A Philosophy of Weakness: Merleau-Ponty on Fugitive Love and the Wisdom in Letting Die

ABSTRACT

This essay provides a sketch of Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of love in relation to human experience and to the conceptualization of φιλία and σοφία outlined in his later works. In response to what he calls a “cruel thought … that is more fear of error than it is a love of truth”, Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on love and jealousy in Proust offer a concept of “fugitive love”. Opposed to the Cartesian desire for apodicticity that seeks to seize and arrest, fugitive love means withholding one’s touch and letting the beloved die. In its offer of dispossession rather than possession, love requires faith. This faith, the opposite of faith in an absolute λόγος, invites and accepts being’s occultation as the very means of its openness. Merleau-Ponty’s thought offers a mode of philosophizing that no longer aims to make being its captive but a philosophy of weakness that allows for its withdraw.

Notes

1 Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 257n.

2 Ibid., 129.

3 An important exception to this is the appendix to Mauro Carbone’s book An Unprecedented Deformation: Marcel Proust and the Sensible Ideas entitled “Love and Music: Theme and Variations,” 69–82. Carbone’s account includes a detailed analysis of the 1954 lecture course “Institution of a Feeling” and Merleau-Ponty’s account of the Recherche and the question of love. I will be referencing Carbone’s treatment. See also Lawlor 2008. It’s also worth mentioning Dillon’s work on this subject: “Toward a Phenomenology of Love and Sexuality,” 1980, and “Erotic Desire,” 1985.

4 Dillon makes the following, indicative remark: “Sartre was right in describing the threat of the other’s competitive perspective as a fundamental mode of our being-with-others. But he was mistaken in conceiving it as the phenomenon in which I originally experience the subjectivity of others. His mistake lies in his failure to understand the threatening/shaming/objectifying look as founded upon the original transfer of corporeal schema, as a disruption of the primordial state of syncretic sociability …  Sartre’s failure, however, is not merely the result of a one-sided and incomplete understanding of the look; it is, rather, the inevitable consequence of adopting a neo-Cartesian ontology predicated on the bifurcation of being into mutually exclusive spheres of immanence and transcendence” (Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, 127).

5 Merleau-Ponty, Notes des Cours, 355–78. For a detailed account of the Broullion text and the sense of φιλία and σοφία at stake there see Lawlor, “The Friend of the Future.”

6 Proust, In Search of Lost Time, I: 853–54. Quoted in “Institution of a Feeling” in Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 32.

7 This term is most immediately recognizable from Plato’s image of the divided line (Republic, Book VI, 509D–513E), and is usually translated as something like “trust”, “faith” or “belief”. I’ve chosen Plato’s word as a means for thinking about the stakes of la foi perceptive – where “faith” here is understood in terms of our openness to perceived, similar to the role it plays Plato’s image.

8 For example, in the 1958–1959 course at the Collège de France, published under the title “Philosophie aujourd’hui”, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the “decadence of express, official philosophy” (Merleau-Ponty, Notes des Cours, 39).

9 See also Lawlor, “The Friend of the Future,” 83.

10 Merleau-Ponty, Notes des Cours, 359. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty doesn’t use the term “cruel thought”, but it appears that the passage was revised and stated as follows: “We would err as much by defining philosophy as the search for the essences as by defining it as the fusion with the things, and the two errors are not so different. Whether we orientate ourselves upon the essences, which are the more pure in the measure that he who sees them has no part in the world, in the measure, consequently, that we look out from the depths of nothingness, or whether we seek to merge with the existing things, at the very point and at the very instant that they are, this infinite distance, this absolute proximity express in two ways – as a soaring over or as fusion – the same relationship with the thing itself” (Merleau-Ponty, VI, 166; 127). All references to The Visible and the Invisible will use the abbreviation VI, citing the French followed the by the English translation.

11 Ibid.

12 Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, 48. It should be noted that this expression is crossed out in the lecture notes.

13 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phénoménologie de la perception, 396, 432, 438; Phenomenology of Perception, 401, 439, 444. All references to Phenomenology of Perception will use the abbreviation PhP, citing the French followed by the English translation.

14 In Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, Merleau-Ponty argues that this “thought without fissures” is caught in a paradox of absolute proximity and absolute distance. As he says, “this consciousness can have dealing only in its significations. Nothing can touch it that awakens in it one of the significations which it conceives. Receptivity is the death of this consciousness. Hence where both the immediate presence of this consciousness to its objects: nothing separates it, it attains them without distance – and at the same time, it is to them an absolute overview, and they cannot turn against it, it is entirely removed” (Merleau-Ponty Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression, 48).

15 Merleau-Ponty, VI, 166/127.

16 Ibid.

17 Proust, Marcel, Within a Budding Grove, 1: 853–54.

18 Merleau-Ponty, VI, 160/122.

19 Lawlor, “The Friend of the Future,” 83.

20 In the “Philosophy Today” course, Merleau-Ponty speaks of this crisis specifically in reference to Husserl’s Krisis.

21 Merleau-Ponty, Notes des Cours, 39.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., 359.

24 Ibid.

25 This description more or less follows the structure of the Meditations. Indeed, Descartes’ is a world full of dreams, illusion, confusion and infinitely powerful and malicious demons, all cast against the backdrop of absolute certainty. Only a miracle, the grace of God, can save us from this macabre scenario. This Cartesian nightmare issues, as Merleau-Ponty knew, from fear and paranoia – fear of errors, the paranoia of not being able to enter into being exhaustively, of not being able to coincide with pure being or even to be pure being. One could suggest then, that Descartes’ nightmare extends from his fear and anxiety of being only human.

