Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature

Author(s): Galen A. Johnson, Mauro Carbone, Emmanuel de Saint Aubert Year: 2020 Type: Book (co-authored, Fordham University Press, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series)

A genuine co-authorship (ten years of collaboration, not a mere collected volume) arguing that Merleau-Ponty's engagement with literature is constitutive of his philosophy, not illustrative. Literary figures — co-naissance from Claudel, "chiasm" from Valéry, "flesh of the world" from Simon — are not metaphors for independently available philosophical concepts but the very conceptual material of the ontology. Part I examines MP's poets (Proust, Breton/Claudel/Simon, Valéry); Part II examines his poetics (sensible ideas, metaphoricity, truth as event). The book draws substantially on unpublished BNF manuscripts (de Saint Aubert is editor of several), making available material not found in other secondary sources.

Core Arguments

  1. Claim: MP's literary engagement is constitutive — literary figures become philosophical concepts. Because: "Chiasm" comes from Valéry's "chiasma of two destinies" (S, 294/231); co-naissance from Claudel's Art poétique; "flesh of the world" from Simon's Le Vent (p. 98). These are not analogies but the actual conceptual material. Against: The standard view that MP uses literature as illustration or object of study.

  2. Claim: MP's poetics is threefold: poetics of flesh (body/desire), poetics of mystery (expression), poetics of visible/invisible (perception) — converging in a poetics of depth. Because: Three dimensions correspond to desire, expression, and perception; their anthropological, epistemological, and ontological horizons. All are "implicated and intimately involved in a poetics of depth." Against: Approaches that treat MP's aesthetics as primarily about visual art.

  3. Claim: The body generates metaphoricity through its fundamental analogicity — metaphor is carnal-ontological, not linguistic. Because: Body schema as "system of equivalences" (Schneider case); "figuratives" as prelinguistic conditions; "In the world of the flesh, metaphors become 'metamorphoses,' and transference becomes 'transubstantiation.'" Against: Standard linguistic/semantic accounts of metaphor.

  4. Claim: "Figuratives" (les figuratifs) — shadow, depth, lighting, contour — are the prelinguistic matrices of visibility, "neither objective beings nor nonbeings." Because: "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" (MP, unpublished note, autumn 1960). Against: Both Cartesian transparency and Sartrean nothingness.

  5. Claim: Truth for MP is event (éclatement, dehiscence), not adequation. Two moments: Prose of the World/1953 = "mystery of language"; V&I/Signs = new vocabulary of éclatement. Because: "Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it" (VI, 251/197). "A power to break forth, productivity, fecundity" (VI, 262/208). Against: Both eternal truth (Platonism) and skepticism.

  6. Claim: Co-naissance (Claudel) is the model for the enveloping-enveloped structure leading from flesh to flesh of world to being. Because: Claudel's network of equivalences (to perceive = to be = to be co-born) provides the passive-active dynamic. Figures of communion, coupling, vibration, respiration describe this. Against: Sartre's partes extra partes; the Cartesian subject-object split.

  7. Claim: The "flesh of the world" has internal difficulties — it risks dissolving alterity into "molluscan ontology." Because: Encroachment so generalized that no boundaries remain. "Flesh" and "world" insufficient to think desire's horizons. The concept is "perhaps meant to be provisional." Against: Those who take flesh of the world as MP's final ontological word.

  8. Claim: Sensible ideas reverse Plato — ideas inseparable from sensible appearances, on "clouded surfaces." Because: Three readings of Vinteuil's "little phrase" show progressive deepening toward quasi-visible ideas. "These ideas have no intelligible sun, and are akin to the visible light" (NC, 194). Against: Platonic separation of intelligible from sensible.

Key Findings

  • The origin of MP's "chiasm" concept is documented: Valéry's "chiasma of two destinies" in Tel quel, first cited by MP in "Man and Adversity" (1951), then the 1953 course. MP's immediate response on encountering the term: "the word is good" (le mot est bon) (S, 294/231).
  • De Saint Aubert identifies surrection as the culminating metaphorical figure of MP's late work — desire's insurrections and resurrections leading to an upright emergence in being — arguing it replaces Ineinander as the privileged ontological schema.
  • The book provides the most sustained treatment of co-naissance in secondary literature, tracing it from Structure of Behavior through the unpublished Being and World manuscripts (1958).
  • De Saint Aubert argues that MP's ontology follows "other tracks" beyond flesh of the world: the invisible, depth, the incorporeal, shadow. These "figuratives" (les figuratifs) are the pre-linguistic matrices of visibility.
  • Carbone provides the first systematic tracking of MP's three successive readings of Proust's description of Swann hearing Vinteuil's "little phrase," showing progressive deepening across the career.
  • Johnson reconstructs MP's two-moment theory of truth: (1) Prose of the World/1953 = truth as "mystery of language"; (2) V&I/Signs = truth as éclatement (bursting forth, radiance), paired with dehiscence.

