Metaphoricity

A term developed by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert (*Poetic of the World*, Ch 5) to name the carnal-ontological capacity for analogy that grounds all linguistic metaphor in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. Metaphor is not a semantic transfer between pre-established domains but the body's own analogical power — the body schema's "system of equivalences" through which the foot of a mountain and the foot of a chair share a structural relation because the body knows what footing is. "In the world of the flesh, metaphors become 'metamorphoses,' and transference becomes 'transubstantiation.'"

Key Points

• Metaphor is carnal, not linguistic: The body generates metaphoricity through its fundamental analogicity. The Schneider case demonstrates this negatively: without an intact body schema, the patient cannot grasp analogies like "foot of the chair" because the body's system of equivalences is disrupted.
• Threefold structure: De Saint Aubert identifies anthropological (body schema), phenomenological (perceptual logic of ecart), and ontological (figuratives, analogy of being) registers of metaphoricity. Each folds back into the others.
• "Figuratives" (les figuratifs): Shadow, depth, lighting, contour, reflection — dimensions that make things visible without being visible things. "Neither objective beings nor nonbeings, neither something nor nothing." From MP's unpublished notes (autumn 1960): "BEING and WORLD (= in-visible and visible). Shadow as model of true negation. Not the nothingness of corporeity, but its other side. A figurative. Language is full of them."
• Incorporeals: The "other side" of corporeality — what sustains the visible and renders it visible. "Not spiritualism, but a philosophy of the flesh and the incorporeal as two sides of the same Being." The body needs incorporeals to be opened to metaphoricity.
• Against Cartesian perspectivism: Cartesian optics erases figuratives by reducing vision to geometry. MP's metaphoricity restores "the oneiric world of analogy" that Descartes abandoned.
• "There is no metaphor between the visible and the invisible" (V&I working note): This seeming denial of metaphor is actually its deepest affirmation — visible and invisible are not analogous (which would presuppose their separateness) but are co-nascent; their relation is not transport but pregnancy.

Details

The Body Schema as Operator of Metaphoricity

De Saint Aubert traces metaphoricity back to the body schema's pre-linguistic system of equivalences. The body "knows" a foot (its own standing, walking, grounding) before it encounters "the foot of the chair" — and this corporeal knowledge is what makes the metaphor possible, not a semantic rule. Metaphoricity is thus older than language and irreducible to it. The key evidence is pathological: Schneider's inability to grasp analogies follows from his disrupted body schema, confirming that the body is the operator of metaphorical transfer.

Figuratives: The Prelinguistic Matrices of Visibility

The most original contribution of the chapter. De Saint Aubert draws on unpublished manuscripts (autumn 1960, Being and World drafts) to introduce MP's concept of les figuratifs — shadow, depth, lighting, reflection, contour. These are not objects or properties of objects but conditions of visibility. Shadow is "the model of true negation" — not absence but the invisible that renders the visible visible. Depth is "the most 'existential' of all the dimensions" because it cannot be reduced to a relation between objects but is the dimensional structure of the perceptual field itself.

MP writes: "Against this Leibnizian God, emphasize the hidden God and his 'figuratives.'" The figuratives are what the Cartesian ontology suppresses — the dimensional, non-objectifiable conditions that make vision (and therefore metaphor) possible.

From Metaphor to Metamorphosis

In the register of the flesh, the semantic gap between literal and figurative collapses. Metaphor becomes metamorphosis — an effective transformation, not a comparison between stable terms. "Transference becomes 'transubstantiation'": the body that sees blue becomes blue (as PhP says, "I deliver over a part of my body, or even my entire body, to this manner of vibrating and of filling space named 'blue'"). This is why MP says there is "no metaphor between the visible and the invisible" — because the relationship is not analogical distance but co-naissance, co-birth.