26 Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 29.

27 As Sartre says, “He wants to possess a freedom as freedom” (Sartre, L’Etre et le Néant, 434; Being and Nothingness, 478). For comment on this in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s lecture, see Carbone An Unprecedented Deformation, 72.

28 Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 29.

29 Merleau-Ponty notes: “He had taken them for ‘mistresses of racing cyclists or prize-fighters.’ They were the daughters of merchants” (Ibid., 91n.).

30 Ibid., 32.

31 Ibid.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. II, eds. and trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 19/13.

35 Descartes, “Discourse on the Method,” 47.

36 Merleau-Ponty cites the following passage from the Recherche: “And in becoming a friend of one of them I should have penetrated – like a cultivated pagan or a meticulous Christian going among barbarians – a youthful society in which thoughtlessness, health, sensual pleasure, cruelty, un-intellectuality and joy held sway” (Proust, I: 888).

37 Proust, In Search of Lost Time, II: 503. This passage evokes Sartre’s famous commentary in Being and Nothingness. Sartre says: “Proust’s hero … who installs his mistress in his home, who can see her and possess her at any hour of the day, who has been able to make her completely dependent on him economically, ought to be free from worry. Yet we know that he is, on the contrary, continually gnawed by anxiety. Through her consciousness, Albertine escapes Marcel even when he is at her side, and that is why he knows relief only when he is at her side, and that is why he knows relief only when he gazes on her while she sleeps. It is certain then that the lover wishes to capture a ‘consciousness.’ But why does he wish it? And how?” (Sartre 1943/1966, 434/478).

38 Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 33.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., 34.

42 Ibid., 37.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 “Touch me not,” John 20:17. In the Greek it reads: Me mou haptou. These are Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene after their encounter outside the tomb. Jean-Luc Nancy’s analysis in his text, Noli me tangere, underscores the extent to which this phrase has figured in works of art, especially painting. Nancy’s treatment is meticulous and relevant and we will return to it. See Nancy, Noli me Tangere.

46 Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 37–38.

47 Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense, 64, 134.

48 As Lawlor suggests, this is the experience of what Heidegger called Gelassenheit. See Lawlor “The Friend of the Future,” 81.

49 Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 38. As Carbone notes in regard to this passage: “ … we could characterize that clair-voyance as the blind clair-voyance of a force that looks for itself in the objects in which it it invests itself and that can subsequently retro-ject them as sensible ideas, and favor the decisions about them which, as soon as they are made, appear to have been made ‘from time immemorial’” (Carbone, An Unprecedented Deformation, 81).

50 Cited by Lawlor, “The Friend of the Future,” 83.

51 Indeed, for Merleau-Ponty, insofar as they are motivated by love and friendship and not by fear, fugitive love defines all of our relationships with others. That is, intersubjective relationships are no longer to be defined in accordance with the kind of certainty required by the anxieties expressed by Descartes in the Meditations. Insofar as I recognize others as others, I make no demands of nakedness because at no point to do I require coincidence or fusion, and I have no expectation of perfect communication or understanding. Insofar as I relate to others, then, I do so precisely through misunderstanding, miscommunication and confusion and expect nothing less.

52 Lawlor, “The Friend of the Future,” 83.

53 As Merleau-Ponty remarks in the Le cogito chapter of Phenomenology of Perception, quoting Valéry, “A thought does not exist which exterminates the power of thinking and concludes it – a certain position of the bolt which definitively closes the lock. No, there is no point of thought which is a resolution born of its own development and, as it were, the final resolution [accord] of this permanent dissonance” (Merleau-Ponty PhP, 461/465, trans. modified).

54 As Merleau-Ponty notes in the Broullion, “exemplar of an alogical essence, what Hermes Trismégiste called ‘the scream [cri] of light’”. Merleau-Ponty, Notes des Cours, 373. Merleau-Ponty makes reference to the same remark by Hermes Trismegiste in Eye and Mind: “Art is not skillful construction, skillful artifice, the skillful relation, from the outside, to a space and a world. It is truly the ‘inarticulate scream [cri],’ as Hermes Trismegistus said, ‘which seemed to be the voice of the light’”. Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit, 70; “Eye and Mind,” 370.

55 Merleau-Ponty, VI, 48/29.

56 “Formal” is Nancy’s description of Thomas’ faith, which is the counterpoint to Mary Magdalene.

57 Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2006, 159/146.

58 Nancy, 30.

59 Ibid., 28–29.

60 This is discussed at the very end of “Interrogation and Intuition:” “‘What do I know?’ is not only ‘what is knowing?’ and not only ‘who am I?’ but finally: ‘what is there?’ and even: ‘what is the there is?’ These questions call not for the exhibiting of something said which would put an end to them, but for the disclosure of a Being that is not posited because it has no need to be, because it is silently behind all our affirmations, negations, and even behind all formulated questions, not that it is a matter of forgetting them in its silence, not that it is a matter of imprisoning it in our chatter, but because philosophy is the reconversion of silence and speech into one another: ‘It is the experience ... still mute which we are concerned with leading to the pure expression of its own meaning’” (Merleau-Ponty, VI, 169/129).

61 Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la philosophie et autres essais, 68, 70; In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, 58, 61; trans. modified. All references to Éloge de la philosophie will use the abbreviation EP, citing the French followed by the English translation.

62 Merleau-Ponty, Notes des Cours, 363.

63 Merleau-Ponty, EP, 69/60.

64 Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 39.