Carbone, Mauro An Unprecedented Deformation Marcel Proust and The Sensible Ideas PDF

PHILOSOPHY
mauro carbone
c a r b on e
French novelist Marcel Proust made famous involuntary memory, a pecu-
liar kind of memory that works whether one is willing or not and that gives
a transformed recollection of past experience. More than a century later,
the Proustian notion of involuntary memory has not been fully explored An Unprecedented
An Unprecedented Deformation
nor its implications understood. By providing clarifying examples taken
from Prousts novel and by commenting on them using the work of French
philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Italian philoso-
Deformation
marcel proust and the sensible ideas
pher Mauro Carbone interprets involuntary memory as the human faculty
providing the involuntary creation of our ideas through the transformation
of past experience. This rethinking of the traditional way of conceiving Niall Keane, Translator
ideas and their genesis as separated from sensible experienceas has been
done in Western thought since Platoallows the author to promote a new
theory of knowledge, one which is best exemplified via literature and art
much more than philosophy.
Mauro Carbone is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Milan,

Italy. He is the author of several books, including The Thinking of the Sensible:
Merleau-Pontys A-Philosophy.
Niall Keane is a postdoctoral researcher at the Husserl-Archives: Centre

for Phenomenology in Leuven, Belgium.
a volume in the suny series in

contemporary italian philosophy
Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors and

contemporary continental philosophy
Dennis J. Schmidt, editor
SUNY
P R E S S
state university of new york press
SUNY
SUNY SERIES IN CONTEMPOR ARY ITALIAN PHILOSOPHY
Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors
SUNY SERIES IN CONTEMPOR ARY CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

An Unprecedented
Deformation
mauro carbone
Translated by Niall Keane

Published by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carbone, Mauro, 1956

[Deformazione senza precedenti. English]
An unprecedented deformation : Marcel Proust and the sensible ideas /
Mauro Carbone ; translated by Niall Keane.
p. cm. (SUNY series in contemporary Italian philosophy)
(SUNY series in contemporary Continental philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3021-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-3020-1 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Proust, Marcel, 18711922. Du ct de chez Swann. 2. Idea
(Philosophy) 3. Intuition. 4. Philosophy, Modern20th century. I. Title.
PQ2631.R63Z54548213 2010
843'.912dc22 2009021080
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Abbreviations vii
Introduction
Seek? More Than That: Create 1
Chapter 1
Nature: Variations on the Theme
Why are there several samples of each thing? 13
Chapter 2
The Mythical Time of the Ideas:
Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze as Readers of Proust 23
Chapter 3
Deformation and Recognition:
Proust in the Reversal of Platonism 33
Chapter 4
The Words of the Oracle:
Merleau-Ponty and the Philosophy of Freudianism 49
Chapter 5
How Can One Recognize What One Did Not Know?:
Mnemosyne and the Art of the Twentieth Century 59
vi CONTENTS
Appendix
Love and Music: Theme and Variations 69
Notes 83
Index 111
Abbreviations
M. MERLEAU-PONTY
AD Les Aventures de la dialectique (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1955); Adven-

tures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1973).
EP Eloge de la Philosophie et autres essais (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1960);
In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1963).
IP Linstitution/La passivit. Notes de cours au Collge de France (1954
1955), Prface de Claude Lefort textes tablis par Dominique Darmail-
lacq, Claude Lefort et Stphanie Mnas. (Paris: ditions Belin, 2003).
N La Nature: Notes Cours du Collge de France, 195657 (Paris: Seuil,
1995); Nature: Course Notes From the Collge de France, trans. Robert
Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003).
NC Notes de Cours 19591961, Prface de Claude Lefort, texte tabli par
Stphanie Mnas. (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1996).
OE Lil et lesprit (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1964); Eye and Mind, in The
Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen Johnson (Evanston: North-
western University Press, 1993), 121149.
PH Prface A. Hesnard, Lvre de Freud et son importance pour le monde
moderne (Paris: Payot, 1960), 510; Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis:
Preface to Hesnards LOeuvre de Freud, trans. Alden L. Fisher in Review
of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 18 (1982), 6772.
PP Phnomnologie de la Perception (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1945); Phe-
nomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1962, revised 1981).
vii
viii ABBREVIATIONS
PriP Le primat de la perception et ses consquences philosophiques (Lagrasse:

ditions Verdier, 1996); The Primacy of Perception, ed. J. M. Edie (Evan-
ston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
RC Rsums de Cours: Collge de France 19521960 (Paris: ditions Gallimard,
1968); Themes from the Lectures at the Collge de France, 19521960,
trans. John ONeill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
S Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960); Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evan-
ston: Northwestern University Press, 1964).
SC La structure du comportement (Paris, P.U.F., 1942); The Structure of
Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fischer (London: Metheun, 1965).
SNS Sens et Non-Sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948); Sense and Non-Sense, trans.
Hubert Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1964).
VI Le Visible et lInvisible texte tabli par Claude Lefort accompagn dun
avertissement et dune postface (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); The Visible
and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1968).
GILLES DELEUZE
CC Critique et clinique (Paris: ditions Minuit, 1993); Essays Critical and

Clinical, trans. Daniel Smith and Michael Greco (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1997).
DR Diffrence et rptition (Paris: P.U.F., 1968); Difference and Repetition,
trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
FBLS Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Editions de la diffrence,
1981); Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
LS Logique du sens (Paris: ditions Minuit, 1969); The Logic of Sense, trans.
Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press,
1990).
PS Marcel Proust et les signes (Paris: P.U.F., 1964, re-edited in 1970 and
1976); Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2000).
MARCEL PROUST
R la recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols., eds. Pierre Clarac and Andr

Ferr, Bibliothque de la Pliade (Paris: Gallimard, 1954); Remem-
brance of Things Past, 3 vols., trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kil-
martin, and Andreas Mayor (London: Penguin Books, 1983).
Introduction
Seek? More Than That: Create.
I propose here to follow to the letter the long and celebrated passage from the
final part of the first chapter of Marcel Prousts Recherche: that part which con-
tains what has come to be known under the title: Resurrection of Combray
through involuntary memory (R 1, 522/1033). Here is the passage on which I
would like to focus.
II y avait dj bien des annes que, de Combray, tout ce qui ntait pas
le thtre et le drame de mon coucher, nexistait plus pour moi, quand un
jour dhiver, comme je rentrais la maison, ma mre, voyant que javais
froid, me proposa de me faire prendre, contre mon habitude, un peu de th.
Je refusai dabord et, je ne sais pourquoi, me ravisai. Elle envoya chercher
un de ces gteaux courts et dodus appels Petites Madeleines qui semblent
avoir t mouls dans la valve rainure dune coquille de Saint-Jacques. Et
bientt, machinalement, accabl par la morne journe et la perspective dun
triste lendemain, je portai mes lvres une cuillere du th o javais laiss
samollir un morceau de madeleine. Mais linstant mme o la gorge mle
des miettes du gteau toucha mon palais, je tressaillis, attentif ce qui se
passait dextraordinaire en moi. Un plaisir dlicieux mavait envahi, isol,
sans la notion de sa cause. Il mavait aussitt rendu les vicissitudes de la vie
indiffrentes, ses dsastres inoffensifs, sa brivet illusoire, de la mme faon
quopre lamour, en me remplissant dune essence prcieuse : ou plutt cette
essence ntait pas en moi, elle tait moi. Javais cess de me sentir mdiocre,
contingent, mortel. Do avait pu me venir cette puissante joie ? Je sentais
quelle tait lie au got du th et du gteau, mais quelle le dpassait infini-
ment, ne devait pas tre de mme nature. Do venait-elle ? Que signifiait-
elle ? O lapprhender ? Je bois une seconde gorge o je ne trouve rien de
plus que dans la premire, une troisime qui mapporte un peu moins que la
seconde. Il est temps que je marrte, la vertu du breuvage semble diminuer.
Il est clair que la vrit que je cherche nest pas en lui, mais en moi. Il ly a
veille, mais ne la connat pas, et ne peut que rpter indfiniment, avec de
1
2 AN UNPRECEDENTED DEFORMATION
moins en moins de force, ce mme tmoignage que je ne sais pas interprter

et que je veux au moins pouvoir lui redemander et retrouver intact, ma
disposition, tout lheure, pour un claircissement dcisif. Je pose la tasse
et me tourne vers mon esprit. Cest lui de trouver la vrit. Mais comment
? Grave incertitude, toutes les fois que lesprit se sent dpass par lui-mme;
quand lui, le chercheur, est tout ensemble le pays obscur o il doit chercher
et o tout son bagage ne lui sera de rien. Chercher ? pas seulement : crer. Il
est en face de quelque chose qui nest pas encore et que seul il peut raliser,
puis faire entrer dans sa lumire.
Et je recommence me demander quel pouvait tre cet tat inconnu, qui
napportait aucune preuve logique, mais lvidence de sa flicit, de sa ralit
devant laquelle les autres svanouissaient. Je veux essayer de le faire rappa-
ratre. Je rtrograde par la pense au moment o je pris la premire cuillere
de th. Je retrouve le mme tat, sans une clart nouvelle. Je demande mon
esprit un effort de plus, de ramener encore une fois la sensation qui senfuit. Et,
pour que rien ne brise llan dont il va tcher de la ressaisir, jcarte tout obsta-
cle, toute ide trangre, jabrite mes oreilles et mon attention contre les bruits
de la chambre voisine. Mais sentant mon esprit qui se fatigue sans russir, je
le force au contraire prendre cette distraction que je lui refusais, penser
autre chose, se refaire avant une tentative suprme. Puis une deuxime fois,
je fais le vide devant lui, je remets en face de lui la saveur encore rcente de
cette premire gorge et je sens tressaillir en moi quelque chose qui se dplace,
voudrait slever, quelque chose quon aurait dsancr, une grande profon-
deur; je ne sais ce que cest, mais cela monte lentement ; jprouve la rsistance
et jentends la rumeur des distances traverses.
Certes, ce qui palpite ainsi au fond de moi, ce doit tre limage, le souve-
nir visuel, qui, li cette saveur, tente de la suivre jusqu moi. Mais il se dbat
trop loin, trop confusment; peine si je perois le reflet neutre o se confond
linsaisissable tourbillon des couleurs remues; mais je ne peux distinguer la
forme, lui demander, comme au seul interprte possible, de me traduire le
tmoignage de sa contemporaine, de son insparable compagne, la saveur, lui
demander de mapprendre de quelle circonstance particulire, de quelle po-
que du pass il sagit.
Arrivera-t-il jusqu la surface de ma claire conscience, ce souvenir,
linstant ancien que lattraction dun instant identique est venue de si loin
solliciter, mouvoir, soulever tout au fond de moi ? Je ne sais. Maintenant je
ne sens plus rien, il est arrt, redescendu peut-tre; qui sait sil remontera
jamais de sa nuit ? Dix fois il me faut recommencer, me pencher vers lui.
Et chaque fois la lchet qui nous dtourne de toute tche difficile, de toute
uvre importante, ma conseill de laisser cela, de boire mon th en pensant
simplement mes ennuis daujourdhui, mes dsirs de demain qui se lais-
sent remcher sans peine.
Et tout dun coup le souvenir mest apparu.
Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was
comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any
existence for me, when one day in winter, on my return home, my mother,
seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take.
INTRODUCTION 3
I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She
sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called petites madeleines,
which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop
shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect
of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I
had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with
the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped,
intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite
pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no sug-
gestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent
to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusorythis new sensation having
had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or
rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel medio-
cre, contingent, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful
joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake,
but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could, no, indeed, be of the
same nature. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and
apprehend it?
I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first,
then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the
potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the
cup but in myself. The drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and
can only repeat indefinitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the
same message which I cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call
it forth again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my
final enlightenment. I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone
can discover the truth. But how: What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the
mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark
region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will
avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something
which does not yet exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance,
which it alone can bring into the light of day.
And I begin to ask myself what it could have been, this unremembered
state which brought with it no logical proof, but the indisputable evidence,
of its felicity, its reality, and in whose presence other states of consciousness
melted and vanished. I decide to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my
thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea. I redis-
cover the same state, illuminated by no fresh light. I ask my mind to make
one further effort, to bring back once more the fleeting sensation. And so
that nothing may interrupt it in its course I shut out every obstacle, every
extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all attention against the sound
from the next room. And then, feeling that my mind is tiring itself without
having any success to report, I compel it for a change to enjoy the distraction
which I have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself
before making a final effort. And then for the second time I clear an empty
space in front of it; I place in position before my minds eye the still recent
taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something
that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise, something that has been
embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I
can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo
of great spaces traversed.
Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be
the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to
follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too confused
and chaotic; scarcely can I perceive the neutral glow into which the elusive
whirling medley of stirred-up colours is fused, and I cannot distinguish its
form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate for me the
evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste, cannot ask
it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, from what period
in my past life.
Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this mem-
ory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has
travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of
my being? I cannot tell. Now I feel nothing; it has stopped, has perhaps sunk
back into its darkness, from which who can say whether it will ever rise again?
Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down over the abyss. And each
time the cowardice that deters us from every difficult task, every important
enterprise, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think
merely of the worries of to-day and my hopes for to-morrow, which can be
brooded over painlessly.
And suddenly the memory revealed itself. (R 1, 4446/4850)
I would like to develop my textual analysis of these pages from a philosophical

point of view. As I have said, the above pages have been traditionally designated
as those which detail the discovery of involuntary memory. On the other hand,
we can assert that they first of all describe an experience of eidetic intuition: the
experience by which the protagonist of the Recherche tastes again the essence
of the village where he spent his childhood holidays, an experience that fur-
nishes him with the idea of this village, i.e., offering him, as Gilles Deleuze
writes, [t]he in-itself of Combray (DR, 115/85; see also PS, 7076/61). Along
with Deleuze, we could define this essence as mythical (DR, 119/88), not only
sought but created, as Prousts Narrator himself admits, as well as being retro-
jected into a past which was never present (ibid., 115/85), into the pure past
of the Ideas (ibid., 119/88). Yet the absence of all logical proof, in the feeling
of the all-powerful joy that accompanies the intuition of that idea, certainly
does not amount to denying the indisputable evidence of its felicity, its real-
ity, and in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished.
Indeed, the mythical essence intuited here was not simply, as the Narrator
informs us, in me but was me.
It is well known that, since the time of his own studies, Marcel Proust
had been interested in the theories (particularly the aesthetic ones) of Arthur
Schopenhauer,1 whose influence on Proust has been stressed by several
commentators,2 and is, in my opinion, overestimated by many of them. It
remains true that the third book of The World as Will and Representationthe
INTRODUCTION 5
one devoted to an analysis of the arts and significantly entitled: The Represen-
tation Independent of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. The Platonic Idea: The
Object of Artcontains a section which focuses on eidetic intuition and which
is important for us to consider here, namely, section thirty-four.
Similarly to the essence of Combray, which the Proustian Narrator felt as
being one and the same with his own essence, in this section Schopenhauer
observes: When the Idea appears, subject and object can no longer be dis-
tinguished in it, because the Idea [ . . . ] arises only when subject and object
reciprocally fill and penetrate each other completely.3 Therefore, according to
another passage from the same section, in eidetic intuition,
[w]e lose ourselves entirely in this object, [ . . . ] we forget our individuality, our
will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object,
so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it,
and thus we are not able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the
two have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by
a single image of perception.4
In other words, eidetic intuition brings about the suspension of my individual-

ityand thus, Schopenhauer underlines, of all relation to the will5granting
an experience of indistinctness from the object, which is thus raised to its own
eidos, and is offered to the contemplation that I am allowed to have, since I am,
in turn, raised to the state of a pure subject of knowing.6
Likewise, the Proustian Narrator experiences that the essence of Combray,
which is one and the same with his own, exceeds his feeling of being mediocre,
contingent, mortal, i.e., precisely, his individuality. However, far from raising
it, in a Platonistic way, to the state of a subject of pure knowing, the intuition
of such an essence is that of the Narrator himselfProust specifiesas the
dark region through which [he] must go seeking and where all [his] equipment
will avail [him] nothing. In other words, the essence that is myself opacifies
my being a subject,7 as Proust indicates, highlighting, with respect to Schopen-
hauer, an anti-Platonistic turn in his description of eidetic intuition.
However, let us dwell further on this description. It is a description, as we
read, of an instantaneous and extraordinary experience, in a certain manner
violent. Schopenhauer himself affirms, in his turn, that the transition that is
possible, but to be regarded only as an exception, from the common knowledge
of particular things to knowledge of the Idea takes place suddenly [pltzlich].8
Based on the Proustian description, we could define the experience in
which an eidetic intuition is given to us as the experience of shock, a term that,
as is well known, was first used by Walter Benjamin in connection with Proust.9
However, let us once again attentively read the most significant passage from
the Proustian description:
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate
than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary
thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses,
something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.
This passage enables us to specify that the shock in question is to be quali-

fied, with Erwin Straus and Henri Maldiney, as an aesthetic-pathetic shock,10
since it occurs by means of an encounter with the sensible (the warm liquid
. . . touched my palate), which is never given without its own affective-tonality
(an exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses), as Husserls phenomenology
had already pointed out.11
The aesthetic-pathetic shock described by Proust breaks with the obvious-
ness of the habitual comportment, which he characterizes with the expression
mechanically [machinalement]: this is the obviousness that Husserl classifies
as the natural attitude and which, he explains, leads us to consider the world
as there for me, as on hand [vorhanden], as a world existing beforehand
which is endowed with objective properties.12 On the one hand, we can thus
affirm that the eidetic intuition described by Proust occurs as an aesthetic-
pathetic shock, which reveals its particular epochalizing merit, the one already
suggested by Schopenhauer.13 On the other hand, one must keep in mind that
such a merit renders necessary the confrontation of the Proustian description
with the formulation given to the epoch by Husserl himself, and before him
by Descartes.
In order to problematize the natural attitude toward the world, it is well
known that Husserl proposes to perform what he defines as a phenomeno-
logical epoch, which he explicitly connects to Descartes attempt to doubt
universally.14 In fact, Husserl refers to Descartes Third Meditation, which starts
as follows:
I will now shut my eyes, stop my ears, and withdraw all my senses. I will elim-
inate from my thoughts all images of bodily things, or rather, since this is
hardly possible, I will regard all such images as vacuous, false and worthless. I
will converse with myself and scrutinize myself more deeply; and in this way I
will attempt to achieve, little by little, a more intimate knowledge of myself.15
Descartes above statement seems to be echoed in a part of the passage

from the Recherche that we have been considering, viz. in the description of
the repeated efforts on the part of the Narrator to provide an explanation of
the meaning of the aesthetic-pathetic shock (moreover, it should be noted that
the original French term for explanation, referring importantly to Cartesian
clarity, is claircissement, usually translated into English as enlightenment,
whose roots appear once more in the same passage).
The Narrators first attempts had at least enabled him to overcome the
stock notions of objectivism (PS, 37/27) in virtue of which one tends to
attribute to the object the meaning that blossomed in the encounter with it; a
prejudice that characterizes what Husserl calls the natural attitude. Yet here
INTRODUCTION 7
one must be careful: what had led the Narrator to this conclusion was not the
success of these efforts, but rather, as he inferred, their failure: . . . the potion
is losing its magic. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but
in myself. And, as he repeats on several occasions, his efforts had enabled him
only to rediscover the same state, illuminated by no fresh light [clart].
At this point, he then decides that such an attempt should make a qualita-
tive leap: I ask my mind [esprit] to make one further effort. And it is precisely
at this pointin which it is a question of underlining this qualitative leapthat
the sentence of Descartes, which we have previously referred to, finds its own
echo in Proust, produced not only from the analogies between the described
situations, but also by some lexical occurrences. In fact, Proust writes: And so
that nothing may interrupt it [i.e., the fleeting sensation] in its course I shut
out every obstacle, every extraneous idea, I stop my ears and inhibit all atten-
tion against the sound from the next room.16
Moreover, it is important to remember that the attempt reported by Des-
cartes in the previously quoted sentence is followed by a statement which is
decisive for the history of the Western thought, namely, I am a thing that
thinks.17 On the other hand, the Proustian Narrators attempt does not bear
any fruit: my mind [esprit] is tiring itself without having any success to report.
Hence, it could be said that Proust wanted to re-echo the Cartesian operation
in order to refute explicitly its efficacy. Immediately after, however, the Narra-
tor introduces a new attempt to carry out this operation, announcing: for the
second time I clear an empty space in front of it [my mind]. Yet Proust himself
had already observed in the Introduction to his translation of The Bible of
Amiens by John Ruskin, . . . the sophism of freedom of indifference was picked
apart long ago. The writer who constantly creates a void in his mind, thinking to
free it from any external influence in order to be sure of remaining individual,
yields unwittingly to a sophism just as nave.18
Needless to say, then, that the Proustian Narrators second attempt is also
doomed to failure, just like the successive ones, [t]en times over I must essay
the task, must lean down over the abyss. And each time the cowardice that
deters us from every difficult task, every important enterprise, has urged me to
leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of to-
day and my hopes for to-morrow, which can be brooded over painlessly.
Yet still the Narrator finally announces, [a]nd suddenly the memory
revealed itself, without Proust having stressed any connection with the efforts
to which the Narrator had subjected himself. Hence, it is precisely when the Nar-
rator gives up activating his own attempts that his memory, finally, appears.
In any event, it is not only the different consequences of the attempts by
the two protagonists which distinguish the Proustian description from that of
Descartes. Taking up the subtle considerations of Gilles Deleuze again, we can
affirm that these efforts also differ, and especially so, with regard to their respec-
tive motivations. For Descartes, it is to achieve, little by little, a more intimate
knowledge of myself, while for the Proustian Narrator it is the fundamental
encounter with something in the world [which] forces us to think, as Deleuze

puts it, clearly re-echoing section forty-nine of the Critique of Judgment (DR,
182/139; see also PS, 25, 122/16, 100).19
It is in Prousts formulation, then, that Deleuze sees traced an image of
thought in opposition to that of philosophy . . . philosophy of the rationalist
type (PS, 115/94) and aims at those presuppositions which nourish the for-
mulation impressed on the issue of the epoch by both Descartes and Husserl.
Such presuppositionsDeleuze explainsconsist in attributing to men a
benevolence of thought, a natural love of truth (ibid., 24/16), i.e., a spontane-
ously philosophical tendency. As Deleuze maintains, it is precisely on such pre-
suppositions that the method of the philosophy in question is based. According
to this philosophyin his opinionfrom a certain viewpoint, the search for
truth would be the most natural and the easiest; the decision to undertake it
and the possession of a method capable of overcoming the external influences
that distract the mind from its vocation and cause it to take the false for the true
. . . (ibid., 115116/94).
On the other hand, we saw that the Proustian Narrator acknowledges feel-
ing willingly ready to surrender to the cowardice which urges him to leave
the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of to-day
and my hopes for to-morrow, which can be brooded over painlessly. Or, to take
up a term suggested by Deleuze once more, Proust describes the spontaneous
human tendency toward misosophy (DR, 182/139), a tendency from which
only the fundamental encounter with something [which] forces us to think
can distract us.
Looking at it more closely, it is precisely such an encounter, which pro-
duces what I have defined, recalling Benjamin, as an aesthetic-pathetic shock
(ibid.). Retrieving the observations of Schopenhauer quoted at the beginning
and in particular that according to which the subject (the perceiver) and the
object (the perceived) prove to be inseparable from one another in the eidetic
intuitionit seems possible to maintain that the aesthetic-pathetic shock, by
producing amazement in our encounter with the sensible, causes the dispos-
session of the reciprocal distinction between the active and passive poles of
perception, i.e., it suspends both habit and will.
If this aesthetic-pathetic shock recovers the epochalizing merit, this merit
does not consist in a suspension of the sensible perspective of the doxa in the
name of a spiritual or intellectual perspective, which could be deemed truer,
but in a suspension of the obviousness of the sensible perspective in the sensible
itself, so that in it the vision of the essences can be given. Put otherwise, by
doing so the sensible is traversed by an eidetic intuition, which is one and the
same with this suspension. In fact, as Proust taught us and as Deleuze under-
lines, the essences dwell in dark regions, not in the temperate zones of the clear
and the distinct (PS, 122/100).
As far as Husserl is concerned, he certainly does not seem to understand
the epochI refer here to the epoch of the surrounding world, i.e., to the
INTRODUCTION 9
transcendental epochin a spiritualistic sense.20 Nevertheless, Husserl tends

