Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on Sense and Being: At the Limits of Phenomenology

Author(s): Marie-Eve Morin · Year: 2022 · Type: book

A comparative ontological study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy structured by the speculative realist challenge to phenomenology. Three parts stage encounters between the two thinkers through a third interlocutor each: Descartes (Part I, BODY), contemporary realists and materialists (Part II, THING — Sartre, Harman, Shaviro, Cohen, Ingold, Latour, Bennett), and Heidegger (Part III, BEING). The master thesis: MP and Nancy each propose an ontology of sense in which sense is made à même Being itself through diarésis or divergence, but they conceptualise écart differently — encroachment + promiscuity for MP (where the chiasm is "spanned" by the total being of body and world, VI 148), unpassable limit + ontological void for Nancy (BSP 5; "Banks, Edges, Limits" 46). Behind this lies, in MP, "a desire for the One that has completely disappeared from Nancy's ontology" (p. 23).

Core Arguments

Claim: The speculative-realist critique of phenomenology is best treated as a guiding thread for re-reading Continental texts, not a defensive prompt or a positive philosophical position to be adopted. Because: Zahavi's defensive Husserlian replies are technically sound but "miss the question" — does SR change which threads in MP/Nancy become visible? Importing SR's lexicon "begins with an aggression and an infidelity" (Derrida, Writing and Difference 193) but may "set free the meaning of a latent process." Against: defensive Husserlian phenomenology (Zahavi); also any SR partisan position.
Claim: MP and Nancy displace, rather than affirm or reject, the inside/outside divide on which Meillassoux's "correlationism" critique depends; both replace the divide with a thinking of the limit — for MP a limit of encroachment, for Nancy a limit of exposure-without-crossing. Because: Meillassoux's framework, despite its anti-Cartesian rhetoric, remains Cartesian — it reaffirms the divide between everyday confused experience and the glacial world of mathematised science (AF 7, 11–13, 115). Husserl makes the limits of consciousness internal (no outside; what would lie beyond is Widersinn, absurdity — CM §41). Heidegger does not ignore Hegel's critique of Kant — he radically recasts what is meant by "limit": the limits of the "There" (death + thrownness) "have no other side, no external edges" (Morin p. 20). MP and Nancy extend these limit-recastings further by making the limit the locus of sense-making rather than the boundary between two domains. Against: Meillassoux's framing of correlationism as a uniform position to be defeated; also a defensive Zahavian reading that would deny the displacement is needed.
Claim: MP's écart and Nancy's écart are conceptually different in kind despite shared vocabulary. For MP, écart is encroachment + promiscuity + depth-as-relief, "spanned by the total being of my body and of the world" (VI 148). For Nancy, écart is unpassable limit + ontological void without depth or thickness ("the interval, at once parted [écarté] and without depth or thickness," "Banks, Edges, Limits" 46; BSP 5: "neither connected nor unconnected, but falls short of both"). Because: MP's flesh functions as principle of doubling (VI 139), but at the decisive moment "is to ensure the adherence of the two sides to one another"; "It is as if at the moment where he thinks the écart as principle . . . Merleau-Ponty could not help but to posit the flesh as a grounding principle behind the écart" (p. 190). Nancy's partes extra partes, mêlée, and "law of touching as separation" (BSP 5) refuse this from the start. Against: Lawrence Hass insists écart is sufficiently radical in MP to escape this charge; Toadvine, Morris, Madison read VI 148 positively (as binding-not-separating). Morin's case rests on the cumulative pressure of the master diagnosis, not on a local hermeneutic of VI 148 alone.
Claim: There is in MP "if not a posited unity, at least a desire for the One that has completely disappeared from Nancy's ontology" (p. 23). Because: MP's body-world communion (PP 221–2), his "presumptive unity within the horizon of experience" (PP 228), his late Ineinander and encroachment (VI 234), his "spanning" of the écart by flesh (VI 148), his unwillingness to take the body proper through partes extra partes radicalisation — all converge on a presumptive-unity tendency that Nancy from the start refuses. Against: A late-MP reading (Toadvine, Morris, Saint Aubert with reservations) that the 1960 working notes ("Ne pas partir de mon corps," EC 129 n. 3) and the Schilder-reception of intercorporeity already dissolve any desire-for-One into encroachment. The thesis is interpretive and reorganises a great deal of secondary literature without a direct MP statement to that effect.
