibly brought home by Judith Butler in her devas-
tating criticism of Merleau-Ponty's account of sexuality.6 While Grim-
shaw's and Young's focus is on the motility of the body, Butler's focus is
on its sexuality. Butler claims that although Merleau-Ponty's account
of sexuality seems to offer significant arguments· against all naturalistic
accounts of sexuality by presenting sexuality as a mode of dramatizing
and investigating a concrete historical situation, it in fact contains tacit
normative assumptions about heterosexual and male character of sexual-
ity. Not only does Merleau-Ponty fail to acknowledge the extent to which
sexuality is culturally constructed, but his descriptions of its universal
features reproduce certain cultural constructions of sexual normalcy.? De-
spite the alleged openness and cultural malleability of sexuality advocated
by Merleau-Ponty, Butler claims that certain bodily structures emerge as
existential and metaphysical necessities, and that this ultimately destroys
Merleau-Ponty's nonnormative pretensions. 8
I argue in the following that underlying both Young's adaptation of
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body and Grimshaw's and But-
ler's criticism of it, is a foundationalist reading of Merleau-Ponty's body-
subject. By foundationalism I refer here to a philosophical position that
seeks in an analysis of the body's structures a universal and stable founda-
tion for subjectivity. This criticism can also be conceptualized in terms
of a distinction between historical situatedness and historical constitu-
tion, or what Judith Butler calls "a stronger version of historical situated-
ness."9
Butler argues that the historicity of the subject in Merleau-Ponty's
account of sexuality is historical situatedness, not historical constitution.
This means that the body forms a universal foundation for subjectivity
that only assumes different guises in different historical situations. Rather
then history constituting all bodily experiences and modalities, there is a
normal, foundational body, which assumes different modalities, depend-
ing on the varying historical situations. While Young thus argues that the
modalities of feminine bodily comportment and movement "have their
source in the particular situation of women as conditioned by their sexist
oppression in contemporary society,"10 Butler criticizes Merleau-Ponty's
212 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

account of sexuality by noting that sexuality cannot be understood as an

expression of a historically situated subject's existence.

Yet, to say that the subject is historically situated in a loose sense

is to say only that the decisions a subject makes are limited-not
exclusively constituted-by a given set of historical possibilities.
A stronger version of historical situatedness would locate the his-
tory as the very condition for the constitution of the subject, not
only as a set of external possibilities for choice. If this stronger
version were accepted . . . sexuality is itself formed through the
sedimentation of the history of sexuality, and the embodied sub-
ject, rather than an existential constant, is itself partially consti-
tuted by the legacy of sexual relations which constitute its
situation. I I

I will argue, agai~st foundationalist readings, that the historicity of the

body-subject in Merl~au-Ponty's phenomenology is not historical situat-
edness but historical constitution. Merleau-Ponty does not understand
the body-subject as "an existential constant": the universal structures of
the body do not.form a foundation for all forms of subjectivity. Instead,
subjectivity, even on the level of the anonymous body, is always histori-
cally constituted. I will defend my argument by constructing two possible
readings of Merleau-Ponty's body-subject. The first puts it forward as
foundational and historically situated, and can be seen to underlie
Young's, Grimshaw's, and Butler's accounts. I will argue against this by
presenting a second reading that emphasizes transcendental intersubjec-
tivity-Ianguage, tradition, and community-as the reality-constituting
principle. In this second reading, Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the
body-subject is seen as compatible rather than opposed to poststructura-
list feminist approaches: the body-subject is fundamentally structured as
intersubjectivity, and is always historically constituted.
I will finish by showing how the two different readings of Merleau-
Ponty's body-subject result in two different views of the freedom of the
body. While the first one is open to the criticism of naively assuming a
realm of "female freedom" outside sexist oppression, I will argue that
the second reading suggests new and interesting ways to think about the
freedom of the female body. ,
 Female Freedom 213

The Anonymous Subjectivity of the Body

Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception presents a detailed descrip-
tion of the experience of the living body.lz It introduces the concept of
the lived body (corp propre, corps phenomenal) and seeks to study the body
of our lived experience, not of bioscientific descriptions. One of his cen-
tral claims is that the human body is not an object, a biomechanical
system described by scientific materialism, but a precondition of all ob-
jects. It is our basic framework of meaning and truth, both the source and
the sedimentation of significations and values.
The term lived body is also used in an attempt to describe and under-
stand the fundamental interrelatedness of consciousness and embodi-
ment, and thus to bypass the dualisms mind/body, interior/exterior, and
consciousness/nature. In the phenomenological description, the lived
body must be understood as a totality of external and internal percep-
tions, intelligence, affectivity, motility, and sexuality. Merleau-Ponty
aims to show, on the one hand, how the mind is always based on corpore-
ality while not reducible to computational or neurological processes, and
on the other hand, how the body's physiological processes, such as per-
ceptions, are never purely mechanical but always incorporate values and
meanings.
Using various case studies of pathological embodiment, he brings to
light the bodily abilities that a normal subject has and takes for granted.
We know, for example, how our body is positioned in relation to its
environment without having to complete a cognitive process. We can
imitate movements without having first to translate those movements
into verbal representations that the body follows or carries out. In short,
we have a "bodily knowledge" of the world.
Merleau-Ponty uses the concepts of body-schema. and intentional arc to
further describe the nature of this bodily knowledge; the mode and struc-
ture through which our body is intertwined with the world. The notion
of body schema is often mistakenly equated with the psychoanalytical
concept of body-image or imaginary body.!3 It is not, however, an image
in the sense of being a mental representation of the body. It is not imagi-
nary, and cannot be understood as some kind of a ghost of the material
body. It is the material body itself, as a structured capacity for actions
and intentions. It describes the bond, the intentional arc, that connects
us to the world. .
214 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Panty

According to Metleau-Ponty, the mode or structure through which our

body is intertwined with the world is possible through a special kind of
intentionality, a prereflective, bodily intentionality. He adopts Husserl's
term operative intentionality (fungierende Intentionalitiit) to describe inten-
tionality that is npt limited to thetic acts-acts of consciousness that
have the structure of act-object-but describes our basic bodily bond to
the surrounding world. This basic bond or relationship is essentially non-
thetic: it cannot be fully analyzed into acts and their objects, but is more
like an intertwining of our body and the world.1 4 Merleau-Ponty writes:
"We found beneath the intentionality of acts, or thetic intentionality,
another kind which is the condition of the former's possibility: namely
an operative intentionality already at work before any positing or any
judgement."15
Through operative intentionality the body is directed to the world; its
acts intend it and anticipate it. The body is "what opens me out upon
the world and places me-in a situation there" (165). Although Merleau-
Ponty takes the fundamental intentionality to be intentionality of the
body rather than consciousness, this does not mean that it is unconscious
or mechanical. Bodily intentionality does not have the structure of an
act and object because this' separation of subject and object is accom-
plished on the level of individual consciousness. It is thus primary in the
sense of being a precondition for intentional consciousness. According to
Merleau-Ponty, our relationship to the world is, in the first hand "not a
matter of 'I think' but of 'I can'" (137).
This basic bodily intentionality is also what underlies Merleau-Ponty's
account of sexuality in Phenomenology of Perception. Sexuality is an in-
tending of the world and the other body in a way that precedes intellec-
tual signification and the separation of subject and object. It is an
intertwining more basic than aU conceptual and theoretical formulations
of it. "When 1 move my eye, 1 take account of the movement, without
being expressly conscious of the fact, and am thereby aware that the
upheaval caused in my field of vision is only apparent. Similarly sexuality,
without being the object of any intended act of consciousness, can under-
lie and guide specified forms of my experience. Taken in this way, as an
ambiguous atmosphere, sexuality is co-extensive with life" (169).
Although Merleau-Ponty's account of sexuality allies itself with psy-
choanalysis in emphasizing the fact that sexuality does not express or
present itself to us ih determinate conscious acts, the opposite pole of
conscious acts is not put forward as unconsciousness, but as bodily ano-
 Female Freedom 215

nymity, which also characterizes sexuality. Throughout Phenomenology of

Perception, Merleau-Ponty presents us with examples of the anonymity of
perceptions. He argues that every perception takes place in an atmo-
sphere of generality and is presented to us anonymously. I cannot say that
I see the blue of the sky in the sense that I can say that I decide to devote
my life to mathematics. I can see blue because I am sensitive to colors,
whereas I am a mathematician because I have decided to be one (215).
In connection with sexuality, Merleau-Ponty takes the example of falling
asleep. It is not an act of positing consciousness where the body simply
expresses a conscious intention. It is a bodily act or an act realized only
through the body. "I lie down in bed, on my left side, with my knees
drawn up: I close my eyes and breathe slowly, putting my plans out of
mind. But the power of my will or consciousness stops there .... There
is a moment when sleep 'comes,' settling on this imitation of itself which
I have been offering to it, and I succeed in becoming what I was trying to
be" (163-64).
In the chapter "The Cogito" in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-
Ponty presents his account of subjectivity-conveyed by his notion of
body-subject-through a critique of the Cartesian cogito. There can be no
subjectivity separable from our bodies because all consciousness is founded
on perceptual consciousness; even the pure ideas of intellect derive their
meaning from the world of perception. Similarly, self-consciousness arises
through direct contact with the world perceived not by consciousness
observing itself perceiving, or by inference from any idea of itself. Con-
sciousness is not closed in on itself, but is always a relation to the world,
a form of conduct. All knowledge of the world is, at the same time,
knowledge of the self; "it is through my relation to 'things' that I know
myself" (383). At the same time, Merleau-Ponty writes that "there is an
element of final truth in the Cartesian return of things or ideas to the
self" (369). The perceiving subject is a precondition of the experience of
a transcendent world. The world only becomes meaningful through the
perceptual acts of a transcendent subject. However, the cogito that Des-
cartes should have discovered at the root of our experiences of the world
is not the cogito of explicit experiences. In the place of the Cartesian
cogito, Merleau-Ponty postulates a tacit cogito that is anonymous or pre-
personal. The tacit cogito underlies or precedes the emergence of explicit
self-consciousness that comes into being through language. Martin Dil-
lon characterizes the tacit cogito by writing that its corporeal reflexivity
is latent and unexpressed, whereas the Cartesian cogito is personal and
216 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

individual and its. explicit reflexivity is thematized in language and

thought. The tacit cogito is thus subjectivity that is yet curiously prere-
flective and unaware of itself.!6 It is bodily consciousness, an intertwining
with the world. The structures of the world are structures of the body,
not of consciousness; "when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find
it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because
my existence as subjectivity is merely one with my existence as body and
with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when
taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world."!?
Hence, Merleau-Ponty clearly claims that the tacit cogito, or the
anonymous body-subject, is foundational in relation to individual, per-
sonal subjectivity. It forms the latter's condition of possibility. What is
not so clear in his account of subjectivity, however, is the relationship
between the anonymous body and intersubjectivity. Although he consid-
ers subjectivity as fundamentally anonymous and general, it is tied to a
singular body: "It is essential for me not only to have a body, but to have
this body."18 My exi~tence is tied to my singular experience of myself as
a body as well as my ~xperience of the world. This is important because
the prereflectivity or anonymity of perceptions does not mean coinci-
dence with the perceived. As Merleau-Ponty writes, "We do not mean
that the primordial . I completely
.
overlooks itself. If it did, it would indeed
be a thing, and nothing could cause it subsequently to become conscious-
ness."19 Self-awareness, even though tacit, thus becomes a precondition
for the experience of a transcendent world. There has to be a space be-
tween the here of perception and the there of the phenomenon, and
there has to be some kind of awareness of the here for the there to appear
as such. IO
Although the tacit cogito or the body-subject does not refer to per-
sonal subjectivity, but should rather be understood as an anonymous and
preconscious layer of subjectivity, it must remain centralized or singular-
ized in such a way that the acts and their object do not coincide. The
perceiving body becomes constituted through its perceptions as a subject
endowed with tacit reflexivity. This reflexivity or tacit self-consciousness
of the body becomes, on the one hand, a precondition for perception,
while perceptions, on the other hand, constitute subjectivity as incarnate
in the body.2! The anonymity of perception, rather than breaking or
decentralizing subjectivity, in fact seems to presuppose not undifferenti-
ated anonymous life"but a subjectivity that is singularized in such a way
that it is equated with an indi~idual perceiving body.
 Female Freedom 217

This raises the question of how the body-subject relates to intersubjec-

tivity: is it foundational in the sense of forming the latter's condition of
possibility? I will argue that Merleau-Ponty's understanding of subjectiv-
ity in Phenomenology of Perception allows for two possible readings. The
first is that we distinguish three separate "layers" of subjectivity: (1)
anonymous, prepersonal subjectivity; (2) personal, individual subjectiv-
ity; and (3) interpersonal intersubjectivity. According to my first reading,
anonymous, prepersonal subjectivity is understood as foundational for the
other two. It forms the condition of possibility, not only for individual
consciousness, but also for intersubjectivity understood as comprising the
linguistic community, culture, and history. In this reading, Merleau-
Ponty presents a foundational account of subjectivity. There is a rudi-
mentary level, the perceptual flow of the singular subject, on which all
forms of subjectivity are founded.
Even though, according to this reading, the anonymous existence of
the body forms a universal foundation, the subject is still not an ahistor-
ical constant. This is because the body-subject is, for Merleau-Ponty, al-
ways and by necessity historically situated and circumscribed. The
phenomenological account of the lived body shows that the body is al-
ways situated or intertwined with its environment. It actively takes up its
situation in the world and transforms it through its bodily acts, attitudes,
or styles. This activity of the body is, moreover, normatively generative:
the body has optimal ways of acting in the world. Normality for the lived
body can, according to this reading, be understood as what is optimal for
it. Optima are instituted within experience by the very fact that the body
takes a perspective on things and is embedded in the surrounding world.
As bodies we can be more open to the giveness of objects or more closed
to them. 22 Following Husserl, Merleau-Ponty refers to normal as optimal
when he writes that "for each object, as for each painting in a gallery,
there is an optimal distance from which it demands to be viewed, an
orientation through which it gives the most of itself ... the distance from
me to the object is not a size which decreases or increases, but a tension
that oscillates around a norm. "23
In this reading, phenomenology of the lived body can be criticized for
approaching the notions of normal and abnormal with respect to the
lived body and its immediate surroundings, not with respect to an inter-
personal community. What characterizes the living body is its ability to
instigate norms,· and norms are founded on the experience of the lived
body.24 This understanding of the foundational role of the structures of
218 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

the body in establishing the normal seems to be in stark contrast to the

feminist analyses that claim that normal and abnormal are always defined
in a social context and attached to the polarity of positive/negative.
Norms offer possibilities for reference and judgment; instituting and iden,
tifying norms is always an act of power.
Hence, according to my first reading, while emphasizing that the sub,
ject is always historically situated, Merleau,Ponty does not problematize
how the "normal subject" itself is fundamentally constituted in history.
As Elmar Holenstein argues, Merleau, Ponty neglects to question both
the possible historical and sociological dependence of the structuring and
orientation of the world as well as of the body.25 Merleau,Ponty's account
of the body,subject would reject a strong version of historical constitu'
tion, according to which intersubjectivity-understood as language, tra,
dition, and community-provides the very condition of possibility for
individual subjectivity as well as for objective reality. The historicity of
the subject in Mer~eau'Ponty's phenomenology of the body would, as
Judith Butler claims, be historical situatedness, not historical constitu'
tion. 26 History as constitutive of the body,subject, even on the level of
rudimentary perceptual flow, would be left redundant.

The Historical Constitution of the Body

I will leave aside nere the methodological questions connected with
studying intersubjectivity-Ianguage, history, cultural normativity-that
arise out of Merleau,Ponty's phenomenology of the bodyP I will argue
that, despite possible methodological problems, his understanding of the
body,subject is open to a second reading that is more in line with Butler's
insights about the historical constitution of the body. According to my
second reading, transcendental intersubjectivity-Ianguage, tradition,
and community-is understood as the reality,constituting principle pro'
viding the conditions of possibility for all forms of subjectivity a~ well as
objective reality. Instead of the tacit cogito being a foundational layer of
subjectivity on which the personal and intersubjective depend, I will
argue that i~ is a dimension of intersubjectivity. It is not a foundation,
but a constitutive condition: a dimension of sense constitution.
Merleau, Ponty clearly emphasizes the reciprocity of all constitutive
processes. For instance, subjectivity and world can never be understood in
 Female Freedom 219

separation from each other. He also explicitly states that transcendental

subjectivity is transcendental intersubjectivity.28 How transcendental in-
tersubjectivity is understood is, however, decisive for the way we under-
stand its relationship to the body-subject.
Dan Zahavi, among others, effectively argues for an intersubjective
transformation of Husserl's phenomenology in his late, posthumously
published writings. 29 These were the texts by Husserl that had the great-
est impact on Merleau-Ponty, and he saw the main thrust of Husserl's
work to be contained in these manuscripts. 3o Zahavi shows that, from
winter 1910-11 until his death, Husserl's aim was to develop a transcen-
dental theory of intersubjectivity. According to Zahavi, what has made
Husserl's account difficult to explicate and understand is that he operates
with several different kinds of intersubjectivity. He did not only under-
stand it to refer to the subject's cultural context, to the fact that we
are constantly confronted with intersubjective meanings such as social
institutions and cultural products. Neither does intersubjectivity refer
exclusively to other people's actual presence in the subject's field of expe-
rience. The core in Husserl's reflections on intersubjectivity lies in its
fundamental reality-constitutive function.
In terms of understanding Merleau-Ponty's body-subject as intersubjec-
tivity, Husserl's major claim is that the experience of objective validity is
made possible by the experience of the transcendence of foreign subjec-
tivity. Objects cannot be reduced to being merely my intentional corre-
lates if they can be experienced by others. Our primal experience of
others permanently transforms our categories of experience. The objec-
tive validity of my experiences does not, after the initial encounter, re-
quire the other's actual presence. The precondition for objective reality
is, however, that it can only be constituted by a subject that has experi-
enced other subjects.3l Just as for Husserl, transcendental intersubjectivity
forms the condition of possibility for our experiences of objective reality,
similarly for Merleau-Ponty, other people function as a precondition for
the objectivity of perceptions. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-
. Ponty discusses in detail the phenomenon of hallucinations. The fact
that I classify the voices and visions of my interlocutor as hallucinations
means that I find nothing similar in my visual field. The world that I
perceive as objective reality is not only a correlate of my consciousness.
An object appears to me only from one possible angle; the other possible
angles are implied in my perception of it. For something to be an object
it must therefore carry with it the potentiality of being perceived simul-
220 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

taneously from multiple angles. Intersubjectivity in Merleau-Ponty's

thought refers not only to the subject's shared cultural context, but also
to the fundamental condition of possibility for objective reality.
Even if the role of intersubjectivity in the constitution of objective
reality is understood as an intertwining of the perceiving body with other
people's bodies and the natural world, the body-subject can still be under-
stood as foundational. The constitutive process takes place in a threefold
structure, subjectivity-intersubjectivity-world,32 and this structure is
essential and universal. Intersubjectivity can, however, also be under-
stood as comprising the linguistic community and historical tradition.
Zahavi argues that this sense is also present in Husserl's late thinking.
Intersubjectivity is now understood as the linguistic community that
forms the fundamental condition of possibility for singular subjectivity.
Zahavi argues that the question of normality and the concept of "homew-
orld" become constitutional core concepts for Husserl. Homeworld refers
to the normatively significant "lifeworld" with its unique language and
tradition. It is the familiar lifeworld that is normatively relevant to us. It
is the world that .our body intends and spins around us. The subject's
embeddedness in this living tradition and its anonymous normality forms
a third type of intersubjectivity and thus the condition of possibility for
the constitution of reality.33
Phenomenologists' concern with the third type of intersubjectivity,
central in Husserl's late writings, can be seen to stem from the acknowl-
edgment of generative issues such as the constitutive role of birth and
death, language and tradition, as well as from the problems of all egologi-
cal accounts of sense constitutfon. My aim here, however, is not to evalu-
ate intersubjective readings of Husserl's philosophy, but to show how the
understanding of transcendental intersubjectivity as social normality is
present in Merleau-Ponty's account of subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty fol-
lows Husserl's late understanding of normality as intersubjectively consti-
tuted.
Anthony Steinbock argues that, when Husserl turned to generative
phenomena, he no longer addressed the problem of normality and abnor-
mality in terms of normal as optimal for the living being and abnormal
as one-sidedly dependent of the normal, but rather treated them intersub-
jectively in terms of homeworld and "alienworld." By doing this, Husserl
implicitly reinterprets the concepts of normality and abnormality.34 Nor-
mality must also De understood as conventionality, which in its being
transcends the individual. Our horizon of anticipations is structured in
 Female Freedom 221

