Al Saji the Temporality of Life Merleau-Ponty

The Temporality of Life

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The Southern Journal of Philosophy (2007) Vol. XLV

Abstract

Borrowing conceptual tools from Bergson, this essay asks after theshift in the temporality of life from Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie dela perception to his later works. Although the Phénoménologie conceiveslife in terms of the field of presence of bodily action, later texts point toa life of invisible and immemorial dimensionality. By reconsideringBergson, but also thereby revising his reading of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty develops a nonserial theory of time in the later works, one thatacknowledges the verticality and irreducibility of the past. Life in theflesh relies on unconsciousness or forgetting, on an invisibility thatstructures its passage.

What concepts of life inform Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy? InPhénoménologie de la perception, the study of the lived body (lecorps propre or vécu) implies a particular understanding of life.1

Life is an intentional, yet operative, activity that brings thebody into contact with objects in the world. In Le visible etl’invisible, the concept of the lived body gives way to that of theflesh (la chair), which brings with it a different sense of life.2

Life, in the flesh, is not limited to an individual body but radiatesin several directions at once, encompassing the world andothers. This life-force is both visible and invisible; perceptionand unconsciousness, activity and passivity, present and pastintertwine therein. But whatever its sense, the concept of life

The Temporality of Life: Merleau-Ponty,Bergson, and the Immemorial Past

Alia Al-SajiMcGill University

Alia Al-Saji (PhD Emory University, 2002) is Assistant Professorof Philosophy at McGill University. Her recent articles addressMerleau-Ponty’s ethics (in Interrogating Ethics, Duquesne UniversityPress, 2006) and Bergson’s influence on Sartre (in Über Sartre,Turia+Kant, 2005). She has also written on memory in Bergson andDeleuze and on sensation in each of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Inaddition to several anthologies, her articles have appeared in ChiasmiInternational, Continental Philosophy Review, and Philosophy Today.Her current work interrogates memory, vision, and ethics throughBergson and Merleau-Ponty.

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remains behind the scenes in these texts. Whether becauseMerleau-Ponty is unable to find in the term “life” the precisionhe desires,3 or because life itself is ambiguous, comprisingseveral tendencies that cannot be integrated under oneoverarching concept, any philosophy of life drawn fromMerleau-Ponty appears heterogeneous, even fragmentary. Theconcept of life has several currents in his work that remainunthematized. I will attempt to make these currents visible byfocusing on the ways in which life deploys time in Merleau-Ponty’s texts. Time offers a unique and productive lens throughwhich to study the life of the lived body and flesh.4 By inquiringinto the temporality of life, my aim is to discover connectionsand discontinuities among Merleau-Ponty’s texts that are notvisible otherwise.

Light can be shed on the relation between temporality andlife by borrowing some conceptual tools from Henri Bergson.Certain Bergsonian concepts will help frame my reading ofMerleau-Ponty: namely, “attention to life [attention à la vie]”and the “past in general [le passé en général]” from Matière etmémoire,5 and the “vital impetus [élan vital]” of L’évolutioncréatrice.6 These concepts define different aspects of life forBergson, in some ways continuous and in others opposed. ThoughI will be drawing upon resonances between Merleau-Ponty’stexts and Bergson’s, these will rarely be direct references. Withthe exception of passages addressing Bergsonian intuition andthe past in Le visible et l’invisible or in footnotes to Phénomé-nologie de la perception, such references are limited.7 Rather, Iwill elaborate upon tendencies hinted at, but not explicitly dealtwith, in Merleau-Ponty’s writings—a certain “unthought” that isrevealed when Merleau-Ponty is read in conjunction withBergson.8

My contention is that the modulation and deployment oftime by the lived body or flesh—and thus the temporal sense oflife and the way that past, present, and future relate—shiftfrom Phénoménologie de la perception to Le visible et l’invisible.Though the earlier text presents bodily life mainly in terms ofaction and a perceptual field of presence, the later text goesbeyond this to a life of invisible dimensionalities andimmemorial depth. Hence, while the Phénoménologie remainsfor the most part in the grips of a philosophy of consciousnessand presence, Le visible et l’invisible opens the way to anoriginal sense of the past and to the irreducible role ofunconsciousness and forgetting.9 In particular, Phénoménologiede la perception seems to generally agree with Bergson’sconcept of “attention to life,” whereas Le visible et l’invisible andlater course notes and essays draw on the Bergsonian concept ofan immemorial past. In parallel with this deepening Bergsonianinfluence, I will point to Merleau-Ponty’s revised approach toEdmund Husserl in his later works. There, Merleau-Ponty’s

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increasingly critical reading of On the Phenomenology of theConsciousness of Internal Time is accompanied by an intensifiedappreciation for later Husserlian texts, in particular “TheOrigin of Geometry.”10 I argue that while Merleau-Ponty’s earlyreading of Bergson is mediated by Husserl’s lectures on time-consciousness, his later revised reading of Husserl is part of adifferent theory of time that takes seriously, and finds its echoin, Bergson.11 This Bergsonian–Husserlian interplay can bewitnessed in the weight accorded to forgetting and the past andthe disruption of serial time in the later works. Hence, aguiding question of my essay: Can Merleau-Ponty’s concept oflife in its various incarnations—as acting body or flesh—accommodate and account for an immemorial dimension ofpastness and thus a structural absence or alterity, irreducible topresence?

1. The Early Merleau-Ponty and Bodily Life as Action

My aim is to elucidate the notion of life in Phénoménologie de laperception by interrogating the temporality of the lived body.The body represents a current of intentional activity, but it isalso subtended by what Merleau-Ponty calls prepersonal or“natural” life—currents of biological, habitual, or sensory exis-tence (which I study elsewhere).12 For the purposes of the com-parison with the later Merleau-Ponty, I will focus on thedominant current of life in the Phénoménologie: the body inaction.

In action, “my body appears to me as an attitude directedtowards a certain existing or possible task” (PhP 100/116). Theperceived world is primarily, though not exclusively, given bythe practical and utilitarian attitude we adopt toward it. It is aworld “organize[d] … in accordance with the projects of thepresent moment” (PhP 112/130). The tasks toward which thebody is oriented are not pure possibilities; they are inscribedwithin a field delimited by the body’s abilities—by whatMerleau-Ponty, following Husserl, calls its “I can.” AlthoughMerleau-Ponty draws a distinction between actual, presentaction and virtual, possible or future action, the second isextrapolated from the first. To be precise, virtual action is anextension not simply of the body’s current occupations, but of itspresent capacities and sensations (built up through habit).Virtual action is felt in the body “by the presence of a particulartension” (PhP 109/126), through kinaestheses that prefigurefuture movements. By means of kinaestheses “[t]he normalperson reckons with the possible, which thus, without shiftingfrom its position as a possibility acquires a sort of actuality”(PhP 109/127). Hence, the field of possible action—though notreducible to the actions of the body at the moment—is opened

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up according to the capacities and projects of the presentmoment and draws its efficacy from them (PhP 111–12/129).Bodily action is centered upon the present and circumscribed bythe possibilities of the now, with the result that what Merleau-Ponty calls “virtual action” takes the form of deferred presence.The futurity of the body has neither the sense of the unpre-dictable nor the merely imagined.13 It is rather projected from,and mirrors, the present.

The vitality of the body is thus understood in terms of whatit does or is capable of doing. The body’s life is its efficacy, whichfinds its reflection in the field of actions available to the body.That bodily life in the Phénoménologie is implicitly identifiedwith action has been argued by other commentators. AsDorothea Olkowski shows, the lived body is not naïve contactwith the world but operates according to a hermeneuticalprinciple of action or utility; although this principle structuresthe phenomenal field in the Phénoménologie, its role remainsunacknowledged by the early Merleau-Ponty.14 Significantly, asI. M. Young has pointed out, bodily efficacy is measured andillustrated in the Phénoménologie by actions that are generallygoal-oriented.15 “[T]o move one’s body is to aim at things throughit,” says Merleau-Ponty (PhP 139/161). In other words, actiontends to be identified with the object at which it aims (PhP110–11/128). Action is based on an objectivating intentionality—through which objects “present themselves to the subject aspoles of action … call[ing] for a certain mode of resolution, acertain kind of work” (PhP 106/123). It is this “intentional arc”that organizes, animates, and “endows experience with itsdegree of vitality and fruitfulness” (PhP 157/184)—so that thelife of the body is woven from things with which it is engaged inthe world. Within this “dialogue” of subject and object, bodilyunity mirrors the unity of the object-pole or single task to beperformed (PhP 132/154). Bodily unity is thus accomplished inthe teleology of action (PhP 101/117), that is, “when [the body]escapes from dispersion, pulls itself together and tends by allmeans in its power towards one single goal of its activity … onesingle intention” (PhP 232/269). The unity of the sensesdiscussed by Merleau-Ponty in the “Sentir” chapter serves as anillustration. Although the senses appear at first to be aheterogeneity, communicating synaesthetically, the presence ofan object-pole in perception puts a term to this instability andimposes upon them an objective and external unity. The sensesthen appear to be united in translating aspects of the samething; “[they] intercommunicate by opening onto the structureof the thing” (PhP 229/265). Their synthesis is not lateral andfree-floating, but frontal and intentionally directed.