Claim: MP's Phenomenology of Perception answers the correlationist accusation via the category of in-itself-for-us (PP 336) — not a yoking of two pre-given ontological registers but a single category that undoes the Cartesian-Sartrian ontology on which Meillassoux's ancestrality problem depends. The thing "denies that it is a correlate of my body" (PP 339, re-translated against Landes/Smith). The "inhumanity" of the thing comes not from a transcendent outside but from the inhumanity of my own body — the intentional life of the eyes, hands, and ears as "natural selves" (PP 224) operating with latent knowledge "I do not possess." Because: An "absolute object" given through "a thousand gazes at once" would not show itself (PP 71–2); finitude is "my way of inserting myself into the world" (PP 345). The dialectical body-world correlate is posited as the ultimate fact, but its origin sinks into "the darkness of pure contingency" — the last word of PoP (PP 360, 383). Against: Meillassoux's ancestrality argument (AF 9–10, 14, 21–2); a reading that takes the PoP answer as fully sufficient (Morin agrees the answer reaches a limit, motivating the move to ontology).
Claim: MP's 1948 anthropomorphic claims (in L'homme et l'objet and the Causeries) are best read as cautious anthropomorphism (Shaviro, Cohen, Bennett) — a strategy of defamiliarisation in both directions, not projection. MP "clothes" things in flesh (WP 49; VI 131, 136) so that things can give themselves "in the flesh" — as Saint Aubert puts it, Leibhaftigkeit is "not a one-way donation but the encounter between two resistances, two forces — that of adversity and desire." Because: Sartre's reading-of-Ponge fails because it tries to deny human transcendence and ends up "outside, staring at things, all alone" (MT 450). MP's path through anthropomorphism is structurally distinct from (a) Sartre's failure-mode; (b) Meillassoux's misanthropic flight from the human centre; (c) Harman's flat-ontology reckless anthropomorphism ("sincerity of objects"); (d) Abram-style animism/panpsychism. Against: Sceptics (Abram, McWeeny) take MP's "lend your flesh" passages as licensing panpsychic / animist readings; transposing Shaviro / Cohen vocabulary onto MP-1948 risks anachronism.
Claim: Nancy de-subjectivises freedom radically: freedom is being-without-why, abandoned-without-being-abandoned-by-anything, "the unfounded factuality of an existence that surprises itself in existing" (EF 92–5, 114–15). Once freedom is de-subjectivised, it extends to the stone — "yes, if I knew how to understand" (EF 159). This is not subjectivism but "a question of the material reality of the being-in-the-world of the finite existent" (EF 192 n. 2). The freedom of the stone connects to the freedom of the world via creation ex nihilo read materialistically ("nothing but that which is, nothing but that which grows," D 24; CW 51: "radical materialism, materialism without roots"). Because: Substantial presence is a "black hole" (C 75); existence is "the hollowing out of pure presence" (GT 64). The stone is a body in Nancy's sense — exteriority, partes extra partes — and its hardness "makes itself feel hard" (se faire sentir dure, FT 322 n. 14) at the threshold where stone meets other surface. Nancy distances himself from Heidegger's stone-doesn't-touch-the-earth (FCM §47): Heidegger reduces sense to givenness-to-Dasein and loses le concret-de-pierre (SW 62). Against: Animism / panpsychism, which Nancy explicitly disavows (Mickey 2018); also Heidegger's preservation of Dasein's privileged access; also Harman's "overmining" charge (Harman "On Interface" 99–101), which Morin defends against by distinguishing "nothing prior to relations" (true of Nancy) from "nothing but relations" (false of Nancy) (Ch 6 §3).
Claim: MP's late ontology is indirect — it shows Being through the Winke (signs, intimations) of life, science, painting — modelled on language's indirect signification (meaning in gaps between words, on a background of silence). Heidegger's later thinking remains a direct ontology that betrays its own insight; it still seeks frontal expression of Being even while showing that any direct grasp turns into dissimulation. Heidegger's dismissal of "non-philosophy" and the Lebenswelt — the "mirrors of Being" (TFL 112) — makes him "more Cartesian than he is willing to admit" (VOI 118). Because: Just as language means in the gaps between words, Being is grasped only through the Ineinander of beings (the verbal Wesen — "that which 'tablefies' in it," VI 175 — read through the active sense of the Wesenserschau). MP's reading is "lateral and silent" (Saint Aubert VOI 103): the proximity to Heidegger is community of writing, not influence. Against: A defender of Heidegger's later thinking (Bernet, Bourgeois, Haar) would charge MP's ontology as naïve in the Basic Problems sense, beginning from everyday self-understanding. Richir defends this naivety as virtue, not fault.
Claim: Nancy annuls (not confuses) the ontological difference via rien — the Latin res emptied of essence, NOT néant / Nichts. The step back from the ontological difference is "the identity of being and beings: existence. Or more precisely: freedom" (EF 167; CW 103). Heidegger's Seinsverlassenheit still retains the connotation of withdrawing-and-keeping-to-oneself (Ansichhalten, Der Spruch des Anaximander); Nancy shifts the emphasis to expenditure-without-reserve — a "garden à l'abandon" is overgrown, not neglected. Because: Nancy reads Heidegger's gewähren / wahren / währen cluster — granting, guarding, sheltering — through Derrida's deconstruction of the gift in Given Time. The gift must be thought without giver, without given, and without property/propriety. Heidegger thinks the former two but fails on the latter, retaining "Being" as a "kind of super-presence." Against: Heidegger's Ereignis binds the human being to Being via the "free gesture" that lets beings be encountered meaningfully — concealing is the mode of disclosure, not an ontodicy.

