Merleau-Ponty: From Perspective to Chiasm, the

Epistemic Rigour of an Analogy

www.isabellethomasfogiel.com/2014/04/merleau-ponty-from-perspective-to.html

Traduction anglaise de l’article paru en français dans Chiasmi, n°13.

ABSTRACT: I wish to reconsider Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the chiasm from the perspective
of its status: is it a cognitively valueless metaphor because it was analogically and arbitrarily
transferred from one domain to another? Or, is it a sound concept that can be subjected to
experimentation and improvement? If the latter, what is the nature of chiasm? Is it
descriptive? Heuristic? Is it even logical? Is the question even worth asking, given that it is
not only the most orthodox positivists who may see in this transfer mere poetic licence?
Indeed, many among Merleau-Ponty’s commentators are in lockstep with the many
criticisms of his supposedly “literary” style, and consider the chiasm to be a metaphor. I will
first examine the function and role of the chiasm in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in order to
determine its precise status. I will then be able to show how this notion sheds light on the
main thrust of Merleau-Ponty's thought: that deep structures underlie all the apparently
unrelated elements of his philosophy, i.e., that chiasm produces a counter-model of
perspective and a new category of relation.

Jacques Bouveresse, in Prodiges et vertiges de l’analogie, denounces concept transference

from one field of knowledge (e.g., mathematics or physics) to another (e.g., philosophy).[1]
For him, Continental philosophy of the last half century has continually confused “metaphor”
with “concept,” and “analogy” with “rigorous relation.” This confusion has led the discipline to
“connections which, from a cognitive point of view, hardly go beyond the level of the simple
association of ideas.” (PV, 37) Is the transference of notions from one field of knowledge to
another really as arbitrary as Bouveresse suggests? Has the migration of concepts not given
rise to fecund discoveries, not to mention paradigm changes both in various fields of
knowledge and in our actual lives? For example, the invention of “perspective” has spread
from painting to architecture, from architecture to mathematics, and from mathematics to
philosophy, transformed and enriched by the multiple spaces it passed through. Are
metaphor (as transposition) and analogy (as association) devoid of cognitive content and
epistemic rigour?

In this article, I will describe one of the numerous transferences performed by philosophy in
the course of its history and test its meaning and rigour. I will examine the introduction of the
notion of chiasm in philosophy, which accounts for its recent popularity in various human
sciences—history of art, psychology, sociology, etc. This introduction has often been
criticized in terms similar to those of Bouveresse: chiasm is seen as metaphorical, born of
an ill-controlled transfer from one field to another.

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The chiasm first appeared as a figure of rhetoric that consists of placing two groups of words
in reversed order, thereby inducing a crossing or parallel of ABBA form (e.g., “the power of
representation, the representation of power,” an example borrowed from Louis Marin, who
made great use of this structure in his studies of painting).[2] Given little respect in treatises
of classical rhetoric, this cross-shaped structure was, however, overabundantly used by the
Romantics, particularly French Romantics[3] such as Victor Hugo, who used it as one of the
main rhetorical devices in his poetical evocations and descriptions. Beyond rhetoric, the term
“chiasm” was used in some treatises of physiology to describe the interlacing or intertwining
of, for example, two nerves. In philosophy, the chiasm was elevated to a “philosophical
concept” by Merleau-Ponty. We might even say that the chiasm is the nodal concept of his
philosophy, encapsulating both its aspect and its content. This is attested to by the fact that,
in every review of Merleau-Pontian vocabulary, the chiasm is central.[4] Its importance is
also reflected in the choice of title—Chiasmi—of a review entirely devoted to Meleau-Ponty’s
thinking, thereby making the term emblematic of the thinker. Finally, it is enforced in the
numerous current evocations of the chiasm in Merleau-Ponty’s work.[5]

I wish to take up the discussion of the notion of chiasm in terms of its status: is it a mere
metaphor devoid of cognitive value, because it has been analogically and arbitrarily
transferred from one field to another? Or is it a rigorous concept that can be subjected to
experimentation, reuse, and improvement? If the latter, what is the nature of this concept: Is
it descriptive? Heuristic? Is it even logical? The question is all the more pertinent as it is not
only the most orthodox disciples of analytical philosophy, such as Bouveresse, who may well
see in this concept of transference mere poetic licence. Indeed, the most highly regarded
commentators on Merleau-Ponty, like his critics, see the chiasm as a literary metaphor.
Some reproach the philosopher for using it. Even Saint-Aubert, usually a scrupulous
defender of Merleau-Ponty, denounces “the equivocity”[6] of the notion of encroachment—
the chiasm occupying pride of place among its possible figure or modalities. Others glorify its
literary allure, as does Matos-Diaz; he hails, in Merleau-Ponty’s recourse to the chiasm,
what he sees as the legitimate fusion of art and philosophy.[7] In either case, we cannot help
but notice that the philosopher’s central notion is hardly considered to be a concept provided
with definite cognitive content, univocal definition, and rigour.

I will therefore first examine the function of this concept in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and
will then review its extension before attempting to determine its status: is the chiasm a
metaphor or a concept? Is its function poetic or epistemic? It is only at the end of this study
that I will be able to show how this notion may enlighten us as to Merleau-Ponty’s leading
concern: to produce a counter-model of Renaissance perspective and to promote a new
category of relation, a concern that unifies all the apparently disjointed facets of his
philosophy.

1. The Function of the Notion of Chiasm in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy

I.1. The Nature of the Transference

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First with the notions of encroachment and intertwining, then with that of reversibility, and
finally with that of the chiasm, Merleau-Ponty undeniably imports notions from one field to
another. It appears worth noting, however, that if there is transference with “chiasm,” it is,
seemingly paradoxically, less a transference from rhetoric or physiology to philosophy than a
transference from mathematics to philosophy. Indeed, if it is argued that the notion of
chiasm appears late in Merleau-Ponty’s work and de facto explicitly relates to the rhetorical
figure (in Valéry)[8] and to its biological use (optics), its use and its extension are the result
of an initial transference of mathematical notions to philosophy. First, it is the notions of
encroachment and intertwining, then that of reversibility that will gradually give Merleau-
Ponty the idea of a category that joins various fields, making them reversible in the sense
that, by inversion, having one means finding the other. True, the term “chiasm” does not
appear as such in Phenomenology of Perception. It is nevertheless implicit in several of the
analyses, notably in that of sensation, where Merleau-Ponty conceptualizes the reversibility
of the sensing and the sensed, of their identities and their opposition. From that point on, the
chiasm, although appearing later in his work, clarifies and deepens the notion of
encroachment, of the Husserlian “ineinander,” of the intertwining formed by the relation
between the sensing and the sensed. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty turns the chiasm into a pure
and simple synonym of intertwining, then of reversibility: “The chiasm, reversibility, is the
idea that every perception is doubled with a counter perception (Kant’s real opposition), is an
act with two faces, one does not know who speaks and who listens.”[9] Thus the chiasm is
used as a figure of space—as an exact synonym of intertwining and reversibility[10]—rather
than as an ABBA figure of rhetoric. It is the pattern of reversibility par excellence and, hence,
is one of the particular modalities of the notion of “proximity” as a spatial idea of being “one
next to the other,” then “one with the other,” and even partly “one in the other” as opposed to
the notion of “being one outside of the other or one facing the other,” which designates the
classical distribution of what is on the side of the subject (i.e., what is the sensation) and
what is on the side of the object (i.e., the sensible). The chiasm as a figure of proximity
leading to intertwining is thus originally linked to an attempt at rethinking space. This
rethinking started as early as Phenomenology of Perception, in which Merleau-Ponty
considers space, more than time[11], to be a central problem. He will further find in topology
—when studying it more seriously a few years later—the concepts of which he already had
some clear understanding from his reading of Cassirer and Panofsky (to which we will return
later) and also of other art historians such as Francastel. He will make use of those concepts
more and more from the end of the 1950s on. Yet, it is well-known that the topological
concepts, which Merleau-Ponty will employ more and more as his work develops, are first
and foremost mathematical concepts, aiming to conceive of more concrete relations than
those defined by space in Euclidian geometry.[12] From a strict mathematical standpoint, the
real development of topological questions is above all due to Poincaré, who deemed
topology to be the most useful type of mathematics, as it deals not with measures but with
concrete forms effectively perceived by the common consciousness, e.g., the intuitive notion
of proximity so central in topology, from Poincaré to the Bourbaki group. Through these
notions, which may have seemed (this is at least what Cassirer will think) more intuitive than
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quantitative, mathematical topology focused on accounting for the world in which we live
effectively, concretely, sensibly[13] rather than for the world as a geometrically structured
expanse.[14] It is this that excited Merleau-Ponty’s hopes: by referring explicitly to the new
mathematical discoveries, he saw a possible redefinition of Cartesian space.