accordance with the intersubjectively handed~down forms of appercep~

tion. 35 Social normativity cannot therefore be regarded only as secondary
or derivative of the individual, lived normativity.
When intersubjectivity is understood as cultural normality, the body~
subject cannot be understood as historically situated but as historically
constituted. According to this view, there can be no one universal or
inherent normativity of the living body. The anonymous body is not
foundational for social normativity, but the relationship between the liv~
ing body and the surrounding culture is complex and chiasmic. The struc~
tures of the body are structures of the world, but not only of the natural
world. The shared normativity of the living tradition also constitutes and
structures the intentionality of perceptions, sexuality and embodiment.
Merleau~ Ponty does not defend a view that posits the body as immune
to the influence of history. According to him, "Man is a historical idea,
not a natural species."36 This claim is often interpreted to mean that the
fundamental structures of the anonymous body, for example, temporality,
spatiality and sexuality, form a foundation that simply assumes different
guises in different historical situations. Merleau~Ponty's emphasis on his~
tory can, however, be interpreted through Husserl's theory of transcen~
dental intersubjectivity as defending a stronger version of historical
consti,tution. The structures of the anonymous body come into being only
as intersubjectively generated. Merleau~Ponty's conditions of possibility
for perception must not be understood as ahistorical or universal forms,
but as dynamic and developing structures derived from our cultural envi~
ronment, constantly in a state of changing. The anonymous body is not
a natural foundation on which intersubjectivity, understood as tradition
and community, forms a secondary layer. Nor is it a case that, in empha~
sizing transcendental intersubjectivity as constitutive of the body~subject,
culture is privileged over nature. It is rather that transcendental inter~
subjectivity represents the very effort to dismantle the nature/culture di~
chotomy and rethink nature as well as culture. Merleau~Ponty's aim
throughout Phenomenology of Perceptions is to argue against all dichoto~
mous and causal modes of thinking which reduce lived phenomena to
primary causes and secondary effects.
The phenomenological conception of intersubjectivity comprises areas
that are traditionally posited not only on the side of culture but also
on the side of nature: geography, physiology, materiality, the body. The
fundamental bodily nature of subjectivity that Merleau~Ponty emphasizes
with his notion of the body~subject is not part of nature or culture, but
222 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

problematizes the distinction between them. The anonymity of percep-

tion must be understood as a layer or dimension of intersubjectivity that
we cannot localize or isolate.3 ? Our relationship to the world is fundamen-
tally ambiguous and therefore resists all conceptualizations. This does not
mean, however, that there exists a sphere of "pure" bodily experiences
independent of intersubjectively constituted structures, meanings, and
linguistic representations of the body.
In the essay "The Child's Relations with Others" Merleau-Ponty stud-
ies intersubjectivity in very concrete terms. 38 He discusses the develop-
ment of a child's corporal schema and shows, through detailed studies in
child psychology, how intersubjectivity forms the condition of possibility
for singular subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty gives a detailed account of how
a child's bodily awareness, as well as perceptual consciousness, develops
as a consequence of being in an intersubjective situation and how these
therefore correspond to cultural variations in the child's environment.
The development of a child's corporal schema is tied internally to the
process that leads.to the distinction between oneself and others. It devel-
ops only in a concr~(e social, historical, and cultural situation. The cor-
poral schema is not an a priori form that the child receives intact at birth,
but is historically constituted and structured as intersubjectivity. The
structures of the' anonymous body come into being only as historically
sedimented structures derived from our cultural environment. Subjectiv-
ity, even on the level of the anonymous body, is always dynamic.

Conclusions: Female Freedom?

When Merleau-Ponty's body-subject is not understood as universal or
foundational, but as essentially dynamic and historically constituted, the
implication for feminist theory is that there are no normal or founda-
tional modes of female embodiment, motility, or sexuality. There is no
inhibited female corporeality and free and normal male corporeality in
societies of sexist oppression, but rather two differently gendered and
historically constituted experiences and modalities of embodiment. What
is called normal depends on the values of the society in question.
This view comes close to Judith Butler's arguments about the culturally
constructed status of the body in Gender Trouble, where Butler criticizes
all feminist efforts that try to liberate the female body from the determi-
 Female Freedom 223

nations of patriarchal power. Butler referred to Foucault and argued that

the body gains meaning within discourse only in the context of power
relations. The body "is not a being, but a variable boundary, a surface
whose permeability is politically regulated, a signifying practice within
a cultural field of gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality."39
According to Butler, the culturally constructed body cannot be liberated
to its "natural" past, or to its original pleasures, but only to an open future
of cultural possibilities. 40
The wide feminist criticism that the understanding of the body in
Gender Trouble received testifies to at least some of the difficulties of
conceiving how exactly the culturally constructed body can be liberated
to the open future of cultural possibilities.41 We can take this criticism as
symptomatic of the problems connected with "poststructuralist" readings
of the body. The feminist concern was that if our subjectivity and em-
bodiment is constituted by the normativity of patriarchal, oppressive
culture, how can we in any way resist it? The subject that engages in
subversive practices in Butler's account is a subject constituted in power
networks. How can a body-subject embedded and constituted by normal-
izing practices turn into a subversive body resisting these very same prac-
tices? What can repeating "otherwise" mean as an involuntary, bodily
style?
Butle~'s books that followed Gender Trouble, particularly Bodies That
Matter and The Psychic Life of Power, partly answer these questions. 42 In
The Psychic Life of Power Butler engages explicitly with the "postlibera-
tory" problem of agency: how can one take an oppositional relation to
power if one is constituted by the very power one opposes? Butler suggests
that to understand how the subject is formed in subordination while be-
coming the guarantor of resistance and opposition at the same time re-
quires thinking the Foucauldian theory of power together with the
psychoanalytic theory of the psyche. 43 In Butler's analysis, the psyche-
not the subject-resists the regularization that, for example, Foucault as-
cribes to normalizing discourses. According to Butler psychoanalysis can
provide a principle of resistance to given forms of reality because the
psyche exceeds the normalizing effects of power. 44 Norms are not inter-
nalized in mechanical or fully predictable ways, but assume another char-
acter as psychic phenomena. Power as a condition of possibility of the
subject is not the same as power considered as the subject's agency-the
power the subject wields by virtue of being a subject in the social matrix.
Butler's recourse to a psychoanalytic account does not, however, mean
224 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

that she posits a wHd, unharnessed remainder, an unconscious outside of

power. Instead she suggests a Foucauldian reading of psychoanalysis in
which the resistance upon which psychoanalysis insists is studied as so-
cially and discursively produced. The symbolic produces the possibility of
its own subversions as its unanticipated effects. 45
Butler now writes about Foucault's poststructuralist understanding of
the body that "perhaps the body has come to substitute for the psyche in
Foucault-that is, as that which exceeds and confounds the injunctions
of normalization. "46 According to Butler, this means, however, that "Fou-
cault has invested the body with psychic meanings that he cannot elabo-
rate within the terms that he uses."47 While Butler's conclusion seems to
hit the point as far as what is lacking from Foucault's conception of the
body, I will argue that the only way to account for these gaps is not to
turn to look for "psychic meanings" but instead to study the meanings
generated by the lived body. I will not go deeper into Butler's solution
here, but I will argue instead that the enabling shift in subjection can
also be thought to take place on the level of the lived body.
In Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological descriptions of the lived body,
the body becomes 'the instigator of normative as well as transgressive
reiteration. The body is not a surface or a site on which psychic meanings
are played out. Neither is it a mute container of subjectivity. The body-
subject is constitutive in the sense of being generative of meanings that
are preconscious and preconceptual: subjectivity means embodied capac-
ity to creatively respond to the existing norms. As Rudi Visker notes,
style is for Merleau-Ponty the moment of singularity.48 Although percep-
tion is fundamentally intersubjective and anonymous, it is also an expres-
sion; it creates a singular style. It actualizes a sexual style that the subject
lives through all its engagements with the surrounding world. 49 Instead of
viewing perception as a process' whereby the hitherto meaningless takes
on meaning through the foundational structures of the body, we must
understand perception as an essentially open and ambiguous process. The
sensory meanings that are ordered and constituted intersubjectively
through our coexistence with the world take several forms. Perception
therefore always remains indeterminate and incomplete. 50 The lived body
is characterized by a fundamental indeterminacy because its relationship
to the world is essentially open and dynamic.
The constant responding of bodily acts to existing cultural meanings
is what interlocks the lived normativity of a singular body and social
normativity; The relationship between subjective, bodily normativity and
 Female Freedom 225

the intersubjective horizon of meanings is dynamically interlocked in a

constant oscillation: shifting, resisting, and adapting. While individual
bodily normativity responds to the established sets of norms-female em-
bodiment is constituted in a certain way in a patriarchal culture-it never
mechanically reiterates the existing norms. The body is constantly mate-
rializing different social norms; it reiterates them but always through its
individual style. It is not a replica or a carbon copy of a preestablished
normativity, but rather materializes an individual style of being. The con-
stitution of meaning, even in the singular living body, is always intersub-
jective, but never mechanical. The body-subject is initiatory and capable
of resistance, and at the same time an effect of an intersubjective normat-
ivity. According to Merleau-Ponty, "The question is always how I can be
open to phenomena which transcend me, and which nevertheless exist
only to the extent that I take them up and live them."51
Hence, my argument is that a nonfoundationalist reading of Merleau-
Ponty's body-subject can provide feminist theory with an account of the
female body that acknowledges its generative status instead of viewing it
only as a passive product of cultural crafting. At the same time, Merleau-
Ponty's thought refutes the possibility of feminist theory's returning to a
fixed or pure female embodiment or essential femininity. Because the
body-subject is always historical as well as generative, the emergence of
new "se~ual styles," new sets of bodily normativities, constantly shifts
the meaning of sexual difference. The intersubjective horizon of meaning
is constantly transformed because what the lived body generates is unpre-
dictable. As Elizabeth Grosz writes in Volatile Bodies, what fascinates her
is the ability of bodies to always extend the frameworks that attempt to
contain them and seep beyond their domains of control. "Bodies are not
inert; they function interactively and productively. They act and react.
They generate what is new, surprising, unpredictable."52
The answer to the question that I pose in the title of this chapter
thus cannot be answered with a simple yes or no, because it relies on an
understanding of both body and freedom that Merleau-Ponty's thought
challenges. The lived body cannot be emancipated from sexist oppression
to free modes of motility or sexuality. Nevertheless, his phenomenology
of the body furthers understanding of not only the cultural constitution
of the body, but also its resistance against this constitution. There is
"freedom" in the creativity of our bodies that establishes the always in-
complete chara~ter of the process of the body's cultural constitution. This
freedom is not to be understood as an inherent attribute of the body as
226 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

such, but it is freed6m understood as the freeing or opening of new possi-

bilities for living our bodies, sexualities, our lives.
This freedom of the lived body is thus not political freedom in the
sense that it is not sufficient to guarantee the political rights that the
feminist movement has fought for and still is fighting for. The fact that
the body will offer resistance to sexist forms of power does not mean that
we can give up political struggles for the feminist issues connected with
the body-such as abortion or rape-and simply let the body do the job
for us. Even if the cultural constitution of the body is never complete
or uniform, the resistance it shows is never enough, because it cannot
rearticulate the terms of the body's cultural constitution. 53 The rearticu-
lation of the intersubjective horizon of meanings cannot be accomplished
by' creative bodies, but only by creative politics. Nevertheless, even if the
female body cannot be emancipated through Merleau-Ponty's phenome-
nology in this sense, our ways of inscribing and reading the body have
important political consequences, particularly in the realm of sexual poli-
tics. A body understood and lived as a universal destiny determines and
justifies a set of pol~ti"cal choices and effectively eclipses alternatives. A
body as a possibility for creative life, however, opens up multiple different
political fields of experimentation. Perhaps it is therefore necessary for us
to rethink not only the body, but also emancipation: it requires not a
body pure of cultural constitution, but one that is inscribed in ways that
are open to reinterpretation and multiple meanings. The undefined free-
dom of the lived body opens up a space where defined political freedoms
can be soug~t. -

Notes

1. Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social
Theory (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990). It can be argued that Simone de Beauvoir
already presents a phenomenological description of female embodiment in The Second Sex. See, for
example, Sonia Kruks, Situation and Human Existence: Freedom, Subjectivity, and Society (New York:
Routledge, 1990); Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (Indianap-
olis: Indiana University Press, 1992); Sara Heinamaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Differ-
ence:Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, BeaullOir (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).
2. Young, ThrOWing Like a Girl, 148.
3. Ibid., 150.
4. Jean Grimshaw, "Werking Out with MerIeau-Ponty," in Women's Bodies: Discipline and
TransgTession, ed. Jane Arthurs and Jean Grimshaw (London: Cassell, 1999), 103.
5. Ibid., 115.
 · Female Freedom 227

6. See Judith Butler, "Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description," in The Thinking
Muse: Feminism and Modem French Philosophy, ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1989), 85-100. For a more recent criticism charging Merleau-Ponty
of bodily fundamentalism, see Shannon Sullivan, "Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty's
Phenomenology of Perception," Hypatia 12, no. 1 (1997): 1-19. For an alternative reading, see Silvia
Stoller's reply to Sullivan, "Reflections of Feminist Merleau-Ponty Scepticism," Hypatia 15, no. 1
(2000): 173-82. For criticisms of Butler's reading of Merleau-Ponty, see Sara Heinamaa, "What Is a
Woman? Butler and Beauvoir on the Foundations of Sexual Difference," Hypatia 12, no. 1 (1997):
20-39; Bernhard Waldenfels, Grenzen der Normalisierung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998).
7. Butler, "Sexual Ideology," 92.
8. Ibid., 89.
9. Ibid., 90-91.
10. Young, Throwing Like a Girl, 153.
11. Butler, "Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description," 90-91.
12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1994).
13. See, for example, Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies (London: Routledge, 1996),12,69-70.
14. See Sara Heinamaa, "From Decisions to Passions: Merleau-Ponty's Interpretation of Hus-
serl's Reduction," in Merleau-Ponty's Reading of Husserl, ed. Ted Toadvine and Lester Embree (Dor-
drecht: Kluwer, 2002).
15. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 429. Page references to this work are cited par-
enthetically in the text.
16. Martin Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988),
105-8.
17. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 408.
18. Ibid., 431.
19. Ibid., 404.
20. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, 103.
21. Ibid., 105.
22. See Anthony Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generatille Phenomenology After Husserl (Evans-
ton: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 138-43. Steinbock argues that when Husserl refers to
normal as optimal the optimal as norm is instituted and generated from within experience.
23. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 302. See also 318.
24. Merleau-Ponty also emphasizes that the subject is able to transcend the normal as optimal
for the living body. He discusses the example of anorexia. The person with anorexia denies the norm
of the living body-the norm of "life." The normativity of an individual body is thus not deter-
mined, but always open and capable of transcending its situation. See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology
of Perception, 164.
25. Elmar Holenstein, "The Zero-Point of Orientation: The Placement of the I in Perceived
Space," in The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Don Welton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999),
87.
26. Butler, "Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description," 90-91.
27. See Johanna Oksala, "A Phenomenology of Gender," Continental Philosophy Relliew, forth-
coming; also Oksala, "The Birth of Man," in Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation, ed. Dan Zahavi,
Sara Heinamaa, and Hans Ruin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003),139-63.
28. See, for example, Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 361-62.
29. Dan Zahavi, "Husserl's Intersubjective Transformation of Transcendental Philosophy," Jour-
nal of the British Society for Phenomenology 27, no. 3 (1996): 228-45. See also Dan Zahavi, Husserl
und die transzendentale' Intersubjektillitiit: Eina Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic, 1996).
30. Zahavi refers to, for example, Ideen II, Erste Philosophie II, ET{ahrung und Urteil, Analyzen zur
228 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

passive Synthesis, Zur Phiinqmenologie der Intersubjektivitiit I-III. See also, for example, Merleau-Ponty,
Phenomenology of Perception, 92-93; "The Philosopher and His Shadow," in Signs (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1964).
31. Zahavi, "Husserl's 1ntersubjective Transformation," 233.
32. Dan Zahavi, "Anonymity and Intersubjectivity," paper presented at the FAU/CARP Re-
search Symposium "Merleau-Ponty Reading Husser!," Florida Atlantic University, Delray Beach,
Florida, October 19-20, 1999.
33. Zahavi, "Husserl's Intersubjective Transformation," 239-41.
34. Steinbock, Home and Beyond, 267.
35. Zahavi, "Husserl's Intersubjective Transformation," 239.
36. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 170.
37. Cf. Rudi Visker, "Raw Being and Violent Discourse: Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, and the (Dis-)
Order of Things," in Merleau-Ponty in Contemporary Pe1'spectives, ed. Patrick Burke and Jan Van Der
Veken (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1995), 120.
38. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Child's Relations with Others," in The Primacy of Perception
and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics (Evanston:
Nor.thwestern University Press, 1964),96-155.
39. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 139.
40. Ibid., 93.
41. Carol Bigwood, among others, argued that Butler's "Foucauldian attempt to avoid metaphysi-
cal foundationalism leaves us with a disembodied body and a free-floating gender artifice in a sea of
cultural meaning production." Bigwood, "Renaturalizing the Body," Hypatia 6, no. 3 (1991): 59.
42. See, for example, Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New
York: Routledge, 1993), xii. S;tler argues that to defend a culturally contructed body does not mean
that one understands cultural construction as a single, deterministic act or as a causal process initi-
ated by the subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects. In place of these conceptions of construc-
tion, Butler suggests a return to the notion of matter as "a process of materialization that stabilizes
over time to produce the effect of boundaty, fixity, and surface we call matter." See ibid., 9.
43. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997), 2-3.
44. Ibid., 86.
45. Ibid., 99.
46. Ibid., 94.
47. Ibid., 95.
48. Visker, "Raw Being and Violent Discourse," 119. In his effort to relate Merleau-Ponty's and
Foucault's thought on the question of experience/discourse, Rudi Visker also argues that we do not
have to choose between them. He writes that "what is at stake here is not the attempt to reduce
discourse to existence, or existence to discourse, but to find in their mutual intrication some indica-
tion of what it could mean for us to be those subjects who take up positions we did not ourselves
generate." See ibid., 126.
49. Sara Heinamaa presents a phenomenological description of sexual difference based on the
notion of style in Merleau-Ponty's and Simone de Beauvoir's thought. Heinamaa describes the conse-
quences that Merleau-Ponty's conceptualization of the body has for our conceptions of sexual differ-
ence: it is theorized as two different modes or styles of being-male and female. See Heinamaa,
Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference.
50. Merleau-Ponty notes that sensation can be anonymous only because it is incomplete. See
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 216.
51. Ibid., 363.
52. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1994), xi. •
53. Cf. Butler,Psychic Life of Power, 89.
 11
Care for the Flesh: Gilligan,
Merleau .. Ponty, and Corporeal Styles
David Brubaker

How should we regard Carol Gilligan's findings concerning an ethic of

care? In her In a Different Voice, Gilligan advances two hypotheses.! First,
the moral perspective of care is distinct from the ethical frameworks of
disinterested reason and impartial justice; and second, care is a mode of
thinking associated empirically with a difference in gender. These two

This chapter is dedicated to Dorothy Hosford Brubaker, a pioneer in the field of medical social
work, whose spirit of firm optimism and enjoyment; experiences from the settlement house move-
ment; and caring practices of friendship, listening, leadership, presence, and social commitment
have inspired and guided the words here.
230 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

hypotheses are borh promising and perplexing. The distinctness or "dif-

ferent voice" hypothesis is promising, because it moves moral philosophy
closer to the concreteness of actual life and away from the limitations of
a purely rational approach to morality. Even Immanuel Kant concedes
that a problem arises for an ethics that bases a principle of morality on
pure reason shorn of all motives from the field of sensibility: it cannot
explain how a moral interest is created in actual practice. 2 Thus, some
writers regard Gilligan as a pioneer in the search for a new ethic capable
of explaining how we acquire a moral interest or a desire to care for
ourselves and others. Yet some critics argue that care is inadequate as a
moral perspective, since its distinctness depends on noticing the personal
needs of unique individuals; for example, both Alison Jagger and George
Sher ask whether care for unique individuals in need can ever reveal the
sort of shared and repeatable characteristic that is required by a moral
principle that applies universally. Jagger doubts that regard for some sub-
jective context of personal need will enable carers to distinguish morally
appropriate behavior from moral mistakes or an arrogant paternalism. 3
Similarly, with regard to the gender-difference hypothesis, we find advan-
tages and difficulties. Moral philosophers who seek a guiding principle
based on embodied life will be open to the possibility of a connection
between morality and gender, especially if Gail Weiss is correct in hold-
ing that the embodying of morality is directly related to the way we live
our bodies and thus to an acceptance of gender as a project.4 But the link
between the ethic of care and gender is puzzling, as well; for how exactly
does the perspective' of care provide a shared moral principle relevant to
unity, the resolution of conflicts, and the moral maturity of us all, when
empirical observation shows that voices of care are associated mainly,
though not absolutely, with women rather than men? Gilligan insists that
listening to the voices of womeri for evidence of a distinct moral perspec-
tive of care will lead us all toward a novel way of valuing life that avoids
old categories, oppositions and debates over who is better (D, xii-xiii).
But Marilyn Friedman believes that we ought to demoralize gender; she
denies that the morality of care is associated with one gender rather than
another. s As Gilligan notes, her two hypotheses have led to discussions
that are both transformative and contentious.
With this chapter, I offer support for both of Gilligan's hypotheses. To
affirm the distinctness hypothesis, it will be necessary to differentiate the
perspective of care from traditional philosophies of morality by specifying
some concrete ground or purpose. In the first section below, I present
 Care for the Flesh 231

