The Non-Human in Merleau-Ponty

Something uneasy about the relationship between Merleau-Ponty and “correlationism" (see here and here). Above all: a slightly condescending view of Merleau-Ponty as a “gifted stylist,” with some “striking formulations,” but whose ontology is nevertheless lacking in originality and radicality. In a word, a thinker whose attempt to overcome Kantianism remains locked within a human-centric divide between world and human (granted that Merleau-Ponty himself remains aware of this divide, noting that “if we try to describe the real as it appears to us in perceptual experience, we find it overlaid with anthropological predicates” (PP. 58). Even—especially?—in his late philosophy, the supposed innovation of the “flesh” remains confined by a dualism contained within a monism. True, there is a layer of Merleau-Ponty which privileges the pairing of the human body and world, but much of the “objet-orientated” critique of Merleau-Ponty either overlooks other aspects of his philosophy or simply caricatures it as a purporting to be a bit “avant garde piece of continental philosophy.” My sense is that presenting Merleau-Ponty as being a “time-bomb” that failed to explode, thus securing the thinker in the history of ideas, is a bit of conceit (Harman’s analogy is itself a bit dubious, given that it presents philosophers as commodities with expiration dates).

Important to note that even in the problematic work of the earlier Merleau-Ponty (i.e., The Phenomenology of Perception), phenomenology already faces its own anthropomorphic edge. Already in this early stage, Merleau-Ponty is aware of the tension between experience and transcendence: “The question is always how I can be open to phenomena which transcend me and which nevertheless exist only to the extent that I take them up and live them” (PP, 417). In turn, this tension is approached by Merleau-Ponty’s radicalising of phenomenology, a process from which space and time as being “for us” is no longer the case. The reason being: the human body does not assume to be the centre of the world, around which reality revolves. Instead, Merleau-Ponty will speak of a body that ceases to have personal attributes, a point I have laboured here and elsewhere. It is neither of the world nor of the body, and thus not “for us.”

The principle implication being that while human and world correlate with another in a pregiven and personal sense, this relationship is not ontologically absolute. There is, after all, a “non-human element” prior to “my” experience of the world, which is “hostile and alien, no longer an interlocutor, but a resolutely silent Other” (PP, 372). Against Harman’s characterisation of the flesh as the “world looks at me just as I look at it,” even in the early Merleau-Ponty the ontology of the world as alien, hostile, and non-human is prior to my correlation with it in the first place. There is no cosy alliance of world and body in Merleau-Ponty, despite the ecological approbation of Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh” as leading toward a crude form of animism (cf. David Abram). As Ted Toadvine writes in his excellent Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature: “[The] resistant and aloof aspect of the thing is precisely what gives it the status of an in-itself in our experience, what rejects the body’s advances even while remaining, in some sense, correlated with it” (58). The ambiguity between the perception of the world and the world’s resistance to perception undercuts human experience, and gives an autonomy to the realism of the world. Flesh is not dialogue, flesh is not a synthesising unity—flesh is prior to human affectivity: it is only through the experience of a personal world that terms such as “unity” and “dialogue” become affixed to philosophical structures.

The Ghost in Me

I'll be speaking at "Traces: Thinking Through Remains" at UCL on Friday, June 4th. Below is my abstract, which builds on material in the previous post.

[UPDATE: I have now uploaded the paper to Academia.edu should it be of interest. The paper is based on material from the forthcoming book, so treat it as a transitional draft.]

The Ghost in Me: Toward a Phenomenology of the Doppelgänger

Why do the dead return? It has been customary to respond to this question in one of two ways. First, ghostly apparitions-ranging from benign phantoms to ominous spooks-have tended to be treated as a defect in imagination, the implication being that such phenomena are merely a projection of the contents of consciousness on the world. The alternative trajectory has been to reduce ghostly matter to a "blockage" in memory. In such a reading, to "see" ghosts would mean to unconsciously remember that which is dead but has yet to move on, with the experience of being haunted traceable to a debt the dead still owe to the living.

In this paper, I will formulate a way to commune with the dead which seeks to avoid reducing ghostly phenomena to an offspring of psychic activity. I will do this via the lived body. Two thoughts will be pursued. On the one hand, with recourse to Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that our embodied experiences are never unequivocally "mine," but forever doubled by an anonymous presence, a trace of a pre-personal body folding into my personal body. Drawing out this theme of doubling, I will develop a phenomenological theory of the Doppelgänger, which attends to the ambiguity of the body as being an object possessed and subject possessing. Phrasing the space between subject and object a site of abjection, I will conclude by aligning the immateriality of the ghost with the materiality of the lived body.