The initial conclusion to be drawn from this initial analysis is that the idea of using, first,
intertwining and reversibility and, then, the chiasm as philosophical concepts was born of a
meditation on the limits of the Euclidean space and an interest in the mathematical notions
of proximity, whose main figures become, for Merleau-Ponty, encroachment as intertwining,
and reversibility. Therefore, we have a double transference: transference from an optical
notion (intertwining of nerves) and then, by association, transference from a figure of rhetoric
to the field of philosophy. However, this transference is predicated on a more fundamental
one: that from mathematical notions to philosophy. Merleau-Ponty sincerely believed that the
most recent research in mathematics and physics could help him achieve his own
philosophical aim. In this regard, beginning with the Structure of Behaviour, he welcomes
“[t]he re-introduction of the most unexpected perceptual structures into modern science.”[15]
Then, in Phenomenology of Perception, the unifying theme of his reflection upon Euclidean
space is the recent inventions in non-Euclidean geometry.[16] This attitude, far from being
an expression of poetic licence, is evidence of a rather “positivistic” leaning in the classical,
neutral sense in which mathematics is explicitly considered as a paradigm that allows us to
understand what is to be understood. Paradoxically, Merleau-Ponty seems to want to go
beyond Euclidean space, borrowing his tools from the extension of Leibniz’s analysis
situs[17], in order that intelligibility may reach even farther towards the concrete, the intuitive,
the day-to-day world. Thus, this initial conclusion on the transference from one field to
another does not seem to agree with Bouveresse, nor with the general condemnation of
metaphorical transference from one field to another. Merleau-Ponty’s attitude consists simply
—and very conventionally if we consider the history of philosophy—of producing more
intelligibility within a previously neglected field: the concrete space of our day-to-day world,
as opposed to the abstract space of geometry. He achieves this thanks to the various
concepts and instruments that science—“new” mathematics and physics—makes available
to him. This will be confirmed as we look further into the function of the chiasm as a
redefinition of Cartesian space.

I.2. The Conquest of the Sensible Based on a Reading of The Dioptrics

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is almost exclusively dedicated to rethinking the relation to the

world that Descartes had created, in which a sovereign and independent subject scrutinizes,
masters and dominates an object offered to his eyes. Man became a spectator of objects—
the position he has occupied since the Renaissance, placing himself in front of a figurative
painting that he scrutinizes and holds in his gaze. The desire to relinquish the Cartesian
schema is derived from a concern to describe the substructures of consciousness in more
depth, i.e., the desire to enlarge the field of our intelligibility by rigorously analyzing this
desire per se. What used to be relegated to the hazy field of sensation, of the living world, of
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the world pre-existing language will henceforth be decipherable through philosophy. Thus,
Merleau-Ponty’s desire to go beyond Cartesian dualism has nothing to do with that of later
deconstructionists such as Derrida, who, following Heidegger, set out to denounce, by
definition, any philosophical apprehension judged to be metaphysical and “violent.” That is
the reason why Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Descartes is less “destructive” than “improving,”
in that he strives to complete or amend the Cartesian project, at least as far as the relation to
space is concerned.

Let us look in more detail at Merleau-Ponty’s criticism following his reading of The Dioptrics.
He does not destroy, but develops a dimension that is unthought but nevertheless implied by
the Cartesian project. The Dioptrics, Merleau-Ponty explains, is dedicated to phenomena of
vision and, more generally, to light; nevertheless, Descartes’ goal is not to describe these
phenomena per se, nor to determine what they really are: “Here there is no concern to cling
to vision.”[18] Descartes means to produce “artificial organs” that can improve our vision.
The technical and hands-on purpose determines the nature and the method of inquiry as
well as the way in which vision and light will be apprehended, as there will be “no
questioning of light, of vision. We do not live in light. We give no thought to that
phenomenon.”[19] Rather, Descartes endeavours to determine the way light acts on our
eye, the way it is in contact with it, in order to modify it. Hence, Descartes, true to the
method defined in the Regulae, constructs a model intended to master the phenomenon.
The Cartesian reflection therefore distances itself from the field of the lived experience of
vision and light to provide a translation of these phenomena into artificial “figures” or
“models.” The models are quasi-fictional, as he earlier pointed out bluntly at the beginning of
World. To build his model of vision, Descartes postulates an analogy between vision and
touch. Just as the blind “see with their hands” thanks to their canes, so through contact with
the eye light can be thought and the phenomenon of vision defined. Merleau-Ponty thus
notes that Descartes “eliminates action at a distance and relieves us of that ubiquity which is
the whole problem of vision (as well as its peculiar virtue).” (EM, 7)

For Merleau-Ponty, this overly simple conception of vision also explains how Descartes
multiplies the stages that, little by little, distance us from the sensible until the latter
eventually disappears. This is evidenced by the famous figure of the man looking, through
the eye of a dead animal, at the process by which we pass from the figure (nature) to the
sensation (the eye experiencing contact with the ray of light)—in other words, the process by
which we pass from the language of quantity and figure to its translation into qualitative and
sensory signs. The establishment is indeed that of a “spectacle” that multiplies the
intermediate stages or screens: our eye looks at the man who looks at the eye of the animal
that looks at the object. The multiplying of screens aims at distancing the sensible until it
disappears as sensible and appears as a figure. But it is not this paradigmatic example that
Merleau-Ponty advances to analyze the “spectacularization” of the world and the dismissal

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of the sensible, but rather the example of line engraving favoured by Descartes. The relation
between an object and the image of the object is a relation of dissimilarity, so that we literally
end up with what Merleau-Ponty calls a perception without an object.

In this regard, Merleau-Ponty notes that Descartes compares the process of

transcription/translation of the figure into sensation to a language whose relation with what it
signifies is intrinsically arbitrary. The image is as it is only because, like the sign, it does not
resemble what it designates. The image “excites our thought” to “conceive,” as do signs and
words “which in no way resemble the things they signify.” (EM, 8) Thus line engraving is an
“occasional cause” and not an image resembling the object represented; it is an arbitrary
sign, not a mimesis. Reality is no longer the sensible offered by sensation, but rather the
length and breadth of figures, geometric projections of algebraic relations, untouched by
irregularity, depth, or obscurity. As the purpose of the explanation is to modify reality, i.e., to
create artificial visual organs such as lenses, it yields not an understanding of the sensible
but a dismissal of reality. Hence, the figure, the only reality, renders the sensible entirely
unreal.[20]

Yet, Merleau-Ponty does not reject this conception of space so much as he grants it less
importance. Indeed, he believes that it was necessary to be able to think, beyond narrowly
empirical considerations, of an idealized space partes extra partes and outside of the
subject: “Descartes was right in liberating space: his mistake was to erect it into a positive
being, beyond all points of view, all latency and depth, devoid of any real thickness.” (EM,
10) Therefore, Merleau-Ponty does not intend to undermine this conception of space, which
he presents, in this text, as a systematization as well as a consequence of research on
perspective conducted since the Quattrocento; his intention is to limit it, to confine it to a
given field of validity, to raise again and differently the question of spatiality. Rather than a
criticism of Descartes, Merleau-Ponty shows that, at the very moment he suggests the idea
of space partes extra partes, Descartes implies an “other” spatiality that cannot be reduced
to the construction of figures (“that dimension…that Descartes opened up and so quickly
closed again” [EM, 12][21]). He shows how all such analyses of The Dioptrics presuppose a
position of the spectator’s body and, hence, a situation different from that of pure,
disembodied vision. The spectator, however external he may be, is capable of determining
“where the parts of [his] body are,” of “transferring its attention from there to all the points of
space that lie along the prolongation of [his] bodily members.” (EM, 11) This is why the body
effectively appears as “the place” from which objects are defined as being “there”—at that
point in space and not at another. The body is the fixed point, the “here” that makes it
possible to locate the different “theres” of exterior bodies. Merleau-Ponty states that
Descartes understood, in spite of his dualism, that the soul thinks with its body and from it,
and that “…space, or exterior distance, is also stipulated within the natural pact that unites
them.” (ibid.) Therefore, Merleau-Ponty uses Cartesianism to demonstrate the necessity, not
of transcending it, but of extending its limits. One has to return to another level to conceive of
vision “of which we can have no idea except in the exercise of it, and which introduces,