Argumentative Movement

The book moves systematically through three encounters. Part I (Body) traces MP's circular reading of Descartes (Sixth Meditation as ground of the cogito, not its consequence) and Nancy's parallel reading of the unum quid in Ego Sum (the ego uttered by the unum quid, not the res cogitans; "ego sum" as teleiopoetic utterance, ego as retranchement-as-distinction). The encounter culminates in Ch 3's "Divergences" — priority of unity over dislocation (MP body schema as system of equivalences) vs. priority of dislocation over unity (Nancy's partes extra partes, corpus corporum, zoned body, L'intrus: intrusion is "the most proper state of the body"). Part II (Thing) moves from MP's in-itself-for-us answer to correlationism in PoP (Ch 4), through MP's 1948 cautious anthropomorphism in dialogue with Sartre / Ponge / Bachelard / Breton (Ch 5), to Nancy's materialism of the stone (Ch 6: freedom-of-the-stone; hardness se faire sentir dure; inorganic body of sense; quelconque contra Harman's overmining charge; weight-of-thought / il y a). Part III (Being) traces MP's and Nancy's distinct paths through Heidegger (Ch 7: MP's "lateral and silent" relation; verbal Wesen via Husserl's Wesenserschau; interrogative philosophy as "ontological organ"; indirect ontology contra Heidegger's direct ontology; Nancy's reading of Seinsverlassenheit / à l'abandon / rien / annulment of ontological difference) and arrives at the climactic comparison in Ch 8 (Two Ontologies of Sense): MP's écart spanned by flesh as encroachment-and-promiscuity, vs. Nancy's écart as unpassable-limit-without-depth. Morin's central diagnostic — "Merleau-Ponty could not help but to posit the flesh as a grounding principle behind the écart" (p. 190) — crystallises here, alongside the reciprocal worries (Watkin: Nancy flattens depth; Saint Aubert: MP evacuates separation). Carbone's adjudication formula closes the book.

