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January 5, 2007
In his review of Vicki Kirby's Telling Flesh entitled, 'Kirby, Merleau-Ponty, and the Question of an Embodied Deconstruction' Jack Reynolds draws attention to the proximity that Merleau-Ponty’s views with what Kirby is exploring in the blurring
of the boundaries between ideality and matter. Reynolds says that:
Merleau-Ponty insists that perception “already stylises,”and in the The Visible and the Invisible he also suggests that what we have termed the object, always encroaches upon us, just as we encroach upon it.These two claims ensure that rather than being conceived of as merely brute facts of the world, objects are capable of the same transformations that are commonly associated with our understanding of culture.
He says that Kirby’s descriptions of matter being generative through differentiation with itself in her comments on Judith Butler would seem to be precisely how our embodiment works according to Merleau-Ponty.
I have not read The Visible and the Invisible as it is out of print, so we need to use Reynolds as a guide. He mentions an example that Merleau-Ponty uses fairly regularly:
it is through the differentiation (or divergence) between our left hand touching our right hand that we gain an apprehension of ourselves. Merleau-Ponty’s initial, and I think permissible presumption, is that we can never
simultaneously touch our right hand while it is also touching an object of the world...Touching and touched are not simply separate orders of being in the world since they are reversible, and this image of our left hand touching our
right hand does more than merely represent the body’s capacity to be both perceiving object and subject of perception, in a constant oscillation (e.g., the Sartrean looked at, looked upon dichotomy, as well as the master-slave oscillations that such a conception engenders).
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