Chiral Reversibility

David Morris's interpretive model of Merleau-Pontian reversibility, deployed by Morin in Ch 8 §2 to block the Hegelian symmetrical-reciprocity reading of the chiasm. The model is the incongruent-counterparts image: a right-hand glove is always already lined with an invisible left-hand glove, but it cannot be this left-hand glove without the now-visible right-hand glove becoming the invisible lining of a left-hand glove. The two are ontologically complicit without identity; the gap between them is necessary to the structure; no congruence is possible within their space (3D-sculpted hands cannot be superposed, though paper cut-outs can — see Morin Ch 8 fn 15). The image lets Morin read the écart in MP's reversibility as structural divergence, not as failure to coincide.

Key Points

  • Right-hand glove + left-hand glove: the canonical image. Vision is "a kind of handshake between my body (right-hand glove) and a visibile (left-hand glove)" (Morin p. 186). The seer-seen is a convulsion of the visibile that reverses the glove — actual vision lined with visibility, rather than visible lined with virtual vision.
  • Ontological complicity without identity: the chiral pair requires the divergence; if the two were identical, neither would be what it is. The écart is what opens together the different possibilities of the two elements (Carbone Chiasmi International 4 [2002]: 57).
  • Not Hegelian "self-restoring sameness": the chiral model blocks the reading where the chiasm is "reflection-into-self of otherness within itself" (Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit §18). Morin uses chiral reversibility precisely to resist this Hegelian reading of MP, which would make vision the closing of a circle.
  • Mirror as open series, not ricochet: the chiral image extends to MP's two-mirrors-facing-each-other figure (VI 254–55). Rather than a simple ricochet that closes the circle, the chiral mirror generates "an open series of reflections where beginning and end indefinitely escape." Valéry: "the more we reflect, so much will we be different" (S 232).
  • Higher-dimensional space caveat (Morris via Morin, Ch 8 fn 15): if we move to a higher-dimensional space, we can superpose the two gloves but they also lose their chiral sense as incongruent counterparts. Paper cut-outs of two hands superpose by flipping one; three-dimensional sculpted hands cannot. The dimensionality of the space is constitutive of chirality.

Details

The argumentative work

Per Morin (morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being Ch 8 §2), the chiral model does three argumentative things at once:

  1. It blocks the symmetrical-reciprocity reading of MP. Some passages — especially VI 139 ("the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen") — read like Hegelian self-restoring sameness. Morin uses chirality to show the reciprocity is ontological complicity, not specular identity.

  2. It rescues écart from being read as failure-of-coincidence. The standard reading (Hass, Toadvine) takes the écart as the productive failure of coincidence; the chiral reading goes further — the gap is constitutive, not the leftover of an attempted overlap.

  3. It opens the rapprochement with Nancy. Once reversibility is chiral rather than symmetrical, MP and Nancy become readable on the same axis (each-of-the-two-as-essentially-different) — though Morin will still argue that MP's chirality is "spanned" by total being (VI 148) in a way Nancy's écart refuses.

Distinguished from the "glove-turned-inside-out" image

The wiki's existing chiasm page (line 27 of the current page) uses the inside-out glove image from MP's November 16, 1960 working note: "It suffices that from one side I see the wrong side of the glove that is applied to the right side, that I touch the one through the other . . . the chiasm is that: the reversibility." This is a distinct image from chiral reversibility:

  • Inside-out glove: one glove turned through itself; the wrong side / right side; the chiasm as touching-through.
  • Chiral reversibility: right-hand-glove vs. left-hand-glove; two incongruent counterparts; the écart as constitutive impossibility-of-superposition.

Both images do interpretive work; the chiral image (Morris's contribution) is the more structural statement — it makes the constitutive role of the gap explicit, whereas the inside-out image emphasises the immanent reversibility.

The Carbone adjudication

Carbone's formula (Mauro Carbone, "Flesh: Towards the History of a Misunderstanding," Chiasmi International 4 [2002]: 57) is read by Morin (Ch 8 p. 192) as the precise formulation of what chiral reversibility avoids:

"It would be as bad to think of a reversibility without écart, that is available to be realized as peaceful confusion of the related elements, as it would be to think of écart as a fracture, which, instead of opening together the different — and divergent — possibilities of those elements, would set their absolute distinction and therefore their reciprocal extrusion."

Chiral reversibility navigates between reversibility-without-écart (peaceful confusion, the MP-tendency Saint Aubert and Watkin worry about) and écart-as-fracture (absolute extrusion, the Nancy-tendency Morin worries Nancy is too quick to take).

Connections

  • is a model of reversibility — the chiral image is one available interpretive lens; the wiki's existing reversibility page should be cross-referenced.
  • is one reading of chiasm — distinct from but compatible with the inside-out-glove image already on the chiasm page.
  • is the structural form of ecart — chirality lets the écart be constitutive of structure, not failure-of-coincidence.
  • blocks the Hegelian reading of narcissism in MP (the two senses) — vision is not self-restoring sameness; the doubling happens through the other, not through return-to-self.
  • opens rapprochement with jean-luc-nancy — once reversibility is chiral, MP and Nancy share the structure-of-divergence; the Carbone adjudication formula adjudicates between the two thinkers' tendencies.
  • via morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being (Ch 8 §2) and david-morris ("The Chirality of Being," Chiasmi International 12 [2010]: 165–82; "The Enigma of Reversibility," Continental Philosophy Review 43 [2010]: 141–65).

Open Questions

  • Does chiral reversibility imply that MP's flesh cannot function as a grounding principle behind the écart? Morin diagnoses MP at VI 148 as positing flesh as just such a grounding principle (his "desire for the One"); but chiral reversibility could be read as already foreclosing this move. The tension between (a) chiral reversibility as block to symmetrical reciprocity and (b) flesh-as-grounding-principle-behind-écart is the heart of Morin's Ch 8.
  • Is the higher-dimensional-space caveat (Morris fn 15) load-bearing for MP's ontology? The fact that 3D-sculpted hands cannot be superposed within their space but can be in a higher-dimensional space is a striking philosophical fact; whether MP's flesh is "the higher-dimensional space" (in which case chirality is not constitutive) or "the same space" (in which case chirality is constitutive) is undecidable from the text alone.
  • Does the chiral image apply to language and to intersubjectivity, or is it restricted to bodily reversibility? The Valéry "les regards se prennent" passage (S 231–32) suggests it extends to gazes; whether it extends to chiasms of perceiving/perceived, body/things, perception/movement, sensation/language is an open extension.

Sources

  • morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being — Ch 8 §2 + fns 14, 15, 16 (the deployment of Morris's chiral model in MP-Nancy comparison).
  • merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — VI 123, 139, 148, 254–55, 263, 264 (the passages chiral reversibility reads).
  • david-morris — "The Chirality of Being: Exploring a Merleau-Pontyan Ontology of Sense," Chiasmi International 12 (2010): 165–82; "The Enigma of Reversibility and the Genesis of Sense in Merleau-Ponty," Continental Philosophy Review 43 (2010): 141–65 (the foundational articulations).