In “La philosophie de l’existence,” a talk from 1959 publishedin Parcours deux, Merleau-Ponty notes that the definition of thebody as that by which we act is already to be found in Bergson

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and constitutes a space in which their philosophies meet.According to Merleau-Ponty, this view of the body as actionemphasizes the dimension of the present, because Bergson“defined the present as that upon which we act, and weevidently act through our body.”16 Though I will have occasion toquestion this reading of Bergson, it is useful to first elaboratethe connection that Merleau-Ponty is trying to make. Indeed,the first chapter of Matière et mémoire presents the body as asensori-motor schema, a center of action and affection. Thisbody exists in the present and its memory is that of repetitionand habit. The body is understood along organic and functionallines. It is an organism whose complexity leads to indetermina-tion and hence hesitation and the ability to choose. The body’sperceptions are the reflection onto things of the body’s possibleactions on them, its possible uses of them. Conscious perceptionis discernment in view of utility and action; it is the ability todetach a figure that interests the body from the background ofindifferent images. The richness of this perception comes fromthe intensity of one’s “attention to life” (MM 7). “Attention à lavie” thus designates a life that is defined by practicality andinterest in the present.

Phénoménologie de la perception resonates with this view ofbodily life centered on the present. The body, from the point ofview of action, is here and now.

Just as it is necessarily “here,” the body necessarily exists “now”; itcan never become “past,” and if we cannot retain in health theliving memory of sickness, or, in adult life that of our body as achild, these “gaps in memory” merely express the temporalstructure of our body. (PhP 140/163)

Though this could be taken to mean that the body lives aninstantaneous existence of discontinuous acts, Merleau-Pontydoes not wish to draw this implication. He points simply to theprivilege of the present in the way in which the body lives time.Notably, the body “secretes time … project[ing] round thepresent a double horizon of past and future” (PhP 239–40/277).This projection takes place “on the basis of the implicationscontained in the present” (PhP 181/211) and spreads out fromthe present in the form of “a network of intentionalities” (PhP417/477). Bodily temporality originates, and takes its energy,from the present—being itself constituted as a “field ofpresence”17 (PhP 416/475–76). This rectilinear and formal viewof time owes much to Husserl’s lectures On the Phenomenologyof the Consciousness of Internal Time.18 But it also presents uswith problems that arise once past and future are conceived interms of the present—difficulties that cause Merleau-Ponty torevise this picture of time in the working notes to Le visible etl’invisible (as we shall see). Three problems can be noted at this

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juncture: (1) The past, however remote, differs from theimmediate past only by its place in the temporal order. Bothremote and immediate past are retrievable and representable inprinciple due to the positions they occupy as former presents(PhP 416/475–76). There is no sense of pastness as an originaldimension of being that is not derived from the field ofpresence. (2) There is no way to explain the discontinuousnature of forgetting (VI 194/248). Forgetting may be understoodas an ordered fading-away that occurs on the horizon beyond acertain arbitrarily designated point in the temporal order. Orforgetting may be conceived as an intentional act, performed inbad faith, by which a memory continues to be possessed but isheld at a distance.19 But, in both cases, the latency and uncon-sciousness of forgetting are elided. Forgetting is sidestepped asa phenomenon, but also as a structural dimension of time itself.(3) As a corollary, the status of the present is not questioned. Asthe naïve presence to self and world, the present is left withoutarticulation or depth. What at once grounds the present andmakes it pass remains unthought.

This view of time is accompanied in Phénoménologie de laperception by a largely critical reading of Bergsonian durée.Since both Renaud Barbaras and Leonard Lawlor have shownthis to be a misreading of Bergson, I will limit my discussion towhat this reveals of the privilege of the present and of theHusserlian framework that mediates Merleau-Ponty’s readingof Bergson in the Phénoménologie.20 Notably, Merleau-Pontytries to fit Bergsonian duration into a flat and linear Husserlianpicture of time (specifically that of the Time-consciousnessLectures)—thus suppressing the dimension of original pastnessthat can be found in Matière et mémoire. Viewed serially,duration becomes a haphazard accumulation of “preservedpresents” (PhP 415n/475n). The critique is twofold: Bergson failsto account for the ordered passage, and retention, of thepresent. And he misses the genuine consciousness of absence,the negativity, that constitutes the past, since “preservedperceptions” continue to coexist with the present (PhP 413/473).In Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Bergson, all of duration is“squeezed into a present” with no possibility of transcendence orpassage (PhP 79n/93–94n). However, since Bergsonian durationis not modeled on retention, the attempt to understand it fromwithin this Husserlian schema results in a misreading. Merleau-Ponty may note, with disapproval, the fusion and fluidity ofconsciousness that he takes to be characteristic of duration(PhP 276n/319n). But this picture of fusion is not surprising,given that the organizing dimension of “past in general,” andthe difference in kind that it installs, are not acknowledged inMerleau-Ponty’s reading of duration.

Even when Merleau-Ponty presents a sympathetic account ofBergson, a similar misreading often takes place. In “La philoso-

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phie de l’existence,” Merleau-Ponty makes the following sur-prising claim: “[T]he analysis that Bergson carried out inMatière et mémoire, for example, shows that if we consider time,we must take into account, within time in particular, thedimension of the present.”21 But to read Matière et mémoire asprivileging the present is to limit oneself to the first chapter ofthe book. Though it is true that duration is contracted into thepresent in the context of action—the past being only selectivelyallowed in and actualized to mold to present interests—this isnot all there is to duration for Bergson. Here, Merleau-Pontyagain elides the dimension of “past in general” or pure memoryso central to Matière et mémoire. Without memory, the body canonly be understood as a zero-point in space (a center of actionand affection) (MM 11–12), while perception remainsinstantaneous and fleeting, the superficial reflection of thebody’s possible actions on objects around it (what Bergson calls“pure perception”) (MM 31, 33–35). But these presentations ofbody and perception are only preliminary; Bergson revises bothand spends much of Matière et mémoire arguing why memorymust in fact already inform any concrete theory of perception.First, because the body has a more complex relation with thepast. Not only does habit form a kind of bodily memory, buteach body expresses a particular rhythm of duration or holdon time (MM 249–50). Bodies are not external envelopsindifferent to duration, and duration is not exclusive or internalto consciousness. Second, pure perception is only a hypotheticalconstruct (MM 31). Not only does concrete perception take timeand thus already contract the immediate past, but memories,more proximate and more remote, are actualized in everyperception, informing and completing what is perceived (MM68).

This reading of Bergson tells us more about Merleau-Ponty’sown early view of time than it does Bergson’s.22 It shows aconceptualization of bodily life centered on the present, ofefficacy limited to action, wherein the force of the past remainsa blindspot. For Bergson, however, it is this elided dimension oforiginary pastness—irreducible to any representational memory-image or present perception because different in kind fromthem—that makes possible the flow of time and the passage ofthe present. In what follows, I will explore productive openingsto such a dimension in Merleau-Ponty’s later course notes andtexts.23

2. The Later Merleau-Ponty and the Life of the Flesh

“In the immemorial depth of the visible, something moved,caught fire, and engulfed his body; everything he paints is inanswer to this incitement.”24 Thus Merleau-Ponty inscribes the

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immemorial past as invisibility in the structure of the flesh. Inthis section, my aim is to discover the sense of life at work inMerleau-Ponty’s later texts by again broaching the question oftemporality, in this case that of the flesh.25 The flesh is adifficult but central concept of Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy—one for which no adequate definition is supplied. In thiscontext, we find that the bodily field of presence has broken up,revealing the ground upon which it is instituted—an immemorialor invisible abyss. Here, the invisible is alternatively referred toby Merleau-Ponty as the “depth” or “lining [doublure]” of thevisible (EM 187/85). These descriptions point to an immemorialthat is neither lost presence, nor distant past; as both groundand abyss, the immemorial is a past that accompanies andmakes possible the present. This insinuation of the past intothe present, we shall see, lies at the heart of what Merleau-Ponty means by describing the flesh as visible and invisible.Central to Merleau-Ponty’s project is a reconsideration of bothBergson and Husserl on time. In conjunction with a critical re-reading of Husserlian time-consciousness, Merleau-Ponty drawson both Bergson’s concept of the “past in general” and Husserl’slater notion of institution in order to think the dimension(s) ofinvisibility that open up the life of the flesh.

