Merleau-Ponty Working Notes Visible and Invisible

In November 1959,

Merlaponti was working on what would

become the unfinished final book, The

Visible and the Invisible.

Only 100 years after the birth of Henri

Bergong and less than 2 years before

[music] his own death. One note reads,

"Meaning is invisible, but the invisible

is not the contradictory of the visible.

The visible itself has an invisible

inner framework membrane

and the invisible

is the secret counterpart of the visible

appears only within it. It is present

unpresentable.

It's presented to me as such within the

world. One cannot see it there. And

every effort to see it there makes it

disappear. But it is in the line of the

visible. It is its virtual focus. It is

inscribed within it in filigree.

The comparisons between the invisible

and the visible, the domain, [music] the

direction of thought are not comparisons

as in Haidiger. They mean that the

visible is pregnant with the invisible.

That to comprehend fully the visible

relations house, one must go into the

relations of the visible with [music]

the invisible.

The others visible is my invisible.

My visible is the other's invisible.

This formula that of Sartra is not to be

retained. We have to say being is this

strange encroachment

by reason of which my visible although

it is not superposable on that of the

other nevertheless opens upon it that

both open upon the same sensible world.

And it is the same encroachment, the

same junction at a distance that makes

the messages from my organs, the

moninocular images resemble reassemble

themselves into one soul vertical

existence and one soul world.

In another note from November, he

writes,

"The senses dimensionality being each

sense is a world that is absolutely

incommunicable for other senses and yet

constituting a something which through

its structure is from the first open

upon the world of the other senses and

with them forms one soul being

sensorality.

For example, a color yellow, it

surpasses itself of itself. As soon as

it becomes the color of the

illumination, the dominant color of the

field, it ceases to be such or such a

color. It has therefore of itself an

onlogical function. It becomes apt to

represent all things.

With one's soul movement, it imposes

itself as particular and ceases to be

visible as particular.

The world is this whole where each part

when one takes it for itself suddenly

opens unlimited dimensions becomes a

total part.

Now this particularity of the color of

the yellow and this universality are not

contradictions are together sensorality

itself. It is by the same virtue that

the color the yellow at the same time

gives itself as a certain being and as a

dimension the expression of every

possible being. What is proper to the

sensible as to language is to be

representative of the whole, not by

signification relation or by the

imminence of the parts in one another

and in the whole, but because each part

is torn up from the whole, comes with

its roots, encroaches upon the whole,

transgresses the frontiers of the

others. It is thus that the parts

overlap, transparency,

that the present does not stop at the

limits of the visible

behind my back.

Perception opens the world to me as the

surgeon opens a body catching sight

through the window he has conrived of

the organs in full functioning

taken in their activity seen sideways.

It is thus that the sensible initiates

me to the world as language to the

other. by encroachment. Uberen

exceeds transcends.

Perception is not first a perception of

things but a perception of elements,

water, air, of rays, of the world, of

things which are dimensions, which are

worlds. I slip on these elements and

here I am in the world. I slip from the

subjective to being the alleged

contradiction between the yellow as

something and the yellow as the [music]

title of a world. This is not a

contradiction for it is precisely within

its particularity as yellow and through

it that the yellow becomes a universe or

an element. that a color can become a

level, a fact becomes a category exactly

as in music. Describe a note as

particular, i.e. in the field of another

tone, and the same note has become that

within whose key a music is written, the

veritable movement toward the universal.

The universal [music]

is not above, it is beneath. As in

cladell, it is not before but behind us.

Atonal music equals the equivalent of

the philosophy of being in indivision.

like paintings without identifiable

things without the skin of things but

giving their flesh. The transponyabakite

transposability

is a particular case of a more general

transposition of which [music] atonal

music is the thematization.

All this implies the being in

indivision.

This universality of the sensible or

presentation of what is not is or

presentable i.e. the original

presentation of what is not originally

presentable.

The sensible hollowed out in the being

without restriction. That being which is

between my perspective and that of the

other. My past and my present.

What is proper to the perceived to be

already there to not be through the act

of perception to be the reason for this

act and not the reverse. Sensorality is

transcendence or a mirror of

transcendence.

Depth

depth and back and behind

it is preeminently the dimension of the

hidden. Every dimension is of the

hidden.

There must be depth since there is a

point whence I see. Since the world

[music] surrounds me, depth is the means

the things have to remain distinct, to

remain things while not being what I

look at at present. It is preeminently

the dimension of the simultaneous.

