Intentional Transgression

Husserl's term (intentionales Überschreiten, from the Cartesian Meditations) as taken up and generalized by Merleau-Ponty in *Signs*' "The Philosopher and His Shadow" (1959) and "On the Phenomenology of Language" (1951). Intentional transgression names the perceptual structure by which "the functions of intentionality and the intentional object are paradoxically interchanged" — the scene invites me to become its adequate viewer, and in doing so I am "invested" by the scene. It is how the other is given to me, and how speech and expression generally become intersubjective.

Key Points

  • The governing text: "It happens that my gaze stumbles against certain sights (those of other human and, by extension, animal bodies) and is thwarted by them. I am invested by them just when I thought I was investing them, and I see a form sketched out in space that arouses and convokes the possibilities of my own body as if it were a matter of my own gestures or behavior. Everything happens as if the functions of intentionality and the intentional object were paradoxically interchanged" (Signs, "On the Phenomenology of Language," p. 94).
  • Not analogy, not inference: Intentional transgression is not the analogical reasoning "the other person's body looks like mine, therefore the other has a consciousness like mine." It is a direct perceptual structure in which my body is already oriented toward behaviors that only another body can complete. "I perceive another" directly, in "co-perception," not by analogy.
  • Reversibility of functions: The "transgression" is that the perceiver and the perceived exchange their roles. I see that the other sees — not by inferring from outward signs but because the other's gaze is a visible configuration that "takes over" my body's capacities. "I am snapped up by a second myself outside me; I perceive another" (Signs, p. 94).
  • Sibling of reversibility: Intentional transgression is the structure that the chiasm names in the case of the body touching itself, applied now to the case of one body meeting another. The same two-sided Fundierung operates across the self-other boundary: my body's power to perceive is already a power to be perceived, and my seeing already contains the possibility of being seen. The other, when encountered, actualizes this latent possibility.
  • Speech as eminent case: "Speech is evidently an eminent case of these 'ways of behaving' which reverse my ordinary relationship to objects and give certain ones of them the value of subjects" (Signs, p. 95). Speaking and hearing are intentional transgressions: the speaker's intention is taken over by the hearer's own significative capacities, and vice versa.

Details

Dissolving the Theoretical Problem of Others

The classical problem of other minds can be stated: if to be conscious is to constitute, then I cannot constitute another consciousness (that would require me to constitute him as constituting in respect to the very act through which I constitute him). MP takes this as a genuine impasse at the level of theoretical consciousness, and argues that its very genuineness shows that the problem must be resolved elsewhere — in the pre-theoretical layer where "I am able to" (the body's motor power) is given along with "the other person exists" (Signs, "Philosopher and His Shadow," p. 175).

Intentional transgression is the name for this pre-theoretical givenness. "The reason why I am able to understand the other person's body and existence 'beginning with' the body proper, the reason why the compresence of my 'consciousness' and my 'body' is prolonged into the compresence of my self and the other person, is that the 'I am able to' and the 'the other person exists' belong here and now to the same world" (Signs, p. 175).

Note the structural move: the "problem of the other" is not solved but dissolved. The theoretical problem arose only because we assumed the mind was closed in on itself. Once we see that perception itself is already a transgression of the self/world boundary, the other appears as a variant of that primary transgression, not as a separate theoretical puzzle.

Esthesiological, Not Conceptual

MP is emphatic: intentional transgression goes "from body to mind," not the other way around. "Einfühlung goes from body to mind. When a different behavior or exploring body appears to me through a first 'intentional encroachment,' it is the man as a whole who is given to me with all the possibilities... that I have in my presence to myself in my incarnate being" (Signs, "Philosopher and His Shadow," p. 170).

This is the esthesiological grounding of intersubjectivity. I do not first see a body and then infer a mind; I see a perceiving thing — a body whose behavior is already perceiving, already oriented, already engaged in the world in a way that my body can be engaged. The mind "over there" is given with the body "over there" because the body is already pre-mental in exactly the way my own body is.

Compresence, Not Projection

Intentional transgression works through compresence (Kompräsenz): the other's body is compresent with mine in the same world, just as my left hand is compresent with my right. Just as my right hand touched discovers itself as potentially touching (the chiasm in the solo body), my body seeing discovers itself as potentially seen (the chiasm across bodies). "My two hands 'coexist' or are 'compresent' because they are one single body's hands. The other person appears through an extension of that compresence (übertragene Kompräsenz); he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeal reality" (Signs, p. 168).