The “immemorial” is presented in Le visible et l’invisible asoriginary nonpresence; it is, to echo Husserl, Nichturpräsentier-bar (VI 239/292). Merleau-Ponty notes that “we find in ourexperience a movement toward what could not in any event bepresent to us in the original and whose irremediable absencewould thus count among our originating experiences” (VI 159/211). But this “originating breaks up” (VI 124/165), so that thesense of the immemorial is not “an original integrity,… a secretlost and to be rediscovered” (VI 122/162). It is neither anempirical past, once present and now forgotten, nor a layer ofpositivity, underlying experience but hidden from view (VI 158/209–10). The immemorial is, Merleau-Ponty says, an “impossiblepast”—one that has never been present and that cannot bemade present in a representation or act of recollection (VI 123/164). It registers within experience as an original forgetting orblindspot that does not derive from, and cannot be overcome in,direct perception (VI 248/301). Merleau-Ponty echoes Bergsonwhen he insists that only a special kind of vision or memorycan allow us to catch a glimpse of this dimension—“not to hold[it] as with forceps, or to immobilize [it] as under the objectiveof a microscope, but to let [it] be and to witness [its] continuedbeing” (VI 101/138).26 This memory rejoins the past through itsconstitutive distance, without seeking to nullify that distance(VI 124/166).

In Merleau-Ponty’s invocation of an “immemorial depth ofthe visible,” we can hear the echo of Matière et mémoire’s “pastin general.” Although Merleau-Ponty still sometimes regards

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Bergsonism as a philosophy that locates “the secret of Being …in an integrity that is behind us” (VI 124/165), in a formerpresent which has been preserved (VI 122/163), I also find apositive re-reading of the Bergsonian past in Le visible etl’invisible. In this reading, the pure past is reinscribed as aninvisible.

[I]f in being inscribed within me each present loses its flesh, if thepure memory into which it is changed is an invisible, then there isindeed a past, but no coinciding with it—I am separated from it bythe whole thickness of my present. (VI 122/163)

This reevaluation of Bergson is accompanied in Merleau-Ponty’slater works by a re-reading of Husserl on time. Merleau-Ponty’sfocus shifts from the lectures on time-consciousness—towardwhich he becomes increasingly critical—to later Husserliantexts, in particular “The Origin of Geometry.” Rather thanreading Bergson through Husserlian time-consciousness,Merleau-Ponty’s interest in Husserl now seems to have aBergsonian inflection.27 Without overstating this influence, amutual re-reading of Bergson and Husserl appears to take placein the later works—motivating, in my view, Merleau-Ponty’srethinking of the past and of life.28

2.1 Re-reading Husserl

The immemorial is described by Merleau-Ponty as a “verticalpast,” which disrupts the serial or linear order of time (VI 244/297). He says: “The ‘wild’ or ‘brute’ being is introduced—theserial time, that of ‘acts’ and decisions, is overcome” (W.N.January 1959; VI 168/222). This corresponds in Le visible etl’invisible to a reversal of the Phénoménologie ’s dominantpicture of time, seen in the acting body and its “field ofpresence.” This reversal is made apparent in Merleau-Ponty’smultiple attempts in the working notes to revise Husserl’stheory of time-consciousness. Indeed, as Renaud Barbaras andMauro Carbone have shown, this criticism of Husserl is part ofMerleau-Ponty’s critical rethinking of the Phénoménologie’sreliance on a philosophy of consciousness and presence.29

Significantly for Merleau-Ponty, “Husserl’s error is to havedescribed the [retentional] interlocking starting from aPräsensfeld considered without thickness, as immanentconsciousness” (W.N. February 1959; VI 173/227). In Husserl’stheory, the past exists only as consciousness of the past; itsbeing is derived from the act of consciousness that constitutes it(IP 33). Time is reduced to a succession of punctual acts—intentionally tied back to a primordial-impressional conscious-ness, what Husserl calls the “source-point” of time-consciousness.Though Merleau-Ponty attempts to re-read the lectures on time-

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consciousness beyond this picture of life as punctuality (VI 195/248), it remains a core problem of Husserl’s account (VI 244/297). For Husserl, primordial-impressional consciousnessgrounds, gives life and meaning to, the present (and hence tothe past and future as modified and dependent dimensions). Itis the absolute self-possession and self-presence of this con-sciousness that is supposed to guarantee the evidentiary andvital givenness of perceptual presence.30 But this self-coincidencenot only excludes any original dimension of unconsciousness orforgetfulness (VI 194/248), it also dictates the punctuality ofprimordial-impressional consciousness and makes its passageinexplicable. Hence, while the present becomes an abstractidealization, an absolutely positive instant with no influence “ofZeitmaterie on Zeitform” (VI 184/238), the past remains amystery to such a philosophy of time founded on consciousness(IP 123).

In place of the rectilinear flow of lived experiences, connectedin succession by retentions and protentions, the immemorialinstitutes a different kind of temporality of life—what Merleau-Ponty calls a “time before time” (W.N. April 1960; VI 243/296).In his reading of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty “leave[s] thephilosophy of Erlebnisse and pass[es] to the philosophy of ourUrstiftung” (VI 221/275). The verticality of time was already acentral theme of Merleau-Ponty’s course on “The Origin ofGeometry,” Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (1959–60);and it can be discerned even earlier in the two courses from1954–55, L’Institution, La Passivité. Thus, it is through Husserl’s“unthought” on institution (HLP 14–15), as it is throughBergson, that Merleau-Ponty comes to rethink time.31 Opposinginstitution and constitution, Merleau-Ponty notes that “time isthe very model of institution.”32 In this sense, time cannot bereduced to constituting consciousness, nor can it simply bedivided along lines of activity and passivity (IP 37). Tounderstand time as institution is to recognize the verticality ofthe past—its originality and alterity, but also its inaccessibilityas it was to present consciousness. This is the surplus of thepast to representation (VI 253/306). In this sense, perception is“borne by the past as massive Being” without exhausting it (VI244/297).

Merleau-Ponty emphasizes in his reading of Husserl thatthis “past in general” is not a positivity—the in-itself conserva-tion of the past—but a “hollow” or “circumscribed negativity”(HLP 20). This “negativity” is understood not as lack butprecisely as surplus, as “more than Being” (HLP 49; IP 168). Itis an absence that Merleau-Ponty describes as “fecund” (VI 263/316), that counts in the world (VI 228/281). The past hencecontinues to have an effect and to leave a trace, but not throughthe efficacy of action; its “efficacy” or generativity is, as we shallsee, that of an unconscious. By instituting itself as past, each

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event opens a dimension.33 It makes possible a different kind offuture—in which it is not just a particular action that becomespossible, but a new style or field of activity is opened up (IP 38,124). The instituted past sets up a level, a different norm ofmeaning, according to which we experience or see differently (IP41).34 Institution means opening a register, says Merleau-Pontyechoing Bergson’s L’évolution créatrice (EC 16/16; IP 40).Curiously, although Merleau-Ponty finds the notion of institutionin Husserl, his elaboration brings several Bergsonian conceptsto bear. (I will explore the role of the “past in general” below,but the image of time as an “open register [registre ouvert]” andBergson’s famous “retrograde movement of the true” should alsobe noted.)

At the same time, the institution of the past means theineluctuable passage of the present: “Husserl has used the fineword Stiftung—foundation or establishment—to designate …the unlimited fecundity of each present which, precisely becauseit is singular and passes, can never stop having been and thusbeing universally” (Signs 59/73–74). This passage, paradoxically,both forgets and conserves; it is a “noble form of memory”(Signs 59/74). It is neither conservation as the accumulation ofin-itself presents; nor is it forgetting as an indifferent succes-sion of mutually exterior moments, one replacing the otherwithout trace. Rather, what Husserl calls “sedimentation” andMerleau-Ponty terms “simultaneity” in depth, are attempts toarticulate this difficult temporal structure of life. It is unclear,however, that Husserl fully thought through the implications ofinstitution; what is missing is a theorization of forgetting thatacknowledges the unconscious and irrecuperable nature of thepast. Though Merleau-Ponty finds forgetting interspersed inHusserl’s texts (e.g., not only in “The Origin of Geometry” butalso in Ideas II), it is left to Husserl’s readers to recognize bothits irreducibility and fecundity; forgetfulness remains forHusserl a lack that could ideally be filled.35 Here the Bergsonianunconscious, as “past in general,” comes to inflect Merleau-Ponty’s reading of time. To see this, I will turn to Merleau-Ponty’s conception of “time before time,” prior to explicitlyinvestigating its resonances with Bergson.

2.2 Time as Chiasm

There are several ways of understanding the anteriorityinvolved in Merleau-Ponty’s reference to a “time before time.”“Time before time” preexists the linear time of presence, wherepast and future are derived from the present moment. Becausethis time is not based on presence, its past is not formed afterhaving been present; rather it comes into existence as alwaysalready past, as preexisting the present in general. “Time beforetime” is therefore a temporality that inscribes a structure of

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preexistence or asymmetry; it is organized around a past thathas never been present. But there is another sense to thisanteriority, for the temporality, which Merleau-Ponty is tryingto highlight, undergirds and makes possible the passage of thepresent that characterizes linear time. “Time before time” hencecoexists with phenomenal time as flow, just as depth coexistswith and provides the structural condition for things to bethings, or as a background coexists with the figure that it putsin relief. In this sense, “time before time” inscribes a structureof coexistence, whereby the past that has never been presentforms the ground for the existence and passage of the present.But these two senses of anteriority, temporal and structural,must be thought together.