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between space and thought, the autonomous order of the composite of soul and body.” (EM,
11) The inadequacy of his theory of vision is indicated by Descartes himself: vision is not
only the act of a disembodied mind that decodes the signs of a world lying before it, but is an
act of a moving body; and it is in relation to its position that space unfolds: vision is
“knowledge by position or situation.” (EM, 12) Descartes’ analyses show, transparently, the
need to extend their limits. One must now recover the sensible, understand its reality at its
proper level, namely at the level of the body moving in the world that surrounds it:

Space is not what it was in the Dioptrics, a network of relations between objects such as
would be seen by a third party, witnessing my vision, or by a geometer looking over it and
reconstructing it from outside. It is, rather, a space reckoned starting from me as the null
point or degree zero of spatiality. I do not see it according to its exterior envelope; I live it
from the inside; I am immersed in it. (EM, 12)

What does this analysis tell us? It reveals the consistency and the purpose of Merleau-
Ponty’s thinking: the sensible, deprived of its reality by Cartesian thinking, has to regain
intelligibility. We have to extend our understanding to fields that so far have been ignored:
the concrete world and how one’s own body is related to other bodies, just as other bodies
are interrelated. This purpose requires the extension, not the destruction, of the limits of
Euclidean geometry and of physics based on the figures which Descartes developed.[22]
This extension demands tools of a different sort but of no lesser rationality, such as the
topological concepts—proximity, then by extension intertwining, and reversibility—with
which the mathematics of the concrete world provides us, concepts of which Descartes had
some intuition. It seems that even Merleau-Ponty’s most acute commentators do not take
seriously his desire to find the seeds of his own theory in Descartes. Saint-Aubert attributes
it to a psychological, therefore incidental, particularity. It results, he explains, in “the usual
strategy of the art of the devious counter-example: let us recognize ourselves in him who
seemed the most opposed to us so as to establish the validity of our theses all the
better.”[23] (LE, ??, my translation) It gives little importance to the time-consuming task of
unearthing, at the very heart of The Dioptrics, the necessity of extending, broadening, and
eventually completing it.

Similarly, in his important and decisive chapter devoted to Merleau-Ponty’s “topology of

reflection,” Matos-Diaz does not mention the analogy with mathematical concepts, but rather
insists on the power of the literary metaphors and the reference to Cézanne. In both cases,
Merleau-Ponty’s genuinely rationalistic trust in science (here, mathematics; elsewhere,
psychology) and in the explanatory potency of philosophy is belittled or ignored. It is not a
matter of “destroying” or “deconstructing” philosophy but quite the opposite. It is a matter of
extending its field of relevance by forging appropriate concepts. Yet, these very concepts—
proximity, intertwining, reversibility, crossing—take on further meaning with reference to
mathematics. This confirms our initial conclusion: Merleau-Ponty shows himself to be a
conventional rationalist (like Descartes, Leibniz, and even Helmholtz), as he expects

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mathematics to provide him with tools to enable him to conceive of the sensible space he
has undertaken to conquer, drawing from what Descartes discarded, stating: “All the
inquiries we believed closed have been reopened.” (EM, 12)

So, what should be concluded from this inquiry into the function of the chiasm and
encroachment if not that we are nowhere near equivocation and metaphor, at least from the
standpoint of the author. True, there is transference of a notion from one field to another; but
this transference is quite common in philosophy, as in physics. Does Descartes not wish to
study vision with “two or three comparisons” as starting points? Moreover, such migration of
concepts between the most seemingly unrelated fields—mathematics, philosophy, and
rhetoric—can be found at the very beginning of philosophy in ancient Greece, where, as A.
G. Wersinger writes, “topological schemas were [equally] resorted to to represent logic:
Aristotle used the figure of the knot and the chain when talking about aporia and reasoning
but Plato also, as I showed in Cercles nœuds réseau, rhétorique et mathématique in
Timée.”[24]

Merleau-Ponty’s concern is therefore to extend the field of intelligibility on the foundation of

concepts found in other sciences (here, mathematical topology, but elsewhere Piagian
cognitive psychology or, for other fields, psycho-pathological studies). His hybridization and
migration of notions returns the sensible, initially dismissed by Descartes, to philosophical
understanding and to ontic reality. It follows that the function of transference is, on the one
hand, heuristic: to find the appropriate tools to think of space by means of the most recent
regional “scientific” research. On the other hand, it is descriptive: to manage, by gradually
refining these concepts—from proximity to intertwining, from intertwining to reversibility, and
from the latter to the chiasm—to describe as accurately as possible what is at stake in our
relation to concrete space.

Once we understand why the concept of the chiasm has been introduced into philosophy
and once its function has been accounted for, we still have to understand its extension; for,
as Saint-Aubert regretfully states, Merleau-Ponty ends up applying the figures taken from the
field of topology, such as encroachment, to everything and

sometimes hovers near the margins of equivocity. It is all the more dangerous since the very
meaning of encroachment tends to make previously separate fields overlap and blurs the
boundaries between them. And when this figure, as it is the case in Merleau-Ponty’s work,
becomes overgeneralized, it comes close to a new chasm: it risks destroying itself by want
of boundaries to transgress. (LE, 20; my translation)

2. Overgeneralization?

II.1. The Process of Extension to All Fields

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Let us try to grasp the logic of this extension. Encroachment, intertwining, reversibility, and
chiasm are, as commentators have pointed out, notions used to understand the body, first in
itself, then in relation to the Cartesian construction of the world. Merleau-Ponty intends to go,
not beyond the man of The Dioptrics, a disembodied spectator who transcribes a message
by deciphering its code, but “back to the working, actual body — not the body as a chunk of
space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and
movement.” (EM, 2) The physical body, the lived body is intertwining. In this regard,
Merleau-Ponty will demonstrate that vision and mobilityare linked to an original experience
and cannot be dissociated as two distinct and independent operations. One calls to the other
and intersects it: vision implies movement and movement implies vision, because eyes
themselves move, just like the rest of the body, to connect with visible things visually. Thus,
vision and mobilityinfringe on each other and intertwine in the sensible experience. The
concern to extend the Cartesian position of the spectator exterior to the world is here
obvious, as vision is no longer pure, theoretical vision, comparable to the attitude of a
geographer contemplating his maps; rather it is inscribed in the world, contained and
intertwined. This is why vision is no longer an appropriation of the visible, control of the real,
but an opening to the world. Similarly, the world is no longer independent, in front of me, as
in classical representationalism, in which two independent entities (res cogitans and res
extensa) face each other. However, if there is an encroachment of vision on movement and
of movement on vision, no coincidence can be found within this relation. In this sense, the
gap that separates vision and movement is integral to their relation and their crossing. The
term “chiasm,” which is synonymous with intertwining, as intertwining is with encroachment,
is consequently used with a definite purpose: to express identity within difference and even
within opposition. Each of the terms, opposed to or different from the other, is itself valid only
in its relation to the other (reversibility and crossing). This intertwining of vision and
movement comprises the fundamental experience by which the body “can also look at itself
and recognize, in what it sees, the ‘other side’ of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it
touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself.” (EM, 3) This unveiling reveals a
relation, not between two entities, but one that constitutes the very identity of the opposites.

