The Intercorporeal Self by Marratto Scott L

Author:Marratto, Scott L. [Marratto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438442334
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2012-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

This notion of the field of presence is the basis upon which Merleau-Ponty establishes the ‘privilege’ of the present. The present is, as we have seen, the ‘zone in which being and consciousness coincide.’ The act which holds, in the protentional fringes of my present consciousness, the ‘appearance’ of the hidden side of the object in front of me, is present to itself as consciousness. Using Gibson's term, we could say that even if an affordance appears, so to speak, as something ‘in the future,’ over yonder, the act which intends an affordance in the present is immediately present to itself.5 The protentional consciousness appears to itself in the present of consciousness. Again, this is the case even when it is a question of my recalling some experience of an event in my distant past—my act of recalling a past appearance, an act with its own protentional and retentional fringes, is present to itself in the present. It is intuitively given, tacitly, or prereflectively, to itself.6 But in this second case, my act of recollecting offers only a mediated appearance of the intentional object—what immediately appears to itself (as conscious experience) in the present is an appearance of an appearance: a re-presentation. The privilege of the present, in Merleau-Ponty, thus relies, in part, on Husserl's delimitation of the living present on the basis of an ‘opposition’ between retentions and re-presentations. My relation to the past begins from here, from the present in which the field of manifestation (consciousness) appears to itself as a consciousness of the past.

While I think that this standard interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's remark about the privilege of the present as a claim about the self-presence of consciousness is, so far as it goes, correct, I also believe that it presents an incomplete picture of the doctrine of auto-affection. Once again, what is missing in the ‘metaphysics of presence’ interpretation is an appreciation of the constitutive non-presence, or spectrality, at the heart of the present. The very presence of the present (as auto-affection) is dependent upon the spacing, or difference, opened up by the non-presence of the original past. But before we explore the development of this theme in connection with the temporality chapter, I want to further clarify what Merleau-Ponty does and does not say about this privilege of the present.

Although in many passages of the “Temporality” chapter Merleau-Ponty's description of the three-fold structure of the living present is dependent upon Husserl's description, let us also note that in a number of other passages his analysis is inflected slightly differently than Husserl's, in a manner that reveals Merleau-Ponty's concern to overcome the vestiges of intellectualism and intuitionism that he finds in Husserl's approach to phenomenology. Where Husserl delimits the field of presence, with its crucial distinction between originary intuitive givenness (in the present) and re-presentation (in the present), from the point of view of time-consciousness, Merleau-Ponty characterizes presence in terms of the sense (sens) of environmentality. The formality of Husserl's 1905 description of the structure of time-consciousness

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