au Collège de France (1954–1955), ed. Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort, and Stéphanie Ménasé (Paris: Belin, 2003).
INTRODUCTION
IN THE SHADOW OF PHILOSOPHY
THE PROBLEM OF PASSIVITY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MERLEAU-PONTY
Therefore let there always be non-being
so we may see their subtlety;
And let there always be being
so we may see their outcome.
These two are the same.
But after they are produced, they have different names.
—Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching
The renewal of the world is also the renewal of the mind, a rediscovery of that brute mind which, untamed by any culture, demands to create culture anew. From this point on the irrelative is not nature in-itself, nor the system of apprehensions of absolute consciousness, and not humanity either, but that «teleology» Husserl, writing and thinking in brackets, speaks of, that jointing and framing of Being realizing itself through humankind.
—Merleau-Ponty, Signs (181/179)1
Life unfolds according to an inverse logic. Rather than emerging from preexisting causes, purposes, or conditions of possibility, life is a movement that puts itself en route by taking up and shaping the very conditions that make it possible. Conditions of possibility of sense must, paradoxically, happen in order to become possible. In both nature and culture, birth marks the way that life, vital or conscious, neither purely constitutes itself nor is constituted by outside forces—life is a becoming-true of conditions and possibilities, a whirlwind of sense that, once it touches down, will have had a formative natural, personal, or historical past. This book is an attempt to uncover these hidden workings of life, what Maurice Merleau-Ponty terms a logic of institution, which lets us think of the past in deeper, existential terms as an unfinished reality on the move; and, thereby, to think of life and culture as inheriting and transforming this radical past. By studying becoming in nature and culture, we can thus unearth this lost sense of an original past, and also definitively account for not only how living sense emerges from nonsense, but also how nature emerges from culture and the person emerges from the body and intercorporeal life.
To do this work requires thinking life and culture as originally passive, but this passivity is not inertness, but rather a generative temporal openness, where meaningful structures or institutions of activity take time to developmentally unfold. Our becoming active as bodies and persons, then, is a process of birth and a growing into being that must happen in order to have become the condition of our being. This, we will see, has implications not only for phenomenological attempts to naturalize consciousness, but also for complicating and rethinking the shared, temporally embedded, and intercorporeal nature of ethical responsibility and political action.
These central questions of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy concern the natural origins of the living body and human subjectivity. As he explains at the outset of his writings, he has a “goal to understand the relations of consciousness and nature” (SB, 3/1). Revealing ambiguity in these relations, these studies also uncover irreducible meaning in both life and consciousness. Yet this early work genealogically discloses the traces within life and experience as a prevital and preconscious past from which these structures emerge. Commonplace interpretations of Merleau-Ponty’s development hold that while his early work is premised on a “philosophy of consciousness,” he later shifts from a phenomenological to an ontological method of a sense-making in nature.2 I do not share this view. Merleau-Ponty’s earliest thinking already locates a developmental passivity of consciousness and has a signal ontological concern for the natural underpinnings of consciousness.
The central focus of this investigation is Merleau-Ponty’s pivotal rethinking of the concept of passivity. Merleau-Ponty’s concern with diffusing the concept of constituting activity and rooting it in the living body is directed not simply at the primacy of consciousness, but at meaning-constituting activity as such, including the vital activity of the living body. There is a line of thinking throughout Merleau-Ponty’s texts that discloses a passive genesis of sense in nature prior to a constituting activity of consciousness or the vital body. Against the idea of constituting activity, and by developing an account of what I term generative passivity, I make the case that it is possible to explain the irreducibly meaningful structures of the organism and human person according to a logic of the passive generation of sense, what Merleau-Ponty terms a concept of institution.
Rather than rejecting the uniqueness of meaning in the vital body and human consciousness, we can utilize institution to account for how these fields do in fact have irreducible senses. We can also show these senses to be derived from a temporality in nature by which distinctive dimensions of meaning develop through what Henri Bergson and Alia Al-Saji describe as a becoming-true. This movement of sense generation requires the explication of three progressively richer concepts of passivity in Merleau-Ponty’s work: a structural passivity of life; a dynamic passivity of development and learning; and a more radical, generative passivity that ontologically precedes living beings and fully determinate causal events. This draws upon Anthony Steinbock’s critical reading of three levels of phenomenological methodology in Edmund Husserl’s work, though, as we will see, Merleau-Ponty importantly diverges and builds upon Husserl’s concept of passivity, definitively moving it beyond the domain of consciousness. This investigation requires a systematic reading of Merleau-Ponty’s texts from the standpoint of how they progressively work to articulate this concept of passivity that does not name an absence or lack of meaning-making activity, but contextualizes this activity within a radically deep natural past, a past prior to already actual causal or constituting activities. Combining this generative reading of phenomenology with the logic of Bergson, we will see that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy entails a radical reevaluation of the metaphysics of possibility.
Generative passivity is a concept that enables a rethinking of the nature-culture distinction, and puts to rest tiresome problems in attempts to “naturalize” consciousness, while providing a deepened view of psychoanalysis and the emergence of personality from the body. It also challenges liberal and social constructivist views of society, instead suggesting a deeper take on the ethics and sociality of intercorporeal dependence, oppression, and creativity. This