Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty. Judith Wambacq

between themselves and with the world, that they differ from one another and from it as perspectives—are to be maintained entirely, to be taken up again in the brute Being, to be separated from the substantialist and ontotheological elaboration Leibniz imposes upon them” (VI, 222–23).²

      However, as Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Sartre indicates, this incompossibility cannot be understood as a contradiction or an opposition. The flesh does not consist of the synthesis of two opposites, as Hegelian dialectics would have it. Merleau-Ponty’s “hyperdialectic” rejects the idea of a surpassing “that would retain everything the preceding phases had acquired” (VI, 95), and that as such installs a hierarchical order. On the contrary, it discovers, under the simple oppositions, “a swarm of relations with double meaning” and positions that are distributed over several planes (VI, 91). In other words, it discovers a fundamental ambiguity (VI, 94). Hence, the flesh unites not only an active and a passive pole, but a myriad of differences that are not clearly delineated.

      This plurality of ever-shifting relations implies a true dynamics, which Merleau-Ponty invokes with Heidegger’s concept of “event”: wild being or flesh is an event (VI, 200) characterized by an explosive power (VI, 265, 124).³ Merleau-Ponty argues that that which makes something what it is—that is in fact what the flesh does, as we will see below—is not: it “essences” (west) (VI, 174). This German neologism is introduced to show that the essence (das Wesen) is not a static principle or form added to matter, but a dynamic process that develops in matter and thus has to be considered a verb: “to essence.” According to Merleau-Ponty, the essence of a table is first and foremost something that “tables” (VI, 175).

      The differences that the flesh consists of are not incompatible with a certain unity. Actually, in his texts Merleau-Ponty pays more attention to the specific nature of this unity than to the differences it contains. Before we discuss Merleau-Ponty’s description of this specific unity, we should mention another Heideggerian concept Merleau-Ponty uses: the fold. This concept, which actually goes back to Hegel and eventually to Leibniz, can be said to form the link between the difference and the unity of the flesh. Merleau-Ponty (VI, 264) writes that the active and passive poles of the flesh are folded around one another. Just as a fold in a paper creates an outside and an inside that run across one another and can be reversed, in the flesh the active and passive poles can be reversed such that it is no longer clear who or what watches (or touches) and who or what is being watched (or touched). Rather than being the point at which things diverge, difference, at the level of the flesh, is a turning point, a point where one thing can turn into its so-called inverse. Thus, difference in the flesh is not so much a difference that separates but a difference that connects.

      How, then, does Merleau-Ponty describe the unity of the flesh? Two notions that often return in this context are “style” and “typicality” (VI, 171; PriP, 16). What, one might ask, is the meaning of these notions in common terms? When one speaks of a literary style or a certain type of person, for example, we do not mean that every book subsumable under this style, or all the people of that specific type, shares some common elements. On the contrary, while one person of this type may be humorous, handsome, and intelligent, a second one may be smart only, while a third may be good-looking and funny. The same is true of books, where sharing a style need not imply a convergence in theme, register, plot structure, and so on. Moreover, the elements that connect books or persons of a same style or type are embodied differently in each book or person. Style or type is defined not by a common identity, but by a jumble of elements that refer to one another. A new book subsumed under a specific style, for example, will resemble as well as differ from the prototypical example that embodies this style. The relation between different works of one style is thus a relation of ever-shifting rapprochements and estrangements.