Gilligan's claim that care arises from a responsiveness to personal needs

that are unique to oneself or to other individuals. At the same time, I
evaluate and reply to some objections expressed by Jagger and Sher. It
will become clear that a satisfying defense of care as a distinct ethic does
ultimately require an interpretation for the uniqueness and irreplacability
of concrete individuals.
In the second section I link care thinking to the possession of a con-
crete context of embodiment that provides each moral agent with an
incentive and a desire to take responsibility for uniqueness in need. This
radical interpretation for corporeal uniqueness is obtained by analyzing
the implications of a third empirical hypothesis that Gilligan has intro-
duced more recently: each moral agent is able to shift between two differ-
ent ways of framing the same context of moral choice (for example, the
agent may alternate between the perspectives of care and justice).6 Once
Gilligan describes the perspective of care in this way, by analogy to cases
of perceptually ambiguous figures and the experiments of Gestalt psychol-
ogists, a path is opened for the development of an unorthodox account
of the concreteness of the context of moral choice, for it is possible to
introduce Merleau-Ponty's notes for The Visible and the Invisible, where
we find a critique of Gestalt psychology.7 This critique asserts that some-
thing is 9verlooked whenever a Gestalt is interpreted merely as a cogni-
tion or a state of consciousness: any visual Gestalt actually witnessed by
a subject always emerges temporarily within a preperceptual context of
visibility that is a portion of interior flesh displayed within the subject's
own body. By combining Gilligan's analogy to ambiguous figure percep-
tion with Merleau-Ponty's claim that one's own body supplies evidence
of an interior pivot of visibility that supports the shift from one Gestalt
to another, it is possible to generate a moral principle that is corporeal in
a novel way: an ethic of care for the flesh of the body. To support Gilli-
gan's claim that care is a mode of thinking favored by some but also
available to all (M, 32), I point out that each moral agent retains the
capacity to notice samples of the intrinsically valuable contexts of inte-
rior embodiment that are described in The Visible and the Invisible. I sug-
gest that experiences, feelings, perceptions, and habits often associated
with practices of care ultimately arise in consequence of the carer's own
intimate acquaintance with innate portions of the flesh of the body, such
as the context of visibility or touch. It is the concrete example of these
sensible roots of one's own interior flesh that gives rise to the ideas of
uniqueness in need, care for the self, and self in connection with others.
232 Feminist Interpretations of MerIeau-Ponty

Such corporeal contexts are the basis for perceptions, experiences, or

perhaps even a Gestalt of care. At times, Gilligan tends to record the
second-order perceptual experiences reported by individuals who practice
care, when she listens to each different voice.
In the third section, I suggest that we may uphold a version of Gilli-
gan's gender-difference hypothesis, by interpreting care thinking and re-
sponsiveness to difference in need as options that result from the choice
of noticing the flesh of interior embodiment. Given the premise that care
is a moral perspective based on noticing sensible samples of one's own
embodiment, the mode of care becomes linked with a project of gender
(that is, with the project of living one's body with an awareness of the
moral value and standing of all those who possess similar preobjective
contexts of flesh). Having arrived at an interpretation that relates the
flesh of the body to visibility and to questions of gender, I revisit Eliza-
beth Grosz's contention that Merleau-Ponty's idea of flesh is ill equipped
to address the differences in perception, desire, and sexuality that must
be accounted for by 'an ethics of the concreteness of embodied subjects. s
I conclude with t~ thought that Gilligan's three hypotheses, in con-
junction with Merleau-Ponty's account of sensible grounds innate to the
body, do lead moral philosophy in a new direction. Our notion of what
counts as a well s~pported morality is radically altered.

Distinctness and Contextual Uniqueness

Our first task is to evaluate the claim that the perspective of care is a
distinct way of thinking about morality. By listening to the way in which
moral agents talk about their choices, Gilligan finds that the thinking
associated with care is differentiated by a responsiveness to contexts that
are basic to the needs of unique individuals. After surveying interpreta-
tions that characterize care as a personal principle, I will reply to some
doubts expressed by. Jagger and Sher; for example, both writers ask
whether such a strong emphasis upon the concrete individuality of per-
sons will prevent this manner of thinking from qualifying as a moral
perspective. I argue that the perspective of care survives the charge that
it is incompatible with the generality required of a moral framework. But
it is clear that doubts about th~ distinctness of care as a moral perspective
will remain, until there is a satisfactory description of the way in which
 Care for the Flesh 233

concrete individuality actually supplies a sensible ground within visible

life for a generally held motive for caring.
There is widespread agreement that the distinctness of the moral ori-
entation of care depends on the claim that caring is motivated by
thoughts about the concreteness of unique selves. Gilligan writes that
relations of care are associated with the contextual nature of particular
needs, the discovery of differences, an intimacy of attachment, and a self
in relationship with others. Care is bound to a particular context: to that
mother in a particular situation (D, 58-59). By emphasizing the particu-
lar in this way, Gilligan tries to give substance to what would otherwise
be-the skeletal lives of generalized or hypothetical people; the carer gains
an awareness of the individual person who suffers. The attention given to
an actual individual "allows the understanding of cause and consequence
which engages compassion" (D, 100). In his commentary, George Sher
takes Gilligan to be claiming that the morality of care is "concrete and
contextual rather than abstract" and "personal rather than impersonal"
(0, 615). Alison Jagger holds that the concrete specificity of persons,
interests, motives, and sensibilities are intrinsic to relations of care; the
individuality of subjectivity (that is, the concreteness of the individual
self) is no longer set to the side. Jagger writes that the care perspective
differs from traditional theories, in that it rehabilitates the arena of per-
sonal life; for example, moral philosophers are able to explore the subjec-
tive context of moral choice more thoroughly, when singular needs and
desires of unique selves are no longer dismissed as obstacles. to moral
activity. Thus, care thinking exposes the limitations of ethical theories
that regard moral agents as representatives of a depersonalized humanity,
and it also differs from traditional theories that restrict the mOl:ally rele-
vant contexts of the concreteness of persons merely to experiences of
pleasure or pain (C, 191). Marilyn Friedman characterizes the care posi-
tion as "responding to those involved as particular in the sense of being
non-substitutable or irreplacable" (B, 136-37). According to Maurice
Hamington, Gilligan's moral perspective of care is concerned with "con-
nections between people and the relationships established"; it is an orien-
tation which regards ethics as a practice for expressing and sustaining
these connections, 'which are concrete and therefore particular."9
One objection to the perspective of care is that the emphasis upon
singularity, uniqueness, and personal needs is inconsistent with the gen-
erality required of a moral principle. Alison Jagger and George Sher ask
whether an awareness of some unique aspect of the concrete situation of
234 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

a person cared f01 will be able to generate a moral principle. As Jagger

notes, this objection ultimately stems from a Kantian argument: a moral
philosophy based on some element of intrinsic value common to all per-
sons must steer clear of specifying a sensible ground peculiar to particular
selves in nature, since such talk is thought to be biased in a way that is
"likely to be epistemologically subversive or morally corrupting" (C,
191). Indeed, Kant does argue that a doctrine of morals can be grounded
neither in our knowledge of any particular object of experience nor in
any sensible example of nature taken from one's own particular life, since
every object of experience will have a value that varies with accidental
circumstances, and since something that holds "only for this or that per-
son's senses" cannot be the motive for a principle that is valid for all
(MM, 24, 35) .. Sher cites this same objection, when he describes the
challenge for anyone who would seek to reconcile an impersonal princi,
pIe of morality with an orientation based on a relationship to some need
that is unique or personal: the problem is that "the motive of duty is in
some sense alienating, and that persons who act merely on principle are
ipso facto not displa,.ying the affection and care appropriate to personal
relationships" (0, ·623). Perhaps the argument can be restated as follows:
no particular experience or observable natural object can serve as the
basis for a general principle of moral value; so no moral principle can
ever be based upon a sensible example in the visible world that is evident
in a singular way to an individual person. Since a comprehensive moral
perspective must motivate concern for all persons, Sher concludes that it
is necessary to turn-back to some repeatable characteristic associated with
the depersonalized observer that is already described in existing philo,
sophical traditions (0,621-22). In short, his objection is that. the mode
of care will qualify as a moral perspective, only after it is detached from
the particularity and concreteness of personal needs that are supposed to
guarantee its distinctness.
It is interesting to note that Seyla Benhabib presents similar reasons
for doubting the perspective of care: a universalistic account of morality
requires us to regard each individual as having something in common
with every other, but the standpoint of the concrete individual, which
consists of associated needs, desires and affects, differentiates and ab,
stracts each of us from what constitutes our commonality.lO Benhabib
resists Kant's inference that relations of morality and dignity require us
to consider each individual as a rational being detached from concrete
individuality, for she argue; that we are able to· recognize the dignity
 Care for the Flesh 235

of other individual persons only after we take their particular concrete

circumstances into consideration (S, 164). Still, Benhabib does finally
reject the standpoint of the concrete individual as a basis for morality,
and she derives that conclusion, it seems, from the premise that the sensi-
ble context of concrete individuality will inevitably consist of knowable
histories and identities (for example, particular conditions of gender,
class, race, culture) that are not common to all persons (S, 164).
Can care for uniqueness in need be reconciled somehow with a moral
orientation? It is undeniable that the mode of care, as a moral perspec-
tive, must apply generally and not to some persons rather than others.
Moreover, if the concrete element basic to a unique person's need for
care must always be defined in terms of a particular physical history that
varies with time and location, then it does seem that advocates of an
ethic of care will find it difficult to specify a personal context to be cared
for that is uniformly distributed across all individuals. This critique is
. challenging, for it does entail that a preference for care as a moral princi-
ple cannot be motivated by an interest in some particular natural object
or perceptual experience that varies with location or culture. If Gilligan's
distinctness hypothesis concerning care is to be vindicated, then moral
philosophers must specify some concrete context in the cared-for's per-
sonal circumstances, without referring to any particular or accidental nat-
ural object or material condition. l1
What then can be said in reply to Jagger and Sher? One possible reply
is that care thinking about morality is not necessarily associated with
the kinds of concrete individuality that would prevent the generality of
application required of a moral principle. There may still be a way to
reconcile care with morality, for we can still explore the possibility that
the roots of concrete individuality may be constituted by some unique
and personal context (or token) other than the historically contingent
transactions and experiences that are known to vary according to culture,
occupation, physical condition, or economic circumstances. However, if
we try this way of affirming the distinctness hypothesis, then it follows
that we must support the idea of care as a moral perspective by thinking
of some uniquely personal but universally distributed context that cannot
be abstracted into any of the known physical conditions or identities that
are ordinarily used to sort persons into separate groups.
This brings us to a second critical objection that Sher raises against
the distinctness of any ethic of care: it is impossible to associate relations
of care with a concrete context that is less abstract than those mentioned
236 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

in traditional morlJl principles. According to Sher's second counterargu-

ment, the moral practice of care will require selectivity of attention to
some sensible aspect of the context of moral choice; so care thinking will
inevitably isolate and privilege some particular feature of interest. Given
this, Sher concludes that it will be impossible to associate care with a
context of moral choice that is more concrete and less abstract than any
of the myriad of contingent features or particular properties that ortho-
dox moral theories have tried to posit as ultimate ends (such as Mill's
isolation of the experience of pleasure as an object of desire that is also
of intrinsic value) (0, 616). In short, how can care thinking lead to
noticing something concrete, without reintroducing empirical concepts
that result in some abstraction from the total context? But Sher's second
objection to the distinctness hypothesis depends on a questionable back-
ground assumption, namely, that selectivity of attention to a morally
pertinent context will always require "some abstraction from the total
context" and the selection of at least one of the "myriad of 'particulars
of time and place'" '(0,616). Sher neglects to explore the possibility that
a carer acting as a mqral agent may notice some total context relevant to
uniqueness in need~some context for all particulars-that is more con-
crete and less abstract, since it cannot be perceived as an historical condi-
tion, an object in time and space, or an object of experience.
The foregoing'discussion leads to the conclusion that the distinctness
of care as a moral perspective depends upon the carer's capacity to notice
some concrete context that cannot be abstracted into any particular time
or location. It does seem that proponents of care must accept the follow-
ing implicat.fon: the .discourse of rational understanding about determi-
nate natural objects and properties cannot be the only possible way of
thinking about concrete difference in need. Advocates of care must spec-
ify some concrete context of uniqueness in need that is an inalienable
part of each moral agent, without naming natural objects or qualities that
are abstracted into particulars by cognitive thinking. All moral decisions
may require sensitivity to context, as Sher insists; but it does not neces-
sarily follow that sensitivity to context occurs only through the rational
discrimination of particular properties or natural objects. Jagger is right
that we caricature care, when we hold that it is absolutely disconnected
from reason and cognition. But no caricature results from accepting the
plausible claim that care is associated, in some fundamental way, with a
context that is not established merely through rational calculation. As
we proceed to explore the hypothesis that a moral perspective of care
 Care for the Flesh 237

depends on thinking about self-evident contexts of concrete individuality

that cannot be divided into particular properties by cognition, we may
still agree that a rational understanding of physical skills and therapies is
a necessary tool for preserving the context of concrete uniqueness pos-
sessed by the person cared for.
Alison Jagger is open to the prospect of a personal principle of moral-
ity, but she is deeply concerned that current descriptions of the care
perspective fail to specify a guiding context that would guarantee that an
individual is treated in a morally appropriate way. How does one guard
against imagining the needs of a patient and presuming consent? What
keeps a carer from transforming the needs of the cared for into a projec-
tion of the self's own contingent and historically relative needs? What
makes a carer's feelings or awareness of another's needs veridical? Jagger
asks how orientations of care that often emphasize subjectivity can avoid
the danger of permitting inadequate responses to perceived or expressed
needs. Proponents of care imply that there is a clear difference between
genuine needs and those felt to be appropriate by carers; but current
formulations do not explain how a carer is to distinguish between desires,
sentiments, or intentions (C, 189). As Jagger suggests, the absence of an
answer is a problem; it is unsatisfying to stop short with the idea that
relations of care are self-authenticating, just as it is unsatisfying to find
that critical theorists explain moral practice with the notion of a self-
justifying reason. Thus, Jagger asks how acts of care are to be distin-
guished as morally appropriate; indeed, she suspects that an answer can
be found only by going outside the subjective intentions, imaginings, or
desires that constitute the dyad of carer and cared-for. Given such ques-
tions and concerns, I agree with Jagger's advice: it is prudent and crucial
for any carer to validate caring intentions by widening "the circle of
intersubjective validation" through consultation with other carers or per-
sons cared for. But this advice does not yet explain how a carer, standing
as a local agent of moral concern, acquires an idea of concrete individual-
ity or uniqueness in need that is capable of motivating the search for
scientific knowledge and physical treatments that may aid another per-
son. Clearly, advocates of care must answer Jagger's concerns, by analyz-
ing the dyad of carer and cared-for: what need within the concrete
individuality of the self could a carer presume to project, with a justified
confidence that a similar need arises from the difference and uniqueness
of the person cared-for? Jagger grants that the "care perspective is not
necessarily without resources for addressing this issue" (C, 192); she
238 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

allows that the current absence of a justification for proper care does not
necessarily entail that there is no desire or interest arising within the
concrete carer/cared-for dyad that might furnish guidance.
So advocates of the moral orientation of care must search for a per-
sonal principle that will specify some repeatable context associated with
the concrete individuality of each moral agent. If this morally relevant
context is not to be abstracted to a realm of pure intellect, then it must
remain concrete and available as a ground for some need, inclination, or
desire. If it is to be a context that is different and less abstract than the
many physical contexts perceived and selectively determined by rational
understanding and cognition, then we must not think of it in the form of
a material object of empirical knowledge. Some cultural traditions already
support such ari idea; there are existing texts that link care and compas-
~ion to noticing a dimension of the senses that is not experienced in the
form of any particular appearance, as Peter Hershock indicates.lZ But as
Sher points out (0, 623), what we still require is a philosophical story
capable of describi~g how a principle of morality can be reconciled with
the idea of care for 1,lnique persons.

Gestalts and Pivots of Flesh

How, then, are advocates of care supposed to name a personal context
that is the source 'Of a moral agent's awareness of difference in need?
Although In a Different Voice cites cases of the way people talk in order
to support the conclusion that an ethic of care exists in the voices of
girls and women, Gilligan does not identify any specific cause for the
responsiveness of a carer to uniqueness in need or for the emergence of a
self in connection with others: "No claims are made about the origins of
the differences described or their distribution in a wider population,
across cultures, or through time" (D, 2). But if we are to establish that
care is a distinct mode of thinking, then we must be willing to delve into
neglected inner origins of the individual person and into interior roots of
the self. In this section, I argue that progress can be made in describing
the sensible roots within each person for the idea of difference in need,
by investigating the implications of Gilligan's third hypothesis, which
states that the selection of th~ perspective of care in the context of moral
choice is analogous to a case of "ambiguous figure perception" (M, 31-
 Care for the Flesh 239

32). Gilligan's analogy to perceptually ambiguous figures does not yet

explain how an agent may develop a tendency to favor one alternative
moral perspective instead of another (for example, compassionate care
instead of impartial justice); however, it does imply that a moral agent
may choose to notice the presence of an observable and sensible pivot
that cannot itself be cognized in the form of the perceptible objects or
experiences for which it provides support. The language for such a per-
sonal yet visible pivot emerges in Merleau-Ponty's critique of Gestalt psy-
chology, where he articulates the principle of the flesh of interior
embodiment. The witnessing of the interior flesh of one's own body gives
rise to the radical and unorthodox idea that the pivotal context of visibil-
ity is a sample of one's own self-actuality and concrete uniqueness; the
idea of flesh of the body implies intercorporeity and a corporal content
for a moral principle of care.
Gilligan invites us to consider the perspective of care by analogy to
cases of ambiguous figure perception. In the case of seeing the ambiguity
of a visible figure, a spectator groups or organizes the same proximal pat-
tern into two alternative perspectives; for example, in one familiar experi-
ment conducted by Gestalt psychologists, the subject perceives a single
figure as a duck and then as a rabbit. Gilligan compares the perceptions
of the duck and the rabbit with the switch between perspectives of care
and justice. She concludes that most people tend to focus upon one moral
perspective (care or justice) and to regard it as more compelling; but she
emphasizes that "people are aware of both perspectives" (M, 132). What
I wish to suggest is that the visible duck-rabbit figure displays evidence of
a sensible ground that permits us to make a second analogy relevant to
moral philosophy and care: the coming-to-be of each form of perceptual
organization, duck or rabbit, depends upon a supporting context of visi-
bility. Subjects may have a contingent cultural tendency to treat a single
figure primarily in terms of perception and the coming-to-be of determi-
nate shapes (such as duck or rabbit); however, each also has the live
option of noticing and acquiring an idea of the visibility that persists as
an observable pivot through each alternation in perceptual shape, pat-
tern, or form. Similarly, it is possible to witness that the practical context
of moral choice within one's own life often consists of a stable, self-
evident, and inalienable portion of flesh, 'such as visibility. Each of us
may then proceed to the thought that every other person with the sense
of sight probably possesses a similar instance of this context of visibility,
no matter which moral perspective or which idea of self each of the
240 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

others finds most 'Compelling. If earlier discussions of the perspective of

care refer primarily to dyads at the level of perceptual experience (duck/
rabbit, feeling/reason), then perhaps this is because many philosophers
are still limited by some contingent need to treat perception as basic and
to avoid thinking of their respective preperceptual contexts of visibility.
Thus, Gilligan's analogy to ambiguous figure perception and Gestalt psy-
chology points to new questions: Are carers able to approach the con-
creteness of the context of moral choice in a less abstract way, because
they choose to notice the pivot of visibility and regard it as compelling?
Could a look at visibility and the idea of it as an irreplaceable context
enable a carer to make moral choices with the thought of uniqueness
in need and not merely with the concept of impartial justice or formal
equality?
Merleau-Ponty's late writings are directly relevant to these questions
raised by Gilligan's analogy to cases of ambiguous figure perception, since
his texts refer specifically to a sensible pivot or hinge that fills the gap left
in the descriptions given by Gestalt psychologists for the context of visual
perception. The· working notes for The Visible and the Invisible ask what a
Gestalt is like for the person who actually experiences it; and some en-
tries point to the reply that such an experience is accompanied by the
body that is co-present as a surrounding context and pivot. The pivot for
a Gestalt, as a person directly witnesses it, is not a spatiotemporal individ-
ual in art objective scientific sense, or a psychic element, or a sensation
cognized as an object; it is none of these, because it escapes "time and
space conceived as' a series of events in themselves" (V, 205) According
to Merleau-"Ponty, the surrounding context or pivot for changing experi-
ences is neither an objective location nor a point in time. It is neither a
spatial essence nor merely an idea; for it is observed to be everywhere
present, with a weight of its own that fixes it as in a region, in readiness
for perception to crystallize it into a particular Gestalt. Merleau-Ponty
characterizes this contextual pivot, in his interpretation of what a Gestalt
is for a person who sees:

Who experiences it? A mind that would grasp it as an idea of

signification? No. It is a body-in what sense? My body is a Ge-
stalt and it is co-present in every Gestalt. It is a Gestalt; it also,
and eminently, is a heavy signification, it is flesh; the system it
constitutes'is ordered about a central hinge or a pivot which is
an openness to ... , a bound and not a free possibility-And at
 Care for the Flesh 241

the same time it is a component of every Gestalt. The flesh of the

Gestalt (the grain of the color, the indefinable something that
animates the contour or which, in Michotte's experiments, ani-
mates the rectangle that "creeps") is what responds to its inertia,
to its insertion in a "world," to its field biases. (V, 205-6)

For Merleau-Ponty, each Gestalt requires that the body lend a pivotal
context by which one witnesses the Gestalt for oneself. This sensible
pivot of flesh is a center or core of concrete self-embodiment, a latent
terminus ad quem for forms of perception; it is the context that makes it
possible to witness the instantiation of innumerable particular features
(duck or rabbit) within the actuality of one's own life. Merleau-Ponty
suggests that if psychologists try to locate the context for a Gestalt figure
merely within some framework of cognition, then they will'miss a sig-
nificant point about cases of ambiguous figure perception. It is the task of
philosophy to describe how a Gestalt comes into being for the person
who witnesses it. There is work to be done: he asserts that Gestalt quali-
ties emerge within a sensible ground that is "a lake of non being" or "an
open register" ready for inscription, and "not a pure agile nothingness"
(V, 206).
Merleau-Ponty develops his language for the corporeal pivot co-
present in a Gestalt in "The Intertwining-the Chiasm," the fourth
chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, where he describes the central
pivot of flesh in terms of such separate portions as visibility and touch.
The red that I see before my own eyes is not merely a quality or an
appearance that one knows, or a being for perception; it is the result of
my gaze focusing and briefly fixing a form to a thickness or "a certain
wooly, metallic, or porous [?] configuration or texture" (V, 132). My
sense-perception of red is a concretion within a woolly visibility, a dimen-
sion of the body that is between what we perceive as an external object
and what is regarded as internal thinking. A visible color is "less a color
or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors, a mo-
mentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility." The visibility of
a particular color is the tissue that lines, sustains, and nourishes the com-
ing-to-be of particular objects in perceptual experience; and this lining
"for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things
(V, 132-33). The gaze of the perceiving subject must wander within the
more general openness of visibility, a dimension of the subject's own
flesh, before it contributes to the emergence of a precise form or color as
242 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

a temporary variaI}t (V, 126). As an exemplar of one's o~n embodiment,

this atmospheric context of visibility is a corporeal texture of nonbeing
beneath and between the particular figures or properties (such as duck,
rabbit, red) which one experiences cognitively; hence, it cannot itself be
brought into perceptual focus by the forms and conceptual frameworks
for which it is the concrete context or pivot. Despite this indeterminate-
ness, the individual person has no difficulty in witnessing the actuality of
this sustaining context of flesh, even though the sensible ground of visi-
bility, as such, has no reality or existence as an object of perception,
cognition, or rational understanding. Thus, each of us is able to alternate
between witnessing visibility as a context constitutive of our own peculiar
body and as a mere background for perceiving particular visual objects
and properties of cognitive interest. In a reversal of Kant, it may be stated
that each of us is acquainted with pivotal contexts of flesh that lie ready
for the application of particular forms of perception and experience;
hence, there is warrant to speak of these self-evident contexts as wholes
apart from all intellecti~n.13 We find a reply to give Sher: there is a con-
textuality (for example, the surrounding context of visibility, as such)
which remains untamed by rational concepts. As Mauro Carbone notes,
Merleau-Ponty's late writings describe the "bond between conceptuality
and conceptlessness"; they express the connection between perceptual
thinking and a sensible ground that is a corporeal excess beyond any
conceptualization of particulars. 14
If we apply Merleau-Ponty's idea of preperceptual contexts of flesh, it
is possible to account for many of the relations and terms that Gilligan
uses to express the distinctness of the perspective of care: a less abstract
way of thinking about a preobjective context possessed by each unique
person, uniqueness or concrete difference in need, a sense of self in con-
nection with others, and a per~onal principle of morality. For example,
each instance of visibility is an innate whole specific to a unique and
singular individual; it is a secret display of concrete individuality in which
one's own body becomes a constituent part of an autonomous, private
dimension (that is, an idios kosmos). Things of the external world are
"repeated in the body by a secret visibility"; hence, the sensible context
of visibility constitutive of the element of flesh is a concrete interior
presence. 15 Yet, since the carnal gift of the visible belongs to the dimen-
sion of sense, the pivot of visibility is an inalienable corporeal context
that directs the indiv.idual person's attention outside rational understand-
ing (namely, outside the self ot intellect that approaches natural life only
 Care for the Flesh 243

through the cognition of spatiotemporal objects). When one witnesses

one's own body for oneself in this way, one discovers oneself as a com-
pound of perceptual thinking with visibility, a composite of thoughts and
a woolly and shimmering context that provides a nonegoistic and yet
unique opening upon the natural world. By choosing to notice this inner
context of visibility as an exemplar of flesh, the carer finds a sample that
gives meaning to the idea that each person has a concrete and unique (or
incomparable) interior life. Merleau-Ponty concludes that visibility-an
open register and sensible pivot present in each visual perception-is 'a
carnal context beyond the language of orthodox philosophies of the mod-
em period that join subject and mind against the combination of object
and body (V, 139). By applying Merleau-Ponty's remarks on the flesh of
the body, we find an idea about the self that helps explain Gilligan's
findings with regard to voices of care: there is a self that is able to think
about its own connectedness with an interior context of concreteness
that is possessed in a similar manner by each unique person. The notion
of flesh implies an innate context that is more concrete, in a way, than
those offered by traditional moral theories.
Merleau-Ponty's idea of innate contexts of flesh suggests that there
may be a corporeal avenue for explaining uniqueness in need, compas-
sion, and a universal principle of morality. At first, the notion of flesh
serves as a personal principle of self-care. If I begin to witness a context
of flesh (for example, the whole designated by the term visibility) as an
exemplar of my unique actuality, then I regard this same context as nec-
essary to my well-being and as valuable for its own sake. It becomes a
corporeal end or purpose toward which I may develop a desire, a need, an
interest, and a feeling. I may need to witness and reacquaint myself with
one or more of the contextual pivots of the interior flesh of my body,
since my own awareness of myself as an actual and concrete existent
seems to depend on noticing such wholes. This need is neither egoistic
nor exactly similar to a desire for one physical state or economic condi-
tion instead of another, for it does not arise from any rational interest
that would regard the body as an object to be used for the satisfaction of
some internal desire. Then, in a second step, a carer can universalize the
principle of the flesh of the body; for example, I judge it probable that
there are other concrete individuals who witness their own peculiar actu-
alities through similar contexts. I presume that my neighbor, who refers
to a landscape as "green," does possess a similar and equally secret texture
of woolly visibility that serves as an exemplar of the concreteness of the
244 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

self. The hand cla~ped together with mine probably possesses a precogni-
tive interior of flesh (that is, tactility) that is similar to my own instance.
Merleau-Ponty does think this way about wholes of visibility, for he refers
explicitly to a "universal visibility" that would presumably consist of the
community of all. individuals who possess their own fragments of flesh (V,
145). He suggests that innate contexts of flesh-the dimension of stable
and sensible pivots for the emergence of transient experiences-may be
sublimated into an idea sufficient for the formulation of a general princi-
ple (V, 145). Yet this idea of flesh corresponds neither to any material
object of empirical knowledge nor to any appearance sublimated as an
object of some concept, for this idea cannot be abstracted from the secret
contexts of sensibility proper to its own mode of existence (V, 149).16 If
the fragment of one's own flesh generates an idea of embodiment that
can be generalized to others, then an imperative to care for all such in-
stances of concrete uniqueness may be generalized as well. If I am to
remain consistent,. I must infer that the hand or eye of another person is
associated with internal exemplars of flesh that deserve equal consider-
ation. More work !s"needed to assess the role of the imagination in prac-
tices of care that depend on generalizing the idea of innate samples of
interior flesh to members of the class of persons; the idea of an interior
look at one's own secret context of visibility may be relevant to the proc-
ess of "vicarious visualization" that Sandra Bartky discusses in connec-
tion with sympathy, Max Scheler, and the term "feeling-with."17
Merleau-Ponty's general principle of the interior flesh of the body is of
practical v,alue, sin'ce it gives health-care profeSSionals some guidance in
how to treat others in a morally appropriate way. The carer's empathy for
the person cared for does not arise merely from an understanding of the
overall physical condition of the cared-for; it stems also from an aware-
ness that such a physical condition is accompanied by the possession of
an irreplacable, interior corporeality, which Merleau-Ponty denotes with
the term flesh. Thus, ethical medical care requires more than acting from
an understanding of the physical condition of a patient; it also requires
an affirmation of the wholes of flesh (for example, the pivots of visibility
and touch), which are the patient's own evidence for the intrinsic worth
and actuality of the self within nature. Programs of treatment may be
more effective, after staff members consider that the individual patient's
incentives for self-care may depend on noticing the sensuous contexts of
visibility and tactifity. For example, a factual and intellectually conceived
discussion of a physical condition or outcome may not give the individual
 Care for the Flesh 245

patient an incentive that is concrete enough to sustain a personal desire

for recovery or feelings of dignity and self-worth ·during a prolonged ill-
ness. The chances for stability, recovery, and dignity may increase,
through supportive care programs that use the arts (painting, sculpture,
music, flower arrangement, dance) to renew a patient's acquaintance
with the sensible pivots of interior flesh that serve as unique and personal
exemplars of the actuality of life. I may be more likely to take an interest
in my own well-being after I am reacquainted with a context of flesh,
such as visibility or tactility, that enables me to witness corporeal samples
of my own intrinsic worth. Thus, there is support here for Sally Bailey's
observation that creative-art programs enable hospice patients to become
reconnected to their own roots of self-worth, to overcome the fragmenta-
tion of the self, and to restore a connection with the earth.1 8 We have an
account that helps to corroborate the external observation that a pa-
tient's expectations of self-efficacy, a factor in coping with disease, may
be increased by the maintenance of activities that include the continua-
tion of "nonphysical intimacy with others."19
To summarize, if we use Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of flesh to develop
a personal principle of morality, then it seems that Gilligan's hypothesis
of the distinctness of care can be defended more easily. When it is inter-
preted in this way, care becomes a mode of thinking about morality that
moves beyond conventional cognitive frameworks that reach only as far
as perceptual experiences. The analogy to ambiguous figure perception
suggests that the experiences associated with care are dependent upon
the witnessing of an even more basic context of flesh consisting of corpo-
real pivots. Since the visibility innate to the flesh of one's own body is
necessary for witnessing a visual perception for oneself, the analogy be-
tween the visibility of the duck and rabbit figures and the visibility present
during moments of moral choice does ultimately satisfy one of Jagger's
requests (C, 195): the concrete pivots of flesh (such as visibility and
touch) central to the perspective of care would ·always be presupposed
as present during a moral agent's perceptual recognition of real social
structures. Moreover, if it is correct that a pivot of visibility beneath or
between perceptions is both an exemplar of the concrete uniqueness of
the self and an avenue of openness to others within nature, then it may
be possible to account for the paradox that Gail Weiss finds in our ongo-
ing, daily practice of shifting between identities or body images. Weiss
holds that a body image is a way of orienting oneself in the world through
perception, "a developmental 'Gestalt'" (BI, 10-11); indeed, she reiter-
246 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

ates Merleau,Pont1"s statement that a body image is an awareness of

being situated in the world, or "a 'form' in the sense used in Gestalt
psychology."zo Weiss goes on to remind us of the following paradox: it is
"at the very moment that one body image imperceptibly gives way to
another" that a person gains "a sense of intercorporeal continuity" with
others (BI, 167). Our results help to explain the paradox: the moment of
openness to the obvious but preperceptible pivot of visibility, which is
the corporeal ground for changing Gestalts and physical identities, leads
to an awareness of a more coherent and less fragmented context of self in
concrete relationship to others.

Care for the Flesh and Gender

How does a distinq moral principle of care for the flesh of the body
cohere with the gender, difference hypothesis? To address this question,
we must interpret th~ meaning of Gilligan's observation that the moral
perspective of care is associated with the voices of women. Clearly, Gilli,
gan is interested in the question of whether there are already moral agents
who choose to ac;t as concrete selves in connection with others, or as
carers with compassion for unique persons. To conduct an adequate test
of the hypothesis that a distinct orientation of care is widely used in
contexts of moral choice, Gilligan argues that it is necessary to extend
special attention to the voices of women, for she notes that if psycholo,
gists contimle to exclude girls and women from research samples, then
the connection between care and moral maturity is more likely to be
missed or dismissed (M, 36-37). At the same time, Gilligan rejects all
attempts to explain the origins of a distinct ethic of care by means of old
categories of thinking, such as biology or SOciology ("nature or nurture"),
since she finds that these discourses tend to imply that women and men
alike are causally determined objects (D, xii). Once the care perspective
is treated as an effect ·of such conditions, no room is left for a moral voice
that connects the "core of the self" to others (D, xvi), and there is "no
possibility for resistance; for creativity." In short, such causal thinking
produces a "suffocation of voice" and a psychic numbing that ripen the
conditions for totalitarian rule (D, xix). Thus, Gilligan's remarks point
to a dilemma that must be aqdressed, whenever advocates of the moral
perspective of care for the flesh try to accommodate the gender,difference
 Care for the Flesh 247

hypothesis. If moral philosophers ignore the gender of individual persons,

then they will suppress evidence of the different voice associated with
care, the new research on the notion of a self in connection with others,
and the possibility of a new ethic. But if the association between care
and a difference in gender is affirmed and explained merely by social or
biological causes, then caring is in danger of losing its promise as a source
for a general principle of morality that upholds the possibility of choice
and relationships of freedom. We face a difficult question: how can one
sustain Gilligan's observation that there is an existing moral orientation
of care adopted by women more often than men, without attributing this
difference to origins within the self that are known to be socially or
biologically determined?
It may be possible to uphold an ethic of care and the gender-difference
hypothesis, by exploring an observation made earlier: the perspective of
care arises when the individual moral agent chooses to notice that the
witnessing of a visual Gestalt also reveals a sample of the agent's own
concrete embodiment. If we accept visibility and tactility as self-evident
contexts of the body that serve as pivots beneath or between the percep-
tion of distinct objects and figures, then it follows that each of us enters
the context of moral choice with the live option of witnessing our own
body as a dimension of flesh that cannot be perceived as an object deter-
mined by physical conditions. In addition, if we import Merleau-Ponty's
discussion on the reversibility of the flesh (V, 138), then two different
ways of witnessing self-embodiment begin to emerge: I may notice my
own embodiment in a nontraditional way, as an interior flesh that includes
the display of preperceptual contexts such as visibility and tactility; or
else I may notice my own embodiment by means of perception as an
object, or as a cognized material condition or physical fact, which exists
through being empirically known. 21 If we join this implication of
Merleau-Ponty's principle of reversibility-that there are two ways of
thinking about embodiment-together with Gilligan's third hypothesis,
which holds that moral choice is analogous to cases of ambiguous figure
perception, then we may infer that a person in one and the same context
of embodied moral choice has the capacity to shift between two different
modes of awareness concerning the body. When a moral agent notices
one of the contexts, such as visibility or tactility, that exemplifies the
concreteness of the self, then we may anticipate a shift in awareness
toward the perspective of care as a result. Strictly speaking, a moral agent
does not literally adopt a care iocus, in choosing to witness the self-
248 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

evident context of. visibility as morally compelling, for visibility is a

thickness of the flesh prior to the gaze of perception, which crystallizes it
into the form of some particular figure or being, by "a focusing, however
brief" (V, 131-32). Moreover, those moral agents who actively select care
as a mode of thinking by choosing to notice visibility as a sample of self-
embodiment may be said to practice a corporeal style. Care for self and
others arises from a willingness to wear one's own body as a unique in-
stance of interior flesh; and this requires that one accept oneself as consti-
tuted by sensible contexts that remain indeterminate from the standpoint
of any controlling causal knowledge. If Judith Butler is right that gender
is "a way of acting the body, a way of wearing one's own flesh as a cultural
sign,"22 or of wearing the body as a sign of one historical perspective
rather than another, then it would seem possible that a difference in
gender might be associated, at this historical moment, with one of the
two ways of thinking already outlined here: the selection of the pivots of
flesh as a compelling corporal orientation, and the selection of care as a
compelling mode of thinking about morality. Thus, the moral perspective
of care could perhaps become largely the contingent project of one gen-
der and less frequently an orientation selected by all if women were gen-
erally more practiced than men in approaching the context of moral
choice with a thought of the intrinsic value of the interior element of
the flesh of the body. As Gilligan observes, it is the repeated use of the
orientation of care that is associated almost exclusively with women; she
makes it clear that not all women give preference to the orientation of
care, and that some woman and some men rely on both the mode of care
and that of justice, without clearly favoring one more than the other (M,
37-38). By joining the empirical association between care and women,
the analogy to cases of ambiguous figure perception, and the idea of a
sensible ground such as visibility, it is possible to suggest that moral prac-
tices of care, based on the contingent noticing of corporeal origins within
the self, may become a project of gender.B
We may continue to experiment with Merleau-Ponty's principle of
flesh to address the contemporary question of how the particularity of the
subject gives rise to different kinds of perceptions and desires concerning
self-embodiment. The discussion here implies that a moral agent may
interpret the body in either of two ways. First; there is the perspective of
care and thinking about embodied life in terms of self-evident wholes
of flesh that are of intrinsic warth; and second, there is the contingent
perspective of the rational self that cognizes embodied life (of self and
 Care for the Flesh 249

other) in the form of external, material objects. The complete privileging

of the second perspective-and the confusion of self~actuality with the
reality of objects-is perhaps accurately described in Helene Cixous's
analysis of masculinity: once self~embodiment is identified with external
physical things to be controlled, a person may fear the possibility of
choosing to shift to the open register of interior flesh that cannot be
experienced as a tractable object. 24 In addition, if we suppose that the
pivots of visibility and touch are relevant as contexts of sexuality, then
an articulation of the second way of thinking about the body-the choice
of regarding the embodiment of self and others in terms of perceptions
that objectify-also enables us to affirm Elizabeth Grosz's suggestion: it is
indeed possible, at this historical moment, that many men could take up
a contingent perspective that leads them to "distance themselves, their
subjectivities, from their sexualities," to regard their sexual desires as un~
controllable impulses, and to "seek sexuality without intimacy," in ways
that could seem alien to many women (VB, 200). By contrast, the first
way of approaching the body may perhaps be expressed in a few lines,
where Merleau~Ponty shows an awareness that flesh is a preobjective con~
text and not a spatiotemporal thing: "[T]he body no longer couples itself
up with the world . . . the body is lost outside the world and its goals,
fascinated by the unique occupation of floating in Being with another
life, of making itself the outside of the inside and the inside of the out~
side" (V, 144).
In short, it may be possible to associate the moral principle of care
with a difference in gender, without turning to talk of sociological or
biological conditions that would put choice into doubt. Since such a
gendeNelated ethic of care would be based on noticing the body as a
sensible ground and not as an object of cognitive experience, it would
seem to follow that some gender projects are not merely flexible products
determined entirely by the concepts prevailing in a culture. Social insti~
tutions and environments (including schools, hospitals, and dwellings)
may well be designed in ways that promote or else discourage the noticing
of the secret contexts of concrete embodiment that motivate care for self
and others. But the portions of flesh, such as the field of visibility, can
never be located as objects of antecedent causal conditions that belong
to the subject matter of sociology. At the same time, since the flesh of
the body is displayed as a concrete, precognitive context, doubt is cast on
the claim that the body is an unmalleable bedrock of matter that must
be perceived only in terms of biologically defined sex differences. The
250 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau·Ponty

contextual pivot ot visibility is an inalienable portion of self-embodi-

ment, but it has no objective or particular physical reality from the cogni-
tive standpoint of natural sciences. Therefore, the moral perspective of
care cannot be identified with one particular anatomy; it is based on
latent contexts of flesh {such as visibility, touch} that are self-evident to
any person or sensible-sentient who is open to witnessing them.

