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and sentient, is seen and sees, is touch<strong>ed</strong> and touches, and contains -- as sentient, seeing,and touching -- an aspect which is “inaccessible to everyone but its owner,” 66 thisunderstanding discloses the very invisibility of the visible and the visibility of theinvisible.What is really at issue in the dream is an unknown system of exchange, through whicha riot of experiences finds shelter “inside of me,” without clear awareness of its relevanceor timing. When Merleau-Ponty talks about the subject of the dream, he accordingly isalluding to a continuous birth situat<strong>ed</strong> in the external, which is brought to life in me,signifying a global relation to a pre-personal unity. A unity that came to me without myactually thinking of it as such, and that now manifests itself -- still without being controll<strong>ed</strong>by an arrogant “self” -- in an apparently unarticulat<strong>ed</strong> profusion of possibles concerninga distant but not absent world. 67 More explicitly: “The distinction between the realand the oneiric cannot be the simple distinction between a consciousness fill<strong>ed</strong> by thesenses and a consciousness given over to its own life. The two modalities encroach uponeach other,” 68 and, for this reason, the real essence of the dream is not a monopoly ofconsciousness, nor a particular case of bad faith, but rather an untam<strong>ed</strong> thought. Therebywe understand what is already in the body, a characteristic of it since the beginning, i.e.,the possibility of understanding the world in what evades every inspective attitude, ofunderstanding the world (whenever I see, hear or touch) in what it already is in me assuch a possibility of understanding. Consequently it be<strong>com</strong>es clear, to what extent the traditionalsplit between interior and external must be modifi<strong>ed</strong> before we can consider, inrigorous terms, the question of space: the dream is not a translation of latent contents intomanifest ones; in the dream, a latent content is liv<strong>ed</strong> through the manifest one, whichproves the capacity of the sensible for feeling itself, and for remaining sensitive in theabsence of the external sensible. While dreaming, the Sensible is manifest<strong>ed</strong> in the contentof the dream. The dreaming subject is not in charge of the content of the dream. Thattestifies to the body being part of the Sensible. 69This is the other (another) scene of the dream: it is the very presence of a reality thatdoes not disappear in its absence, a corporeal reality that goes on existing even in theabsence of its external deployment. But “where” does that sensible be<strong>com</strong>e an “innersensible,” where does it appear in the counter-light of its exteriority? We have alreadyseen it: in a (fr.) on, i.e., in a body of flesh, in a Leib that thus reveals itself -- in theapparent épochê of the Körper situat<strong>ed</strong> as observatory -- as anonymity, dispossession. Th<strong>ed</strong>ream is the sensible in the body of flesh, as <strong>com</strong>pelling. 70 It is the mark of a being inspace that it is also a mode of “being in the world without a body,” 71 without a bodyobjectbut still and never without an own body, never without a Leib. The dream revealsthe touch<strong>ed</strong>-touching body inhabiting space in the very eclipse 72 of the body as touch<strong>ed</strong>.This does not, however, correspond to a denial of the body’s concreteness. The point hereis the reality of a presence which mere topographic location cannot describe; a presencewhose mode of being is concealment and, thereby only, presence and situation; a presencethat implies a belonging, but not only to the external of space, also to its interior, to its66Ibid., 177.67Cf. ibid., 67.68Ibid., 69.69Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, 316.70Ibid.71Marc Richir, “Le sensible dans le rêve,” in Renaud Barbaras, <strong>ed</strong>., Merleau-Ponty. Notes de courssur L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl, suivi de Recherches sur la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty(Paris: P.U.F., 1998), 242.72Ibid.123

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