Merleau-Ponty and the Sense of Sexual Difference

Abstract

While Merleau-Ponty does not theorize sexual difference at any great length, his concepts of the flesh and the institution of a sense suggest hitherto undeveloped possibilities for articulating sexual difference beyond the male–female binary. For Merleau-Ponty, flesh is a “pregnancy of possibilities” which gives rise to masculine and feminine forms through a process of mutual divergence and encroachment. Both sexes bear “the possible of the other,” and neither represents the first or generic form of the human; each sex bears the possibility of the other. By approaching sexual difference in terms of intersubjectively distributed possibilities rather than interlocking forms or types, we may grasp sexual difference in terms of both a developmental process in which bodies become sexed (and sometimes re-sexed) over time, and in terms of a social-historical process in which patterns of relation and exchange between sexed bodies shift over time, altering the very sense of sexual difference.

Keywords:

• Merleau-Ponty
• sexual difference
• temporality
• flesh
• institution
• embryology

Notes

I would like to thank Bettina Bergo, David Morris, Noah Moss Brender and Shiloh Whitney for their comments on a draft of this paper.

1. See Levinas, Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity.

2. “Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother” (VI 267).

3. Merleau-Ponty continues: “[T]he soul is the hollow of the body, the body is the distension of the soul” (VI 233). The relation between body and soul “is to be understood as the bond between the convex and the concave, between the solid vault and the hollow it forms” (VI 231).

4. The encounter with an other is therefore an “initiation to a symbolics and a typicality of others of which the being for itself and the being for the other are reflective variants and not the essential forms” (VI 82 fn. 14).

5. Indeed, we could think of men and women as “total parts” of humanity, where each expresses the totality of the human, but only in its partiality, which in turn implies a reference to the other sex. See VI 134, 216–17 for a discussion of “total parts.”

6. There may be a more generous way of reading this phrase in relation to Merleau-Ponty's image of a mutually defining surface between self and other. This “surface of separation and of union … is the invisible hinge upon which my life and the life of the others turn to rock into one another, the inner framework of intersubjectivity” (VI 234). But even this image implies a duality – self and other, male and female – where the only “between” is the hinge of their mutual relation. For this reason, its promise remains limited for my project of opening up the logic of sexual difference to a plurality – unless the hinge is conceived as a zone of mutual divergence rather than a simple point.

7. This image is reminiscent of Aristophanes’ comic account of the genesis of sexual difference in Plato's Symposium (189C–193d), where humans begin as double-sided beings who are then split in half by Zeus, and so spend their whole lives searching for the other half that will complete their wounded being. But to the extent that Merleau-Ponty grasps sexual difference in terms of possibility rather than fixed forms, the encounter with the other need not be understood to fill in a gap in my own identity, because on the account of intersubjectivity I have given here there is no gap; there is rather a hollow that makes determination possible, but does not seal off the possibilities for further development in divergent directions. I elaborate this reading in the second section of this paper.

8. This interpretation is supported by another passing remark in The Visible and the Invisible: “The other is born from my side, by a sort of propagation by cuttings or by subdivisions, as the first other, says Genesis, was made from a part of Adam's body” (VI 59). Depending on whether one emphasizes “from my side” or “from a part of Adam's body,” woman appears either as equal or secondary. In any case, woman is aligned with the other, and man/Adam with the self. Note also the formulation of the passage analyzed above: “The I–other relation to be conceived … as complementary roles one of which cannot be occupied without the other being also: masculinity implies femininity, etc.” (VI 220–21). I have assumed that the “etc.” implies that femininity also implies masculinity, but the parallelism is clearly between I–other and masculine–feminine. The issues of sexual difference and temporality raised by this biblical reference are so complex, and yet so radically undeveloped in Merleau-Ponty's work, that I have bracketed them for the purposes of this paper. I address these issues in a different context in “Who Follows Whom? Derrida, Animals and Women.”

9. Merleau-Ponty adds in the margin: “that which is and demands to be; it has to become what it is” (IP 80).

10. Merleau-Ponty explicitly compares institution to birth:

• [F]rom the moment of conception and still more after birth, there is an encroachment towards a future which is made from itself, under certain given conditions, and which is not the act of a Sinngebung. Birth [is not an act] of constitution but the institution of a future. Reciprocally, institution resides in the same genus of Being as birth and is not, any more than birth, an act. There will be later decisionary institutions or contracts, but they are to be understood on the basis of birth and not the reverse. (IP 8)

From the perspective of institution, birth is the emergence of someone to whom something can happen; it is the opening of a future, not from nothing, but from a field of possibilities which is itself shifting as some of these possibilities are taken up and others left behind. The future of the one who is born encroaches; it is neither projected nor mapped out in advance, but is made from the one who is born and the situation into which s/he is born. Birth is an event, an emergence of the new from what was already there, but which will be altered in relation to that which is born.

11. See also Merleau-Ponty's comments on embryonic development in the chiasm chapter of The Visible and the Invisible:

• [A]s though, through all these channels, all these prepared but unemployed circuits, the current that will traverse them was rendered probable, in the long run inevitable: the current making of an embryo a newborn infant, of a visible a seer, and of a body a mind, or at least a flesh. In spite of all our substantialist ideas, the seer is being premeditated in counterpoint in the embryonic development; through a labour upon itself the visible body provides for the hollow whence a vision will come, inaugurates the long maturation at whose term suddenly it will see, that is, will be visible for itself, will institute the interminable gravitation, the indefatigable metamorphosis of the seeing and the visible whose principle is posed and which gets underway with the first vision. What we are calling flesh, this interiorly worked-over mass, has no name in any philosophy … (VI 147)

12 In “The Five Sexes, Revisited,” Fausto-Sterling complicates this model of the continuum into a multidimensional map which takes into account differences at the chromosomal, hormonal, and anatomical level, not to mention differences in gender and sexuality. However, the concept of sexual differences in degree rather than kind remains in this expanded version of the model.

13. A second period of intense sexual development occurs at puberty, and arguably continues throughout adult life in more or less subtle ways. See IP 56–61 for a discussion of puberty. Transsexuals take up the possibility of diverging from one's born sex through a combination of hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery, both of which unfold over months and even years of transitioning. See Prosser 99–134 for a discussion of the complex role that narrative plays in this spatio-temporal process of changing sex. Needless to say, the transsexual does not merely actualize the “lost” possibility of being sexed otherwise, thus canceling out the negativity involved in sexuation, but rather takes up this possibility in a way that shifts the dynamics of the field, underscoring the sense in which each body bears its own history of sexuation, and its own particular relation to the modes of sexuation from which it diverges.

14. Arguably, this pertains not only to sexual difference but to other forms of embodied difference, such as race and abilities.

15. See Laqueur for an historical account of shifts in biological accounts of sexual difference, from the one-sex model of Aristotle and Galen to the two-sex model of nineteenth- and twentieth-century biology.

16. In the present paper, I do not have room to discuss in detail the influence of trans and intersex theory on my approach to sexual difference; a fuller discussion will be forthcoming in the next stage of this project. For the time being, I can only list the authors whose work has most influenced my thinking: Clare, Lane, Prosser, Salamon, Shotwell, and Stone. For another component of my own project, see “Other Fecundities.”