The Desire for Transformation

Our investigation suggests that the three hypotheses associated with Gil-
ligan's ethic of care-those concerning distinctness, alternating moral
perspectives, and gender differences-may be combined with Merleau-
Ponty's late writings on the flesh of the body. Merleau-Ponty's account of
flesh offers help to ~hose who seek to formulate a new moral principle
that is corporeal. Alison Jagger may be right, in part, when she warns
that the care perspective's emphasis on personal relations does not di-
rectly address structural oppositions between social groups that hinder
caring; she raises a legitimate concern, in claiming that the care ethic
"seems unable to focus on the social causes of many individual problems"
(C, 196-97). It seems that the moral perspective of care for the flesh
cannot replace our empirical understanding about objects and conditions,
such as the structural relations in global society that cause injury, oppres-
sion, and starvation, 'or else the material conditions necessary to protect
physical health and well-being. Yet it is not enough to have a causal
understanding of the world; individuals must desire to change it. Persons
are likely to seek causal knowledge and to change conditions by means
of it only if they are guided and motivated by some moral purpose or
perspective. This chapter merely conveys an interpretation for the moral
perspective of care and for an idea about the concreteness of living per-
sons; but perhaps it still manages to address interests of importance. As
Merleau-Ponty notes, "[F]lesh is ... what makes the facts have meaning,
makes the fragmentary facts dispose themselves about something" (V,
140).
The foregoing results suggest that we should revisit the question of
whether Merleau-Ponty's late writings on the flesh of the body can con-
tribute to a viable ethics of s~xual difference. While his account may
prove inadequate in some respects, not all the objections currently raised
 Care for the Flesh 251

by critics are persuasive. Elizabeth Grosz, for example, raises at least four
objections to Merleau-Ponty's account that may still be questioned. First,
she holds that his language of flesh is a neutral discourse that cannot
explain how different kinds of perceptions and sexual desires result from
the particularity or concreteness of the subject. As Grosz notes, Merleau-
Ponty never explicitly asks if his account stems from the experiences of
one type of subject, or if the relations between owning and being a body,
or between one subject and another, are different for women and men
(VB, 110). Yet it seems that Merleau-Ponty's idea of the reversibility of
the flesh implies that each moral agent has two modes of thinking with
which to interpret the relation between self and embodiment; so feminist
theorists may perhaps be able to use these two ways to explain how inter-
ests, feelings, and desires differ for women and men.
Grosz argues that Merleau-Ponty's account also fails in a second way:
the corporeal principle of flesh is inadequate, because it cannot describe
the preontological, ungraspable, unrecognizable, and indeterminate cor-
poreal zones associated with sexual difference (VB, 11 0-11 ). According
to Grosz, the "pre-epistemological" terrain of sexual difference preexists
what we know, since it is a ground that explains how the making of
sexual identities and external relations are possible (VB, 208-9). The
insistence here on a ground that is prior to what we know is needed
and beneficial; however, on Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy of flesh, the
bodily contexts of visibility and touch are zones beneath the level of
cognitive experience associated with a Gestalt. So they are ungraspable
and indeterminate from the standpoint of knowledge and traditional phi-
losophy (V, 139). Each pivotal context of flesh is a self-evident texture
or terrain of nonbeing, a "thickness of the flesh" between perceptual
thinking and the things themselves (V, 135). Since each sensible pivot is
a wholeness or unity, indivisible by perception, Merleau-Ponty's language
may perhaps cohere with two descriptions that Grosz uses in connection
with sexual difference: it seems that visibility, as sensible ground and
pivot, does bind "each thing to every other" within carnal life as a person
actually lives it. It is also a medium that does bind each perceptible thing
"to the whole of existence"; for when perceptible objects and appear-
ances arise visibly, for oneself, within one's own element of interior flesh,
this gives rise to the idea that the context of visibility is the inside lining
of another dimension beyond (VB, 209). Therefore, both visibility and
touch, as wholes that perception cannot divide, may qualify as candidates
for the zones of indeterminacy mentioned by Grosz. Each innate portion
252 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

of flesh is a horizoJ)., a context, that enables multiple body images; self-

concepts; and conceptions of sex, gender, race, and class to inhere within
the idios kosmos of the individual person's own unique and actual life
in nature. Social structures of race and sex exist only within particular
situations, as Jagger states (C, 195); but it is possible to add that a person
acquires an accurate practical understanding of such structures and their
effects, because they are exemplified within the concrete contexts specific
to the individual person's own flesh.
Third, Grosz objects that Merleau-Ponty reduces desire to significance
or intentional consciousness, with the result that he cannot explain some
cases of desire with regard to the body, where the breakdown of inten-
tionality and cognition is sought with pleasure (VB, 110). In reply, it
may be pointed Out that on Merleau-Ponty's account the preperceptual
zones of flesh are corporeal contexts for which there may be desire and
compassion. The conceptlessness of such self-evident samples of self-
embodiment will inevitably have a central and disruptive role in percep-
tual life and the cognition of objects, because the sensible grounds of
visibility and touch c.an never be encompassed by the perceptions for
which they serve as concrete pivots. Merleau-Ponty seems to express this,
by stating that the body, as self-evident flesh, is no longer conceived as a
thing that is occupied in seeing the natural objects of the world; it is "lost
outside the world 'and its goals," fascinated with the practice of making
itself "the inside of its outside" (V, 144).
The fourth doubt stems from Merleau-Ponty's emphasis upon visibil-
ity, when he outlines- his account of the flesh of the body. Grosz argues
that The Visiele and the Invisible offers a flawed account of flesh, because
it relies so heavily on cases of visibility to bridge the gap between subject
and object. She suggests that the. gulf between subject and object, or
intellect and material object, is bridged more persuasively by examples of
touch, and less well by references to the relation between seer and seen,
or between the gaze of perception and the context of visibility. Touch is
more effective as an example of the requisite medium or bridge, because
the toucher is inevitably touched, whereas "in traditional understandings
of vision the seer sees at a distance and is un implicated in what is seen"
(VB, 101). According to this objection, the innate whole of visibility
constitutive of the element of flesh cannot serve as a concrete context
that fills the gap between thought and things, because "the gulf between
subject and object is never so distant as in vision" (VB, 101). Grosz is
quite correct about vision. But'doubts about Merleau-Ponty's late writ-
 Care for the Flesh 253

ings on flesh can still be lifted, since he often distinguishes between vi-
sion as perceptual thinking and visibility as flesh. The two mingle but
never blend (V, 131). It follows that any painter who actually perceives
an instance of the color red in the distance is inevitably implicated in
the color seen; for the particulars of visual perception are always exempli-
fied within the corporeal context of visibility that is, no less than touch,
a self-evident sample of the painter's own body (E, 127-28). This result
is beneficial; for it enables us to value ornamentation and practices of
painting as instruments that reacquaint persons with their own corporeal
roots in natura1.life.
Luce Irigaray gives a different reason for doubting that visibility works
as well as touch as an exemplar of self-embodiment. To take up lrigaray's
own terms, the earliest relations between mother and child remain in
darkness; hence, Irigaray concludes there is no seeing and thus "neither
visible nor visibility in that place."25 By contrast, tactility is present in
darkness and precedes the light and colors of subsequent life. But if Iri-
garay's argument is to persuade, then it needs reinforcement; for darkness
or a nocturnal state does not necessarily entail an absence of visibility.
Even darkness would seem to depend on the presence of the context of
visibility that belongs to the flesh of one's own body. Indeed, this is
suggested implicitly by Merleau-Ponty himself: "With each flutter of my
eyelashes a curtain lowers and rises, though I do not think for an instant
of imputing this eclipse to the things themselves" (V, 7). In short, if there
is darkness, then there is a sensible-sentient in possession of a pivotal
context of visibility. Therefore, the context of the visible might still ex-
emplify embodiment in a manner that is similar to that of touch. If this
is correct, then Merleau-Ponty's account of visibility does not simply
make use of metaphors that merely hint at the feminine, which remains
unspoken. We may even begin to ask whether visibility is another source
of the feminine jouissance that is associated with touch. To put this in
Eleanor Godway's terms, the question is whether sight depends on an
element that can become the source for "an awareness of a region of
sensuality involving a primordial orientation. "26
In conclusion, the three hypotheses associated with Gilligan's ethic of
care find support in Merleau-Ponty's late writings on the flesh of the
body. This result helps to dispel suspicions that Merleau-Ponty's idea of
flesh is the product of a phenomenological method that distorts. I suggest
that he notices distortions in his earlier work and begins to describe the
lived body anew, with a notion of flesh as a radical element-perhaps the
254 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

inner body of a living soul-that mingles but never merges with intellect.
Merleau-Ponty's late writings are beneficial, since they add to the credi-
bility of Gilligan's claim that there is a moral principle of care already in
use that is not mentioned in European traditions of moral philosophy.
Finally, it follows that Gilligan is correct: our willingness to notice the
differences in the lives and voices of women could indeed lead to a wider
acceptance of the idea of a self in connection with others, to a reduction
of alienation and violence, and to a more generative way of living to-
gether.

Notes

1. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Pr.ess, 1993), 1-2. This work is hereafter cited as D.
2. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James Ellington (Indianapo-
lis: Hackett, 1993),59-61. Hereafter cited as MM.
3. See George Sher, "o.th'er Voices, Qther Rooms? Women's Psychology and Moral Theory,"
in Moral Theory (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace, 1996), hereafter cited as 0.; and Alison Jagger,
"Caring as a Feminist Practice of Moral Reason," in Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist
Ethics, ed. Virginia Held (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), hereafter cited as C.
4. Gail Weiss, Body Images (London: Routledge, 1999), hereafter cited as BI.
5. Marilyn Friedman, "Beyond Caring: The De-moralization of Gender," in Justice and Care,
70, hereafter cited as B.
6. Carol Gilligan, "Moral Qrientation and Moral Development," in Justice and Care, 31-33,
hereafter cited as M.
7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 204-7, hereafter cited as V.
8. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), hereafter
cited as VB.
9. Maurice Hamington, Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Feminist Eth-
ics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 14-15, hereafter cited as EC.
10. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodemism in Contemporary
Ethics (London: Routledge, 1992), 158-59, hereafter cited as S.
11. This is to say that a philosophical defense of the moral orientation of care must specify some
sensible sample of concrete uniqueness that is of intrinsic worth, without naming some natural object
and committing what G. E. Moore describes as the "naturalistic fallacy"; see G. E. Moore, Ethica
Principia (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988),38-41. Maurice Hamington makes the suggestive
comment that Moore's "naturalistic fallacy is an example of an artificial philosophical boundary on
morality that care breaches" (EC, 32). However, the problem with Moore's account is not his claim
that a natural property or object of experience can never serve as a sensible ground for a general
principle of morality; instead, the problem is Moore's adherence to the restrictive modem doctrine
that defines nature and naturali~m in terms of the subject matter of the natural sciences and psychol-
ogy. Hamington is right that it is benefic1al to cross disciplinary boundaries, so that pragmatist
descriptions of care in terms of particular physical habits can be combined with Merleau-Ponty's
 Care for the Flesh 255

account of the body as one lives it for oneself. Yet if we are to formulate a moral principle of
embodied care for better guidance, then we must go beyond the limits of Moore's definition of
natuTe, and also beyond the factual understanding of physical bodies that still seems to be the basis
of Hamington's excellent description of caring habits. Advocates of an ethic of care must describe
some concrete ground of intrinsic value evident within one's own unique body that provides a
personal motive for the launching of habits. Hamington's account of embodied care emphasizes
physical habits-active listening, friendly and reciprocal participation, leadership and social activism
in connection with community-that characterize the social ethic of Jane Addams and participants
in the settlement movement (EC, 97-121).
12. Peter Hershock, Chan Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005), 100, 106,
150. See Hershock's account of Huineng.
13. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of PUTe Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1929),60,65, 144.
14. Mauro Carbone, The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty's A-Philosophy (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2004), 46-47. Carbone's interpretation seems to conflict with that
of Hamington, who often states that Merleau-Ponty gives a central role to bodily perception (EC,
48). But the difference here results from changes of emphasis in Merleau-Ponty's account. Carbone
emphasizes the late writings contained in the manuscript and working notes for The Visible and the
Invisible, whereas Hamington often cites earlier writings from The Phenomenology of Perception.
15. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," trans. Michael Smith, in The Merleau-Ponty Aes-
thetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1993), 125-26, hereafter cited as E.
16. To differentiate the idea of flesh from a mere sensible intuition of an object (that is, from a
form of mind that is "the contrary of the sensible"), Merleau-Ponty refers us to Proust's description
of the "little phrase," or musical idea, and to his notion of sound, light, and relief, as rich possessions
that adorn our own inward domains: the musical idea, the dialectic of love, the articulation of light,
and the modes of sound and touch all owe their authority or power to their attachment to the heart
of the sensible, that is, to the interior contexts of negativity or nonbeing, which retreat from personal
awareness in proportion to our attempts to "get at" or circumscribe them with the marks of musical
notation, or with particular colors (V, 150-52).
17. See Sandra Bartky, "Sympathy and Solidarity" and Other Essays (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2002), 77, 84-86. Empirical knowledge would contribute to the inference that another
physical body possesses an internal exemplar of flesh that deserves equal care; but this would not
weaken the idea that contexts of interior flesh are ends of intrinsic worth that cannot be expressed
in the cognitive terms of rational knowledge.
18. Sally Bailey, "Comprehensive Spiritual Care," in Principles and Practices of Supportive Oncol-
ogy (Philadelphia: Lippincott-Raven, 1998),724. I wish to thank Mary P. Carney for helpful conver-
sations about nursing and hospice care, and for sharing her unpublished paper, "Being Present in the
Midst of Confusion," which describes the living person's own dimension, the choosing of a posture
of presence in order to be with those who are here now, and the importance of keeping wonderment
alive.
19. See, for example, Thomas V. Merluzzi and Mary Ann Martinez Sanchez, "Assessment of
Self-Efficacy and Coping with Cancer: Development and Validation of the Cancer Behavior Inven-
tory," Health Psychology 16, no. 2 (1997): 163-70. The philosophy of flesh gives new meaning to the
claim that adequate medical practice requires concern for the treatment of a disease as it is lived from
within by the individual patient; see Abby Wilkerson, Diagnosis: Difference: The Moral Authority of
Medicine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 108.
20. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Rout-
ledge, 1962),99-100.
21. For more discussion concerning this circular course or the reversibility of the flesh, see my
"Merleau-Ponty's Three lntertwinings," Journal of Value Inquiry 34 (2000): 89-101.
256 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

22. Judith Bulter, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
1990), 256. •
23. For a related discussion of gender difference, the late writings of Merleau-Ponty, and the
value of favoring the capacity to witness space intimately as a ground provided by the flesh of one's
own body, see Susan Best, "Driving Like a Boy: Sexual Difference, Embodiment, and Space," in
Imagining Australian Space: Cultural Studies and Spatial Inquiry, ed. Ruth Barcan and Ian Buchanan
(University of Western Australia Press, 1999), 100: "[W)e could argue that rather than 'failing' to
distinguish figure from ground, women have a heightened capacity for seeing interconnections and
continuities, for intertwining text and context, and for the appreciation of embeddedness." As Best
suggests, an openness to intimate connection with the "ground" of one's own corporeality implies
the awareness of some context that is not merely seen in the form of another perceptible figure.
Perhaps a heightened capacity to appreciate one's own embeddedness within nature and the land
results from noticing the pivot of visibility as a first dimension of depth that precedes the emergence
of physical spaces and objects through perception.
24. Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks
and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 247.
25. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (ith-
aca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 154.
26. See Eleanor M. Godway, "Phenomenology and the Frontiers of Experience: Merleau-Ponty
and Irigaray," Historical Reflections/Reflections Hysterics 19, no. 1 (1993): 28. After suspending the
cognition of visual propertie;s, one may find secretly for oneself what is usually overlooked in silence:
a Visibility that is before seeing and any distinction between subject and object. "Primary speech"
must be created for this shimmering texture and atmosphere of the self that puts personal experiences
into question. •
 12
Language in the Flesh:
The Politics of Discourse in
Merleau .. Ponty, Levinas, and Irigaray
Ann V. Murphy

Merleau-Ponty is best known for his philosophical descriptions of the

lived body. Against a tradition that had consistently given priority to the
mind and claimed reason as the seat of humanity, he argued that meaning
is given in and through the experiences of embodied life. As such, it

An earlier draft of this chapter was presented at the twenty-fifth annual meeting of the Interna-
tional Merleau-Ponty Circle at George Washington University, Washington D.C., September
2000. I thank the audience there for their insight and criticism. Thanks to Len Lawlor, Robert
Bernasconi, and Tina Chanter for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks also to Gail Weiss
and Dorothea Olkowski for their careful reading and commentary.
258 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

comes as no surpris~ that feminists have taken Merleau-Ponty's philoso-

phyas a resource in giving voice to experiences of the sexed body that
have traditionally been marginalized. Not everyone has been quick to
embrace Merleau-Ponty's position, however. Some critics, feminists
among them, have argued that Merleau-Ponty's descriptions of embodi-
ment are unfairly general and anonymous insofar as they fail to address
the specific differences that may mark and differentiate certain bodies in
ways that are politically meaningful. No less important is the criticism
that Merleau-Ponty's rendering of intersubjectivity is totalizing, as it can-
not account for the alterity of the Other, or the Other's unthematizable
difference from the self. Different versions of this criticism are put forth
by Luce Irigaray and Emmanuel Levinas, both of whom argue, albeit in
different ways, that the Other of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is not suffi-
ciently different from the self. In diagnosing the validity of these criti-
cisms, it is useful to consult Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of language.
In what follows, the Levinasian critique of Merleau-Ponty will be ex-
plored with an eye t~ward discerning how Merleau-Ponty understood the
experience of intersubj.ectivity in language. While the alterity that marks
Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the Other may indeed not be alterity in
the Levinasian sense, there is evidence that Merleau-Ponty understood
discourse to be an ,experience of rupture, noncoincidence, and difference.
Still, Levinas argues that. the sense of rupture and noncoincidence be-
tween selfand Other that imbues Merleau-Ponty's discourse is superficial
to the extent that the Other is known within the horizon of a common
history and language: Hence the alterity of the Other is not absolute in
the Levinasirn sense.· The Irigarayan critique-while it shares much of
the spirit of Levinas's criticism-bends this concern in an explicitly femi-
nist direction. Irigaray argues that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of lan-
guage retains a problematic tendency toward universalizing and totalizing
the experience of an unknowable feminine Other.
It is true that the desire to unveil a "wild" or originary experience
hidden beneath the sediment of language and culture lies at the heart of
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological project. Beneath the movements of
language, Merleau-Ponty posits a prereflective sociality that conditions
linguistic experience even as it is masked by it. One need not look far in
the Phenomenology of Perception (hereafter PP) before one finds reference
to this "basic doxa" (PP, 355/408), a "submergence in generality," indeed
a "generality of the body" (PP, }58/411).l More specifically, in his men-
tion of an "ambiguous presence," or an "opaque mass" that underlies the
 Language in the Flesh 259

flux of experience (PP, 355/409), Merleau~Ponty makes explicit his belief

in a prereflective sociality that imbues our experience, a sociality that
informs all perception and judgment (PP, 362/415). Even as this anony~
mous sociality is prepersonal, Merleau~ Ponty claims that it implies our
collective immersion in the "the basic structure of history"-or, to im~
port the rhetoric of the later "Eye and Mind" (hereafter EM)-
"primordial historicity"-a "thinki~g older than myself" in which I
nevertheless abide (EM, 123/13).2 This anonymous sociality, our collec~
tive immersion in a history that prereflectively informs our judgments,
is the concern of this chapter. More precisely, the presumption of this
anonymous historicity has provoked concern that Merleau~Ponty's ontol~
ogy is of limited political import, insofar as it cannot accommodate the
theorization of true difference or alterity, racial, sexual, or otherwise.
This notion has sparked the concern that the experience to which
Merleau~Ponty returns is not "wild" at all, but tamed, already, by an
historical symbolic. In short, it is the concern that this fundamental his~
toricity might somehow be linked to the foreclosure of alterity, or the
denial of the irreducible difference between self and other. If the primor~
dial historicity is a male historicity, and if this very historicity comes to
form the grounds for our entrance to language, what possibilities remain
for the articulation of the feminine Other? Perhaps more ominous still is
the accusation that the erasure of alterity amounts to a dismissal of ethics,
as alterity has been linked, certainly in the work of Emmanuel Levinas,
to the very integrity of ethics itself. Hence the accusation that Merleau~
Ponty's failure to sufficiently theorize alterity may thwart many attempts
to render his ontology politically or ethically viable. In what follows, I
want to come to terms with this accusation, and explore what is at stake
in Merleau~Ponty's invocation of this "primordial historicity."
From his earlier refutations of the rigid schema of idealism and realism,
to his later invocation of the notion of the flesh, Merleau~Ponty's elabora~
tion of the embodied self is an elaboration of a body that is contiguous
with the world, at one with it. The same might be said of our relations
with others, for Merleau~ Ponty recognized that the rhythms that habitu~
ate the body are not simply the rhythms of an inert world, but the
rhythms that have come to mark one's life with others. It is for this reason
that I might laugh in response to a joke and tum my head, in expectant
company of an absent friend, in an act that is entirely free of reflection,
my body symptomatizing her absence in an act as natural and immediate
as a reflex. And it is for this reason that the death of a loved one is akin
260 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