It is this experience by which the body splits into two, becoming both body-subject and body-
object—primordial, an original experience that expresses our relation not only to our body
but also to ourselves as subjects and to the external world in general. Let us consider this
double extension. This experience of our body displays a circularity by which it reflects itself,
becomes seeing and see-able, sensing and sensible—in Phenomenology of Perception.
This encroachment of the body on itself exemplifies codetermination, in which the
interconnection implies a fundamental gap between the two dimensions of the experience,
which denies the possibility that the touching and the touched, for example, are one within a
relation of identity. When my right hand touches my left hand, an “exchange” takes place
between the two hands, while excluding possible perfect equivalence. Here we have a
reciprocal relation in which one gives its reality to the other, excluding fusion and identity.
Thus, what this experience of reversibility essentially reveals to us is that one’s relation to
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oneself is blurred. Reflection or reflexive relation to self cannot be of the same order as
immediate access to the self (i.e., the transparency of the Cartesian system). The
experience of reversibility implies an access to the self that is simultaneously distance, an
apprehension of the self that reciprocally suggests a dispossession of the self. What is
obtained is an intersecting structure of possession/dispossession. Any relation of the subject
to himself thus implies some integral opacity through which he can connect with himself only
thanks to the self’s distance from the self, which is the very origin of reflexivity. This is why
Merleau-Ponty characterizes the subject in Eye and Mind as “a self by confusion, narcissism,
inherence of the see-er in the seen, the toucher in the touched, the feeler in the felt — a self,
then, that is caught up in things….” (EM, 3)

Such a conclusion is obviously charged with implications for the relation of the “subject” to
the exterior world. If the subject is already intrinsically visible and sensible to himself, the
relation of this subject with the world can only be prolongation, the extension of this
reversibility. Because it is itself visible, the body is a thing amongst the things of the world;
nevertheless, it does not fuse with them. Here again the relation as both identity and
opposition can be applied. Because the body “moves itself and sees, it holds things in a
circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted in its
flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body.” (EM,
3)

We therefore have an extension of the notions used initially in the field of topology, from the
body proper to the reflexive subject, then to the world in general—the world of objects and
the world of others. The chiasm expresses my relation to the other: “Chiasm, instead of For
the Other: that means that there is not only a me-other rivalry, but a co-functioning. We
function as one unique body.” (VI, 215) Through these notions of encroachment, intertwining,
chiasm, and reversibility, Merleau-Ponty attempts to subvert all the classical oppositions of
modern metaphysics. He rejects the whole system of opposition of an independent subject
and an object (or other subject) placed in front of him.

It follows that it is not only the Cartesian conception of space that is rejected but also the
position of the subject in front of the world, introduced by perspective during the
Quattrocento. Let us consider this fundamental point which will reveal the meaning of
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of extension.

II.2. Intertwining as a “Counter-Model” to Perspective

Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of perspective belong to this field of thought. Perspective, he

says, is a construction or invention of a world and not a transfer of our real perception. To
prove it, he quite clearly relies on Panofsky’s analyses, which, in Eye and Mind, he
envisages in relation to Descartes’ analyses. As Hubert Damisch indicates, Merleau-Ponty
was one of the first to introduce Panofsky’s analyses in France. He dedicated Le langage
indirect et les voix du silence (1950) to a criticism of Malraux’s position; as well, he delivered
an analysis of Perspective as Symbolic Form in his 1954–55 lectures on the “institution.”[25]
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For Panofsky, perspective, mathematically conceived, is not the continuation or extension of
the psycho-physiological experience of perception but an artificial, “symbolic” construction
(perspectiva artificialis), which, Merleau-Ponty holds, aims at “developing a practically
usable construction of the plane pictorial image.”[26] Perspective is therefore a “symbolic
form” in Cassirer’s sense, from which Panofsky draws his inspiration in his studies of the
history of art. Panofsky has shown the “abstract” and constructed character of perspective in
relation to sensible, real space:

In order to guarantee a fully rational – that is, infinite unchanging and homogeneous – space,
this ‘central perspective' makes two tacit but essential assumptions: first, that we see with a
single and immobile eye and, second, that the planar cross-section of the visual pyramid can
pass for an adequate reproduction of our optical image. In fact these two premises are
rather bold abstractions from reality, if by ‘reality’ we mean the actual subjective optical
impression. For the structure of an infinite, unchanging and homogeneous space – in short,
a purely mathematical space – is quite unlike the structure of psychophysiological space.[27]

With perspective, objects become ordered in such a way as to fit on one plane; they make
space appear as pre-existent to them, a homogeneous space, an ordered space whose slow
development, from Lorenzi to Brunelleschi and P. della Francesca, was later theorized by
Alberti as recourse to the principle of intersection and to the plan of the visual pyramid.
Merleau-Ponty, drawing upon Panofsky’s analyses, takes up the idea of a historical
construction and “symbolic”[28] establishment of space. Perspective has induced a general
conception of relation: we are in front of and exterior to the world, we control it through our
eyes, and the relation between the seeing subject and the object seen is a relation of
exteriority (i.e., the two entities are independent and constituted before they are put in
relation to each other) and of confrontation. In a nutshell, the invention of perspective has
shaped not only our relation to space but also our way of thinking about the category of
relation to every other—to space, thing, another person. How am I in the world? Am I face to
face​—with space, with the object, with the other? The thinking underlying the chiasm
therefore substitutes itself for the classical category of the relation induced by the position of
perspective. This allows us to understand the generalizing character of this relation, as
“generalizing” as was perspective, which has progressively shaped all our thinking about
relation: first, relation to space; then, relation to the world; and then, relation to the other.
Thus it is just as futile to reproach Merleau-Ponty for his extension or “overgeneralization” as
to reproach perspective for shaping the very category of relation as a face-to-face between
two distinct and independent entities (me and things, me and my body, me and the other)
after having first been conceived of as a relation to space (by the painters of Quattrocento).
Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Panofsky[29], too little mentioned in the studies of the former,
thus proves of utmost importance. Panofsky is the missing link that allows us to understand
Merleau-Ponty’s aims to illuminate intertwining and chiasm as encompassing categories. His
purpose is to refashion our relation to the world, as perspective has informed the modern
age. One decisive fact confirms this interpretation: Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of Cézanne.

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They have often been seen as representing an interest in painting and Merleu-Ponty’s
progress in the field of aesthetics. This, in itself, is obviously not untrue; but it lessens, to my
mind, the fundamentally epistemic scope of all his analyses of the painter. It means no less
than substituting another relationship to the world for that inferred by the invention of
Brunelleschi and ratified by the philosophical conceptions of Descartes and, later, of Kant.
Only by taking into consideration Merleau-Ponty's reading of Panofsky, whom he first made
known in France, can we understand the epistemological concern underlying his studies of
Cézanne.[30] Let us examine this point using the chiasm, namely, to illuminate a new
category of relation, the ultimate and unifying design of his analyses in the most varied fields
—perception, painting, mathematics, psychology, etc.

II.3. Cézannian Epistemology

Merleau-Ponty, without a hint of ambiguity, draws attention to the relation between

perspective and the Cartesian relation to the world: “Four centuries after the ‘solutions’ of the
Renaissance and three centuries after Descartes, depth is still new, and it insists on being
sought, not ‘once in a lifetime’ but all through life.” (EM, 13) Against this viewpoint he sets a
painter’s thinking; as he points out, what is peculiar to Cézanne is that he kept looking for
depth throughout his life. The Cézanne study thus seems to be a quasi-epistemological
inquiry insofar as it revolves around verifying and extending analyses on depth and its
importance in our relation to the world, which Merleau-Ponty had already developed at
length in Phenomenology of Perception. If Cézanne arouses Merleau-Ponty’s interest, it is
as a counter-example to Descartes, insofar as his painting means to reveal a spatiality
different from the Cartesian, from the homogeneous space as a system that Panofsky
described in discussing Renaissance painting. To this space, Cézanne opposes depth,
which will become the dimension through which things are in relation. Restoring depth
means disrupting the face-to-face relation that places the sovereign subject in opposition to
the object, looking down from the exterior in an “all-encompassing” gaze. In this respect,
Merleau-Ponty shows how the whole of Cézanne’s work can be conceived of as a
meditation and variations on and against perspective. He tells us that Cézanne wants “to put
intelligence, ideas, sciences, perspective, and tradition back in touch with the world of nature
which they must comprehend.”[31] For him, Cézanne’s concern is clearly knowledge (“to
put…sciences…back in touch”). Cézanne is understood to be the Husserlian painter par
excellence, because he strives to restore the world of life, on which science has built.
Cézanne’s purpose is clearly conceived as a counter-proposition to the abstract construction
of a world without depth, as an attempt to return to the lived experience of natural
perception. That is the very thing Descartes’ Dioptrics had branded as both unintelligible and
unreal, given his thinking of the sign and the code: one might say Cézanne is a critic of
Descartes, in that his paintings aim at restoring the genesis of the world, the birth of the
sensible, which is negated by Cartesian science. Going beyond the constructed world,
Cézanne attempts to return to our native, primary perception, to our initial intertwining with
the world and in the world. Thus it is indeed as an epistemological project that Cézanne’s

