Chapter One
The Time of Half-Sleep: Merleau-Ponty between Husserl and Proust
Lived Time
In the chapter on "The Body as Expression, and Speech" in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty cites a famous description of half-sleep given by Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past:
... when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavor to construe from the pattern of its tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece together and give a name to the house in which it lay. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulder-blades, offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, while the unseen walls, shifting and adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirled round it in the dark.... [M]y body, the side upon which I was lying, faithful guardians of a past which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its urn-shaped bowl of Bohemian glass that hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble in my bedroom at Combray, in my grandparents'' house, in those far-distant days which at this moment I imagined to be in the present without being able to picture them exactly.... (PP 211 n. 1/181 n. 2)
According to Merleau-Ponty, the experience described on this page from Proust reveals that "memory is, not the constituting consciousness of the past, but an effort to reopen time on the basis of the implications contained in the present" and that "the body, as our permanent means of ''taking up attitudes'' and thus constructing pseudopresents, is the medium of our communication with time as well as with space" (PP 211/181, trans. modified). In fact, by virtue of the original movement of intentionality that "produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and of our life" (PP xiii/xviii), one''s own body inhabits a spatiotemporal totality. It animates space and time with its presence, and literally incorporates space and time into its experience, where later it can find their traces.
Thus, far from being an intellectual operation, memory emerges from the corporeal experience of lived space and time. This "body''s function in remembering" (PP 211/181) appears, therefore, to be at the foundation of what Merleau-Ponty indicates elsewhere as one of the central philosophical ideas of Proust''s oeuvre: "the envelopment of the past in the present and the presence of lost time" (SNS 45/26).
If we want to penetrate more deeply into the motives behind Merleau-Ponty''s interest in Proust''s work, our attention is thereby drawn to the analysis of temporality which he develops in the Phenomenology of Perception. Concerning this issue, it is also necessary to remember that for Merleau-Ponty "subjectivity, at the level of perception, is nothing but temporality" (PP 276/239) because "the spatial synthesis and the synthesis of the object are founded on this unfolding of time" (PP 277/239) that one''s own body produces. Thus, Merleau-Ponty''s reflection endeavors to underline what the description of the waking body in the Remembrance has shown: "My body takes possession of time; it brings into existence a past and a future for a present; it is not a thing, but creates time instead of submitting to it" (PP 277/240).
How, then, does this time present itself, this time which one''s own body "secretes," as Merleau-Ponty says?
It is precisely this question that Merleau-Ponty chooses to answer in the chapter of Phenomenology of Perception dedicated to "Temporality," in which he is committed to refuting, in its multiple versions, the common notion of time as a "succession of instances of now" as well as that of a "non-temporal subject": "The problem is how to make time explicit as it comes into being and makes itself evident [en train d''appara?tre], time at all times underlying the notion of time, not as an object of our knowledge, but as a dimension of our being" (PP 475/415).
It is a question of describing the originary experience of time. Merleau-Ponty conceives it as temporality lived by the subject inside his or her own "field of presence," enclosing these two horizons which, inspired by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, as we know, calls "horizon of retention" and "horizon of protention." Merleau-Ponty also specifies that what Husserl understands by the notion of retention is not "voluntary memory"-that is, the fruit of intellectual synthesis by which the past event is deliberately evoked-but what we could call the "lived past," which subtends this voluntary memory and which is still retained in the field of presence. Also, as Merleau-Ponty explains in Phenomenology of Perception: "when I rediscover the concrete origin of the memory ... it is, therefore, because I recapture [rejoins] time that is lost: because, from the moment in question to my present, the chain of retentions and the interlocking horizons coming one after the other insure an unbroken continuity" (PP 478/418). Is it not, then, a question of analyzing, in other terms, "the envelopment of the past in the present and the presence of lost time" that Merleau-Ponty discovers in Proust''s work? In fact, Proust''s intention is precisely to describe the lived temporality from which Marcel feels the involuntary memory emerge-the involuntary memory which, as Paul Ricoeur emphasizes, "opens up the recaptured time."