According to Merleau-Ponty, “time before time” exists “bypiling up, by proliferation, by encroachment, by promiscuity” (VI115/155). It is a time structured by virtual envelopment orcoexistence rather than succession. In the working notes to Levisible et l’invisible, Merleau-Ponty refers to this as the“simultaneity” of past with present (VI 243/297; also IP 124). Henotes that the present or “the visible landscape under my eyesis not exterior to, and bound synthetically to … other momentsof time and the past, but has them really behind itself insimultaneity, inside itself and not it and they side by side ‘in’time” (VI 267/321). This coexistence is not, however, coincidence.There is a constitutive distance, or difference, that holds pastand present together, but prevents the past from simplybecoming present.36 “What is given,” says Merleau-Ponty, is not“the past itself such as it was in its own time, but rather … thepast such as it was one day plus an inexplicable alteration, astrange distance” (VI 124/166). This distance is one of differencein kind for Bergson, one of chiasm for Merleau-Ponty. AlthoughMerleau-Ponty first hesitates to call this a difference in kind—or to use the philosophical categories of the homogeneous andheterogeneous (IP 194–95)—by the time of Le visible etl’invisible he recognizes that the true difference in kind is thatof chiasm.37 Crucially, the chiasm institutes an irreversibility.The relation of past and present is asymmetrical, since one ofthe terms appears to forever preexist the other. But it is also areversibility (VI 148/194), since there is preexistence of the pastin general only in connection with the present.38 Moreover, thepresent continues to pass, to incorporate itself into and trans-form the past, as the past continues to coexist with and insinuateitself into the present. “Simultaneity” is, then, one with theirreversible passage that defines time (VI 243/297).

For Merleau-Ponty, the apparent positivity of the presentthus incorporates and relies on a negativity of the past—just asthe visible spectacle includes an invisibility in principle. It isuseful to explore this analogy between past-present andinvisible-visible a little farther. The invisible plays a crucial role

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in Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy of life, for it designates theabsence, negativity, or difference that he takes to be constitu-tive of being or flesh.39 Most importantly, the invisible permitsMerleau-Ponty to conceptualize this difference as an irreduciblepart of all experience. The visibility of a spectacle involves“clear zones, clearings,” and intervals that are themselvesunperceived but make possible the articulation and formation ofa perceived (VI 148/195). Though intervals between “things” arenot seen for themselves, they serve to differentiate and definewhat is seen (VI 180/234). The invisible is thus not an in-itself,but rather the “lining [doublure]” or reverse side of the visible(EM 187/85). Visible and invisible are inseparable terms forMerleau-Ponty, without being coincident (VI 152/200). They arenot opposed, but belong to each other—so that we must speak ofan invisible of the visible. (VI 247/300) But the relation ofvisible and invisible also involves an asymmetry. For theinvisible is, according to Merleau-Ponty, that which makesvisible. This account of the power and generativity of theinvisible is clearly illustrated by Merleau-Ponty’s example ofdepth in L’Œil et l’Esprit. Depth is not merely an objective andmeasurable third dimension, but that which generates dimen-sions. To see in depth is to see material objects in their placedespite, or rather because of, the fact that they overlap witheach other (EM 180/64). Depth makes possible not only thecoexistence of visible things in space, but lived space itself as adiacritical and heterogeneous locality in which distinct objectscan appear to, and coexist with, my body. It is from this spa-tiality that measurable dimensions are abstracted (EM 180/65).But depth itself cannot be seen; what is visible is the play ofthings one behind the other, movements closer and farther, andshifts within space. What is made visible is thus not a copy ofthe invisible, for the invisible is not a thing or idea. Theinvisible is a power of differential creation. It opens the dimen-sion of visibility. It creates diacritical differences within theworld and in this way makes the world visible—vision being thediscernment of difference in the perceptual field.40

Just as visible and invisible require one another, just as theyare different but coexistent terms, so are past and present. Tounderstand the invisible as an “invisible of the visible” (VI 247/300) is hence to understand “time as chiasm” (W.N. November1960; VI 267/321). However strange it may seem to describepast and present in these terms—to say that the past not onlypreexists the present but also coexists with and makes present—this is Merleau-Ponty’s position in Le visible et l’invisible. Theinscription of an immemorial dimension in life—of a verticalpast of institution—results in a time where, as Merleau-Pontysays, “[t]he past and the present are Ineinander, eachenveloping-enveloped—and that itself is the flesh” (VI 268/321).The immemorial appears as a constitutive dimension of the

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present and the flesh, just as the invisible opens for us visibility.This is because Merleau-Ponty has come to understand timedifferently in Le visible et l’invisible: not as succession, but as astructure requiring the negativity of pastness to make possiblethe existence and passage of the present. The present is nolonger privileged. Rather, the present appears at the intersectionof lines of force and dimensions that are not themselves present,but that make present (VI 114/153). (It is rethought beyondpunctuality, as we shall see.) “Time before time” does nottherefore designate a temporally prior origin, an integral andin-itself past. It points, rather, to a time that is the structuralcondition of all temporalizing movement—the ground of thepassage of time as well as the possibility of remembering. Inthis vein, the immemorial should not simply be understood as aremote past. It is both closer to the present, as the ground thatmakes it present and allows its passage, and farther from thepresent, since this ground was never itself present. Drawing onHeidegger, Merleau-Ponty describes this ground as an abyss.41

The immemorial past is not a thing or a collection of memories(VI 236/289); it is the constitutive distance or difference, thenegativity, that structures time itself. Rather than beingcomparable to any given object set off in the distance opened upby depth, the immemorial is akin to depth itself.

2.3 Bergsonian Inflections

Like the invisible that is revealed as that which makes visible,Merleau-Ponty seeks within time a negativity that will makepossible its organization and its passage. As we saw, Merleau-Ponty uncovers this verticality in part by interrogatingHusserl’s unthought in “The Origin of Geometry”; “time aschiasm” is also Stiftung (VI 267/321). But the understanding ofpastness, and even the reading of Husserl, in the later worksshows Merleau-Ponty’s renewed attention to Bergson. That thepast is not negativity for Bergson, but virtuality, and that hesometimes speaks of it as though it were in-itself, does notprevent the later Merleau-Ponty from reading Bergsonism asthe insinuation of negativity into being or life.42 We find inMerleau-Ponty the same motives that led Bergson to seeduration as coexistence of the past with the present (in the coneof pure memory in Matière et mémoire), after he had theorizedit as succession and flow in Les données immédiates.43 WhatGilles Deleuze will later call Bergson’s paradoxes of time meanthat the past must already coexist with the present, already beheld within it.44 In order for the present to pass, there must beboth a past of the present that allows it to be retained andrecalled, but also a dimension of original pastness thatdestabilizes the present and ensures its passage. This original orimmemorial past preexists the present in general, just as it

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coexists with and permits the passage of each present. Withoutthis dimension, the present would have no internal reason forpassing. The only way for the present to pass, says Bergson, is ifit passes while it is present—if the past is given along with thepresent and internally implicated in it.45 (Hence, Merleau-Pontywill point to the “simultaneity” of past and present.) But inorder for this coexistent dimension to be past and not merely aduplicate of the present that is, this dimension cannot itself bepresent. It must be instituted along with the present as a pastwhich has never itself been present, different in kind from thepresent. (Hence, Merleau-Ponty will insist on a difference thatinternally connects past and present, a chiasm, “which isobstacle and connection.”)46 For Bergson, this is not a particular,dateable and recollected past, but the virtual element of the“past in general.”