Connections

• is grounded in the body schema — the pre-linguistic system of corporeal equivalences
• extends primordial-expression — every use of the body is already expression, and every expression is already metaphorical
• has as its prelinguistic condition figuratives (les figuratifs) — the dimensional conditions of visibility
• operates through ecart — metaphoricity requires the divergence that prevents the sensible from collapsing into identity
• is distinguished from standard rhetoric — metaphor as figure of speech presupposes the carnal metaphoricity that grounds it
• enriches indirect-language — if all language is indirect and allusive, this is because it inherits the body's analogical indirection
• culminates in sensible-ideas — ideas that appear through the sensible, on "clouded surfaces," are the product of metaphoricity

E&C II Ch VII: expanded treatment

Saint Aubert's 2021 volume chapter on Métaphoricité expands the 2020 Fordham treatment (marked as "un texte à la structure analogue mais au contenu différent"). The chapter's Introduction frames metaphoricity as a "poétique de la chair" in three registers: (a) poétique du mystère — mystery is not primarily what is hidden but what expresses itself; (b) poétique du visible dans son rapport à l'invisible — latent as infrastructure and matrix of manifest; (c) poétique de la naissance et de la co-naissance — articulating desire, foi perceptive, and portance.

MP's écriture enacts metaphoricity: the choice of figures drawn from French mother tongue — chair, empiétement, promiscuité — is itself philosophically committed. These words "préservent et cultivent en connaissance de cause leur dynamique sensori-motrice, leur dimension érotique, leur traîne de sens moral ou politique, leurs échos psychologiques et spirituels". Metaphoricity is not an ornament of the argument but the argument's mode of proceeding.

Heidegger's critique reframed

Saint Aubert engages Heidegger's Der Satz vom Grund (1957, tr. 1962): "Le métaphorique n'existe qu'à l'intérieur des frontières de la métaphysique". Heidegger rejects the sensible/non-sensible split as metaphysical; the standard metaphor concept dies with that split. Saint Aubert's reading: Heidegger's critique is valid, but Heidegger remains at the level of being-and-speech, whereas MP descends to being-and-flesh. MP's metaphoricity thus does not belong to the metaphysical tradition Heidegger targets — it reinstates the sensible ontologically, and so reinvents metaphor from below.

Against Perelman's "condensed analogy"

Perelman (1958): metaphor as condensed analogy. Saint Aubert (via MP): "intelligent et trompeur". The analogical pattern (A:B::C:D) is a retrospective explanation; metaphoricity is prospective, accompanying the emergence of sense at the level of the body's system of equivalences. The body "knows" grésil before it represents the word (PhP 461-462): the mot is "happé et assumé par une puissance parlante", not "inspecté, analysé, connu, constitué".

Metaphor as fruit of co-naissance

Saint Aubert's final formulation: metaphor is the fruit of co-naissance — the co-birth of flesh and being. "On ne pense pas sans le corps transfiguré par l'être — sans la chair" (MSME 162). If chair is the transfigured body, the body is in turn what transfigures being. Metaphor is the cristallisation of this mutual transfiguration, the épreuve mutuelle at the level of sense.

The four technical concepts of metaphoricity (Ch VII § 2, re-ingest 2026-04-23)

Saint Aubert's Ch VII § 2 identifies FOUR technical concepts that structure MP's metaphoricity-of-the-flesh (the re-ingest second pass brought these to full articulation):

1. Ambiguïté (vs ambivalence) — Ch VII § 2a. The sortie from monocular alternation via binocular depth. Metaphor is the mature intelligence that holds figure AND fond together. See ambiguity-vs-ambivalence.

2. Réversibilité des dimensions — Ch VII § 2b. NOT Piaget's logical reversibility, NOT (or not only) the sensing-sensed reversibility of VI4, but the carnal reversibility of dimensions (profondeur, horizon, spatialité-temporalité). OE p. 65. This grounds metaphor's ubiquité et simultanéité virtuelles. See reversibility.

3. Écart / diacritique — Ch VII § 2c. MSME 1953's diacritical perception extended to language via Saussure. Metaphor operates by four-term relation (latence sensible × différence de sens). See ecart.

