Enabling/Disabling Sensation

Abstract

Sensation breaks up every system ... Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity It is both our panic and our privilege to be mortal and sense-full. We live on the leash of our senses. Although they enlarge us, they also limit and restrain us, but how beautifully. Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses When phenomenology turns to the body in its analyses of perception, it is seeking a way out of the tacit idealism which haunts its methodology. Carnal phenomenology, such as that elaborated in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, attempts to extricate itself from the trappings of transcendental idealism and to articulate an account of perception that takes seriously the role of the body in our consciousness of the world.1 In the last analysis, however, Merleau-Ponty's account of embodied perception subordinates the objects of perception to the perceiver's grasp of them; the practical grasp of human sensibility retains its mastery over the sensible objects themselves. Despite its attempts to escape, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology begins and ends with a theory of perception whose primacy is defended to the detriment-but not the elimination-of the reality of sensation and the autonomy of sensible material.2 The sensibility of the lived body (the body experienced subjectively) is equally susceptible to this perceptual mastery, this taming of the sensible. How can theories of lived experience and philosophies of the body speak ontologically of the material effects of the world upon the human body if they mitigate the objective, that is, material sensitivity of the body? Such an omission compromises the very meaning of vulnerability. This criticism does not discount Merleau-Ponty's efforts against idealism, but it does gesture toward possibilities for deconstructive critique, which has been particularly keen among feminist readers. From a perspective sympathetic to this criticism, Emmanuel Levinas and Alphonse Lingis carry out a renovation of some fertile, but still underdeveloped, Merleau-Pontyan insights. Specifically, they take up Merleau-Ponty's analysis of sensation in Phenomenology of Perception and other texts, alongside his thinking on the chiasmatic structure of being: these are reflected back critically on the prioritization of perceptual competence, or the grasp, that Merleau-Ponty never seemed to relinquish. Following Levinas' reservations about perception and alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Lingis provides phenomenology with a materialist theory of the body which does not reduce corporeal subjectivity to purely physiological, neuroscientific, or biological terms. Lingis comes closest to delivering a fully materialized body to phenomenology, although he could not achieve this without passing through the door opened by Levinas' metaphysics of the body and Merleau-Ponty's critique of sensation and intercorporeity. Taken together, Levinas and Lingis present us with a phenomenology of sensation which resists the idealist tendencies of phenomenology, and works toward a realist, if not materialist, conception of being-in-the-world. It is arguably with Levinas and Lingis that immanent materiality is reintroduced into the phenomenology of the body, and thus it is not until Levinas and Lingis that the flesh is reincarnated as a vulnerable corporeal surface. They expose an ethical component of embodiment that remains latent in Merleau-Ponty's analyses. This perspective illumines the immanent environmentality of the human at the level of sensibility. Here I want to give a reading of sensation not as a mode of knowing, or as one level of the edifice of absolute knowledge, but as a material which nourishes our senses and thereby gives rise to the possibility of subjectivity and knowledge. This requires tracing a collective ontology of sensation and a metaphysics of the body in the phenomenological investigations of Levinas and Lingis-both of whom appreciate a conception of immanence taken from Merleau-Ponty's early and late work-and trying to accentuate their resistances to idealism. …