Merleau-Ponty will add another paradox to this Bergsonianpicture of time. In the working notes to Le visible et l’invisibleand in his lectures on La Passivité, we find that both memoryand perception require forgetting. The past should not be under-stood as a container that preserves all memories intact ready tobe recalled. Nor is the past reducible to a construct of conscious-ness. Both conservation and construction fail to address whatMerleau-Ponty in La Passivité calls the “problem of memory” (IP231). This problem is badly posed if forgetfulness is understoodas an inability to remember, or a difficulty to be overcome.Merleau-Ponty’s innovation comes in seeing forgetting as thesolution—as a necessary and original structure of time (IP 256).As we saw with institution, in order for the past to be conserved,it must be forgotten; it must be unconscious (HLP 31; IP 257).Merleau-Ponty notes that it is this “inaccessibility” of the pastthat makes it past (IP 257; VI 122/163), so that “the past existsin the mode of forgetfulness.”47 The error is to believe that thepast in general was first consciously present and only thenpassed. Rather, the past is an originary forgetting—imper-ception or blindspot—that accompanies every present, animmemorial48 (VI 247/300). The past is already insinuated inevery present, as the invisible ground of every perception (VI194/248). Forgetting is, however, not absolute negation—theerasure of the past as if it never was (IP 256). Forgetting isdistance, difference, or transcendence of the past, which meansthat there is no possibility of coinciding with it in recollection.Only in this way is memory possible according to Merleau-Ponty: “Forgetfulness that is memory, transcendence of the pastthat drives into me its arrow like a wound, that whichseparates is also that which unites.”49

It is in this sense that Merleau-Ponty, in his reading ofHusserlian institution, calls forgetting a “secret” or “noble”memory (IP 256; Signs 59/74). Sedimentation, notes Husserl,leaves our capacities and energies free for production (rather

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than endlessly engaged in the task of reactivation to secureself-evidence) (HUA 373–74). But Husserl’s use of intemporalformulas in “The Origin of Geometry” leads to reservations onMerleau-Ponty’s part (HLP 20, 30–32). For the “unconditionedgeneral validity [unbedingte Allgemeingültigkeit]” that Husserlseeks implies the ability to ultimately overcome forgetfulness(HUA 366, 385). In this regard, the past would be an in-itselforigin that could be recovered, or coincided with, in principle.The inability to completely reactivate the past would reflect thelimits of our individual capacities and social communication(HUA 375), rather than a structural or ontological element ofthe past itself. Husserl’s ambivalence—conceding the necessityof forgetfulness but still desiring coincidence with the entireinstituted past—means that the fecundity of forgetting is finallyelided (HLP 20). It is left to Merleau-Ponty to draw the implica-tions of this Husserlian “unthought.” Though it is unclearwhether he intended to take this route, Merleau-Ponty’s insis-tence on the unconscious nature of the past recalls Bergson’sconcept of pure memory. One may speculate, then, that theBergsonian past helps Merleau-Ponty save institution from thepresence of origins.50

What Bergson calls “pure memory [souvenir pur]” is not apassive imprint on the mind. Pure memory has a power(puissance), which is not that of efficient causality but ofsuggestion.51 What it suggests is not a copy of the present fromwhich it was formed, but a different way of living time—a par-ticular rhythm of duration or intensity of life that characterizesa plane of pure memory. Pure memories are not atomistic orseparable moments, but planes in which the whole past coexistsat different levels of tension (corresponding to sheets in Bergson’sfamous image of a cone) (MM 181). Each plane instantiates adifferent style or configuration of pastness, a different perspec-tive of the past. Each opens, to use Merleau-Ponty’s terms, adimension or level according to which the present is experi-enced and has meaning. It is thus artificial to speak of indi-vidual, dateable pure memories.52 Pure memory is not theempirical or factual content of the past, but its dimensionality—not recollection, but what sets the tone, or style, of our recollec-tions and perceptions. In actualization, the suggestive richnessand complexity of this past is reduced in light of utility andindexed, as memory-images, relative to the present (MM 156).What was a fluid and polyphonous network—where eventsinterpenetrated and were over-inscribed with meaning—isdecomposed. But as an interconnected, open, and endlesslydetailed whole, the past in general is unconscious; it cannot berepresented as such. Pure memory therefore lies outsideconsciousness and the present; it constitutes an original kind offorgetting.53 (Deleuze describes it as “extra-psychological,” an“ontological unconscious.”)54

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This unconsciousness points to the peculiar “spontaneity”that belongs to the past—if, as Stéphanie Ménasé suggests, weunderstand spontaneity as a surging forth (“surgissement”) thatlies outside the control of consciousness and hence is notopposed to passivity.55 But, as Merleau-Ponty makes clear, suchspontaneity cannot be understood as a “cause” of consciousness(IP 181). The weight of the past forms “another power [uneautre puissance]” of life, one that he tries to articulate in hislater work beyond the dichotomies, not only of subject-object,but also of activity-passivity (IP 251).56 The past in generalreveals a deeper current of life, which incarnates the force oftime, not the efficacy of action. As we saw with institution, thispast is theorized by Merleau-Ponty as a fecund absence or“circumscribed negativity” (HLP 20, 29). But the full sense ofthe fecundity of the past can only be understood by takingforgetting and unconsciousness seriously—by reconceptualizingthe invisible as that which makes visible (as seen above).Merleau-Ponty appeals to Bergson in this context: “Bergson:unconscious, lacuna of consciousness, and lacuna which is notonly non-being, emptiness, but operative emptiness, active.”57

It is by opening a dimension, a register, that the institutedand forgotten past makes a difference for, and in, the present.The key to the generativity of the unconscious thus lies in itsinvisible dimensionality, its making visible. Forgetting leaves atrace (IP 99; HLP 29) that calls for an indefinite search orelaboration (IP 124), “which depends upon [the forgotten] andgoes farther.”58 In this regard, the unconscious “functions as apivot” (VI 189/243), as “hinges of our life” (VI 221/274), or“articulations of our field” (VI 180/234). In Merleau-Ponty’s laterworks, I find at least two ways in which this dimension isinvisible or unconscious. (i) It is the level according to whichone perceives, and as such cannot itself be perceived. What areperceived are “figures upon levels”—perception requiring, forMerleau-Ponty, the differentiation of a Gestalt structure (VI189/243). It is in this sense that perception is “ignorance ofitself, imperception” (VI 213/267), for it forgets the openness ordimensionality that makes it possible. This may shed light onMerleau-Ponty’s description of forgetting as “indifferentiation”in the working notes (VI 197/250). Although this indifferen-tiation seems, at first, to simply be the result of a lack of separ-ation (specifically that of figure-ground)—a fusion that destroysthe past—the notion of dimension suggests another interpreta-tion. The “indifferentiation” of the past would not be lack ofdifference, but the multiplication of differences that connectlaterally and nonoppositionally, without selection. The pastwould be a polysemic and overdetermined matrix, a “mixed life”that can suggest divergent futures (IP 269) Could this be anattempt to understand difference, the articulation of our field,beyond the frontal structure of the Gestalt—and to reinterpret

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the Gestalt itself (VI 205–207/258–60)—as winding, or élanvital?

(ii) Every level or dimension is the deformation of an alreadyestablished level; it is “divergence with respect to a norm ofmeaning, difference.”59 The old level is destabilized, redistri-buted, and reorganized in order to create the new (IP 249–50).Before the new level has been established, it therefore appearsas a “disarticulation” of the previous order (VI 197/250). It is inthis additional sense that the opening of a new dimensionalways involves an initial, structural blindness of consciousness(VI 225/278); perception begins in imperception and forgetful-ness of what was previously given, only to take this up differ-ently (IP 99). While, as instituted, the past will give the newnorm or articulation of the field of experience, as instituting itrepresents a change of direction (“virage”) from the alreadygiven norm (IP 87)—a disarticulation that, in the case of“matrix-events [événements-matrices]” (IP 44) or traumaticevents (IP 250), registers as nonsense with respect to thatnorm. This open-ended movement is described by Merleau-Ponty as “decentering and recentering, zigzag, ambiguouspassage.”60 It is in this sense that life is a “winding [serpente-ment],” he says citing Bergson (VI 194/247).61 This windingdesignates—in language that immediately predates that of theflesh—a lateral, dynamic, and diacritical differentiation. Itsuggests a transcendence without subject or object, wherebyperception is “formed in the things” and not imposed upon them(VI 194/247).62 Merleau-Ponty’s clearest account of this probablycomes in L’Œil et l’Esprit. Again drawing on Bergson, he under-stands the latent line in painting as a generating axis, or élan,that institutes a new index of spatial curvature by means of itsinflection—rendering things visible through its self-differentia-tion (EM 183/72–4). Whether as line-become-level or vector,point-become-center of forces (VI 195/248), or color-become-neutral lighting (VI 247/301), the winding points to a durationthat grounds the process by which dimensions are opened up.

