Intercorporeity

Merleau-Ponty's name (intercorporéité) for the structure that makes the other accessible — not as a foreign for-itself but as another locus of the same reversibility in which I am already caught up. Intercorporeity is reversibility extended beyond the single body. "If my left hand can touch my right hand while it palpates the tangibles, can touch it touching, can turn its palpation back upon it, why, when touching the hand of another, would I not touch in it the same power to espouse the things that I have touched in my own?" (V&I Ch 4, p. 141). It is MP's constructive answer to Sartre's solipsism problem.

Key Points

• "Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is possible within each? Their landscapes interweave, their actions and their passions fit together exactly: this is possible as soon as we no longer make belongingness to one same 'consciousness' the primordial definition of sensibility, and as soon as we rather understand it as the return of the visible upon itself, a carnal adherence of the sentient to the sensed and of the sensed to the sentient" (Ch 4, p. 142)
• "An anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general, in virtue of that primordial property that belongs to the flesh, being here and now, of radiating everywhere and forever, being an individual, of being also a dimension and a universal" (Ch 4, p. 142)
• The handshake is the paradigm: "the handshake too is reversible; I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching"
• Intercorporeity is the reply to Sartre. Sartre had absolutized the medusan look as the structure of the other; MP shows that this is one local form of a more general structure that is not fundamentally adversarial
• It is grounded in the chiasm of the body's own two-handed reversibility — but the move from intracorporeal to intercorporeal reversibility is one of the weakest points in MP's argument (see Open Questions)
• Carries forward an early concept of interanimality: "The notion of species = notion of interanimality" (February 1959 working note)
• The 1956–57 Husserlian source: MP's strongest early formulation of intercorporeity appears in Course 1 of the *Nature* courses (1956–57), pp. 76–77, reading Husserl's Ideas II on Einfühlung: "Einfühlung is a corporeal operation. The hand of the other that I shake is to be understood on the mode of the touching-touched hand... I do not project on the body of the other an 'I think,' but I apperceive the body as perceiving before apperceiving it as thinking... There is intercorporeity such that even God can become an instance only on the condition of being taken up in the tissue of carnal things." The last sentence is striking: intercorporeity is so fundamental that a divine instance must enter it to count as a locus for anything at all. This is MP's strongest anti-spectator-theological claim about intercorporeity: not "God is included alongside others" but "God cannot be anywhere for us except by becoming carnal." Course 3 (p. 241) supplements this with the transcendental reading of intercorporeity as the framework of desire: "Desire considered from the transcendental point of view = common framework of my world as carnal and of the world of the other. They all end up at one sole Einfühlung"

Details

From Single Body to Multiple Bodies

The argument structure of Ch 4 (pp. 141-143) proceeds in three steps:

1. Within my own body, there is reversibility: my left hand touches my right hand touching the things. The two hands belong to "one same body" and have a "very peculiar relation" that is not the relation between two consciousnesses.
2. The unity of my body is not the unity of "one sole consciousness" — it is the synergy of the body's parts via reversibility. "My synergic body is not an object, it assembles into a cluster the 'consciousnesses' adherent to its hands, to its eyes, by an operation that is in relation to them lateral, transversal."
3. Therefore: if synergy is possible within one body via reversibility, why not between bodies? "Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is possible within each?"

The move from (1) to (3) is the constructive answer to the problem of the other. MP rejects the Sartrean alternative ("we are two for-itselves staring at each other across the abyss of nothingness") in favor of an intercorporeal structure where I and the other are both loci of the same flesh's reversibility.

"The handshake too is reversible; I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching, and surely there does not exist some huge animal whose organs our bodies would be, as, for each of our bodies, our hands, our eyes are the organs. Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is possible within each? Their landscapes interweave, their actions and their passions fit together exactly: this is possible as soon as we no longer make belongingness to one same 'consciousness' the primordial definition of sensibility, and as soon as we rather understand it as the return of the visible upon itself, a carnal adherence of the sentient to the sensed and of the sensed to the sentient." (Ch 4, p. 142)

The Anonymous Visibility

The key conceptual innovation: there is "an anonymous visibility" that "inhabits both of us." This is not a common consciousness (which would be a return to a transcendental subject) and not a species in the biological sense (which would be a third-person abstraction). It is the flesh as a "general thing" that any individual exemplifies — a "vision in general" that is realized in particular acts of seeing but is not exhausted by them.

