A Lacanian Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Embodied Otherness

My Body as an Other

A Lacanian Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Embodied Otherness

Eran Dorfman

I. Phenomenology and the Embodied Constitution of the Other

One of phenomenology’s important challenges is to resolve the paradox of the constitution of the other. This has been articulated already by Edmund Husserl in his fifth Cartesian Meditation: How can I, as a transcendental subject – the origin of everything – constitute the other, whose essence is precisely not to be me? How can I find within myself something that is alien to me? The answer to these questions is given, according to Husserl, by means of my body: not the body as an object among others in the world (Körper), but the body as a living one (Leib), a body that amounts to my own way of perceiving the world and of moving within it. By perceiving other bodies that are functioning and living in the world, I effectuate what Husserl called “analogical apperception” which sees these bodies as the front of other persons in exactly the same way as my own living body is perceived as the front of myself.^[1]

Maurice Merleau-Ponty continues this line of thought and radicalizes it in his Phenomenology of Perception. For him, my embodied existence implies first of all, in contrast to the Cartesian point of view, the opacity of consciousness to itself. The body stands as what consciousness has not chosen, as what precedes it by being its pre-personal pole. Thus, consciousness is discovered as having not only a constitutive capacity, but also a constituted aspect, by way of the body in which it is integrated. This body, as is already stressed by Husserl, is not a detached and objective one, but a living body which exists as inseparable and even indistinguishable from consciousness. As a result, it makes consciousness lose its autonomous god-like power and self-knowledge, but this in order to gain a real possibility of being in the world, a world that is, like consciousness, embodied, sensual, enveloped by the subject and enveloping him or her at the same time.

The entire philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, throughout its different phases, is based upon this double aspect of embodied existence as constitutive and constituted,^[2] which introduces ambiguity at the heart of any presumably objective thought. What are the implications of this ambiguity with regard to otherness? We would expect Merleau-Ponty to use ambiguity in order to explain the subject’s ambivalent attitude towards other subjects in the world, for they, too, are constituted by me and simultaneously constitute me. However, it is interesting to note that, for Merleau-Ponty, embodied existence mainly serves to explain the possibility of the constitution of the other, rather than its actual constitution in concrete and diverse forms. Thus, Merleau-Ponty affirms that “the other can be evident to me because I am not transparent for myself, and because my subjectivity draws its body in its wake”.^[3] Thus the ambiguity of the body does not at all affect the evidence that I have of the other’s presence. We are merged within an otherness that we experience in our own body, and this “internal” otherness, such as my own private past for instance, is to explain and make possible any “external” otherness, which is to say the otherness of other persons: “If my consciousness has a body, why should other bodies not ‘have’ consciousnesses?” (PhP 351).

It is thus first of all the Husserlian question of transcendental solipsism that has to be resolved by means of the body, according to Merleau-Ponty. But once the question of solipsism is resolved, once the possibility of my relations with other persons is retrieved, can we understand how these relations are concretely established? Can we find by these phenomenological means the essence of affection and love, aggression and hate? Merleau-Ponty gives several descriptions of the former pair, but almost none of the latter. This, I would argue, because he places far less stress on the otherness of the system “I-other” and more on its wholeness, that is, on our common inherence in the same world. This world functions according to the same harmony which reigns between the bodily organs: “it is precisely my body which perceives the body of another, and discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world. Henceforth, as the parts of my body together form a system, so my body and the other’s are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon” (PhP 354, translation modified).

Now, if all that is true, where do aggression and violence, which are incontestable phenomena, come from? Why can I not always live harmoniously with other people? Merleau-Ponty seems to consider the problems that might surface within the relationship with the other as derived or secondary phenomena, resulting from the passage from childhood to adult age:

The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematical only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awareness of himself or of others as private subjectivities, nor does he suspect that all of us, himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the world. […] At about twelve years old, says Piaget, the child achieves the cogito and reaches the truths of rationalism. […] Piaget brings the child to a mature outlook as if the thoughts of the adult were self-sufficient and disposed of all contradictions. But, in reality, it must be the case that the child’s outlook is in some way vindicated against the adult’s and against Piaget, and that the unsophisticated thinking of our earliest years remains as an indispensable acquisition underlying that of maturity, if there is to be for the adult one single intersubjective world. (PhP 355)

Merleau-Ponty thus finds in the child the primordial world before the rationalism of objective thought. It is a rather harmonious and peaceful world which is to be the basis of the derived and ulterior one, where the other is actually conceived as an other, as a different being, and which can therefore be conceived as a threat or a potential enemy. There is no violence in the infantile world as Merleau-Ponty describes it, and hostility arises only in a relatively late phase, that of objective thought and of the cogito: “With the cogito begins that struggle between consciousnesses, each one of which, as Hegel says, seeks the death of the other. For the struggle ever to begin, and for each consciousness to be capable of suspecting the alien presences which it negates, all must necessarily have some common ground and be mindful of their peaceful co-existence in the world of childhood” (PhP 355).  

The child often serves as a model in the Phenomenology of Perception, demonstrating a rich, open-minded perception that underlines our everyday objective and quite static one. Merleau-Ponty calls us time and again to revive this primordial perception and arrive at a richer world that would maintain all its colors, and where the separation between the I, the other and worldly objects would be much less accentuated. It is thus possible to regard the Phenomenology of Perception as a prescriptive or therapeutic enterprise that shows us a concealed perception, a secret experience which we are summoned to renew and revitalize in order to arrive at a world in which the interpersonal relationships would not be based upon hostility and struggle for life and death, but rather upon attunement.^[4]

And yet, it seems that the dichotomy between the child’s pre-objective and peaceful world, and the adult’s rationalist and violent one, prevents us from understanding the way that lies between the two. It seems that while growing up we have lost our innocence, that is, our fresh and enchanted perception, and it is only the philosopher, or more precisely the phenomenologist, detached from everyday life, that can live or at least describe this innocence once more, arriving at the things themselves, beyond or below any separation between subject and object, the I and the other.^[5] But is there not a way to obtain a richer perception that would be applicable also to everyday life? And is it not psychoanalysis that we can call on for help in this regard, in order to understand the everyday relationship with the other and its possible change? Let us therefore examine the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan, as it is manifested in his early writings.      

1. II. Psychoanalysis and the Body Image: The Mirror Stage

For Lacan, the constitution of the self and the constitution of the other are linked together through what he names “the mirror stage”. In his 1949 famous “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function”, Lacan describes this decisive step in the creation of the ontological structure of the subject. According to him, it is the helpless baby which enters this stage, totally dependent on others in that it cannot even stand up or walk alone. The baby, then, goes through a process of recognition and identification with its reflection in the mirror. It passes through a “transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image”.^[6] In this way the baby overcomes “the obstructions of his support”, by taking upon itself as an exterior envelope or Gestalt, the “total form of his body, by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage” (E 76). Thus, by assuming an image, the baby overcomes its primordial lack, its total dependency on others. It has no power and therefore tends to precipitate itself and anticipate its lacking power, and the only way to do so is through the identification with its apparently strong and intact mirror image.