{"agent_id":"merleau-ponty","agent_name":"Maurice Merleau-Ponty","slug":"flesh-and-chiasm","label":"Flesh and chiasm: does the late ontology of the Visible and the Invisible radicalize the body-subject of PoP into a generalized ontology of the sensible, or does it break decisively with the earlier framework?","topic":"Flesh and chiasm","question":"Does the late ontology of the Visible and the Invisible radicalize the body-subject of PoP into a generalized ontology of the sensible, or does it break decisively with the earlier framework?","position":"The late ontology of flesh and chiasm radicalizes the PoP analysis into a generalized ontology of the sensible — it does not break with PoP but completes the project PoP had opened. Flesh (la chair) is not matter, not mind, not substance; it is the elemental medium of the sensible, the formative medium that subject and object both emerge from. Chiasm names the reversibility structure of the touching-touched, the seeing-seen, the structure in which the perceiver and the perceived are not two distinct terms brought into relation but are reversibly intertwined in a single ontological texture. The relation to PoP is the relation of an early articulation that still operated in the vocabulary of a philosophy of consciousness to a late articulation that has worked out the ontology the earlier project required.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The late ontology of flesh and chiasm radicalizes the PoP analysis into a generalized ontology of the sensible — it does not break with PoP but completes the project PoP had opened.","n":[]},{"t":"Flesh (la chair) is not matter, not mind, not substance; it is the elemental medium of the sensible, the formative medium that subject and object both emerge from.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Chiasm names the reversibility structure of the touching-touched, the seeing-seen, the structure in which the perceiver and the perceived are not two distinct terms brought into relation but are reversibly intertwined in a single ontological texture.","n":[]},{"t":"The relation to PoP is the relation of an early articulation that still operated in the vocabulary of a philosophy of consciousness to a late articulation that has worked out the ontology the earlier project required.","n":[1,2]}]],"texts":"*The Visible and the Invisible* (1964 posthumous; composed 1959-61) — \"Reflection and Interrogation\" Ch 1, \"The Intertwining — The Chiasm\" Ch 4, the working notes; *Signs* essay \"The Philosopher and His Shadow\" (1959) on the late reading of Husserl that prepares the flesh ontology; *Eye and Mind* (1964, in *The Primacy of Perception*) — the most accessible articulation of the late vision through Cézanne, Klee, and painting; *Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952-1960* on the Nature course and the lectures preparing the late ontology; the working notes throughout the Collège course volumes (La Nature, The Sensible World and the World of Expression, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology). Reception: Renaud Barbaras, *The Being of the Phenomenon* (1991, English 2004) — the major French reading of the late ontology; Lawrence Hass, *Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy* (Indiana 2008) on chiasm and reversibility; Taylor Carman, *Merleau-Ponty* Ch 3 section on \"Flesh and chiasm\"; Galen Johnson on the aesthetics of the late ontology; David Morris on the Nature lectures.","works":["*The Visible and the Invisible* (1964 posthumous","composed 1959-61) — \"Reflection and Interrogation\" Ch 1, \"The Intertwining — The Chiasm\" Ch 4, the working notes","*Signs* essay \"The Philosopher and His Shadow\" (1959) on the late reading of Husserl that prepares the flesh ontology","*Eye and Mind* (1964, in *The Primacy of Perception*) — the most accessible articulation of the late vision through Cézanne, Klee, and painting","*Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952-1960* on the Nature course and the lectures preparing the late ontology","the working notes throughout the Collège course volumes (La Nature, The Sensible World and the World of Expression, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology)"],"reception":"Renaud Barbaras, *The Being of the Phenomenon* (1991, English 2004) — the major French reading of the late ontology; Lawrence Hass, *Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy* (Indiana 2008) on chiasm and reversibility; Taylor Carman, *Merleau-Ponty* Ch 3 section on \"Flesh and chiasm\"; Galen Johnson on the aesthetics of the late ontology; David Morris on the Nature lectures.","status":"developmental-completion","era":"1908-1961","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Visible and the Invisible","page":"pp. 146–147","canonical":"","quote":"Conversely, when, starting from the body, I ask how it makes itself a seer, when I examine the critical > THE V I S I B L E AND T H E I N V I S I B L E region of the aesthesiological body, everything comes to pass (as we have shown in an earlier work e) as though the visible body remained Incomplete, gaping open; as though the physiology of vision did not succeed in closing the nervous functioning In upon itself,…","label":"The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 146–147"},{"n":2,"work":"The Visible and the Invisible","page":"p. 139","canonical":"","quote":"There is reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other. Or rather, if, as once again we must, we eschew the thinking by planes and perspectives, there are two circles, or two vortexes, or two spheres, concentric when I live naïvely, and as soon as I question myself, the one slightly decentered with respect to the other....","label":"The Visible and the Invisible, p. 139"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"perception-against-objective-thought","label":"Perception against objective thought: are Cartesian intellectualism and behaviorist empiricism two faces of the same error, and does phenomenology return to a perceptual phenomenon prior to the subject-object split?"},{"slug":"the-body-subject-the-body-schema-and-motor-intentionality","label":"The body-subject, the body schema, and motor intentionality: is the lived body the medium of having a world, against Cartesian res extensa and against Sartre's body-for-others?"},{"slug":"freedom","label":"Freedom: is freedom always situated and conditioned, against Sartre's radical freedom of the for-itself?"},{"slug":"history-politics-and-the-liquidation-of-the-dialectic","label":"History, politics, and the liquidation of the dialectic: was the 1955 break with Sartre principled, and is dialectical politics possible without sliding into either ultra-bolshevism or liberal proceduralism?"}]}