What changes if flesh is already Marxist (1844 Manuscripts) rather than invented in V&I?

The decisive fact, flagged on flesh-as-element: in Course 3 of *The Possibility of Philosophy* (lines 1858–1894), Merleau-Ponty reads Marx's 1844 Manuscripts and arrives at the formulation "history is, in this sense, the very flesh of humanity" (line 1872). The metaphor is found in Marx, not invented for V&I. This shifts how the flesh should be read in three ways: it adds a Marxist source to the known Bachelardian/Husserlian/Schellingian lineage; it makes the flesh historically-genetic at its origin rather than a static elemental structure later applied to history; and it reframes the relation between the late ontology and Course 3's critique of Hegel-and-Marx as two sides of one project rather than two unrelated late interests.

The Three Changes

1. The Sources of the Flesh Are Four, Not Three

The standard genealogy names three sources: Bachelard (the elemental register — water, material imagination), Husserl (Leiblichkeit, the lived body, intentional inhering), and Schelling (Naturphilosophie, the non-objective depth of nature). Course 3 adds a fourth: Marx, via the 1844 Manuscripts. Line 1872's "flesh of humanity" is not MP inventing a metaphor as he reads Marx; it is MP finding the metaphor already at work in Marx's text as he glosses it.

What the Marxist source supplies that the others do not: a historical-genetic register. Bachelard gives the flesh its poetic and elemental dimension but Bachelard's elements are not historical. Husserl gives the flesh its phenomenological lineage but Husserl's Leib is not a mediator of history. Schelling gives the flesh its non-objective depth but Schelling's Nature is a-historical at its root. Marx supplies what the others miss: the flesh as the form through which nature, humanity, and history pass into one another.

This is not a deflation of the other sources. It is a reintegration: the flesh's four sources correspond roughly to its four dimensions — the elemental (Bachelard), the lived body (Husserl), the natural depth (Schelling), and the historical mediation (Marx).

2. The Flesh Is Historical-Genetic At Origin

A claim worth stating sharply: if the flesh metaphor is found in Marx's account of nature-humanity-history as a "single Being where negativity is at work" (MP's gloss of the 1844 Manuscripts, lines 1864–1872), then the flesh is already the form of a passage when MP first lays hands on it. It is not a static ontological structure that MP later applies to history. It is the form in which nature becomes history, labor becomes world, and the species-being realizes itself — and MP extracts it from that historical-genetic context and generalizes it.

The usual reading has this order reversed: flesh is an ontology of perception articulated in V&I, and Course 3's Marx commentary happens to use a cognate metaphor. The textual evidence suggests the opposite order: the metaphor enters MP's vocabulary through Marx, carrying its historical-genetic character with it. The V&I development then extends the metaphor into the perceptual register, not the other way around.

Consequence: the three modes of flesh (body / world / element) cannot be read as ahistorical registers even in their perceptual form. The flesh of the body is the flesh of a historical animal; the flesh of the world is the flesh of a world that has undergone Stiftung and sedimentation; the flesh as element is "what makes the fact be a fact" — where fact is always historically constituted. The historical register that Course 3 treats explicitly is not a separate domain but the deepest register of the same flesh.

3. The Late Ontology and the Hegel/Marx Course Are One Project

This is where the Marxist source connects to the seinsgeschichte disagreement and the 1959→1961 reversal. On the standard reading, V&I and Course 3 are two late interests — the former ontological, the latter historical-philosophical — that MP was pursuing in parallel without a clear integration. The flesh-in-Marx finding suggests these are the same project seen from two sides:

  • V&I is the articulation of the flesh in the perceptual register: body, world, reversibility, chiasm, anonymous visibility.
  • Course 3 is the articulation of the flesh in the historical register: Hegel's false positivism, Marx's correct descent into the "flesh of the world," and the shape of the present that this descent leaves us with.

What connects them is not a metaphor used in two places; it is a single concept — the flesh — whose structure is both perceptual and historical because the flesh is the form of any passage in which the perceived and the historical can be distinguished at all. The "element" that is "midway between the individual and the idea" (V&I Ch 4, p. 139–140) is also the element that is midway between nature and history.

This matters for how one reads the unfinished state of both projects. V&I breaks off in Ch 4; Course 3 ends before the Heidegger sections. If they are one project, the missing parts are complementary: Course 3 would have supplied the historical genealogy of the flesh that V&I takes as starting point, and V&I would have supplied the perceptual-ontological structure that Course 3's historical genealogy culminates in. Neither is complete without the other, and their joint incompleteness is tighter than their separate incompletenesses.

What It Does Not Change

Three things the Marxist source does not change, worth stating to avoid overclaiming:

  • It does not make MP a Marxist. MP reads Marx as right against Hegel's false positivism but wrong about positive humanism. The "flesh of humanity" formulation belongs to the Marx MP accepts, but MP rejects the closure Marx gives it. The flesh in V&I is not a humanist concept — it explicitly decenters the human (see interanimality, flesh-as-element §3-modes).
  • It does not reduce the flesh to history. The perceptual register is not collapsed into the historical. What the Marxist source changes is how the perceptual register is related to the historical one, not whether the perceptual register is philosophically prior.
  • It does not displace Bachelard or Schelling as decisive influences. The aquatic and Naturphilosophie registers of the flesh (worked out in aquatic-ontology, natural-symbolism, barbarian-principle) remain intact. The Marxist source is additive, not substitutive.

Open Questions

  • How far back in MP's corpus can the "flesh" metaphor, in the historical-genetic sense, be traced? Is it already present in the Marxism essays of the 1940s and 1950s (Humanism and Terror, Adventures of the Dialectic)?
  • Does the Marxist source commit MP to a form of historicality that is closer to Hegel than the seinsgeschichte disagreement with Heidegger would suggest?
  • The 1844 Manuscripts were published in 1932 and became widely discussed in French Marxism in the 1950s (Hyppolite, Althusser). Where does MP stand in that reception history, and does his use of the "flesh" passage belong to a distinctive reading?
  • Is there a tension between the Marxist source (which would ground the flesh in labor and species-being) and the non-anthropocentric reach suggested by interanimality and flesh-as-element §3-modes (which extend the flesh beyond the human)?

See Also