[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

conceives it, not on the basis of non-coincidence, but on the basis of coincidence, not onthe basis of blindness, but on the basis of vision, not on the basis of impotence, but onthe basis of the “I can,” finally not on the basis of something like an absolute invisibility,but on the basis of “the non-mediated presence which is not something positive.” (VI302/248) Because for Merleau-Ponty invisibility is always relative to the visible, becausecoincidence is always partial, all the prepositions in Merleau-Ponty, the “to” (“à”), the“in” (“en”), the “within” (“dans”), the “beyond” (“par-delà”), and the “between” (“entre”),in short, what he calls “the inside,” have the signification of resemblance. If we are goingto have a strict conceptual difference between immanence and transcendence, theresemblance relation implies that Merleau-Ponty is not a philosopher of immanence, buta philosopher of transcendence. But even more, the resemblance relation implies that theupright human body is the “between” of survey and fusion, the “mi-lieu,” the “mi-chemin”between essence and fact. (Cf. VI 328/274) Since the human body is visible, the humanis the figure standing out from the ground of the visible; as the figure, man can be studiedas an empirical positivity. And, since the human body sees, the human resembles theground of the visible; as the ground, man can as well be taken as the transcendentalfoundation. As Merleau-Ponty says, “the manifest visibility [of things] doubles itself [sedouble] in my body.” (OE 22/125, my emphasis) Therefore, and this claim is what I shalldemonstrate in the essay that follows, Merleau-Ponty’s thought, his ‘mixturism,’ is definedby the “et” in “l’homme et ses doubles.”The Conception of Merleau-Ponty’s MixturismAs is well known, “Eye and Mind” is the last text Merleau-Ponty published while he wasalive. Merleau-Ponty wrote it during the summer of 1960 and published it in January1961. 7 Immediately after the initial publication of “Eye and Mind,” during the springsemester of 1961 at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty was teaching a course called“l’ontologie cartésienne et l’ontologie d’aujourd’hui” (“Descartes’s Ontology and ContemporaryOntology”). 8 Following the structure of “Eye and Mind,” but also expanding onit, the lectures fell into two parts: fundamental thought given in art, and then Descartes’sontology. The lectures on Descartes were given during April of 1961 right up to Merleau-Ponty’s death on May 3, 1961. At the beginning of the Descartes lectures, Merleau-Pontysays,If Descartes’s philosophy consists in this, [first, in the] establishment of a naturalintelligible light against the sensual man [l’homme sensuel] and the visible world, then[second, in] the relative justification of feeling [du sentiment] by the natural light, itmust contain … an ambiguous relation of light and feeling [sentiment], of the invisibleand the visible, of the positive and the negative. It is this relation or this mixture [cemélange] that it would be necessary to seek. 9 (NC 1959-61, 222, my emphasis)7In 1961, it appeared in Art de France. In 1964 it appeared as a small book with Gallimard.8See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours, 1959-1961 (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Hereafter citedas NC 1959-61. Since the English translation of these notes does not yet exist, all translations are my own.9See also NC 1959-61, 264, where Merleau-Ponty says that Descartes is the most difficult ofauthors because he is the most radically ambiguous; Descartes, Merleau-Ponty says, has the most latentcontent. Merleau-Ponty makes the same comments about Descartes in the first nature lectures course. SeeMaurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature. Notes de cours du Collège de France, établi et annoté par DominqueSeglard (Paris: Seuil, 1995), 36-37, in particular; English translation by Robert Vallier as Nature: CourseNotes from the Collège de France (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 17-18. In the126