to characterize the epoch performed with respect to our natural attitude, in
strongly subjective terms, as an unnatural, voluntary attitude,21 rather than
proceeding to examine what can suspend both habit and will. However, if it is
deemed that the disinterested spectator, reduced in the epoch, [is] a meta-
physical fiction, no less than the panoramic spectator in the name of which sci-
ence claimed to speak about the world itself and its laws,22 then it is necessary
to take seriously Merleau-Pontys invitation to think to the end the passivity of
our activity (VI, 274/221).
The present work tries to respond to this invitation in a direction opened
up by Merleau-Ponty himself. As is well known, the pages devoted to the
Recherche that interrupt The Visible and the Invisible begin with the assertion
that, [n]o one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the
visible and the invisible, in describing an idea that is not the contrary of the
sensible, that is its lining and its depth (VI, 195/149). In other words, Merleau-
Ponty attributes to Proust a characterization of the ideas thatlike the one of
love incarnated in the petite phrase of Vinteuilappear to be inseparable from
their sensible presentation and, therefore, differently from the ideas of the
intelligence, are impossible to isolate as positive entities that can be actively
grasped. This is why Merleau-Ponty interprets this Proustian characteriza-
tion in a substantially anti-Platonistic sense, as he had done previously, again
in the notes on the Recherche prepared for the course of 196061, under the
title Cartesian Ontology and the Ontology of Today (NC, 191198)23: notes
which are fundamental insofar as they trace the developments that the pages
devoted to the same argument in The Visible and the Invisible would have fol-
lowed, had it not been for his sudden death.
In the constant attention that Merleau-Ponty devotes to Proust, here is the
principal motive that guides his reflection in the later phase of his work: with
respect to an appropriate philosophical formulation of the mutated rela-
tionship with ourselves, with others, with things, with the worldultimately
a mutated relationship with Beingwhich Merleau-Ponty sees at work in
our epoch, a different description of the relationship between the sensible
and the intelligible becomes decisive, i.e., a new theory of ideas. According
to Merleau-Ponty, it was Proust, more than any other, who pushed in such
a direction.
It is well known that Deleuze, just like Merleau-Ponty, found in the Recher-
che a constant point of reference for his own philosophical reflections. However,
it should also be stressed that Deleuzes own book on Proust and, even before
that, the article which preceded it in Revue de Mtaphysique et de Morale,24 were
published a few years after the course of 196061 in which Merleau-Pontys
reflections on the Recherche had been widely developed. So, if one considers
that the Proustian conception of the ideaor essenceoccupies in its turn
a crucial position in Deleuzes book, it becomes easy to understand why, in
the present book, the chapter that examines Merleau-Pontys most extreme
attempts to retrieve a thought of the sensible idea in the work of Proust is fol-
lowed by a chapter that both compares and puts in dialogue these reflections
with those given by Deleuze on the same themes, in order to seek possible ways
of developing them.
Yet, in order to investigate such ways, another direction is no less important,
namely, that which Deleuze starts off with while measuring himself against the
Platonic concept of eidosof form, idea or essencein his attempt to focus
on the task of reversing Platonism, a task which Nietzsche has bequeathed
to the thought of our time. Hence, it is first of all Deleuzes programmatic text,
originally entitled Renverser le platonisme (LS, 292324/253279), to which
we will make further reference. In light of this text, the idea which for Proust
is inseparable from its own manifestations is specified as form which is not
given first, but together with its own sensible deformations: the only ones which
can offer us a presentation, albeit indirect, of that idea. In its turn, the form
so conceived forces us to reconsider, in the same direction, the meaning of
resemblance and recognition, which no longer find, in a preliminary model,
the reference on which to found themselves. By exploring the mystery of a
recognition without resemblance, also in this case Proust also appears to have
gone very far. Yet to explore this mystery means, in other words, to wonder
about the question of knowing how it is possible to recognize what one did not
know. Hence, the ancient problem of Platos Meno returns with the questions it
raises with regard to the genesis of the ideai.e., of the transformation of the
particular into the universaland to the role that memory plays in this genesis,
the configuration of this memory, as well as the particular nature of the time in
which the ideas appear to live.
Consequently, based on the Proustian conception of the sensible idea, this
present work endeavors to measure itself against such questions via a twofold
confrontation. On the one hand, we intend to compare the thought of Merleau-
Ponty with Freudian psychoanalysis, and especially with some of his reflec-
tions on fetishism, while on the other, we intend to compare the philosophy of
Deleuze with the conception of memory elaborated by the early Greeks: such
confrontations, like the two sides of the Recherche, end up revealing their inti-
mate convergence.
The first allows us to place the accent on the primordial symbolism that
transforms the sensible particular into a universal from which it is inseparable,
thanks to the dynamics of anticipation and retrieval that reveals the passing, in
our existence, of a circular temporality: a temporality in which there seems to
echo the mythical time recounted by the early Greeks.
Precisely in the light of such myths, the second confrontation allows us to
clarify the work of that memory, which is specifically exercised in the dynamics
of the anticipation and retrieval in which the sensible idea originates. Here we
are dealing with the work of involuntary memory which is anticipated in the
passage of the Recherche quoted at the outset: a passive operationand there-
fore inseparable from the action of memorys oblivionbut at the same time
INTRODUCTION 11
an operation which the Proustian Narrator defined, while correcting himself

significantly: Seek? More than that: create.25
Hence, the anti-Platonic characterization of the ideas, which Merleau-
Ponty finds in Proust, combines with the anti-Platonic conception of recollec-
tion that Deleuze sees in the author of Recherche, and in doing so, it offers to the
thought and art of the twentieth century a mirror in which to reflect itself.
Chapter 1
Nature: Variations on the Theme

Why are there several samples of each thing?
I. NATURE AND ONTOLOGY
The last courses that Merleau-Ponty held at the Collge de France focus on the
concept of Nature on the one hand, and the possibility of philosophy today
on the other. Merleau-Ponty brings together under the first heading both the
courses of 195657 and the courses of 195758of these courses, the latter,
centered on Animality, the Human Body, Transition to Culture, purport to be
the continuation of the former. In 195960, Merleau-Ponty uses his last com-
plete course to discuss the further issue of Nature and Logos: the Human Body.
As for Merleau-Pontys reflections on the possibility of philosophy today, one
can trace these not only to the 195859 course, where that expression actually
appears,1 but also to other courses: two courses which Merleau-Pontys unex-
pected death left unfinishedPhilosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel
and Cartesian Ontology and the Ontology of Todayand the remaining
course of 195960, entitled Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology.
What is the connection between these two foci of attention toward which
Merleau-Pontys last reflections converge? Undoubtedly, the connection lies
within the problem of what he called new ontology: the problem of its con-
figuration and of its philosophical formulation.2 Indeed, the preparatory notes
for the last course dedicated to the concept of Naturethe goal of which is to
define the place of these studies in philosophy (N, 263/203)speak of the
ontology of Nature as a way toward ontologya way that we prefer because the
evolution of the concept of Nature is a more convincing propaedeutic, since
it more clearly shows the necessity of the ontological mutation (N, 265/204).
Evidently, by retracing the path of what Merleau-Ponty had previously defined
as the philosophical history of the idea of Nature (N, 117/83), as well as by
exploring, with the help of contemporary science, the problems posited
(ibid.) by this very history, these courses are an effort to show that a particular
13
relationship operates between humanity and Being. This relationship eludes the
modern formula that counterposes subject and object. According to Merleau-
Ponty, our epoch has made this relationship more evident, but has not been
able to give an explicit philosophical formulation for it, an onto-logy. This is
most specifically the theme of the lectures on Cartesian Ontology and the
Ontology of Today.3
I have already mentioned this, but it is still worth emphasizing: Merleau-
Pontys enquiry concerning Nature is not the kind of enquiry that, because of
its ontological orientation, confronts the scientific standpoint with an attitude
of denial. Just the opposite: it holds that such a confrontation with the scientific
perspective cannot be avoided, and advocates an attitude of critical listening.
Clearly, one should not expect to find in science a fully elaborated ontology
capable of taking the place of the modern ontology, according to which Nature is
the absolute Object and in which the Subject is Kosmotheors (an equally abso-
lute spectator). As Merleau-Ponty contends, science as such does not provide
an ontology, not even under a negative form. It has only the power to divest
pseudo-evidence of its pretension to be evidence (N, 145/106). Still, the for-
mulation of ontological hypotheses, which is the task of philosophy, ought to be
based on the outcomes of scientific inquiries too. In fact, Merleau-Ponty con-
sistently emphasizes the way in which currents of twentieth-century scientific
inquiry decisively converge. According to him, they converge in emptying of
evidence the opposing causalistic and finalistic conceptions of Naturewhich
he considers concepts of artificialism(RC 117/151) along with the idea of the
separability of existence and essence4 (which he holds to be equally artificial).
II. MELODY AND SPECIES
Merleau-Ponty sees a contribution to this kind of emptying of evidence in

Jakob von Uexklls theories. These theories see biology as an autonomous sci-
ence inspired by Goethes conception of the knowledge of Nature, and conse-
quently as essentially anti-Darwinistic5; on this basis, they see the study of the
reciprocal action between the organism and its environment as the specific task
of biology. Onto his examination of Uexklls theories, Merleau-Ponty grafts
the ontological hypothesis that he attempts to elaborate. In so doing, he pres-
ents his own hypothesis in an especially enlightening way.
Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that the notion of animal environment (Umwelt)
put forth by Uexklland which Merleau-Ponty explicates as the milieu that
the animal gets for itself (N, 226/172; trans. modified)is a novel one, and is
independent from Kants or Schellings philosophical framework (despite the
fact that, for Merleau-Ponty, Uexklls thought sometimes seems to place such a
notion there).6 According to Merleau-Ponty, the novelty of this notion consists
precisely in the way it avoids both causalism and finalism, as well as a Platonis-
tic formulation that would conceive it as an essence outside of time.7 Merleau-
Ponty connects this conception to Marcel Prousts characterization of melody,
NATURE: VARIATIONS ON THE THEME 15
drawing on a metaphor according to which Uexkll (with an explicit reference

to the nineteenth-century embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer) states that the
deployment of an Umwelt is a melody, a melody which sings itself.8
On the basis of some pages from the first volume of the Recherche to which
we shall later refer,9 Merleau-Ponty explains that Marcel Proust characterizes
melody as a Platonic idea which cannot be seen separately since it is impos-
sible to distinguish the means and the end, the essence and the existence in
it (N, 228/174). He alludes to the fact that, for the main character of those
pages of the Recherche, a peculiar idea of love is incarnated in the sound of a
melodythe melody of the petite phrase of Vinteuils sonatato such an extent
that that idea of love becomes inseparable from Vinteuils listening.
Merleau-Ponty builds on Uexklls and Prousts conceptions, and sees in
the different manifestations of zoological behaviour the variations in which the
theme of the animal melody (N, 233/178)10 finds its expression. More gener-
ally, he comes to interpret the crucial question of the relation between parts and
whole11be it the relation between the organs and the organism or between the
organism and its territory, or for that matter the links between sexes, or those
of individuals with one another and with their speciesin terms of a variable
thematism that the animal does not seek to realize by the copy of a model, but
that haunts its particular realizations (ibid.; trans. modified), prior therefore
to both causalism and finalism.12 Actually, as Uexkll nicely said by mentioning
a melody which sings itself, it is even prior to the distinction between activity
and passivity, a distinction in which, if we look thoroughly enough, even the
preceding opposition between causalism and finalism finds its roots.
Echoing the concluding sentence of the essay The Philosopher and His
Shadow (a true manifesto for the elaboration of the new ontology), we might
say, therefore, that in the thmatisme mentioned above, Merleau-Ponty finds
a sui generis teleology, which is written and thought about in parentheses
(S, 228/181).13 In the summary of his first course on Nature, Merleau-Ponty
underscores how this teleology, unlike the proper one, contributes to the
characterization of Nature as oriented and blind productivity.14 The aspect of
orientation hereas explained in the notes on Uexklls frameworkshould be
understood as something similar to the orientation of our oneiric conscious-
ness toward certain poles that are never seen for themselves, but which are,
however, directly the cause for all the elements of a dream (N, 233/178).
Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that, on this basis, we shouldnt see, in the very
numerous individualities that life constitutes, corresponding separated abso-
lutes, in relation to which every generality would only represent beings of reason
[tres de raison] (N, 247/189, trans. modified). He explains that, rather, they
return an ontological value back to the notion of species (ibid.).15 Yet what
does he mean by the ontological value of the notion of species? And why does
he deem this point so important that he returns to it again and again?16 Finally,
in what sense does returning an ontological value to the notion of species help to
delineate the new ontology which Merleau-Ponty wants to work out?
III. VOYANCE
We might look for an answer to these questions in the preparatory notes of

one of the two courses interrupted by Merleau-Pontys death. This course bears
the title Cartesian Ontology and the Ontology of Today. The notes for this
course discuss how the experiences of contemporary art and literature con-
verge toward delineating a new ontology, and how they serve to specify the
features of this new ontology. From these notes emerge the developing lines
that Merleau-Ponty wanted to follow in reconsidering, according to this new
ontological perspective, the relation between the sensible and the intelligible,
i.e., the relation between existence and essence. (To reiterate, Merleau-Ponty
considered these lines of development to be operatingeven if they are not
made philosophically explicitin contemporary ontology.) The notes are par-
ticularly clear in this regard.
At the very centre of these lines of development there appears a notion
thematized at lastwhich had often, but only implicitly, been present in the
later texts of Merleau-Ponty (it is formulated only once in Eye and Mind).17
This notion is central in reconsidering the relation between the sensible and the
intelligible. It is the notion designated by the term voyance.18
Voyance literally indicates clairvoyance, the gift of double sight, but, in
view of the misunderstandings that might occur if such a notion is given a Pla-
tonistic interpretation, we shall continue to use the original French term. In an
effort to understand fully the import of this notion, we shall turn to it after briefly
reviewing the overall project for the course in which the notion finds its place.
As I have already suggested, the task of this course is to try (in part through
a direct contrast with Cartesian ontology) to give a philosophical formulation
to contemporary ontology, whichaccording to Merleau-Pontyhas until
now found its expression particularly in art and in literature. The first stop that
he envisions for his journey is thus a survey of the landscape of contemporary
ontology, as it is spontaneously and implicitly delineated in art and in litera-
ture: especially in literature (NC, 391), he emphasizes at a certain point. This
remark is worth noting for those who claim that the last phase of Merleau-Pon-
tys thought refers exclusively to painting. Merleau-Pontys discussion of the
artistic domain does indeed concentrate on painting, following the path already
traced out in Eye and Mind. But when it comes to the recognition of the literary
domain, here Merleau-Ponty intends to examine the work of Proust as well as
the investigations of Valry, Claudel, and other authors of the recent literature
(NC, 191) individuated in Saint-John Perse and in Claude Simon.19
Although unmentioned in this program, there is another literary reference
that assumes a theoretically central position in the definition of the contempo-
rary ontological landscape in Merleau-Pontys view. This reference is to Arthur
Rimbauds Lettre du voyant. Merleau-Ponty arrives at this reference via a state-
ment by Max Ernst that assimilates the present task of the painter to precisely
the task that Rimbauds manifesto assigns to the poet: Just as the role of the
poet since [Rimbauds] famous Lettre du voyant consists in writing under the
dictation of what is being thought, of what articulates itself in him, the painters
role is to circumscribe and project what is making itself seen within himself.20
Both have to bring to expression, as it were,in terms that inevitably recall
Uexklls notion of a melody which sings itself what following Merleau-
Ponty we might call the passivity of our activity (VI 274/221), that is the
reflexivity of Being itself.
From this perspective, voyance ends up baptizing that new bond between
the writer and the visible (NC, 190), which Merleau-Ponty sees as enforced by
the research he calls modern (though we were saying that it should be under-
stood as contemporary) and which according to Merleau-Ponty can rediscover
the Renaissance beyond Descartes (NC, 175). As he explains, [t]he mod-
erns rediscover the Renaissance through the magical idea of visibility: it is the
thing that makes itself seen (outside and inside), over there and here (NC,
390). While on the one hand Merleau-Ponty contends that da Vinci vindicates
voyance against poetry (NC, 183)which, unlike painting, da Vinci considers
to be incapable of simultaneity (NC, 175)at the same time Merleau-Ponty
notes that moderns make of poetry also a voyance (NC, 183). Therefore, they
show that poetry is indeed capable of simultaneity. The frequent effort to
bring simultaneity to expression is thus, according to Merleau-Ponty, one of
the characteristic traits of contemporary ontology.21
At this point Merleau-Ponty departs from Descartes view of vision. Des-
cartes reduces vision to a kind of thoughta kind of thought that is stimulated
by images, in just the way that thought is stimulated by signs and words. By con-
trast, Merleau-Ponty conjectures that the unveiling of the voyance in modern
arta voyance which is not Cartesian thoughtmight have [an] analogue in
the arts of speech (NC, 182183; my emphasis). He suggests that [p]erhaps,
we should, instead of reducing vision to a reading of signs by thought, redis-
cover in speech, conversely, a transcendence of the same type that occurs in
vision (ibid). Indeed, it is precisely to this that he thinks Rimbaud has contrib-
uted in a decisive way.
Voyancewhich in the mutual referring of perception and the imaginary,
renders present to us what is absent (OE, 41/132)hence characterizes Mer-
leau-Pontys conception of seeing. As Heidegger reminds us, seeing is not vor-
stellen, i.e., to represent by frontal positioning and, by doing so, to subject.22
Seeing should instead be regarded as complying witha verb which expresses
the indistinguishability of activity and passivity. With voyance, we discover that
seeing is a complying with the showing of the sensible universe itself, within
which we find ourselves and through which runs the power of analogy.23 In
virtue of this power, bodies and things recall and implicate each other, establish
new relations, invent lines of force and of flight, and, in the end, draw what
Husserl expressed as a logos of the aesthetical world.24 This expression of Hus-
serls is often used by Merleau-Ponty precisely because of the reconsideration it
suggests of the relationship between the sensible and the intelligible.
As a result of the fact that it offers this characterization of seeing, voy-

ance helps to characterize that ontological mutation whichin relation to
the concept of Naturewe have seen promoted by Merleau-Pontys effort: the
mutation of the relationship between humanity and Being (OE, 63/139, trans.
modified) that in Eye and Mind he confesses to feeling when he holds up a
universe of classical thought, contrasting it en bloc with the explorations of
modern painting (ibid.), the same mutation which a dense working note of
The Visible and the Invisible finds manifest in atonal music (atonal music is
in fact assimilated to paintings without identifiable things, without the skin of
things, but giving their flesh25), that very mutation which, therefore, consists
in a carnal configuration of the relationship between humanity and Being. This
mutation is obviously not expressible in the language of consciousness, of rep-
resentation, of the modern frontality between subject and object. This is why
Merleau-Ponty judges contemporary literature as linking, with the visible, that
new bond which might be configurable as voyance.
After having examined the conception of language that Descartes expressed
with regard to the idea of a universal language,26 and after having seen in this
conception the equivalent of the theory of perspective (NC, 183),27 Merleau-
Ponty turns to the contrasting contemporary conception of language, which
according to himcharacterizes language not as an instrument in which
thought would be as the pilot in his boatbut as some sort of substantial union
of thought and languageLanguage not governed, but endowed with its own
efficacy (NC, 186). The Lettre du voyant becomes an emblem of this contem-
porary conception, since there the autonomy of language is pushed to such a
point that poetry is supposed to be voyance. This is why Merleau-Ponty con-
siders Rimbaud a fundamental milestone within a development of literature
which began before and continues after him (NC, 187). Echoing that muta-
tion of the relationship between humanity and Being, which Eye and Mind
sees expressed by painting, Merleau-Ponty writes: It might be the case of a
change of the relationship with the Being in the writer starting from Romanti-
cism (ibid.). As we have already seen, the change he has in mind is a change of
the relationship between the visibility of the first and the speech of the other,
whichinstead of aiming at designating meanings28mixes with things and,
just as, for Rimbaud, the wood which finds itself a violin, it becomes a sensible
emblem of the sensible itself.29
Merleau-Ponty sees another manifestation of this change (while claiming
that this very manifestation entails a sketch of a non-Platonistic theory of ideas
as I have already noted in the introduction30) in the pages of the first volume of
the Recherche, pages to which he returns again and again throughout the course
of his reflections and to which we have already seen him connect Uexklls met-
aphor of melody. These pages are those in which Proust distinguishes musical
ideasas well as literary ones, and also our notions of light, of sound, of per-
spective, of physical pleasure, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple
is diversified and adornedfrom the ideas of the intelligence. The former
are veiled in shadows and therefore impenetrable to the human mind, but
none the less perfectly distinct from one another, unequal among themselves
in value and significance.31
Thus, the preparatory notes we are considering have an additional point of
interest, insofar as, by newly examining just those pages of the Recherche that
The Visible and the Invisible was commenting on when it was interrupted by its
authors sudden death,32 they suggest what the developments of that commen-
tary might have been.
The Visible and the Invisible defines as sensibles the ideas described by
Proust,33 for they appear to be inseparable from their sensible presentation (as
we have seen even when Merleau-Ponty connects them to Uexklls melody
metaphor). It is to our sensible finitude, therefore, that they are offered.
The course notes proceed to consider, in their own right, the grounds on
which such ideas had been assimilated by Proust to the notion of light in partic-
ular. In fact, as Merleau-Ponty explains, the encounter with these ideas, just like
the one with lightvisible light (NC, 194), he specifiesand just like the one
with the sensible, is an initiation to a world, to a small eternity, to a dimension
which is by now inalienableUniversality through singularity (NC, 196).
Moreover, the notes continue, here just as there, in light just as in the
musical idea, we have an idea which is not what we see, but is behind it (ibid.).
If, on the one hand, this transcendence restrains us from possessing such
ideasfrom conceptually grasping them, as light is likewise ungraspable, on
the other hand, it compels them to show themselves (again just as light does)
in what they illuminate. Something similar happens to the idea of love in the
petite phrase of the Vinteuils sonata that had once been the national anthem
of Swann and Odettes love.
Therefore, it is toward such transcendence that the sensible finitude is an
opening: that very transcendence of the same type that occurs in vision which,
as we have seen, Merleau-Ponty holds that we should rediscover in speech and
which he recognizes in Rimbauds poetics of voyance. It is, precisely, the tran-
scendence of voyance: not a second sight directed to the intelligible, but rather
a vision that sees the invisible in the visible and thus allows us to find, within
the very veil of music or of literary speech, the invisible of the idea that shines
throughas Proust has taught us.
IV. GENERALITY OF THINGS
We find here an explanation for why Merleau-Ponty insists on the importance

