References
- Agamben, G. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Heller-Roazen Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 239, and Smith, D. W. ‘Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence’ in Between Deleuze and Derrida, eds. P. Patton and J. Protevi, p. 46, London: Continuum 2004. We are indebted to the Australian Research Council for providing support for this research in the form of a Discovery Grant awarded to Jack Reynolds. We would also like to thank James Williams, John Mullarkey and others at the University of Dundee for their valuable feedback on an earlier version of this paper.
- Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., What is Philosophy? trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, Columbia: Columbia University Press 1994, p. 59 (hereafter referred to as WP).
- Exceptions to this include the following essays: Lawlor, L. ‘The end of phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty’, Continental Philosophy Review, 31 (1998): pp. 15–34; Weiss, G. ‘Ecart: The Space of Corporeal Difference’ in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh, eds.F. Evans, and L. Lawlor, Albany: State University of New York Press 1995; Bell, J. ‘Phenomenology, Poststructuralism, and the Cinema of Time’, Film and Philosophy, ed. A. Casebier (Vol 2, 1994); and D. Taylor, ‘Phantasmatic Genealogy’ in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics and Postmodernism, eds. Thomas Busch and Simon Gallagher, Albany: State University of New York Press 1992.
- Deleuze, G. The Logic of Sense, ed. c. Boundas, trans. M. Lester and c. Stivale, London: Continuum 1993, p. 66. (Hereafter referred to as LS)
- On Deleuze's analysis, by moving from the more differentiated to the less differentiated, good sense engenders a teleological and linear account of time; the most differentiated is the immediate past, and the least differentiated is the future, which is considered to be an end of some sort. Good sense hence does not attain to the ontologically primary ‘eternal return of difference’ understanding of the future that Deleuze proposes in Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, Columbia: Columbia University Press 1994, p. 90. (Hereafter referred to as DR).
- Merleau-Ponty, M., The Visible and the Invisible, ed. c. Lefort, trans. A. Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1968, p. 94 (hereafter referred to as VI).
- In applying this analysis of good sense and common sense to Husserl, Deleuze suggests that: “Husserl does not think about genesis on the basis of a necessarily paradoxical instance, which, properly speaking, would be ‘non-identifiable’ (lack its own identity and origin). He thinks of it, on the contrary, on the basis of an original faculty of common sense, responsible for accounting for the identity of an object in general, and even on the basis of a faculty of good sense, responsible for accounting for the process of identification of every object in general ad infinitum. We can clearly see this in the Husserlian theory of doxa, wherein the different kinds of belief are engendered with reference to an urdoxa, which acts as a faculty of common sense in relation to the specified faculties” (LS p. 97).
- LS 98; In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari argue that this urdoxic aspect of phenomenology also has political implications. They suggest: “are we not led back […] to the simple opinion of the average capitalist…whose perceptions are clichés and whose affections are labels?” (WP, p. 149) They follow this briefly with the further claim that if “we do not fight against perceptual and affective clichés [the empirical mannequins of the urdoxa] we do not also fight against the machine that produces them” (WP, p. 150). This is obviously the point of contact between a critique of the urdoxa and the political program of schizoanalysis elaborated firstly in Anti-Oedipus (1972). For them, the urdoxa assumed by phenomenology is not at all transcendental, but is constituted on the basis of the sociopolitical milieu. Thus a certain socio-political conservatism is inherent in the phenomenological project.
- Again, Merleau-Ponty also moves in this direction in the closing pages of the important chapter on ‘The Phenomenal Field’ in Phenomenology of Perception, in which an outline for the definition of transcendental philosophy is provided, and it is curious that Deleuze is so positive about Sartre's notion of an impersonal transcendental field (WP, p. 47). While this may be a step in the right direction, surely Merleau-Ponty's ongoing emphasis on the importance of habit, the development of skills, etc., is more empirical than Sartre's work, which exaggerates consciousness’ capacity for negation, for transcendence, and for moving beyond and outside of the world of things. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty does not instantiate this radical distinction between being-for-itself and being-in-itself, which befits a philosophy of transcendence that cannot consider questions of genesis and entails that human consciousness substantially differs from all of others. Moreover, for Merleau-Ponty negation isn't ontologically fundamental and he consequently reformulates dialectical thinking, much as Deleuze also does.
- For Deleuze, singularities “occur on the unconscious surface and possess a mobile, immanent principle of auto-unification through a nomadic distribution, radically different from fixed and sedimentary distributions as conditions of the syntheses of consciousness. Singularities are the true transcendental events” (LS, p. 102).
- At least, that is one way to avoid the problems engendered by modern philosophy's subjectivism. As Daniel Smith has suggested in his essay, ‘Deleuze and Derrida, Transcendence and Immanence’, there are at least two main ways in which we can question the importance accorded to the transcendental subject: firstly, via a recognition of the transcendence and constitutive significance of ‘the other’; or secondly, via recourse to the immanent flux of experience, from which the transcendental subject is but a derivative abstraction. On Smith's view, Levinas and Derrida can be said to do the former, while Deleuze does the latter. Notwithstanding our introductory caveat about such characterisations not being overly helpful, our contention is that Merleau-Ponty, like Deleuze, questions the transcendental subject via the immanent flux of experience.
- Merleau-Ponty, M., The Phenomenology of Perception, trans, c. Smith, London: Routledge 1962 (hereafter referred to as PP).
- Deleuze. G. The Fold—Leibniz and the Baroque, London: Athlone Press 1993, p. 146 n28. This note begins by discussing Heidegger, but goes on to describe very briefly Merleau-Ponty's philosophical concern with the theme of the fold, including references to the chiasm or intertwining (entrelac) between the seen and the seer that, as is well-known. Merleau-Ponty deals with in The Visible and the Invisible.