to the loss of a limb, the horizon of one's affective world having been
forever altered. Our bodies remain haunted by the rhythms that mark our
lives with others. To be with another, in the world and in language, is to
acknowledge another's presence within oneself; one's haunting by an-
other. 3 In the Phenomenology of Perception, we find that this affective tie
extends well beyond the purview of our most intimate relations, and
binds us to a history that predates our own existence, but continues to
prereflectively inform our experience. It is precisely this sense of historic-
ity that worries Levinas and Luce Irigaray, as it seems to provide no space
for the transcendence of the Other, but rather inaugurates a hermeneutic
that renders alterity invisible by assimilating difference within the grasp
of an allegedly common or universal history.4
The concern w.ith Merleau-Ponty's success or failure in the elaboration
of alterity and its relation to contemporary feminism is at the heart of
Irigaray's critique. In her Ethics of Sexual Difference (hereafter ESD), Iri-
garay assents to Merleau~Ponty's effort to return to prediscursive experi-
ence, to locate ben~ath the language of culture a preformal moment on
the basis of which o~ might construct a different language. 5 Allegedly,
she finds this dimension of the phenomenological project amenable to
her own. But for Irigaray, this new language must be one that enables the
expression of the ,maternal-feminine that has thus far been barred entry,
even as it serves precisely as the originary or preformal ground for the
linguistic order of phallocentric culture. Merleau-Ponty's depiction of the
mute world where "all the possibilities of language are already given"
(The Visible and the Invisible [hereafter VI]; 155/200)6 provokes Irigaray's
accusation that the prediscursive meaning that Merleau-Ponty hopes to
excavate is not "wild" at all, but implicated, rather, in patterns of patriar-
chal exclusion with which we are all too familiar, particularly the impos-
sibility of articulating a feminine imaginary in the face of a masculinist
culture that requires the erasure and cooption of that very imaginary for
its own survival. On her account, philosophy's search for this wild mean-
ing must be accomplished on more radical terrain than that afforded by
Merleau-Ponty's ontology-a different terrain where the very founda-
tions of language have changed. How, Irigaray laments, are we to con-
struct a new philosophy or a new ethics from an historical (albeit
prereflective) world where all linguistic potential is already presumed and
given?
In lrigaray's engagement wjth Merleau-Ponty in An Ethics of Sexual
Diff?rence, her elaboration of the difference between the sexes clearly
 Language in the Flesh 261

resonates with the Levinasian description of the ethical relation, in

which the Other remains transcendent, irreducibly different, "forever un-
knowable" (ESD, 13/20). Irigaray's language here betrays her interest in
Levinas, whose elaboration of the transcendent ethical Other-an Other
who defies disclosure and representation-informs her own attempt to
elaborate an ethics of sexual difference in obvious ways. If it is precisely
the articulation of alterity that Irigaray finds so compelling in Levinas, it
is the lack of it that troubles her engagement with Merleau-Ponty. Draw-
ing on Merleau-Ponty's notion of the flesh, she asks how a philosophy of
reversibility might ever accommodate a language in which two sexes,
each irreducible to the other, come into contact. Her concern is to in-
quire after the very possibility of reconCiling the reversibility thesis with
an ethics in which the Other remains transcendent and irreducible to
the self. In short, how can an ethic of reversibility ever accommodate an
ethics of difference? If the early Merleau-Ponty advocated that "return to
the things themselves" that has come to be the hallmark of phenomenol-
ogy, the later Merleau-Ponty advocates a return to the being that lies
before the cleavage operated by reflection, intention, and consciousness.
In both cases, what precedes reflection for Merleau-Ponty is a unity, "the
compound of self and world," "the universe of brute being and of coexis-
tence."
Levinas, in his tum, expresses a similar worry, suggesting that Merleau-
Ponty could never elaborate an ethics of alterity, as for Levinas the power
of ethics was contingent precisely upon the transcendence of the Other,
or more precisely the Other's transcendence of history, his or her irreduc-
ibility to a common material soil. For these reasons, Merleau-Ponty's in-
vocation of this fundamental historicity is met with some reticence by
Irigaray and Levinas both. Both critiques are alike in their mutual suspi-
cion that the mute and anonymous world that founds Merleau-Ponty's
phenomenology is problematically mired in the symbolic soil of history.
Yet in examining Merleau-Ponty's comments on language, we find some
evidence to weaken these accusations. Despite Merleau-Ponty's specific
invocation of a shared sense of historicity, it is not at all clear that the
other of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is entirely immanent.
Before exploring the Levinasian and Irigarayan critiques in greater de-
tail, a cautionary note seems prudent: In daring to theorize the generality
of the body, Merleau-Ponty was clearly not espousing anything akin to a
universal affectivity.7 The grief, anger, and jubilation of life embodied are
highly individuated emotions, informed by a particular corporeal style-a
262 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

style that is raced, sexed, aged, and marked by the specific manner in
which one's body gr~ets the world. The production of meaning is a func-
tion of a finite cultural moment and of a highly stylized body that greets
this moment. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty's description of the problem of
sociality as a problem of transcendence (PP, 363/417) seems to under-
mine the accusation, put forth by both lrigaray and Levinas, that, for
Merleau-Ponty, intersubjective life is immanent. This critique seems
somewhat dubious, especially given Merleau-Ponty's insistence that the
experience of discourse is disruptive, involving a mutual transfiguration
of the way our bodies interact with the world (PP, 184/214). When
Merleau-Ponty speaks of the "fecundity of expression" he gestures to the
surplus, and difference, of expression in discourse as opposed to the ho-
mogenizing force of representation: "Speech . . . is that moment when
the significative int~ntion proves itself capable of incorporating itself int~
my culture and the culture of others-of shaping me and others by trans-
forming the meaning of cultural instruments. It becomes 'available' in
tum because in retrospect it gives the illusion that it was contained in
the already available Significations, whereas by a sort of ruse it espoused
them only in order to "'infuse them with new life" (Signs [hereafter S],
92).8
In the Phenomenology of Perception, one's understanding of the other is
made possible by the other's intermingling within a certain linguistic
horizon, a horizon bound to a carnal schema, or body image. Comprehen-
sion may indeed result from the reciprocal overlap and concurrence of
the other's gestures and the intentional powers of one's own body. Yet
this overlap inJanguage is disruptive (PP, 184/215-16).9 In dialogue with
another, my own existence changes, is disturbed by difference; the body
of another presents me with a question, and calls for a transformation
of my being (PP, 183-84/214). Communication is not an intellectual
interpretation, but a reciprocal disturbance (PP, 185/215). Hence for
Merleau-Ponty, discourse with another consists in nothing less than a
synchronized change in existence (PP, 184/214). Given these descrip-
tions of the discursive experience, it seems clear that our being with oth-
ers in language is not a peaceful coexistence in all ways. For if language
were simply a symptom of an anonymous and collective sensibility, its
characterization as disruptive and disturbing would be strange indeed.
Moreover, this reciprocal disturbance of one by another in discourse is
not a representational4isruption. As a "modulation" of the body, speech
is not an intellectualist endeavor, but an expressive one (PP, 185/216).
 Language in the Flesh 263

Indeed, Merleau~Ponty could not be more explicit in his rejection of

intellectualism. "Thus speech, in the speaker, does not translate ready~
made thought, but accomplishes it" (PP, 178/207). On this point,
Merleau~Ponty is explicit: thought does not posit or represent objects or
relations prior to its inception in language; language is the literal embodi~
ment of thought.
It is this "subordination of the intellect to expression" that Levinas
applauded, even as he remained one of Merleau~Ponty's most critical in~
terlocutors. In Totality and Infinity (hereafter TI), Levinas praises
Merleau~ Ponty for wresting language free of its subordination to
thought-a subordination that has historically plagued philosophy, par~
ticularly the transcendental thought of idealism (TI, 205/225).10 It is
here that Levinas calls language "an attitude of the same with regard to
the Other, irreducible to the representation of the Other" (TI, 204/224).
Careful to qualify this description by noting that the identification of
language with an attitude of the mind does not amount to its disincarna~
tion, Levinas is rather attempting to take its incarnate essence seriously,
to wrest language free from the terrain of transcendental idealism. It is
precisely the incarnate essence of language that produces what Levinas
terms "new powers of the soul," powers of welcome, hospitality, and gen~
erosity. And it is also the incarnation of language that Levinas believes
can touch the Other who consciousness cannot contain, but with whom
it stands in ethical relation.
With Merleau~Ponty, Levinas insists that thought and reason alike are
subject to the contingencies of language and culture. Even so, Levinas
finds that Merleau~Ponty still grounds the event of signification in an
intentional structure (a consciousness of ... ) that remains problemati~
cally bound to idealism, despite its mediation by the corporeal (TI, 206/
226). The intentionality of representation is, for Levinas, founded in the
mastery of the subject, a mastery that dictates the subsumption of the
Other into the same. Against the intentional structure of representation,
Levinas posits the structure of enjoyment, or the relation of the body to
the world that sustains it. The structure of enjoyment is reciprocal; it
disrupts subjective privilege, demanding recognition of the fact that em~
bodied subjectivity is sustained by the world even as it represents this
world. While the structure of enjoyment clearly resonates with the
Merleau~ Pontian elaboration of embodiinent, Levinas claims that signi~
fication remains, for Merleau~ Ponty, an intentional process, the function
264 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

of a constitutive consciousness that allegedly "recovers all of its rights

after the mediation of the body" (TI, 206/226).
In the later essay "Meaning and Sense" (hereafter BPW), the Levina-
sian critique is radicalized and the political stakes are raised. While Levi,
nas once applauded Merleau,Ponty's subordination of the intellect to
expression, he now questions this move on political grounds, arguing that
it leads to a threatening ethical indifference (BPW; 47).11 It is in "Mean,
ing and Sense" that Merleau,Ponty is credited with the overcoming of
Platonism. In this context, Platonism represents an intellectualism, ac,
cording to which different cultural expressions are rendered intelligible,
and given their value, in accord with their relation to a privileged culture
(or realm of Ideas) against which all others are measured. Levinas is quick
to note that Merleau,Ponty was able to overcome Platonism with the
suggestion that contact between cultures is not mediated by a privileged
universal realm of Ideas, and that alleged claims to universality are them,
selves contingent. But on Levinas's reading, it appears that this betrayal
has come at a cost. Merleau,Ponty's ontology inspires an "essential disori,
entation" that results in "the pure indifference of multiplicity" (BPW;
47). Given his insistence that there is no level of meaning that escapes
determination through culture, Merleau,Ponty deprives us of a ground
upon which we might issue judgments between cultures; and it seems
clear that we do is~ue judgments of this type, regarding the immorality of
torture or genocide, for instance. The danger in Merleau,Ponty's account
is thus the indifference that appears as the requisite consequence of his
insistence on the paJ;ticularity and cultural determinacy of meaning. 12
Thus, while Levinas is willing to celebrate the diversity of cultural expres,
sions that is enabled by Merleau,Ponty's ontology, his persistent concern
is with the disorientation and indifference that might come in its wake.
The historicity of Merleau,Ponty's prereflective sociality is thus not im,
mune to political contamination; for this very reason, this sociality can'
not generate an ethical relation to others.B
Here, the salient and lasting difference between Levinas and Merleau,
Ponty becomes clear. While Levinas assents to the claim that all discur,
sive moments are founded in a primary Signification, for him this signifi,
cation is founded on the ethical society of self and other, the obligation
and responsibility of one to another-not in the shared soil of history,
then, but beyond it. Thus in Totality and Infinity-subtitled An Essay on
Exteriority-Merleau,Ponty is critiqued on the grounds that he fails to
move beyond the structure of intentionality, and so recuperates the privi,
 Language in the Flesh 265

lege of subjectivism or interiority. For Levinas, the prelinguistic sense

that orients language must remain outside history; the call to language
must issue from beyond history's boundaries. Only then can the call to
ethics disrupt the politicohistorical landscape. For Levinas, the integrity
of ethics is bound to the transcendence of the Other, a face of humanity
that overflows every idea I have of it (TI, 53/45).14
In Levinasian discourse, one gestures to an Other who remains tran-
scendent, whom one's words welcome but do not represent or assimilate.
"The relationship of language implies transcendence, radical separation,
the strangeness of the interlocutors, the revelation of the Other to me"
(TI, 73/70). The Other of Levinasian ethics stands beyond the assign-
ment of any attribute, quality, or concept that might reduce one to gener-
ality or translate one's being into the common terms of existence. Indeed,
the experience of conscience, the calling into question of oneself, is not
commensurate with any conceptual experience; it is a "conceptless expe-
rience" insofar as it is not an experience that is reducible to representa-
tion or disclosure (TI, 10/103). Levinas's account does bear an obvious
debt to Merleau-Ponty, insofar as it is difficult to conceive of the abso-
lutely Other beyond the purview of a philosophy that can account for
the manner in which representation is continually trumped by its consti-
tutive excesses. The two agree that signification is always an artificial
stasis; my relation to another is never constant; it is disrupted at every
moment. But Levinas will insist that the departure from the soil of history
is precisely what lends the ethical its force. In this context, the shortcom-
ing of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of language appears to be its refusal to
depart from the material past.
Indeed, in the Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty concedes that the pres-
ent can never be lived with certainty; "the lived is never entirely compre-
hensible" whether it is the lived of the present or the past (PP, 347/399).
The past is reconstructed differently in each today, so my sense of history
is interminably disrupted, such that I am never quite at one with myself
(PP, 347/399). Thus Merleau-Ponty does not intend the reciprocity in
language to mask a latent humanism. In short, the basic structures of
history that unite us all are not transparent; they are not represented to
consciousness in their entirety, and they are subject to disruption. Merleau-
Ponty's iteration of the fact that discourse is a disruptive and disturbing
event, one that calls for a transformation in my being, seems also to
remind us that, for all of the restrictive force that this fundamental histo-
ricity may enact in our use of language, our engagement with others is
266 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

like our engagemen~ with the past: mutable, subject to change, and differ-
ent with each new moment. Merleau-Ponty, like Levinas, insists upon
the deficient and incomplete nature of representation in language. For
them both, one's manifestation in language is a symbolic paralysis whose
finitude necessarily gestures to an excess that lies well beyond the discur-
sive moment itself.·
At the heart of Levinas's critique is the distinction between the ethical
and the political. While Levinas's invocation of the ethical is never far
removed from his consideration of justice, the division between the two
remains salient. Presumably, then, the worry behind Levinas's critique of
Merleau-Ponty relates to Levinas's hesitation regarding how an ontology
so mired in the soil of history might ever be reconciled with the transcen-
dence of ethics. In short, the accusation seems to be that there could
never be a palatable ethics derived from Merleau-Ponty's notion of funda-
mental historicity, for that notion itself is too fraught with immanence
to provide for the difference of others, a difference that must be honored
a
if we are to establish politics that is ethical.
But here we might ask Levinas how we might ever conceive of bodies
that are beyond history. And if our concern is to articulate an ethics that
has political promise, ought this not be an ethics that can account for
how history is marked in politically important ways on all bodies, some-
times in ways that we fail to recognize? If sex, race, ablism, and ethnicity,
among other things, influence the way one's body interacts with the
world, should we not take very seriously Merleau-Ponty's reluctance to
depart from history's soil? In a world where horror, trouble, and political
abjection are ..the frequent consequence of a body's failure to abide by
history's limitations and the logic of the past, it seems as though Merleau-
Ponty's attempts to address the body's historicity should be applauded.
Must an ethics be rendered ineffeGtual should it refuse to depart from the
soil of the sensible? And what sort of ethics do we inherit from Merleau-
Ponty's ontology?
Whereas Levinas locates the disruption of intersubjectivity in the in-
terminable accusation of the self that is accomplished in dialogue with
the other, Luce lrigaray finds this "never-finished differentiation" to be
symptomatic of the irreducibility of sexual difference. The affinity be-
tween Levinas and lrigaray stands, then, regarding the irreducible alterity
of the Other, but for Irigaray this irreducible difference is explicitly sexu-
alized. The ceaseless disruption ,of the self that is accomplished in lan-
 Language in the Flesh 267

guage may well be the recollection of the differences that have been
rendered inarticulate and unrepresentable; for Irigaray, however, this dif,
ference is always and only sexual difference, whose specter continues to
haunt language even as it fails to be achieved within it (ESD, 167/157}.15
If the best we can hope for is a return to the "soil of the sensible," or
"primordial historicity," which is already scarred by the exclusion of the
feminine, then what hope has Merleau,Ponty left for the articulation of
this constitutive outside? At the heart of Irigaray's criticism is the claim
that such an ontology cannot accommodate "an other whose body's on,
tological status is different than my own," an other who is irreducible to
the self (ESD, 157/148). The rendering of the relationship between the
subject and language as circular prompts Irigaray's accusation that
Merleau,Ponty's discourse is "monosexual," to the extent that it fails to
leave a place for the articulation of a differently sexed subjectivity (ESD,
177/165).
For Irigaray, Merleau,Ponty's universalism is the result of a conception
of language in which reversibility and reciprocity are not disrupted or
problematized. Language can speak of nothing new so long as it traffics in
this "universal word which amounts to the most solipsistic construction,"
words that allow for none other than the "perpetual repetition" of the
same, the totalization of history, the incarceration of novelty in language
and history alike (ESD, 178/166). A language of difference that can ges,
ture toward the truly other is not conceivable within the bounds of
Merleau,Ponty's discourse, as Irigaray understands it. She laments the
exclusion of the maternal,feminine, calling for the generation of another
discourse, "one that is put together differently" (ESD, 177/165). Thus
Irigaray calls for a change in the very foundations of language and for the
birth of a language that can interrogate the alleged "truth" of reciprocity
and reversibility, a "truth" that confounds the vicissitudes of history and
language and that silences-indeed erases-its aberrations, deviations,
and events.
Presumably, a primary deficiency in Merleau,Ponty's account of lan,
guage is its rendering of speech as an encounter with oneself, an encoun,
ter that fails to exceed the duplication and reduplication of one's own
experience. Discourse appears less devoted to change and the surpassing
of history than it is to the survival of the past, more concerned with
sedimentation and permanence than with invention, novelty, or promise.
It cannot, according to Irigaray, celebrate creation, invention, and nov,
268 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

elty. In this respect,. her account resonates with the Levinasian critique
from Totality and Infinity. This seems to be as much a critique of phenom-
enology generally as it is of Merleau-Ponty himself. Indeed, one may be
justified in reading Levinas's and Irigaray's ambivalence toward Merleau-
Ponty as symptomatic of their ambivalence toward phenomenology more
generally. If phenomenology remains haunted, however tentatively, by a
residual subjectivism, then the political or ethical worry of how this
model of the self might ever be truly disrupted by the alterity of the
Other seems legitimate. How could it ever help but iterate the violent
foreclosure of difference? At stake, it seems, is nothing less than the role
that experience should play in our theorization of politics, and, indeed,
the degree to which this experience might be bound to, or depart from,
the symbolic structures of the past.
The Irigarayan critique, however, elides the disruptive force that char-
acterizes the reciprocity of discourse for Merleau-Ponty, as she accuses
one of subjectivism's greatest critics of subjectivism. Merleau-Ponty was
not one to fall readily to one side of the notorious binary between self
and world, interiority apd exterioritYi indeed, few were more adept at its
undoing than he. To acknowledge the disruptive component of Merleau-
Ponty's descriptions of linguistic experience would surely not redress his
problematic dismissal of sexual difference, but it would seem to problema-
tize Irigaray's claiu{ that the reciprocity of dialogue in Merleau-Ponty is
not an accusatory or disruptive reciprocity, but rather a reciprocity of the
self. Indeed, when Merleau-Ponty speaks, in the Visible and the Invisible,
of a negation, or nonpresence, that makes possible the "being in tran-
scendence" of-the Other, he renders the relation between self and other
as one of alterity and dispersion (VI, 228/277). Sexual difference is itself
located in this transcendence: "[i]t is this negative that makes possible
the vertical world, the union of incompossibles, the being in transcen-
dence ... and the male-female relation" (VI, 228/277). Merleau-Ponty's
identification of sexual difference as a transcendental difference would
seem, counter to Irigaray's protests, to bring the two in striking proximity
to each other. This strange kinship is magnified with Merleau-Ponty's
note in The Visible and the Invisible: "Do a psychoanalysis of nature: it is
the flesh, the mother" (VI; 267/315). This fragment that would seem to
confirm that the nature or flesh that was being suppressed in discourse
was indeed sexed, as Irigaray would have it.
In "Eye and Mind," Merleau-Ponty states that "it is no more possible
to make a restrictive inventory 'of the visible than it is to catalog the
 Language in the Flesh 269

possible expressions of a language or even its vocabulary and turns of

phrase" (EM, 127/30). In doing so, Merleau~Ponty makes clear his faith
in the inexhaustibility of expression and in the promise of an infinite
vocabulary. Indeed, for him, novelty is at the heart of expression; to speak
is to make words say something they have never said (S, 91). So even as
the present remains tied to the past, the temporal self does not exist as a
self~identical entity. The generality of the body is not a generality that is
permanent and self~aware; it is a paradoxical generality that exists in time
as a chain of disruptions. It is endlessly mutating, reinterpreting the past
in each moment. Expression surely negotiates history even as it punc~
tures, defiles, and violates this illusory contiguity by making words and
gestures do something altogether new.
The debates concerning the degree to which political subversion must
negotiate the traces of the past, and the concomitant degree to which it
must free itself from those binds, continue to be central. These conten~
tions are new to neither feminist theory nor to philosophy more broadly
conceived. With the claim that we are, as flesh, "ever new" and "always
the same," Merleau~Ponty remains a resource for thinking through the
relationship of history and innovation in language (VI, 267/315). Vul~
nerable yet irrepressible, as expression, the flesh creates; as passivity, it is
burdened by the weight of the past.

