Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Language by Dimitris Apostolopoulos;

Author:Dimitris Apostolopoulos; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)
Published: 2012-09-17T20:00:00+00:00

A basic conclusion in this passage is that dialogical speech undermines the hitherto central role of subjectivity. Dialogical expression shows that an ostensible spectator actually exercises significant demands on us, which we must respond to. The passage works out these demands in a perceptual, rather than a linguistic, register. But Merleau-Ponty’s conclusion that the adequacy and self-sufficiency of a constituting subject is upset follows from the distinctively linguistic character of dialogue. In dialogue, the subject cannot be the sole arbitrator of sense, since the objects of experience (here, a conversational partner) eventually codetermine the meaning of what is said or seen. And because the meaning we express in a discussion soon becomes the object of another subject’s evaluations, dialogue shows that subjects can take on the status of objects or things seen.

These observations anticipate two fundamental claims in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology: the ‘reversibility’ of subject-object relations, and the claim that perception is ‘narcissistic’. Consider the concept of ‘reversibility’ first. While he does not use the term ‘réversibilité’, Merleau-Ponty suggests that dialogue establishes a structural relation of reversibility between subject and object. A speaker can guide the flow of conversation, but they can also pass to the status of object while receiving the contributions of others. Speaker and listener exchange and effectively substitute their roles. In a contemporaneous article, he notes that speech is a prime example of engagements that ‘reverse [renversent] my ordinary relation to objects and give some of them the value of subjects’ (S 94/153).

Even if this is not quite the mature account of reversibility, the basic position is nevertheless offered in outline. In later texts, he will claim that a reversibility between seeing and object seen, touching and object touched, and so on, defines ‘the flesh’, a term used to describe the basic structure of experience. This relation generalises to a wide range of objects and domains of experience (VI 144/187). In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty will claim that there is a ‘reflexivity’ in speech of the same order as that in touch and sight (144/187–88). In a note from December 1959, he reproduces an earlier description of speech: ‘The others’ words make me speak and think because they create within me an other than myself, a divergence [écart] by relation to . . . what I see’ (224/273). He continues to retain a link between reversibility and dialogue in later works, and uses the important term ‘écart’ to describe the ‘second self’ that emerges in a dialogue. Even if this view is maintained in later works, the key point is that The Prose of the World first advanced an account of reversibility that is not antedated by other texts in Merleau-Ponty’s corpus, at least until ca. 1952.

In addition to reversibility, the remarks above also anticipate the claim that perception is ‘narcissistic’, a related tenet. In The Visible and the Invisible, this term is used to describe the seamless contact between subjects and perceptual objects. As he puts it, ‘Since the seer is caught up in

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