of returning an ontological value to the notion of species. More generally, the
notion of voyance has the merit of making clear the sense of the questionat
first glance a surprising onethat appears in a working note of The Visible
and the Invisible dated November, 1959: Generality of things: why are there
several samples of each thing? (VI 273/220; trans. modified). Judging by
what we have said up to now, the sentence that immediately precedes this
question seems to provide an answer: the things are Essences at the level of
Nature (ibid.).
In other words, each thing as generality is a sensible idea. Likewise with each
species.34 Hence, returning an ontological value to the notion of species means
to recognize this notion as a sensible idea, rather than to consider it merely as a
being of reason. It certainly is not an idea in the Platonistic sense, whichas
Merleau-Ponty emphasizedwould remain outside of time as well as outside
space: an idea which would be presupposed as an origin by its samples. On the
other hand, neither is it an empiricist inductive generalization,35 which inevi-
tably would take place a posteriori with respect to the samples. Rather, as we
have seen, it is a generality that, as a transtemporal and transspatial element
(N, 230/176), shines through (trans) its samples. In fact, these samples are
what provide us with the initiation, that isas Merleau-Ponty explains in The
Visible and the Invisible, commenting on Prousts thought, not the positing of
a content, but the opening of a dimension that can never again be closed, the
establishment of a level in terms of which every other experience will hence-
forth be situated. The idea is this level, this dimension. It is therefore . . . the
invisible of this world, . . . the Being of this being (VI, 198/151).
The sensible idea is, therefore, a dimension which opens up simultane-
ously with our encounter with its samples, thus offering to us an anticipation of
knowledge which can never again be closed. The sensible idea thus turns out to
be marked by a temporalityto which also the term initiation referswhich
is similar to the one that marks the rhythm of a melody. In discussing Uexklls
metaphor, in fact, Merleau-Ponty reminds us that in a melody, a reciprocal
influence between the first and the last note takes place, and we have to say that
the first note is possible only because of the last, and vice versa (N, 228/174).36
In Merleau-Pontys view, it is this very temporal structure that seems to
allow Uexklls notion of Umwelt to escape the opposing concepts of artificial-
ism, i.e., causalism and finalism. The notion of Umwelt does not claim to be
outside of time, nor is it subjected to the law of temporal succession. Conse-
quently, it avoids the separation between the sensible and the intelligible, exis-
tence and essence, variations and theme.37 Thus, the (animal) theme only exists
together with the variations which on the one hand deny itbeing variations
but which by this very negation indirectly affirm it.
Hence, mediated by the description given by Proust of the musical idea,
Uexklls perspective seems to characterize the theme as the absent which
only its own variations can indirectly make present,38 and which is therefore
inseparable from and simultaneous with them. The variations themselves con-
stitute the theme, without however exhausting it: they constitute it as their own
excess,39 as it were. By connecting the conceptions of Uexkll and Proust we are
brought back to what Merleau-Ponty already reminded us of in his first work:
in the melody each [note] is demanded by the context and contributes its part
in expressing something which is not contained in any one of them and which
binds them together internally (SC, 96/87).
It is in this light that the sensible idea itself, in relation to its own samples,
finds its definition. The notion of voyance, which for Merleau-Ponty asserts its
rhythm in simultaneity, allows us to rethink the relation between the sensible
and the intelligible: in our vision, the particular, while offering itself as such,
contemporaneously dimensionalizes itself and becomes a universal, like a note
that becomes tonality.40 In other words, the particular becomes an element
to which we are initiated. Thus, the voyance enables us to trace the genesis of
the sensible ideaor, in other words, the sensible genesis of the idea, which is,
after all, the empirical genesis of the transcendental, as I will explain in the next
chapterin the vision of the individualities amongst which the generality takes
its shape, andlike something which is not contained in any one of them and
which binds them together internallyit radiates throughout these very indi-
vidualities, eliciting the glimmering of an anticipation of knowledge.41
The sensible idea, then, should not be conceived as an abstract substitute
for what is perceived, as though it were its imprint and, as such, separable and
therefore graspable. Rather, it should be understoodas I mentioned abovein
terms of an absence, which is for this reason always missed in every attempt to
grasp it.42 It is an absence indirectly presented by its samples, which refer back
to it in a convergent manner.
The voyancewhich, on the analysis that I have so far proposed, sees in
a given entity the shaping of its own Being, and which therefore cannot sepa-
rate existence and essencecomes to manifest itself as Wesensschau. However,
it does not consist in the operation of a Subject which is Kosmotheors in a
modern sense, but rather in a thought that is one with that sensible seeing
which I have proposed to define as complying with, from within, the show-
ing of the sensible itself. This is thus a thought that works through a carnal
Wesensschau43 which, precisely for this reason, is a synaesthetic one.44 To use
the telling expression from the title of Paul Claudels book (to which Merleau-
Ponty refers in his lectures on the ontology of today45), we might say that
this is the Wesensschau of a listening eye: an expression which, synaesthetically,
refuses any analytical separation between the sensory fields and more particu-
larly between the presupposed activity of seeing and the presupposed passivity
of listening. By conferring a mature philosophical formulation to the operation
of this eye, we might perhaps reach the new ontology that Merleau-Ponty
hoped to elaborate.
Chapter 2
The Mythical Time of the Ideas:

Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze as Readers of Proust
I. THE CHIASM BETWEEN EMPIRICAL AND TRANSCENDENTAL
The Freudian idea of the unconscious and the past as indestructible, as

intemporal = elimination of the common idea of time as a series of Erleb-
nisse There is an architectonic past. cf. Proust: the true hawthorns are the
hawthorns of the past Restore this life without Erlebnisse, without interi-
ority . . . 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)
Thus begins one of the densest working notes from The Visible and the Invisible,
dated April 1960 and entitled Indestructible past, and intentional analytic
and ontology. Here we find Merleau-Ponty rendering the Husserlian notion of
Stiftung as initiation, which designates, according to him, the unlimited
fecundity of each present which, precisely because it is singular and passes,
can never stop having been and thus being universally (S, 7374/59). There-
fore, this present has opened up, once and for all, a dimension pregnant with
promises and anticipations. And it is precisely this initiation which is defined
in another passage from The Visible and the Invisible as [t]he opening of a
dimension that can never again be closed, the establishment of a level in terms
of which every other experience will henceforth be situated (VI, 198/151). This
passage, which refers to Prousts Recherche, continues by stating that: [t]he idea
is this level, this dimension . . . it is the invisible of this world . . . the Being of
this being (ibid.).
In order to better understand the implications of such a conception, it may
be useful to refer to a book by Maurizio Ferraris entitled Estetica razionale.1 As a
matter of fact, what Ferraris specifically defines as the chiasm between empiri-
cal and transcendental,2 i.e., the empirical genesis of the transcendental,3
seems to be already implied in Merleau-Pontys above formulation. What
23
Merleau-Ponty describes seems, in other words, to configure itself as an empir-

icalnot empiricisticinitiation to the transcendental, which does not exist
prior to experience, but finds in our openness to experience the condition of its
opening, hence revealing that openness as the transcendental condition of the
transcendental itself.4 With respect to experience, then, the transcendental can
in fact be definedin Merleau-Pontys termsas the invisible of this world
and, as such, it transcends experience according to that transcendence of the
same type that occurs in vision (NC, 183), which, according to Merleau-Ponty,
is particularly stressed in the ontology of today. As I have said, the transcen-
dental transcends experience, of which, once and for all, it institutes the idea,
hence rendering re-presentation and recognition possible.
Thus, based on what we have observed up to now, it seems possible to
assert that for Merleau-Ponty initiation not only consists in the empirical foun-
dation of the transcendental but, moreover, with its own establishment it simul-
taneously institutes the very distinction between a priori and a posteriori.
Our tradition has continued to affirm the symmetrical tendencies to apos-
teriorize and to apriorize the idea. With regard to this, however, Marc Richir
observes that such tendencies seem to refer respectively to what he defines as
the two, correlative poles,5 whichimplicitly but inseparablyaccompany
the givenness of every phenomenon:
. . . the first [pole], that of an illusion of the centralization [of the phenomenon]
on itself that allows it to be seen, in a coincidence of centre with centre (i.e., of
the centre of vision, that is the eye, with the centre of the phenomenon), like
an indivisible individual. And the second, that of an illusion of universal cen-
tralization that would allow it [the phenomenon] to be seen, but as decentred
in a contingent way in relation to this universal centre, as a particular case or
a simple factual illustration of an idea.6
Richir observes that these poles, which in the appearing of every phenomenon
appear only in imminence,7 nevertheless end up hypostatizing themselves in
the symmetrical tendencies to aposteriorize and apriorize the idea. Such ten-
dencies have been historically shaped as that which the classical way of philos-
ophizing thought of subsuming from the phenomenality of the phenomenaas
the Being of beings.8
Instead, as we have seen above, Merleau-Pontys formulation leads us to
consider the distinction between a priori and a posteriori not as constituting,
but rather as constituted. This is the same consideration that Ferraris proposes
by creatively developing one of Derridas ideas.9 In this chiasmatic conception of
the relationship between transcendental and empirical, in addition to the inspi-
ration that Husserl impresses on transcendental phenomenology, one can also
trace a Leibnizian influence on Merleau-Ponty (an influence effectively shown
by Renaud Barbaras and Paolo Gambazzi10). More precisely, it is the Leibniz-
ian conception of the whole-part11 that allows the idea to be conceived as a
dimensionalizing of the particular to the universal.12 Moreover, an analogous
THE MYTHICAL TIME OF THE IDEAS 25
influence is recognizable in Prousts Recherche, whose protagonistin getting

ready to assist at a theatrical show for the very first timehappens to observe:
I was happy, too, in the theatre itself; since I had made the discovery that
contrary to the notion so long entertained by my childish imaginationthere
was but one stage for everybody, I had supposed that I should be prevented
from seeing it properly by the presence of the other spectators, as one is when
in the thick of a crowd; now I registered the fact that, on the contrary, thanks
to an arrangement which is, as it were, symbolical of all spectatorship [percep-
tion], everyone feels himself to be the centre of the theatre. (R 1, 18/482483).
II. DIVERGENCES: ART AS THE TRUTH OF THE SENSIBLE

FOR MERLEAU-PONTY AND DELEUZE
Instead of the prospectivism and expressionism of perception, which seem to

be echoed in the above, for Gilles Deleuze the Leibnizianism of Proust consists
rather in affirming the incommunicability of the points of view which only art
allows us to overcome. It is illustrative, in this regard, that both Merleau-Ponty
and Deleuze tend to stress opposite elements in their reading of the same pas-
sage by Proust, which I shall quote here in full:
But art, if it means awareness of our own life, means also awareness of the lives
of other peoplefor style for the writer, no less than colour for the painter, is
a question not of technique but of vision: it is the revelation, which by direct
and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the
uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us, a dif-
ference which, if there were no art, would remain for ever the secret of every
individual. Through art alone we are able to emerge from ourselves, to know
what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and
of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those
that may exist in the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only,
our own, we make that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as
many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the
other than those which revolve in infinite space. (R 3, 202/931932)
Merleau-Ponty remarks: The visible (with all the invisible that it drags behind
it) is the Being that we share and the language of the artist (in so far as it is
indirect and unconscious) is the means of achieving our mutual participation
in such Being (NC, 196). Deleuze observes, instead, that for Proust essences
are assimilable to the monads and, as such, would remain incommunicable if
it were not for art: There is no intersubjectivity except an artistic one (PS,
55/42).
Hence, even if we can affirm that both of these perspectives end up indi-
cating that art is the truth of the sensible, they turn out to be reciprocally sym-
metrical. Merleau-Ponty mostly tends to underscore the continuity between
the sensible and art, in such a way that he risks overlooking the peculiarity of
the latter in respect to the former. Deleuze, on the other hand, mainly tends
to underscore their discontinuity and thus overlooks the bond that must bind
them, in order to make possible the becoming true of the sensible in art.
Deleuze denies, in fact, that the Recherche considers the sensible signs
and even less so of the worldly and of loveas fragments bearing the value
of the whole-part; vice versa, he finds in the work of Proust an antilogi-
cal formulation (and as such un-Platonic) that makes these fragments valid
in as much as they are fragments, which only art knows how to gather.13
Yet if we bear in mind, as Heidegger also did,14 that gathering constitutes
precisely one of earliest meanings of , and moreover if we consider
that Deleuze himself shows how in Prousts Recherche style is ultimately one
and the same with essence,15 then the formulation he outlinedrather than
being antilogicalturns out to find its own logos precisely in style, while
the sensiblewhich only receives its truth from the reverberation of artis-
tic revelationwith a totally Platonic gesture, ends up preserving a dimin-
ished value. In reality, Deleuzes stress on the presumed antilogical character
of the Recherche seems to come from an analogous inspiration to the one put
forward slightly later by Jean-Franois Lyotard to criticize Merleau-Ponty:
Lyotard criticizes him for having elaborated, on the basis of an ontological
rehabilitation of the sensible, a philosophie de la chair savante,16 namely a
philosophy of the flesh, in which there is already rooted the possibility of
intersubjective communication, since within it a logos is delineated, namely,
the logos of the aesthetic world.
Those ideas that are the invisible of the aesthetic world, and which
Merleau-Ponty qualifies therefore as sensible (VI, 198199/151152), partici-
pate in delineating such a logos. Let us now examine their characterization.
We have seen that the sensible idea is designated as a dimension that
opens up simultaneously with our first encounter with its samples, thus offering
us an anticipation of knowledge which can never again be closed and there-
fore constituting itself, as I have tried to show, in terms of an a priori. All in all,
together with the dimension of the sensible idea, there is simultaneously inau-
gurated a time that The Visible and the Invisible significantly defines as mythi-
cal, since in it certain events in the beginning maintain a continued efficacity
(ibid., 24; my emphasis),17 the way in whichas Merleau-Ponty recalls in the
working note cited at the outsetfor the protagonist of the Recherche the true
hawthorns are the hawthorns of the past (VI, 296/243).18
It is precisely in such a working note that Merleau-Ponty remarks that the
past evoked by Proustwhich was defined slightly earlier as architectonic
belongs to a mythical time, to the time before time, to a prior life, farther
than India and China (VI, 296/243). Elsewhere Merleau-Ponty indicates that
we are dealing with a time in which . . . synchronics . . . encroaches upon
succession and diachronics (S, 154/122123): a time that flashes or shines in
the simultaneity to which the ontology implicit in contemporary thought (and
Prousts work itself)19 attempts to give expression. That is to say, we are dealing
with a time flashing in the relief of the simultaneous and of the successive (VI,
153/114), which founds, in our experience, the chiasm between anticipation
and retrieval, as in a melody, the chiasm between the first and the last note.20 It
is a time flashing precisely in those chiasms.
It is precisely in a time thus characterized, rather than in a Platonistic eter-
nity, that Merleau-Ponty sees the life of the sensible ideas described by Proust,
ideas which he in fact qualifies as the eternal in the ephemeral and immedi-
ately after defines as the ciphers of the singular (NC, 196).
Even if ephemeral, our first encounter with these ideas samples is such
thatProust explainsso long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves
to a state in which we shall not have known those ideas, since for their part
they have espoused our mortal state (R 1, 344/381). In Merleau-Pontys terms,
the singularity of that encounter anticipates itself as a generality21a cipher
and as such it is sedimented in the memory of our body (VI, 297/243).22 Thus,
the dimension which has opened up is by now inalienable, the initiation irre-
versible (NC, 193).
For Merleau-Ponty the reason why Proust assimilates the ideas that shine
in art to those of light, of sound, of relief, of sensual pleasure (ibid.),23 that is
to say, to the sensible ideas, is precisely such an irreversible sensible inscription,
simultaneously both singular and general (since, as Proust wrote in somewhat
Leibnizian fashion, in perception everyone feels himself to be the centre of the
theatre), taken together with their mutual configuration of notions without
(intellectual) equivalent (ibid., 194195),24 i.e., negative entities.
In virtue of this assimilation, Merleau-Ponty can therefore interpret the
order of those ideas by remaining on this side of the opposition between indi-
vidual essences and universal ones, as well as characterizing in the above man-
ner the mythical time in which they live. Gilles Deleuze, on the other hand,
tends to emphasize that which distinguishes what he respectively calls sensible
signs and artistic signs. Deleuze observes, first of all, that the former still
remain material, while the latter achieve a peculiar ductility and transparency
(PS, 81/64), which allow them to be, with their own spiritual sense, in that per-
fect unity of which essence consists (ibid., 5253/4041). Moreover, Deleuze
points out that such an essence turns out to be not only absolutely individual,
but even more so it individualizes (ibid., 56/43) when it is embodied in the
signs of art, whereas there still persists in it a minimum of generality when
it is encounterednot without a margin of contingency and casualtyin the
sensible signs (see ibid., 80/64).25 Finally, Deleuze states that these sensible
signs merely give us the instantaneous image (ibid., 79/63) of that original
time (ibid., 78/62), identical to eternity (ibid.), which is revealed instead in
artistic signs.
Thus, it is above all in the first edition of Proust and Signs, that of 1964, that
Deleuze ends up offering us an image of Prousts Recherche as a Bildungsroman
of the Hegelian kind, in which the artistic revelation of essence carries out the
function of a form of absolute knowledge.26
Yet if this systematic consideration unavoidably tends to emphasize the

existing points of divergence between the Deleuzian reading of the Recher-
che and that of Merleau-Ponty, significant signs of convergence can, on the
contrary, be seen if we focus on the characterization that Deleuze supplies of
Prousts sensible idea, which is more deeply thematized by him, namely, the
idea of Combray. The in-itself of Combray, as Deleuze properly defines it (DR,
115/85),27 is sensible in as much as it is contained in the taste of the tea and
the madeleine, and from this it is inseparable (PS, 144/119120) in the essential
bond that it maintains with its own peculiar temporality and which comes to be
investigated principally in the pages of Difference and Repetition.
III. CONVERGENCES: THE SENSIBLE IDEA OF COMBRAY
In Difference and Repetition the in-itself of Combray comes to be identified in

the essential difference between the Combray effectively lived through in the
past and the Combray that is voluntarily remembered in the present.28 The in-
itself is therefore designated as a fragment of that pure past (DR, 160, note
1, 122)or as Deleuze otherwise defines it, a past which never was present
(DR, 111/82)29in which the ideas live and which offers itself as an ancient
mythical present (DR, 119/88).
It is not only in this expression that there seems to echo a consonance
between the above formulation and the one outlined by the late Merleau-Ponty.
Yet it is from this expression that we should start. We know that we have already
encountered it, at the beginning of this essay, in the working note from The Vis-
ible and the Invisible that recalls how the protagonist of the Recherche felt the
essence of a past, which belongs to a mythical time, to the time before time,
to the prior life, to be enfleshed in the hawthorns on the Msglise Way. In the
preparatory notes to the course entitled Cartesian Ontology and the Ontology
of Today, Merleau-Ponty returns to a phrase from those Proustian pages which
had frequently caught his attention, namely, reality will take shape in the mem-
ory alone.30 By thishe remarksProust does not want to claim that memory
creates an illusion of reality. No, one remembers precisely what once was (NC,
202).31 This last affirmation, then, seems to bring to light a distance between
such a conception and Deleuzes, which affirms, instead, how Combray does not
come back to life as that which was effectively lived through, but rather as the
in-itself of Combray. Yet we know we should not misconstrue the meaning
of Merleau-Pontys vindicationone remembers precisely what once was
since he specifically wrote that this past belongs to a mythical time, to the time
before time, to the prior life. Commenting on the above Proustian sentence, the
course notes in fact specify that [t]hrough distance, the present develops all of
its meaning (NC, 202). Subsequently, he explains how one is to understand this
development,32 i.e., as flesh that has become essence (NC, 202).
The above development, due to a distancing, pulls the past away from
how it had been actually lived, in order to make its carnal essence, its sensible
idea or, put otherwise, its in-itself , explicit. Significantly, a little further on
(ibid.) we find a quote from the last volume of the Recherche, which speaks in
this respect of what is . . . conveyed to us outside time by the essences that
are common to the sensations of the past and of the present (R 3, 205/935);
essences which, precisely because being common to them, cannot but be differ-
ent from them, like the in-itself of Combray.
By thinking of Merleau-Pontys sensible idea in the way that Deleuze char-
acterizes that of Combray, we can better understand the reasons why Merleau-
Ponty, in the second course on the Concept of Nature (195758), defines
another notion which I believe should be conceived in terms of a sensible
ideai.e., the biological notion of speciesas a trans-temporal and trans-
spatial element(N, 230/176)33 to which an ontological value (N, 247/189) is
attributed. In fact, according to Merleau-Pontys indication, if the term ele-
ment is meant as a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being
wherever there is a fragment of being (VI, 184/139), the trans which charac-
terizes its temporality is most certainly not to be conceived as the traversing of
the temporal succession in its punctiform seriality, butjust as Deleuze writes
of the in-itself of Combrayas the differenciator (DR, 160, note 1/122)34 of
the chiasm between past and present, i.e., as its wholly virtual center (VI,
154/115), which in this sense, and not in the Platonistic sense, is placedas
Proust writesoutside time. That is to say, it is not placed beyond it, but,
as is explained in another working note from The Visible and the Invisible,
between . . . my past and my present (ibid., 272/219). We should not conceive
differently the trans that characterizes the elements spatiality, permeating it
with an unmistakable style which, however, is not locally isolable: a style that is
therefore everywhere and nowhere.35 In this waylike Wesen, in the verbal
sense (ibid., 256/203)Merleau-Ponty tries to think it via Heideggers refer-
ences to the high school building36 or, in the course notes that immediately
follow those dedicated to Proust, finding in the Introduction la peinture hol-
landaise by Claudel37 an introduction to the cipher itselfthe in-itselfof
Holland (NC, 200). Yet in such a wayin terms of differentiation and not
juxtapositionMerleau-Ponty realizes the need to think, first of all, the essen-
tializing of the cohesion of man with his space-time (ibid., 199). Indeed, it is
precisely with respect to Claudel that Merleau-Ponty writes: Time and space
are horizons and not a series of things. And horizons that encroach upon each
other reciprocally: I read time in space and read space in time . . . One big dif-
ferentiation of a single Being (ibid., 200).
The trans-temporality and trans-spatiality that characterize an element are
consequently intended as . . . rays of the past and rays of the world at the end
of which . . . pulsate some almost sensible structures . . . (VI, 293/240). The
encounter with the translucence of these rays therefore endows us with the
self-opening of a sensible idea which therefore, without claiming to be a meta-
physical essence, reclaims its proper ontological value. In fact, the being itself
is concerned in that ideas blossoming (), a term that allows us to return
to what Heidegger apparently had in mind in Introduction to Metaphysics, to

which, as we have seen, Merleau-Ponty had already implicitly referred.38 If that
idea is not a mere ens rationis, then it is not even a reflection on being from an
external point of view, but rather is an essential unfolding of the latent inten-
tionality thatas we have already recalledMerleau-Ponty characterizes as
within being (VI, 298/244; my emphasis), and which functions prior to every
opposition between I and world. In this sense, that idea can therefore be con-
sideredaccording to an expression of Henri Maldineyas an event-advent
of this being.39 It is most certainly a fragile event-advent, since Marc Richir
defines Merleau-Pontys sensible idea as a sort of precipitate or crystallization
(yet always provisory, contingent and fleeting) of the indefinite (or in-finite)
subtlety of the phenomenon.40 Nevertheless, we should bear in mind that it
is an event-advent of an initiation to a dimension, and is hence destined for
sedimentation, like the eternal of the ephemeral, in a mythical time before
time. That is to say, it is destined to make itself into an element.41
For all this, on the same page where we find the above quoted definition,
Merleau-Ponty writes that, understood in such a way, the element is the inau-
guration of the where and the when (VI, 184/140). For his part, referring to sen-
sible ideas such as the in-itself of Combray, in Proust and Signs Deleuze writes
that their emergence is the birth of an individuating world (PS, 134/111). I
have already pointed out that the Proustian essence is, in Deleuzes opinion,
not only individual, but even a principle of individuation. Its individua-
tionthe becoming flesh of the world that is enveloped within itis there-
fore, he emphasizes, always . . . a beginning of the universe (ibid., 57/44),
as well as an initiation to it.42 Hence, that commencement marks the birth of
Time itself (ibid., 58/45), whichprecisely because it is in a nascent state
(ibid., 59/46)is still complicated within essence itself, embracing simultane-
ously all its series and dimensions (ibid.). Therefore, it is still in that original
state (ibid., 58/45) which Deleuze identifies with eternity and that, according
to him, only the signs of art know how to retrieve (ibid., 60/46). Moreover, it
should also be noted, at least in passing, that Deleuzes reading of Proust does
not grant a similar dignity to space43 in considering the sensible incarnation of
essence, precisely in as much as it is localizing, to be diminished.44 However, on
the basis of what we have observed up to nowi.e., of the developments reg-
istered in Difference and Repetition as well as of the consonance between these
and the conceptions retraced in the late Merleau-Ponty, we could wonder if,
for complicated timeand for an analogously designated spaceone should
not understand the field of spatio-temporal differentiations rather than their
respective originary state as previously defined. That is, a field opened up by
our initiation to the world, where space and time, being mythically compli-
catedthat is, each of them being, in its own dimensions as well as with regard
to each other, Ineinanderdo not turn out to be less unfolded by the initiation
itself, according to a twofold and simultaneous movement that becomes one
with Merleau-Pontys conception of the originating (originaire) in perennial
explosion (see VI, 165/124),45 and as such essentially different from a state
identical to an eternity to which one should try to return.46 In fact, as I have
previously pointed out, in virtue of this twofold and simultaneous movement,
the initiation can open, along with the sensible idea, a dimension that can
never again be closedhence it can found an uninterrupted continuation of
retrievals and recommencementsonly insofar as it simultaneously founds
a prior life, which will never cease to extend itself on such a continuation,
maintaining, according to Merleau-Pontys apt definition of a mythical time,
a continued efficacity to certain events in the beginning.
IV. THE BODY OF THE IDEAS
To think in this direction means to avoid affirming, in the reading of Prousts