It is hence through a certain disorder, which creates a neworder, that dimension is installed—a process which itself takestime. In the shift, “bougé,” between instituting and instituted,the present is opened up to duration and passage (IP 88); itssupposed punctuality and self-presence are shattered. Rethinkingthe past demands such a reconceptualization of the present,according to Merleau-Ponty (IP 252). The dimensional present,thus understood, is unlocalizable or “ungraspable … in theforceps of attention” (VI 195/249). Its passage cannot be under-stood serially, as a succession of instants “with defined contours”that replace one another (VI 184/238). To say that the presentpasses is to say that it “has no locus between the before and theafter” (HLP 9). But this does not mean that the present isnothing; it has thickness or verticality, since the past is

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“simultaneous” with the present, as we have seen (VI 243–44/297). The living present is “a swelling or bulb of time”—a “cycle”that Merleau-Ponty understands by means of the Husserliannotion of horizon (VI 184/238): “Through the horizon, there isstill a double circulation of the past toward the future and thefuture toward the past” (HLP 32). It is in this context thatMerleau-Ponty brings together Husserl’s institution andBergson’s “retrograde movement of the true”63 (IP 91, 93–94). Tobe precise, the present becomes something only as past for afuture; it gets its date only afterward (HLP 31). The futuralhorizon promises forgetfulness, and conservation, of the present;the productivity of the present as dimension is felt in thefuture(s) it makes possible.64 Yet dimension, once instituted,appears to have always preexisted itself (IP 94). This is the“retrograde movement” by which the dimensional, institutedpresent is reflected back onto its instituting process, bringinginto focus the present as an event. But since the future isdivergence with respect to the present, this reflection is also arefraction of sense; the present is not given in-itself. DespiteBergson’s hesitations, this noncoincidence is not an illusion forMerleau-Ponty but the structure of meaning by which an event“has to become what it is.”65

2.4 Life, Flesh, and a Plurality of Invisibles

As a result of this reconceptualization of time, the life of theflesh is not limited to the here and now, to the field of presenceof the individual body, but “radiates beyond itself ” (EM 186/81).There is a “flesh of time” (VI 112/150)—a temporalizing move-ment, “without displacement, a movement by vibration or radia-tion” (EM 184/77). Merleau-Ponty notes:

As the formative medium of the object and the subject, [the flesh]is not the atom of being, the hard in itself that resides in a uniqueplace and moment: one can indeed say of my body that it is notelsewhere, but one cannot say that it is here and now in the sensethat objects are. (VI 147/193)

The difficulty in rendering this radiation or dimensionalityappears in Merleau-Ponty’s repeated attempts to articulate theflesh: “what we are calling flesh, this interiorly worked-overmass, has no name in any philosophy” (VI 147/193). Midwaybetween the material individual and the universal idea, thoughcoincident with neither, the flesh comes into contact withBergson’s élan vital (VI 139–40/184). The sense of life aswinding that we find in the flesh recalls Bergson’s philosophy oflife in L’évolution créatrice. Like the past in general, life is avirtual multiplicity of tendencies or rhythms, at times incom-possible (EC 258/259). Due to this “unstable balance of

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tendencies,” vital impetus is divided between various directions(EC 98/99). In actualization, only some rhythms can come intoexistence to the detriment of others. Life is in this sense a finiteprinciple—one that is blind, since Bergson does not posit a goalto life, but that is also creative. The generativity of life meansthat it can be conceived under two aspects: as invisible vitalimpetus and as visible actualizations or offshoots of that impetus.Life is at once a continuous vital force and the discontinuous,material sedimentations of that force. It is at once an insti-tuting élan, or winding, and the instituted dimensions, forgottenalong this winding and sedimented in the form of organisms. Itis both the drive to see and the eyes that see (EC 91–94/92–95).66 Like Merleau-Ponty’s invisible, life is generative of differ-ence in the visible world; the evolution, or actualization, of lifegoes toward increased differentiation and divergence accordingto Bergson (EC 117/118). Like Bergson’s concept of life, the fleshappears to overflow the bounds of the present and to holdwithin its folds the invisible trace of a past which has neverbeen present and the virtual memories of other lines of differ-entiation, other rhythms or invisibles (EC 118/119–20). But theconcept of life in L’évolution créatrice also pretends to harmonizethese rhythms within the unity of a virtual origin (EC 117/118–19). While the diversity that Bergson describes in the develop-ment of élan vital resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s idea of theflesh, Merleau-Ponty dismisses any original unity that wouldhold together the invisibles of the flesh, be it virtual or otherwise.We are therefore left, in Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the flesh,with a heterogeneous multiplicity of invisible dimensions.

In this essay, I have pursued the parallel between imme-morial past and invisible in Merleau-Ponty’s later works, andthus avoided relegating the immemorial to the sphere of presenceor positivity, to a remote but once present past or a past in-itself. The immemorial, then, is a kind of invisible, a dimensionof invisibility of the flesh. But it is not all the invisible. There ismore to the invisible for Merleau-Ponty than the past ingeneral, and in this he differs from Bergson.67 For “[t]he ‘origin-ating’ is not of one sole type, it is not all behind us” (VI 124/165). And “[t]he reversibility that defines the flesh exists inother fields” (VI 144/189). Not only is the present also dimen-sional for Merleau-Ponty, but the flesh is a “spatializing-tempor-alizing vortex” (VI 244/297). It is not possible to give anexhaustive list of the invisible, since it is not a homogeneous orunivocal dimension.68 The invisible proliferates with the beingof which it is the condition and the reverse side. This isreflected in the impossibility of coinciding with the invisible, ofholding it with forceps as Merleau-Ponty says, for there isalways a further invisible dimension within what we grasp aswell as behind it. There is heterogeneity of the invisible, asthere is heterogeneity of life and in the flesh for Merleau-Ponty.

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But there are also ways in which these invisibles intersect, inwhich the flesh of the visible and the flesh of time come together.Significantly, it is by appealing to the heterogeneous nature oflife that the two temporalities of life presented in this essay—acting body and flesh—can meet.

3. Conclusion

We began with a conception of life, framed by the activities andinterests of the body in the present. We have arrived at anunderstanding of life, no longer as a field of presence or action,but as flesh inscribing an invisibility or pastness in principle.These two senses of life appear at first to be unbridgeable.Their difference would be insurmountable if it were simply ashift in concepts, a discontinuity between different periods of aphilosophy. But the shift and the heterogeneity are here withinlife itself. This offers us a means of bridging the two conceptsnot by reducing one to the other, but by situating them withinthe general impetus of life that holds together incompossibletendencies or directions.

Our access to life in Le visible et l’invisible came through theimmemorial, but Merleau-Ponty offers another route to theconcept of life in his later work, a route that proceeds by way ofvision. In “Bergson se faisant,” Merleau-Ponty reads theBergsonian concept of life as a “prehuman” or “total act ofvision” (Signs 187/235). Here Merleau-Ponty’s analysis connectsthe élan vital of L’évolution créatrice with the discussion ofperception in Matière et mémoire (Signs 186/234–35). Merleau-Ponty notes that the main illustration of élan vital is to befound in the example of the formation of the eye in L’évolutioncréatrice—which is not an arbitrary example. There is continuitybetween individual perception, as it is presented in Matière etmémoire, and the inner workings of life as a kind of vision.

But behind this continuity lies a deeper sense of life thanMerleau-Ponty’s account suggests. The analogy between visionand life is a complex one for Bergson, since they are not onlyparallel structures or tendencies, but enjoy a relation of part towhole. The description of life as a kind of vision owes to thesense that life has for Bergson in L’évolution créatrice: “life is,more than anything else, a tendency to act on inert matter” (EC96/97). He adds: “the rôle of life is to insert some indetermina-tion into matter” (EC 126/127). Action, for Bergson, is not theperformance of a predetermined behavior; it involves indeter-mination and “a rudiment of choice” (EC 96/97). For this tooccur, the possibilities of action of a living body must be markedout in advance in terms of its environment. This is “visualperception”: the things surrounding my body present to me theoutline of my possible actions upon them (EC 96/97–98). Visionis thus not an innate principle, but a drive that is immanent to

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life as action. However paradoxical it may be, there is a drivewithin life—a tendency to action—that carries us away from thevirtuality and pastness inscribed in life. Bergson calls this drive“attention to life.”

However, once indetermination is inscribed in the flesh, oncea distance or gap is installed between body and world, otherlines of development are opened up. Vision is also hesitationand discernment. It is the ability to refrain from immediateaction and to take up alternate paths that may no longer obeythe imperatives of utility, in other words, to see differently. Inthis sense, vision can also be affective, intuitive or aesthetic.Most importantly, these paths are opened up because thehesitation, which constitutes vision, allows the virtuality of thepast to surge into the present. Useful, actualized memories arethen selectively allowed into the present, molding to and deep-ening our perception of it. But other memories can alsocontaminate the present, reverberating as traces of a dimensionof pastness hitherto forgotten (MM 90). The flow of life is thussustained by an immemorial depth, which life covers over in itspush toward action, but which is recalled when life turns toother ways of seeing. Vision is therefore a figure for both sensesof life outlined in this essay: vision is perception in view ofaction, but vision can also be “an auscultation or palpation indepth,” a special vision or intuition that glimpses the imme-morial dimensionality, invisibility, or winding of life withoutreducing it to presence (VI 128/170). Indeed, vision is onlyperception and action by relying upon and forgetting this depth.Both senses of life and of vision are present in Merleau-Ponty’stexts as they are in Bergson’s.69 It is through this optics thatthe two senses of life, presented in this essay, can be seen toconverge.

Notes

I wish to thank Leonard Lawlor for his insightful and detailedcomments on an earlier draft. I gratefully acknowledge the financialsupport of Le Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et laculture and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council ofCanada.