Key Findings

The MP/Nancy divergence is not substantive opposition but a difference of priority: each provides a corrective against a tendency in the other.
MP's écart and Nancy's écart share a vocabulary but conceptualise the gap differently (encroachment-spanned vs. unpassable-limit-as-void).
MP's "natural selves" + the "inhumanity of the body" (PP 224, 247, 341) is the PoP answer to correlationism, working through the inhumanity of the body itself rather than positing a transcendent outside.
Nancy's partes extra partes is non-Cartesian: the extra is the place of differentiation, not undifferentiated void.
MP's anthropomorphic claims of 1948 (WP) anticipate the contemporary cautious anthropomorphism of Shaviro / Cohen / Bennett.
Nancy's stone-claims (freedom, hardness, sense, world) are not animism / panpsychism but radical de-subjectivisation: the stone is à-soi, exposed at its limits, before any sentient encounter.
Il y a (MP and Nancy's preferred locution) is opposed to Heidegger's es gibt in its refusal of the giving-to-Dasein structure.
The annulment-not-confusion of the ontological difference via rien (Nancy) is distinct from Heideggerian Ereignis.

Methodology

Comparative reading using uncanny resonances (Intro §3): bringing the two thinkers as close to one another as possible, then uncovering the origin of their divergences. Heavy reliance on Saint Aubert's Le scénario cartésien (SC) and Vers une ontologie indirecte (VOI) for the MP side, and on Derrida's On Touching, Nancy's own Corpus / Corpus II / Ego Sum / Being Singular Plural / Sense of the World / Creation of the World / Finite Thinking / Adoration for the Nancy side. Morin's distinctive moves include (a) treating MP's PoP "in-itself-for-us" as a single category that undoes the Cartesian-Sartrian ontology rather than failing to escape it; (b) treating MP's 1948 anthropomorphism as cautious anthropomorphism avant la lettre; (c) diagnosing the "spanned hiatus" of VI 148 as MP retreating from écart-as-principle; (d) defending Nancy's quelconque against Harman's overmining charge by distinguishing "nothing prior to relations" from "nothing but relations."

Concepts Developed

in-itself-for-us — Morin's reading of PP 336 as a single category that dissolves Meillassoux's ancestrality problem.
cautious-anthropomorphism — Shaviro / Cohen / Bennett term, applied by Morin to MP's 1948 corpus.
chiral-reversibility — Morris's incongruent-counterparts image (right-hand-glove / left-hand-glove), deployed by Morin in Ch 8 to read MP's reversibility against the symmetrical-reciprocity charge.
whateverness-quelconque — Nancy's quelconque as the double determinacy (conceptual indeterminacy + material concretion), defended against Harman's overmining critique.
freedom-of-the-stone — Nancy's de-subjectivised freedom extending to the stone (EF 158–60).
creation-ex-nihilo-materialist — Nancy's materialist redeployment of ex nihilo (CW 51; D 24).
abandonment-of-being / Seinsverlassenheit — Nancy reading Heidegger.
rien-nancy — Nancy's distinction from néant / Nichts; the res emptied of essence.
coefficient-of-adversity — Bachelard → Sartre → MP genealogy (Morin Ch 5).
cartesian-sartrian-ontology-of-the-object — Morin's diagnostic frame across Part II.
unum-quid — Sixth Meditation; shared anchor for MP (Ch 1) and Nancy (Ch 2 Ego Sum).
melee-nancy — Nancy's entanglement-with-disentanglement, distinct from mixture and Ineinander.
corpus-corporum — Nancy's "collection of collections" body (C 155).
inorganic-body-of-sense — Nancy SW 61–2.
weight-of-thought — Nancy GT 76–80; thought weighs in both senses.

