The Expression of the Psychosomatic Body from a Phenomenological Perspective by Jennifer Bullington

Author:Jennifer Bullington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

The flesh could thus be compared to the ancient Greeks’ arche, that is, that through which things can come to be. The term flesh is by no means crystal clear, but to sum up, we find in Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh a way to describe the coming together of man and world in the unity of upsurge (becoming together) that was not possible to describe from within a classical phenomenological framework.

The Visible and the Invisible

Let us move on to the notions of the “visible” and the “invisible”. The “visible” has already been mentioned by Merleau-Ponty in the above quotations on the flesh. Hopefully, it is clear that when he speaks about the “visible” he does not mean the perceived object as such, as commonly understood, which would be too rooted in the philosophy of consciousness which he was trying to surpass in his new ontology. The visible is a completely new landscape never before articulated. It is a manner of being that comes to light as a unity of style, which is nevertheless in a constant state of transcending, it is a certain manner of “[…] managing the domain of space and time over which it has competency […]” (ibid, p. 115). There is a kinship between the seer and the seen which opens up to each other with a familiarity that is not in the order of thought/cognition. The world is elaborated for us already. We do not “[…] look at a chaos, but at things […]” (ibid, p. 133). What we call a visible is “[…] a quality pregnant with a texture, the surface of a depth, a cross section upon a massive being, a grain or corpuscle born by a wave of Being” (ibid, p. 136). There is familiarity to the visible, but also movement. Things come into presence but are always further on, unfolding into a horizon.10 The domain of the flesh inaugurates this visibility for us. It is marked out because of the way in which subjects and the world partake of this unitary movement. However, the visible should not be understood as something that only has to do with our perceptual capacities:When we speak of the flesh of the visible we do not mean to do anthropology, to describe a world covered over with all our own projections, leaving aside what it can be under the human mask. Rather, we mean that carnal being, as a being of depths […] is a prototype of Being, of which our body, the sensible sentient, is a very remarkable variant, but whose constitutive paradox already lies in every visible (ibid, p. 136).

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