Merleau-Ponty brings this idea of an implication of the past-and, symmetrically, of the future-in the present to the Husserlian notion of operative intentionality (fungierende Intentionalit?t), that is, to the antepredicative relation which, in unifying the individual with the world, inaugurates lived time. In fact, by virtue of this operative intentionality, which Merleau-Ponty finds again in the Heideggerian concept of transcendence, "[m]y present outruns itself in the direction of an immediate future and an immediate past and impinges upon them where they actually are, namely in the past and in the future themselves" (PP 478/418).
This description of the implication of the past and of the future in the present also shows us-in addition to the character of transcendence-the character of continuity in which time is wrapped in our originary experience. Critical of Bergson''s thesis on this point, Merleau-Ponty nevertheless affirms that continuity, though it is an "essential phenomenon" (PP 481/420), does not however suffice to explain time, but calls for clarification in its turn: this continuity must be brought back precisely to the transcendence which pushes the present to surpass itself toward the past and toward the future. In Merleau-Ponty''s conception, time thus unfolds itself as a single movement, the different moments of which flow into each other. From this fact, rather than erasing each other, the different moments mutually recall and reaffirm each other-starting from the privileged field of the present-in a sort of coexistence which is habitually hidden by the idea of time as "a succession of instances of now." It results from this that time, according to Merleau-Ponty, is one unto itself; and, in his opinion, this is what expresses its "mythical personifications." In this way, in accordance with Proust''s tendency to make time a "personified entity," as Ricoeur notes, which will reveal itself more and more as the main character of Proust''s work, Merleau-Ponty affirms that "[w]e are not saying that time is for someone, which would once more be a case of arraying it out, and immobilizing it. We are saying that time is someone, or that temporal dimensions, in so far as they perpetually overlap, bear each other out and ever confine themselves to making explicit what was implied in each, being collectively expressive of that one single explosion or thrust which is subjectivity itself" (PP 482-83/422).
The circularity of temporal dimensions comes to light in this manner in lived temporality, a circularity analogous to that which Florival notes in Proust''s work: "the past is realized through the future that reveals and unfolds all of its possibilities. A past, the presentness [l''actualit?] of which had not been recognized in its time, looms up in the light of present temporality. Thus, the reversibility of time is finally obtained." It is probably this manner of posing the problem which allows Merleau-Ponty to not see the opposition between the "intermittences" of Proustian time and his own phenomenological conception of temporal continuity.
But the circularity of temporal dimensions inside of lived temporality cannot be understood if one conceives of ultimate subjectivity (where there is the consciousness of time) as "intratemporal," that is-in Heideggerian terms-as an "innerworldly being" (innerweltliches Seiendes) which is arrayed out in time. In this case, in fact, temporal dimensions could present themselves only as reciprocally antagonistic, because it would be impossible for an irremediably intratemporal subjectivity to develop the cohesion among these dimensions which makes their relation circular. This does not, however, situate subjectivity in a sort of eternity. Merleau-Ponty, on the contrary, emphasizes that "we must understand time as the subject and the subject as time" (PP 483/422). In this chiasm, the two formulas clarify each other mutually. The first intends to indicate that the "object time" or "constituted time" of intratemporality (that is, time as a "succession of instances of now" or as a "developed series of presents") is made possible precisely by the "subject time" or "constituting time" that presents itself "as an indivisible thrust and transition" (PP 484/423); it subtends object time and coagulates into it. In return, the second formula aims to underline the fact that subjectivity, insofar as it is enrooted in a field of presence, expresses its own "indivisible power" in "distinct [i.e., intratemporal] manifestations," but at the same time-from the fact of the movement of transcendence which characterizes it as temporality-it does not cease to recapture these manifestations in developing their coexistence and circularity.
In this duality, Merleau-Ponty sees a light bursting forth: that of the "relationship of self to self" (PP 487/426). He then continues by affirming that "it is through temporality that there can be, without contradiction, ipseity, significance and reason" (PP 487/426).
The duality of the phenomenon that we have just described is expressed in the concept of temporalization, which designates the movement by which lived time springs forth: the subject finds itself situated in this movement (of which it is not the author), but can at the same time take on this situation. Thus, Merleau-Ponty considers that the concept of temporalization makes possible the elucidation of the paradox that Husserl calls the "passive synthesis" of time.
