Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20

Topologies of the Flesh: A Multidimensional

Exploration of the Lifeworld, by Steven M. Rosen
Orion Edgar
To cite this article: Orion Edgar (2009) Topologies of the Flesh: A Multidimensional Exploration
of the Lifeworld, by Steven M. Rosen, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 40:3,
339-340, DOI: 10.1080/00071773.2009.11006694
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2009.11006694

Published online: 21 Oct 2014.

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TOPOLOGIES OF THE FLESH: A MULTIDIMENSIONAL EXPLORATION

OF THE LIFEWORLD, by Steven M. Rosen. Pp. xix + 313. (Series in Continental
Thought) Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-8214-1676-6. Hardback
$59.95.
In this remarkable book, Steven Rosen, emeritus professor of Psychology at CUNY,
picks up on a passage in the working notes Merleau-Ponty left when he died, now
published as an appendix to The Visible and the Invisible, in which he suggests that the
ontology of flesh which he was developing in his final years may require a topological
investigation for its clarification. He refers this thought to an eclectic mix of research,
from Social Psychiatrist Trigant Burrow, and Jungian psychology, to Jean Gebsers
quasi-Hegelian cultural and historical philosophy and Mircea Eliades history of
religion.
Rosen begins by taking up the Heideggerian picture of mankind abstracted from
nature by technology, with such abstraction leading to a potentially devastating
ignorance of the natural realities on which human life depends. This abstraction is
grounded, for Rosen, in a way of perceiving, of which early signs may be seen in
ancient culture and the coming to prominence of alphabetical language, and of which
the renaissance turn to perspective and to an individualistic and rationalistic
understanding of nature is a crucial juncture.
Rosen opposes Euclidean geometry, which is linked to this reductive and rationalist
way of perceiving to topology, which is defined as the study of those properties of
geometric figures that remain unchanged even when under distortion, so long as no
surfaces are torn (3f). Such a discipline is grounded, Rosen insists, following Maxine
Sheets-Johnstone, in the body, though this point is not argued with force. For Rosen,
this abstract branch of mathematics, the most abstract of the abstract sciences, pushes
the course of abstract thinking to its interior limit, which is the only way out of
abstraction simpliciter, a way which passes fully through abstraction. Abstract thought,
which extricates man from his nature in its progress, cannot simply be left behind,
Rosen argues; abstraction cannot simply be abstracted.
Rosen powerfully presents Merleau-Pontys late work as an attempt to overcome
the reductionism of classical cognition, epitomised in Cartesian thought, and which he
thinks of as the trichotomous division of reality into object-in-space-before-subject
(12). So, for Rosen, the hyper-abstraction of topology is in fact the way towards a
rediscovery of the lifeworld. This strategy is opposed to that typical of Deleuze and
Guattari, amongst others, of claiming to deny all binary oppositions by affirming
difference, becoming and multiplicity over identity, being and unity, but in doing so
maintaining those oppositions in a sublated form.
In Part I of the book, which occupies the first two chapters, Rosen lays out the
foundations for this attempt to think the ontology of flesh in a topological fashion. He
takes up, first, the figure of the Moebius strip, which is constructed by connecting the
two ends of a long flat strip, so as to form a ring, but with a 180 lateral twist. For
Rosen this figure grounds a seeming dualism (if we take a local section of the strip it
appears to have two sides) in a greater unity the two sides are seen to be continuous,
to be but one side, when the whole figure is taken into account.
If it were possible to join two Moebius strips with opposite twists together along
their edges, the resulting shape would be a Klein bottle. This (impossible, in threedimensional space) shape is a higher-order counterpart of the Moebius strip, and
displays a similar relationship between part and whole. In a local section, the Klein
bottle is seen to have a contained part, a containing part, and both are situated in a

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greater space. But taken globally, this trichotomous division is seen to be grounded in
a deeper unity all three parts are in fact continuous.
Rosen begins the much longer Part II of the book, which takes up the remaining five
chapters, with an investigation of the order of bisection Klein bottle, Moebius strip
and the topological figures obtained by further bisecting these: the lemniscate and sublemniscate. These figures are linked to dimensionalities which Rosen takes as models
for stages of ontogenesis.
Rosen has a somewhat Hegelian understanding in which the ontogenetic
development of Being itself is seen in its ongoing unfolding. According to him, the
third and highest stage of ontogenetic individuation, which he calls variously Kleinian
being, cogito and rational thought, coincides with what Heidegger calls the end of
philosophy, i.e., the nineteenth-century endgame of philosophy in which it is
transformed into the natural sciences. But this is not, for Rosen, the end of the story.
Rosen conflates, interestingly but not terribly clearly, the movement of individuation
with the birthing and self-appropriation of higher-dimensional orders. So the zerodimensional mineral order gives birth to the first-dimensional vegetable and the
second-dimensional animal, culminating in the leap towards third-dimensional,
Kleinian being. This process of individuation leads to the atomised cogito of modern
philosophy, and the divorce of thought from matter. For Rosen, these dimensions must
be gathered together again in a (real and historical) movement of proprioception,
which reverses the appropriative movement as the cognitive third dimension
acknowledges its grounding in and birthing from the lower orders, and offers thanks
for receiving the gift of being from lower-order midwives and mothers, whose work
is the realisation of being itself.
In chapter five Rosen introduces two tables which he claims express the full course
of development of all orders of topogeny (121). Rosen refers to these matrices
regularly in the latter half of the book, and his argument appears to be structured around
them, but their meaning is not made sufficiently clear at their introduction or during the
subsequent discussion. The axes of these tables are unlabelled, and the relationship
between their plural parts go unexplained in any terms that would make clear sense. As
a consequence, while Rosens work is suggestive and picks out what seem to be
genuinely valuable possibilities for the explication of and development of MerleauPontys later thought, its undoubtedly significant philosophical contribution is not
brought to full expression.
Orion Edgar
The University of Nottingham
THE IDEA OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY, by Simon Glendinning,
Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2006, 160 pp., ISBN 0748624708 (hbk),
0748624716 (pbk).
Contrary to what Continental thinkers are used to say, philosophical progress is
possible, and the content of Simon Glendinnings book nicely supports this claim. The
only disappointment one might have after reading it is that now one is not really
allowed to make of Continental philosophers a unified school of obscure antirationalists. Indeed, the major thesis advanced by this clear book is that we cannot find
any genuinely philosophical difference between what is called Continental and analytic
philosophy. What we have here is the story of how it came about that Continental
philosophy became the tag for analytic philosophys hated Other (p. 32).

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