ContextThe field of contemporary psychoanalysis is more than ever open to mutually fecund interactions with other disciplines; phenomenology, on the other hand, is also searching for new means to enlarge its scope and describe phenomena such as desire, anxiety, or the spatiality of the body more accurately. In this situation, the works of Guy Félix Duportail (1952-2018) are worthy of serious consideration. He developed a highly sophisticated approach to combining Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the flesh and Lacan's use of topology (in its later, 1970s iteration) in his attempt to visualize the structure of the unconscious. ObjectivesThis article centers on Duportail's work, its scope, and its limits. The aim is to assess Duportail's contribution to the concept of the body, its both organic and relational nature, and to situating the limit between the subjectively lived body and the body as a biological being. MethodIn order to do so, I present his strategy by focusing on his critique of the Merleau-Pontian conception of the unconscious, that is, the excessive privilege given by the philosopher to the dimension of desire, and thus of the imaginary, at the cost of the symbolic. According to Duportail's demonstration, Merleau-Ponty's ontology should be corrected by making holes, or cuts, in the tissue of the flesh of the world, the only condition for the subject to establish and preserve her unity and not merge with the flesh of the world. ResultsThe result of this attempt is the necessity to better understand the death drive: does taking seriously the Freudian concept of the death drive imply the introduction of a form of ontological dualism (life-death, being-nothingness), or is it always from inside life that death can make sense ? This question is the topic of a second article that will more closely examine the manner in which Duportail accounts for the working of the drives, and that will put this in dialogue with a reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, on the one hand, and with the desiring machines of Deleuze and Guattari on the other.