Where Is Negation in Merleau-Ponty's Ontology? Symbolic Formation and the Implex

Author: Rajiv Kaushik Year: 2021 Type: Journal article (Research in Phenomenology 51: 372–393)

Kaushik argues that the apparent tension in Merleau-Ponty's ontology between reversibility (continuity, sameness) and *écart* (separation, difference) is not a contradiction to be resolved by choosing one side. Instead, the chiasm is a "matrix formed through counter- and interpositioning" whose internal mechanism is what MP calls "redoubled" or "double-bottomed" negation — a negation inside being that is neither absolute nothingness (Sartre) nor replaceable by being alone (Barbaras). This negation is prefigured in the 1954–55 Passivity lectures' account of symbolic formation and concretized as the implex — a term MP borrows from Paul Valéry to name the body's anonymous capacity that is "the advent of difference," internal to signification and nowhere localizable.

Core Arguments

  1. Claim: The reversibility/écart tension is resolved not by choosing one side but by the chiasm's internal principle: "redoubled negation." Because: The chiasm (rhetorical ABBA, anatomical optic-nerve crossing) is itself neither synthesis nor distinction; it is a matrix of counter- and interpositioning. What makes both reversibility and écart possible is a negation that is dispersed through the entire structure of sensation — "what is left out in all conceptualizations of sensation" (pp. 374–375). Against: Both continuity-readings (reversibility-first) and deconstructive readings (écart-first) miss the chiasm's structural character.

  2. Claim: Redoubled negation is a negation inside being, not opposed to it — it is "natural negativity" that "counts in the world." Because: Sartre's absolute negation (nihilation transcending being) prevents movement because it "leaves untouched what it negates." The dialectical materialist insight (Hegel/Marx/Engels, not Hegelian sublation) is that a "negated negation" remains determined inside the higher positive value (Engels's algebraic example: $-a \times -a = a^2$, which always retains $a$ and $-a$ as square roots). For MP, "this pseudo-positivity of my present is only a more profound or re-doubled negation" (V&I 53–54). Against: Sartre's absolute negation; also against any reading that takes MP's natural negativity as a form of Hegelian sublation.

  3. Claim: Against Barbaras — negation cannot be replaced by being. Being and negation are "crystallized into one another," diacritical from the start. Because: Barbaras correctly rejects "eminent being" and the principle of sufficient reason (via Bergson's "false problems") but makes "the mistake of replacing negation with being." The correct reading: "each is lateral and crystallized in the other" (pp. 377–379). Against: Barbaras's Desire and Distance, which tries to ground MP's ontology in being alone.

  4. Claim: Against both Husserl and Heidegger — both found philosophy on an identity not itself subject to difference. MP places difference inside identities: difference is first. Because: Husserl "uncritically attributes positivity to essences." Heidegger thinks "difference in terms of identity." Both posit a centripetal movement constituting a time and space to which it is not itself subjected. MP makes the limits of phenomenality "dehiscent" and "promiscuous" (pp. 385–386).

  5. Claim: The symbolic (from the Passivity lectures) is the structural operator of redoubled negation in signification: it is "positive" (productive of both manifest and latent meaning) and "censorious" (it effaces itself in its products). Because: MP's reading of Freud discovers "positive symbolism: meaning beyond the meaning" — a phrase with a crucial double sense. The symbolic is "inapt to both meanings" and is their "immanent limit." The censor is "not nonbeing" but a redoubled negation configured inside being (pp. 386–391). Against: Sartre's bad faith critique of Freud; traditional Freudian reading (censor as separating agency); Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms.

  6. Claim: The implex is the concrete bodily instantiation of redoubled negation — "the very spatialization of the relation between the interior and the exterior and, at the same time, the symbolization or symbolic formation of their relation." Because: Valéry relates the implex to the optic nerves and subconscious musculature — not activity but "capacity." MP describes the unconscious as "the implex, the animal, not only of words, but of events, of symbolic emblems... principle of crystallisation (rameau de Salzbourg), not behind us, fully within our field, but pre-objective" (I&P 158–159). Passivity is "the fact that, paradoxically, separation is what is most internal to the life of subjectivity" (pp. 392–398). Against: Derrida's reading of the implex in Valéry as absolute heterogeneity. For MP, the implex is a de facto negative (concrete, ontologically significant), not an in-principle limit.