Concepts Referenced

ecart — Morin Ch 8 §3 (encroachment vs. unpassable limit thesis). Major update.
chiasm — Morin Ch 8 §2 (chiral reversibility, mirror-as-open-series, narcissism in two senses).
reversibility — Morin Ch 8.
flesh-as-element — Morin Ch 8 (the spanned-hiatus diagnostic; "leaves of the body," VI 136; flesh as "incarnate principle," VI 139).
empietement — Morin Ch 5 §2 (1948 attestation at WP 69), Ch 8 §3 (encroachment as "universal structure of world," VI 234).
depth — Morin Ch 8 §3 (depth as "way of being of the world," EC 392; absent in Nancy).
wild-being — Morin Ch 4 §3 ("bear its shadow," S 178; Madison ground/abyss gloss).
indirect-ontology — Morin Ch 7 §4 (paired with direct ontology charge against Heidegger; the Winke-strategy of MP).
tacit-cogito — Morin Ch 1 §3 (MP's recognition that "tacit Cogito is impossible," VI 171); replacement with operative cogito (NC 251).
anthropologisme — Morin Ch 5 distinguishes cautious-anthropomorphism from MP's polemic against negative humanism.
ineinander — Morin Ch 7 §3 ("Das intentionale Ineinander," Beilage XXIII of Crisis; alter-ego as model).
interrogation — Morin Ch 7 §3 (VI 120–21; "ontological organ").
passivity — Morin Intro §3 (Nancy's partial-approval reading of MP's passivity lectures, AR 299).
primacy-of-perception — Morin Ch 1 §3 (1946 PoP discussion, Bréhier / Beaufret / Hyppolite as catalyst).
verflechtung — Morin Ch 7 §3 (alongside Ineinander).
operative-intentionality — Morin Ch 1 §3, Ch 7 §1.

Terminology (bilingual / multilingual)

French / German	English	Attestation locations	Translation notes
écart	divergence / spread / gap / separation	VI 148, 249; passim	Morin notes the term is "variously translated" — separation in Nancy, divergence/deviation/spread in MP.
à même	"right at"	Intro fn 35 + passim Nancy	Translator's note: NOT "within"; preserves opening, difference, self-differentiation.
partes extra partes	parts outside parts	Ch 3 + passim Nancy	Latin; Cartesian extension term reappropriated by Nancy as place-of-differentiation.
unum quid	"a certain something one" / a kind of unit	Ch 1, Ch 2 (AT VII 15, 81; AT IXa 12, 62)	French: "une même chose" / "un seul tout"; English: "a kind of unit" / "a unit."
retranchement	withdrawal / retreat / cutting-off	Ch 2 (ES 79, 87)	Nancean term for the doubt-stage that produces extremity, not interiority.
Leibhaftigkeit	"in the flesh" / givenness in person	S 167	Husserlian term reread by Saint Aubert as encounter of resistances.
concret-de-pierre	concreteness of the stone	SW 62	Nancean micro-formula; not stone-as-encountered, not stone-as-essence.
se faire sentir dure	"makes itself feel hard"	FT 322 n. 14	Reflexive verbal construction; neither correlate nor in-itself.
quelconque	"whatever" / "anything whatsoever"	BP 173–87	Both conceptual indeterminacy AND material concretion.
mêlée	entanglement-disentanglement	C II 100, BSP 152–3	Distinct from mixture (homogeneous compound).
à l'abandon	left to itself / overgrown	BP 36–37	Nancean shift from gewähren — overabundance, not neglect.
rien	nothing (but: from Latin res)	EF 167, CW 103	Old French (Littré): "something" → thing-emptied-of-essence; NOT néant / Nichts.
Wesen (verbal)	"tablefies," "roseness extending itself"	VI 174–75	MP reads verbal Wesen through Heidegger; answers was AND dass.
Ineinander	intertwinement	VI 174; NC 79, 85, 383–88	Husserl Crisis Beilage XXIII. The "in-one-another" of fact-and-idea.
gewähren / wahren / währen	granting / watching-over-keeping-safe / enduring	Heidegger Letter on Humanism, "Question Concerning Technology"	Cluster Nancy critiques as ontodicy.
Seinsverlassenheit	abandonment of Being	passim Heidegger / Nancy	Nancy's double-sense reading (left-behind AND withdrawing-into).
Verborgenheit / Unverborgenheit	concealment / unconcealment	NC 118–20	"Being is withdrawal that shows itself" — chiasm of the two terms.
Ereignis / es gibt / il y a	event of appropriation / "it gives" / "there is"	Heidegger / MP NC 113–14 / Nancy passim	MP & Nancy converge in preferring il y a over es gibt.