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C.Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962); Phénoménologie dela perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). Henceforth cited as PhP, withEnglish then French pagination.

2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. C.Lefort, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,1968); Le visible et l’invisible, suivi de notes de travail, établi par C.Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Henceforth cited as VI, with Englishthen French pagination.

3 In a discussion with Ortega y Gasset in 1951 concerningDilthey’s use of the term “Leben” to express historicity, Merleau-Pontynotes the relative imprecision of the term life. Cf. “L’homme et

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l’adversité,” in Parcours deux, 1951–1961 (Paris: Verdier, 2000), 376.4 If, as Merleau-Ponty notes, “[c]oncepts for a philosopher are only

nets for catching sense,” then the workings of time in his texts will tellus something about the concept(s) of life operative therein. Cf. Husserlat the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. L. Lawlor and B. Bergo (Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 2002), 53; Notes de cours sur L’originede la géométrie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,1998), 64. Henceforth cited as HLP. (The English version will beprimarily used.)

5 Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corpsà l’esprit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1896), 7 and 148.Henceforth cited as MM. Gilles Deleuze calls the “past in general” apure past, borrowing the term from Bergson’s concept of souvenir pur.Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Le bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires deFrance, 1966), 54. I will employ both formulations as equivalent inwhat follows.

6 Henri Bergson, L’évolution créatrice (Paris: Presses Univer-sitaires de France, 1907), 88; Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell(Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998 [1911]), 87. Henceforth cited asEC, with English then French pagination.

7 Here I should add the various texts in which Merleau-Ponty payshomage to Bergson or revises his early, mainly critical, reading:“Bergson in the Making,” in Signs, trans. R. McCleary (Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 1964); Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960),henceforth cited as Signs, with English then French pagination. Élogede la philosophie et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1953); La Nature:Notes, Cours du Collège de France, établi et annoté par D. Séglard(Paris: Seuil, 1995); and “La philosophie de l’existence,” in Parcoursdeux, 1951–1961 (Paris: Verdier, 2000).

8 Though I find recent studies of the explicit comparisons andinfluences among Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and other authors veryuseful, my approach differs in that it seeks to use Bergson to developMerleau-Ponty’s thought (or “unthought,” HLP 14–15) further. Notableamong these recent comparisons are Florence Caeymaex, Sartre,Merleau-Ponty, Bergson: Les phénoménologies existentialistes et leurhéritage bergsonien (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005), and MarkMuldoon, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur in Search of Time, Selfand Meaning (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006). I findinspiration for my own approach in the work of Renaud Barbaras, EdCasey, and Elizabeth Grosz, who show how Merleau-Ponty can beproductively read through Bergson. See Renaud Barbaras, Le tournantde l’expérience: Recherches sur la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty (Paris:Vrin, 1998), 33–61; Edward S. Casey, “Habitual Body and Memory inMerleau-Ponty,” Man and World 17 (1984): 279–97; and ElizabethGrosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham and London:Duke University Press, 2005), 113–29.

9 This is one of Merleau-Ponty’s famous criticisms of Phénomé-nologie de la perception: “the fact that in part I retained thephilosophy of ‘consciousness’” (W.N. February 1959; VI 183/237). Thiscriticism has been elaborated by several commentators, notablyRenaud Barbaras, Le tournant de l’expérience, 44–46.

10 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness ofInternal Time (1893–1917), trans. J. B. Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer,1991), and “The Origin of Geometry,” in The Crisis of European

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Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction toPhenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: North-western University Press, 1970), 353–78, cited as HUA with Germanpagination.

11 Bergson and Husserl are, of course, not the only authors whomMerleau-Ponty re-reads in his later works. A study of the workingnotes to Le visible et l’invisible and the course notes from the Collègede France from 1954–55 and 1958–61 shows that Heidegger and Freudare also important in this regard. My focus on Bergson and Husserlcomes from the complex mirroring that characterizes Merleau-Ponty’sre-reading of these authors and their significance with respect to hisunderstanding of the past.

12 See my manuscript “‘A Past Which Has Never Been Present’:Toward an Alternative Theory of the Prepersonal in Merleau-Ponty’sPhenomenology of Perception.”

13 “Virtual action” in the Phénoménologie does not share theBergsonian or Deleuzian sense of the virtual (a generative, productive,always self-differentiating power). It is more in line with whatBergson calls the “possible” in La pensée et le mouvant (Paris: PressesUniversitaires de France, 1938), i.e., it is conceived on the basis of thereal (109–12).

14 Dorothea Olkowski, “Merleau-Ponty and Bergson: The Characterof the Phenomenal Field,” in Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality,Painting, ed. V. Fóti (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996), 29–30.

15 Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: Twenty Years Later,”in Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Oxford:Blackwell, 1998), 288–89.

16 “[Bergson] a défini le présent comme ce sur quoi nous agissons,et nous agissons évidemment par notre corps” (Merleau-Ponty,Parcours deux, 252, translation my own).

17 For the relation between this field of presence and the centralproblem of the Phénoménologie, that of subjectivity, see John Sallis,“Time, Subjectivity, and the Phenomenology of Perception,” TheModern Schoolman 48 (May 1971): 343–57. (Merleau-Ponty famouslycriticized this philosophy of subjectivity later in his career (VI 200/253). But decisive, in my view, is how the Phénoménologie’s desire forsubjectivity as presence limits its ability to think the originary natureof the past.)

18 As evidenced by Merleau-Ponty’s close reading of that text in the“Temporalité” chapter of the Phénoménologie.

19 The latter option appears as Merleau-Ponty’s provisional solutionin Phénoménologie de la perception: “Forgetting is therefore an act; Ikeep the memory at arm’s length, as I look past a person whom I donot wish to see” (PhP 162/189).

20 Cf. Barbaras, Le tournant de l’expérience, 41–42; Leonard Lawlor,Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 89–90.

21 “[L]’analyse à laquelle Bergson s’est livré dans Matière etmémoire, par exemple, montre que si nous considérons le temps, il fautconsidérer, dans le temps en particulier, la dimension du présent”(Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux, 252, translation my own).

22 It also reflects, as Elizabeth Grosz points out, Merleau-Ponty’sanxiety with respect to Bergsonian influence (Time Travels, 116).

23 There is a location in Phénoménologie de la perception that offers

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such an opening: Merleau-Ponty’s reference to “a past which has neverbeen present” at the end of the “Sentir” chapter (PhP 242/280).Although it foreshadows discussions of the invisible and unconsciousin later texts, the prepersonal temporality opened up by this referenceremains marginal to the dominant current of bodily life—the primacyof perception and action—that runs through the Phénoménologie. Ianalyze this temporality elsewhere (see my paper “‘A Past Which HasNever Been Present’: Toward an Alternative Theory of the Prepersonalin Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception”).

24 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. C. Dallery, in ThePrimacy of Perception and Other Essays (Evanston: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1964), 188; L’Œil et l’Esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964),86. Henceforth cited as EM, with English then French pagination.

25 The texts concerned are Le visible et l’invisible and L’Œil etl’Esprit, as well as some of the published notes from Merleau-Ponty’slectures at the Collège de France, in particular Husserl at the Limitsof Phenomenology, La Nature, and L’Institution, La Passivité, Notes decours au Collège de France, 1954–1955 (Paris: Belin, 2003), cited as IP.

26 Also VI 128/170. Merleau-Ponty is drawing here on Bergson’s Lapensée et le mouvant, 4. The relevant passage is referred to byMerleau-Ponty in a working note from May 20, 1959 (VI 193/247).

27 More generally, the importance of Husserl for the later Merleau-Ponty has been demonstrated by Marc Richir, “Le sens de laphénoménologie dans Le visible et l’invisible,” Esprit 66 (June 1982):124–44. Also see Claude Lefort in an essay written after Merleau-Ponty’s death collected in Sur une Colonne Absente: Écrits autour deMerleau-Ponty (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 8–44. For an excellent accountof Bergson’s growing influence on Merleau-Ponty (especially on hislater critique of Husserlian eidetic phenomenology), see Barbaras, Letournant de l’expérience, 33–61, 71–73.

28 Other important influences for the later works are, of course,Freud (cf. L’Institution, La Passivité and Working notes to VI, e.g., VI243/296) and Heidegger (cf. Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenologyand Notes des cours au Collège de France, 1958–1959 et 1960–1961,étabi par S. Ménasé [Paris: Gallimard, 1996]). The later Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Heidegger is a complex question, which I must deferto others (cf. Richir, “Le sens de la phénoménologie,” 137–38, 140–42;Lawlor, “Foreword,” HLP). Interestingly, this reading is itself mediatedby his interpretations of Husserl and Bergson (for Bergson, Notes descours, 1958–59, 103 and, for Husserl, HLP 53–54).

