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February 07, 2007
As Joshua Shaw over at Film Philosophy observes in a review of Cathryn Vasseleu's Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty:
Metaphors involving light and illumination have played a vital role in Western philosophy. One thinks of Plato's allegory of the cave, divine illumination in Augustine, Descartes's *lumen naturale*, or the reference to light in terms like enlightenment or *Aufklarung*. Philosophers have often turned to metaphors of light and vision to help them explain the nature, methods, and goals of philosophy. Jacques Derrida has recently argued that these metaphors in fact play a foundational role in philosophy. Metaphors involving light and vision aren't mere rhetorical devices philosophers have used to decorate their prose; light is the suggestive metaphor that launches the very enterprise of philosophy. 'Derrida argues', Vasseleu explains, 'that light is not just one metaphor used in philosophy, but the metaphor which founds the entire system of metaphysics of metaphoric truth'.
Vasseleu presents Merleau-Ponty as trying to show how subject-object relations can be understood in terms of touch.
Merleau-Ponty uses the example of one hand rubbing another to illustrate his understanding of touch. Suppose I rub my hands together: Does my right hand touch my left hand? Or does my left hand touch my right? Is my right hand touched, or is it the agent doing the touching? It seems as if my skin quivers between these possibilities. Merleau-Ponty suggests that this ambivalence is paradigmatic of touch. To be an embodied being, a being that touches and is touched by the world, is to be a site where this ambivalence occurs. Thus Merleau-Ponty tries to show how subject-object relations, which have generally been analyzed in epistemological terms like 'knower' and 'known', or in visual terms like 'viewer' and 'viewed', are reducible to opposing poles of this primal ambivalence that occurs at the level of 'flesh'.
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