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In order to go deeper with this possibility, Merleau-Ponty assumes the necessity ofexplaining ontologically the results of phenomenology and of thematizing Being -- withwhich we make contact -- a task, which the full range of Phenomenology is not entirelycapable of accomplishing. It is quite clear, which way we should follow: to lay aside thepoint of view of consciousness and all the presumptions still founded on “echoes” of thesubject-object dualism, and to return to the original nature of perception, materialized inthe natural and intentional life of the human body in the world. In this radical course, thesignificance of being-in-the-world will acquire a final sense with its immersion andabsorption in “the flesh” (la chair), the ultimate ontological dimension which is the radicalphenomenalization of Being. Pre-empting further developments, Merleau-Ponty (still inhis Phénoménologie) will term as “ontological world and body” the world and the bodydiscovered at the “heart of the subject.” 49 Thus he paves the way to our comprehensionof his late works, where he will welcome the nature of Being as “wild,” “brute” and“vertical.”In every effective perception of space, it is therefore necessary to presuppose a deeperfunction that is a movement that takes us beyond (or ahead of) subjectivity and embeds usin the world by means of a perceptual faith, 50 which demands, in its turn, a “genealogyof the subject” 51 capable of finally answering the question “who sees?” The answer tothis question cannot be “the soul,” nor “the eyes,” nor even “consciousness,” since none ofthese answers recognizes in the visible that which, since the beginning, surrounds and permeatesme. It is for this reason that, in Le visible et l’invisible, the visible is said to be a“twilight brought on by a wave of Being,” 52 whose prototype is flesh and whose body,while viewer-visible and touching-touched, is the most remarkable variant. Furthermore,in this context we may understand the sense in which the body unites us “directly tothings, by its ontogenesis,” 53 welding together the two parts that make it up, namely, thegrain of “sensible” that it is, and the “sensible” from which it is born by segregation and towhich it will always remain open. The presence in the world of a “visible” that ‘looks’and that, actualizing itself in sensations and movement, becomes expression, is thereforea possibility given by a common origin which is neither matter, spirit, nor substance, 54but flesh or undivided Being. It is an ultimate ontological texture where body and spaceare both part of an enveloping relationship between the visible and the invisible in each.The “feeling” of a body thus uncovered from the pre-reflexive unity in which it unfoldsinto itself, and where the flesh of the world reflects and is reflected upon, acquires anultimate meaning in this way. To feel is the very “turning upon itself of the visible, acorporeal adhesion of the one who feels to what is felt, and from what is felt to the onewho feels.” 55 Therefore I live space because (and to the exact measure in which) it lives me.But how should we think about this possibility? We have already seen it: as criss-crossing,intertwining, reversibility, overlapping or, finally, chiasm, a notion by which Merleau-Ponty chose to name the reality of that dual movement where ‘the look’ and ‘theperceived’ discover themselves as being always already contained in each other. Thus,49Ibid., 467.50Cf. ibid., 17ff.; 209. Cf. Marc Richir, Méditations phénoménologiques – Phénoménologie et phénoménologiedu langage (Grenoble: Millon, 1992), 345ff.51Rudolf Bernet, “Le sujet dans la nature – Réflexion sur la phénoménologie de la perception chezMerleau-Ponty,” in Marc Richir and Etienne Tassin, ed., Merleau-Ponty – Phénoménologie et expérience(Grenoble: Millon, 1992), 76.52Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 180.53Ibid., 179.54Cf. ibid., 184.55Ibid., 187.121