Key Findings

  • The chiasm was borrowed from Valéry (1953 literary language lectures, Recherches sur l'usage littéraire du langage), not only from anatomy
  • The implex, also from Valéry, is a neglected but crucial term in MP's ontology — naming the body's capacity as symbolic formation
  • "Difference, not identity, must be first" — Kaushik argues MP's ontology is a diacritical ontology where identities exist because there are differences, not the reverse
  • The "endo-ontology" is an "ontology before formal ontology" where the transcendental is "an ascent on the spot (ascension sur place)" — always "as on the first day" (V&I 177)
  • Kaushik identifies a specific connection between the 1954–55 Passivity lectures and the late ontology: the symbolic formation of passivity is the redoubled negation of the flesh

Methodology

Hermeneutical close reading of primary texts (mainly V&I and Institution and Passivity), with targeted engagement of secondary literature (Barbaras, Derrida, Nancy) and philosophical sources (Hegel/Engels, Schelling, Freud, Valéry). Kaushik triangulates MP with Schelling (the "symbol of primordial knowing," Urwissen) and Freud (the "unconventional thought" of dream-symbolism) to build the argument for the implex.

Concepts Developed

  • redoubled-negation — the paper's central concept: negation inside being, not opposed to it; the internal mechanism of the chiasm
  • implex — the body's anonymous capacity that is the advent of difference, the concrete form of redoubled negation; from Valéry

Concepts Referenced

  • chiasm — guiding principle; read specifically as "matrix of counter- and interpositioning" and traced to Valéry
  • ecart — used to define diacritical ontology; read specifically as "diacritical meaning" (V&I 224)
  • reversibility — one pole of the central tension (continuity/sameness)
  • dehiscence — "a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two"; the body as "the advent of difference"
  • flesh-as-element — "one sole Being," "unique Being" — the element within which redoubled negation operates
  • primordial-symbolism — "the picture of primordial symbolism"; Kaushik emphasizes its productive-censorious double character
  • passivity — "separation is what is most internal to the life of subjectivity"; the site of the implex
  • perceptual-unconscious — identified directly with the implex: "the unconscious is the implex"
  • hyper-reflection — referenced as the reflexive structure that discovers "natural negativity"
  • perceptual-faith — "the basic phenomenological idea that we have to attend to perception"
  • indirect-language — the diacritical principle extended from linguistics to ontology
  • speaking-spoken-speech — "unspeaking speech" as the linguistic register of the implex

Key Passages

"A chiasm is a rhetorical structure in which two clauses are balanced against one another and then again appear in reverse order... The two clauses do not only intercross but also balance and reject one another. The chiasm thus works by counter- and inter-positioning." (p. 373) — the chiasm as matrix, not as synthesis or distinction

"This separation (écart) which, in first approximation, forms meaning, is not an I affect myself with, a lack which I constitute as a lack by the upsurge of an end which I give myself – it is a natural negativity." (V&I 216, cited p. 377) — natural negativity as distinct from Sartrean nihilation

"We must conceive of being from not nothing: non-hidden Being." (Unpublished V&I note, via Barbaras Desire and Distance p. 50, cited p. 379) — the starting point: not from absolute nothing but from a being that negates nothingness

"In reality, this pseudo-positivity of my present is only a more profound or re-doubled negation." (V&I 53–54, cited p. 383) — the canonical formulation of redoubled negation

"light may be considered as matter, but light is also something other: it is subtle, it penetrates everywhere, explores the field promoted by our gaze and prepares it to be read... There are three kinds of beings illustrated by the table, the light, and the I. To refuse this third meaning of Being is to make every carnal relation with Nature disappear." (Nature 42–43, cited p. 385) — Schelling's "third meaning" of being

"Freud discovered this positive symbolism: this meaning beyond the meaning has a double sense. One usually retains only the two separate meanings from it: manifest meaning and latent meaning." (IP 152, cited p. 388) — the double sense of the symbolic

"[The] unconscious [is the] implex, [the] animal, not only of words, but of events, of symbolic emblems. [The] unconscious [is] unknown acting and organising dream and life, principle of crystallisation (rameau de Salzbourg), not behind us, fully within our field, but pre-objective, like the principle of segregation of 'things.'" (IP 158–159, cited pp. 391–392) — the implex passage: the single most important citation

"The I, really, is nobody, is the anonymous; it must be so, prior to all objectification, denomination, in order to be the Operator, or the one to whom all this occurs." (V&I 246, cited p. 396) — anonymity as the form of redoubled negation