- In Cinema 1, Deleuze discusses Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the cinema and offers another version of the argument that phenomenology is rooted in “natural perception” (see Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, pp. 1–3. 22. and pp. 56–7).
- In his book Foucault (eg. pp 59, 88, 108–12), Deleuze contrasts a hybridised Heidegger-Merleau-Ponty with Foucault. However, the apparent significance of these passages for the purposes of our essay can be ameliorated by noting the following points. First. Deleuze is never talking about Merleau-Ponty directly, but within the Heidegger-Merleau-Ponty-Foucault nexus. Taking into account Deleuze's method of ‘free indirect discourse’ (the mode in which he writes on other thinkers), and this hyphenated entity, it is difficult to be clear what Deleuze is actually claiming about Merleau-Ponty himself. In the main. Merleau-Ponty's terminology is used in passing (the fold, the visible and invisible, the chiasm, etc.) but little is actually said about his position aside from very general summaries. In short, this text shows only a superficial familiarity with the relevant texts and we can note again the limits of Deleuze's understanding of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. The discussion of flesh, for example, found on p. 149n36 (and again in explicit relation to Heidegger) presents it as the “place” in which the visible and the invisible are folded or intertwined together. On the contrary, as we will argue shortly, what Merleau-Ponty means by ‘flesh’ is more closely connected with Deleuze's ‘univocity of being’ than it is with any spatial metaphors or the Heideggerian sense of place as clearing.
- In that respect. What is Philosophy? is a very important text to consider. By doing so. this essay also serves to supplement and enrich Leonard Lawlor's essay on Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty that largely ignored What is Philosophy? (see ‘The end of phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty’). Unlike Lawlor. we also consider The Visible and the Invisible rather than Phenomenology of Perception which he focuses upon.
- Lawlor 1998, p. 15.
- If Husserl proposed a methodology of pure immanence, the existential phenomenologists consider this impossible—which is to say that any complete reduction is considered to be untenable—and their criticism of Husserlian phenomenology is that it becomes an immanence so purified of transcendence that the cogito is entirely divorced from world, body, others, history.
- Deleuze. G. Pure Immanence, ed. Rachman, J.. New York: Zone Books 2000, p. 26–7 (Hereafter referred to as PI).
- Lévinas. E. ‘Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity’. Collected Philosophical Papers, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977.
- Smith, 2002, p. 47.
- The key text of Merleau-Ponty's in this regard is certainly ‘Eye and Mind’ (1961), his final published paper. Whether or not Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of art is insufficient to account for the ‘being of sensation’ that is the artwork cannot be explored here, but Deleuze and Guattari clearly think that it is, despite constituting a move in the right direction.
- As mentioned, this discussion in What is Philosophy? is the culmination of a series of minor remarks about Merleau-Ponty that can be found throughout Deleuze's work. As well as the references already discussed, comments on Merleau-Ponty can also be found as early as his 1964 piece, ‘Il a été mon maître’, which is dedicated to Sartre, and in which Deleuze describes Merleau-Ponty's work as derivative and academic in relation to Sartre's.
- In fact, after Difference and Repetition, Deleuze more and more speaks of the relationship between substance and modes in terms of a mutual immanence, redeeming Spinoza from this criticism. See, for example, WP p. 48 and PI p. 26.
- Deleuze. G. Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, New York: Zone Books 1988, p. 20.
- Badiou. A. Deleuze—The Clamour of Being, trans. L. Burchill, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press 2000. In this text. Badiou argues that Deleuze's emphasis on difference remains merely secondary, and that his thought remains a form of metaphysics of the One.
- In his essay ‘Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel’. Merleau-Ponty explicitly argues that his ongoing insistence upon ambiguity does not imply a lack of univocity; ‘Philosophy and Non-philosophy since Hegel’, trans. H. Silverman. Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Merleau-Ponty, New York: Routledge 1989, p. 52.
- There are, of course, other problems that Deleuze has with phenomenology that might be listed here, even if they are not as prominent as these. Notably, following Foucault in The Order of Things, Deleuze argues that phenomenology introduces a splitting of the subject (LS p. 100). Phenomenology is envisaged as instigating a radical cleavage of consciousness into the reflective cogito and the pre-reflective or tacit cogito, and it is true that not only in Husserl, but also in the work of Sartre and the early work of Merleau-Ponty, this distinction is an important feature.
- The relationship between subjectivity and habituality is also a concern discussed in many of Deleuze's works, notably Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953). Difference anil Repetition, and, in a different way, Anti-Oedipus (1972). In all these texts, the first two particularly. Deleuze is concerned to describe the way in which the subject as a coherent active being must be based on fundamental sets of habits acquired by a passive ‘larval self’, which then generate the complexity necessary for such activity. In the words of Gilbert Simondon, whose work is essential for Deleuze, part of the movement of individuation, which proceeds from pre-individual states of affairs, is effected by habit.
- Flynn. B. ‘The Question of Ontology: Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’ in The Horizons of the Flesh: Critical Perspectives on the Thought of Merleau-Ponty, ed. T. Gillian. Urbana: Southern Illinois University Press 1973.
- Dews. P. The Logics of Disintegration, London: Verso 1987, p. 134.
- For a detailed discussion of this, see Reynolds. J. ‘Merleau-Ponty. Levinas and the Alterity of the Other’. Symposium 6. no. 1 (2002). pp. 63–78. where it is argued that it is partly Merleau-Ponty's preoccupation with refuting the Sartrean model of conflict that is responsible for the affectionate tenor of the former's work—in other words, it is not something endemic to the ontology itself.