Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy

Author(s): Emmanuel Alloa, Frank Chouraqui, Rajiv Kaushik (eds.) Year: 2019 Type: Edited volume (14 essays + epilogue), SUNY Press

A multi-author volume arguing that Merleau-Ponty's work reinvigorates contemporary philosophy across ontology, politics, aesthetics, philosophy of nature, and institutional theory. The editors' central thesis is that MP ventures into Husserl's "abyss of sense" between consciousness and reality, and that this move — far from being dated — anticipates and exceeds three standard criticisms of phenomenology (materiality, idealism, mere description). The volume's dominant motif is institution (Stiftung), which nearly every essay extends into new domains: law, power, habit, biosemiotics, museum critique, self-constitution. A secondary structural thread is the relationship between the visible and the excluded/invisible — manifest in politics (Ahmed on whiteness, Chouraqui on the tacit), aesthetics (Fóti on strong beauty, Kaushik on voyance), and ontology (Barbaras on the three senses of flesh).

Core Arguments

  1. Claim: Flesh has three senses — ontic, ontological, transcendental — and MP's univocal concept is internally inconsistent. Because: The direct move from corps propre to "flesh of the world" illegitimately presupposes spatial continuity; flesh should be thought as world (non-being totality), not of the world. The transcendental sense is desire — the only mode of phenomenalization whose reach matches the world's withdrawal. Against: MP's single concept of flesh; Michel Henry's transcendental flesh (lacks relation to externality). (Barbaras, ch. 1)

  2. Claim: Perceptual faith is the unity of recognition and institution, and this structure IS the structure of power. Being is power. Because: Intra-ontology must account for philosophy's place in its own world. "Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it" (VI 197). Power has the same structure — "no power has an absolute basis" (S, "Note on Machiavelli"); authority requires obedience that the subject institutes while believing it recognizes. Against: Cognitivism (adhesion follows from truth-attribution); Foucault's autonomy of power. (Chouraqui, ch. 9)

  3. Claim: Flesh entails panpsychism (pansensism) — all flesh is self-sensing, all beings possess sentience-sensibility. Because: Reciprocal expression (Leibniz freed from God) requires symmetrical capacities; Einfühlung obtains universally between self-other and self-thing; a two-flesh structure would require unexplained second-order mechanisms. Against: MP's own May 1960 note ("flesh of the world is sensible and not sentient"); Dillon's anatomical argument. (McWeeny, ch. 6)

  4. Claim: Institutions become habits; whiteness is an institutional habit that creates spaces where some bodies "fit" and others encounter "brick walls." Because: MP's habitual body (the body that "trails behind" action) extends to institutional bodies; institutions acquire the shape of bodies that tend to inhabit them; diversity work reveals walls invisible to those who fit. Against: Formal/explicit conceptions of institutional norms. (Ahmed, ch. 10)

  5. Claim: Strong beauty is an event, not a quality; sensus has dissensus as its precondition. Because: Beauty requires acknowledgment of the excluded/unformed within systems of form; aisthēsis (sheer exposure, pathos) must be distinguished from perception (objectifying quest). Against: Classical beauty as perfection; beauty as complicit with domination. (Fóti, ch. 14)

  6. Claim: MP is a "dark precursor" to Deleuze's cinema; "a-philosophy" thinks without concepts, through images and sensible manifestations. Because: MP's 1945–1961 engagement with cinema shows continuous convergence of art and philosophy; sensible ideas (Proust) can only be experienced through "screens" or "veils"; Deleuze regressed to philosophy-as-conceptual-knowing in his cinema books. Against: Deleuze's late separation of philosophy (concepts) from cinema (movement-images). (Carbone, ch. 13)

Key Findings

  • Institution (Stiftung) as hub concept: Nearly every essay extends institution into new domains — law, power, habit, self, museum, biosemiotics. The concept proves to be MP's most versatile and productive philosophical tool.
  • The three criticisms rebutted: Foucault's materiality critique, speculative realism's idealism critique, and the description-only critique all misunderstand MP's phenomenology, which thinks from within the abyss between consciousness and reality.
  • Passivity as "continuous baseline": Nancy's epilogue confirms passivity as a thread connecting MP, Levinas, Derrida, and Bergson — preceding the explicit thematizations by Levinas and Derrida.
  • Animal meaning is oneiric: Dufourcq shows MP (via Portmann) treats animal appearance as creative imagination — autotelic Selbstdarstellung, not functional code.
  • The law has a pre-human history: Flynn argues the institution of the law precedes human existence, existing "in a past that was never present" — proto-political practices in animal life.

Methodology

Multi-author volume: 14 independent essays + epilogue organized in four sections (Legacies, Mind and Nature, Politics/Power/Institution, Art and Creation). Each essay engages a specific domain of contemporary thought with MP's resources. The editors' Introduction frames the volume around the three criticisms and MP's venture into Husserl's "abyss of sense."

