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?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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.12

Sources

  1. 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,…
    The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 146–147
  2. 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....
    The Visible and the Invisible, p. 139

Where the argument is made

  • 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)

How the argument was received

developmental-completion