Contac/Improv

Abstract

In On On Touching-Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida complains that despite his efforts to wriggle free of it, Merleau-Ponty remained enthralled by a humanist, intuitionist tradition.1 According to Derrida, this tradition is dominated not simply by the familiar dangers of a presentist metaphysics of sight. It is marked, too, by a solid privilege of a particular conception of touch-what Derrida calls a "haptocentric" tradition (OT, 41). "Haptocentrism" reduces the multiple aporias of touch brilliantly analyzed by Aristotle in De Anima to an anthropology of the hand as "the" organ of touch.2 While the critique of the metaphysics of sight aims at subject-object relations, Derrida's critique of haptics aims at apperception, "the feeling that one feels," especially as this is cast as a mode of self-reflection governed by the human hand associated with human making and mastery. Derrida's deconstruction of haptics aims to unsettle any notion of "the" body, or "my" body, indeed, any "proper" body such mastery might underwrite. Instead, along with Nancy, Derrida endorses a view of the body or flesh as multiple and fluid points of contact, a view that seeks to reconfigure oppositions between integrity and alterity.3 Now Derrida admits that "The [haptic] tradition becomes complicated, with the risk of being interrupted, in Merleau-Ponty' (OT, 41).". Yet according to Derrida, this "risked" interuption never fully comes to pass. For instead of drawing radical conclusions from Husserl's novel appach to touch, Derrida claims that Merleau-Ponty "seems to reinstate a symmetry that Husserl challenges between the touching-touchable and the seeing-visible" (ibid). By doing so, Merleau-Ponty appears to lose even the slender ground Husserl had gained, thereby lapsing into a new, even more virulent form of intuitionism. Undergirding this intuitionism, again according to Derrida, is a metaphorical displacement, parallelism, and/or hierarchy among the senses. Such displacement, parallelism, or hierarchy permits the scopic and haptic to be superimposed, thereby reinforcing rather than rejecting an ideal of mastery that would braid the subjective and the self-reflexive and render axiomatic what both philosophical and common language cling to as the ideal of intuition: the eye that sees is the eye that grasps, be-holds (hence com-prehend, con-cept, be-griff, and so forth). Thus precisely where the reach of sight-based intuitionism faltered in Husserl-the juncture where the eidetic constitution of objects gives way to touch and the passage to alterity this allows-Merleau-Ponty's alleged hierarchy, displacement, or parallelism consolidates a scopic/haptic alliance that leaves no space for alterity, rejoinder. But is this the best way to understand Merleau-Ponty's remarkable "chiasm" between touching and seeing in The Visible and the Invisible? Derrida himself points to an alternative possibility present already in The Phenomenology of Perception and, on my reading, gaining strength (albeit not under this name) in Merleau-Ponty's late work. This possibility is of a synaesthetic relation between senses, a relation that resists consolidation and instead engenders multiple possibilities of sensibility and a fecundity of the flesh. Is it right to say, with Derrida, that this thought remains merely latent in Merleau-Ponty, stalled by an assumption of unity and an inability to shake off the burden of intuitionism? Or is it better, meaning at least equally warranted while more richly layered, to read the clues provided in Merleau-Ponty's posthumously published notes as pointing in the direction of a radicalization of his early thought that all perception is synaesthetic and an extension of this insight to the relation to the other?4 To pursue this question, I want to focus on three of Derrida's criticisms of Merleau-Ponty. First, that Merleau-Ponty misreads Husserl's exemplary phenomenological approach to the other, and ends up reducing the other to an object of intuition. …