Recherche, an absolute separation between the time retrieved, intended as
originary in the sense of identical to eternity, hence revealed only from the
single signs of art in their nexus with pure thought as a faculty of essences
(PS, 106/98), and the time retrieved from the sensible signs in their bond with
the faculties embedded in our corporeality, such as involuntary memory or an
imagination born of desire (ibid.). Precisely in a polemic with Deleuze, even
Paul Ricoeur advises against such a separation, observing that the theme of
Prousts work is not the achievement of the first of the above dimensions, but
rather the problem of the relation between the two.47 Yet this is not only the
problem of Prousts work. In a more general way, according to the terms uti-
lized by Merleau-Ponty in the chapter of The Visible and the Invisible entitled
Interrogation and Intuition, the problem is to avoid the distinction between
facts intended as a multiplicity of spatio-temporal atoms (VI, 153/114) and
essences understood as significations without locality or temporality (ibid.,
152/113). One should avoid distinguishing themas he explainsnot because,
mixed up in our experience, they in their purity would be inaccessible (ibid.,
153/114), but in order to think precisely such a mixture48 and therefore pre-
venting one falling back into Platonism. This is precisely what Merleau-Ponty
is aiming at. According to a suggestion by Valry, he even attributes a body to
the ideas49the mythical timein virtue of which one can no longer reduce
the initiation to a metaphysical beginning. This is what Deleuze in turn will
attempt to do in The Logic of Sense, namely, to think the unthinkable being
together of chrnos and ain.50 If, according to the above expression by Valry,
time is the body of spirit, then one can assert that the way of effectively under-
standing the chiasm between empirical and transcendental above-all passes
through time.
With regard to the correlation between these two terms, it is remarkable
to observe how, in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze explains that empiricism
truly becomes transcendental . . . only when we apprehend directly in the sen-
sible . . . the very being of the sensible (DR, 7980/5657). The above words
are certainly not extrinsically consonant with the definition that we have heard
Merleau-Ponty give of the sensible idea as the invisible of this world, . . . the
Being of this being, namely, the sensible idea as its transcendental, in the sense
that I tried to specify at the beginning of this chapter.
For this reason, I have to concur with Maurizio Ferraris when, in the book
I had occasion to cite at the outset, he observes that Difference and Repetition
incorrectly presents transcendental empiricism as an exotic and subversive
plant.51 By thinking philosophically the Proustian sensible idea in its essential
nexus with the notions of initiation and mythical time, Merleau-Ponty was,
in fact, sprouting a bud from his own ontology which is not so fundamentally
different from that plant. Let us now more closely compare this convergent
thinking of the sensible idea with the legacy of the Platonic tradition.
Chapter 3
Deformation and Recognition:

Proust in the Reversal of Platonism
I. THE ADVENTURES OF DEFORMATION
If it is trueas Alfred North Whitehead affirmedthat the entire history of

Western philosophy is nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato and, in addition,
that the figure most characteristic of this thought is contained in his theory of
ideas, i.e., in his conception of (the term which is the plural of ), then
the notion of eidos (translated variously as idea, essence, or form) could
be, in certain respects, legitimately regarded as the most fundamental concept
for philosophical thought. As Ernst Cassirer writes in his text devoted to this
issue,1 in general the profundity and originality of Platonic philosophy consist
in the fact that it raises for the first time the philosophical consideration of the
sphere of mere being to that of form:2 that is to say, to the sphere of .
Thus, if for these reasons eidos can be considered, in certain respects,
the most fundamental concept for philosophical thought, what then are the
additional reasons with which it could claim a centrality in the specific field
of aesthetics? To answer this question, one could draw on a statement by one
of the greatest English-speaking painters of the twentieth century, namely
Francis Bacon. Bacon, in connection with one of his paintings entitled Jet of
Water (1988), declared to David Sylvester, What I would like those things to be
would be an essence, you might say, of landscape and an essence of water. Thats
what I would like them to be.3
How can such a sentence, which sounds so innocuous, cast light on the
reasons that bind, in a particular way, the concept of eidos to the field of aes-
thetics? Actually, it can cast light on such reasons by suggesting that art is the
privileged field which presents the essence of reality itself, or, put otherwise,
which offers us its idea.
On the other hand, it is well known that Plato employed the equivalent of
these Greek termsnamely the word eidos and its cognate ideato indicate
33
the intelligible world, which he conceived as true, in opposition to that of

the visible, thus placing a heavy burden on arts possibility (which turns pre-
cisely toward the visible) of reaching the world of the ideas. Thus, if according
to Bacon art can offer us a privileged access to the essence of things, it is pre-
cisely in the name of these same essences that Plato banished art and mimetic
poetry from the ideal Republic. Yet here the question about the specific nexus
between the Platonic concept of eidos and the field of aesthetics finds its expla-
nation: despite Platos condemnation of art in the name of a theory of ideas
(or essences), no other theoryCassirer suggestshas exerted such a strong
and enduring influence on art and the philosophical reflection on art (defined
in modernity as aesthetics), and this is attested to by Bacons own sentence,
which employs precisely the term essence. Here is how Cassirer puts it: Always,
wherever one has, over the course of centuries, sought a theory of art and the
beautifulthe gaze always returns, as if by mental coercion, to the concept and
term Idea.4
In addition, Cassirer continues, the fascination produced by the Platonic
concept of eidos has historically engaged not only art theorists, but the great
artists themselves.5 In the twentieth century, however, the adventures that
the concept of eidos has undergone in the field of art as well as literaturethe
adventures of formrather seem to have become, in a manner increasingly
more explicit and insistent, the adventures of deformation. And indeed, the
technical manifesto of the futuristic painters, dated April 11, 1910, immedi-
ately underlines that for the persistence of the image in the retina, the moving
objects multiply, become deformed, following one another, like vibrations, in
the space which they traverse.6 A few years later, Georges Braque summarizes
this in the following way, the senses deform, the mind forms.7 In turn, Fran-
cis Bacon characterizes the painting of Pablo Picassoand implicitly his own
tooin terms of organic form which refers to the human image while being its
complete distortion.8 Moreover, Paul Klee proposes, in a lecture significantly
entitled On Modern Art, to show how it is that the artist frequently arrives
at what appears to be such an arbitrary deformation [Deformation] of natu-
ral forms.9 Obviously, this list could be significantly extended.10 To conclude
this list, however, let us recall (in an extra-pictorial sphere) that Michel Butor
qualifies as exercises of deformation11 not only his own work, but even all the
literature and art of the twentieth century,12 including the musical structure of
perpetual variation.13
Hence, we ought to ponder attentively the relation that these exercises
of deformation, theorized and practiced by art and literature in the twentieth
century (sometimes, as in the case of Bacon, in the name of the essence of
things), have with the Platonic concept of form.
In painting, one could consider that these exercises of deformation were
initiated by the work of Paul Czanne, in whom the incomprehension of his
contemporaries indeed created the doubtto which the title of a famous
essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers14that his art was simply due to
DEFORMATION AND RECOGNITION 35
a defect in sight. In reality, precisely the term deformation can effectively

summarize the characters of modernity that Czanne looked for even in the
classical works which he regularly studied in museums.15 Such characteris-
tics range from the unfinished of Michelangelo to the academically badly
made drawing, destined to become one of the most characteristic elements of
twentieth-century painting.
It should be also remembered how in the deformation, increasingly prac-
ticed in Czannes worksfor example, in the torsion and the anti-realistic
stretching of the bodiesone can recognize the intention (continued by
many twentieth-century painters) to express, in its immediacy, our constantly
renewed sensible-affective encounter with the world.16
Those who were opposed to the lines of research sketched by Czannes
paintings both recognized and criticized the deformation practiced by him
as an anti-mimetic element, precisely because it did not respect the pretended
realism of the principle according to which art imitates the visible: the principle
on which academic painting was founded and whose formulation clearly points
to its own Platonic derivation.
However, when looked at more closely, the opposition between deforma-
tion and imitation appears unfounded: all art was and isin its essencea
deformation, since in any event it always responds to a principle of distortion
that underlies the very mode of the givenness of the phenomena. In this direc-
tion, art was and is a deformation, either reducing the visible to immutable
formulae (like the Egyptian art that Plato favored), or claiming to correct the
deformations due to the sensible-affective immediacy of our encounter with the
world, through equal and contrary deformations, as in the case of the Minerva
of Phidias, which for Plato was emblematic of sham art.17 According to Plato,
in both cases, . . . the work of art can never claim a higher rank than that of
(image), which, though apparently accurate, falls short of its Idea.18
Precisely insofar as an opposition between deformation and imitation
appears in this sense unfounded, both Plato and the twentieth century end
up convergingalbeit for opposite motivations and evaluationswhen they
affirm that art is ontologically a deformation. It is not by chance that Cassirer, in
Eidos und Eidolon, summarizes the motivation behind the Platonic judgment
of art in the following terms: Instead of the reality of the form [Gestalt], he
[viz. the artist] places [ . . . ] in front of us only its apparent image [Scheinbild],
affected by all kinds of deferral, abbreviation and distortion [Verzerrung].19
With respect to this, Cassirer refers in particular to a passage from the
Republic and to another from the Sophist20: in the early Plato Cassirer calls such
an image , while the later Plato notoriously defines it as and
opposes it to that image which is indicated by the term .21 In his view,
the since its like the thing [ ]22distinguishes the art
[] which we have whenever someone produces an imitation by keep-
ing to the proportions [] of length, breadth, and depth of his model
[], and also by keeping to the appropriate colors of its parts.23 On
the contrary, just like Phidias in the anecdote quoted previously, contemporary
artistsPlato remarkswork out images that do not seek a resemblance with
the model,24 but only the appearance [] of resemblance;25 thus pro-
ducing the that were previously condemned in Book X of the Republic.
As Cassirer suggests, the consequence of such a judgment for art was
twofold:26 not only was it banished from the ideal city, but also it remained
boundalong with aesthetics as the philosophical reflection that relates to
itto the terms of such a judgment. It could never cease to measure itself against
the terms of such a judgment; but at best it could only succeed in accomplish-
ing what Heidegger (by analyzing the task that Nietzsche had undertaken with
regard to Platonism) defined as a simple overturning [Umdrehung].27
Cassirer underlines how, as a prisoner of these bonds, the concept of form
proper to art tends to be suppressed by the Platonic concept of form,28 which
precisely judges the former in terms of a deformation.29
Cassirer places the reflection on nature parallel to the Platonic reflection
on art, since both relateas he explainsto the two fields in which there per-
sists no fixed and true configuration of being30: both art and nature offer us
rather than , deformed images in place of forms.
Gilles Deleuze also refers to the concept of , as it is formulated in
the above-mentioned passage from the Sophist, rendering as simu-
lacrum and underlining that the effect of resemblance to the model that it pro-
duces can be qualified in terms of illusion, whereas the , instead, resembles
from within (DR, 165/127).31
In particular, in his essay entitled The Simulacrum and Ancient
Philosophy32 Deleuze traces, in a way similar to Cassirer, a problematic con-
stellation which, starting from the consideration of the Platonic formulation,
connects the reflection on art to that on nature and confronts both with the
thought of the essence (i.e., of the idea, or the form), highlighting in this
respect the fact that natural products are inseparable from a diversity which
is essential to them (LS, 307/266).33 Let it be noted that here we are dealing
with the same constellation that we saw Merleau-Ponty draw together in our
first chapter.
II. YET WHICH REVERSAL OF PLATONISM?
Both the essay by Deleuze and the lecture by Cassirer remind us how Plato had
indicated that art and nature were the two fields in which reflection is to be
located, in order to think the relationship between the individual and the uni-
versal, between difference and identity, between image and essence: in short,
between deformation and form.
In connection to this, in his essay Deleuze invites us to consider . . . the two
formulas: only that which resembles differs and only differences can resemble
each other. He explains that [t]hese are two distinct readings of the world:
one invites us to think difference from the standpoint of a previous similitude
or identity; whereas the other invites us to think similitude and even identity as
the product of a deep disparity (LS, 302/261).34
It is in the passage from the first to the second of these readings of the
world that Deleuze tends to see the possibility of reversing Platonism (LS,
302/261). Yet is not this the simple reversal which Heidegger had warned us
against? As is well known, the above consists, for Heidegger, in limiting one-
self to inverting the old structural order35 that Platonism had brought about
between the sensible and the non-sensible. Obviously, to avoid this mere
inversion, it is not enough to indicate that the differences that make up the
sensible constitute the non-sensible of resemblance or even of identity, rather
than vice-versa. Neither would it be helpful to locate resemblance and identity
a posteriori in chronological time, rather than founding them a priori. On the
contrary, it seems more fruitful to recognize that succession is overlapped by
simultaneity and to make the assumption, then, that resemblance and iden-
tity are produced simultaneously with the repetition of our encounter with the
differences which constitute such resemblance and identity (as George Didi-
Huberman also seems to suggest by recalling that simultaneity and simili-
tude have the same root).36 Hence, constituted by differences, resemblance and
identity nevertheless remain in excess with respect to those differences, in the
same way as the whole stands in relation to its own parts. Thus, resemblance
and identity come to be located in a different temporality (which was defined
as mythical in the preceding chapter and which will be deepened in the final
chapter) and appear irreducible to the gesture that elevates the sensible by
diminishing the non-sensible: that gesture of placing what was at the very bot-
tom on the very top.37 This, according to Heidegger, would simply represent
the wish to reverse matters within the old structural order.38
To return to the confrontation between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty with
regard to thinking the sensible idea, it seems possible to claim that, for both
philosophers, such an ideawithout ever being reduced to the sensible of its
own deformationscan be given only together and through these very defor-
mations, namely, according to the modality that Merleau-Ponty illustrated in
the following way in his last completed text:
When through the waters thickness I see the tiling at the bottom of the pool,
I do not see it despite the water and the reflections; I see it through them and
because of them. If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were
without that flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would cease to
see it as it is and where it iswhich is to say, beyond any identical, specific
place. (OE, 70/142)
Marc Richir attributes decisive importance to the consideration of this

originary distortion of the phenomenon,39 in order to avoid conceivingin
a Platonistic mannerthe intuition of the essences (or ideas, or forms) as
a dis-incarnated vision (dis-incarnated because it is frontal), i.e., as direct and
immediate access to Being.40 That is to say, this is done to avoid regarding truth
as intrinsically separable from illusion, i.e., from the illusion that disqualified
the deformed images, and which is precisely an integral part of the truth, in
that the phenomena show themselves to us in an originary distortion.41
However, Heidegger himself recalls that Nietzsche was already heading
toward such a conclusion, in virtue of his new interpretation of sensibility,
stressing that semblance itself is proper to the essence of the real.42 Hence, as
Marc Richir indicates, appearance becomes truly illusory only if it can autono-
mize itself, if it is detached from the phenomenon so that it can efface it.43 From
Richirs point of view, Nietzsche had been able to write the words, to which I
have already had occasion to refer, that alone would be sufficient to account for
the adventures of twentieth-century deformation:
We no longer believe that truth remains truth when one pulls off the veil; we
have lived too much to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency
not to wish to see everything naked, to be present everywhere, to understand
and know everything. [ . . . ] Perhaps truth is a woman who has grounds for
not showing her grounds?44
In the characterization of the sensible idea, form appears to be thought as

the un-presentable, which only its deformations can present indirectly: for this
reason, as I have already suggested, it is neither given originally, nor successively,
but simultaneously with its deformations, which constitute it as their excess.
The essay by Deleuze to which I have referred previously also seems to be
oriented toward this approach. Differently from Cassirer (and from Heidegger),
we indeed saw Deleuze developing his own confrontation with thinking the
essence (the idea, the form), by focusing not on the tension between
and , but rather on that which opposes and and in
this sense offering elements of reflection that are not reducible to a simple inver-
sion of the old structural order between sensible and non-sensibleon
the basis of a conviction that to reverse Platonism means to make the simula-
cra rise and to affirm their rights among icons and copies (LS, 302/262).
The comparison between the two readings of the world that he takes into
account concludes with the affirmation that resemblance then can be thought
only as the product of this internal difference (ibid.), that it can therefore only
be thought as a product of that part of the art of likeness making []
(Sophist, 235d) that Plato condemned in the Sophist because it is founded on
the deformations of the simulacrum (), rather than on the adher-
ence of the icon (): a resemblance which is merely apparentnot the
fruit of a passive and faithful copying45since, as Deleuze explains, it is built
upon divergent series (LS, 303/262), between which a sort of internal reso-
nance is produced (ibid., 301/261).46
According to Deleuze, the same thing occurs in the painting of Fran-
cis Bacon: in his triptychs, thanks to the resonating of the various organic
deformations painted on the canvas, amongst them a form imposes itself such
that it can be recognized as a model, consequently retro-jecting itself outside
the space and time of the work.47 Yet something analogous to this also seems
to occur in the world of nature: here, thanks to the concurrent resonating of a
certain series of individuals, a forma speciesdeploys itself. In fact, to adopt
an expression from the German biologist Jakob von Uexkll, often quoted by
Merleau-Ponty, it is like a melody that is singing itself.48
What, then, does recognizing mean, if it happens by virtue of a resem-
blance produced by the resonating of reciprocal differences? In Chapter 5, I
will seek to demonstrate that one can hear, in such a question, the echo of those
questions that Menoa disciple of a sophistput to Socrates in the Platonic
dialogue that bears his name: How is it possible to seek what one is completely
unaware of, and how is it possible to recognize it when one finds it?
Anticipating somewhat differently the considerations that I intend to
develop there, I would here like to recall the terms in which Hans-Georg Gad-
amer characterizes the variant of the concept of developed by Aristo-
tle, in his opinion closer than the Platonic alternative to the situation basic to
imitation,49 which affirmed itself in the field of ritual, where it was understood
as an expression rather than a reproduction.50
It is precisely by discussing such a question that Gadamer first defines rec-
ognition by means of the formula: That is how things are.51 This definition is
then explained in the following way:
[b]ut we do not understand what recognition is in its profoundest nature if we

only regard it as knowing something again that we know alreadyi.e., what is
familiar is recognized again. The joy of recognition is rather the joy of know-
ing more than is already familiar.52
In this way, Gadamer goes so far as to suggest that Platonism had given the
name recognition to the genuine knowledge of essence.53 In such a sense, even
Deleuzes characterization of resemblance can be referred to Gadamers formula-
tion, according to which to recognize means knowing more than is already
familiar, hence feeling a peculiar joy, which must have also contributed to the
powerful joy accompanying Marcels encounter with the essence of Combray.
Indeed, in Deleuzes characterization too, resemblance is tied to a knowl-
edge of essence, which, needless to say, does not appear as a metaphysical
primum, and thus neither is it isolated from the contingency of the chance
conditions in which it appears . . .54 Therefore, Gadamers formula also confirms
the definition of essence as exceeding all of the chance conditions in which it
appears. Yet one must take up such a formula, reaffirming that precisely these
modes of appearance are what constitute the essence and are therefore insepa-
rable from it.
On the other hand, ascertaining the excess-character of essence, in rela-
tion to the manifestations that constitute it, entails acknowledging the creativity
which is at work in the recognition of essence, that is, the creativity at work in
the memory which produces such a recognition. Of course, such a creativity
cannot consist in a creatio ex nihilo, but must be certainly brought to bear on
what one already knew, even if one was not aware of it. In this way, Gadamers
formula could be brought togetheras will be seen in Chapter 5with Mer-
leau-Pontys late characterization of the Freudian concept of the unconscious:
I did not know and I have always known it.55 Read through the lens of the
latter, Gadamers formula describes recognition as the knowledge of essence,
idea, or form whichas I have suggested and observed in the preceding chap-
terone tends, however, to retro-ject, as a model, into a mythical past.
III. DELEUZE AND THE MODEL OF RECOGNITION
However, this is not the conception of recognition to which Deleuze refers. It

is well known that in Difference and Repetition Deleuze indicates the model of
recognition (DR, 174/134), as one of the four postulates implied in that image
of thought which, in his opinion, philosophy uses as its own implicit presup-
position, deduced from common sense (ibid., 172173/132133). According
to Deleuze, to the two postulates that consist in hypothesizing a goodwill on the
part of the thinker and an upright nature on the part of thought (ibid., 171/131),
two others must be added. These are the two postulates that relate to the method
that can guarantee the correct nature of thought: Deleuze designates these pos-
tulates as the model of recognition and the form of representation (ibid.,
175/134).
Thus, recognition would constitute the model of natural and pre-philo-
sophical thought, implied by the image of thought that philosophy assumes
as its own implicit presupposition. This model would be characterized as
transcendental (ibid). Recognition, Deleuze explains, may be defined by
the harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon a supposed same object: the
same object may be seen, touched, remembered, imagined or conceived (ibid.,
174/133). By doing so, he confirms that recognitionwith regard to its own
objectaligns with the form of the Same (ibid., 175/134), which is the form
of representation insofar as it is defined on the basis of an intrinsic relation to
the model or foundation (LS, 299/259).
On the other handthat which relates to the subject of recognitionthe
model in question, Deleuze continues, relies upon a subjective principle of
collaboration of the faculties for everybodyin other words, a common sense
as a concordia facultatum (DR, 174/133). It is this very principle which he rec-
ognizes both in the Cartesian Cogito and in the Kantian I think (ibid.), specify-
ing, however, that, in the latter case, the model of recognition can vary on the
basis of the faculty (understanding, reason, or imagination) which provides, as
Kant illustrates in his three Critiques, the model itself. Thus, for Deleuze, what
we find in the Critique of Judgmentwith the single exception of imagination
in the judgment of the sublime56is a properly aesthetic common sense in

which the faculties attain a free accord (ibid., 178/137), confirming the para-
digm of common sense as a concordia facultatum, as well as the related model
of recognition.
According to Deleuze, that paradigm and this model are also recognizable
in the conception of sensibility as a passive synthesis (ibid., 179/137)i.e., as
the originary correlation between the body as sentient and the world as sen-
siblewhich has been developed by phenomenology. In this regard, Deleuze
returns to a passage in the Phenomenology of Perception in which Merleau-Ponty
explains that [t]he unity and identity of the tactile phenomenon do not come
about through any synthesis of recognition [recognition] in the concept, they
are founded upon the unity and identity of the body as a synergic totality (PP,
366/316317). As I have said, it is already in this respect that Deleuzes critique
of the phenomenological conception of corporeality emerges, a critique that
returns in much later texts such as the one dedicated to the painting of Fran-
cis Bacon.57 Hence, one can use this occasion to observe that if, according to
the latter, this critique is argued from the perspective of the phenomenological
impossibility of accounting for the difference in level proper to sensation, it is
precisely in the pages of the Phenomenology of Perception, which Deleuze refers
to in Difference and Repetition, that Merleau-Ponty writes, . . . thanks to this
unity of the body, the tactile perceptions gained through an organ are immedi-
ately translated in the language of the rest (PP, 366/317). Hence, it appears that
we are not dealing with a conception of the unity of the body which would lead
us to overlook its own internal differentiations, in this case sensorial.
Yet it proves even more interesting to return to the evaluation that one
finds in Difference and Repetition with regard to the Critique of Judgment, where
we retraced the substantial persistence of the paradigm of common sense as a
concordia facultatum, as well as the connected model of recognition. It should
be pointed out, then, that in the article entitled On Four Poetic Formulas that
Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy, first published in 1986 and sub-
sequently collected in Essays Critical and Clinical,58 Deleuze seems to revise
his earlier evaluation by extending to the entire third Critique what in Differ-
ence and Repetition he had only admitted for the imagination in the sublime.
Deleuze points to the poetic formula, which in his opinion epitomizes the inspi-
ration of the Critique of Judgment, in the following words by Arthur Rimbaud
from The Letters of the Seer, and his incunabulum which is the letter To George
Izambard, It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of
all the senses . . . a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses.59
Or rather, Deleuze continues, an unregulated exercise of all faculties (CC,
47/33), comparing the faculties, which maintain such a rapport, to wrestlers
(ibid., 48/34). This is the same comparison that Deleuze employs to designate
how the coupling between various sensations is analogously described by both
Proust and Bacon, in his book devoted to the latter (FBLS, 6571/6268).
However, let us return to the faculties in Kants Critique of Judgment which,

