2 - Merleau-Ponty and the Fold of the Flesh

Summary

Unlike Sartre, Merleau-Ponty moves towards a more direct ontological enquiry into the appearing of the visible-tactile field – the actual – itself, which results in an anti-humanist ontology (or real humanism as he calls it) that locates perceiving bodies within a meaning-generating folded flesh; a folded fabric of univocal Being that is beyond any notion of a metaphysical outside or internal transcendent Other. Merleau-Ponty's ‘fold’ signifies a necessary renewal of philosophical language that entirely bypasses dualism in vernacular form, and subsequently any evocation of transcendence – a limitation that plagues Sartre. This serves to both radicalise Sartre's socio-political ethic of authenticity as an a-subjective form of resistance and set the premise for the development of Foucault's relational understanding of immanent power, and Deleuze's subsequent addition of desire as the folded inside of that power. This makes Merleau-Ponty pivotal to the present lineage, where he acts as a proverbial halfway house between Sartre's instigation of immanence through existential phenomenology and its more overt, systemised and politicised form in Foucault and Deleuze. Ultimately, it is through exploring Merleau-Ponty that we may come to understand the necessity and thus importance of the fold in the development of ‘pure’ immanence and micropolitics.

I begin the chapter by arguing that Merleau-Ponty's early works, particularly Phenomenology of Perception, opens the way for the development of the fold, in particular through its anti-Cartesian focus on the subject-body and the related attempt to overcome extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism via focusing on the non-dualist lifeworld to which the subject-body belongs. This comes out of a direct engagement with Sartre's phenomenological ontology, albeit one partly based upon a ‘creative misreading’ of it, with its alleged rationalist self-transparency used as a methodological foil. I move on to consider Merleau-Ponty's all-important ‘self-criticism’, i.e. the realisation that this anti-Cartesian bid for the non-dualist lifeworld, cannot be fully realised without investigating, and correcting, its own presupposition or prejudicative Logos to which its expressive style and conceptual apparatus is beholden. The presupposition, in this instance, is that of a dualistic subject-object epistemological starting point that in a circular fashion unwittingly corresponds with and props up a dualistic ontology.