29 Renaud Barbaras analyzes Merleau-Ponty’s critical re-reading ofHusserl’s early theory of time in The Being of the Phenomenon:Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology, trans. T. Toadvine and L. Lawlor (Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press, 2004), 218–23, especially 219. MauroCarbone presents this re-reading in light of Merleau-Ponty’s reading ofProust, see The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty’s A-Philosophy(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 1–13.

30 For the importance of self-presence to Husserl, see Rudolf Bernet,“Is the Present Ever Present?” Research in Phenomenology 12 (1982):105–106, and, of course, Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 67.

31 For a detailed analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s course L’Institution,see Robert Vallier, “Institution: The Significance of Merleau-Ponty’s1954 Course at the Collège de France,” Chiasmi International 7 (2006):

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281–302; while for Merleau-Ponty’s reading of “The Origin of Geometry,”see Françoise Dastur, Chair et Langage: Essais sur Merleau-Ponty(Fougères: Encre Marine, 2001), 177–90.

32 “Le temps est le modèle même de l’institution” (IP 36, translationmy own).

33 Whether this applies to every present or only to those presentswe may designate events (“événements-matrices,” IP 44, or eventraumatic events, IP 250) is a more complex question.

34 For dimension in the later Merleau-Ponty, see Barbaras, Being ofPhenomenon, 174–81, and Carbone, Thinking of the Sensible, 36–37.

35 Cf. Signs 173/218. What appears mentioned in passing byHusserl (Selbstvergessenheit in Ideas II) is read by Merleau-Ponty as astructure. Marc Richir describes this reading as a “fecund infidelity”that draws on Husserl’s concrete analyses (“Le sens de la phénomé-nologie,” 136). (Cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a PurePhenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book,Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. R. Rojcewicz andA. Schuwer [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989], 55.)

36 Renaud Barbaras elaborates this idea of constitutive distancein Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy in Le tournant de l’expérience,53–56.

37 In a working note from May 20, 1959, Merleau-Ponty criticizesBergson for being conceptually unable to sustain a genuine differencein kind: “Inadequacy of the Bergsonian representation of a soul thatconserves everything (this makes it impossible that the perceived—imaginary difference be a difference in nature)” (VI 194/247). This is amarkedly ungenerous reading of Bergson. But it shows, in reverse,what Merleau-Ponty is trying to argue—the true difference in kindbeing that of chiasm. Moreover, in Notes de cours, 1960–61, Merleau-Ponty describes the relation of past and present as “[c]ohésion parl’incompossibilité,” again criticizing Bergson for not going far enough(199).

38 For an analysis of the reversibility of time, see Glen Mazis,“Merleau-Ponty and the ‘Backward Flow’ of Time: The Reversibility ofTemporality and the Temporality of Reversibility” in Merleau-Ponty,Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. T. W. Busch and S. Gallagher(Albany: SUNY, 1992), 53–68. I would add to this, however, that timeas chiasm must be understood not only in terms of reversibility butalso irreversibility.

39 For the invisible in the later works, see Marc Richir, Phénomènes,Temps et Etres: Ontologie et phénoménologie (Grenoble: J. Millon,1987), 82–85.

40 Although depth appears as first dimension in Merleau-Ponty’saccount, other differentiations—such as color, line, Gestalt, andmovement—also contribute to the “deflagration of Being” that rendersvision and visibility possible (EM 180/65).

41 For Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Heidegger’s Abgrund, seeHLP 49, 52. In Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, Merleau-Pontyis reading closely Martin Heidegger’s “Language” (Poetry, Language,Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter [New York: Harper & Row, 1971]). There,Merleau-Ponty uses Bergson’s famous argument about nothingness toshow that the Heideggerian abyss is not a lack of Being, but “morethan Being” (HLP 49). (For the play between ground and abyss inMerleau-Ponty’s thought, see Rudolf Bernet, La vie du sujet:

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Recherches sur l’interprétation de Husserl dans la phénoménologie[Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994], 169.)

42 “Le vrai sens de la philosophie bergsonienne n’est pas tantd’éliminer l’idée de néant que de l’incorporer à l’idée d’être” (Merleau-Ponty, La Nature, 97).

43 Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1889).

44 Deleuze, Le bergsonisme, 53–57.45 Henri Bergson, L’énergie spirituelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires

de France, 1919), 130–31.46 The full text reads: “Le temps n’est pas enveloppant et pas

enveloppé: il y a de moi au passé une épaisseur qui n’est pas faited’une série de perspectives ni de la conscience de leur rapport, qui estobstacle et liaison (Proust)” (IP 36, above translation my own).

47 “Le passé existe dans le mode de l’oubli” (IP 272, translation myown).

48 On originary forgetting, see Bernhard Waldenfels, “Time Lag:Motifs for a Phenomenology of the Experience of Time,” Research inPhenomenology 30 (2000): 115.

49 “Oubli qui est mémoire, transcendance du passé qui plante enmoi sa fléche comme une blessure, ce qui sépare est aussi ce qui unit”(IP 258, translation my own).

50 Merleau-Ponty’s reference to “partial coincidence” in the contextof the Bergsonian past in Le visible et l’invisible, and his reading ofHusserl and Bergson together there, seem to support this (VI 122/163).

51 Bergson, L’énergie spirituelle, 99, 133.52 “Il n’a pas de date et ne saurait en avoir; c’est du passé en

général, ce ne peut être aucun passé en particulier” (Ibid., 137).53 In this regard, I disagree with Rudolf Bernet’s characterization

of Bergson as having no genuine sense of forgetting (“A Present FoldedBack on the Past (Bergson),” Research in Phenomenology 35 [2005]:55–76). Though Bernet’s phenomenological reading of Bergson offerssubstantial insight—in particular into the relation of perception andmemory (66–68)—it remains that by identifying the pure past with thevirtual consciousness of it, Bergson is assimilated to philosophies ofconsciousness (63, 73–74). (One question would be whether Merleau-Ponty’s description of forgetting as imperception is open to the samecriticism.) My reading of pure memory thus comes closer to LeonardLawlor’s analysis in The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology,Ontology, Ethics (London: Continuum, 2003), 54–59. A consequence(which I do not have the space to develop) would be the following: Ifforgetting is also a kind of death, then life for the later Merleau-Pontymust already be intertwined with death. (For my reading of Bergson,see “The Memory of Another Past: Bergson, Deleuze and a new theoryof time,” Continental Philosophy Review 37(2004): 203–39.)

54 Le bergsonisme, 50, 69. In his study of memory in La Passivité,Merleau-Ponty was already concerned with the philosophical, orontological, significance of forgetting (IP 167).

55 Stéphanie Ménasé, Passivité et création: Merleau-Ponty et l’artmoderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), 134.

56 For an elaboration of how Merleau-Ponty’s “time before time”contributes to overcoming the dichotomy of activity-passivity, seeCarbone, Thinking of the Sensible, 12–13.

57 “Bergson: inconscient, lacune de la conscience, et lacune qui n’est

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pas seulement non-être, vide, mais vide opérant, actif ” (IP 222n,translation my own).

58 To quote the full text: “La sédimentation est cela: trace de l’oubliéet par là même appel à une pensée qui table sur lui et va plus loin”(IP 99, above translation my own).

59 “[Ce sens interne] est écart par rapport à une norme de sens,différence” (IP 41, translation my own).

60 “[D]écentration et recentration, zigzag, passage ambigu …” (IP87, translation my own).

61 Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant, 264. Elizabeth Grosz sees inthis “winding” the distinctly Bergsonian inflection of Merleau-Ponty’slater ontology (Time Travels, 126–27).

62 Mauro Carbone describes this as “‘complying with,’ from within,the showing of the sensible itself,” or “seconder” (Thinking of theSensible, 37). See also Mauro Carbone, La visibilité de l’invisible:Merleau-Ponty entre Cézanne et Proust (Hildesheim: Georg OlmsVerlag, 2001), 177 and 185.

63 Cf. Barbaras, Being of Phenomenon, 99n.64 It is in this way that the newness of the present is given: as

negativity, experienced in opening up the future, or Vorhabe (HLP 21),not in the positivity of presence (VI 267/320–21).

65 The full note reads: “[C]e qui est et demande à être: il a àdevenir ce qu’il est” (IP 36, margin, above translation my own).

66 For vision is opened up as a diacritical dimension through thetwo eyes (cf. VI 217/270).

67 There are other invisibles in Bergson’s texts, e.g., unperceivedspatial objects, but these play a minor role (MM 158–61).

68 See Véronique Fóti, Vision’s Invisibles: Philosophical Explorations(Albany: SUNY, 2003), 74.

69 Bergson theorizes concrete perception, or “attentive recognition,”as a form of action and contrasts this to intuition, which detaches fromaction and sees life in terms of dynamic tendencies and rhythms ofduration (EC 176–77/178). Merleau-Ponty distinguishes betweenobjectifying, “profane” vision and the painter’s vision, which sees thevisible “from within” and expresses, instead of representing, the workof invisibility (EM 165/25).

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