Notes

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York:

Roudedge, 1962); Phenomenologie de /a perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). In parenthetical refer-
ences to this work, English pagination precedes the French.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," in The Merleau-Ponry Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen
A. Johnson, trans. Michael Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993); L'oeil et I'esprit
(Paris: Gallimard, 1964). In parenthetical references, English pagination precedes the French.
3. Merleau-Ponty's account of affectivity differs, then, from the one put forth by Foucault, and
from similar accounts that credit the foreclosure or repression of certain possibilities with the forma-
tion of our social drives. In contrast to these accounts, Merleau-Ponty's own descriptions of affecti-
vity as social and interpersonal tend to accentuate the openness of the body to the world and to
others, and not the foreclosure or repression of these relations. But might one suggest that this
opening on the world is the requisite ground of any account of foreclosure or repression, in the sense
that they presuppose an affective connection to others?
4. This discussion also direcdy bears on Merleau-Ponty's relationship to philosophers of the
new, such as Gilles Deleuze. If Merleau-Ponty can articulate a philosophy of difference that escapes
reference to this generality, his project is arguably more amenable to the Deleuzian agenda, or more
precisely a philosophy that is concerned to account for the novelty of thought and language.
270 Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty

5. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill {Ith-
aca: Cornell University Pre;s, 1984);·Ethique de la cJjfference sexuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1984). In paren-
thetical references, English pagination precedes the French.
6. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973); Le visible et l'invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
7. For Merleau-Ponty, the contingency in speech descends to the heart of the intersubjective
world. "Feelings," he writes, "are invented like words" (PP, 189). Hence Merleau-Ponty's claim that
the divergent expressions of emotion that may be witnessed in different cultures (e.g., smiling in
anger), are not simply behavioral differences, but differences in the way the body interacts with the
world. Merleau-Ponty's commitment to the contingent and culturally specific nature of speech and
expression is tempered somewhat by his insistence that there is no behavioral or linguistic event
that escapes indebtedness to "purely biological being"-although Merleau-Ponty insists also that
there is no nature that is not modified by culture. Humanity is defined as this "genius for ambiguity,"
the ceaseless interplay of nature and culture. While it remains unclear which side of this ambiguity
Merleau-Ponty privileges, he does state that cultural life "borrows its structure" from nature and that
thought has the corporeal as its basis (PP, 193). This is not to question, however, the existence of
problematic universalizing tendencies that inform his analysis. Judith Butler, for example, has noted
that while Merleau-Ponty might be credited with the notion that sexuality is a mode of existence,
his analysis of the body and. its sexual being betrays a heterosexist male bias. See Judith Butler,
"Phenomenology and Sexual Description," in The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modem French Phi-
losophy, ed. Jeffner Allen and,Iris Marion Young (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1964),85; Signes V'aris: Gallimard, 1960).
9. This chapter is specifically concerned with the expressive function of language, as opposed
to its more instrumental usage. As a means of expression, speech may cease to be instrumental; it
rather becomes a medium for the "revelation" of the "psychic link" that unites us with others (PP,
196/229).
10. Emmanuel Levin~s, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne Uni-
versity Press, 1969); Totalite et infini (Paris: Martinus Nyhoff, 1960). English pagination precedes the
French.
11. Emmanuel Levinas, "Meaning and Sense," in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T.
Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
12. For a detailed discussion of this tension between Merleau-Ponty's thought and the thought
of Levinas in this regard, see Robert Bernasconi, "One-Way Traffic: The Ontology of Decolonization
and Its Ethics," in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B.
Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990),67-80.
13. Thus Levinas espouses a return to PI~tonism in a sense, even as he distances himself from
the politicS with which he understands Platonism to be implicated. The celebration of the particu-
larity of expression over the universalism of idealism is tempered by Levinas's reintroduction of an
ethical sense that universally orients language (BPW; 46-47). It is crucial to note, however, that
Levinas's return to Platonism is far from benign. Levinas privileges the Greek language and the
cultures of the West at the expense of an appreciation of other cultures, so there is a more ominous
dimension of Levinas's rejection of Merleau-Ponty's cultural pluralism.
14. Speech does remain a privileged medium for Levinas. Space, the medium of vision, provides
the condition for the "lateral signification of things within the same," the subsumption of difference
to universality (TI, 191/209). Thus the dimension of height that accomplishes the revelation bf the
Other is not preserved in vision; it is speech alone that accommodates the transcendence of the
Other. As expression, language maintains the Other insofar as it calls upon and invokes the Other's
presence. If language is a gesture, a beckolling, then it must presuppose an Other to whom it is
addressed. "Language," writes Levinas, "presupposes interlocutors, a plurality" (TI, 73/ 70). Lan-
 Language in the Flesh 271

guage thus institutes a relation that defies objectivity and signification: the Other's revelation. The
revelation of the Other in linguistic expression is a properly ethical phenomenon for Levinas. "All
recourse to words takes place already within the primordial face to face of language" (TI, 206{227).
15. lrigaray's contention that men and women are irreducibly different from each other is not
unproblematic, as this claim is readily implicated in lrigaray's privileging of sexual difference over
other differences.
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 Contributors

JORELLA ANDREWS is a lecturer in visual cultures at Goldsmiths College, University

of London, and is on the editorial board of the journal Third Text. Her interests are
phenomenology, modern and contemporary art, and Dutch seventeenth-century visual
culture. She is currently working on a book titled Showing Off: Ethics and the Image-World.
DAVID BRUBAKER lectures in ethics and aesthetics at the University of Connecticut
and the University of New Haven. After receiving an MFA in painting at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago, he completed a doctoral degree in the philosophy of film at
the University of Illinois at Chicago. He works primarily in the area of aesthetics and has
published articles on painting, architecture, and documentary film in Analecta Husserli-
ana, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the Journal of Contemporary Thought, and
the Journal of Value I114uiry. He is active as a painter and printmaker.
JUDITH BUTLER is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric, Compara-
tive Literature, and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She re-
ceived her PhD in philosophy from Yale University in 1984. She is the author of
Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000); He-
gemony, Contingency, Universality, with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek (Verso Press,
ZOOO); Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1987); Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge,
1990); Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993); The Psy-
chic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997); and Excitable
Speech (Routledge, 1997) as well as numerous articles and contributions on philosophy,
psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory. She has recently published a collection of
writings on war's impact on language and thought titled Precarious Life: Powers of Violence
and Mourning (Verso Press, 2004). The Judith Butler Reader, coedited by Sara Salih (Black-
well, 2004), has now appeared, as has a collection of Butler's essays on gender and sexual-
ity, Undoing Gender (Routledge, 2004).
LAURA DOYLE is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst. She is editor of Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and
Culture (Northwestern, 2001), coeditor of Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity
(Indiana, 2005), and author of Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction
and Culture (Oxford, 1994), which won the Barbara and George Perkins Prize. Her cur-
280 Contributors

rent project studies the transatlantic, English-language novel as it has unfolded within
discourses of race and liberty since the seventeenth century.

HELEN A. FIELDING is an associate professor of philosophy and women's studies at The

University of Western Ontario. Her research interests include phenomenology, feminist
theory, embodiment, and art. Her articles on Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and lrigaray
have appeared in various journals and book collections.

VICKI KIRBY is a senior lecturer in the School of Sociology and Anthropology at the
University of New South Wales. She is the author of Telling Flesh: The Substance of the
Corporeal (Routledge, 1997) and Judith Butler: Uve Theory (Continuum, forthcoming).
She has an enduring interest in the question of language and its relevance for contempo-
rary criticism. She is currently working on a manuscript, provisionally titled "Quantum
Anthropologies," which explores posthuman concerns. .

SONIA KRUKS is the Robert S. Danforth Professor of Politics at Oberlin College. She
teaches political theory, including feminist theory, and has served as director of the wom-
en's studies program. She is the author of numerous works on French existential phenom-
enology. Her most recent book is Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in
Feminist Politics (Cornell t}niversity Press, 2001), and she is currently working on a book
about Simone de Beauvoir's political thought.

ANN MURPHY is assistant professor of philosophy at Fordham University in New York.

Her interests are in twentieth-century French philosophy, political philosophy and femi-
nist theory. She has published various book chapters and journal articles on Beauvoir,
Irigaray, Fanon, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Foucault. She is currently at work on a book
manuscript on violence, vulnerability, and embodiment. Her latest research focuses on
the relationship between symbolic and material violence in relation to sexuality and race.

JOHANNA OKSALA is.a research fellow in the Department of Philosophy, University

of Helsinki. She is the author of Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
She has also published articles on Foucault, phenomenology, and feminist theory.

DOROTHEA OLKOWSKI is professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado,

Colorado Springs. She is the former co-chair of the Deptartment of Philosophy and for-
mer director of women's studies. Her publications include Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of
Representation (1999) and Resistance, Flight, Creation: Feminist Enactments of French Philos-
ophy (2000). She has just completed The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible) and is
working on a collection of her own essays on Merleau-Ponty (tentatively, Merleau-Ponty:
Desires and Imaginings).
BEATA STAWARSKA is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy, Univer-
sity of Oregon. She specializes in French phenomenology, notably Sartre and Merleau-
Ponty, and has written numerous essays published in leading continental philosophy
journals and anthologies in this area. Stawarska's main interests include embodiment and
sociality, and she actively combines resources from phenomenology, feminist theory, and
the cognitive sciences, especially developmental psychology research into social relations
in infancy, in her \Vork.
 Contributors 281

GAIL WEISS is director of the human sciences graduate program and associate professor
of philosophy at The George Washington University. She is the author of Body Images:
Embodiment as Intercorporeality (Routledge, 1999) and coeditor of Thinking the Umits of
the Body (State University of New York Press, 2003) and Perspectives on Embodiment: The
Intersections of Nature and Culture (Routledge, 1999). She has published numerous articles
and book chapters on phenomenology, philosophy and literature, and feminist theory.
She has completed "Indeterminate Horizons: Figuring the Grounds of 'Ordinary' Experi-
ence," and is working on a monograph, "Beauvoir's Ambiguities: Philosophy, Literature,
and Feminism."
 Index
Abu Ghraib prison, 184
affectivity, Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 259-
61, 269n.3, 270n.7
agency: Butler's discussion of, 223; gender-
difference hypothesis of care and, 247-50
alterity: ethics of sexual difference and, 111-25;
politics of discourse and, 258-69
ambiguous figure perception, in Gilligan's care
ethics, 239-50
Anderson, Benedict, 199
Andrews, Jorella, 17-18, 167-81
anonymous body: intersubjectivity and, 221-22;
Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 35-39,
46n.21, 224-26, 228n.51
anorexia, Merleau-Ponty's discussion of,
227n.24
appropriation, masculine substitution as,
111-25
Architecture from the Outside, 158
arc metaphor, Merleau-Ponty's use of, 31-33
Arendt, Hannah, 149-50, 153-54, 166n.5
Art Make-Up (film), 71-72
asymmetrical positions in sexual difference, Iri-
garay's discussion of, 110-11
attachment, in child's world, 54-55
Bailey, Sally, 245, 255n.l5
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 192-93
Bartky, Sandra, 244, 255n.l7
Beauvoir, Simone de: ethics of violence and,
154-56, 168; female embodiment of, 1-2, 7,
226n.l; intersubjectivity and, 92, 104-5,
105n.2; Merleau-Ponty critiqued by, 3-5;
Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 17-18; re-
flections on L'invitee, 178-81; on style,
228n.50; violence of emplacement and,
153-54
behavior: cultural differences in, 270n.7; lived-
experience and, 51-52, 69n.8
Being and Nothingness, 4 7n.3 2
Being and Time, 113-14
Benhabib, Seyla, 234-35
Berube, Michael, on role of canon, vii-ix
Best, Susan, 256n.23
Bigwood, Carol, 36-37, 42, 150-51, 165n.3,
228n.42
binaries, urban flesh and violence of, 148-51
Black (film), 72, 85
Black Is ... Black Ain't, 80-83, 87-88
Black Skin, White Masks, 165n.l
"Blanket Protest" at Long Kesh, 185
Bluest Eye, The, 19, 184, 188, 200-208
Bodies That Matter, 223-24, 228n.43
body: anonymous subjectivity of, 213-18; in
Beauvoir's L'inviree, 178-81; care ethics and
role of, 254n.1; historical constitution of,
218-22; pivotal context for, 241-46; politics
of discourse and, 260-69; as protest weapon,
184-88. See also embodiment
body-schema, Merleau-Ponty's concept of, 213-
18,262-68
Bordo, Lorraine, 92-94, 103-4
brand names, nationalism and use of, 199
Brubaker, David, 20-21, 229-54
"Building Dwelling Thinking," 157-59
Bumiller, Kristin, 79
Burke, Carolyn, 128
Butler, Judith: critique of Merleau-Ponty, 6, 13-
14,19,80,211, 227n.6, 270n.7; on cultural
construction of the body, 222-24, 228n.43;
on gendered body, 199,248
Carbone, Mauro, 242, 255n.l4
care ethics: gender-difference hypothesis con-
cerning, 232-38, 246-50; Gestalt psychol-
ogy and, 238-46; Merleau-Ponty and,
20-21, 229-32
Carney, Mary, 255n.l8
284 Index
Cartesian philosophy: MeIleau-Ponty's phenom-
enology and, 84-88; phenomenology and,
118-25
Casey, Edward, 151; chiasmatic alterations, 159;
on fragility of dwelling, 159-64, 166n.9
cezanne, Paul, 82
"Cezanne's Doubt," 171-73
chiasmatic intercorporeality: flesh in context of,
241-46; hiding and hoarding behaviors and,
193-95; lrigaray's concept of, 5, 124-25;
mind-body dualism and, 189-91; paradox of
violence and, 183-84; perception of horizon
and, 196-99; racism and seizure of sexuality
and, 200-206; torture and, 18-19; violence
and, 186-88
"Child's Relations with· Others, The," 222
child's world: intersubjectivity in, 222; lived ex-
perience of, 49-68,253-54; Merleau-
Ponty's discussion of, 9-10
citational appropriation, lrigaray's technique of,
108-25
Cixous, Helene, 195,249
class issues: Merleau-Ponty's vj.ew of, 40, 47n.33;
urban flesh concept of, 149-51, 165n.3
clitoridectomy, feminist theory concerning, 43,
47n.39
closure, Merleau-Ponty'~ phenomenology and,
133-45
Code,Lonaine,43-44
cogito, body-subject and, 215-18
Collins, Patricia Hill, 79-80
"colonial intimacy," of violence and resistance,
185-88
color: Gestalt psychology and, 241-46; as West-
ern cultural symbol, 71-88
commonality, embodied subject and, 34-35,
38-39,42-43
communication: perception and, 34-35; in
prison environment, 194-95; visual commu-
nication of prisoners, 197-99
communism, Merleau-Ponty on, 39-42
conflict, Merleau-Ponty on, 39-42
connections: embodied subject and role of, 29-
30, 45n.11; in feminist theory, 43-44,
47n.39
consciousness: in child's world, 53-68; Merleau-
Ponty's discussion of, 40, 47n.32; sexuality
and,214-18
constancy, logic of, 80-88
Constante, Lena, 184, 188-208
continental criticism, feminist theory and,
127-28
critical race theory, urban flesh concept and,
149-51
cultural objects, child's appropriation of, 53-68
culture: emotional expression and differences in,
261":69, 27On.7; intersubjectivity and nor-
mality and, 221-22; nature and, 149-51,
165n.3
Dasein, Heidegger's concept of, 2
Deleuze, Gilles, 69n.7, 157-59, 269n.4
Derrida, Jacques: Merleau-Ponty and, 15-16;
space concepts of, 157-59; textuality con-
cept of, 139-45
Descartes, Rene: fragility of dwelling and,
161-64; Merleau-Ponty and, 86-87
dialectic, relation of self to, 32-33
differential consciousness, in U.S. Third World
feminism, 44n.1
Dillon, Martin, 215-18
"Dirty Protest" at Long Kesh, 185
disability, embodied subject and, 46n.22
discourse, Merleau-Ponty on politics of, 257-69
dispersion, Merleau-Ponty's discussion of,
137-45
distinctness hypothesis (Gilligan), 229-38; pre-
personal body and, 242-46
DoU's House, A, 161-62
domination: control of space through, 188-91;
paradox of violence and, 184-208
"Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty's
Phenomenology of Perception", 35-39
double-cross, oflrigaray with Merleau-Ponty,
127-45
doubleness, of tortured bodies, 188-91
double/reversible sensation, intercorporeality
and,98-99
Doyle, Laura, 18-19, 183-208
dwelling: fragility of, 159-64; material destruc-
tion of, 157-59
Dyer, Richard, 74-78, 80, 87-88
ecofeminism, urban flesh and, 150-51
ego: lrigaray's discussion of, 123-25; Merleau-
Ponty's concept of, 63-68
"elemental" logic of generality, violence of bi-
naries and, 148-51
embodiment: anonymous body concept and,
35-39; care ethics and, 247-50; Cartesian-
ism and, 118, 215-18; in child's world,
55-68; fitness and exercise and, 210-11;