Key Passages

"if not a posited unity, at least a desire for the One that has completely disappeared from Nancy's ontology" (p. 23, Intro §3).

"We pass from phenomenology to ontology (in the non-Husserlian sense) when we silently question in the direction of the upsurge of naked factuality and cease to consider the Fact in its phenomenological 'function'" (p. 22, citing Derrida, Husserl's 'Origin of Geometry' 151–2 n. 184).

"Heidegger is not ignoring Hegel's critique of Kant. Rather, he is radically recasting what is meant by limit: the possibilising limits that open the 'There' are limits that have no other side, no external edges" (p. 20, on BT H. 211–12; AF 41).

"What we find in his texts, under the guise of the union between the soul and the body, is a description of 'the impossible experience of the human being that the thinking of the Subject is compelled to reach, but which it cannot face'" (p. 61, citing Nancy ES 110).

"Ego sum is a kind of teleiopoetic uttering . . . a sentence that begins at the end, travels at infinite speed, 'advances backwards . . . outruns itself by reversing itself'" (p. 63, citing Derrida Politics of Friendship 32, on Nancy's reading).

"Extremum is the superlative of exterum: the extremity is that which is most exterior. It is, of all the things that are interior, the one that is farthest out" (Nancy ES 79, quoted p. 65).

"Corpus: a body is a collection of pieces, bits, members, zones, states, functions . . . a corpus corporum, whose unity remains a question for itself" (Nancy C 155, quoted p. 73 and p. 91).

"I am the illness and the medical intervention; I am the cancerous cell and the grafted organ; I am the immune-depressive agents and their palliatives . . . I am becoming like a science-fiction android" (Nancy C 170, on L'intrus, quoted p. 83).

"The sense of the ashtray . . . is not a certain ideal . . . it animates the ashtray, and it is quite evidently embodied in it . . . the thing is the correlate of my body and, more generally, of my existence . . . burdened with anthropological predicates" (MP PP 333–4, quoted p. 103 — and then immediately balanced against PP 336–9, the "in-itself-for-us").

"I perceive with my body or with my senses, my body and my senses being precisely this habitual knowledge of the world, this implicit or sedimented science. If my consciousness constituted the world that it perceives at this moment, there would be no distance between it and that world . . . intentionality would transport us to the heart of the object" (MP PP 247, quoted p. 107).

"the life of my eyes, hands, and ears, which are so many natural selves" (MP PP 224, quoted p. 107).

"the philosopher must bear [her] shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of a future light" (MP S 178, quoted p. 110).

"It is because I am there and because I have made of myself what I am that the rock develops in relation to my body a coefficient of adversity" (Sartre BN 489, quoted p. 109).

"Look at the stone, it is alive. Look at life, it is stone. Anthropomorphic comparisons abound, but at the same time as they cast — a relatively dubious — light on things, their effect is mainly to degrade [degrader] the human, to 'tangle it up'" (Sartre on Ponge, MT 441, quoted p. 117).

"each one of them symbolises or recalls a particular way of behaving" (MP WP 48, quoted p. 119).

"things that do not pass quickly before our eyes in the guise of objects we 'know well' but, on the contrary, hold our gaze, ask questions of it, convey to it in a bizarre fashion the very secret of their substance . . . and which, so to speak, stand 'bleeding' in front of us" (MP WP 69, quoted p. 121).

"Leibhaftigkeit is truly not a one-way donation but the encounter between two resistances, two forces — that of adversity and desire" (Saint Aubert, "Au croisement du réel et de l'imaginaire" 253, quoted p. 122).

"a touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations" (Bennett Vibrant Matter 99, quoted p. 124 fn 17).

"ex nihilo, which is to say: . . . nothing but that which is [rien que cela qui est], nothing but that which grows [rien que cela qui croît] (creo, cresco), lacking any growth principle" (Nancy D 24, quoted p. 131).

"with the reseda, the eglantine, and the thistle — as well as with crystals, seahorses, humans, and their inventions" (Nancy BSP 86, quoted p. 131 — coexistence-without-ground).

