Coefficient of Adversity

A term coined by Bachelard (against the phenomenological tradition) for the resistance things offer to projects. The concept's genealogy is the precise pivot of Ch 5 of morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being: Bachelard's complaint that phenomenology under-thinks adversity → Sartre's conditional acceptance (rebinding adversity to the project of freedom) → Merleau-Ponty's recasting (adversity as a function of flesh-engagement, "the gift of my flesh" — not freely-chosen-project).

Key Points

  • Bachelard's coining (cited at BN 324): phenomenology has "not sufficiently taking[n] into account . . . the 'coefficient of adversity' in objects." The concept names what survives the phenomenological reduction — the resistance things offer that is not exhausted by their mode of givenness.
  • Sartre's rebinding (BN 489, 509): Sartre concedes Bachelard's point but rebinds adversity to freely-chosen project: "It is because I am there and because I have made of myself what I am that the rock develops in relation to my body a coefficient of adversity" (BN 489). Adversity becomes a function of the for-itself's freedom — "the necessary resistance that allows me to feel my freedom or to feel myself exist as freedom."
  • MP's recasting (Ch 5 §2): adversity is a function of flesh-engagement, not project. MP's "lend things our flesh" (WP 49; VI 131, 136) lets things give themselves in the flesh (S 167) — with the graininess that interrupts and the depth that arouses desire. Saint Aubert's formulation: "Leibhaftigkeit is truly not a one-way donation but the encounter between two resistances, two forces — that of adversity and desire" ("Au croisement du réel et de l'imaginaire," 253).
  • The pivot: under Sartre, adversity is unilaterally generated by the for-itself's project (no project = no adversity). Under MP, adversity is mutually generated by the encounter — the thing has its own adversity because it bleeds its envelope, has depth, has another side. The thing is not "an object that lies there in the 'outside' world, but something that inhabits him and resonates within him" (line 1326, on Sartre's reading of Ponge).
  • The full late-ontology consequence: by VI 144, MP defines desire as the "exchange between the inside and the outside — both mine and that of others and of things"; adversity-and-desire are the dual structure of encroachment. The 1948 anthropomorphic claims of MP's Causeries are continuous with this: things "burst their envelopes and bleed in front of me" (WP 69).

Details

Why the genealogy matters

The Bachelard → Sartre → MP sequence is not a smooth refinement but two structural inversions. Bachelard saw the problem; Sartre acknowledged it but rebound it to his ontology of for-itself / in-itself; MP recasts it as a mutual structure of flesh-engagement. The genealogy is one of Morin's clearest demonstrations of the cartesian-sartrian-ontology-of-the-object's limits: Sartre's "objects" are without their own adversity or aggressivity (strictly delimited, with clearly defined boundaries, contemplable from all sides), so adversity must be imported via project; MP undoes this by giving the thing an inside that passes into the outside.

Relation to nausea (Sartre)

In Sartre's BN, the limit-case where the for-itself encounters In-itself is nausea — consciousness "thickens" (s'empâte, s'englue), Roquentin sees the world return to "soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder — naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness" (Nausea 127). The slimy = fear of absorption into the In-itself (BN 609); the stone = "digested indigestible," the dream of non-destructive assimilation (BN 579). Nausea is the limit-case of adversity for Sartre — and shows the cost: because adversity is bound to project, the only way to exceed my project's adversity-coefficient is to lose freedom altogether.

For MP, by contrast, the limit-case is not nausea but encounter — the dialogue / débat (WP 47) between embodied subject and thing, where neither side strictly acts or suffers. The thing has agency, the perceiver responds; both are passive-active.

What MP keeps and what he rejects

MP keeps the coefficient of adversity term and the underlying intuition that phenomenology must account for the thing's resistance. He rejects:

  1. Sartre's binding of adversity to chosen project (which makes adversity a unilateral function of the subject).
  2. The Cartesian-Sartrian ontology of strictly-delimited objects (which makes adversity intrinsically external).
  3. The treatment of anthropomorphism as projection (which makes adversity a covering rather than an encounter).

MP recasts the coefficient of adversity as constitutive of the flesh-engagement by which things give themselves in the flesh.

Connections

  • coined by gaston-bachelard — anti-phenomenological objection.
  • conditionally accepted but rebound by jean-paul-sartre (BN 324, 489, 509).
  • recast by maurice-merleau-ponty as a function of flesh-engagement (WP 47, 49; VI 131, 136).
  • connected to cautious-anthropomorphism — MP's "gift of the flesh" is what licenses adversity-as-encounter; cautious anthropomorphism is the methodological correlate.
  • connected to empietement — encroachment is the late-ontology articulation of adversity-as-mutual-bleeding-of-envelopes.
  • seed of flesh-as-element — the encounter-of-resistances reading of Leibhaftigkeit prepares the flesh as element-of-Being.
  • contrasts with the cartesian-sartrian-ontology-of-the-object — adversity-as-project is the Sartrian symptom of that ontology; flesh-engagement is MP's reply.

Open Questions

  • Does Nancy's freedom-of-the-stone retain the coefficient of adversity terminology, or does Nancy abandon the genealogy? Nancy's stone has "concreteness" / concret-de-pierre and "hardness" that "se faire sentir dure" — these seem to do the adversity-work without the term. Worth investigating whether Nancy is consciously avoiding the term.
  • Is Bachelard's original critique compatible with MP's recasting, or does MP's "encounter of resistances" already exceed Bachelard's intent? Bachelard's "psychoanalysis of elemental materials" is closer to Sartre's psychoanalysis-of-things than to MP's flesh-engagement; the dependency chain is more complicated than a smooth refinement.
  • Does the coefficient of adversity survive into the speculative-realist conversation? Cohen's trans-ontological affinity, Shaviro's cautious-anthropomorphism, and Harman's withdrawal of objects all engage something like adversity but under different names; tracing the term's afterlife would be valuable.

Sources

  • morin-2022-mp-nancy-sense-being — Ch 5 §1 (Sartre's BN 324, 489, 509 — the conditional acceptance + rebinding); Ch 5 §2 (MP's Causeries / L'homme et l'objet recasting); Ch 5 §3 (Saint Aubert's "Au croisement du réel et de l'imaginaire" 253 formulation of Leibhaftigkeit-as-encounter-of-resistances).