The Body Out of Time

For all its overexposed saturation, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time” remains an exemplary lesson in the liminal phenomenology of the human body. In particular, by mirroring Lovecraft against Merleau-Ponty, a mode of phenomenology is conceived, which foregrounds the un-naturalism of the body. Already in Merleau-Ponty, this incipient weirdness is announced as the “prepersonal body”—this other “subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it.” (More on this idea here). What remains unsaid in Merleau-Ponty, however, is how this anonymous subject materialises in the flesh of the body. All that we are left with is the fleeting impression that “when I am in danger…my human situation abolishes my biological one…my body lends itself without reserve to action.” Beyond these liminal experiences, the “impersonal existence,” of which the “I” is composed, is repressed into the organism, the body. Here a question forms: if my body is subjected to another self, and a self whose ends are unknown to me, then do I retain possession of my body? After all, do I really “experience” the prepersonal body that forms a double of my own presence? Here, Lovecraft can help us address Merleau-Ponty’s lacuna.

“My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—altogether new to me—that some one else was trying to get possession of my thoughts.” So begins Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee’s experience of being possessed by another species of life. In this case, it is The Great Race, a collection of disembodied minds, who journey through the universe in search of finite bodies to dwell in so that they may extend their knowledge. And the possession is phenomenologically telling. For what takes place in this second life is not simply the seizure of Peaslee’s mind, as though thought were the province of the head and its cognitive faculties—but a disordering of the whole body, and thus identity itself.

“Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned English language from books.” Merleau-Ponty tells us that speech is an “originating realm,” whose expression is dependent less on the words themselves and more on how they are used (pp.202-203). For him, speech is an attitude, a manner of being-in-the-world. Philosophy, too, is the organ of language, whose understanding calls upon “feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher.” What Lovecraft presents us with is a speech that becomes increasingly incomprehensible the more an “unknown sort of knowledge” is articulated. “The pronunciation was barbarously alien,” Lovecraft writes. This conflation of estrangement and knowledge points to the body becoming at once constitutive of self while simultaneously exposing itself to being the host of another subject.

Merleau-Ponty writes of “another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it.” This body is “more ancient than thought”: it is the transcendental condition of there being a body in the first place, and thus necessary that it possesses me in order for my personal body to persist. Though anonymous, the body is within me. I am it, it is me. As ancient, my body—its corpus of flesh, bone, and memory—is absorbed with the immateriality of a spirit manifest in and through my own materiality. In a word, I am the organ of the waking dead, whose agency employs my body to summon a different age.

The disordering and disjoining of different bodies pushes the body beyond time, placing it beyond a linear concept of time altogether. Speaking through Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, Lovecraft writes: “My conception of time—my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness—seemed subtly disordered; so that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one’s mind all over eternity for knowledge of past and future ages.” Through the body, time has been put out-of-joint, divested of all its human elements, and thus “seized with a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence typified by vocal and bodily awkwardness.”

Lovecraft and Merleau-Ponty are both bound with an implicit sensitivity toward the anonymity lurking beneath personal identity. In both case, the body becomes the site of abjection, a space for the disordering of time and materiality. Thus, Lovecraft poses a question: “Had something been groping blindly through time from some abyss in nature?” Faced with the “alien civilization” of our own planet, Merleau-Ponty responds to Lovecraft, speaking of an “amorphous existence which preceded my own history”: “I have only to look within me that time which pursues its own independent course, and which my personal life utilises but does not entirely overlay.” We are faced with a body that by its very nature is the genetic recipient of a memory necessarily outside of its own existence. With this influence, the world of bodily things—“roads, plantations, villages, streets, churches, implements, a bell, a spoon, a pipe” [a future nod to Latour]—becomes imbued with a strange, depersonalised quality. The body does not end with its own materiality, nor does the prepersonal subject incubating within the self. Both direct themselves to the flesh of the world, with its anonymity and alienness. Eventually, the gaze of the prepersonal body turns inwards, in the process revealing a body held captive not by the Great Race, but by the very banality of there being a body in the first place.