MP is careful to distinguish compresence from "projection" or "introjection." I am not projecting my mind into the other's body; I am discovering, in the other's body, the latent possibility that my body already carried. The structure was always there; the other actualizes it. "All introjection presupposes what is meant to be explained by it" (p. 171).

The Linguistic Extension

In "On the Phenomenology of Language" (Signs, p. 94), MP explicitly extends intentional transgression to speech. When I understand what the other says, I am not inferring from sounds to a private meaning; the other's words arouse in me a significative intention that is mine and the other's at once. "I shall never in all strictness be able to think the other person's thought. I can think that he thinks... But I know unquestionably that that man over there sees" — and similarly, I know unquestionably that he speaks, that his words are already inscribed in a shared system of significative intentions.

This is why MP says (Signs, p. 96) that "transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity" — Husserl's formula, but now understood as a claim about intentional transgression. The transcendental subject is not a solitary ego; it is always already the site of a compresence through which others' expressive capacities are given in my own.

The 1950–51 Developmental Attestation

The Signs 1951 and 1959 essays are the canonical published statements, but MP applied the term intentional transgression earlier in the Sorbonne course of 1950–51 (The Child's Relations with Others, Ch 4), where it appears in the developmental register:

"Since at the same time the other who is to be perceived is himself not a 'psyche' closed in on himself but rather a conduct, a system of behavior that aims at the world, he offers himself to my motor intentions and to that 'intentional transgression' (Husserl) by which I animate and pervade him. Husserl said that the perception of others is like a 'phenomenon of coupling' [accouplement]. The term is anything but a metaphor. In perceiving the other, my body and his are coupled, resulting in a sort of action which pairs them [action à deux]. This conduct which I am able only to see, I live somehow from a distance. I make it mine; I recover [reprendre] it or comprehend it." (Ch 4, p. 138)

The 1950–51 passage is a significant genealogical middle term. It shows that by the time of the Sorbonne course — a year before "On the Phenomenology of Language" and eight years before "The Philosopher and His Shadow" — MP had already grasped intentional transgression as the constitutive structure of intersubjectivity AND had formulated it in the same action-à-deux / coupling register he would use later. The 1951 and 1959 essays refine and extend this 1950–51 application; they do not introduce it.

The developmental anchor also shows that intentional transgression is not merely an adult or theoretical structure; it is operative from the first perceptions of the other. The specular-image phase (specular-image), syncretic sociability (syncretic-sociability), and transitivism (transitivism) are all modes of intentional transgression in the developmental register.

Connections

  • borrowed from Husserl — Cartesian Meditations (intentionales Überschreiten)
  • is the self-other extension of chiasm — the same structure that the body's reflexive touching enacts, now across bodies
  • is the ground of intercorporeity — intercorporeity is the stabilized form of a network of intentional transgressions
  • is the mechanism of lateral-universal — cross-cultural understanding is a long-range intentional transgression
  • is an eminent case of indirect-language — speech is intentional transgression in the expressive register
  • underwrites interanimality — the primitive form of the transgression crosses species, not only human bodies
  • dissolves the theoretical problem of other minds — the problem is a symptom of treating consciousness as closed on itself

Open Questions

  • Does intentional transgression privilege vision? MP's examples are visual ("I see that he sees"), and the structure seems most intuitive in the visual case. But MP also uses tactile examples (the handshake) and auditory examples (speech). Is vision the paradigm, or one case among equals?
  • Can intentional transgression fail? The "paranoiac" who refuses the other's gaze is a case worth considering but not developed in Signs. Sartre's analysis of the "look" (Being and Nothingness) is a case of successful transgression experienced as violation; MP seems to want a reading in which the transgression is fundamentally non-hostile.
  • Relation to the mirror-neuron hypothesis in contemporary cognitive science: the empirical claim is plausibly continuous with MP's phenomenological description, but the status of the relation — confirmation, naturalization, or category mistake — is contested.

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1964-signs — "The Philosopher and His Shadow" (pp. 159–181), especially pp. 166–171 (the reflexive-touching passage, the extension to other bodies, the "no constituting of a mind for a mind, but of a man for a man" thesis); "On the Phenomenology of Language" (pp. 84–97), especially p. 94 (the paradigmatic formulation of the transgression).
  • merleau-ponty-1964-primacy-of-perception — Ch 4 (1950–51) p. 138 contains the developmental-register application: the perception of the other as a "phenomenon of coupling," with the action à deux formula and the explicit attribution of "intentional transgression" to Husserl. This is the earliest in-print application in a context other than the Husserl shadow / language papers.