in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze sees as collaborating on the basis of the
model of recognition. Like wrestlers, Deleuze writes twenty-one years later,
One faculty pushes another to a limit, but they each make the one go beyond
the limits of the other. [ . . . ] This is a terrible struggle between the imagi-
nation and reason, but also between the understanding and inner sense, a
battle whose episodes will be the two forms of the Sublime, and then Genius.
There is a tempest in the chasm opened up inside the subject. [ . . . ] now, in
an exercise of limits, the various faculties mutually produce the most remote
harmonics in each other, so that they form essentially dissonant accords. The
emancipation of dissonance, the discordant accord, is the great discovery of
the Critique of Judgment [ . . . ] An unregulated exercise of all the faculties,
which was to define future philosophy, just as for Rimbaud the disorder of all
the senses would define the poetry of the future. (CC, 49/3435)
At this point, it is inevitable to add a further element of perplexity with

respect to the characterization of the model of recognition proposed in Dif-
ference and Repetition. Returning to the criticism addressed by Deleuze to the
phenomenological conception of corporeal unity, it is advisable to bear in
mind that the same sentence by Rimbaud quoted by Deleuzea long, gigan-
tic, and rational derangement of all the sensesis also commented on with
a sufficiently clear intention in Merleau-Pontys last course notes. Merleau-
Ponty writes, It is not a matter of no longer thinkingthe derangement of
the senses is the breaking down of the barriers between themselves in order to
retrieve their undividednessAnd therefore not my thinking, but theirs (NC,
186; my emphasis).
The above statement expresses an intention that is profoundly consonant
with the one that drives Deleuze to affirm, in Difference and Repetition, that rec-
ognition cannot be a model for what it means to think (DR, 176/135) since,
on the basis of such a model, thought is thereby filled with no more than an
image of itself, one in which it recognizes itself the more it recognises things
(ibid., 181/138). Yet Deleuze limits himself to a characterization of recognition
which one could define as tautological, on the basis of which it would tend to
reproduce and reaffirm not only previously acquired knowledge, but, together
with it, inevitably also the values that come to be attached to an object
(ibid., 177/135) when it becomes an object of knowledge; values that end up
remaining established values. On the contrary, Deleuze replies, the newin
other words, differencecalls forth forces in thought which are not the forces
of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model,
from an unrecognised and unrecognisable terra incognita (ibid.).
Yet this contrast of new and same proves difficult to sustain for the
one who has attempted to think difference and repetition together. More
than the conception of recognition developed by Deleuze, it is rather the
one proposed by Gadamerto recognize is to know more than is already
familiarwhich seems more consistent with such an attempt if this concep-

tion is understood according to the double formulation of Freuds unconscious
evoked by Merleau-Ponty, I did not know and I have always known it. Rather
than opposing itself artificially to the Deleuzian concept of the encounter, which
we referred to in our Introduction, Gadamers definition refers precisely to an
eidetic recognition such as the one described by Proust in the pages that I com-
mented on there.
This is, after all, only an apparent paradox of the art and literature of the
twentieth century: by their attention to the virtues of a resemblance obtained
by the uninterrupted exercises of deformation, they have, at bottom, sought
only to explore the mystery of this recognition.
As for the resemblance which seems to be related to this recognition, Deleuze
himselfwho in his book on Bacon interprets his painting as a prolongation of
the undertaking initiated in the twentieth century by Czanneattributes to
both painters the intention of achieving a resemblance that appears abruptly
as the result of relations that are completely different from those it is supposed
to reproduce: resemblance then emerges as the brutal product of nonresem-
bling means (FBLS, 108109/115). It is particularly significant to indicate the
way in which this definition follows the same pattern as the one he related,
fourteen years earlier, to the resemblance achieved by the Platonic ,
understood as : resemblance produced by totally different means
than those at work within the model (LS, 297/258). Moreover, if we wanted
to render the eidolon in terms of deformation, at least in order to echo the
linguistic nexus with which Plato binds the eidolon to the eidos,60 I should
repeat that I am here dealing with a deformation without preliminary form,
namely, an unprecedented deformation.61 Indeed, if all art is, as I have said, in
its essence a deformation, then the peculiarity of the deformation that charac-
terizes the artistic-literary research of the twentieth century seems to consist
in a critique aimed at the principle of representation (Vorstellung) insofar as
it is a mere frontal-positioning (Vor-Stellung) toward the world and, in such
a way, a critique aimed at conception of the model understood as that form
which is given preliminarily.62
IV. RECOGNITION WITHOUT RESEMBLANCE:

PROUSTS BAL DE TTES
It is not surprising to learn how the bal de ttesone of the most decisive loci in
all of Prousts Rechercheposes the problem of recognition to the aged Narrator
himself. After spending years isolated from society, the guests and the master of
the house, present at the matine of the Princes of Guermantes, all having aged,
appear to him precisely for this reason as disguised: For a few seconds I did
not understand why it was that I had difficulty in recognising the master of the
house and the guests and why everyone in the room appeared to have put on a
disguise . . . (R 3, 499/960; my emphasis).63
First of all, the transformation that impedes recognition appears to be

a bodily transformation, yet, more than once, Proust specifies that it cannot
but be one and the same with a total transformation of the personality (R 3,
500/961).64 Hence, what he is suggesting in these pages could be considered as
a theory of identity65 that simultaneously sustains both the bodily and psychic
transformation of this very identity.
Consequently, we return to Menos question: If in both cases this transfor-
mation proves to be, as one can read, complete, what remains of the idem, the
same, which defines identity?
If it were not for this question, in the first pages of the bal de ttes recogni-
tion would appear to be described in terms that could easily be brought back
to the definition that Deleuze offers in Difference and Repetition, namely, the
definition modelled with the form of Same (DR, 175/134). Such a definition
indeed seems to find an illuminating exemplification in Prousts presentation
of the bal de ttes:
A puppet show, yes, but one which, in order to identify the puppets with people
whom one had known in the past, it was necessary to read what was written on
several planes at once, planes that lay behind the visible aspect of the puppets
and gave them depth and forced one, as one looked at these aged marionettes,
to make a strenuous intellectual effort; one was obliged to study them at the same
time with ones eyes and with ones memory. (R 3, 503/964; my emphasis)66
As is explained in Difference and Repetition, recognition seems to require a

collaboration of the faculties (DR, 178/137) which allows us to identify the
poupes [puppets] with that which is already known. Defined as such, recogni-
tion appears to consist of bringing somebody or something back to an identity
which one had known in the past, which insofar as it has been given previously,
continues to be regarded as that which is true.
However, soon after in the Proustian text, a detail intervenes to contradict
this approach. Yet before returning to the similarity of the disguise [ttes],
which seems to mask the effective aspect of the characters through the metaphor
of the marrionettes and the old puppets, the Narrator frustrates all expecta-
tions, dictated by such a formulation, by classifying as real the M. dArgencourt
who now stands in front of him, rather than the one whom [he] had known (R
3, 500501/961962; my emphasis).67
Yet if the present M. dArgencourt does not have, indeed, less of a right
than the previous one to be recognized as real, on what grounds should he
have more of a right? Is not this what Heidegger would call a simple reversal?
The answer seems to be found on the page that immediately follows the one
which contains the metaphor of the marionettes and the old puppets. Here,
the Narrator observes that what the bal de ttes places in front of him is not
simply an image that can be situated in a determined time. Rather, it offers him
something akin to
. . . all the successive imageswhich I had never seenwhich separated the

past from the present, better still it showed me the relationship that existed
between the present and the past; it was like an old-fashioned peepshow, but a
peepshow of the years, the vision not of a moment but of a person situated in
the distorting [deforming] perspective of Time (R 3, 504/965).
Not only does this consideration seem to exclude the suspicion that the bal
de ttes would conceal a simple reversal of the truth of the past in the truth
of the present, but rather it strives to describe a view (vue) of a person that
phenomenology would define as eidetic. In the recognition of such a person,
which is enabled by such a view, the movement of bringing the present back to
what was known in the past (which for Deleuze contributes to the definition
of the model of recognition) is accompaniedbut one should rather say it is
one and the sameby an opposite movement. This opposite movement is that
which compels Prousts Narrator . . . to re-establish, to give their real place to
those years whose passage [he] had hardly noticed (R 3, 504/966).
According to Proust, it is precisely this last movement which opens up to
the Narrator the point of view (point de vue) (ibid.) on this fourth dimen-
sionthe dimension of timewhich by Habit is made invisible and to become
visible seeks bodies (R 3, 503/964), so that they can be located in the perspec-
tive which is proper to times own dimension: the perspective which is defined
by a word which traverses and underlies all the narration of the bal de ttes,
namely, deforming (ibid., 504/965966).68
In what Proust is aiming to describe here, it seems that one can recog-
nize what, in the first chapter of the present book, I tried to define as a car-
nal Wesensschau. Here it even produces a double effect; rendering sensible to
the Narrator the revelation (ibid., 504/966) of a dimensioninconceivable
yet apprehensible (ibid.)of time and enabling him to recognize the carnal
essence of the person he encounters as that element which Merleau-Ponty
significantly defines as transtemporal. Moreover, this second revelation can-
not be divorced from the first. Proust even wants to suggest that it is precisely
through the deformations which take place in the body of a person that time
can manage to offer such an essence, eidos, idea or form of this very person
to someone.
Anticipating it with the expressions modelled on the experience of vision,
with allusions to the widespread questions within the artistic debate concern-
ing this fourth dimension,69 by expressions of a clearly pictorial origin, such as
the arrangement in perspective, Proust introduces a decisive metaphor for the
development, which in this scene he gives to the theme of recognition. Namely,
the metaphor which he makes explicit many pages later when speaking about
Time, the artist, declaring it similar to those painters who keep a work by
them for half a lifetime, adding to it year after year . . . (R 3, 513/978).
In the course of the episode of the bal de ttes, Proust interweaves with
this metaphor an attention to the function of the characters names, which
actually appears to come into conflict with such a metaphor. The first grants
to the bodies, transformed by time, the possibility of favouring a special type
of recognition, which could be defined as eidetic, whereas the second tends to
deny such a possibility, making the name the sole clue (R 3, 519/982), which is
capable of ensuring a connection between the recollection of a body preserved
by memory and its present aspect or appearance. After all, the analytic effort
which ends up intellectualizing certain Proustian descriptions (which some-
times also happens with regard to the experience which brings the Narrator
to a striking revelation . . . of that chronological reality which under normal
conditions is no more than an abstract conception to us R 3, 505/966) and
the sensible tonality of the experiences which these descriptions would like to
explicitly render,70 are characterized by a similar tension.
In any case, the present reflections on deformation and recognition turn
their attention to the Proustian developments of the metaphor of Time, the
artist, above all because Proust writes of this artist that, placing people in its
peculiar deforming perspective, it was able to render them in such a way that
they were recognisable; yet [ . . . ] were not likenesses (R 3, 513/978).
With regard to what I have said above in connection with the character-
istics of art and literature in the twentieth century, Proust described, in the
same pages, this artist (time) as both spiteful [malveillant] and inaccurate
[inexact]i.e., non-mimeticso that many of the people depicted within its
paintings are identified immediately [ . . . ] as rather bad portraits of them-
selves (ibid.). Evoking Plato, one could thus say that these people are identified
by virtue of a mere appearance of resemblance in that, in respect to their former
aspect, the artist had hardened the features of one sitter, robbed another of
her fresh complexion and her slender figure, spread a gloom over the counte-
nance of a third (ibid.), avoiding altogether every effective likeness.71 Indeed,
this artist does not seem interested in a recognition which, supported by the
imitation of a preliminary model, would rely on the concordia facultatum. On
the contrary, it is interested in the recognition, similar to the one defined as
eidetic and which Proust, as we are about to read, prefers to call identification: a
recognition obtained by deformations as effective as those operated by Phidias.
However, such deformations do not depend on any optical correction which
would compensate for them, hence forcing the faculties to work together with
one another, but not in Concordia,72 so that they form primarily dissonant
agreementsas we saw Deleuze writee in connection with Kants third Cri-
tiquewith which they correspond to the bold contrasts (ibid.) that the artist
himself had introduced.
For to recognise someone, and, a fortiori, to learn someones identity after hav-
ing failed to recognise him, is to predicate two contradictory things of a single
subject, it is to admit that what was here, the person whom one remembers,
no longer exists, and also that what is now here is a person whom one did
not know to exist; and to do this we have to apprehend a mystery almost as
disturbing as that of death, of which it is, indeed, as it were the preface and the
harbinger (R 3, 518/982; my emphasis).
Something of this mystery ultimately remains in the mystery of the eidetic

recognition that, as I have previously noted, both the art and literature of the
twentieth century sought to explore. After all, it is clear that Proust, by bring-
ing together the artist and Time, does not only want to indicate the style of
the latters work, but also the task to which, precisely for this reason, the artist
is called.
Chapter 4
The Words of the Oracle: Merleau-Ponty

and the Philosophy of Freudianism
I. A NEW INTEREST FOR PSYCHOANALYSIS
In the same year that Merleau-Ponty penned the lines I cited at the beginning of
my second chapter, lines which connect the mythical time of Prousts sensible
ideas with the Freudian idea of the unconscious and the past, he also wrote
the preface to a book entitled Luvre de Freud et son importance pour le monde
moderne,1 written by the psychoanalyst Anglo Hesnard who at the time sup-
ported a position close to Laans.2 In concluding this Preface, Merleau-Ponty
stressed the new motives (PH, 10/72) which were stimulating his interest in
Freuds work. A few pages previously he had acknowledged that
. . . a philosophy that is now perhaps more mature, and also the growth of
Freudian researchprecisely in the direction taken by Doctor Hesnard
would today lead me to express in a different way relations between phenom-
enology and psychoanalysis, the implicit philosophy of psychoanalysis itself,
and in the long run would make me less indulgent than doctor Hesnard gen-
erously is toward my earlier attempts. (ibid., 7/69)
Nevertheless, this did not stop Merleau-Ponty from noting that the cri-
tiques he had leveled against Freudian psychoanalysis in the past still seem true
to me (ibid.). A few pages earlier, he had summarized such critiques as they
were set out in an early work (ibid., 5/67), which one could assume to be the
Phenomenology of Perception. At issue were the critiques of those who, like him,
consider the Freudian unconscious as an archaic or primordial consciousness,
the repressed as a zone of experience that we have not integrated, the body as
a sort of natural or innate complex, and communication as a relation between
incarnate beings of this sort who are well or badly integrated (ibid).
The Preface to Hesnards book is contemporaneous with the last of the
three courses dedicated to the concept of nature that Merleau-Ponty gave at
49
the Collge de France between the academic years of 195657 and 195960:
it is the course entitled, significantly, Nature and Logos: the Human Body,2
which focuses precisely on our body as the root of symbolism (N, 259/199).
It is precisely in describing the emergence of symbolism (RC, 137/98) at
this level that Merleau-Ponty refers to what he had qualified a few years ear-
lier, in the summary of another course, the one dedicated to The Problem
of Passivity, as
Freuds most interesting insightnot the idea of a second I think which

could know what we do not know about ourselvesbut the idea of a symbol-
ism which is primordial, originary, the idea of a non-conventional thought
(Politzer) enclosed in a world for us, which is the source of dreams and more
generally of the elaboration of our life. (RC, 6970/49)
The definition of symbolism on which Merleau-Ponty insists with respect

to the human body in the course he dedicates to the latter in 195960 thus
motivates the fundamental place psychoanalysis occupies within it: symbol-
ismnot in a superficial sense, i.e., a term representing another, holding the
place of another,but in the fundamental sense of: a term which expresses
another (N, 281/219; trans. modified).
Amongst the preparatory notes about psychoanalysis that Merleau-Ponty
collected for this course, several pages have been rediscovered which he had
written for the previous years course, entitled Philosophy Today (NC, 149
156; 388389).3 For a better understanding of these pages, one must therefore
recall the intention lying behind this other course.
Just like the working notes from The Visible and the Invisible, the course
outline (ibid., 3536) begins with the observation of our state of non-philoso-
phy (ibid., 35)4 with regard to which Merleau-Ponty states: . . . never has the
crisis been so radical (VI, 219/165). As the course notes explain, it is a matter
of a crisis of rationality in the relations between men (NC, 40), as well as in
our relations with Nature (ibid., 42), both of which reflect the consequences
of the development of technology [technique] (ibid., 46).
These course notes then concentrate on the attempt to identify the multiple
cultural symptoms that attest to [a] similar crisis situation, i.e., simultane-
ously both peril and possibility for the rebirth of philosophy: example, in our
Western ideology: poetry, music, painting, and psychoanalysis (ibid.).
In psychoanalysis, as in the other cultural symptoms, Merleau-Ponty
recognizes an ambivalent sense, to which the pages dedicated to psychoanaly-
sis repeatedly return: there is the psychoanalysis that is a symptom of dec-
adence, whether it posits a separate unconscious or opposes it to conscious
control. There is a psychoanalysis that, on the occasion of disintegration, redis-
covers a deeper unity: unconscious thought as a non-conventional one, the I
as profoundly related (ibid., 388389). The first of these pages explains this
ambivalence in the following manner: psychoanalysis, respectively, is (1) if it
THE WORDS OF THE ORACLE 51
is understood as a positivistic explanation by the sexual or at the opposite end

by the I. It is (2) if one understands that the sexual on which everything rests
is not the genitalthat everything rests on it because human desire is entirely
different from an automatic function (ibid., 149).
The continuity of thought that binds these notes to those earlier attempts
Merleau-Ponty mentions in his Preface to Hesnards book thus becomes evi-
dent: one can find this continuity as much in the critiques which, as early as
The Structure of Behavior, were leveled against the causalistic temptations of
psychoanalytic language and in the interpretation of the Freudian pansexual-
ism formulated in the Phenomenology of Perception.
With regard to both of these topics, at the beginning of the very long
footnote, which concludes the chapter on The Body in its Sexual Being
from Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty wrote that, one can no
more get rid of [ . . . ] psychoanalysis by impugning reductionist concep-
tions and causal thought in the name of a descriptive and phenomenological
method (PP, 199/171). Ratherhe continuesthis method can contribute
to formulating psychoanalysis in another language (ibid.). In fact, precisely
in the same chapter of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty tried to
formulate Freudian pansexualism in a non-causalistic way: There is inter-
fusion between sexuality and existence, which means that existence permeates
sexuality and vice versa, so that it is impossible to determine, in a given deci-
sion or action, the proportion of sexual to other motivations, impossible to
label a decision or act sexual or non-sexual (ibid., 197/169). I would like to
stress that in this passage Merleau-Ponty used the phenomenological notion
of motivation (ibid., 61/49), which in a previous chapter of the same work he
qualified, along with Husserl, as a fluid concept (ibid.), explaining that [t]o
the degree that the motivated phenomenon comes into being, an internal rela-
tion to the motivating phenomenon appears; hence, instead of the one merely
succeeding the other, the motivated phenomenon makes the motivating phe-
nomenon explicit and comprehensible, and thus seems to have pre-existed its
own motive (ibid., 61/50).
Therefore, whatever the theoretical declarations of Freud may have been
(ibid., 184/157158), Merleau-Ponty specified, when the former described what
we heard the latter calling the interfusion between sexuality and existence, it
would be a mistake to imagine that psychoanalysis is opposed to the phe-
nomenological method; psychoanalysis has, on the contrary, albeit unwittingly,
helped to develop it by declaring, as Freud puts it, that every human action has
a meaning, and by making every effort to understand the event, short of relat-
ing it to mechanical circumstances (ibid., 184185/158).
In the late period of Merleau-Pontys thought, this motivation is joined by
the new interest in psychoanalysis as one of the cultural symptoms within
which Merleau-Ponty thinks he sees a new ontology implicitly operating, an
ontology which, by virtue of the above-mentioned ambivalence, struggles to
find an appropriate philosophical formulation, and could perhaps never find
it at all. Merleau-Ponty seeks this new formulation especially in his last two
courses of the year 196061, which were interrupted by his sudden death: Phi-
losophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel and, even more explicitly, The Car-
tesian Ontology and the Ontology of Today (NC, 159ff ).
The new motives (PH, 10/72) concerning an interest in psychoanalysis,
which we found outlined in the preface to Hesnards book, consist of the con-
viction that what we there saw qualified as the implicit philosophy of psycho-
analysis itself (ibid., 7/69) helps to delineate the contours of this ontology of
today to which Merleau-Ponty sought to give an explicit philosophical for-
mulation in his last courses at the Collge de France. The continuity between
this new evaluation of psychoanalysis and the critiques and interpretations he
had proposed in the past becomes particularly apparent in a passage contained
in the course notes we are in the process of examining. Here, Merleau-Ponty
decides in favor of this evaluation precisely because of the interpretation of
Freudian pansexualism that he developed previously: The true (+ compre-
hension) formulation is not that everything is sexual, but: there is nothing that
is not sexual, nothing is asexual, the the overcoming of the genital is not an
absolute distinction or break -> ontological character of sexuality, i.e., it is a
major contribution to our relationships with being (NC, 150151; ).
The same text adds that [psychoanalysis] outlines a philosophy [ . . . ] if
it allows itself to be guided by the relationship with being such as it appears in
mankind (ibid., 151). Therefore, it is not surprising that Philosophy of Freud-
ianism is precisely the title of a working note in The Visible and the Invisible, a
note that is amongst the most important for our comments here.5
II. FREUDIANISM AS A PHILOSOPHY OF THE FLESH
This working note begins by reiterating the critique of the causalistic inter-
pretation of what Freud defines as the connection between the impressions
of the artists childhood and his life-history on the one hand and his works,
as reactions to those impressions, on the other.6 Howeveras the note points
outthis causalistic interpretation is but a superficial interpretation of Freud-
ianism (VI, 323/269). If such an interpretation is obviously to be avoided, it is
generally more a matterthe same note indicatesof making not an existen-
tial psychoanalysis, but an ontological psychoanalysis (ibid.).
The development of the preceding elements of critique and interpreta-
tion of psychoanalysis within the new motives concerning an interest in it
is therefore encouraged, in the thought of Merleau-Ponty, by the passage from
the existential perspective, which one encounters in the Phenomenology of
Perception, to the ontological perspective that inspires his later reflections. In
other words, what promotes this developmentand, of course, nourishes itis
the deepening of the notion of a proper body within the notion of flesh.
Indeed, the notion of a proper body, if it implies the correlation between a
perceiving subject and the perceived world, nevertheless remains within the
consciousness-object distinction, as The Visible and the Invisible also admits

