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God creates, or better, draws, a “géométral,” a surveying plan. 24 So, we can see now thatMerleau-Ponty’s analysis of vision in Descartes’s Optics goes from fusion, at one extreme,to the other extreme, i.e., surveying thought, (OE 48/134) the kosmotheoros.Merleau-Ponty’s analysis is complicated. So, I am now going to reduce it down to itsmost basic steps. According to Merleau-Ponty, Descartes starts from the conception oflight as a cause contacting the eyes. The contact of light with the eyes is the absoluteproximity of fusion. Because the contact with the eyes is causal, there is no resemblancebetween the image and the thing. Instead of images that resemble, we have signs. Signsare the figure without the background, immobile, and they are flat, like writing or adrawing. Vision in Descartes, then, becomes the decipherment of signs. And the deciphermentof signs leads to the intellectual surveying plan, the géométral. The géométral is adrawing according to rectilinear perspective, with nothing hidden. It is surveying thought.Now, before moving onto what Merleau-Ponty says about painting, we should note twothings about this analysis.First, the movement from fusion to survey is Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation ofDescartes’s dualism of substances. Thus, how Descartes conceives vision in the Opticsreally concerns how the two substances (of course, mind and body) relate to one another.As the citation from “Cartesian Ontology and Contemporary Ontology” indicates, the twosubstances, according to Merleau-Ponty, interact by “découper,” a cutting out or apart, adividing. Therefore we can now provide a more conceptual determination of Merleau-Ponty’s mixturism. Like Sartre’s ontological monism, Descartes’s dualism of the divisionis opposed to Merleau-Ponty’s mixturism. In contrast, for Merleau-Ponty, in sensibilitythere is an “indivision” between the sensing or activity and the sensed or passivity. (OE20/125) The move from division to indivision is Merleau-Ponty’s translation, as mentionedearlier, i.e., in “Everywhere and Nowhere” (S 189/150), of Descartes’s ontology ofsubstances into the ontology of sensibility.The second thing we must note before we depart from Merleau-Ponty’s analysis ofvision in Descartes’s Optics is that Merleau-Ponty is making a distinction between imageand representation. As we have seen, according to Merleau-Ponty, the positive infinitecontains the properties of all partial beings in an eminent way; in other words, Godpossesses the same properties as the creatures but only more so. 25 Thus, following thetranslation of the positive infinite, an image is always based on resemblance, on thesameness not of God and man, but on the sameness of seeing and seen. In contrast, arepresentation is a sign; it involves no resemblance between the representation and therepresented. So we must anticipate, once again, the intersection with Foucault. In Les motset les choses, the final sentence of his description of the structure of Velasquez’s paintingis: “This very subject [ce sujet même] – which is the same [qui est le même] – has beenelided. And representation, freed finally from the relation [that of the same] that wasstructuring it [l’enchaînait], can give itself off as pure representation.” (MC 31/16, myemphasis)Merleau-Ponty’s translation of large rationalism is not yet complete. According to him,Descartes could not eliminate “the enigma of vision.” (OE 51/135) Instead, the enigmais shifted from surveying thought, the thought of vision, to “vision in act.” (OE 55/136)In other words, it is shifted to factual vision, to embodied vision. According to Merleau-Ponty, however, factual vision does not overthrow Descartes’s philosophy. For Descartes,24For more on Merleau-Ponty and the “géométral,” see Jacques Lacan, Les quatre conceptsfondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, Essais, 1973), chapter 2; English translation by AlanSheridan as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton, 1978).25See Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression, 38; Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza,46-7.132