Interanimality

Merleau-Ponty's working-note term (interanimalité) for intercorporeity generalized beyond the human: the species-level dimension of carnal life, in which animals of the same species — and, the later notes suggest, across species — share a flesh in the same way that two humans do. "The notion of species = notion of interanimality" (February 1959 working note to V&I). A single compressed formula, never developed into a chapter or essay, but repeatedly invoked in the 1959–1960 working notes. One of the points where MP's late ontology reaches toward what would later be called non-anthropocentric or ecological phenomenology.

Key Points

The species is not (only) a biological category. It is the interanimal dimension of life — the being-with-other-organisms that is a structural feature of embodiment, not a contingent social fact
The formula appears in the February 1959 working note "Reduction—the true transcendental—the Rätsel Erscheinungsweise—world" — where MP is reformulating the reduction in terms of "a field of transcendencies" rather than acts of a constituting subject
Interanimality is introduced in the same breath as a methodological point about "Selbstheit of the world" — the intertwining of biology, psychology, and philosophy. The concept belongs as much to MP's rethinking of the transcendental as to his theory of intersubjectivity
MP's reading of Adolf Portmann's biology of animal display (November 1960 note "Telepathy—Being for the other—Corporeity") provides the concrete grounding: the body is intrinsically visible, "with a halo of visibility" around each part, and this openness is what makes intercorporeity and interanimality possible
The difference between intraspecies and interspecies relations, on this view, is not the absolute difference that anthropocentric philosophy assumes

Details

The February 1959 Formula

"The notion of species = notion of interanimality. The intertwining of biology or psychology and philosophy = Selbstheit of the world" (February 1959 working note, V&I)

Two claims in one sentence. First, the species is the interanimal. Second, to think this is also to dissolve the border between biology, psychology, and philosophy — because what they each study is the same structure: the Selbstheit ("selfhood") of the world, the way the world is a self-relating whole in which the embodied being is a locus. The note is compressed to the point of near-opacity, but its force is clear: interanimality is a transcendental category, not a biological one derived from philosophy's application to the life sciences.

Portmann and the Intrinsic Visibility of the Body

The most concrete passage on interanimality is MP's engagement with the Swiss biologist Adolf Portmann's work on animal display, in the November 1960 working note "Telepathy—Being for the other—Corporeity":

"To perceive a part of my body is also to perceive it as visible, i.e. for the other. And to be sure it assumes this character because in fact someone does look at it — But this fact of the other's presence would not itself be possible if antecedently the part of the body in question were not visible, if there were not, around each part of the body, a halo of visibility."

Portmann's insight was that animal markings, coloration, and display are not reducible to communication or to sexual selection; the body is display, as a structural feature of being an animal body at all. MP takes this as empirical confirmation of an ontological point: the body is not first private and then secondarily made visible; it is intrinsically visible, and other bodies are structurally co-given with it. This is the biological version of the argument that intercorporeity is not a bridge across a gap but a feature of the flesh itself.

The Primary Text: The 1957–58 Nature Course

The canonical formulation appears in the second of the Nature courses (1957–58), Course 2 Ch. 2 §B.2, on Portmann's Die Tiergestalt:

"There is as an inter-animality. The species is what the animal has to be, not in the sense of a power of being, but in the sense of a slope on which all the animals of the same species are placed. Life is not 'the ensemble of functions that resist death,' to use Bichat's expression, but rather is a power to invent the visible. The identity of that which sees and that which it sees appears to be an ingredient of animality." (Course 2, p. 186)

A paragraph earlier MP draws out the reciprocity: "Just as earlier there was a perceptual relation before perception properly so-called, so too is there here a specular relation between animals: each is the mirror of the other" (Course 2, p. 185). And the anti-Darwinian consequence: "This perceptual relation gives an ontological value back to the notion of species. What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality."

Three things are distinctive about this formulation compared to the later 1959 working notes. First, the species is explicitly defined against the Darwinian-lineage and Platonic-essence readings: it is a slope, not an essence and not a descent. Second, the phrase "a power to invent the visible" — anti-Bichat, anti-mechanist, anti-finalist — is the course's strongest positive definition of life; the working notes do not have this formulation. Third, the argument proceeds via mimicry (the preceding Hardouin section on animal mimicry), which means interanimality is grounded in the same argument as natural-symbolism: "behavior can be defined only by a perceptual relation and that Being cannot be defined outside of perceived being" (Course 2, p. 185).

The 1957–58 Nature course is thus the full underlying text for the abbreviated 1957–58 course summary published in In Praise of Philosophy Course 9, and for the compressed 1959 working note ("The notion of species = notion of interanimality"). The working note is a reminder of what the course developed, not a standalone formulation.

Species as a Flesh-Concept

The move from "notion of species" to "notion of interanimality" is not a substitution of one scientific category for another. It is a reformulation of what it is to belong to a kind. Animals of the same species are not related by their shared participation in a universal (Platonism) nor by their descent from a common ancestor (Darwinian species-concept) nor by their capacity to interbreed (biological species-concept). They are related by their sharing of a flesh: the same reversibility, the same anonymous visibility, the same carnal openness that MP describes between two humans in Ch 4 of V&I (see intercorporeity) is already present within the species as such.

This is suggestive rather than argued. MP never writes the chapter that would derive interanimality from intercorporeity or vice versa, and the asymmetry is left open: is interanimality the species-form of intercorporeity, or is intercorporeity the human-form of interanimality?

