Onirisme (troisième ordre)

Merleau-Ponty's name for the hybrid ontological register that is neither fully real nor fully imaginary — the "third order" in which perception and imagination intersect. Onirisme is the ontology-of-the-dreamwork that MP develops from 1949 onward as his counter to Sartre's polarized real/imaginary dichotomy (L'Imaginaire, 1940). It underwrites the "texture imaginaire du réel" (OE p. 24) and is the ontological register in which the late MP locates the perceived world.

Key Points

  • Onirisme is a "troisième ordre", not a mixture of real and imaginary. Sorb(SCCE) p. 230: "L'enfant ne vit pas dans le monde à deux pôles de l'adulte éveillé : il habite une zone hybride qui est la zone d'ambiguïté de l'onirisme." Initially developed apropos of the child (Sorbonne 1949-52), extended to the adult in PbPassiv 1955.

  • Perception has an onirique dimension; the dream has a quasi- perceptive dimension. PbPassiv p. 194/[207]v(2): "Il y a donc un onirisme de la veille. Et inversement un caractère quasi perceptif du rêve." The clivage between waking and dreaming is dissolved.

  • "Perçu et imaginaire sont deux modalités de l'être-au-monde" (PbPassiv 132/NP). Both are modes of fleshly engagement, not opposed regimes of presence and absence.

  • RC55 p. 68-69: "La distinction du réel et de l'onirique ne peut être la distinction simple d'une conscience remplie par les sens et d'une conscience rendue à son vide propre. Les deux modalités empiètent l'une sur l'autre. Nos relations de la veille avec les choses et surtout avec les autres ont par principe un caractère onirique."

  • Onirisme and the sleep-body: sleep is not absence from the world but a different mode of fleshly presence. PbPassiv 142/NP: "Dormir n'est ni être au monde réel, présence immédiate au monde, ni ne pas y être et être dans le néant de l'imaginaire. (...) La description de Sartre méconnaît l'état onirique dans ce qu'il a de propre."

  • Cardinal formula: DESC 87 (underlined repeatedly by MP in black then red): "Il faut reconnaître la chair imaginaire de la perception (...) il n'y a de chair qu'imaginaire."

Details

Genesis against Sartre

Sartre's L'Imaginaire (1940) posed two absolute categories: the réel (observable, present in flesh) and the imaginaire (position of absence, pseudo-observation, no flesh). Perception = Erfüllung in flesh; image = "chair intime" but fundamentally non-carnal, pauvre, "l'objet de l'image n'est jamais rien de plus que la conscience qu'on en a" (L'I p. 26-27).

Merleau-Ponty's turn against this position begins in 1946 (Le primat de la perception, p. 99: "on vit dans l'imaginaire aussi"), crystallizes in the Sorbonne 1949-52 with the "third order" formulation, and becomes programmatic in PbPassiv 1955. EM2 [223]v, 16 juin 1959: MP even acknowledges the shift — "j'ai admis dans Phénoménologie de la perception l'ambivalence de l'imaginaire et du réel".

The verbs hanter and tapisser

MP borrows Sartre's own verbs (from L'homme et les choses, 1947, in Situations I) and inverts them. For Sartre, "haunt" and "carpet" name the harassing situations phenomenology should deliver us FROM. For MP, they name our ontological condition: flesh haunts and carpets the world.

  • EM2 [155]v(14), 1959: "Einfühlung avec les choses : elles me tapissent, elles sont moi (...) chair et ma chair."
  • OE-ms 9: "Les autres qui me hantent, que je hante, et avec qui je hante un même monde."
  • VI3 p. 164, novembre 1960: "Notre chair tapisse et même enveloppe toutes les choses visibles et tangibles dont elle est pourtant entourée, le monde et moi sommes l'un dans l'autre."

This gives the topology of the Ineinander — the world of mutual enveloping that is precisely onirique in texture.

Bachelard against Sartre

Bachelard's L'eau et les rêves (1942) provides MP with an alternative to Sartre's imaginaire: imagination not as "faculté de former des images" but as "faculté de déformer les images". MP adopts Bachelard's vocabulary of "éléments" against Sartre's "objets"/"étants":

  • NT p. 320, nov. 1960: "L'être et l'imaginaire sont pour Sartre des 'objets', des 'étants' — Pour moi ils sont des 'éléments' (au sens de Bachelard)."
  • NTi-58 [330]v, déc. 1959: "Il y a d'autres choses cachées dans toutes les choses, il y a une imagination des éléments, il y a une perception onirique, Bachelard."

The perception-of-éléments is onirique-in-principle because elements (like water, air, earth, fire) are not objects but figuratifs — hence the explicit connection between onirisme (Ch II) and figuratifs (Ch VII).