Concepts Developed

  • co-naissance — the most sustained treatment in secondary literature; traces from Structure of Behavior to Being and World (Ch 2)
  • metaphoricity — de Saint Aubert's term for the carnal-ontological ground of metaphor; threefold (anthropological, phenomenological, ontological) (Ch 5)
  • sensible-ideas — Carbone's systematic tracking across three readings of Vinteuil (Ch 4)
  • surrection — de Saint Aubert develops as culminating figure replacing Ineinander (Ch 2)
  • Figuratives (les figuratifs) — shadow, depth, lighting as prelinguistic matrices of visibility (Ch 5)
  • Incorporeals — the "other side" of corporeality, what sustains and renders the visible visible (Ch 5)
  • Éclatement — Johnson develops MP's late vocabulary for truth as event: bursting forth, radiance (Ch 6)
  • Sublime point — Breton's concept adopted by MP as structural figure for the coincidence of antinomies (Ch 2)

Concepts Referenced

Key Passages

"Poetry = the metamorphosis of one thing into another such that they have the same manner of modulating Being." (MP, ULL, 141; cited Introduction)

"Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it. Make an analysis of literature in this sense: as inscription of Being." (VI, 251/197; cited Introduction)

"Ontology is the attempt to formulate this nascence and co-naissance, to find that which is beyond naturalism and idealism, to portray man as he really is: not the sketch of an absolute subjectivity, but a surrection, a light at the top of this incredible arrangement that is the human body." (EM1, unpublished; cited Ch 2)

"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." (MP, unpublished note, autumn 1960; cited Ch 5)

"One says Platonism, but these ideas have no intelligible sun, and are akin to the visible light." (NC, 194; cited Ch 4)

"We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn." (Nietzsche, cited by MP at NC, 277; cited Ch 6)

"Every perception is a communication or a communion, the taking up or the achievement by us of an alien intention or inversely the accomplishment beyond our perceptual powers and as a coupling of our body with the things." (PhP; cited Ch 2)

"I have never ceased to identify the flesh of the being I love and the snow of the peaks in the rising sun." (Breton, Mad Love; cited Ch 2)

"The exchange expressed by 'chiasma' is exactly the right word [le mot est bon]." (MP, S, 294/231; cited Ch 3)

"Implex is the operation of a meaning that is not yet thematized, liberated, posed for itself." (MP, ULL, 133; cited Ch 3)

What's Not Obvious

  1. De Saint Aubert critiques the flesh of the world from within. He argues that MP's signature late concept risks "molluscan ontology" — a "vertiginous fusion and confusion" (Ch 2, pp. 79-81) — and that "flesh" and "world" are insufficient to think the horizons of desire. The concept was "perhaps meant to be provisional." This internal critique from one of MP's manuscript editors carries weight that a standard commentary does not. The specific passage (Ch 2 §"The Flesh of the World: Impasses") shows that de Saint Aubert identifies the problem not in the concept's logic but in its imaginary infrastructure: the oral/uterine oneirism of enveloping-enveloped risks making separation unthinkable, and without separation there is no genuine birth. This connects directly to the negative-reality-of-love page — Proust's "the other inside me" is precisely the structure of desire that the flesh-of-the-world concept threatens to dissolve.

  2. The book demonstrates that MP's key ontological terms have literary origins, not phenomenological ones. The chiasm comes from Valéry (a rhetorical-poetic term), not from Husserl. Co-naissance comes from Claudel (a poet-dramatist), not from any philosophical source. "Flesh of the world" is borrowed from Claude Simon's novel Le Vent. This is not incidental decoration but structural: if the ontology is constitutively literary — if its concepts cannot be detached from the figures they borrow — then the ontology cannot be stated in non-figurative language. This is the book's answer to the question "Why did MP never finish The Visible and the Invisible?" — the concepts resist the propositional form that a finished treatise would require.

  3. De Saint Aubert argues that surrection — not Ineinander — is the privileged schema of the late work. Surrection (uprising, insurrection-resurrection) names a vertical emergence — desire's capacity to deliver us upright into being — that breaks the circularity of the enveloping-enveloped (the horizontal Ineinander). The textual evidence is in unpublished manuscripts: "surrection or insurrection or resurrection... this fertility or productivity" (1955 Passivity course) and "not the sketch of an absolute subjectivity, but a surrection" (Being and World, 1958). If correct, this reorients the standard reading of the late ontology: the Ineinander and flesh are not the final word but a station on the way to a more vertical, birth-oriented vocabulary. This claim is specific to de Saint Aubert and contested — the published V&I relies heavily on Ineinander vocabulary.

Critique / Limitations

  • De Saint Aubert's chapters (2 and 5) are the densest and most original, but they draw heavily on unpublished manuscripts. Some claims (especially about surrection replacing Ineinander) rest on a few passages from the BNF folders and may over-read unpublished material against the published corpus.
  • The book's three authors, while collaborative, have distinct interpretive tendencies. Carbone is more systematic and art-theoretical; Johnson bridges MP with analytic aesthetics and American pragmatism; de Saint Aubert is closest to the manuscripts and most psychoanalytically inflected. The book does not always reconcile these tensions (e.g., de Saint Aubert's emphasis on desire vs. Johnson's emphasis on truth).
  • The Walter Benjamin comparison in Ch 1, while illuminating, rests on an argument from parallel reading rather than documented influence — there is "no explicit trace" of Benjamin in MP's texts (p. 39). The comparison enriches understanding but should not be taken as evidence of intellectual exchange.
  • The claim that literary figures are constitutive rather than illustrative, while compelling, risks its own version of the genetic fallacy: even if a concept originated in a literary figure, it may have been abstracted from that origin in later use. The chiasm of V&I Ch 4 operates at a level of generality that exceeds Valéry's "chiasma of two destinies."

Connections