"Whatever is the indeterminateness of being in what is posited and exposed within the strict, determined concretion of a singular thing, and the indeterminateness of its singular existence" (Nancy BP 174, quoted p. 142).

"At the heart of thought there is some thing that defies all appropriation by thought . . . The heart of things: where thought stumbles or bangs itself, where it knocks. Hard thought" (Nancy BP 169, 182–3, quoted pp. 146–7).

"Simple hardness of stone that thought endures in order to simply be thought, that is, to be 'the stone itself'" (Nancy BP 182–3, quoted p. 147).

"Our body as a sensible sentient is . . . a 'remarkable variant' or a 'prototype' of Being so that its constitutive doubling, paradox or chiasm is not one of 'man' but one of Being itself" (MP VI 136, quoted p. 178).

"the touching itself, seeing itself of the body is itself to be understood in terms of what we said of the seeing and the visible . . . it is not to apprehend oneself as an ob-ject, it is to be open to oneself, destined to oneself (narcissism) — Nor, therefore, is it to reach oneself, it is on the contrary to escape oneself, to be ignorant of oneself, the self in question is by divergence (d'écart)" (MP VI 249, May 1960 working note, quoted p. 183).

"this hiatus between my right hand touched and my right hand touching, between my voice heard and my voice uttered, between one moment of my tactile life and the following one, is not an ontological void, a non-being: it is spanned by the total being of my body, and by that of the world; it is the zero of pressure between two solids that makes them adhere to one another" (MP VI 148, quoted p. 188 — the KEY PASSAGE for Morin's central diagnostic).

"It is as if at the moment where he thinks the écart as principle — this would ultimately be what flesh is: the primordiality of écart, or of incarnate difference — Merleau-Ponty could not help but to posit the flesh as a grounding principle behind the écart" (Morin p. 190 — the KEY DIAGNOSTIC).

"The limit . . . is therefore the interval, at once parted [écarté] and without depth or thickness, which spaces the plurality of singulars; it is their mutual exteriority and the circulation between them" (Nancy "Banks, Edges, Limits" 46, quoted p. 189).

"This 'between' . . . does not lead from one to the other; it constitutes no connective tissue, no cement, no bridge . . . it is neither connected nor unconnected, but falls short of both. Or rather, it is what lies at the heart of the connection: the interlacing [l'entrecroisement] of strands whose extremities remain separate even at the very center of the knot" (Nancy BSP 5, quoted p. 190).

"Nothing gets through, which is why it touches" (Nancy C 11, quoted p. 190).

"the 'logic of promiscuity' . . . has the tendency to evacuate, in the end, the fundamental existential virtue of space that is separation" (Saint Aubert EC 380, quoted p. 192).

"It would be as bad to think of a reversibility without écart, that is available to be realized as peaceful confusion of the related elements, as it would be to think of écart as a fracture, which, instead of opening together the different — and divergent — possibilities of those elements, would set their absolute distinction and therefore their reciprocal extrusion" (Carbone, Chiasmi International 4 [2002]: 57, quoted p. 192 — the adjudicating formula).

"there remains, in Merleau-Ponty's later work, a desire for some regime of indivision or confusion that is from the start foreign to Nancy's ontology" (Morin p. 192 — the master thesis at the climax).

