Table Of ContentMerleau- Ponty and
Nancy on Sense and Being
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Merleau-Ponty and Nancy on Sense and Being: At the Limits of Phenomenology, by
Marie- Eve Morin
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Merleau- Ponty
and Nancy on
Sense and Being
At the Limits of
Phenomenology
MARIE- EVE MORIN
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© Marie- Eve Morin, 2022
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Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction: The Speculative Realist Challenge and the Limits
of Phenomenology 1
1. The context: The speculative realist challenge 1
2. The limits of phenomenology: Being and sense 5
3. Merleau- Ponty and Nancy: Influence and resonances 13
4. Chapter breakdown 16
Part I – BODY
1 Merleau- Ponty, Descartes and the Unreflected Life of the
Body 27
1. Reading Descartes: The relation between reflection and
the unreflected 29
2. Sensing and self- sensing body of the Phenomenology of
Perception 34
3. The problem of the Phenomenology of Perception: Tacit
versus operative cogito 41
2 Nancy, Descartes, the Exposition of Bodies and the Extension
of the Soul 50
1. Nancy’s reading of Descartes: The unum quid against the
modern subject 50
2. Nancy’s bodies: Skin, sense, touch 60
3 Divergences: Unity versus Dislocation 70
1. Synthesis of the body schema or partes extra partes? 71
vi | merleau-ponty and nancy on sense and being
2. Synaesthesia or dislocation of the senses? Self- touching or
touching the outside? 75
Part II – THING
4 Things in the Phenomenology of Perception: The Paradox of an
In- Itself- for- Us 89
1. The order of the phenomena: Between being and
appearance 90
2. Answering the accusation of correlationism 94
3. The limit of the answer in the Phenomenology and the
move to ontology 98
5 Things after the Phenomenology: Merleau- Ponty’s Cautious
Anthropomorphism 104
1. Sartre’s things 105
2. Merleau- Ponty’s things 109
3. Anthropomorphism as defamiliarisation 113
6 Nancy’s Materialism and the Stone 119
1. The freedom of the stone and the creation of the world 119
2. The existence of the stone and its feeling hard 122
3. Materialism, materiality, matter 126
4. Thinking and things 134
Part III – BEING
7 Merleau- Ponty’s and Nancy’s Engagement with Heidegger 146
1. Is Merleau- Ponty’s late ontology Heideggerian? 147
2. Merleau- Ponty between Husserl’s Wesenschau and
Heidegger’s Wesen 150
3. Merleau- Ponty between the negativism of doubt and the
positivism of essences 154
4. Merleau- Ponty’s indirect ontology 157
5. Nancy and Heidegger’s withdrawal of Being 159
8 Two Ontologies of Sense 168
1. Merleau- Ponty, écart and the flesh 171
2. Narcissism and the reversibility of the chiasm 175
3. Écart as encroachment or separation 178
4. Conclusion: Two ontologies of sense for our time 183
Bibliography 189
Index 197
Acknowledgements
In winter 2013, at the request of my students, I taught a seminar on
Merleau- Ponty. Up to that point, I had not delved seriously into Merleau-
Ponty’s thought and it is fair to say that r eading – as well as t eaching –
Merleau- Ponty had a significant impact on my own thinking. My biggest
debt of gratitude then is to my students, not only those who made their
first foray into Merleau- Ponty’s work with me in 2013, but also those
who studied Merleau-P onty with me in winter 2019. My understand-
ing of Merleau- Ponty and my ability to explain his most complex ideas
is indebted to our conversations. I am also grateful to all those who par-
ticipated in our Nancy reading group in 2019 – M ackenzie, Júlia, Felix,
Markéta, Jay – for reviving my enthusiasm for Nancy.
Along the way, there were many conferences and informal conversa-
tions with colleagues and friends, for which I am also grateful. Some parts
of the following study have also been published in various forms. A much
shorter version of Part I appeared as ‘Corps propre or corpus corporum:
Unity and Dislocation in the Theories of Embodiment of Merleau- Ponty
and Jean- Luc Nancy’ in Chiasmi International 18 (2016): 353–70. An
earlier version of Chapter 8 appeared as ‘Flesh and Écart in Merleau-
Ponty and Nancy’, in Irving Goh (ed.), Nancy Among the Philosophers
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2022). Chapter 5 appeared in
an earlier version as ‘Merleau- Ponty’s Cautious Anthropomorphism’
in Chiasmi International 22 (2020): 167–81. Some of the discussion of
Nancy in Chapter 7 appeared in ‘“We Must Become What We Are”:
Nancy’s Ontology as Ethos and Praxis’, in Sanja Dejanovic (ed.), Nancy
and the Political (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). The
beginning of the Introduction is adapted from ‘Continental Realism –
Picking Up the Pieces’, with Vladimir Dukić, in Marie- Eve Morin (ed.),
viii | merleau-ponty and nancy on sense and being
Continental Realism and Its Discontents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2017).
My thanks also go to Carol MacDonald for her enthusiasm for the
project and her renewed encouragement over the years and to all the staff
at Edinburgh University Press for seeing this project through. Finally, the
research for this study was supported in part by a research grant from the
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Abbreviations
Works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
CPP Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952
MO ‘Man and Object’
N Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France
NC Notes de cours 1959–61
PP Phenomenology of Perception
PoP The Primacy of Perception
S Signs
TFL Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, 1952–1960
VI The Visible and the Invisible
WP The World of Perception
Works by Jean-Luc Nancy
A Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II
AR ‘Merleau- Ponty: An Attempt at a Response’
BP The Birth to Presence
BSP Being Singular Plural
C Corpus
C II Corpus II: Writings on Sexuality
CW The Creation of the World or Globalization
D Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity I
EF The Experience of Freedom
ES Ego Sum
FT A Finite Thinking
x | merleau-ponty and nancy on sense and being
GT The Gravity of Thought
MM Marquage manquant (et autres dires de la peau)
NMT Noli me tangere
SW The Sense of the World
Other works
AF Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude
BA Tim Ingold, Being Alive
BN Jean- Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
BT Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
EC Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Être et chair 1. Du corps au désir
LEEE Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Du lien des êtres aux éléments de l’être
MT Jean- Paul Sartre, ‘Man and Things’
OT Jacques Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy
SC Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Le scénario cartésien
SEI Jeffrey Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman
VOI Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, Vers une ontologie indirecte
