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1. PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE INSIDE OF SPACE: READINGS OF MERLEAU-PONTYLuís António Umbelino1.It is with the notion of vécu -- a live reality, reality as “lived” -- at the forefront of hisinvestigations, that Maurice Merleau-Ponty examines (among other notions) the “originalexperience of space, prior to making a distinction between form and content.” 1 The‘original’ experience of space makes us think of space as it might be, before the intrusionof some quantitative, measurable, and geometrical scheme; it makes us think of a realityin which I can move corporeally, by means of an original and invisible connection. Qualifyingspace as lived corresponds to discovering it as a “perceptual ground,” 2 in so far asit is neither constituted from an objective quality belonging to things with their relationsof size or distance, nor from a ‘decree’ issuing from a subject. By “perceptual ground”we must understand the very relation of coexistence by which the one who thinks aboutspace realizes that he already belongs to that which he thinks. Thus the deep reality ofspace offers itself up to discovery only in those qualitative experiences where a locus orlocality makes our gaze quiver with emotion 3 and turns itself into deep intimacy andevidence of belonging. In other words, it needs to be said that the “ensemble of ourexperiences … is permeated throughout by an already acquired spatiality,” 4 in which we“discover ourselves already under the influence of” 5 an atmosphere that is not, bydefinition, entirely thematizable. Therefore, to state that a space is lived means, equally,to presuppose that, through my body, I have already established with the world a pact,more ancient than any other pact, i.e., a pre-thematic connection grounded on acommunication that is “older than thought.” 6 When we interrogate this pact, we learn thata concept of space purely founded on knowledge of spatial relations, between objects thatare geometrically held like abstract functions, is very far from being impartial and fromcovering the whole of our experience concerning space. 7 And this, because from the verystart, and for a body situated in the world, the technical question of how to determine thespatial relations of defined objects is invariably tackled with a view to the originalpresence of a world that is always already familiar to us.Whenever I open my eyes to what surrounds me, I do not see all things as if they weremade up of “a thousand facets [or] a sum of perceptions” 8 ; I do not see isolated objects,I do not see this house or that tree, as if alone in a void. I am permeated by space and,for that reason, each thing I see, in the world, acquires its sense for me in the midst of anensemble that seems to establish each and every thing in the encounter with my gaze; anensemble, which is always already what I see. My home town, to which I return after atrip, or the face of a friend arriving, are, in this sense, lines belonging to the one space,in which presence happens through a non-presentification, intertwining things with oneanother. This feeling, imposed upon us by our experience of space, and which Patočka1Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 287.2Ibid., 290.3Ibid., 289.4Ibid., 293.5Ibid.6Ibid., 294.7Cf. ibid., 324.8Ibid., 325; 331: “Tantôt il y a entre les événements un certain jeu qui ménage ma liberté sansqu’ils cessent de me toucher.”113