Literature, Ontology, and Implex in Merleau-Ponty: Writing and Finding the Concrete Limit of Phenomena

Rajiv Kaushik

doi:10.3390/h10040118

Abstract

This paper examines the ambiguous relationship between the literary uses of language in Merleau-Ponty’s own work and his ontology. It is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s critique of phenomenology—that is, his critique of an already critical philosophy—leads him to say that the limits of phenomena are inside the entire structure of the phenomena. They are, in other words, promiscuous or dehiscent and therefore are not limits that can themselves be given. Merleau-Ponty would say that such limits are silent or mute within meaning. This will have repercussions for the very method of phenomenology. It can no longer be a descriptive method, concerned with the givenness of the phenomena, but needs to be matrixed with an expressive method that shows up the impossibility of such a return. This expressive method has to do with what he calls the “implex”—the very bodily limit of the inside and the outside that cannot be thought as one or the other, or even their synthesis. In other words, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology invites us towards a concrete bodily limit that is, at the same time, a limit to philosophy. In effect, one cannot think of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh apart from language, because this ontology, its very concrete crystallization, requires expression and not just description.

Highlights

This paper examines the ambiguous relationship between the literary uses of language in Merleau-Ponty’s own work and his ontology
In “Qual Quelle”, commenting on Paul Valéry, Derrida notes that philosophy is regulated by the law of pure cognition and is the desire to hear oneself speak in monologues
It is sometimes argued that the “indirect” ontology requires an indirect language as opposed to a direct language; and in particular it requires metaphorical language as opposed to scientific language

Summary

Merleau-Ponty and Derrida

An issue in Voice and Phenomenon is the problem of givenness and intentional consciousness, its structure of noesis and noema (its structure of sense and meaning), and signification. Merleau-Ponty’s thesis, I think, is not that there is an absence that presents itself as absent but a more radical claim and critique of phenomenology: There is a non-significance internal to signification that makes signification possible; this non-significance does not itself signify but is rather threaded throughout the entire axis of relation between the signifier and the signified, within both, so that we can think of the former referring to the latter and the latter as what is meant by the former. It instead forms what Merleau-Ponty calls “indirect ontology”; and this ontology, even more than does Derrida’s account of speaking and the voice, draws together existence and writing, the figures of language and the figures of the body.

Is Indirect Ontology an Ontology of Metaphor?

Philosophy and Literature