4. Latent-manifeste pris à la lettre — Ch VII § 2d. N-Corps 88, mars 1960: "Le contenu latent, c'est le contenu manifeste pris à la lettre, pris non comme symbole au sens d'analogie, mais comme identité." The invisible is IN the visible as its "contrepartie secrète" (NT p. 269/[51]), not its symbolic substitute. NT p. 275/[58]: "il n'y a pas de métaphore entre le visible et l'invisible" — metaphor operates at the linguistic register BECAUSE the visible- invisible relation is NON-metaphoric (it's identity, not analogy).

Cardinal formulation — MSME p. 162/128

Saint Aubert elevates this MSME 1953 line to CARDINAL status for the ontology of metaphor:

"On ne pense pas sans le corps transfiguré, porteur des significations, qui est le schéma corporel. (...) l'ordre du Λόγος ne se comprend que comme sublimation de la corporéité."

The body is not just OPERATOR of metaphoricity; the body IS metaphoricity in act (métaphore-phore, borrowing Guillerault 1996). The logos is a sublimation of corporeity — metaphors are how the body comes to speak.

Figuratifs are prior to metaphors

Ch VII § 3a's cardinal specification: metaphors come FROM the figuratifs, not the other way round. EM3 [254]: "Les figuratifs ne sont pas des métaphores : ce sont les métaphores qui viennent d'eux."

This reverses the usual picture: we tend to think metaphors generate figurations. Saint Aubert's claim (via MP): the figuratif-register (fond, ombre, horizon, silence, profondeur) is ontologically PRIOR and it is what makes metaphor possible. Metaphor translates perceptual écart into linguistic écart; but the écart itself is a figuratif structure.

This implies: metaphoricity is not primarily about language at all. It is about the figuratif-mechanism of phenomenality, which only then expresses itself in language. See figuratifs for the full elaboration.

Metaphor as transitional object (Saint Aubert's original Winnicott cross-link)

Ch VII § 1c, p. 278: "La métaphore, telle un objet transitionnel winnicottien, est à la pointe de ses conquêtes sur le dehors, l'inconnu et l'invisible, de sa quête de la profondeur du monde et des corps."

Saint Aubert's own Winnicott-inflected reading: metaphor is a transitional device that makes the raw ultra-chose endurable and creatively workable. Risk: auto-figuration — when figures cease to transition (cease to be hinges-to-an-outside) and become self- referential idols. See hyper-objet for the Winnicott link and idole for the auto-figuration critique.

Open Questions

• How does metaphoricity relate to Derrida's account of metaphor in White Mythology? De Saint Aubert's account is explicitly carnal-ontological where Derrida's is linguistic-deconstructive. Are they complementary or rival accounts?
• Can the concept of figuratives be extended beyond the visual? MP's examples (shadow, depth, lighting) are predominantly visual. What would an auditory or tactile figurative be?
• Does de Saint Aubert's emphasis on the body schema as operator of metaphoricity risk reducing ontological metaphoricity to embodied cognition?
• The 2020 and 2021 treatments differ in emphasis — the 2020 chapter foregrounds figuratifs; the 2021 chapter foregrounds the écriture itself as metaphoric practice. Is this a deepening, or two distinct theses?

Sources

• saintaubert-2021-etre-et-chair-ii — Ch VII (pp. 261-305), the expanded and structure-different treatment. Core claims: metaphor is carnal system of equivalences; body schema grounds metaphoricity via the grésil analysis (PhP 461-462); MP's écriture performs the thesis; against Heidegger's metaphysical-only critique and Perelman's condensed analogy.
• johnson-carbone-saintaubert-2020-poetic-of-the-world — Ch 5 (de Saint Aubert): the primary and most sustained treatment. Develops the threefold structure; introduces figuratives and incorporeals from unpublished manuscripts. Ch 2 also contributes the communion/coupling/vibration/respiration register as instances of carnal metaphoricity.