An Unprecedented Deformation by Carbone Mauro;

Author:Carbone, Mauro; [Carbone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438430225
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2010-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

“Oneiric and poetic”: these two adjectives return in the conclusion of the last summary composed by Merleau-Ponty—that of the previously mentioned course on “Nature and Logos: The Human Body”—in order to designate what he defines there as “powers” of the flesh (RC, 179/130)37: it is a philosophy of this flesh that is the “condition without which psychoanalysis remains anthropology” (VI 321/267), as a working note from The Visible and the Invisible cautions.

Indeed, the flesh—since it binds, as I have already stated, our body to that of others and to the things in the world—is shot through with “a logic of implication or promiscuity” (RC, 71/50) that Merleau-Ponty praises Freud for having indicated,38 while not always knowing how to describe it in an appropriate manner.39 Not unlike the involuntary memory described by Proust, dreams, as well as the “free associations” of psychoanalysis, hint at this logic (this is why they should not be interpreted in a merely associationistic manner), both attesting to the fact that it deals with a logic constantly operative within the “carnal” relationships our body has with others and with things.

It is precisely to such an operative (fungierende) “logic of implication or promiscuity” that Merleau-Ponty refers his eventual characterizations of the unconscious40 “as perception that is imperception” (NC, 149–150),41 as “feeling itself, since feeling is not the intellectual possession of ‘what’ is felt, but a dispossession of ourselves in favor of it, an opening toward that which we do not have to think in order that we may recognize it” (RC, 179/130). This is an opening to which conscious thought can but remain essentially “correlated.”

If such a “logic of implication or promiscuity” constitutes the framework of the sensible of which it makes the “oneiric world of analogy” (OE, 41/132), then for this very reason it reveals how the “poetic” power of the flesh can also be qualified as the “poietic power of worlds.”42

The poetic and oneiric powers of the flesh—powers that therefore do not belong to us—are, in short, powers of primordial symbolization, by virtue of which the others and the things we experience can acquire a dimension (in the sense Merleau-Ponty ascribes to this word) and a mythical temporality, sedimenting themselves in our unconscious. That is why Merleau-Ponty characterizes the unconscious as “an archaic structure,” not only in the previously cited note on Claude Simon, but also in his “Preface” to Hesnard's book, where an analogous expression—“archaic or primordial consciousness” (PH, 5/67)—appears as Merleau-Ponty is synthesizing his own previous interpretation of psychoanalysis, with respect to which he thus displays an important element of continuity.

Even “our waking relations with objects and others especially”—he writes in the summary of his course on “The Problem of Passivity”—“have an oneiric character as a matter of principle: others are present to us in the way that dreams are, the way myths are” (RC, 69/48). Indeed, the poetic and oneiric powers of the flesh are also mythopoietic43 powers that, as such, introduce an operative mythicity in the “logic of implication or promiscuity” through which our relations with others and with things are continually animated.

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