The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology by Dan Zahavi;

Author:Dan Zahavi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

20.3 BODY SCHEMA AND INTERCORPOREITY

Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the flesh is extended beyond its critical constitution (turned against Descartes and Sartre), along the lines of a positive relationship with a diverse range of non-philosophical fields. In the early 1950s—notably in the 1953 course Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression—Merleau-Ponty revives his phenomenological research on perception (mostly in the background since 1945), which is now nourished by a remarkable attention to work being done in neurology (Lhermitte, Head, Ajuriaguerra, and especially Schilder), child psychology (Piaget, Wallon), and psychoanalysis (Freud, Klein, Lagache, Lacan).8 He finds a major support for his philosophy in the theories of body schema and body image, found at the intersection of these three disciplines: phenomenology, neurology, psychology and psychoanalysis. This conjunction is embodied in a vital reference found in the course of 1953: Paul Schilder. The primary authority on the question of body schema and body image, Schilder is the first to introduce phenomenological and psychoanalytical insights to the issue.9

“Before being reason,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “humanity is another corporeity. The concern is to grasp humanity first as another manner of being a body” (2003: 208). It is precisely in this “manner of being a body,” this style that makes the flesh, that the modern notion of body schema contributes a fundamental opening for Merleau-Ponty. Initiated by the neurologists Pierre Bonnier and Henry Head, body schema theory emphasizes the analogical unity of the body, notably its “systems of (inter-sensorial and inter-modal) equivalences.” It takes into consideration the original form of infra-representational knowledge that the body has of its own situation and its competences, thus paving the way for a subtle proximity between perception and non-perception, perceptive consciousness and the unconscious. Schilder, significantly extending the work of his predecessors, clarifies the intercorporeal and relational nature of the body image, including the way in which its dynamics are fundamentally structured by incorporation, animated by a desire to enter into relation with other body images. As the architectonics of a corporeity which itself structures the world, the body schema can only forge its unity within a relational fabric where body, world, and others serve as a symbolic matrix. This issue thus responds directly to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical objectives, and contributes toward the development of his philosophy of the flesh, both in its critical power against intellectualism, as in its free assimilation and alteration of psychoanalysis.10

In contrast to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty insists on the passive–active complexity of the flesh, starting from the intimate relations of perception and body motility. Aggressive and desiring, the flesh prevents my fusion with others—by its resistance, its thickness, and its opacity—although it is also, at the same time, the very medium of our communion. In arresting my gaze and my gestures at the margins of the invisible and the intangible, it also perpetually revives perception. Foreign to the total illusory presence delivered by the pure externality of the object, the flesh delivers itself within the relativity of the inexhaustible, toward the promise of an inside that calls to and hollows out our own depth.

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