(see VI, 253/200), whereas with the notion of flesh Merleau-Ponty manages
to designate the common ontological texture that interweaves our body, the
others body and the things of the world, enveloping them all in a horizon of
co-belonging within which subject and object are not yet constituted, such that
every body and every thing is given only as difference with respect to others.
The working note to The Visible and the Invisible that we are in the process
of examining thus proposes that, if one interprets it from such a perspective,
the philosophy of Freud is not a philosophy of the body but of the flesh (VI,
324/270), the latter understood precisely as the common horizon where all
beings belong. It is to such a horizon that this note suggests that we refer the
Freudian overdetermination of symptoms (see VI, 323/270) on which Mer-
leau-Ponty insisted in the Phenomenology of Perception in order to contend
that Freud himself, in his concrete analyses, abandons causal thought (PP,
184, note 3/158, note 2): it is precisely as interwoven with the flesh of Being
that any entity can be accentuated as an emblem of Being (VI, 323/270), as
the note to The Visible and the Invisible explains. And, being overdetermined
in this manner, it can lead to the fixation of a character by investment of the
openness to Being in an Entitywhich, henceforth, takes place through this
Entity (ibid.).
Let us then recall and reread from this perspective the affirmation, accord-
ing to which, within the circular movement of our lives, [ . . . ] everything sym-
bolizes everything else,7 which gave credit to the psychoanalytic intuition8
in Cezannes Doubt. Let us also recall the Freudian overdetermination of all
symptoms,9 which is also indicated in this text, and, more generally, the totality
of the commentary, developed in this same text, on the famous essay by Freud
entitled Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood.10 Moreover, this
latter essay is of particular interest because it intersects in a significant manner
with two Freudian writings dedicated to the theme of fetishism. Indeed, on
the one hand, this text was written in the same year (1909) that Freud presented
his hypothesis On the Genesis of Fetishism to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society,
while on the other, he will state that the essay had already put forth the explana-
tion of fetishism presented by him in a text published on this subject in 1927.11
As we know, the childhood memory to which the title of Freuds essay
makes reference was recalled by Leonardo in the midst of his scientific research
into the flying of kites, as this memory concerned precisely the figure of a kite
that had landed on his crib and hit him in the mouth with its tail: a figure that
is evoked, according to Freud, by the drapery of Marys cloak in St. Anne with
Two Others.
On the basis of this childhood memory (Kinderheitserinnerung), Freud is
impelled to attempt to decipher the enigma12 of Leonardos character. However,
despite its title, Freuds essay supposes that the scene with the vulture would
not be a memory of Leonardos but a phantasy [Phantasie], which he formed at
a later date and transposed to his childhood,13 or, to be more exact, the later,
phantasmic elaboration of a double recollection: that of being suckled and

being kissed by his mother.14
According to the perspective Merleau-Ponty now adopts, as in the case
which inspired this memory, an experience of initiation therefore occurs as
soon as there is an encounter with a being, an entity, which, insofar as it is
taken from the ontological horizon of the flesh, is accentuated as an opening
of a dimension of being (VI, 323/269; my emphasis), according to an expres-
sion that recurs in the working note to The Visible and the Invisible I have been
examining up to now.
As I have noted in the first two chapters of the present work, in an expe-
rience of initiation a being, an entity, ends up dimensionalizing15 itself as an
essence.16 This occurs when this being has been revived in a creative manner
(according to the Merleau-Pontian expression creative revival, which also
appears in the essay on Czanne17) within an association such that that being
turns out to be overdetermined. As is explained in another working note to The
Visible and the Invisible, a note that is fundamental for this problem, there is
no association that comes into play unless there is overdetermination, that is,
a relation of relations, a coincidence that cannot be fortuitous, that has an omi-
nal sense (VI, 294/240).18
III. ASSOCIATION AS INITIATION
Merleau-Ponty therefore warns us against a simply associationistic interpreta-

tion of the associations of psychoanalysis (VI, 293/240),19 seeking rather
to think association as initiation: this is what the title of one of his notes on
the writer Claude Simon significantly proposes. Allow me to quote it here in
its entirety:
The red on the artillery soldiers uniform (cf. Claude Simon in the Lettres fran-
aises text). He reports this and thatby association, one says. Its not really
that, nor is it Verschmelzung, etc.Rather the texture of this red has a signify-
ing virtue, a qualitative texture above all. Then there are experiences which
carry some feeling, experiences that have been lived through it (like things
through their names). In this wayfollowing an archaic structurewe will
always be a mediator of these experiences. Because our experience is not a flat
field of qualities but rather always invoked by this or that fetish, a fetish which
intercedes on its own behalf.20
The initiation is therefore not initial. It can give itself only through the
revival of an experience in another, but it can nevertheless not be resolved
in the simple association of the two, since it is always a matter of a creative
revival, even if, by virtue of a retrograde movement of the true, we tend to
consider the sense as preexisting in the experience, whose signifying virtue in
reality consists only in an anticipation of the revival that follows.21 The initia-
tion is thus accomplished in the between that lies between the experiences that
are associated with it, and that is why it gives itself as an overdetermination
with respect to both of them.
This is possible because, as we saw in the note on Claude Simon, our expe-
rience is not a flat field of qualities, that is, to return to the working note to The
Visible and the Invisible on the Philosophy of Freudianism, insofar as it pos-
sesses this ontological capacity that Merleau-Ponty defines as the capacity to
take a being as representative of Being (VI, 318/270). Indeed, it is by virtue of
this capacity that a being can be dimensionalized, and therefore that a thing
can be overdetermined as an essencethat is to say, in Greek terms, as an
ideabut also as a fetish, as the note on Claude Simon again suggests.
IV. FETISHISM
From this perspective, one could therefore say that fetishism reveals itself to be
a special, and in some cases pathological, instance of our ontological capacity.
Now, it can be understood as such, as I noted, not by a philosophy of the body,
but of the flesh. And it is precisely on the level of this philosophy that Freud
seems to position himself in his presentation On the Genesis of Fetishism.
Borrowing several observations proposed by Krafft-Ebing, he begins by
admitting that ultimately anything possible, can become a fetish.22 Nonethe-
less, and in disagreement with the one who had invented the term fetishism,
Freud subsequently affirms that fetishism does not derive from a memory,
but that it is tied to the repression of an impulse: a type of repressionhe
explainswhich is instituted by the splitting of the complex. A portion is
genuinely repressed, while the other portion is idealized, what in our case is
specifically raised to a fetish.23
That is why Freud, with respect to this issue, writes of a partial repression
[partielle Verdrngung]24 of the representatives tied to the repressed impulse:
precisely because it is partial, this repression produces a peculiar elevation of a
portion of the repressed complex to an ideal,25 and this is what, in his opinion,
fetishism consists of.26
Once again it is necessary to emphasize the manner in which he refers
the representatives on which this repression is effected to various impulses,
such as the visual impulse27 in the case of clothes fetishism, and the olfac-
tory impulse28 in the case of shoe or hair fetishism, these beings thereby find-
ing themselves accentuated, one could say with Merleau-Ponty, as so many
emblems of Being.
In the brief article that Freud devotes to Fetishism eighteen years later, the
fetish is again correlated to the partial repression of an object of which it is
the idealized preservation. Yet Freuds interest is here focused on the object of
this repressionindicated in a univocal manner in the womans (the mothers)
penis29rather than on the genesis of fetishism, as the title of his 1909 presenta-
tion appropriately indicated. Fetishism henceforth appears tied, in a causalistic
manner, to the castration complex,30 and this is the primary reason why this
article seems to be based on a philosophy of the bodyin some aspects of the

objective body even more than of the lived bodyrather than on a philosophy
of the flesh.
Merleau-Ponty never seems to have referred explicitly to Fetishism. None-
theless, Freuds article also shows another aspect on which Merleau-Ponty
focused his criticisms of psychoanalysis, criticisms that he borrowed in par-
ticular from the work of Georges Politzer.31 By categorizing the repressed as
what is denied (which would be to say known) (NC, 152), as Merleau-Ponty
observes in the course notes devoted to psychoanalysis examined above, Freuds
article indeed seems to characterize the unconscious as a second conscious-
ness (NC 149), an adequate thought hidden (NC, 150) by the I in order to
defend itself from it. Yet Merleau-Pontys notes remind us that this character-
ization leads us to affirm the postulate of the priority of conventional thought,
of the priority of the thinking subject (NC, 151), whereas the perspective at
which Merleau-Ponty arrived led him to an ontological generalization of pri-
mordial symbolism through which one can already see him referring to the
non-conventional thought of Georges Politzer.32
In light of this, if one considers that Freud is referring in the article in ques-
tion to his essay on da Vinci,33 one could then maintain that what inspires such
a recapture is precisely the orientation of psychoanalysis which Merleau-Ponty
criticized with respect to that essay too, namely, the orientation whereby we
saw psychoanalysis signify a cultural symptom of decadence.
Indeed, and as I have indicated, such an orientation in Merleau-Pontys
opinion explicitly reintroduces a philosophy of consciousness by positing the
separation between the conscious and the unconscious.34 In order to retain the
sense of the word unconscious as the index of an enigma (PH, 9/71) as Mer-
leau-Ponty wants to do in his Preface to Hesnards book, this separation must
therefore be necessarily avoided. Here, again, one must return to the work-
ing note to The Visible and the Invisible entitled Philosophy of Freudianism,
where he recommends: The Id, the unconsciousand the Ego (correlative) to
be understood on the basis of the flesh (VI, 324/270; my emphasis).
During the important conference devoted to the unconscious which
took place at Bonneval in 1959, Merleau-Ponty points to the model for such
a correlationwhich allows us to unravel the negative in the positive and
the positive in the negative (RC, 73/52), as he highlights in the conclusion to
his summary on the Problem of Passivityin the notion of negative mag-
nitude illustrated by Kant,35 given that this notion allows one, in his opinion,
to recognize an articulation, a simultaneity of presence and absence,36 since
it consists precisely in the idea of a reciprocal implication of the positive and
the negative.
It is according to a similar dynamic, I think, that Freud, in his 1909 presen-
tation, describes the partial repression that engenders fetishism. Conversely,
the orientation underlying his 1927 article contains a few affirmations to
which one could connect the words Merleau-Ponty employs in his Preface to
Hesnards book in order to reaffirm his critical remarks on psychoanalysis: We

refused, as we always will, to grant to that phallus which is part of the objective
body, the organ of micturition and copulation, such power of causality over so
many forms of behavior (PH, 7/69).
On the other handthat same passage goes on to sayfrom psychoanaly-
sis, we learned [ . . . ] to discern an imaginary phallus, a symbolic phallus,
oneiric and poetic (ibid.).
V. SYMBOLIC, ONEIRIC AND POETIC
Oneiric and poetic: these two adjectives return in the conclusion of the
last summary composed by Merleau-Pontythat of the previously men-
tioned course on Nature and Logos: The Human Bodyin order to des-
ignate what he defines there as powers of the flesh (RC, 179/130)37: it is a
philosophy of this flesh that is the condition without which psychoanalysis
remains anthropology (VI 321/267), as a working note from The Visible and
the Invisible cautions.
Indeed, the fleshsince it binds, as I have already stated, our body to that
of others and to the things in the worldis shot through with a logic of impli-
cation or promiscuity (RC, 71/50) that Merleau-Ponty praises Freud for hav-
ing indicated,38 while not always knowing how to describe it in an appropriate
manner.39 Not unlike the involuntary memory described by Proust, dreams,
as well as the free associations of psychoanalysis, hint at this logic (this is
why they should not be interpreted in a merely associationistic manner), both
attesting to the fact that it deals with a logic constantly operative within the
carnal relationships our body has with others and with things.
It is precisely to such an operative (fungierende) logic of implication or
promiscuity that Merleau-Ponty refers his eventual characterizations of the
unconscious40 as perception that is imperception (NC, 149150),41 as feel-
ing itself, since feeling is not the intellectual possession of what is felt, but a
dispossession of ourselves in favor of it, an opening toward that which we do
not have to think in order that we may recognize it (RC, 179/130). This is an
opening to which conscious thought can but remain essentially correlated.
If such a logic of implication or promiscuity constitutes the framework
of the sensible of which it makes the oneiric world of analogy (OE, 41/132),
then for this very reason it reveals how the poetic power of the flesh can also
be qualified as the poietic power of worlds.42
The poetic and oneiric powers of the fleshpowers that therefore do not
belong to usare, in short, powers of primordial symbolization, by virtue of
which the others and the things we experience can acquire a dimension (in the
sense Merleau-Ponty ascribes to this word) and a mythical temporality, sedi-
menting themselves in our unconscious. That is why Merleau-Ponty charac-
terizes the unconscious as an archaic structure, not only in the previously
cited note on Claude Simon, but also in his Preface to Hesnards book, where
an analogous expressionarchaic or primordial consciousness (PH, 5/67)

appears as Merleau-Ponty is synthesizing his own previous interpretation of
psychoanalysis, with respect to which he thus displays an important element
of continuity.
Even our waking relations with objects and others especiallyhe writes
in the summary of his course on The Problem of Passivityhave an onei-
ric character as a matter of principle: others are present to us in the way that
dreams are, the way myths are (RC, 69/48). Indeed, the poetic and oneiric
powers of the flesh are also mythopoietic43 powers that, as such, introduce an
operative mythicity in the logic of implication or promiscuity through which
our relations with others and with things are continually animated.
Just as in the case of da Vincis kite and the hawthorns for Marcel, in our
experience these powers are invested in certain beings through which we open
up onto Being and which, for that reason, become its emblem (VI, 323/270):
the figures not of an origin having occurred in the past once and for all, but of
an originary that, although subject to the retrograde movement of the true,
operates in an explosion which is forever (VI, 318/265),44 enveloping our rela-
tions with others and with things in a decisive and inextinguishable mythical
halo. For this reason, our experience will never cease to take up, in a creative
manner, these emblems as though they wereas one reads in Cezannes Doubt
the words of the oracle (SNS, 42/75),45 which are ultimately nothing other
than the words of myth.46 From this perspective, then, Merleau-Ponty writes in
the Preface to Hesnards book that psychoanalysis returned our myths to us
(PH, 8/71). Indeed, it is in the course notes he devotes to it that Merleau-Ponty
indicates the contribution psychoanalysis can make to a non-nihilistic resolu-
tion of this crisis of which it is at the same time one of the symptoms. He
writes: [psychoanalysis] can be the deepening, the enrichment of culture or
the aggravation of the crisis, depending on whether it accentuates the objectiv-
istic and technical spirit from which it emerges [ . . . ] or whether it is this spirit
recognizing its limits, the rediscovery of our archaeology as not being made up
of decisions on the part of the I or the Erlebnisse of consciousnessMythical
time = time before time or before things, and still present (NC, 155).
If the crisis of our epoch can have a positive outcomeMerleau-Ponty
suggests in these linesthen this will mean, among other things, that psycho-
analysis will have succeeded in reconfiguring the mythical heritage of the West-
ern tradition in terms that allow us to continue to think of it as ours.
Chapter 5
How Can One Recognize What One

Did Not Know?: Mnemosyne and the
Art of the Twentieth Century
For Giovanna
I. I DID NOT KNOW AND I HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN IT
I did not know and I have always known it: it is through this double
formula that Merleau-Ponty characterizes the Freudian notion of the uncon-
scious (RC, 179/130; trans. modified) when, in the last course he was able to
complete at the Collge de France (195960), Nature and Logos: The Human
Body, to which I have frequently referred, he conceives its identification with
feeling: [t]he unconscious is feeling itself (ibid.).
Now, this formula inevitably reminds us of the Platonic theory of rec-
ollection. As is well known, the locus classicus for the foundation of such a
theory is to be found in the pages of Platos Meno, where it is framed, by Meno
himself, as two interrelated questions: How is it possible to inquire into what
one does not know at all? And, in the event that one finds it, how is it possible
to recognize it?
In other words, the problem raised by Meno concerns the possibility of
recognizing what was not known as such, either because its model has not
been contemplated hitherto or because the model differs from the image
one has encountered. Th is problem can be further articulated as follows:
Is recognition which is not guaranteed by resemblance to a model at all
Professor Giovanna Borradori (Vassar College, Poughkeepsie) discussed a previous version

of this chapter with me, sharing the effort of thinking and unfolding many aspects of it. The
present version owes a lot to her.
59
possible, and concurrently, can resemblance be produced not through imi-

tation but through difference? Th is double question proves to be crucial to
the art and literature of the twentieth century. Look, for example, at how
Milan Kundera struggles to make sense of what he seems to recognize in
Francis Bacon.
Looking at Bacons portraits, I am amazed that, despite their distortion, they

all look like their model. But how can an image look like a model of which it
is consciously, programmatically, a distortion? And yet, the image resembles
the model; the pictures of the persons portrayed bear that out. And even if I
did not know those photos, it is absolutely clear that in every cycle, in every
triptych, the various deformations of the face resemble one another, so that
one recognizes in them one and the same person.
In other words, how is it possible to recognize, through its different deforma-

tions, a face never seen before? In this manner, Kunderas question about Bacon
touches on those formulated by Meno.
In response to Meno, Socrates develops the theory according to which
learning signifies recollecting. He does so by purporting to deduce it from
metempsychosis, or the transmigration of the soul after death from body to
body. Yet, this reference quickly gives way to Socrates decision to question one
of Menos own slaves.
Over the course of the first argument, Socrates observes nothing prevents
a man, after recalling one thing onlya process men call learningdiscover-
ing everything else for himself (Meno, 81d). He explains that this can occur
because Nature is co-generated [suggens] (81d): it is precisely this feature
which one could also define as organicthat allows whoever has recollected
one aspect to infer the others.
Socrates argument presupposes a relation between part and whole that
Deleuze generalizes in the following manner:
When a part is valid for itself, when a fragment speaks in itself, when a sign
appears, it can be in two very different fashions: either because it permits us
to divine the whole from which it is taken, to reconstitute the organism or the
statue to which it belongs, and to seek out the other part that belongs to itor
else, on the contrary, because there is no other part that corresponds to it, no
totality into which it can enter, no unity from which it is torn and to which it
can be restored. The first fashion is that of the Greeks.
As we have already alluded to in the second chapter of this work, the other
way here described by Deleuze is the one he recognizes in Prousts Remem-
brance of Things Past and classifies as antilogos, thus emphasizing its contrast
with the tradition of Platonism.
Deleuze believes that Proust departs in an essential way from the Platonic
formulation of the problem of recollection. Proust sketches, in Deleuzes words,
HOW CAN ONE RECOGNIZE WHAT ONE DID NOT KNOW? 61
an entirely new or modern conception of recollection I shall now elaborate on

this modern conception of recollection, which, I wish to suggest, enables us to
answer the question of whether and how it is possible to recognize anything or
anyone we did not know, an enticing puzzle for philosophers but also a crucial
motif in the art and literature of the twentieth century.
II. RECOLLECTION AND IDEA
Deleuze observes that for Plato the idea is the goal of recollection (PS,
132/109; trans. modified), since the Idea is always before, always presup-
posed, even when it is discovered only afterwards (ibid.). In this sense, the
idea constitutes the stable Essence, the thing in itself separating opposites,
introducing the perfect mean into the whole (ibid.), and thus offering to the
real the guarantee of a metaphysically grounded logos. According to Deleuze, it
is precisely the recomposition of this preliminary logos that Platoin a manner
coherent with classical Greek culturesees in recollection. Hence, recollection
proves to be a point of departure that is valid only in its capacity to imitate,
already, the goal (ibid.; my emphasis). Here one can again trace the paradox of
the double formula I mentioned at the outset, which Merleau-Ponty indicates
as characterizing Freuds notion of the unconscious: I did not know and I
have always known it. Indeed, when Deleuze uses the term to imitate in rela-
tion to the goal, he undoubtedly intends to remind us that Plato refers to this
goalthe ideaas an always before [toujours avant], that is, through explicit
references to the artistic field, as a model. The notion of model is expressed by
the Greek verb pardeigma, which is used by Plato with reference to both the
painters or sculptors model and as a divine example of earthly things. This is
a confirmation of the intimate bond between the question of recollection and
that of art: in the tradition grounded in Platonic thought, recollection and art
do stem from models, but these same models are also the goals in light of which
their capacity for imitation is to be measured.
Deleuze contends that the entirely new or modern conception of recollec-
tion proposed by Proust finds a particularly effective expression in Chateau-
briands phrase, which the Narrator of the Recherche declares to be among the
most beautiful in Mmoires dOutre-Tombe:
A sweet and subtle scent of heliotrope . . . was brought to us not by a breeze from
our own country but by a wild Newfoundland wind, unrelated to the exiled
plant, without sympathy of shared memory or pleasure. (R 3, 919/958959)
Deleuzes comment on Chateaubriands phrase highlights how it represents

a departure from the Platonic path:
. . . there is no Platonic recollection here, precisely because there is no sympa-

thy as a reuniting into a whole; rather the messenger is itself an incongruous
part [partie htroclite] that does not correspond to its message nor to the
recipient of that message. (PS, 137138/114; trans. modified)
The Nature evoked by Chateaubriands phrase is not, for Deleuze, co-gener-

ated, and thus it is not a being whose parts are related in any way. As its proper
model and goal, recollection can refer neither to a being of this kind nor to the
ideas in which it is grounded. Therefore, the accuracy of recollection cannot be
measured in terms of its capacity to imitate anything. This enables Deleuze to
describe recollection as working as an unrelated part, an incongruous part,
which unifies an associative chain that is in turn incongruous, whose model
recollection creates as its own goal. This entirely new or modern conception of
recollection reveals its intimate bond with the terms in which the radical ques-
tioning of art begins to be formulated during the same historical period: as Paul
Klee famously put it, art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible.
Deleuze points out that the essentially creative character of recollection
affirms the anti-Platonistic value of recollection itself:
It is no longer a matter of saying: to create is to thinkbut rather, to think

is to create [ . . . ] To re-remember is to create, not to create memory, but to
create the spiritual equivalent of the still too material memory. (PS, 134/111;
trans. modified)
To remember is not to retrieve the representation of a lived experience, which

is what Deleuze calls the too material memory, but rather to create its spiritual
equivalent, that is precisely the idea of it. The essentially creative character of
recollection in its new or modern conception consists, then, in the creation of
the idea, which can therefore no longer be posited as a preliminary model. Let
us therefore concentrate on such a creation.
III. RECOLLECTION AND THE PURE PAST
In Difference and Repetition, two years before the second edition of Proust and
Signs, Deleuze had already established that recollection does not simply refer
us back from a current present to former presents (DR, 115/85, trans. modi-
fied). As we know, in this work the Proustian example of the flavors of the
tea and of the madeleine, which make the in-itself of Combray (ibid.) arise,
shows how recollection rather evokes a past that was never present (ibid.): a
past which is the pure element of the past, understood as the past in general,
as an a priori past (DR, 110/81). This pure past is the past understood as a
dimension where each present will be situated once it is past, and which we
would tend to confuse with these presents and therefore lose as such, if recol-
lection did not attend to sav[ing] it for ourselves (DR, 115/84).
Deleuze emphasizes that it is in recognizing this property of recollection
that Proust intervenes, taking up the baton from Bergson (DR, 115/84). And
yet, he notes immediately afterwards, it seems that the response has long been
known (DR, 115/8485), since recollection designates a passive synthesis, an
involuntary memory which differs in kind from any active synthesis associated
with voluntary memory (DR, 115/85). Since the past that recollection saves
for us possesses, as I have noted, a pure character, it will be constituted by
a passive synthesis to which one would be able to assign only a transcenden-
tal value (DR, 110/81). Deleuze gives this passive synthesiswhich, according
to him, grounds the active synthesis of voluntary memorythe name of the
Greek divinity of memory, Mnemosyne (see DR, 108/80).
IV. THE HISTORY OF MNEMOSYNE
An essay by one of the most important contemporary authorities in Greek

