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outside, I recognize my inside (an inside which, if I am a child, had hitherto beenconfusedly felt affects). But, this recognition does not occur before the mirror image, andit occurs only on the basis of that specular image that is outside. Then, I can transfer thisrecognized inside to other outsides, which are like the specular image I had seen of myselfoutside. In other words, on the basis of the specular image, I can attribute my inside toanother’s flesh, even though the inside of another’s flesh remains invisible, even thoughit is Nicht-Unpräsentierbarkeit. 32 (VI 292/238-39) As Merleau-Ponty says, “They [thatis, the image, the picture, and the drawing] are the inside of the outside and the outsideof the inside, which the duplicity [duplicité] of sensibility makes possible and withoutwhich we would never understand the quasi-presence and imminent visibility which makeup the whole problem of the imaginary.” (OE 23/126) It is significant, of course, that hereMerleau-Ponty is alluding to Lacan’s mirror stage, about which Merleau-Ponty hadlectured in 1949, and that he speaks of the imaginary and not of the symbolic. 33 But,what we must stress is that, for Merleau-Ponty, the vision of the painter “gives visibleexistence to what profane vision believes to be invisible…. This voracious vision, reachingbeyond [par delà] the ‘visual givens,’ opens upon a texture of Being of which the discretesensorial messages are only the punctuation or the caesura.” (OE 27/127) Because paintingreaches beyond and gives visible existence to what was invisible, for Merleau-Ponty thereis only ever “the invisible of the visible.” (VI 300/247) The invisible is always relativeto the visible and is always on the verge, imminently, of being visible, of coinciding withthe visible. (Cf. VI 163/122-23) The invisible is never a teeming presence but always onthe horizon of the visible. (VI 195/148) And even if we can speak of a “blind spot” (VI300-01/247-48), an “impotence” (impuissance) of vision, (VI 194/148) Merleau-Pontyalways conceives it, not on the basis of non-coincidence, but on the basis of coincidence,not on the basis of blindness, but on the basis of vision, not on the basis of impotence,but on the basis of the “I can.” 34 Here, in the question of power, we have the subtle shiftof emphasis between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. This subtle shift of emphasis reallydoes mean that 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, theinside, have the signification of resemblance. If we are going to have a strict differencebetween immanence and transcendence, then the resemblance relation implies thatMerleau-Ponty is not a philosopher of immanence, but a philosopher of transcendence. Weshould recall again what Klee says: “I cannot be grasped in immanence.”What, or better, who is the emblem of transcendence in Merleau-Ponty? Who is the“between”? Between the two extremes of the distant view from the airplane and the up32See also my “The Legacy of Husserl’s ‘The Origin of Geometry’: The Limits of Phenomenologyin Merleau-Ponty and Derrida,” in Leonard Lawlor, Thinking Through French Philosophy (Bloomington,Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2033), 62-79. At the time of the writing of “The Legacy” essay (1999), Iwas not aware of the difference of emphasis that this imminence makes. See Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher– Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 238-40.33Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les relations avec autrui chez l’enfant (Paris: Centre de DocumentationUniversitaire, 1960), 55; English translation by William Cobb as “The Child’s Relation with Others,” inMaurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964),135. The lectures date from 1949-1951. In reference to the difference between the imaginary and thesymbolic, see Gilles Deleuze, “A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?” in idem, L’île déserte et autrestextes (Paris: Minuit, 2002), 238-269; English translation by Melissa McMahon and Charles J. Stivale as“How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts (New York:Semiotext(e), 2004), 170-192.34For more on blindness in Merleau-Ponty, see Galen Johnson, “The Retrieval of the Beautiful,”unpublished manuscript, 2004. I completed all three parts of this trilogy before reading Johnson’s essay,which he was kind enough to share with me.137