What's Not Obvious

MP's VI 148 "spanned hiatus" passage as a retreat from écart-as-principle, not its positive grounding. The wiki's ecart and chiasm pages currently take VI 148 as a positive statement of non-coincidence-as-binding (following Toadvine, Morris, Hass). Morin reads it as MP's desire for the One surfacing: "It is as if at the moment where he thinks the écart as principle . . . Merleau-Ponty could not help but to posit the flesh as a grounding principle behind the écart" (p. 190). Combined with Saint Aubert's worry (EC 380) about MP's "logic of promiscuity" evacuating separation, this constitutes the central interpretive diagnostic of the book. It requires the reader to resist the common reading of VI 148 — a move that is not obvious from any single passage but emerges from the cumulative pressure of the desire-for-One thesis. Connects to ecart, chiasm, flesh-as-element.
Nancy's partes extra partes as non-Cartesian. A naive reader would assume Nancy's redeployment of the term imports the Cartesian semantics — exteriority-as-undifferentiated-void. Morin shows (Ch 3 §1; C 97, 29, 143) that Nancy's extra is precisely the place of differentiation and articulation; bodies always open onto more bodies; nothing oversees the spacing. This is the precise opposite of Cartesian extension. The conceptual shift makes Nancy's body-without-organs / corpus corporum not a return-to-mechanism but an alternative principle of body-articulation. Anchored at C 97 ("the extra of partes extra partes is the place of differentiation").
MP's "natural selves" (PP 224) as a PoP-stage answer to correlationism. Morin's reading shifts the locus of the "inhumanity" of the thing from a transcendent outside to the body itself. The body's eyes, hands, and ears are "natural selves" operating with latent knowledge "I do not possess" — and this inhumanity (PP 247, 341) is what gives the perceived its thickness, not a noumenal remainder. The reading is not standard: most readers of PoP either take MP's correlationist statements (PP 333–4) as definitive, or read the move to ontology as the necessary corrective. Morin's intermediate position — PoP already has the answer, just incompletely worked out — is what licenses her claim that "Merleau-Ponty's reading of perception is, but isn't quite, correlationist." Anchored at PP 224, 247, 341 and the Cohen-Shaviro reading in Ch 5 §3.

Critique / Limitations

The "desire for One" diagnosis is interpretive. No direct MP passage states this; Morin must produce it as the cumulative pressure of communion, Ineinander, encroachment, and the VI 148 spanned hiatus. Sympathetic MP readers (Hass, Madison, Morris, Toadvine) would reject the diagnosis and read the same passages as positive affirmations of non-coincidence.
Heavy reliance on Saint Aubert. The tremblement cartésien, the EC 380 promiscuity-worry, the VOI direct/indirect ontology framing, and the Leibhaftigkeit-as-encounter-of-resistances all come through Saint Aubert. Readers who reject Saint Aubert's Blondelian-psychoanalytic framework will not get to Morin's central diagnostic.
Nancy's side is over-read for harmony with the master thesis. Morin's Nancy is consistently the écart-radical who refuses what MP cannot help reinstating. A more agonistic reading would press harder on Nancy's own tendencies toward unity (the with of being-with as effort to maintain coexistence).
The art / political extensions in §4 of the conclusion are sketches, not arguments. Morin flags both as future-extensions; the book itself does not develop either.

Connections

contests meillassoux-correlationism (if such a page exists) / standard correlationism framing — by displacing the inside/outside divide rather than affirming or rejecting it.
applies cautious-anthropomorphism to merleau-ponty-1948-causeries (if such a page exists; otherwise the 1948 corpus broadly) — reading MP-1948 as cautious-anthropomorphism avant la lettre.
extends ecart — adds Nancy as a counter-pole to MP's encroachment-spanned reading.
contrasts with chouraqui-2014-ambiguity-and-absolute — both work on the MP/écart axis but Chouraqui foregrounds intra-ontological ambiguity (mute meaning, the absolute); Morin foregrounds the écart-as-shared-vocabulary-conceptualised-differently across MP and Nancy.
contrasts with knight-2024-merleau-ponty-essence-of-nature — Knight develops the Schelling route for MP's nature ontology; Morin does not appeal to Schelling and instead routes through the speculative-realist challenge and Saint Aubert.
is read alongside madison-1981-phenomenology-merleau-ponty — Madison's classic phrasings (ground/abyss; Being as "absence of light") are cited by Morin at key moments. Morin's "desire for One" thesis is not in Madison; the comparative-with-Nancy axis is Morin's distinctive contribution.
complements carbone-2015-flesh-of-images — Carbone treats Nancy as "partly with and partly against" MP; Morin's diagnosis specifies the partly against as the écart-as-encroachment-vs-limit contrast.

Sources

(No prior sources cited from the wiki — this is the first ingest of Morin's monograph.)