Against the analogon

The analogon in Sartre (and, Saint Aubert argues, in Husserl's Krisis supplement on biology) is a conceptual device that preserves the purity of consciousness by interposing a "representative" between conscious and absent object. MP critiques this from PbPassiv 1955 onward — OE and the OE-ms texts attack the analogon as intellectualist construction. MP's alternative: the analogie est "selon le corps" (OE p. 40-41); the "monde onirique de l'analogie" (OE p. 24) is not a substitute for perception but the dimension in which perception OCCURS.

Grain, foi, imaginaire

In onirisme, the grain of the sensible operates not as verification-threshold but as promesse. PbPassiv 153/NP: "Le moindre craquement réel est différent en nature d'un bruit imaginaire — Mais différent avant toute observation: c'est le grain même du bruit qui permet de le dire 'réel'." We do not verify, we ADHERE — this is the distinction between foi and croyance. Onirisme is the ontological register within which perceptual faith operates at all.

Relation to unconscious

Onirisme and the inconscient d'état are structurally linked. Both are modalities of carnal being-in-the-world that escape the conscience/neant binary. EM3 [247]v(32): "la perception est le véritable inconscient" — because the perceived world is onirique, its structure cannot be captured by consciousness but only by the desire-animated schema corporel.

Positions

  • saintaubert-2021-etre-et-chair-ii (Ch II § 2) treats onirisme as MP's cardinal anti-Sartre concept. Saint Aubert argues that the full weight of this concept was not adequately developed by MP's earlier interpreters — including Saint Aubert himself in Du lien des êtres (2004). The 2021 re-reading elevates it.
  • Standard readings (Madison, Barbaras) have preferred "texture imaginaire du réel" (the OE 1961 formulation) over "onirisme" (the 1955 formulation) because the later formula is more palatable. Saint Aubert shows these are the same position.
  • carbone-2015-flesh-of-images reads MP's late analogie as "ressemblance efficace" of the cinematic image, which is onirique-in-structure (the screen as carpet of visibility).

Connections

  • replaces Sartre's real/imaginary dichotomy (L'Imaginaire 1940) by the third-order.
  • draws on Bachelard's imagination of éléments.
  • operates within the figuratifs — the fond/ombre/ silence in which onirisme becomes possible.
  • anchors perceptual-faith — onirisme is the register of foi.
  • anchors the chair du sensible — DESC 87: "il n'y a de chair qu'imaginaire" makes the chair-of-the-sensible essentially onirique.
  • is a structural parallel to inconscient-primordial — both are modes of carnal-world-engagement that escape the binary conscience/rien.
  • resonates with flesh-as-element — Bachelard's éléments are onirique-éléments, not objets.
  • underpins metaphoricity — all metaphor operates on the onirique hinge between sens figuré and sens propre.

Open Questions

  • Does onirisme coincide with the Freudian dream-work, or is it structurally distinct? MP distinguishes his onirisme from Freud's dream (pre-linguistic carnal vs. language-structured), but the overlap merits further exploration.
  • Is onirisme properly called an "ontology"? The term designates a mode of being-in-the-world; the word "ontology" applies to the being of this mode, which MP names figuratif.
  • How does the onirique of adult relations (RC55 p. 68-69) function ethically? Saint Aubert hints at but does not develop this.

Sources

  • saintaubert-2021-etre-et-chair-ii — Ch II § 2 "L'être onirique" (p. 95-103), with supplementary anchoring in Ch II §§ 3-4.
  • saintaubert-2023-etre-et-chair — I.1.b (p. 8) on the onirisme de la chair as cultural-existential register: "L'onirisme de la chair assume à la fois le rêve du lien et le cauchemar de sa rupture, dans une tension qui n'est ni morale, ni anthropologiquement dualiste, mais existentielle". Public-facing anchor for the dialectical reading of the dream-register of flesh.
  • merleau-ponty-1961-eye-and-mind — OE p. 24 (texture imaginaire du réel), OE p. 40-41 (monde onirique de l'analogie), OE p. 74 (painting rend visible).
  • Primary archival refs via Saint Aubert: Sorb(SCCE) p. 224-235; PbPassiv 1955 (especially p. 163-168, 193-194, 142/NP, 155/NP); RC55 p. 68-69; EM2 [223]v; DESC 87; NT p. 298, 320; NTi-58 [330]v; NTi [356]; EM2 160, [173]v(16).
  • Secondary: Bachelard, L'air et les songes (1943); L'eau et les rêves (1942). Frenkel-Brunswik 1949 (on intolerance of ambiguity, for the psychological background).