"It is said that the colors, the tactile reliefs given to the other, are for me an absolute mystery, forever inaccessible. This is not completely true; for me to have not an idea, an image, nor a representation, but as it were the imminent experience of them, it suffices that I look at a landscape, that I speak of it with someone. Then, through the concordant operation of his body and my own, what I see passes into him, this individual green of the meadow under my eyes invades his vision without quitting my own, I recognize in my green his green, as the customs officer recognizes suddenly in a traveler the man whose description he had been given. There is here no problem of the alter ego because it is not I who sees, not he who sees, because an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general, in virtue of that primordial property that belongs to the flesh, being here and now, of radiating everywhere and forever, being an individual, of being also a dimension and a universal." (Ch 4, p. 142)

The "individual green of the meadow" is the same green for me and for the other not because we both have a private green that happens to match, but because the green is "of the world" in such a way that to see it at all is to see the green that is visible from any embodied position.

MP's Reply to Sartre

The central polemic of Ch 2 was that Sartre had absolutized the medusan, petrifying look — the look of shame, of objectification — as the canonical form of the relation with the other. MP's reply was that this is "but one empirical variant" of the relation, the "ambivalent or labile relationship" that is the "particular case" rather than the structure (Ch 2, p. 81).

Intercorporeity is the positive version of that critique. The other is not the foreign gaze that freezes me; the other is "another body" whose "landscape interweaves" with mine. The November 1960 working note "The other" makes this most explicit:

"The other is no longer so much a freedom seen from without as destiny and fatality, a rival subject for a subject, but he is caught up in a circuit that connects him to the world, as we ourselves are, and consequently also in a circuit that connects him to us—And this world is common to us, is intermundane space—And there is transitivism by way of generality... the other is a relief as I am, not absolute vertical existence." (Nov 1960 working note)

The other is "a relief," not an absolute. He is one differentiation of the same flesh, one "opening" or "cavern" (in the November 16, 1960 note) onto the same world — not a foreign world that I have to bridge or be alienated from.

The "Hinge" as Precursor (May 1959)

Before the fully articulated reversibility doctrine of Chapter 4, the May 1959 working notes already describe the body's double belonging that makes intercorporeity possible — under the figure of the "hinge." A woman in the street "feeling that they are looking at her breast, and checking her clothing" operates through her corporeal schema as visible for others: "Her corporeal schema is for itself—for the other—It is the hinge of the for itself and the for the other" (May 1959). The "hinge" is the body's double inscription — the fact that the lived body is always already a visible body, hence always already open to the other's gaze. This is the structural precursor of intercorporeity: the same structure that Chapter 4 will articulate through reversibility and flesh is already at work here in the prereflective adjustments of the body-as-visible.

Co-functioning: The November 1959 Formulation

A full year before Chapter 4, the November 1, 1959 working note gives the intercorporeal structure its most direct formulation: "Chiasm, instead of the For the Other: that means that there is not only a me-other rivalry, but a co-functioning. We function as one unique body" (November 1, 1959). This "co-functioning" formula is important because it goes beyond the negative claim (intercorporeity is not fusion, not projection, not constitution) to a positive structural description: the bodies function together. The chiasm at this point is already a triple structure — "not only a me-other exchange... it is also an exchange between me and the world, between the phenomenal body and the 'objective' body, between the perceiving and the perceived" — and intercorporeity is one dimension of this triple exchange.

Interanimality

The February 1959 working note introduces a striking generalization: "The notion of species = notion of interanimality." Animals of the same species share a flesh in the way that two humans do, and the difference between interspecies and intraspecies relations is not the absolute difference anthropocentric philosophy assumes. The concept has its own page — see interanimality — which collects the working notes and the Portmann reading on the intrinsic visibility of the animal body.

Reversibility "Through Another Eye"

A November 1960 working note develops this as a structural claim about vision:

"As soon as we see other seers, we no longer have before us only the look without a pupil, the plate glass of the things with that feeble reflection, that phantom of ourselves they evoke by designating a place among themselves whence we see them: henceforth, through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible; that lacuna where our eyes, our back, lie is filled, filled still by the visible, of which we are not the titulators." (Ch 4, p. 143)

This is intercorporeity in its fullest form: through the other's eyes, I become visible to myself. The blind spots of my own visibility (my back, the lacuna where my eyes are) are filled in by the other's vision — and this is not a reconstruction or an inference but a structural feature of being a body in a world that contains other bodies.

