Thinking Between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty by Wambacq Judith;

Author:Wambacq, Judith; [Wambacq, Judith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780821422878
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Merleau-Ponty’s Late Reading of Bergson, Seen Through a Deleuzean Lens

Bergson occupies a central place in Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on time in The Visible and the Invisible, which borrow the concept of “partial coincidence,” crucial to the entire argument, from Bergson.

Merleau-Ponty holds that it is impossible to recall the past as it was: our present cannot coincide with the being of the past, and every memory bears the traces of our search for it. Were this not the case, we would be unable to distinguish the past from the present. This is not to say, however, that a memory is nothing but a trace, that is, a construction without any inscription of the past. For that would mean, first, that there is in fact no past, only a present; and, hence, that there is no access to the past, but only to the present. Merleau-Ponty believes that we can only partially coincide with the past; this coincidence, he says elsewhere, has always already happened or is always about to happen—but never actually happens. As such, the past we appeal to is an “impossible past” (VI, 122–23), “a past that has never been present” (PP, 242). It is “the past such as it was one day plus an inexplicable alteration, a strange distance—bound in principle as well as in fact to a recalling that spans that distance but does not nullify it” (VI, 124).

Merleau-Ponty embraces this very Bergsonian idea (as does Deleuze, by the way; see DR, 343), and yet he accuses Bergson of having failed to realize that the impossibility of a complete coincidence with the past is, paradoxically, also the opening to the past (VI, 124). The argument here anticipates the analysis of sensation he will develop later in The Visible and the Invisible: It is impossible to have, simultaneously, a sensation of the touching of one’s hand and of the being touched of one’s hand. One always switches positions, and this chiasm is what makes access to the world of touched things, the “objective” world, possible. Similarly, the divergence (écart) that separates us from the past as it was is simultaneously our point of entry to the past. This is not simply a matter of fact, but a matter of principle. The “partial coincidence” is not so much a regrettable side effect of our human condition but the condition of possibility—and of the reality—of memory. Bergson, Merleau-Ponty (VI, 196) argues, underestimated the constitutive power of the divergence, of the hollow character of being, of non-being.

Can we agree with this criticism of Bergson? Is it true that Bergson does not attribute any constitutive power to the noncoincidence with the pure past? Is its different nature, its indeterminate, nonsignifying character, really not a positive characteristic? Deleuze argues that it is. For him, the nonrepresentational nature of the virtual is a constitutive characteristic because it allows the endless stream of actualizations to continue. It is exactly because the virtual can never be exhausted by the sum of its actualizations or representations, regardless of their infinite number, that the drive to actualize or represent is maintained.

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