Time and Subject
Fifteen years after the publication of Phenomenology of Perception, in April 1960, Merleau-Ponty drafted one of the most dense and most pregnant working notes of The Visible and the Invisible-entitled "''Indestructible'' Past, and intentional analytic-and ontology"-beginning with the following words:
The Freudian idea of the unconscious and the past as "indestructible," as "intemporal" = elimination of the common idea of time as a "series of Erlebnisse"-There is an architectonic past. cf. Proust: the true hawthorns are the hawthorns of the past-Restore this life without Erlebnisse, without interiority ... which is, in reality, the "monumental" life, Stiftung, initiation.
This "past" belongs to a mythical time, to the time before time, to the prior life, "farther than India and China"-(VI 296/243)
By this exordium, Merleau-Ponty expresses his intention of rethinking the Husserlian description of time-and, consequently, the themes of the continuity of time and subjectivity as temporality-in supplying the ontology of brute sensible being with motifs of reflection drawn once again from Proust''s Remembrance, as well as Freudian psychoanalysis.
In fact, the "ontological rehabilitation of the sensible" (S 210/167) that Merleau-Ponty had announced in "The Philosopher and His Shadow" also has consequences for the conception of time and subjectivity, and ends by bringing Merleau-Ponty to criticize the way in which Husserl himself treats these problems.
As another working note from The Visible and the Invisible affirms, "[t]he sensible, Nature, transcend the past present distinction, realize from within a passage from one into the other Existential eternity" (VI 321/267). The dimension of the erste Natur which underlies the concept of Nature that dominates beginning with Descartes is, in other words, the dimension of the erste Geschichtlichkeit, in which palpitates a time that is not "the serial time, that of ''acts'' and decisions" (VI 222/168), but rather a time characterized by the enjambment of simultaneity "upon succession and diachronics" (S 154/123). It deals with the time that Merleau-Ponty now calls precisely "mythical": a time, he explains, "where certain events ''in the beginning'' maintain a continued efficacity" (VI 43/24).
But the ontological rehabilitation of the sensible does not limit itself to transcending the distinction between past and present; it also leads us back to this side of the distinction between time and space. The sensible, in fact-as an indivisible stuff which interweaves things, animals, and others at the same time as our body-opens us to them in a simultaneity which is just as much temporal as spatial, as the innovations of contemporary painting have revealed. And the sensible makes the latency of the elsewhere, as well as that of past and future, erupt in the here and now, as happens to Marcel with the rediscovered hawthorns.
Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that our perceptual opening to Being is, thus, the "foundation of space and of time" (VI 244/191, Merleau-Ponty''s emphasis): it is to this that the concept of Stiftung, evoked in the working note cited at the beginning of this section, alludes.
In its turn, this Husserlian concept refers to that of "institution," which Merleau-Ponty had introduced in his writings in the first half of the 1950s to indicate how sense is not constituted by consciousness but autoconstitutes itself inside of a system that is structured diacritically. It is precisely according to this acceptation that Merleau-Ponty now defines time-but he conceives of space in the same fashion-as "an institution, a system of equivalences" (VI 238/184) whose sense is not constituted by our intentional activity, as Phenomenology of Perception had already shown, but autoconstitutes itself, as Merleau-Ponty now adds, inside the carnal fabric of differentiations of which we are [dont nous "en sommes"]. As seeing-visibles, we are in fact inherent in a visible present which, all the while inhabiting us, announces and opens up to us simultaneously other invisible dimensions of space and time, compossibles in sofar as they are all levied against Being as "universal dimensionality" (VI 289/236). As Merleau-Ponty implies more than once, it is thus on the model of the ontology of the visible that this fabric of spatiotemporal differentiations should be described. What in fact does simultaneity indicate, if not the chiasm of presence and absence sketched by the relation between visible and invisible? And how, then, does the relation-on which the institution feeds-between the sedimented presence of the instituted element and the latency of possibilities of the instituting element appear, except as the chiasmic relation between visible and invisible?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE THINKING OF THE SENSIBLEby Mauro Carbone Copyright © 2004 by Northwestern University Press . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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