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work is being interrogated here. As a counterpoint to the Cartesian vision of the world, his
pictorial undertaking consists in recovering our “primary” perception underlying the abstract
construction fashioned by centuries of “information” and, consequently, of cultural
“deformation.” Cézanne used the chiasm, this “system of exchanges” (EM, 4), and Merleau-
Ponty, like Descartes faced with the invention of perspective, takes up the painter’s attempt
to reinstate chiasm as the truth of our relation to all things and, by extension, the truth of
relation itself. Cézanne recovers the primordial expression that the first cave painting
expressed, the prolongation of the child’s perception. For Merleau-Ponty, Piaget’s studies
showed how the child’s relation to the world is initially a topological one.[32] We can
appreciate here both the centrality of the meditation on Cézanne’s painting to Merleau-
Ponty’s epistemological aims as well as the consistency of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. Initially
derived from a meditation on topological concepts based on mathematical research, which
were supposed to be more in touch with the concrete world, the chiasm as a figure of
reversibility becomes the relation that Merleau-Ponty places in opposition to that induced by
the scientific and abstract construction of the modern world. Through this relation, raised to
the status of quasi-logical category, as it can be applied to numerous fields, Merleau-Ponty
means to access this wild world, the world of our primary perception, the world the child
experiences before he is informed by culture. The purpose of the chiasm is to replace
perspective and the category of relation that its implementation induced: the face-to-face
relation of two separate entities. “Take topological space as a model of being. The Euclidean
space is the model for perspectival being, it is a space without transcendence, positive, a
network of straight lines….” (VI, 210) The intertwining relation of the subject and the world is
the truth of the substructures on which science was built and to which Husserl wanted to
return. This shows that Merleau-Ponty chose to play Cézanne against Descartes and to turn
the study of painting into an epistemological project, as the birth of perspective effectively
did. The difference between Panofsky or Cassirer and Merleau-Ponty lies in the fact that the
former consider our world as a construction and that any construction other than perspective
is an elaboration or, itself, a construction of the world, i.e., “symbolic forms.” To this Kantian
vision Merleau-Ponty opposes the world of the primary, the primordial, the infans, the
primitive man. I detect a quasi-“naturalistic” concern in Merleau-Ponty’s undertaking, as what
matters to him is to return to original space and, beyond that, to put forward a new category
of relation.

These analyses demonstrate how, far from being an “overgeneralization,” the extension of
the concepts of intertwining and encroachment, reversibility, and chiasm is proof of an
epistemological consistency throughout the diversity of the fields explored: from
Phenomenology of Perception which, in counter-position to Euclidean space, attempts to
explore the succession of singular spaces[33], to mathematical topology, to Piaget’s studies
on the topological space of the infans, to Descartes’ Dioptrics, to Panofsky’s study of
perspective, to Merleau-Ponty’s meditation on Cézanne’s painting, we encounter the same
concern again and again: to advance a category of relation better suited to describing our
being in the primary world. This category of relation becomes a quasi-logical category in the
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sense that we witness the development of a new logic, just as Hegelian logic undertook to
rebuild the categories of relation in quite a different way. Merleau-Ponty’s purpose is to
conceive of a relation as an identity of opposites, not as an interface of two distinct entities.
The extension of this category is therefore not in the least surprising; rather, it is the mark of
the consistency of Merleau-Ponty’s project. As in Hegel, all fields are affected by this thinking
of relation as identity within opposition, as opposition within identity, as crossing of opposites
and reversibility. This thinking of relation will even be used by Merleau-Ponty as a tool to
thematize the relation between the various fields of knowledge—history, mathematics,
neurology, psychology, philosophy, etc.: If philosophers, historians, scientists of all ilk enter
a dialogue, Such a dialogue will take place thanks to the figure of encroachment, which, in
fine, will be the very definition of philosophy[34] and will express its “relation” to all fields of
knowledge.

3. The Crossing as a Definition of the Relation

III.1. The Theses Involved

What do we learn from this second stage in our analysis of the extension of the notions that
chiasma sums up—encroachment, intertwining, and reversibility? First and foremost, it
clearly demonstrates that the function of chiasm is to replace “the symbolic institution” of
perspective. As a result, another category of relation is advanced, one as all-encompassing
and general as relation had become when understood as a secondary interface between two
entities initially separated from and external to each other—subject/space, subject/body,
subject/world, subject/the other, as well as the relation of one discipline to any other[35], etc.
To conceptualize identity within opposition, or opposition within identity is what the chiasm
renders possible: “Negativity/chiasm…The negative exists only upon a ground of identity
(identity of thing and of its reflection). Negative: the reverse side of identity…me-world
chiasm”; or still “[t]he idea of chiasm, that is: every relation with being is simultaneously a
taking and a being taken, the hold is held; it is inscribed and inscribed in the same being that
it takes hold of.” (VI, 266) This ambition is therefore clearly gnoseologic: against a truncated
relation—the perspective of Euclidian geometry that Descartes defines as relation to all
things—Merleau-Ponty sets the “true” relation, more “primary” and authentic. His study of
Cézanne continues this epistemic concern to restore our true relation to the world. Merleau-
Ponty’s consistency proves complete: far from “overgeneralizing,” he advances a new
category of relation, capable, in his eyes, of replacing the relation posed by modern
philosophy, the relation of opposition or exteriority secondarily based on initial and
constituted elements, a relation that the perspective of the Quattrocento developed and that
has been “generalized” to all things by modern science and Descartes’ philosophy. The
“overgeneralization” criticism is itself contingent upon a “generalization” derived from our
entering the world of perspective from the Renaissance onwards, and which Merleau-Ponty
strives to leave.

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Thus, at the end of this study on the functioning and the extension of the concept of chiasm,
I come to a paradoxical argument, at least with respect to classical commentarism or to
Merleau-Ponty’s disciples who, according to a French trend in phenomenology, have tended
to group him with literary philosophers (“the phenomenology of writers”) rather than with
scientific ones. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty proves here to be almost “positivist,” given his trust in
regional sciences (first, mathematics, then psychology for topological concepts) and
“naturalistic,” given his concern to recover a primary nature, buried deep in our actual bodies
under layers of culture.

III.2. Merleau-Ponty, a “Positivist”?

We may consider him a positivist for, as we have seen in the course of this analysis,
Merleau-Ponty believes that recent discoveries in mathematics can help him conceptualize
space. He reads, among others, Cassirer on the mathematics of his time (including Poincaré
and topology, non-Euclidian geometries, etc.). In a thorough study of The Dioptrics, he
attempts to extend its theories by using the concepts of intertwining and encroachment to
restore reality and intelligibility to the sensible, two qualities that Descartes had partially
deprived it of. In this sense, his attitude seems quasi-“Leibnizian,” as he extends our field of
intelligibility thanks to tools better suited than those provided by Euclidian geometry.[36]

Of course, Merleau-Ponty is not a “positivist” in the narrow definition that implies that only
regional sciences are paradigms of truth (as Carnap holds for mathematics and physics, or
Austin and Quine hold for linguistics and psychology) and that philosophy is nothing but the
pathological ramblings of failed artists. In this regard, Merleau-Ponty is rather a classical
“philosopher”: all science can help us, as philosophers, to create tools that can bring us
closer to the reality that is there to be conceived. In this way, Piaget’s psychology shows us
how the child’s space is initially a topological space. Poincaré’s mathematics provides us
with proximity, which help us to come to terms with the changeability of the concrete world.
Here, Merleau-Ponty is thinking of the communication between different fields of knowledge
and their contributions to, i.e., encroachment upon, one another.