mythology, Jean-Pierre Vernant, significantly entitled, Mythical Aspects of
Memory, will help us to elucidate why Deleuze names this transcendental pas-
sive synthesis Mnemosyne. Vernants essay describes the transformations of the
Greek conception of memory from the archaic epoch to the time of Aristotle.
After recalling them, I shall point out how Deleuzes interpretation of Mnemos-
yne carries within it certain characteristics from the archaic epoch.
Between the twelfth and eighth centuries BC, at a time when writing was
the privilege of a few initiates and the poetry of Homer and Hesiod was unfold-
ing, memory indeed appears as the apex of the hierarchy of faculties, and it is
not only held sacred under the name of Mnemosyne, but also conceived as the
mother of the Muses, whose choir she leads and with whom she is sometimes
confused. Mnemosyne thus presides concurrently over the faculty of recollec-
tion and over the poetic function (see ibid.), without there being a distinction
between the two. In this way, memory is given a fundamental poietical power,
to take up the expression by Marc Richir quoted in the previous chapter, that is,
an essentially creative character. As Vernant writes, the poet, being possessed
by the Muses, is the interpreter of Mnemosyne. In ancient Greece, divinatory
capacities similar to those of the diviner are attributed to the poet, who shares
with the former the gift of clairvoyance, of second sight, which is to say, that
of seeing the invisible. While in the case of the diviner, the invisible consists
most often in the future, in the case of the poet it concerns almost exclusively
the past. And not the individual past, of course, but, as Vernant points out, the
olden days, with their own particular content and qualityfor example, the
heroic age, or, even further back, the primeval age or original time. Moreover,
that past is not irrevocably past, but still constitutes an integral part of the cos-
mos. The original time, in particular, is the very source of the present, the
very foundation of being . . . which makes it possible to understand the whole
process of becoming.
The poet receives from Mnemosyne the privilege of being present to this
past, which is inaccessible to all but the poet, who, therefore, is entrusted with
a direct, personal vision of it: consequently, for the poet, to remember, to
know, and to see are so many interchangeable terms. Vernant summarizes this
point in the following manner:
What then is the function of memory? It does not reconstruct time, nor does it
abolish it. By eliminating the barrier that separates the present from the past it
throws a bridge between the world of the living and th[e] beyond.
This is a bridge between the visible and the invisible, which the poet has the privi-
lege to cross. Anamnesis, remembering, is thus for him a kind of initiation,
which is one and the same with a transmutation of his own temporal experi-
ence. According to Vernants interpretation, this initiation consists in the contact
with primordial time, with the time of the always which is used to define the life
of the gods. The faculty of recollection, indistinguishable from the poetic func-
tion, offers the experience of a very specific time that the Greeks called ain.
In the anti-metaphysical context of Difference and Repetition, the faculty of
recollection not only offers us the possibility of knowing the pure past, as the
Greeks thought in the archaic epoch, but, according to Deleuze, it constitutes
the pure past itself (DR, 108/79).
In the same text, Deleuze underscores the decisive role played by forgetting
in this constitution. According to him, it is in Forgetting, as though immemo-
rial, that Combray reappears in the form of a past which was never present: the
in-itself of Combray (DR, 115/85). To summarize, it is within forgetting that
Mnemosyne transforms the memory into its spiritual equivalent: namely, it
is in forgetting that Mnemosyne creates memorys in-itself, and retro-jects it
into a past that was never present. Thus, ain turns out to be that mythical
time which I have dealt with in the second chapter of this work.
From this perspective, Lethe proves not to be the opposite of Mnemosyne,
but rather its reverse (and complementary) side: namely, the side in virtue of
which Mnemosyne can exercise its eidetic creativity. Vernant explains that in
the archaic period the Greeks thought of these two divinities, Lethe and Mne-
mosyne, precisely as a pair of complementary religious powers. The oracle of
Lebadeia is a testament to the complementarity of memory and forgetfulness:
he who had the intention of consulting it first had to drink from the spring of
Lethe in order to forget, as the dead do, the time of earthly life, and then from
the spring of Mnemosyne, in order to preserve the memory of the contact with
the divine ain. Vernant points to the creative value of this complementar-
ity: the Mnemosyne of the Lebadeia ritual is still from many points of view
related to the goddess who presides over poetic inspiration in Hesiod. As the
mother of the Muses her function is to reveal what has been and what is to
come. This past and this future are thus precisely that which concern the time
of the always.
Vernant goes on to say that it is not only the conception of this kind of
time, but also that of Mnemosyne and its relation to Lethe that were modi-
fied in Greece starting in the seventh century BC, such that, in the thought of
Aristotle, there is no trace of the Mnemosyne of myth. This is why Vernant

does not conclude his essay before reiterating that, the distance between these
archaic forms of memory and memory today is very great.
V. THE FACULTY OF SENSIBLE IDEAS AND BLIND RECOGNITION
Vernants essay was fi rst published in the Journal de Psychologie in 1959. It

is remarkable that Merleau-Ponty, during the same period, perhaps even
that same year, wrote the following in his unfi nished text, The Visible and
the Invisible:
Social psychology, precisely if it wishes to really know our own societies, can-
not exclude a priori the hypothesis of mythical time as a component of our
personal and public history. To be sure, we have repressed the magical into the
subjectivity, but there is no guarantee that the relationship between men does
not inevitably involve magical and oneiric components. (VI, 4344/24)
It is in this same perspective that I want to highlight the ineluctable quality of

these components and call attention to their constant mytho-poietic operating,
to which the archaic understanding of memory had already borne witness.
As I have already had occasion to recall, Merleau-Ponty qualifies the pow-
ers of the flesh as poetic and oneiric. Precisely in the sentence from Themes
from the Lectures at the Collge de France that I cited at the beginning of this
chapter, Merleau-Ponty makes these powers correspond to the double formula
of the unconscious (I did not know and I have always known it). On the one
hand, this is the formula of a system in which the conscious and the uncon-
scious are inseparable components, since the consciousas Freud explains
dialectically recognizes the unconscious at the very moment it negates it. On
the other hand, this formula seems to imply, according to Merleau-Ponty, the
primordial unconsciousness that would be the letting-be [le laisser-tre], the
initial yes, the undividedness of feeling (RC, 179/131; trans. modified). This
primordial unconsciousness would be marked, as that formula itself suggests,
by the time of the always. Consequently, if this time bears the name ain, then
the ain, or the time of the gods, runs through the unconscious.
In other words, ain designates our always-operative and never thema-
tized experience of time, that is to say our operative temporality. This is why
it seems possible to recognize in the sentence I did not know and I have
always known it the formula of the passage from operative intentionality to
act intentionality. That is to say, the passage from our always-operative and
never-thematized relationship with the world to any thematized relation with
it. As a consequence, this formula seems also to designate the grafting of chron-
ological time (to the extent that I did not know in reality implies until now)
onto that of ain, by mapping onto chronological time what pertains to mythi-
cal time, with all the equivocations this graft inevitably generates.
The archaic forms of memory, explained by Vernant, identified Mnemos-

yne as the divinity enabling contact with ain. If aion manifests itself as the
temporality operative within the unconscious, understood as undividedness
of feeling, it seems possible to define Mnemosyne as the memory opera-
tive within feeling itself, and to recognize in it characteristics similar to those
Deleuze attributes to it in Difference and Repetition.
Characterized as Mnemosyne, the memory operative within feeling is
afforded an essential poietic power, a power that is not incompatible with the
peculiar faithfulness and one could and should allow oneself to recognize
in this memory. In fact, this faithfulness is one with the poietic power, since it
is not a question of faithfulness to a preliminary model, but faithfulness to an
experience one can regain only in its eidos, assumed as that which, by exploit-
ing the analogizing virtues of the sensible as well as of language, Mnemosyne
has the power to create, surrounded by a mythico-symbolic halo, in the flesh of
our operative relation with the world.
As Proust has shown, and Deleuze has stressed, Mnemosyne is thus the cre-
ative faculty of those ideas which Merleau-Ponty qualifies as sensible. Looked
at more closely, moreover, Mnemosyne is another name for the imagination,
which Kant defines precisely as creative in the third Critique and which he
sees at work in genius as the production of aesthetic ideas. Nevertheless dif-
ferently from what the Greeks of the archaic epoch had believed, and from
what Kant himself believed, the transcendental character that Deleuze explic-
itly recognizes in this faculty forbids us from considering it as an exclusive pos-
session of the poet or, more generally speaking, of the artistic genius. On the
other hand, the indirect cognitive value that Kant attributes to the ideas created
by that faculty is thus specified as an unconscious one, if by unconscious we
understand the feeling itself as Merleau-Ponty suggestedsince feeling is
not the intellectual possession of what is felt, but a dispossession of ourselves
in favor of it, an opening toward that which we do not have to think in order that
we may recognize it (RC, 179/130; my emphasis).
Thus, the essential creativity of Mnemosyne, as I have already noted, does
not encounter an obstacle, but rather an outcome in rendering such recognition
possible. Indeed, if its essential poietic power makes Mnemosyne the faculty of
eidetic creation, always operating within experience, Mnemosyne also reveals
itself on the other sidethe other side of the sameas the faculty of eidetic rec-
ognition, which in its turn never ceases to operate within experience. Therefore,
Mnemosyne corresponds to the double formula of the unconscious: I did not
know and I have always known it.
It is precisely in reference to this formula that Merleau-Ponty writes of a
blind . . . recognition (N, 351/283), entirely similar to that which we witness
in the encounter between Prousts Narrator and the flavor of the tea and the
madeleine. If indeed this recognition, rather than elevating us to the metaphysi-
cal sky of the ideas, proves to be blind, that is, deprived of the intellectual pos-
session (RC, 179/130) of what is being recognized, it is because it is a matter of
the recognition of ideas that are created in operative experience. Ideas, that is,
created through difference and not through imitation of preliminary models,
ideas that can only arrive, as Deleuze showed, at being recognized as models. As
I have already said, it is this recognition that the art and literature of the twenti-
eth century appear to have explored. It is precisely to this that Proust refers, not
only in the episode of the madeleine or in that of the bal de ttes, but also when,
as we saw in Chapter one, he defines the sensible ideas as veiled in shadows
and thus impenetrable to the human mind, but none the less perfectly dis-
tinct from one another, unequal among themselves in value and significance
(R I, 349350/379381). They are identifiable by way of difference, as noted by
Merleau-Ponty, who talks of a cogitatio cca (NC, 184), i.e., a thinking that
operates without thinking (N, 351/283) insofar as it relies onit seems legiti-
mate to explainthe poetic and oneiric powers of the flesh.
Merleau-Ponty also detects the tendency to explore such recognition in
modern painting. In his reading, modern paintings effort has been directed
not so much toward choosing between line and color, or even between figura-
tive depiction and the creation of signs, as it has been toward multiplying the
system of equivalences, toward severing their adherence to the envelope of things
(OE, 7172/142; my emphasis). This effort ultimately consists in renouncing
all attempts to make these systems of equivalences resemble the exteriority of
things, posited as a preliminary model, in order to practice a form of painting
. . . without identifiable things, without the skin of things, but giving their flesh
(VI, 272/218).
This pictorial direction can be identified with the middle way of paint-
ing in the twentieth century, avoiding both traditional figurative painting, on
the one hand, and abstract painting on the other: that middle way, the course
of which Deleuze sees running from Czanne to Bacon: the one that makes
use of the diagram in order to constitute an analogical language (FBLS, 76/96)
such that this middle way arrives at creating a resemblance through non-
resembling means (ibid., 75/94).
Thus, on the one hand Merleau-Ponty remarks that, in the Cartesian reflec-
tion on painting, nothing is left of the oneiric world of analogy (OE, 41/132),
and, in a complementary way, on the other hand Deleuze states that where
Bacon does remain Czannean is in the extreme elaboration of painting as ana-
logical language (FBLS, 78/97). Indeed, by proceeding in the same fashion as
the thought that blindly identifies sensible ideas through difference, this ana-
logical language utilizes what Merleau-Ponty defines as the oneirism . . . of the
sensible (NC, 194) and Deleuze as the rights of simulacra (LS, 302/262)
which is to say the merely apparent resemblance produced by the deformations
of the phenomena and condemned for this reason by Plato (see Sophist, 236b).
Mnemosyne is thus called on to elaborate on what appears as the resumption of
an anticipation that, on closer inspection, was never really lived: it was thus not
necessary to have known anything in order to recognize it.
Appendix
Love and Music: Theme and Variations
I. THE THEME IS PRESENTED AND PURSUED BY VARIATIONS
In music the theme is presented and pursued by variations. We cannot express

the theme itself directly, we can only represent it by means of its variations: it
is from the variations that one identifies the theme. We proceed in the same
way when investigating the style of an historical epoch. All the forms of life
of a time, the Renaissance, Baroque, etc., are known as variations of a theme.
That they are variations of one theme, expressions of a basic relation of man to
the world, gives them, in spite of all their material differences, a unity of style.
We can but inadequately express the theme itself; we have the multifarious-
ness of the phenomena before our eyes which, however, we grasp as the mani-
fold aspect of a unity and not as the repetition of one and the same thing.1
This passage, taken from the neuropsychiatrist and philosopher Erwin Straus
masterpiece Von Sinn der Sinne, effectively condenses the question of Pla-
tonism and its reversal as it will be later raised by Gilles Deleuze.
In his essay originally entitled Renverser le platonisme Deleuze invites us
to consider the following two formulas: only that which resembles differs and
only differences resemble each other (LS, 302/261), explaining that
These are two distinct readings of the world: one invites us to think difference
from the standpoint of a previous similitude or identity; whereas the other
invites us to think similitude and even identity as the product of a fundamen-
tal disparity. (ibid.)
It is precisely in the passage from the first to the second of these readings
of the world that Deleuze tends to see the possibility of reversing Platonism.
By Platonism Deleuze means a simplified version of the philosophy to
which Plato, more than anyone else, has contributed in shaping that image of
69
thoughtas Deleuze calls it2within whose parameters we are still accustomed

to thinking. In reformulating such an image in the terms suggested by Straus,
we could claim that, similarly to what for him happens in music, in thinking,
according to Platonism, the themethat is to say, that which resembles
is presented and pursued by variations. Hence, the notion of Theme can
be linked up with the one of Idea intended as essence or form, in short,
as eidos. Correlatively, according to the terms of Straus passage, the notion of
variations turns out to be another way to designate the multifariousness
of the always inadequate (because intrinsically partial) phenomena of the
theme itself.
Indeed, Deleuze assimilates the notion of Theme and the one of Idea
as he wonders what, in Prousts Recherche, serves as a law for the series of our
loves (PS, 93/75).
An original difference presides over our loves. Perhaps this is the image of
the Motheror that of the Father for a woman, for Mlle Vinteuil. More pro-
foundly, it is a remote image beyond our experience, a Theme that transcends
us, a kind of archetype. Image, idea or essence rich enough to be diversified
in the beings we love and even in a single loved being, but of such a nature
too that it is repeated in our successive loves and in each of our loves taken in
isolation. (PS, 8384/67)
Therefore, in order to find the sense of our love experiences we should not
isolate them from one another, concentrating on each one separately. Instead,
we shall consider them as variations through which we can indirectly see the
theme that connects them and thus serves as a law for the series of our loves.
Yet where does the theme of our love experiences come from? As Deleuze
himself implicitly suggests, according to Freudian psychoanalysis the object-
choice toward which each one of us directs his or her own libido3 is related to the
childs fixation of tenderness aimed at the mother or the father.4 According to this
formulation of the problem, even in the case of our loves the theme is presented
and pursued by variations. In the above case, the theme is presented as the desire
generated by a lack: the lack of the original parental relationship. In such a way,
even the structure of Eros is still thought of in terms of Platonism.
On the other hand, Deleuze highlights the suggestion, emerging from
the Recherche, of problematizing the identification between the theme and the
mother in order to show that the series of our loves transcends our experience,
links up with other experiences, accedes to a transubjective reality. Swanns love
for Odette already constitutes part of the series that continues with the heros
love for Gilberte, for Mme de Guermantes, for Albertine (PS, 88/71). Conse-
quently, we can deduce that
The image of the mother is perhaps not the most profound theme, nor the
reason for the series of loves: it is true that our loves repeat our feelings for the
APPENDIX 71
mother, but the latter already repeat other loves, which we have not ourselves
experienced. The mother appears rather as the transition from one experience
to another, the way in which our experience begins but already links up with
other experiences that were those of someone else. At its limit, the experience
of love is that of all humanity, which is traversed by the current of a transcen-
dent heredity. (PS, 89/72)
II. THE INSTITUTION OF A SENTIMENT:

ILLUSION OR PHENOMENON?
It is precisely the description of love experiences, as recounted in the Recher-

che, which Merleau-Ponty also refers to in a section of the notes he prepared
for the course entitled Institution in Personal and Public History, held at the
Collge de France in 195455. Therefore, if we have come to the description of
such experiences by first examining the possible parallel between the theme
and variations in music and love, and then by wondering how a love-theme
can be transmitted, we find the same question and a similar parallel as we come
across Merleau-Pontys reflection on how a sentiment of love is instituted and
on how the same subterranean logic (RC, 63/42) can be traced in the way that
the work of an artist is instituted.
The summary that Merleau-Ponty himself offered of his course begins by
explaining: The concept of institution may help us find a solution to certain
difficulties in the philosophy of consciousness. For consciousness there are only
the objects which it has itself constituted (RC, 59/39).
In short, Merleau-Ponty opposes the above subterranean logic of institu-
tion to the one of constitution affirmed by the philosophy of consciousness,
a philosophy according to which consciousness itself is always before (PS,
132/109), we could say, echoing the terms that Deleuze uses to refer to the
notion of the idea in characterizing Platonism.
Previously we had seen Deleuze tracing this Platonistic way of thinking
back to Freuds conception of desire as a lack entrenched in the original
parental relationship, a lack that would preliminarily orient the sense of desire
itself, whereas Deleuze instead suggests a transubjective notion of desire.
Now we see Merleau-Ponty implicitly identifying a similar Platonistic char-
acter in the conception of consciousness as constituting and of sense as being
constituted by consciousness, and trying to find a solution for it in the notion
of the self-constitution of sense. The notion of institution is precisely directed
to account for this.
Yet obviously Merleau-Pontys philosophical interlocutor in the notes ded-
icated to the Institution of a Sentiment could not be the merely thirty-year-
old Deleuze (whom, however, he was about to entrust with the preparation of
the Bergson entry for his anthology dedicated to Les philosophes clbres),
but ratheralbeit without naming himonce again Jean-Paul Sartre. In fact,
Merleau-Pontys personal and political break with Sartre was about to find its
own philosophical formulation in Adventures of the Dialectic. For it is Jean-Paul

Sartre and the thought expressed in Being and Nothingness where one can find
several considerations about love which refer to Marcel and his life with Alber-
tine, to recall the title that usually designates the first part of The Captive.
It is well known that here the desire for submission exerted by the Narra-
tor on Albertine seems to find momentary satisfaction only in the sleep of the
loved one, who has become similar to an object insofar as she is unconscious,
but at the same time remaining a subject and, as such, she is still in the position
to offer her lover the recognition he is seeking. From the many celebrated pages
in which the incessantly declared desire for possession corresponds to the no
less reiterated characterization of the sleeping Albertine in vegetative terms, let
me limit myself to this exemplary passage:
Stretched out at full length on my bed, in an attitude so natural that no art

could have devised it, she reminded me of a long blossoming stem that had
been laid there; and so in a sense she was: [ . . . ] as though by falling asleep she
had become a plant. In this way, her sleep realizes to a certain extent the pos-
sibility of love: alone, I could think of her, but I missed her, I did not possess her
[ . . . ]. By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped
off, one after another, the different human personalities with which she had
deceived me ever since the day when I first made her acquaintance. She was
animated now only by the conscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different
from my own, more alien, and yet one that belonged more to me. [ . . . ] In keep-
ing it in front of my eyes, in my hands, I had an impression of possessing her
entirely which I never had when she was awake. Her life was submitted to me,
exhaled towards me its gentle breath. (R 3, 6364, 6970)
To which Sartre remarked:
Prousts hero, [ . . . ] who installs his mistress in his home, who can see her and
possess her at any hour of the day, who has been able to make her completely
dependent on him economically, ought to be free from worry. Yet we know
that he is, on the contrary, continually gnawed by anxiety. Through her con-
sciousness, Albertine escapes Marcel even when he is at her side, and that is
why he knows relief only when he gazes on her while she sleeps. It is certain
then that the lover wishes to capture a consciousness. But why does he wish
it? And how?5
He wants to possess a freedom as freedom6 (ibid.), Sartre replies: such is

the paradox of the desire for submission.7
In this section from Being and Nothingnesstruly a reflection on love in
the time of Nihilism as an epoch marked by the lack of foundationsSartre in
fact describes how both of the lovers abdicate their own freedom in trying to
establish a foundation in the others freedom. In this wayMerleau-Ponty sum-
marizes in his course noteseach one of them forgets that the other is, in their
turn, joyful freedom to surrender, or to leave things to destiny (IP, 63). That is
APPENDIX 73
to say, both of the lovers like to rely on the common idea according to which
a love feeling begins from a prearranged reciprocity (ibid.), wishing to find in
such a way what Sartre designates as the basis for the joy of love when there is
joy; [the basis for this joy is that] we feel that our existence is justified.8
Hence, according to Sartre, both of the lovers, as they fall in love, forget
about the others freedom as well as forgetting about their own (IP, 63) in vir-
tue of a double illusion that Merleau-Ponty schematizes as follows: a) [the
other] actually recognizes me, which is not true because he or she also wants
to be recognized; b) I actually recognize him or her, which is not true because
I just want to be made whole again. This double illusion [is] constitutive of
the us (ibid.). In other words, the double illusion produces the us that
the lovers use to designate each other as made for one another, or as soul
mates9both expressions which clearly evoke the myth told by Aristophanes
in Platos Symposium.
As Merleau-Ponty reminds us, in Being and Nothingness there follows a
whole critique of sentiments which shows a) their subjectivity: the mental con-
struction of each sentiment; b) the submission to this construction, how we let
ourselves be fascinated without reason; c) the elements of contingency or chance:
if I had not met this person, said this word [ . . . ], or made up this fatality . . . (IP,
64): in short, the very elements on which Proust never stops reflecting.
In fact, it is precisely Proust and precisely the volume of the Recherche
recalled by Sartre to exemplify his conception of love to which Merleau-Ponty
refers in order to challenge such a conception and to draw attention to its insuf-
ficiency. The question which opens his discussion of Sartres critiques against
the common idea of love goes like this: All these critiques are right. But do
they exhaust the matter? (ibid.).
To answer such a question, Merleau-Ponty also turns to the author of the
Recherche. Proust: a whole critique of love as subjective, fortuitous, folly or
invasive disease, as founded upon the mirage of the other, precious insofar as
it is inaccessible, imaginary, [because] if I were to live this other life, I would
find it banal and valueless. Love dies as soon as it is satisfied and it can only be
reborn from deprivation or jealousy. Love as impossible: either irremediable
sufferance or disgustand no reality of love. Hence, The Captive (ibid.), writes
Merleau-Ponty, synthesizing the point of the Sartrian reference to this volume
of the Recherche. Still, here is what he adds immediately afterwards: However,
Proust recognizes that this is but half the truth (ibid.).
Consequently, Merleau-Ponty wonders what love is for the author of the
Recherche: illusion or phenomenon? (ibid., 65).
Before referring to the love-story between the Narrator and Albertine,
Merleau-Ponty endeavors to find some clues that may help him to answer such
a question in the second part of the volume that opens the Recherche, the part
entitled Swann in Love, albeit admitting that here this is unconvincing [ . . . ]
as there is love only on one side (ibid., 67). Nevertheless, in the love that Swann
feels for Odette, Merleau-Ponty already finds a fundamental objection to the
Proustian arguments he had previously synthesized: of course love as a desire

for possession of the other through their body is illusion (ibid., 66), for the
other is desirable only as long as we do not possess them, but the illusion is in
the realization, not in the project, which is real because we actually become the
other, and the other invades us (ibid.).
Merleau-Ponty subsequently deduces that Impossible love, but not unreal.
Its reality will be an alternation of pure alienation and a slightly bored posses-
sion (ibid.). Yet the alienation of the lover in the loved onehe believesis far
from revealing the mere subjectivity of love (ibid., 65), just as the boredom in
possessing the loved one only disavows that naively realistic idea (ibid., 66)
according to which the reasons for loving someone would indeed be within the
chosen person. At this point Merleau-Ponty asks: As a consequence, is there
not an institution of a between the two? Love as the phenomenon of a reality?
Perhaps contradictory, but for this reason real? (ibid.).
The expression of the first among these questions, which appears slightly
obscure, may be clarified by the question that Gilles Deleuze raises after he
too described the protagonist of the Recherche, who senses the insufficiency of
the first objective and then subjective interpretations given to his own experi-
ences, including love experiences. Deleuze asks: Yet what else is there except
the object and the subject? (PS, 49/37). There are the essences (PS, 50/37),
he replies, defining them as alogical or supralogical (ibid.)as irreducible to
the truth (that which Proust qualifies as logical) of the ideas formed by pure
intelligence (R 3, 880/914).
EssencesDeleuze explainstranscend the states of subjectivity no less
than the properties of the object (PS, 50/38). It is in these terms that Merleau-
Ponty seems to refer precisely to essences as he wonders whether there can be
an institution of a between the two (IP, 66). In fact, on the following page he
writes that, in the alienation of the lover in the loved one, love resembles the
ideas the writer searches for,10 which, like the ones of music and painting, can-
not be isolated, divided from the sensible matter (ibid).
Here Merleau-Ponty seems to assimilate the institution of a sentiment to
what, in the manuscript of The Visible and the Invisible which was interrupted
by his sudden death, he will define, again commenting on Proust, as initia-
tion to a sensible idea, that is, an idea or essence that, differently from the
ideas of the intelligence but similarly to those of art (NC, 196), turns out to
be inseparable from its sensible manifestation, as we know, and opens up as a
dimension of sense in which every other experience will henceforth be situ-
ated (VI, 198/151).
In Merleau-Pontys opinion, then, love as it is described by Proust, rather
than revealing the futile texture of a subjective illusion, shows a texture that is
not unlike the one that characterizes the ideas of art. In Swanns sentiment,
Proust writes, it is possible to recognize a certain conception of love and hap-
piness (R 1, 350/380) which is inseparable from Odette just as the ideas of art
are inseparable from their concrete realization, and whose effectiveness is such
APPENDIX 75
that it can even find, in the music of the little phrase from Vinteuils Sonata,
its own national anthem.
Not illusion, then, but a well founded phenomenon (IP, 67), answers
Merleau-Pontys previous question about the meaning of love for Proust.
If a person is loved as if he or she were a sensible idea, it is because the rela-
tion that connects the person to the ideaMerleau-Ponty stressesdoes not
appear fortuitous in any way; in fact, the person and the idea turn out to be one
and the same. Consequently, in loving a certain person, it is not just him or her,
nor his or her body, but rather the idea itself that one desires to possessor the
idea by which one, perhaps together with that other person, feels possessed.
III. THE LOVE OF ALBERTINE DIFFERS FROM THE