Non-Anthropocentric Reach

A handful of readers have taken interanimality as a resource for non-anthropocentric phenomenology and for environmental philosophy. The grounds are that (a) MP's flesh vocabulary is explicitly cosmological, not merely intersubjective (see flesh-as-element, aquatic-ontology), and (b) the working notes on interanimality place no in-principle limit on the reach of the concept: if the structure of interanimality is the anonymous visibility of the flesh, and if the flesh is "the element of Being," then there is no obvious boundary at which it would stop — not at species, not at the animal-plant distinction, possibly not at the living-nonliving distinction.

Whether MP himself would endorse this extension is undetermined. The late working notes flirt with cosmological readings but do not commit to them.

Connections

is the species-level form of intercorporeity — or possibly the general form of which intercorporeity is a special case; MP does not settle the direction
presupposes reversibility — the anonymous visibility that grounds interanimality is the reversibility of flesh
is the ontological form of "species" — rethinking the biological concept as a flesh-concept
extends flesh-as-element — flesh as element has no in-principle limit, and interanimality is one register of that unbounded reach
anticipates non-anthropocentric phenomenology — though MP did not use the term
has a temporal-constitutive dimension developed by Décarie-Daigneault (2025) — interanimality involves not only shared visibility (Portmann) but shared structures of time-constitution through organic signs. The "animal stratum" (Toadvine) is generative of the present through passive temporal syntheses. MP's shift from "vertical transcendence" (early works) to "lateral" relation (Nature Lectures) parallels Deleuze's non-teleological emergence: "a becoming-animal of the human that is a becoming-human of the animal" (Toadvine 2024). See multilateral-emergence
is empirically grounded in Adolf Portmann's biology of animal display — the November 1960 working note
contrasts with the Darwinian and biological species-concepts — which treat species as extrinsic (common descent, interbreeding capacity); interanimality is intrinsic to the structure of flesh

Open Questions

Is interanimality the species-level form of intercorporeity, or is intercorporeity the human form of interanimality? The working notes permit both readings
How far does interanimality extend? To plants? To non-living bodies (a stone, a river, a planet)? The flesh vocabulary suggests no in-principle limit but MP never commits
Does interanimality require shared perceptual modalities (vision, touch), or can it hold across organisms with radically different sensoria (echolocation, electroreception, plant signaling)?
What is the relation between interanimality and the phenomenology of animal experience more broadly (von Uexküll's Umwelt, which MP knew; Merleau-Ponty's earlier The Structure of Behavior)?
Does interanimality ground an ethics of non-human life? MP did not address this; Levinas would argue it cannot, because it remains within "the same"
See also: MP's relation to Ruyer's finalism

Synthetic Claims

The synthetic interpretive layer (wiki/claims.md) names this page as a Wiki home for the following supported claim. Supported claims may be cited as stable synthetic claims without provisional framing per CLAUDE.md §Claims Register Format.

supported claim, see claims#sb-1942-kinetic-melody-origin — the kinetic-melody / melody-as-form-of-the-whole register, currently treated by the wiki's melody HUB as PoP-and-after, is established at full HUB weight in SB 1942 (Ch I raw 402–404 piano-melody; Ch II raw 982–984, 1144 kinetic-melody-of-behavior; Ch III raw 1528 Uexküll's "every organism is a melody which sings itself"). The genealogical re-attribution shifts the corpus melody HUB origin point by three years and materially affects the genealogy of interanimality, grounding the species-as-shared-melody register through MP's own 1942 vocabulary.

Sources

merleau-ponty-2003-nature — Primary text. Course 2 (1957–58), Ch. 2 §B.2 (Portmann's Study of Animal Appearance), pp. 185–186: the canonical formulation "What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality... life is a power to invent the visible." This is the full underlying text of which the course summary in merleau-ponty-1970-in-praise-of-philosophy is the compressed public version. The 1959 working notes in merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible are reminders of what this course worked out at length
merleau-ponty-1970-in-praise-of-philosophy — Course 9 ("The Concept of Nature II: Animality, the Human Body, Transition to Culture", 1957-58), pp. 168-171: the public course summary that MP himself prepared; key passage (p. 170): "The transcendence of one by the other is, so to speak, lateral rather than frontal"
merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — February 1959 working note "Reduction—the true transcendental—the Rätsel Erscheinungsweise—world": the compressed formula "The notion of species = notion of interanimality." November 1960 working note "Telepathy—Being for the other—Corporeity": the "halo of visibility" around each part of the body. Ch 4, pp. 141-143 (the main intercorporeity passage) is the published text to which the working-note concept of interanimality should be read as a generalization.
decarie-daigneault-2025-anonymous-temporality — adds the temporal-constitutive dimension: the "animal stratum" is not only shared visibility but shared time-constitution through organic signs. Develops the shift from "vertical transcendence" (early MP) to "lateral" relation (later MP) via Toadvine's The Memory of the World (2024) and its Deleuzian reading
merleau-ponty-1942-structure-of-behavior — the 1942 origin site of MP's kinetic-melody / melody-as-form-of-the-whole register: Ch I raw 402–404 (piano-melody as MP's earliest philosophical use); Ch II raw 982–984, 1144 (kinetic-melody-of-behavior register; "any change in the end of the melody qualitatively modifies its beginning and the physiognomy of the whole"); Ch III raw 1528 (Uexküll's "every organism is a melody which sings itself" — the corpus locus classicus). The 1942 anchor of the species-as-shared-melody register that interanimality articulates ontologically. See claims#sb-1942-kinetic-melody-origin (supported).