This concern, classically philosophical, rationalistic, even broadly “positivistic,” in the

philosophical sense used by Descartes or Leibniz, distances Merleau-Ponty from
phenomenology, which, in Husserl’s analysis of phenomenality, refuses recourse to regional
sciences. Merleau-Ponty certainly means to recover “the world of life” that science has lost
due to its construction. In this sense, he accepts the conclusions drawn by the Krisis.
Husserl sees here the hold of narrowly positivistic or scientistic rationality that considers as
true only what is determined by the shape of a quantifiable object, is attributable to a cause,
is calculable according to laws, and that can eventually be manipulated (as the
mathematized world of Galilean science and Cartesian philosophy can be). Husserl believes
that, in this way, Descartes, through the generalization of the object of physio-mathematical
science, has obscured or shrouded the meaning of the world. It is Decartes’ considered
choice of a single form of rationality that brings about the crisis of meaning and knowledge,
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as this logos—measuring, staking out, dominating, and manipulating—relegates to non-
sense whole sections of human experience, such as the “world of life.” For Husserl,
however, the criticism of this rationality is contingent upon a wholly different world, that of
pure phenomenality, which, because it radically differs from the world of science, of the
psycho-physiological subject, will not use the limited tools of specialized science.[37] In
contrast, Merleau-Ponty undertakes to conceptualize the “world of life,” using all the
resources he can draw from regional sciences: mathematics, physics, psychology,
psychoanalysis, history (of perspective and of painting), sociology, etc. Merleau-Ponty is
undoubtedly, in the precise sense of the term, less a phenomenologist than is Levinas or,
today, Marion. Let us sketch a short comparison of these authors: both Levinas and Marion
undertake to advance a type of relation other than the purely metaphysical (i.e., Cartesian
exteriority as a face-to-face relation of object to subject). In both cases we have the
development, as in Merleau-Ponty, of a thinking of relation as primary, preceding and
instituting the poles of identity: subject/world, subject/the other. Levinas does this through
the elaboration of a primarily ethical relation that precedes and defines both subjects. Marion
does it through his definition of love as an “intersecting phenomenon”: “Not only does the
erotic phenomenon appear in common to him and me and without a single egoic pole, but it
only appears in this intersection. Intersecting phenomenon.” [38] Love as intersection (in
which we again find the idea of intertwining and crossing) effectively refers to a relation that,
beyond subject and object, beyond the sum of two subjects, precedes and establishes the
one and the other. There is therefore a common aim amongst these undertakings: to
advance a relation as “crossing” that is different from the face-to-face relation.[39] However,
while the undertakings may be identical, the approaches are radically different. Indeed,
Merleau-Ponty, constantly referring to other sciences, effectively seems not to want to
accept a strict division between phenomenology and regional sciences, while, paradoxically,
Levinas and Marion prove more orthodox, as they undertake to describe appearance as
appearance solely with the resources of phenomenological description, without making use
of the numerous tools of regional sciences. This is also why Merleau-Ponty proves quasi-
logically to be more naturalistic in his approach.

III.3. Merleau-Ponty, a “Naturalist”?

He is indeed a naturalist as his nodal concern is to arrive at what is more “primary,” through
redefining the notion of relation. As I have shown elsewhere, the primary in Merleau-Ponty is
clearly conceived as what comes first in time, initial lived experience, the past of the infans,
of the primitive. This past, shrouded by culture, is the opposite of the concept that conceals,
mutilates, and betrays. His recurring image of the primitive man who instinctively finds his
bearings in the desert[40], his evocation of the cave painter, his study, via Piaget’s analysis,
of the infans and his behaviours, reveal to what extent Merleau-Ponty’s concern is for the
primary, clearly elaborated as a time before the fall into objectivization, before manipulation,
before the loss of the body of the flesh engendered by the Cartesian mathematization of the
world. True, some will say that the search for the primary is integral to the aim of

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phenomenology; some will claim that Husserl’s followers have, as François David Sebbah
writes, “all, and each in a completely different way, a quite obvious desire to unearth a
primary more primary than the Ego <..> a hither of the place where conscience can be
controlled.”[41] Nevertheless, the primary can be given different meanings; and, in Husserl,
nothing legitimizes referring it to the classical sense of origin.[42] But here again, if we briefly
compare Merleau-Ponty’s and Levinas’ use of the term “primary,” a huge difference is clearly
evident. For instance, in Levinas we find a “primary” defined as the invisible that any visible
summons and demands. If we must assume “a hither side, a pre-original, a non-presentable,
an invisible”[43], this original does not have “the status of origin,” for it does not have a
temporal meaning; rather it is condition. Likewise, when Marion, in La croisée du visible,
represents the relation of the invisible and the unseen through the model of perspective that
allows the visible to appear without itself, however, being the object of seeing, he clearly
interprets the unseen not in terms of time and history but in terms of principle or condition.
Merleau-Ponty’s categories are “before” mathematization and “after” conceptualization,
which shrouds and mutilates our first relation. Merleau-Ponty is consequently led to think the
movement of history and culture to be a reminder of this buried primary[44]:

Philosophy is a reminding of this being. Science is not concerned with it because it

conceives of the relationship of being and understanding as those of the geometrical and its
projections, and forgets the being which surrounds and invests us, and could be called the
topology of being. (S, 22)

Through philosophy, one tries to define “the first experience of the impalpable body of
history,” the “primordial expression.” Art, particularly painting, is the “amplification” of this
primary experience, which the first cave painting, a prolongation of the initial perception of
the infans, expressed.[45] This naturalistic tendency, in the sense of trying to find the nature
of man and his primary relation to the world, can be clearly seen in Merleau-Ponty’s relation
to Cassirer and Panofsky. As mentioned, Merleau-Ponty carefully analyzes Panofsky’s
arguments about the allegedly symbolic form of perspective. His point of departure from
Panofsky and Cassirer is that, for him, the relation to space that he means to advance has
nothing to do with construction of the subject, either in Cassirer’s Kantian version (i.e., all is
construction) or in Panofsky’s particular conception of historicized transcendence (i.e., all is
historical construction).The relation Merleau-Ponty attempts to clarify through the concepts
of intertwining and chiasm is effectively a truth of our “primary” nature. As Hubert Damisch
shows in L’origine de la perspective, if Merleau-Ponty dwells not on the influence that
perception may have had on perspective but, rather, on the influence that perspective has
had on perception, it is because of his corollary idea that there is a “brute” or “wild”
perception.[46] Thus, we have three distinct lines of argument: first, that perspective is a
symbolic and transcendental form (Cassirer); second, that it is a historically constructed,
symbolic form (Panofsky); and, third, that it is a construction beyond which we have to go in

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order to attain brute perception, free of cultural work (Merleau-Ponty). Merleau-Ponty’s aim is
to return to buried nature, in opposition to Cassirer’s and Panofsky’s concerns. For all these
reasons, it is no exaggeration to speak of Merleau-Ponty’s “naturalism.”

IV. Conclusion

Where has this study taken us? I have studied the movement of concepts from one field to
another and questioned the status of this transference. Through this analysis we have come
to the opposite of Bouveresse’s position on the arbitrary use of analogy in philosophy.
Indeed, Merleau-Ponty proves to be a very classical philosopher (like Descartes and
Leibniz) insofar as he borrows his concepts from various fields of knowledge, and from
various “regional sciences” (mathematical topology, psychology, history of perspective, etc.).
This concept of transference, far from being arbitrary, is, on the contrary, the rigorous
consequence of the leading concern of the philosopher: to define a category of relation that
restores to the sensible its intelligibility of which Descartes had deprived it. Relation is no
longer a secondary interface between two previously constituted entities (i.e., the relation of
classical representationalism) but identity within opposition, a crossing that establishes the
very elements it puts in relation. This conceptualization of relation makes it possible to open
up all fields previously ignored by philosophy and thereby to extend its investigative range.
Therefore, the extension of relation as crossing is in no way an “overgeneralization,” despite
what Saint-Aubert states; rather it is akin, following the model of the Hegelian category of
identity of difference and identity, to the implementation of a new logic—that of the sensible.
This logic undertakes to offer a counter-model to perspective. This enquiry has also led me
to discover a more unexpected determination of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy: a genuine trust
in the possibility that “regional sciences” can provide tools for philosophy that further extend
its intelligibility. This recourse to regional sciences not only distances Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology from one more “orthodox” but also confers upon it its specific character: that
of a phenomenology that paradoxically appears positivistic and naturalistic. More generally,
all these outcomes compel us to rethink the philosophical practice of the migration of
concepts from one field to another with something other than indignation and condemnation.