"Symbolism, signifying and signified – Impossible to distribute the roles absolutely, to say that one of the relationships only signifies the other. It is a relationship to Eros which has many pairs of arms and clusters of faces..." (IP 185, cited p. 392) — the erotic-diacritical character of the symbol

What's Not Obvious

  1. The chiasm is from Valéry, and the implex is its companion. MP borrowed "chiasm" from Valéry's 1953 literary language lectures (Recherches sur l'usage littéraire du langage, p. 103) — not from anatomy alone. The "implex" was borrowed from the same source. This means the chiasm was always already a literary-rhetorical concept for MP, not (or not only) a phenomenological one. A conventional summary would note that MP uses "chiasm" from V&I; what is not obvious is that its co-concept, the implex, was always there alongside it and names the chiasm's bodily mechanism. This reframes the chiasm: from a structure observed in perception to a rhetorical-poetic matrix whose bodily instantiation is the implex. (See RL p. 103; Kaushik pp. 373–376.)

  2. Kaushik breaks with Barbaras on a precise point that reconfigures the secondary literature. Barbaras's Desire and Distance is the most influential secondary reading of MP's ontology in the Anglophone world. Barbaras's move: eliminate absolute nothingness, then replace negation with being. Kaushik accepts the first step but refuses the second: "it is impossible to say Merleau-Ponty's ontology concerns negation rather than being or vice versa. But this is not because they are each originally categorially distinct or synthetic so much as they are diacritical from the start" (p. 385). This has consequences: Barbaras's reading tends toward a philosophy of desire (being as desire, the subject as desiring body); Kaushik's reading tends toward a philosophy of difference (being-and-negation as diacritical, the body as implex). The two readings open different research programs. (This connects to the diacritical reading of écart on the wiki.)

  3. The paper answers the question of what concretely prevents MP's ontology from becoming either monism or dualism. This is the unstated question the text answers. If flesh is "one sole Being," we have monism and lose difference. If reversibility and écart are simply opposed, we have dualism and lose unity. Kaushik's answer: redoubled negation is the structural operator that holds identity and difference together without privileging either — and the implex is where this happens in the body. The redoubled negation is "determined" inside being (not external) and "counts in the world" (not metaphysical). It is the specific mechanism that prevents collapse in either direction. No conventional summary of V&I identifies this mechanism, because V&I itself does not name it explicitly — Kaushik reconstructs it from the tension between the completed text and the working notes. (See the passage at V&I 53–54 on "redoubled negation," cited pp. 383–384.)

Critique / Limitations

  • The §3-to-§4 transition is the weakest link. Kaushik establishes that the symbolic is the productive-censorious limit of signification, then identifies this limit with the body's passivity/implex. But the identification is more asserted than argued: why must the symbolic limit be bodily? The paper's own diacritical logic (dispersed, nowhere specific) seems to resist localization — even in the body.
  • The rhetorical/anatomical chiasm definitions are used as philosophical arguments without defense. Kaushik moves from dictionary definitions to ontological structure as though the connection is obvious. It is suggestive, but a critic could press: what warrants taking the rhetorical or anatomical chiasm as a guide to ontological structure rather than a contingent metaphor?
  • The engagement with Derrida/Nancy is brief. Kaushik distinguishes MP from Derrida/Nancy on the implex (de facto vs. in-principle negativity; anonymity vs. heterogeneity) but does not develop the distinction in detail. The distinction matters and deserves more argument.
  • The paper does not engage the Possibility of Philosophy courses or the Nature courses' third course on the libidinal body at length — both of which would support the thesis. The reference to Schelling's light (Nature 42–43) is a striking exception but is not followed up systematically.

Connections

  • builds on merleau-ponty-2010-institution-and-passivity — the Passivity lectures' account of symbolic formation is the paper's primary material for §§3–4
  • builds on merleau-ponty-1968-visible-and-invisible — the reversibility/écart tension and the working notes on natural negativity are the paper's framing
  • engages critically with renaud-barbaras (Desire and Distance) — agrees on rejecting eminent being; disagrees on replacing negation with being
  • situates itself against jean-paul-sartre — Sartre's nihilation is the explicit adversary throughout
  • draws on merleau-ponty-2003-nature — Schelling's light as "third meaning of Being" (Nature 42–43)
  • references paul-valery — source of both "chiasm" and "implex" for MP
  • references Derrida (Margins of Philosophy) and Nancy (The Intruder) — to distinguish MP's implex from deconstructive heterogeneity