The Flesh of Images, Images of Flesh: Merleau-Ponty Forwarded

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Notes

1 Carbone, The Flesh of Images, 128 pages inclusive.

2 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 139. Hereafter cited in the text as VI.

3 Larry Hass created an Appendix to his Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy titled “The Multiple Meanings of Flesh in Merleau-Ponty’s Late writings” in which he listed and counted the number of occurrences of what he took to be the three primary senses of “flesh” in The Visible and the Invisible, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” Eye and Mind, the Third Course on Nature, and “Introduction” to Signs. He found “carnality” 49 times, “reversibility” 46 times, and “element of being” 8 times. He also lists several “obscure usages:” flesh as mother, as horizonality, the flesh of time, and the sublimation of the flesh. What was innovative in Hass’s work was the notion of flesh as a multiplicity. Nevertheless, Visibility was not listed. Cf. Hass, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, 201–203.

4 Merleau-Ponty scholars such as Martin C. Dillon and Jacob Rogozinski who have made reversibility the prominent meaning of “Flesh” will notice that reversibility receives the least attention in Carbone’s reading of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, appearing mainly in the discussion of the reversible relation between painter and landscape from Eye and Mind (FI, 65). Cf. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, Nine, “The Reversibility Thesis”; and Rogozinksi, “The Reversibility which is the Ultimate Truth, 469–83.

5 Another earlier interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s Flesh, of Deleuzian inspiration by Evans and Lawlor, had interpreted Flesh as a “plane of immanence” expressing the “internal logic of institutions” and symbolic matrices of history, which they linked, not with polytheism, but with pantheism. Evans and Lawlor also view such a radical pluralism to be a “profound Nietzscheanism.” Cf. “The Value of Flesh,” 15–16.

6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Monde sensible et le monde de l’expression: Cours au Collége de France, 1953, text established and annotated by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert and Stefan Kristensen (Geneva, Switzerland: MétisPresses, 2011).

7 Hermeticism is the controversial tradition of writings and literature descended from the Corpus Hermeticus that began with the Egyptian god-priest, Hermes Trismegistus, and established African sage philosophy. For further discussion, cf. Johnson, The Retrieval of the Beautiful, 108–10. Carbone discusses the “inarticulate cry of the light” from Trismegistus’s Poimandres and links it to Delaunay’s La Lumière that Paul Klee translated into German, and most importantly to the notion of khora in Plato’s Timaeus. (FI, 69–73).

8 Heraclitus created the image of Nature as “veiled” in a fragment found in the book Heraclitus deposited in the temple at Ephesus in which there was a statue of Artemis. In his book The Veil of Isis, Pierre Hadot writes of the “genius of paganism” deriving from Heraclitus’ fragment: “discourse on Nature must be mythical but also to justify . . . polytheism and the whole of ancient civilizations, with its temples, statues, tragedies, and poems.” Cf. Hadot, The Veil of Isis, 1, 68. The veil of the ancient templum is not taken up in Flesh of Images but is found in a new paper by Carbone on screens titled “Thematizing the ‘Arche-Screen’ through Its Variations,” forthcoming.

9 Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, compiled and with notes by Dominique Séglard, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 42-43.

10 That critique originated from Lyotard, but is also found, perhaps surprisingly, in Lefort. Lyotard had written: “There is no Father in Merleau-Ponty, or else there is too much; in short, this throws his discourse into an insatiable demand for the Mother.” Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 58. Cf. Claude Lefort, “Flesh and Otherness”, 12–13. Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, Diana Coole, and other feminist philosophers have extended this discussion and debate. Cf. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, “The Invisible of the Flesh: A Reading of Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ‘The Intertwining – The Chiasm,’” 151–184. Diana Coole has summarized the interpretation of Irigaray: “In her version, this alterity [of Flesh] does refer to the maternal-feminine . . . . of the tenderness and the milieu that constituted the atmosphere of the nursling, the infant.” Cf. Coole, Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism, 215.

11 Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 143–44, 200. Hereafter cited in the text as PW.