Connections

• is the extension of reversibility — intercorporeity is reversibility beyond the single body
• is grounded in chiasm — the chiasm of the body's two hands is the model for the chiasm between bodies
• is the medium of flesh — flesh is "anonymous visibility" that inhabits multiple bodies
• is the constructive reply to Sartre's problem of the other — the other is not a foreign for-itself but another locus of the same flesh
• is the same as ineinander — applied to the body-other relation
• generalizes via interanimality (February 1959 note) — to relations between species, not only between humans
• contrasts with the Husserlian Fremderfahrung analysis — Husserl's analysis is intentional and cognitive; intercorporeity is carnal and pre-intentional
• contrasts with the Sartrean look — the look is one local variant of intercorporeity, not its canonical form
• contrasts with "empathy" or "perspective-taking" — both presuppose two consciousnesses that must be bridged; intercorporeity rejects this starting point

Open Questions

• The transition from intracorporeal to intercorporeal reversibility is the weakest point of MP's argument. The "very peculiar relation" between my two hands is precisely what I do not have with the other person's hand — they belong to one body that I never see in mirror-form, while the other's hand belongs to a body whose interior I never have. MP himself notices this question and his answer essentially generalizes the structure rather than deriving it. Whether this generalization is earned or merely asserted is contested.
• How does intercorporeity relate to language and speech-acts? The November 1960 "Speech does indeed have to enter the child as silence" note suggests language is a register of intercorporeity but the connection is not developed
• Does intercorporeity have ethical implications? Levinas would say it cannot ground ethics because it remains within the order of the same. MP did not address this
• How far does interanimality extend? To plants? To non-living "bodies" (a stone, a planet)? MP's flesh-as-element vocabulary suggests no in-principle limit, but the working notes leave this open
• Is intercorporeity the structure of all intersubjectivity, or only of perceptual encounters?

Cultural Objects Falling onto the Common Ground of Perception (Heinbokel 2021)

Heinbokel 2021 develops a feature of intercorporeity the wiki page treats lightly: the participation of cultural objects in intercorporeal intersubjectivity, and specifically the participation of artefacts of sedimented human action — including scientific case reports, lab results, tissue samples, and diagnostic imaging.

The argument is reconstructive of PhP Part Two Ch IV. Behavior "descends into nature and is deposited there in the form of a cultural world" (PhP 363); the very first cultural object is the other's body as bearer of behavior (PhP 364); "as soon as existence gathers itself together and engages in a behavior, it inevitably 'appears to perception [elle tombe sous la perception]'" (PhP 378). The "common world where 'everything resides'" (PhP 204) admits sedimented action as one of its registers. Heinbokel's distinctive synthetic remark (Conclusions raw line 85): "This begins with the banal examples of a blood-stained shirt or an unused walking cane, but continues with lab results, case reports, even tissue samples and diagnostic imaging, all of which we can classify as artefacts of sedimented human action."

The implication: scientific writings — neuropsychological case reports in particular — are not external interruptions of intercorporeal intersubjectivity but artefacts that participate in it, falling onto the common ground of perception "through the crease of speech" (Heinbokel Conclusions raw line 124). This grounds Heinbokel's broader case-report-as-coherent-deformation argument (see science-as-coherent-deformation and schneider-case §"Schneider as Methodological-Epistemic Exhibit (Heinbokel 2021)").

The page's late-ontology development of intercorporeity (V&I Ch 4; Nature courses 1956–57) does not itself thematise this register; Heinbokel's reading is PhP-internal and complementary, working PhP Part Two Chs IV–VI rather than the late-ontology vocabulary.

Sources

• merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — Ch 4, p. 141-143: the canonical development through the handshake and the "anonymous visibility." Working notes: February 1959 ("interanimality"); November 1960 "The other"; November 1960 "Telepathy—Being for the other—Corporeity"; November 16, 1960 "Chiasm—Reversibility" (the "two caverns, two opennesses" passage as the structural form of intercorporeity).
• heinbokel-2021-johann-to-maurice — develops the cultural-objects register of intercorporeity from PhP Part Two Ch IV (PhP 363, 364, 367, 368, 369, 370, 378). The case-report-as-cultural-artefact synthesis at Conclusions raw line 85 and the "crease of speech" image at Conclusions raw line 124. See §"Cultural Objects Falling onto the Common Ground of Perception (Heinbokel 2021)" above.