Is Constitutive Non-Coincidence the Meta-Structure of MP's Philosophy?

The Pattern

At least six central structures in the wiki share the same formal feature — an essential, productive failure to coincide:

Concept Formula Register
reversibility "always imminent and never realized in fact" (V&I Ch 4, p. 147) Perception/ontology
institution "one does not change and never remains the same" (I&P 21) Personal/public history
perceptual-faith Pre-predicative certitude that never becomes apodictic Epistemology
hyper-dialectic "does not realize the synthesis, not even in the future" (V&I Ch 2, p. 95) Method
interrogation A question that never arrives at a definitive answer Philosophy
ecart Divergence as the positive structure of any contact with Being Ontology

In each case: (a) full coincidence is structurally impossible; (b) this non-coincidence is not a defect but the positive condition for the structure's operation; (c) the attempt to overcome the non-coincidence destroys the structure (coincidence in perception = death of consciousness; synthesis in dialectic = bad dialectic; apodictic certainty = philosophy of reflection).

The Question

Is there a single meta-concept — call it constitutive non-coincidence — that governs all six? If so:

  • Would it deserve its own concept page, or is it merely a description of what the six share?
  • Is it Merleau-Ponty's own concept (he uses non-coïncidence in the working notes), or the wiki maintainer's retrospective abstraction?
  • Does it have a Nietzschean parallel? Chouraqui's reading of Nietzsche converges on "becoming and being merge into eternal recurrence only as an approximation" — the same asymptotic, never-realized structure. asymptotic-intentionality already names this for the Nietzsche side. Is constitutive non-coincidence the Merleau-Pontian form of asymptotic intentionality?

What It Would Change

If constitutive non-coincidence is tracked as a meta-structure:

  1. The wiki's typed connections would gain a new axis: every concept exhibiting the pattern links to every other not just topically but formally.
  2. The distinction between concepts that exhibit the pattern (reversibility, institution) and concepts that name the pattern (écart, flesh) would become sharper.
  3. The developmental question becomes: did MP always think this way (PhP's "impossibility of a complete reduction" is already the pattern), or does the pattern emerge only in the late ontology?

Against

  • The abstraction may be too thin. Saying "six concepts share a formal feature" is not the same as showing they are instances of a single concept. Reversibility's non-coincidence (touching/touched) and institution's non-coincidence (subject/past) may be analogous without being identical.
  • MP himself may not have wanted a meta-concept. The late ontology's method is to describe structural features in their concreteness, not to abstract them into higher-order categories. A meta-concept of "constitutive non-coincidence" risks the very overflying (survol) that MP opposes.

Sources