Concepts Developed

  • institution — Massively extended: to law (Flynn), institutional habits (Ahmed), being-as-power (Chouraqui), self-constitution (Alloa), museum critique (Kaushik), biosemiotics (Dufourcq)
  • strong-beauty — Fóti's retrieval: beauty as event requiring acknowledgment of the excluded within form
  • perceptual-faith — Chouraqui's political reading: unity of recognition and institution = structure of power
  • flesh-as-element — Barbaras's three senses (ontic, ontological, transcendental); McWeeny's panpsychism
  • passivity — Extended to institutional/political register; Nancy: "continuous baseline of the time"
  • nonphilosophy — Carbone's "a-philosophy" as positive late formulation; cinema/painting as "fundamental thought"
  • natural-symbolism — Dufourcq: biosemiotics, Portmann's Selbstdarstellung, oneiric meaning in animal life

Concepts Referenced

Key Passages

"carnal being, as a being of depths, of several leaves or several faces, a being in latency, and a presentation of a certain absence, is a prototype of Being, of which our body, the sensible sentient, is a very remarkable variant, but whose constitutive paradox already lies in every visible." (VI, "The Intertwining—The Chiasm") — McWeeny's key passage for panpsychism reading

"Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it." (VI, 197) — Used by both Alloa (institution of self) and Chouraqui (perceptual faith as unity of recognition/institution)

"There is no power that is absolutely grounded. All there is is a crystallisation of opinion." (S, "Note on Machiavelli") — Chouraqui's political reading of perceptual faith

"If the subject were taken not as a constituting but an instituting subject, it might be understood that the subject does not exist instantaneously" but is "the field of my becoming... the instituted subject exists between others and myself, between me and myself, like a hinge." (TLC, 40) — Alloa's key passage for institution of self

Husserl's Stiftung: "the power to forget origins and to give to the past not a survival, which the hypocritical form of forgetfulness, but a new life, which is the noble form of memory." (S, "Indirect Language") — Central passage for Kaushik's museum critique

"The flesh of the world is not self-sensing (se sentir) as is my flesh—It is sensible and not sentient—I call it flesh, nonetheless... in order to say that it is a pregnancy of possibles, Weltmöglichkeit" (VI, 250, orig. 304) — Barbaras and McWeeny read this passage in opposite directions

"Vision is the means given to me to be absent from myself, to witness from within the fission of being; at the end of which I alone close myself onto myself." — Nancy: the first clause touches him deeply; the concluding "closure" remains alien

What's Not Obvious

  1. The volume's dominant motif is not flesh but institution. Despite the title suggesting a survey, and despite Barbaras's flesh essay opening the volume, the concept that nearly every essay orbits is Stiftung — extended far beyond its original domain in the 1954-55 course. This makes the volume, read as a whole, an argument for institution as MP's most versatile concept — more so than flesh, chiasm, or reversibility. The passage at VI 197 ("Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it") functions as the book's hidden epigraph, cited by both Alloa (ch. 3, p. 88) and Chouraqui (ch. 9, p. 201) in entirely different registers.

  2. McWeeny and Barbaras are conducting opposite operations on the same textual evidence. Barbaras argues that MP's flesh concept is too univocal — it illegitimately collapses the sensing and the sensed into one element. McWeeny argues that the concept is not univocal enough — MP inconsistently introduces a distinction (sentient vs. merely sensible flesh) that his own ontology cannot sustain. They both cite the May 1960 working note, but Barbaras reads it as MP's belated admission of failure, while McWeeny reads it as a working-note hesitation overridden by the systematic logic of reciprocal expression. This internal debate within the volume maps precisely onto the tension in flesh-as-element between the "three modes" reading and the "one flesh" reading.

  3. Nancy's epilogue reveals that passivity — not flesh — is where his thought and MP's genuinely intersect. Nancy admits discomfort with "flesh" and "perception" as terms, and his epilogue's most animated moment concerns the passivity notes: they arrived "against my expectations" after Levinas and Derrida had already insisted on passivity, yet had "in many ways preceded their works." This makes passivity a cross-tradition structural concept connecting MP to post-structuralism — a connection the wiki's passivity page does not yet capture. The specific passage that struck Nancy is MP on dreams as "neither ignorance nor knowledge" — a formulation that sidesteps the entire Freudian/Lacanian apparatus (IP, Passivity course).

Critique / Limitations

  • Chouraqui's "being as power" thesis is the volume's most ambitious single argument but risks making everything political and nothing specifically so. The structural parallel between perceptual faith and power is compelling, but the connection to actual political analysis (post-truth) remains suggestive rather than demonstrated.
  • McWeeny's panpsychism faces the difficulty that MP himself explicitly distinguished sentient from merely sensible flesh in the May 1960 working note. Her systematic argument is strong, but the textual evidence is genuinely ambiguous.
  • The volume draws heavily on posthumous and unpublished material (V&I working notes, Institution and Passivity course, Nature lectures, Sorbonne lectures) without addressing the hermeneutic problems this raises — how much weight should working notes carry against published arguments?
  • Several essays (Benoist, Dufourcq) are more expository than argumentative — they trace MP's engagement with naturalism and biosemiotics without advancing strongly original theses.
  • The absence of engagement with MP's political writings (Humanism and Terror, Adventures of the Dialectic) is notable given the political section's ambitions. Flynn and Chouraqui work primarily from the "Note on Machiavelli" and the Signs preface.

Connections

  • extends institution — the volume's most consequential contribution; six essays extend institution into new domains
  • extends perceptual-faith — Chouraqui's political reading adds recognition/institution unity
  • critiques flesh-as-element — Barbaras argues MP's univocal flesh is inconsistent; McWeeny argues it should be more univocal (panpsychism)
  • extends passivity — Nancy's epilogue establishes passivity as cross-tradition baseline
  • extends nonphilosophy — Carbone's "a-philosophy" as positive late formulation
  • extends natural-symbolism — Dufourcq adds biosemiotics, oneiric meaning
  • applies body-schema to institutional theory — Ahmed's institutional habits
  • builds on johnson-carbone-saintaubert-2020-poetic-of-the-world — Johnson and Carbone are contributors to both volumes
  • builds on chouraqui-2014-ambiguity-and-absolute — Chouraqui's ch. 9 extends the perceptual-faith/truth analysis from his monograph into political theory; Flynn explicitly cites Ambiguity and the Absolute
  • builds on kaushik-2021-negation-implex — Kaushik's ch. 12 extends his work on art, expression, and institution