gender difference and, 27-28, 92-93,
247-50; Gilligan's hypothesis concerning,
229-31, 254n.l; interspecies comparisons
in, 36, 46n.23; intersubjectivity and, 91-
105; Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 3-5;
moral agency and, 231; structure of enjoy-
ment and, 263-69; "third genus" concept,
30-33; torture and, 18-19. See also body
emplacement, violence of, 151-54
environment, material destruction of, 157-59
epistemology, Heidegger's discussion of, 113-14
equality, embodied subject and role of, 38-39
essentialism, feminist view of, 25-26
ethics: of care, Gilligan's hypothesis for,
229-54; intersubjectivity and, 17-18; poli-
tics of discourse and, 261-69; of sexual dif-
ference, 13-14, 107-25, 133-45, 250-54.
See also care ethics; morality
Ethics of Sexual Difference, An, 107-25, 128-29,
260-69
"Everywhere and Nowhere," 45n.6
exercise, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and,
210-11
existence: dialectic tension with, 32-33;
Merleau-Ponty's concept of, 134-45
experience: lrigaray's discussion of, 117-25; pol-
itics of discourse and, 259-69
"Experience of Others, The," 139-45
exploitation, Merleau-Ponty's discussion of,
144-45
"Eye and Mind," 86-87; politics of discourse
and,259-69
Fanon, Frantz, 165n.1
Feder, Ellen, 161-62
Feldman, Alan, 183-88
feminist emancipation: cultural construction of
the body and, 222-24; phenomenology of,
209-26
feminist theory: continental criticism and,
127-28; difference in, 8, 13-14,25-44; em-
bodiment in, lOS, 106n.15; intersubjectivity
of Merleau-Ponty and, 92-105; lrigaray's
contributions to, 107-25; Merleau-Ponty
and, 3-23, 45n.3; "project" concept in, 31-
32, 46n.15; sexual difference concepts and,
225-26; universalism of Merleau-Ponty and,
103-5; urban flesh ~oncept and, 149-51; vi-
olence of binaries and, 148-51; on Western
canon, vii---ix
Index 285
feminization, of violence victims, 184-208
Fielding, Helen A., 10-11,71-88
fitness, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and,
210-11
flesh: care ethics and role of, 20-21, 231-54;
gender-difference hypothesis and care of,
246-50; Gestalt psychology and visibility of,
239-46; lrigaray's discussion of, 108-25,
132-45; language in, 259-69; Merleau-
Ponty's concept of, 11-13, 22-23,95-99,
129-30, 255n.16; transformation of,
250-54; violence of binaries and, 147-51;
Weiss's urban flesh concept, 147-64
Formations of Violence, 183
Foucault, Michel: on affectivity, 269n.3; body
metaphor of, 91; cultural construction of the
body and work of, 223-24, 228nn.42, 49
foundational ism: Merleau-Ponty's body-subject
and, 211-12; subjectivity in context of,
217-18
France, childhood culture in, 68, 70n.32
Frankenberg, Ruth, 165n.3
freedom: of lived body, 225-26; morality and,
19-20
Freud, Sigmund: lrigaray's work and, 123;
Merleau-Ponty's concept of ego and, 63-68
Friedman, Marilyn, 230, 233
"From Front Stoop to Backyard Barbecue: The
Triumph of Levittown and the Production of
Whiteness," 161
gait analysis, prepersonal body concept and,
36-37
gender: care ethics and, 21, 229-32, 238-46;
Gilligan's gender-difference hypothesis,
229-32,246-50; intersubjectivity and, 91-
lOS, 105n.2; lrigaray on flesh and, 141-45;
Merleau-Ponty and issues of, 47n.33; preper-
sonal body concept and, 36-39; urban flesh
concept and, 149-51, 165n.3; violence and,
ISO-51, 166n.5, 184-208; in Western
canon, viii-ix
Gender Trouble, 222-24
generality: care ethics and, 233-38; child's per-
ception and, 55-56; perception and, 79-88
Gestalt psychology: care ethics and, 238-46;
gender-difference hypothesis and, 247-50;
Merleau-Ponty on, 2-3, 231
Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Under-
sUlnding of the Place-World, 151
286 Index
Gilligan, Carol, 20-21; care ethic of, 229-32;
distinctness hypothesit of, 231-38; gender-
difference hypothesis of, 246-50
"god-trick," Haraway's discussion of, 30-33,
40-41
Godway, Eleanor, 253, 256n.26
Green (film), 72, 85
Grimshaw, Jean, 19, 210~11
Grosz, Elizabeth, 157-59, 162-64, 225, 249,
251-53
"group life," Merleau-Ponry's discussion of,
57-58
group-solipsism, multiple-difference feminism
and,27
Guattari, Felix, 69n.7
Guillaumin, Colette, 75
habituation, Merleau-Panty's discussion of,
69n.5
Hamington, Maurice, 233, 254n.l, 255n.14
handiwork, as resistance, 190-93
handshake, Merleau-Ponty's embodied subject
and,96-105
Haraway, Donna, 28-29, 31,.H
Hegel, G. F. w., Merleau-Ponty's discussion of,
39-40
Heidegger, Martin: "Building Dwelling Think-
ing" essay, 157-59; :'dinge" concept of,
191-92; Merleau-Ponry and, 113-14, 122;
on nature and place, 151; phenomenology
of, 1-2; "thrownrtess" concept of, 196
Heiniimaa, Sara, 228n.50
hermeneutic circle, Heidegger's discussion of,
113-14
Hershock, Peter, 238
heterosexualiry: ethics of, 142-45; invisibility
of,80
historicity: constitution of the body and,
218-22; ethics of violence and, 155-56;
Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 67-68,
70n.26, 211-12; phenomenologyand,
21-22; politics of discourse and, 259-69
Holenstein, Elmar, 218
Homeworld, 110
"House and Home," 161
Humanism and Terror, 39-42, 1H-56; fragility
of dwelling in, 162-64
humanity: Merleau-Ponty's "genius for ambigu-
iry" of, 270n.7; perception of, 79-88; reci-
prociry in language and, 165-69
hunger strikes as resistance, I, 185
Husserl, Edmund: intercorporeality and, 97-98;
intersubjectiviry in work of, 219-22; on nor-
maliry, 217, 227n.22; operative intentional-
iry of, 214-18; phenomenology of, 1-3,20,
36,219; violence of emplacement and,
152-53
hypokeimenon, Irigaray's discussion of perception
and, 121
"I cans" of human embodiment (Husserl),
36-37
identity: lrigaray's discussion of, 141-45;
Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 13 7-45; re-
duction of, in prison, 192-93; role of touch
in, 93; violence of emplacement and,
152-54
image-producing cultures, ethics of perception
in, 171-81
In a Different Voice, 229, 238; gender-difference
hypothesis in, 246-50
"in-between," space of, material destruction
and, 157-59
"Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,"
176
individual: care ethics and role of, 233-38; piv-
otal context of flesh and, 242-46
intentional arc, body subjectivity of, 213-18
intentionality: Levinas on, 263-69; lived expe-
rience and, 51, 69n.18
intercorporeality: context of flesh in, 244-46;
horizontal space and, 195-99; Merleau-
Ponry's embodied subject and, 97-99; pris-
oner resistance and, 194-95
"interoceptive image," Merleau-Ponty's concept
of, 56, 69n.ll
interrogative, Heidegger's discussion of, 114
intersubjectivity: antagonistic aspects of, 39-42;
distinctness hypothesis and care ethics,
237-38; embodied subject and, 8-13, 16-17,
27-28; equality and, 38-39; ethics and, 17-
18, 177-81; historical constitution of the
body, 219-22; Merleau-Ponry's philosophy
of flesh and, 91-105; perception and, 34-35;
of visual perception, 170-71
"Intertwining-The Chasm, The," 108, 112-
13,132-45, 198-99; pivotal context for
flesh in, 241-46
intra/intercorporeal resistance: horizontal space
and, 195-99; of prisoners, 194-95
Iraq war, violence of emplacement and, 166n.7

lrigaray, Luce: ethics of sexual difference, 107-
25, 128-45; Merleau-Ponty and, 5, 13-16,
21, 45n.3, 59, 69n.l5; on perception, 77,
139-45, 253; politics of discourse and,
257-69; "primary maternal-feminine" of,
104-5, 106n.15; on violence of binaries,
147-51; on visual perception, 168-19
"Irigaray Through the Looking Glass," 128
irreversibility, violence of binaries and, 148-51
Jagger, Alison, 230-38, 250, 252
"just" encounter, lrigaray's discussion of, 142-45
Kant, Immanuel, 166n.8, 230, 234
Kirby, Vicki, 14-16, 127-45
Kosakiewicz, Olga, 172
Kristeva, Julia, 170
Kruks, Sonia, 3, 6-9, 23nA, 25-44
Lacan, Jacques, symbolic cultural world of,
69n.16
language: Irigaray's discussion of, 110-25, 128-
29, 142-45; Levinas' discussion of, 263-69;
Merleau-Ponty on, 143-45, 270n.7; politics
of discourse and, 258-69, 270n.9
"Laugh of the Medusa," 195
learning, lived experience and, 51, 68n.4
Le Temps Modemes, 2
Levinas, Emmanual, 21-22, 258-69,
270nn.13-14
lighting, perception and, 77-88
linguistics: Levinas' discussion of, 264-69; re-
versibility of, 67-68, 70n.29
L'invicee, 17-18, 168, 171-72, 175-81
lived experience: feminist emancipation and,
209-26; Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology
of,49-68
Living Across and Through Skins, 46n.21
logic, of lighting; Merleau-Ponty's discussion of,
77-88
Long Kesh prison, violence in, 183-88
"Love of the Other," 136-45
Lugones, Marfa, 44n.l
Machiavelli, Merleau-Ponty's view of, 40-41
Marxism, Merleau-Ponty on, 39-42
masculinism: Irigaray's ethics of sexual differ-
ence and, 110-25; Merleau-Ponty on, 130-
32, 143-45
"master-slave dialectic," Merleau-Ponty's discus-
sion of, 40
Index 287
maternal: Irigaray's discussion of, 119-25, 129-
32,253-54; Merleau-Ponty's view of, 15-16,
132-45
meaning, Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 138-45
"Meaning and Sense," 264
medical care, ethics of, 244-46, 255nn.18-19
Mendieta, Eduardo, 166nA
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: ethics of violence and,
154-56; Heidegger and, 113-14; on paradox
of violence, 183-205; Same and, 2-3
metaphysics, Merleau-Ponty on, 73-88
"Metaphysics and the Novel," 172; ethics of vio-
lence and, 168, 174-75; intersubjectivity
and, 177-81
Mill, John Stuart, 236
mind/body dualism: concealment strategies of
prisoners and, 193-95; Merleau-Ponty and,
16-17,96-99; torture and violence and,
188-91; urban flesh and, 149-51
mirror phenomenon, body image and, 63-68,
70n.21,99-105
Moi, Toril, 179-80
Moore, G. E., 254n.11
morality: distinctness hypothesis concerning,
233-38; ethic of care and, 229-31; feminist
solidarity and, 42-43; freedom, 19-20;
gender-difference hypothesis and, 247-50
Morrison, Toni, 19, 165n.1, 184, 188, 199-207
multiple-difference feminism, characteristics of,
26-27,44n.l
Mulvey, Laura, 170
Murphy, Ann, 21-22, 257-69
nationalism: Timerman's vision of, 199; vio-
lence of emplacement and, 152-54
naturalistic fallacy, care ethics and, 254n.l1
natural time, Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 50
natural world, lived-experience and, 51-68
nature: culture and, 149-51, 165n.3; violence of
emplacement and, 151-54
Nature: Course Notes from teh College de France,
163-64
Naumann, Bruce, 71-75, 84-86, 87-88
Nazism: ethics of violence and, 155-56;
Merleau-Ponty and, 39-42
neutrality, constancy of color and, 79-88
normality: constancy of color and, 79-88; inter-
subjectivity and, 220-22; lived body concept
and,217-18,222-23,227n.24
nostalgia, Irigaray's discussion of, 130-32
nuclear weapons, ethics of violence and, 156
288 Index
objectitication: ethics of visual perception and,
169-81; Merleau-Ponty's ~oncept of, 39-42,
64-68
objective knowledge: Haraway's discussion of,
28-29; historical constitution of the body
and,219-22
O'Brien, William, 149
Odyssey, 163-64
Oksala, Johanna, 19-20, 209-26
Olkowski, Dorothea, 1-23,49-68
"On the Relationship fo Theory to Practice in
Political Right," 166n.8
ontology: Heidegger's discussion of, 113-14;
Merleau-Ponty's concept of, 138-45; politics
of discourse and, 260-69
On Violence, 150-51, 166n.5
operative intentionality, Husserl's concept of,
214-18
"Origin of the Work of Art, Th~," 151
Ortner, Sherry, 150-51, 165n.3
Other: lrigaray's discussion of, ~09; Merleau-
Ponty's discussion cif, 14,59-68; politics of
discourse, 258-69; uniform reversibility and,
94 I-
"Other Selves and the Human World," 169-81
passivity, as resistance, 189-91
perception: ambiguous tigure hypothesis and,
247-50; care ethics and role of, 238-46;
color constancy and, 72-88; deprivation of,
in prisons, 196-99; of flesh, 252-54; gener-
ality in, 55-56; of inhabited horizon,
195-99; Irigaray's discussion of, 117-25,
131-45; Merlea1!-Ponty's discussion of, 11,
30-35,57-68, 69n.12; objectivity of,
219-22; of prepersonal body, 36-39, 46n.24
phallocentrism, lrigaray's discussion of, 128
phantom, Merleau-Ponty's embodied subject
and, 100-101
phenomenology: feminist emancipation and,
209-26; historical constitution of the body,
218-22; intercorporeal activities and, 195;
Merleau-Ponty's concept of, 2-3, 133-45;
paradox of violence and, 184-208; politics
of discourse and, 258-69; white logic and
color constancy, 72-88; Young's discussion
of,210-11
Phenomenology of Perception (Phenombwlogie de
la perception), 3, 27, 45n.3; anonymous sub-
jectivity of body and, 213-18; constancy of
color in, 80-88; corps propre of, 95-99; em-
bodied subject in, 29-43; ethics of violence
and, 168-81; politics of discourse and,
258-69; solipsism in, 41-42; violence of em-
placement and, 151-54
"Philosophy of Man," 95
physical routines, as resistance to prison,
190-91
Pink (tilm), 72, 85
Platonism, Merleau-Ponty and, 264, 27On.13
Playing in the Dark: Whitness and the Uterary
Imagination, 165n.l
pleasure and pain: intrinsic value in, 236; lived
experience of, 63-64, 70n.21
politics of discourse, Merleau-Ponty on, 257-69
poststructuralism, cultural construction of body
and,224
power: Butler's discussion of, 223-24; domi-
nated and gendered body as locus of,
183-84; Irigaray's discussion of, 108-25
prepersonal body, Merleau-Ponty's concept of,
35-39,242-46
"Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical
Consequences, The," 177-81
Prime of Life, The, 179-80
primordial communication, Merleau-Ponty's
concept of, 34-35
"prisoner's reflex," Constante's description of,
196-99
Prisoner Without a Name, CeU Without a Number,
184, 188-208
prison narratives: contiscation of things in,
191-93; paradox of violence in, 183-208
"project," feminist concept of, 31-32, 46n.l5
Proust, Marcel, 255n.l6
psyche, Merleau-Ponty's concept of, 56-68
Psychic Life of Power, 223
psychoanalytic theory~ Irigaray's use of, 119-25;
Merleau-Ponty's concept of sexuality and,
214-18
racism: context of flesh in, 252; feminism and,
42,44, 47n.37; Merleau-Ponty's concept of
color and, 73-88; seizure sexuality and,
200-206; social geography of, urban flesh
concept and, 165n.3; urban flesh concept
and, 149-51; violence of binaries and,
148-51
rape: seizure of sexuality through, 202-6; as vio-
lent touch, 187-88
Razak, Sherene, 79-80

reciprocity of discourse, Merleau-Ponty on,
267-69
reconstruction: ethics of violence and, 155-56;
Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 50
resistance: at Long Kesh prison, 184-88; para-
dox of violence and, 183-208
reversibility: of flesh, 101-5,251-54; gender-
difference hypothesis of care and, 247-50;
intercorporeality, 98-99; intra/intercorpore-
ality and, 198-99; Irigaray's discussion of,
120-25, 132-33; of linguistics, 67-68
Riggs, Marlon, 80-84, 87-88
sadism, embodied subject and role of, 47n.36
Sartre, Jean-Paul: Beauvoir's relationship with,
172; Merleau-Ponty and, 2-3, 47n.32; "prac-
tical material field" of, 45n.11; transcendent
subject of, 1-2; violence of emplacement
and, 153-54
Scarry, Elaine, 198-99
Scheler, Max, 244n.17
Schilder, Paul, 7On.21
screens, Merleau-Ponty's experiments with,
83-84
"sediments" of situations, Merleau-Ponty's con-
cept of, 31-33
self: child's concept of, 53-68; as embodied sub-
ject, 30-33, 248-50, 253-54, 259-69; Har-
away's concept of, 28-29; Irigaray's
discussion of Other in relation to, 115-25,
132-33; postmodemist emphasis on, 44n.1;
prison resistance and concept of, 188-91;
uniform reversibility and, 94
self-care principle, innate context of flesh imd,
243-46
semiotics, sexual difference and, 135-45
Sensible, Merleau-Ponty's concept of, 134-45
sexism of Merleau-Ponty, 32-33, 35-39; con-
stancy of color concept and, 79-88; flesh
conceptand,252-54
sexual difference: constancy of color and,
79-80; ethics of, 111-25, 128-45, 250-54;
irreducibility of, 266-69, 271n.15; Merleau-
Ponty's discussion of, 8, 13-14, 25-44; rac-
ism and seizure of, 200-206; style and con-
cepts of, 228n.50
sexual dimorphism, embodied subject and, 37,
46n.26
sexuality: Merleau-Ponty's concept of, 211-12,
214-18; violence as seizure of, 200-206
Index 289
sexual violation, as terror technique, 192-93
Sex Which Is Not One, The, 128
She Came to Stay, 4-5
Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, 46n.22
Sher, George, 230-38, 242
signifiers, in child's world, 55-68, 69n.7
Signs, 134-45
sign-signification relation, logic of lighting and,
78-79
Silent Escape, The, 184, 188-208
sisterhood, feminist theoty and role of, 26,
41-42
"Situated Knowledges," 28-29
situated subject, Merleau-Ponty's concept of,
1-23
sleep, Merleau-Ponty's concept of sexuality and,
215-18
sociality, politics of discourse and, 259-69
social justice, violence and, 162-64
solipsisim: ethics of violence and, 174-81; Iri-
garay's discussion of, 116-17; multiple-
difference feminism and, 27; natural world
and,62-68
space: domination as control of, 188-91; ethics
of sexual difference and, 133-45; gender-
differenc hypothesis and role of, 248,
256n.23; horizon in, 195-99; Irigaray on
perception and, 131-32; material destruc-
tion of, 157-59; violence as invasion of,
187-88
spatial environment, embodied subject and, 4-5
specular behavior, Merleau-Ponty's felt experi-
ences and, 62-68
Speculum of the OtheT Woman, 112, 128
speech, Levinas' concept of, 267-68, 270n.14
Spelman, Elizabeth, 43-44
Spirit in Ashes, 191-92
Stawarska, Beata,. 11-12, 91-105
Steinbock, Anthony, 220-21, 227n.22
Stocker, Susan, 46n.22
StructuTe of Behavior, The, 2-3; ethics of vio-
lence and, 174
subjectivity: anonymous subjectivity, 213-18;
Merleau-Ponty's concept of, 65-68, 224-26,
228n.50
substitutability of gender, Irigaray's discussion
of,119-25
suffering, feminist solidarity in face of, 43-44,
47nn.38-39
Suleri, Sara, 185
290 Index
Sullivan, Shannon, 22-23,35-39, 46n.21
sympathy, awareness;,f suffering and, 43, 47n.38
tenderness, seizure of sexuality and, 203-6
terrorism: human nature and, 39-42; violence
of emplacement and, 152-54
textuality: Derrida's concept of, 139-45; Iri-
garay's discussion of, 108-25
things: concealment'by prisoners of, 193-95;
confiscation in prison of, 191-93
Throwing Like a Gil and Other EssCl)'sin Feminist
Philosophy and Social Theory, 21 0-11
Timaeus, Irigaray's discussion of, 121
time, ethics of sexual difference and, 133-45
Timerman, Jacobo, 184,188-208
torture: closure of horizon through, 196-99; in-
voluntary witnessing of, 206-8; Merleau-
Ponty in context of, 18-19; passivity as resis-
tance to, 189-91
Totality and Infinity, 263-69
totality of relations, Irigaray's discussion of,
114-15
touch: embodied subject' and, 95-99; flesh in
context of, 252-54; intra/intercorporeality
and, 198-99; Irigaray's'discussion of,
117-25; Merleau-Po~ty's handshake and,
98-105; resistance through, 189-1; violence
through, 186-88
transcendence: intersubjectivity and, 219;
Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 32-33; social-
ity of, 262-69
Tuana, Nancy, vii-ix
"two lips," lrigaray's concept of, 124-25,
140-41 - "withdrawal technique," of Timerman, 189-91,
undifferentiated origin, self concept and, 58-59,
69n.l3
uniform reversibility: embodied subject and,
93-94; of flesh, 102-5
uniqueness, innate contexts of flesh and,
243-46
universality: care ethics and, 234-38; ethics of
sexual difference and, 110-25, 267-69; in-
tersubjectivity of Merleau-Ponty and, 92-
105; Merleau-Ponty's primordial
communication and, 34-35
urban flesh, violence of binaries and, 148-51
Valery, Paul, 138
"vicarious visualization," Bartky's concept of,
244,255n.17
violence: of binaries, 147-51; of emplacement,
151-54; ethics of, 154-56, 167-81; lri-
garay's discussion of, 142-45; Merleau-Ponty
on, 39-42, 47n.35; resistance and, 183-208
Visible and the Invisible, The, 45n.3, 105n.4; con-
cept of flesh in, 95-99, 103-5, 243-46,
252-54; fragility of dwelling and, 163-64;
Gestalt psychology in, 231, 240-46; Iri-
garay's discussion of, 112-13, 116-25,
132-45; logic of lighting in, 78-88; politics
of discourse and, 260-69
Visker, Rudi, 224, 228n.49
visual perception: deprivation of, in prisons,
197-99; flesh in context of, 252-54; gender-
difference hypothesis of care and, 247-50;
Gestalt psychology and, 231; Gilligan's am-
biguous figure metaphor and, 239-46; inter-
subjectivity and, 93-94; Irigaray vs.
Merleau-Pontyon, 140-45; Merleau-Ponty's
lived experience with, 64-70; violence and,
154-56, 167-81
"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," 170
Vogel, Steven, 150-51, 165n.2
Volatile Bodies, 225
Weiss, Gail, 6-7,16-18,63-64, 70n.21,
147-64; on embodied morality, 230, 245-46
Western canon, Irigaray's critique of, 107-25
Western culture, color as symbol in, 71-88
White (book), 74
White (film), 72
whiteness, Merleau-Ponty's discussion of, 73-88
Wispe, Lauren, 47n.38
202-6
woman, philosophical definition of, vii-ix
Woolf, Virginia, 161
"Working Out with Merleau-Ponty," 210
World Trade Center attacks: fragility of dwelling
concept and, 159-64; material destruction
of world and, 156-59; violence of emplace-
ment and, 151-54, 166n.6
Wyschogrod, Edith, 191-92
Young, Iris Marion, 6, 24n.l6, 106n.l5; on femi-
nist emancipation, 210-12; on fragility of
dwelling, 161-62; on morality and freedom,
19
Zahavi, Dan, 219-20