References
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l ‘invisible, ed. Claude Lefort. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1964, 219; The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968, 167, hereafter VI, with original pagination preceding English translation.
- Of particular importance are the notes on the course that Merleau-Ponty was offering at the time of his death, “L'ontologie cartésienne et l'ontologie d'aujourd'hui,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours au Collège de France 1958–1959 et 1960–1961, ed. Stéphanie Ménasé. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1996, hereafter NC; English translations are my own. The precedent for the remarkable chapter in The Visible and the Invisible, “The Chiasm,” is to be found largely in the section entitled, “Le visible et l'invisible: Proust”, 191–8.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours sur “L'Origine de la géométrie” de Husserl, suivi de recherches sur la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty, ed. Franck Robert. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998, 13; Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002, 12, hereafter HP, with original pagination preceding English translation.
- Indeed, Merleau-Ponty explicitly connects the problem of reflective thought (as the conflation of brute perception with conscious reflection) with the task that is the poetic task: to recover the non-coincidence and bring it to expression. He writes, “To criticize the ‘little man inside the man’—perception as cognition of an ob-ject—to rediscover man finally face to face with the world itself, to rediscover the pre-intentional present—is to rediscover that vision of the origins, which sees itself within us, as poetry rediscovers what articulates itself within us, unbeknown to us (Max Ernst in Charbonnier's book)” (VI, 258/208). The reference, by way of Charbonnier’ s work, Le Monologue du peintre I, is to the poet Rimbaud. An excerpt from Rimbaud's “Letter to Paul Demeny” is as follows, “For I is someone else. If the brass awakes as horn, it can't be to blame. This much is clear: I'm around for the hatching of my thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I release a strike from the bow: the symphony makes its rumblings in the depths, or leaps fully-formed onto the stage.” Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete, trans. Wyatt Mason. New York: The Modern Library, 2003, 366. Merleau-Ponty mentions the connection again in the final course that he was presenting at the time of his death, “L'ontologie cartésienne et l'ontologie d'aujourd'hui” (NC, 186).
- It should be noted that here Merleau-Ponty is speaking of Husserl's work. Merleau-Ponty's treatment of Husserl can be taken as a paradigm for the way in which we, ourselves, must think through the work of Merleau-Ponty.
- From an essay entitled, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1960, 72; The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson and trans. Michael B. Smith. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993, 82, hereafter IL, with original pagination preceding English translation.
- “Crisis of Verse,” in Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2007, 210–11.
- “Crisis of Verse,” 205–6.
- Guy Michaud, Mallarmé, trans. Marie Collins and Bertha Humez. New York: New York University Press, 1965, 107.
- Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems, trans. Henry Weinfield. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994, 122. Later in the Preface, he writes as well that his poetry admits of “a strange influence, that of Music, as it is heard at a concert; several of its methods, which seemed to me to apply to Literature, are to be found here.” Collected Poems, 123.
- Collected Poems, 121.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Causeries, 1948, ed. Stéphanie Ménasé. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002, 59–60; The World of Perception, trans. Oliver Davis. London: Routledge Classics, 2008, 75.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Deux Notes Inédites sur la Musique,” trans. Leonard Lawlor, Chiasmi International, vol. 3, 2001, 18.
- Quoted from Leon Botstein, “Beyond the Illusions of Realism: Painting and Debussy's Break with Tradition,” in Debussy and His World, ed. Jane F. Fulcher. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, 160.
- It should be noted that, at the time of the composition of the Prélude, Debussy frequented the circle of poets and artists known as Les Mardis who convened regularly in Mallarmé's own home. Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894) was inspired, of course, by Mallarmé's poem, L'après-midi d'un faune (1876). Yet one might say that Debussy's Prélude serves less as an imitation and more as a non-coincident companion to the poem; from the depth between the poem and the Prélude springs the full expression of the dreams and desires of the faun.
- “Deux Notes Inédites sur la Musique”, 18.
- Debussy and His World, 265.
- Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 3 vol., trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Vintage Books, 1982, 1:379.
- Merleau-Ponty uses this term to describe the musical idea of Proust. See NC, 194.
- In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes, Every ideation, because it is an ideation, is formed in a space of existence, under the guarantee of my duration, which must turn back into itself in order to find there again the same idea I thought an instant ago and must pass into the others in order to rejoin it also in them. Every ideation is borne by this tree of my duration and other durations, this unknown sap nourishes the transparency of the idea; behind the idea, there is the unity, the simultaneity of all the real and possible durations, the cohesion of one sole Being from one end to the other. Under the solidity of the essence and of the idea there is the fabric of experience, this flesh of time…(VI, 148/111).
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La structure du comportement. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942, 96; The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1963, 87.
- We are reminded here of Merleau-Ponty's description, While listening to beautiful music: the impression that this movement that starts up is already at its endpoint, which it is going to have been, or [that it is] sinking into the future that we have a hold of as well as the past—although we cannot say exactly what it will be. Anticipated retrospection—Retrograde movement in futuro: it comes down towards me entirely done (“Deux Notes Inédites sur la Musique” 18).
- The editor of The Visible and the Invisible points, with respect to Merleau-Ponty's use of “Sigè,” to a passage from Claudel's Poetic Art. Indeed, in Poetic Art, Claudel writes what one could again take as a description of the Prélude itself, May this discourse emerge in silence and on a blank page! Where only this last question remains unanswered: but, after all, the sense and direction, this sense and direction of life we call time, what is it? All movement, we have stated, is from and not toward a point. There starts the trace. This is the point to which clings all life unfolded by time: it is the string on which the bow starts and ends its play. Time is the means offered to all that which will be to be, in order to be no more. It is the Invitation to Death extended to each sentence, to decay in the explanatory and total harmony, to consummate the word of adoration, whispered in the ear of Sigè, the Abyss, (Paul Claudel, Poetic Art, trans. Renee Spodheim, New York: Philosophical Library, 1948, 35) The essay from which this passage is drawn, “Knowledge of Time,” plays a significant role (along with that of another work of Claudel, The Eye Listens) in The Visible and the Invisible as well as Merleau-Ponty's course notes, “L'ontologie cartésienne et l'ontologie d'aujourd'hui.” See NC, 198–204. Specifically, Merleau-Ponty explores the notion of “simultaneity” in the work of Paul Claudel as “cohesion which is not indistinction, which is [cohesion] of incompossibles, which is encroachment, absence” (NC, 199).
- In this context, please note that this essay offers themes from the beginning of a larger book project, forthcoming, by the same author. See Jessica Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought: Art, Literature, and Music after Merleau-Ponty. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013.