=======

[1]Jacques Bouveresse, Prodiges et vertiges de l’analogie (Paris: Raisons d’agir, 1999).

Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as PV. All translations of all texts for which
another translator is not specified are mine. See in particular the chapter titled “les malheurs
de Gödel ou l’art d’accommoder un théorème à la sauce préférée des philosophes.”
Bouveresse, in this text, is not critical of Merleau-Ponty but of other less prestigious thinkers
who, in some cases, do not even claim to be philosophers. Nevertheless, the main purpose
of the book is twofold. He warns against transference from one field to another and often
generalizes from these thinkers or essayists to “French philosophy” (e.g., “we know that
logic is not given great importance in French philosophy” any more than is “empiricism,” 37).

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He then goes on to generalize to a certain form of “Continental” philosophy, always tinged
with “literaristic” influences, which, for Bouveresse, are quite clearly derived from
Heidegger’s phenomenology.

[2] For this use of the notion of chiasm by Louis Marin, see my article “Louis Marin
philosophe? La signification à la croisée du langage et de la vision,” in La raison des effets,
travailler avec Louis Marin (conference publication of the EHESS in 1997 and of the Cicada
in 2001), (ed.) P. A. Fabre and B. Rougé (Paris: Presses de l’EHESS, 2010), 42–64.

[3] The form of the alexandrine, with two hemistiches of equal length, obviously lends itself
easily to effects of symmetry and parallelism.

[4] See, to take a recent example, in France, the Dictionnaire Merleau-Ponty, by Pascal
Dupond (Paris: Ellipses, 2008), one of a series of books that aim to present in brief the key
concepts of an author. It devotes a very long entry to this term (among the twenty-six notions
reviewed).

[5] Of course, it would be impossible to refer to all the studies that consider chiasm a
fundamental notion. Nevertheless, see the introduction of Merleau-Ponty, Chiasm and
Logos, Studia phaenomenologica, vol. III, no. 3–4 (2003), in which we are reminded right
from the first lines that: “the chiasm is without a doubt the one figure that steers Merleau-
Ponty’s discourse. Reversibility, intertwining, gap, dehiscence, are all chiasmatic inflections
that one can feel in those deepest attempts to convert into meaning, into uttered logos.” P.
34.See also in this book the article by Renaud Barbaras “le problème du chiasme,” and his
article “le chiasme du rythme, une révision merleau-pontienne de l’incarnation lacanienne,”
in Chiasmi, vol. 5 (2004, 192-201). In English, see D. Olkowski, “Intertwining and
Objectification,” Phaenex, vol. 1, no. 1 (2006), 62–73; J. Reynolds, “Merleau-Ponty, Levinas,
and the Alterity of the Other,” Symposium, vol. 6, no. 1 (2002), 63–78; and W. S. Hamrick,
“A Process View of the Flesh : Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty,” Process Studies, Spring-
Summer (1999), 117–29.

[6] Emmanuel de Saint-Aubert, Du lien des êtres aux éléments de l’être (Paris: Vrin, 2004. I
translate.), 20. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as LE. Here Saint-Aubert
speaks of a “drift,”of “overgeneralization” and emphasizes “that the philosopher sometimes
hovers near the margins of equivocity.” For the complete quotation, see below.

[7] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Une poïétique du sensible (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du

Mirail, 2001), 87ff. In Usages contemporains de la phénoménologie (Paris: Sens et Tonka,
2008), François David Sebbah contrasts a “phenomenology of writers” with a more scientific
phenomenology derived from Husserl. Merleau-Ponty has often been associated with this
phenomenology of writers, and one might forget to quote the commentators who mention his
“poetic usage” of language or “metaphor,” whether meant as praise or not. It is this
distinction between “phenomenology of scientists” and phenomenology of writers that I

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intend to question, at least insofar as Merleau-Ponty is concerned, as he is, as I will
demonstrate, one of the most paradoxically “scientistic” (in the neutral sense of the term)
phenomenologists ever.

[8] Merleau-Ponty quotes Valéry and his conception of “chiasmi” in The Man and His
Adversity (September 1951, article in Oeuvres De Merleau-Ponty, Quarto Gallimard, 2010,
1377-1397), Translation by R. McCleary (Signs, Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1964), 284. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as S.

[9] See the chapter titled “The Intertwining – The Chiasm” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The
Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, (ed.) C. Lefort, (tr.) A. Lingis
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 264–65. Hereafter refered to
parenthetically in the text as VI. In the Dictionnaire de Merleau-Ponty, previously cited, the
terms of reversibility and chiasm are given as synonyms. The chiasm is the cross that does
not literally refer to the figure that rhetoric strictly defines as ABBA. The term chiasm is also
often used as a cross in space (Marin, Damisch), a painter’s technique. See for example, as
evidence of this usage, an article in Communications, vol. 34 (1981) titled “le chiasme
cézannien,” a structuralist study of semiology in painting.

[10] It goes without saying that the substitutive analogies we use to specify the notion of
chiasm—intertwining, Ineinander, encroachment, reversibility (all of them linked to what
Merleau-Ponty thinks “topology” is)—are all considered equivalent by Merleau-Ponty himself.
See, besides the appositions already mentioned and among them, “the chiasm and the
Ineinander” in notes inédites accompagnant la préparation de cours, 1961 ((ed. C. Lefort
(from January 1959 to March 1961, following Le Visible et l’Invisible), and the substitution
“encroachment and chiasm”: “This other side…is not linked to this entity by a foreign
simultaneity but by a reciprocal encroachment which is also mutual calling, the exchange of
two needs in the circulation of the chiasm,” in: working notes 1960, (ed.) C. Lefort (from
January 1959 to March 1961, following Le Visible et l’Invisible, 313). Also, on topology, see
the most famous working notes of October 1959, edited by C. Lefort and following Le visible
et l’Invisible (Gallimard, Tel, 264), and for the direct link between “chiasm” and “topology,”
see the preface to Signs. Please refer to my more precise commentary on this note,
“Spatialiser nos concepts . La tentative de Merleau-Ponty” Symposium, vol. 12, no. 1 (???
2008), ??–??; and, last but not least, the first paper on the topic by Jean Petitot, “Topologie
phénoménale : sur l’actualité scientifique de la phusis phénoménologique de Merleau-
Ponty,” in Merleau-Ponty, le philosophe et son langage, Cahiers, no. 15 (Grenoble: Groupe
de recherches sur la philosophie et le langage, 1993), 291–322.

[11] Two long chapters are devoted to space, whereas time is dealt with in only one short
chapter. I have previously noted the importance of space in my article “L’espace chez
Merleau-Ponty, problèmes et enjeux contemporains,” publication of the Beijing conference

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Merleau-Ponty contemporain, colloque pour le centenaire de sa naissance, September 5–6,
2008, in Reading Merleau-Ponty (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2011), 43–62. A French
translation is available at [http://www.cerium.ca/contenu30.html?id_mot=468].

[12] Cassirer (then Kurt Lewin, Panofsky, and Francastel) thought of the topology as more
“concrete” than Euclidian geometry. It was a commonplace in 1950. Merleau-Ponty was
influenced by this reception of “new geometry.” About Merleau-Ponty and the “new
geometry” as “topology,” see the very important aformentioned article by Jean Petitot.

[13] TN: “Sensibly” meaning “perceptible through the senses.”