Without it, there would not be a world

or being. There would only be a mobile

zone of distinctness which could not be

brought here without quitting all the

rest and a synthesis of these views.

Whereas by virtue of depth they coexist

in degrees of proximity. They slip into

one another and integrate themselves. It

is hence because of depth that the thing

has a flesh that is opposed to my

inspection obstacles a resistance which

is precisely their reality their

openness their totem simol

the look does not overcome depth it goes

around it depth is

stiffen originally given or originally

founded

Depth is originally founded in what I

see in clear vision as retention is in

the present without intentionality.

CF Mezer saying that it arises at the

moment when it was going to be

impossible to have a direct vision of

two points at the same time. Then the

two images that are out of phase are not

superposable.

They suddenly take as profiles of the

same thing in depth.

This is not an act or an intentionality

which would go to an in itself and would

give only juxtaposed in itself.

It is in general and by virtue of a

field property that this identification

of two incompossible [music] views is

made and because depth is open to me

because I have this dimension so as to

move my look in it this openness.

And in another note from the same time,

philosophy has never spoken, I do not

say of passivity. We are not effects but

I would say of the passivity of our

activity as Valerie spoke of a body of

the spirit.

New as our initiatives may be they come

to birth at the heart of being. They are

connected onto the time that streams

forth in us supported on the pivots or

hinges of our life. Their soul's sense

is a direction. The soul always thinks

this is in it a property of its state.

It cannot not think because a [music]

field has been opened in which something

or the absence of something is always

inscribed.

This is not an activity of the soul, not

a production of thoughts in the plural.

And I am not even the author of that

hollow that forms within me by the

passage from the present to the

retention. It is not I who makes myself

think any more than it is I who makes my

heartbeat.

From there leaves the philosophy of

arinance

experience and pass to the philosophy of

orchift original founding or institution

uh direction of thought. This is not a

metaphor. There is no metaphor between

the visible and the invisible.

The invisible either my thought for

myself or the sensible given to the

other for me. Metaphor is too much or

too little. Too much if the invisible

[music] is really invisible. Too little

if it lends itself to transposition.

There is no metaphor. One because

thought involves a quasi locality that

has to be described. Locality not by

inference in the spacio temporal point

but locality by elastic tie. One cannot

say that a mind is here. But one can say

that it is not there. This negation

little by little extends to all parts of

the world and of the living body. And

yet there is a locality by investment.

And when all that is said, there is the

theater of apparation of the other. And

there is no metaphor too because the

originating locality even in what

concerns the things or the direction of

the movement of things is not

identifiable in objective space either.

Not a relation in objective space. A

direction is not in space. It is in

filigree across it. It is therefore

transposable to thought.

The mind is neither here nor here nor

here. And yet it is attached, bounded.

It is not without bounds. Negation of

negation and position. One does not have

to choose between them. The mind is in

no objective sight, and yet it is

invested in a sight which it rejoins by

its environs which it circumvents as my

locality for myself is the point that

all the vanishing lines of my landscapes

designates to me and which is itself

invisible.

And finally, I'll read from December

1959,

a note on linen.

In denying the conception of perception,

reproduction on my body in itself, of

the exterior thing in itself, I open up

access to a brute being [music]

which I would not be in the subject and

object relation, and still less in the

relation of effect with cause.

In being in the world, relation will

take the place held in lienids by the

relation of reciprocal expression of the

perspectives [music] taken on the world

and hence God as the unique author of

these diverse perspectives which emanate

from him as thoughts. The being thus

discovered is to be sure not the god of

linenets. The monadology thus disclosed

is not the system of monads substances

but certain lienidsian descriptions that

each of the views of the world is a

world apart and that nevertheless what

is particular to one would be public to

all. And the monads would be [music] in

relation of expression between

themselves and with the world that they

differ from one another and from it as

perspectives are to be maintained

entirely to be taken up again in the

brute being to be separated from the

substantialist and onto theological

elaboration lienids [music] imposes upon

them. The expression of the universe in

us is certainly not the harmony between

our monad and the others. The presence

of the ideas of all things in it. But it

is what we see in perception to be taken

as such instead of explaining it. The

soul has no windows. That means being in

the world.

The pre-established harmony like

occasionalism

always maintains in itself and simply

connects it with what we experience

through a relation from substance to

substance founded in God instead of

making it the cause of our thoughts. But

it is precisely a question of rejecting

entirely the idea of the in itself.

It is the recovery of the theme of

perception that transforms the

significance of the lienzian idea of

expression.

Vertical world and vertical history.