[14] On the importance of topology and of Poincaré in 20th-century mathematics, see Ernst
Cassirer, “Book I, Mathematics and Physics,” in The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy,
Science, and History Since Hegel (New Edition), (tr.) C. W. Hendel and W. H. Woglom (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977). Merleau-Ponty, as we shall see, was
acquainted with Cassirer’s theses on mathematical revolutions, which were widely known
through various channels. Cassirer had particularly “publicized” what he deemed to be
(resting on real statements by Poincaré) a proximity between the concrete world and
topology. Kurt Lewin, much influenced by Cassirer, looked in the same way upon these
breakthroughs in mathematics and topology, and made use of them as we know in his
Gestalt psychology. Above all, the art historians most contributed to popularize this
interpretation of topology. Francastel, following the German art historians, will even go about
making contemporary art “a topological art” in his paper “Espace géométrique et espace
esthétique” in Revue d’esthétique, January–March (1948). No doubt this is what most
interested the phenomenologist willing to go back to the “world of life” and to go beyond the
rupture between the concrete world and science, this rupture being, according to the Krisis,
the source of the crisis of the European sciences. We could of course discuss whether or not
this use of topology (which Merleau-Ponty also often calls “new geometry”) would have
made Poincaré shudder (which is not even certain), but we think that this would have no
more interest than to remind us that the problems of mathematics are not exactly the same
as those of philosophy (see, on this obviously non-literally “mathematical” use, my book Le
concept et le lieu (Paris: Cerf, 2008). Like perspective in the Renaissance, some notions
cross their original field to become common goods to be interpreted and modified. As
Merleau-Ponty posits “concrete universality” and not the “brain of the leech,” it is not
surprising that he used all the tools from other sciences to gain access to it. What we find
interesting here is that, rightly or wrongly, Merleau-Ponty thought that this constellation of
concepts—united around the notion of proximity—could help him clarify his philosophy. With
this crossing constellation, we really witness something similar to what Damisch describes
about perspective in the Renaissance: mathematicians, architects, painters, theoricians of
art, philosophers, take over the same notion which they modify according to the different
fields of reception concerned.

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[15] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, (tr.) A. Fisher (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1963; London: Methuen, 1965), 145.

[16] Phenomenology of Perception, Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge, 2002), 391.

[17] Initially, topology is a development of Leibniz’s analysis situs. See Cassirer on Poincaré
in Ernst Cassirer, Problèmes de la connaissance dans la Philosophie et la Science des
Temps Modernes, (tr.) I. Thomas-Fogiel (Paris: Cerf, 1995).

[18] L’oeil et l’esprit, Folio, Essais, 1964, 7. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in text as
EM.

[19] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours au Collège de France: 1958-1959 et 1960-1961

(Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 176. My translation.

[20] On this analysis of the dismissal of the sensible by the code in The Dioptrics, see Jean-
Luc Marion, Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1981), 262ff.

[21] See also EM, 10: “Yet Descartes would not have been Descartes if he had thought to
eliminate the enigma of vision”; and EM, 12: “All the inquiries we believed closed have been
reopened.”

[22] We find as early as Phenomenology of Perception the source of this attitude of

extension; Merleau-Ponty proving to be really coherent throughout his work. Indeed, he
wrote there: “the alleged transparency of Euclidean geometry is one day revealed as
operative for a certain period in the history of the human mind, and signifies simply that, for a
time, men were able to take a homogeneous three-dimensional space as the ‘ground’ of their
thoughts, and to assume unquestioningly what generalized science will consider as a
contingent account of space.” (PP, 454) In this quotation can be seen the attitude we call
“positivist,” which here simply signifies a trust in the latest developments of some science to
help us move forward in our philosophical conquest of the space we live in.

[23] Le scenario cartésien, Paris, Vrin, 2005, p. 32 (LE).

[24] Anne Gabrièle Wersinger, “L’autoréfutation du sceptique vu de la scène antique,” Revue

de métaphysique et de morale, vol. 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010), 43–
67, here 43. My translation.

[25] L’institution, la passivité. Notes de cours au collège de France (1954-1955), Paris, Belin,
2003,, 45.

[26] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’institution. La passivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France

(1954-1955) (Paris: Belin, 2003), 80. My translation.

[27] La perspective comme forme symbolique, Paris, Minuit, 1976, pp. 41 .

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[28] The term is initially used by Cassirer, then taken up by Panofsky.

[29] In this regard, Panofsky’s is not mentioned once in Saint-Aubert’s three books
(published by Vrin) which claim to be an exhaustive list of Merleau-Ponty’s influences.

[30] Merleau-Ponty associates Cezanne with topology several times and without a hint of
ambiguity: “example of Cezanne for a whole quest, of everything at once. To study space for
him is to study everything. Outcome: a topological space” in: notes de lecture pour la
préparation de L’oeil et l’esprit, Unpublished Manuscript, Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris,
Issue V, 174 pages, 157.

[31] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Nonsense (Evanston: Northwestern University

Press, 1964), 14.

[32] On Merleau-Ponty and Piaget, see Osborne Wiggins, “Merleau-Ponty and Piaget: An
Essay in Philosophical Psychology,” Man and World, vol. 12 (1979), 21–34; Emmanuel de
Saint-Aubert, Vers une ontologie indirecte (Paris: Vrin, 2006), Chapter 6; and my Concept et
le lieu, Chapter 2, Part One.

[33] I have studied this point at length in my article “Spatialiser nos concepts, la tentative de
Merleau-Ponty,” Symposium, vol. 12, no. 1 (2008), ??–??.

[34] For the definition of philosophy as chiasm and encroachment, see, among others, The
Visible and the Invisible: “The true philosophy = apprehend what makes the leaving of
oneself be a retiring into oneself, and vice versa” (VI, 199), and on the extension of the
category to think the relations between various fields of knowledge and not only the relation
to the proper body, see my chapter devoted to Merleau-Ponty in Le concept et le lieu,
Chapter 2, Part One, 46–80.

[35] This is my thesis in Le concept et le lieu, Chapter 2.

[36] For Leibniz, the analysis situs is already the ancestor of topology.

[37] It is a distinction that leads us to suggest the term “positivist” and not simply rationalist.
Indeed, Husserl is a rationalist but not a positivist in that he refuses all borrowing from the
specialized sciences and in that he wishes to preserve the purity of the phenomenological
field. He is followed in that position by phenomenologists such as Sartre and Marion. In
contrast, Merleau-Ponty explicitly rests on the sciences and borrows numerous concepts
(from psychology, physiology, physics, mathematics). He shows then genuine trust in those
sciences and in their recent “discoveries.” Nevertheless, he is not a “scientist" in so far as he
never claimed that philosophy had to dissolve itself in another science.

[38] Jean-Luc Marion, Le phénomène érotique (Paris: Livre de poche, 2003), 164.

[39] We think that reflection on a new category of relation or on other modes of relation is
one of the tasks of contemporary philosophy. See the recent attempt by Michel Bitbol, in a
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completely different philosophical universe, De l’intérieur du monde, pour une philosophie et
une science de la relation (Paris: Flammarion, 2011). The crossing category in Merleau-
Ponty, by clearly opposing the face-to-face world of perspective, is a sign of the beginning of
such an attempt.

[40] See above quotation: “…As primitive man in the desert is always able to take his
bearings immediately without having to cast his mind back and add up distances covered
and deviations made since setting off.” (PP, 334)

[41] François David Sebbah, L’épreuve de la limite (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
2001), 28. My translation.

[42] On this point, I refer to my “Daniel Arasse ou le pur plaisir de penser,” Figures de l’art,
no. 16 (2009), 45–69, in which I analyze the two possible meanings of the term “primary” in
Husserl’s work.

[43] Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (Transl. A. Lingis,
Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1995), 259.

[44] One has to come back to the “brute,” “wild” being (VI, 212), the “pre-objective,” the world
where the “vertical” being of before “our idealisation and our syntax.” (VI, 102)

[45] For all these expressions see S, 83–84.

[46] We must remember that Damisch is the pupil of Merleau-Ponty. According to Damisch,
Merleau-Ponty’s project of return to the origin has numerous weaknesses: can we really say
of a perception, which we strive to come back to through various conceptual means, that it is
truly “brute” and “wild”? Can perception, which will happen after the deconstruction of
perspective and which will have therefore required considerable effort of the mind, really be
deemed to precede reason? Let us not forget, either, that one of the highest claims of
perspective is to enable painting to express a truth never before attained, and therefore to
truly reflect the perception of human vision. This questioning on the relation of perspective
and perception is central in Damisch’s text on the origin of perspective and conditions
Damisch’s criticism of his master. On Damisch’s relation to Merleau-Ponty, see my “Louis
Marin philosophe?”

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