PRECEDING LOVES AS THE SEPTET DOES FROM THE SONATA
What Merleau-Ponty subsequently remarks in order to verify his own inter-

pretation has nothing to do with the experience of requited love, even though
he looks for a confirmation of the elements he has hitherto worked out in the
Proustian tale of love as a pair-phenomenon: Albertine (IP, 67).
In light of such a story, he confirms: we do not love a person as a posi-
tive being (ibid., 70), yet this does not account for the relativistic argument
(ibid.) concerning the contingent character of the one whom we invest with
our love. The reason why a person is not really and only loved as such does not
coincide with the fact that investing him or her with our love, rather than some-
body else, is due to contingency: the point is that such an investment exceeds
him or her as a positive being and institutes a sensible idea that fills the whole
horizon of my life (ibid.).
On the other hand, the fact that we do not love someone simply as such is
of no use in demonstrating that the theme of our loves is preliminarily consti-
tuted. Reintroducing the parallel between love and music, Merleau-Ponty high-
lights that however general love is (echo from Gilberte to Albertine), the love
of Albertine differs from the preceding loves as the septet does from the sonata
(the reality of the subjective, quasi-Platonism) (ibid., 72).
The proportion between two different kinds of love affairs, on the one
hand, and two musical compositions, on the other, returns a few pages later
in Merleau-Pontys commentary.11 Therefore, I would like to dwell on this fur-
ther in order to understand more deeply the interpretation he proposes with
regard to the Proustian conception of love. However, before we move on, it
seems advisable to give an account of the elements with which he constructs
such a proportion.
It is common knowledge that music comes to form one of the load-bearing
pillars of the complex structure of the Recherche, which, since it is made up
of cross-references and symmetries, is often described in architectural terms.
Indeed, two great musical compositions, characterized in an openly contrasting
though intimately complementary way, occupy a strongly emblematicand
precisely symmetricalplace in the novel, one in the first volume, the other in
the fifth, The Captive, which anticipates the development of the last volume. Yet
their composer does not appear in the novels index, since he is the imaginary
musician Vinteuil.
The figure and work of Vinteuil thus constitute the musical pillar of the
Recherche, and its end-points are the two great compositions Proust ascribes to
him: the lily-white Sonata in F Sharp for piano and violin and the glowing
Septet (R 3, 255/256).
In the first volume of Prousts novel, it is Swann who, over the course of a
series of performances, discovers the Sonatacomposed by a musician whose
name is the only thing he manages to learnand it is also Swann who wonders
about the mystery of both the Sonata and its composer, without getting, how-
ever, to contemplate the deepest meaning of that music since he is unable to
dissociate it from his love affair with Odette, a love affair which that music had
served to consecrate.
Even when this love will be replaced by marriagein the following volume
of the Recherchewhile listening to his wife play the piano part of the Sonata
for the young Narrator (who has in the meantime fallen in love with Swanns
daughter, Gilberte), Swann believes that he is capturing its essential aspect as
it brings him back to the now distant moonlit nights he spent with Odette at
the Bois de Boulogne (see R 1, 533/573574). Yet in such a way, he leaves the
young Narrator justly unsatisfied, even though, together with the knowledge
of that music, the heritage of wondering about its mystery and the mystery
of its authors life whichas Proust suggestsare at one with the mystery of
art itselfis meanwhile being ideally transmitted to him. Unlike Swann, then,
the Narrator will be able to contemplate the deepest meaning of art. This will
happen during an evening charged with omens of his breakup with Albertine,
whose nameas Merleau-Ponty mentionsechoes that of Gilberte. Precisely
during that night, however, he will get to listen to Vinteuils posthumous work,
the Septet, discerning the meaning of art through the revelation of the essence
of the things that that work discloses to him, finally prompting him to discover
his own literary vocation.
Yet let us go back to the proportion formulated by Merleau-Ponty, and
let us try to be more precise with the help of the Proustian sentence to which
it refers and which we will examine directly later on. Here is the proportion:
the love for Albertine differs from the love for Gilberte as the Septet does from
Vinteuils Sonata.
The diacritic relation among the elements of this proportioneach one
finding its own identity in its difference from the othersrecalls a similar rela-
tion which Proust elsewhere attributes to musical motifs (R 1, 349/379) and
which Merleau-Ponty, in the previously mentioned pages from The Visible and
the Invisible, sees as taking place, more generally, among sensible ideas (VI,
198/151), since Proust assimilates those motifs to ideas veiled in shadows,
unknown, impenetrable to the human mind, but none the less perfectly distinct
APPENDIX 77
from one another, unequal among themselves in value and significance (R 1,

349/379381; my emphasis).
Still in those pages from The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty
explains this Proustian passage as follows:
The ideas [ . . . ] are there, behind the sounds or between them, behind the
lights or between them, recognizable through their always special, always
unique manner of entrenching themselves behind them. (VI, 198/151)
It is in this sense that he qualifies such ideas as negativity or absence

circumscribed (ibid.), explaining that, precisely due to this character of
theirs, we do not possess the musical or sensible ideas [ . . . ]; they possess
us (VI, 198199/151). That is what happens to the violinist whom Proust
describes while he is busy performing Vinteuils Sonata during a soire at
the marchioness of Saint Euvertes: rather than producing the sound of that
music, he seems to do his best to let the sound produce itself through him
(VI, 199/151).
Both musical and, more generally, sensible ideas, are then negative ideas, or
ideas that, unlike those of the intelligence, cannot be detached from the sen-
sible appearances and be erected into a second positivity (ibid.) and are hence
knowable only through difference.
It is precisely in these terms that Merleau-Ponty seems to interpret the
Proustian conception of love. For this reason, Merleau-Ponty writes that it is
real like a negation (IP, 69). Still in this sense, neither the love for Gilberte nor
that for Albertine can find a positive definition, yet they are knowable only by
their mutual difference. However, they do not lack reality, which indeed con-
sists in the actual alienation (ibid., 74) of the life of the lovera life which
turns out to be implicitly deniedin an absence which, just like a sensible idea,
exerts its quasi-presence on such a life.
Therefore, these loves are realand effectiveprecisely because they act
in a negative way, as Proust writes referring to Albertine in a sentence that
Merleau-Ponty quotes twice in his notes: She caused my ills like a deity who
remains invisible (R 3, 152/148).
We could refer such a characterization to what Merleau-Ponty claims a
little later when he writes that Albertine is present at a distance like the little
phrase in the sounds: inseparable from them and yet intangible (IP, 74).12
Therefore, let us continue to follow the development of the parallel between
love and music. Because love is real like a negation, its effectiveness is no less
than the one shown by the music during the soire at the marchioness of Saint-
Euvertes: like the violinist with regard to Vinteuils Sonata, the lovers seem to
belong to their love more than their love belongs to them. This is why love
arises in the interpersonal meeting, but then retro-jects itself as pre-individual.
And this is why we end up identifying ourselves with the myth told by Aristo-
phanes in Platos Symposium.
IV. SYMBOLIC MATRICES
As negativity or absence circumscribed, a lovemuch like a musical or,

more generally, a sensible ideais, in other words, a wholly virtual center
(VI, 154/115) circumscribed, to evoke the term used by Merleau-Ponty, or insti-
tuted by the encounter with the same signs on which it, too, both institutes and
radiates its effectiveness, just as the theme does with regard to the variations,
according to Glenn Goulds interpretation of the Goldberg Variations in the
essay that the pianist dedicated to them.13
With regard to what we are trying to think here, it now seems worthwhile
to remind ourselves that, on the one hand, in the preparatory notes of his last
course, Merleau-Ponty also defines Prousts sensible ideas as symbolic matri-
ces, and that, on the other, the expression foyer virtuel (AD, 30)which is
translated into English as focal point(17), but in French is very similar to
the one from The Visible and the Invisible I quoted a few lines backoccurs
in Adventures of the Dialectic, a text contemporaneous with the notes we are
examining, in order to clarify the character of other symbolic matrices: those
that are described as negative ideas around which a sense in public history
institutes itself. Here is such a description:
These intelligible nuclei of history [ . . . ] appear at the point where men and
the givens of nature or of the past meet, arising as symbolic matrices which
have no pre-existence and which can, for a longer or shorter time, influence
history itself and then disappear, not by external forces but through an inter-
nal disintegration or because one of their secondary elements becomes pre-
dominant and changes their nature. (AD, 29/1617)
Similarly, the negative ideas of the women and loves narrated by Proust
and commented on by Merleau-Ponty in the notes dedicated to the Institution
of a Sentiment can be effectively interpreted in terms of symbolic matrices
around which a sense in the personal history of Swann and the Narrator insti-
tutes itself.
Moreover, through the notion of the symbolic matrix, the institution is
defined, in the course dedicated to it, similarly to the initiation to the sensible
idea that, as I have previously mentioned, Merleau-Ponty will describe in The Vis-
ible and the Invisible. Here is the passage from the course notes to which I refer:
[The] institution in a strong sense [is] this symbolic matrix that allows a field
to open up, a future according to [certain] dimensions, from which the pos-
sibility of a common adventure and of a history as consciousness. (IP, 45)
Concluding the notes on the Institution of a Sentiment, Merleau-Ponty

writes: the idea of institution is precisely this: the fundament of a personal his-
tory through contingency (ibid., 73). It is precisely in the name of such an idea
APPENDIX 79
that we saw him implicitly criticizing Sartre by showing that Proust describes
love not as an illusion but rather as a negative reality. The error is to believe it
is simply an error (ibid., 74), is the remark that seems to be addressed to Sartre,
who had by then become his frre-ennemi.
Far from being considered as errors, those women and those loves, intended
as symbolic matrices, are recognized as having a capacity for symbolic pro-
duction whichconstantly nourished on tradition as much as contingencies
allows them to gradually elaborate new or renewed galaxies of sense.
Such galaxies are drawn by the spontaneous coagulating of directions
arising in disparate ways, without having to obey, Merleau-Ponty highlights, a
model,14 since they are produced by symbolic matrices which have no pre-
existence and which can, for a longer or shorter time, influence history itself.
The theme of the mother, or at least the parent of the opposite sex, can evi-
dently be considered as the example par excellence of this conception. Indeed,
it is so effective that it makes us believe that its imprint is traced on a model
placed in the origin, as Freud tends to think as he uses precisely the term,
model.15 In reality, it is a theme which is exposed to the same danger as the
other symbolic matrices: [to] disappear, not by external forces but through an
internal disintegration or because one of their secondary elements becomes
predominant and changes their nature. With regard to this theme, it seems
that we could claim something similar to what Roland Barthes maintains about
Beethovens Diabelli Variations, asserting that this composition behave[s] like
Prousts Recherche: it pretends to take up the theme and variations structure,
but in reality disintegrates it.16
In this sense, if at the beginning of this text we heard Deleuze claim that
an original difference presides over our loves, it would be useful to specify
the nature of this original difference through the conception of the perpet-
ual explosion of the originating that Merleau-Ponty opposes to the notion of
origin,17 thus considering even the theme of the mother according to what he
writes about the originating in The Visible and the Invisible:
The originating is not of one sole type, it is not all behind us; the restoration
of the true past, of the pre-existence is not all of philosophy, the lived experi-
ence is not flat, without depth, without dimension, it is not an opaque stratum
with which we would have to merge. The appeal to the originating goes in
several directions: the originating breaks up. (VI, 165/124)
Understood as a symbolic matrix, then, the theme of the mother is not

placed entirely behind us, to serve as a law for the series of our loves, which
would follow like a series of variations. Understood as a symbolic matrix, the
theme of the mother turns out to be always already exploded and always explod-
ing anew, so that, instead of the reassuring there is but one mother18 we shall
turn to Pirandello to sayin a form that may (or may not) be even more reas-
suringthat there are one, none, and one-hundred thousand. Understood as
a symbolic matrix, always exploding anew, the theme of the mother goes in
several directions which, as they accompany us, come across other directions
of different provenances and, together with them, generate symbols in which
the theme cannot help being unrecognizable as such, just as the theme in the
Goldberg Variations, according to Glenn Gould, is unrecognizable in the prog-
eny of its variations.
However, it is well known that Plato had already suggested that the species
of the matrix had to be considered as an invisible [] and characterless
[] sort of thing, one that receives all things (Timaeus, 51ab), tracing
the filial relation of resemblance back to the paternity of the ideal model. In
the epoch of Nihilism, which has challenged such a filial relation of the image
with the idea understood as its model in order to reverse Platonism, the spe-
cies of the matrix seems to maintain a certain invisibility because of which it
turns out to be only indirectly recognizable through the resemblances that bind
its progeny, just like the above-mentioned theme of the Goldberg Variations is
according to Glenn Gould.
In this sense, that quasi-Platonism which we have previously heard
evoked by Merleau-Ponty, while noting the proportion he himself formulated
between the loves of the Narrator, on the one hand, and Vinteuils composi-
tions, on the other, will become clearer in Merleau-Pontys extreme thought as
non-Platonism, since the sensible ideas, like those which form such a propor-
tion, appearhe writeswithout an intelligible sun and for this reason are
only recognizable by mutual difference.
When one looks deeper, such a non-Platonism was already traceable in
the sentence by Proust from which Merleau-Ponty drew his proportion. Indeed,
we can say that what is regretted in this sentence is precisely the lack of intel-
ligible suns capable of illuminating the resemblances among the variations:
The example of Gilberte would as little have enabled me to form an idea of

Albertine and guess that I should fall in love with her, as the memory of Vin-
teuils sonata would have enabled me to imagine his septet. (R 3, 502/512)
The variations are not prefigured and illuminated by their own theme. In
other words, specifically those of Deleuze, it is not from the standpoint of a
previous similitude or identity that the difference has to be thought. We can
rather claim that the theme finds itself within its own variations, in the double
sense of such an expression.
It is precisely from this perspective that we can understand the consider-
ations Merleau-Ponty formulates when concluding his own interpretation of
the Proustian conception of love:
Instead of what you had imagined, life gives you something else, some-
thing which was secretly wanted, not fortuitous. Realization is not what was
expected, but still that which was wanted: we move forward backwards, we do
APPENDIX 81
not choose directly, but in an oblique way, and yet we do what we want: love is
a clair-voyance, it leads us precisely to what can pierce us. (IP, 75)19
V. WHAT IS TO BE REALIZED IS A DISPOSSESSION
In an implicit polemic with the Sartrean judgments which rely on Prousts text
in order to consider love moment by moment (ibid., 65)now fascination,
now boredomand eventually judge it illusory and fortuitous, Merleau-Ponty
highlights instead how, in the institution of a sentiment, an instituted element
is at work, or a sort of tradition acts, revealing, in the above-quoted passage, the
characters ascribed to the Freudian unconscious by the formula he will pick
up in the very last course he completed at the College de France: the formula
I did not know and I have always known it (RC, 179/130; trans. modified).
In fact, it appears as if that which secretly wants, in Merleau-Pontys passage,
could be named desire. However, the clair-voyance of a force that is supposed
to be always before, like the Platonic idea according to Deleuze, shall not be
ascribed to such a desire. If anything, we could characterize that clair-voyance
as the blind clair-voyance of a force that looks for itself in the objects in which
it invests itself and that can subsequently retro-ject them as sensible ideas, and
favor the decisions about them which, as soon as they are made, appear to have
been made from time immemorial.20
Together with the importance of the instituted element, Merleau-Ponty
thus highlights how the institutionas already mentionedkeeps finding itself
in the events that it encounters and vice versa. To these events, then, there is
implicitly recognized a side of the expropriation of subjectivitythe side
that Heidegger names Enteigniswhich one cannot help acknowledging if
one wishes to find the solution to certain difficulties in the philosophy of con-
sciousness that we heard Merleau-Ponty declaredly looking for in the notion
of institution.
In the course notes that we have considered here, however, such an aspect
is not yet thought or formulated as radically as the term I used to designate
itexpropriationsuggests. Nevertheless, such an aspect is quite evidently
already involved in the decisive role played by what Merleau-Ponty calls con-
tingency, which he draws attention to in an increasingly persistent way in these
notes. Having said this, it is a role still described in terms of the reorientation of
meaning, rather than expropriation.
However, Merleau-Ponty will try to think about it more radically in the last
phase of his production, when the philosophical stakes will no longer consist
in looking for a solution to certain difficulties in the philosophy of conscious-
ness and talking about the subject not as a constituting but an instituting sub-
ject (RC, 59/39), but rather those stakes will consist in the elaboration of the
notions that have to replace that of transcendental subjectivity, those of subject,
object, meaning (VI, 221/167) starting from the experience of dispossession.
The previously recalled Proustian description of the relation between the little
phrase and the violinist, significantly commented on by Merleau-Ponty in the

pages where the manuscript of The Visible and the Invisible is interrupted by his
death, is typical of such an experience:
The performer is no longer producing or reproducing the sonata: he feels

himself, and the others feel him to be at the service of the sonata; the sonata
sings through him or cries out so suddenly that he must dash on his bow to
follow it. And these open vortexes in the sonorous world finally form one sole
vortex in which the ideas fit in with one another. (VI, 199/151)21
The word initiation seems to account better than institution for such an
experience and for the discontinuity it can introduce in both personal and pub-
lic history, since the term institution seems to suggest, instead, the continuity
of such histories. Moreover, the word initiation avoids the duality between
the instituted and the instituting element, which still means a duality between
activity and passivity. It is perhaps for these reasons that, in his late production,
Merleau-Ponty sometimes prefers to think about the Husserlian concept of Stif-
tung in terms of initiation rather than institution.
For instance, at the beginning of the working note of The Visible and the
Invisible entitled Indestructible Past, and intentional analyticand ontology
we know that he writes, still referring to Proust:
There is an architectonic past. cf. Proust: the true hawthorns are the hawthorns
of the pastRestore this life without Erlebnisse, without interiority . . .
which is, in reality, the monumental life, Stiftung, initiation. (VI, 296/243)22
In any case, what there is to be grasped is a dispossession (VI, 319/266), as

another working note from The Visible and the Invisible explains. In the Recher-
che, love and music can at times provide us with remarkable evidence of this.
Yet obviously, when one looks deeper, the same can be said about each and
every one of our encounters with the world.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. See L. Fraisse, Lesthtique de Marcel Proust (Paris: Sedes, 1995), 7.

2. See, for example, S. Beckett, Proust (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931); A. Henry,
Marcel Proust, thories pour une esthtique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1981); and also J.-J. Nat-
tiez, Proust musicien (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984); trans. Derrick Puffett, Proust as
Musician (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
3. A. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Erster Band (Zrich: Haff-
mans Verlag, 1988), 246; The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, trans. E.F.J. Payne
(New York: Dover Edition, 1969), 180.
4. Ibid., 244/178.
5. Ibid., 244/179.
6. Ibid.
7. The essence which, in its opacity, is me, is defined as singularity, see R. Breeur,
Singularit et sujet. Une lecture phnomnologique de Proust (Grenoble: Millon, 2000),
in particular 24.
8. A. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Erster Band, 243/178.
9. See W. Benjamin, ber einige Motive bei Baudelaire [193940], in Gesammelte
Schriften, Bd. I, 2, hrsg. v. R. Tiedemann und H. Schweppenhuser (Frankfurt a. M.:
Suhrkamp, 197277), 605653; On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, in Illuminations: Essays
and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968)
155200.
10. See E. Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne. Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psycholo-
gie (Berlin: Springer, 1935, 1956); The Primary World of Senses. A Vindication of Sen-
sory Experience, trans. J. Needleman (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1963). See also, H.
Maldiney, Le dvoilement de la dimension esthtique dans la phnomnologie dErwin
Straus [1966], in Regard Parole Espace (Lausanne: Lge dHomme, 1973, 1994), 124
146. In addition, see R. Bernet, La vie du sujet. Recherches sur linterprtation de Husserl
dans la phnomnologie (Paris: P.U.F., 1994), 255: For Proust the associative mechanism
83
by means of which past and submerged feelings are resuscitated has an affective nature.
The shock of these feelings produces a sort of affective resonance.
11. See for example E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnom-
enologischen Philosophie, I, Allgemeine Einfhrung in die reine Phnomenologie [1913],
Husserliana, Bd. III, hrsg. v. W. Biemel (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), 5960; Ideas
Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book,
trans. Fred Kersten (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), 27,
53: . . . this world is there for me not only as a world of mere things, but also with the
same immediacy as a world of objects with values, a world of goods, a practical world.
I simply find the physical things in front of me furnished not only with merely mate-
rial determinations but also with value-characteristics, as beautiful and ugly, pleasant
and unpleasant, agreeable and disagreeable. Immediately, physical things stand there as
Objects of use, the table with its books, the drinking glass, the vase, the piano, etc.
Naturally this applies not only in the case of the mere physical things, but also in the
case of humans and brute animals belonging to my surroundings. They are my friends
or enemies, my servants or superiors, strangers or relatives.
12. See also ibid., 32, 67/61, note 30.
13. The epochalizing merit of the experience described by Proust is thematized by
Jacques Garelli as follows: In the moment itself in which the contingent order of life is
suspended, a true parenthesis or, if you will, a strange epoch, both natural and sponta-
neous, of the ontical conditions of existence, is performed, because the vicissitudes of
life are now perceived as being indifferent . . . its disasters innocuous, its brevity illu-
sory (J. Garelli, Rythmes et mondes [Grenoble: Millon, 1991], 151).
14. E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen
Philosophie, I, Allgemeine Einfhrung in die reine Phnomenologie, 31, 64/58
15. R. Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery
(Paris: J. Vrin, 1904), vol. VII: 34; The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, eds. J. Cot-
tingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), vol. II, 24.
16. With reference to the lexical choices common to both Descartes and Proust, I
am thinking about the recurrence of the verb tcher (to seek or to attempt) and the
substantive oreilles (ears or hearing), which in one case one intends to boucher
(to plug or to cork) and in the other abriter (to defend). Jacques Garelli has com-
pared these two passages with intimately similar intentions to the ones that guide this
present work. See his Rythmes et mondes, 157. More specifically, see the chapter entitled:
De la cire de Descartes la madeleine de Proust, ibid., 148167.
17. R. Descartes, Oeuvres De Descartes, 11 vols., edited by Charles Adam and Paul
Tannery. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1983, VII:, 34; The Philosophical Writ-
ings Of Descartes, 3 vols., translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dug-
ald Murdoch, volume 3 including Anthony Kenny. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988, II, 24.
18. M. Proust, On Reading Ruskin, Prefaces to La Bible dAmiens and Ssame et les
Lys. trans. and ed. Jean Autret, William Burford, and Phillip J. Wolfe, with an introduc-
tion by Richard Macksey (Hew Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 60. In the original,
Proust uses the same expression which appears in the above-quoted passage from the
Recherche, Il y a longtemps quon a perc jour le sophisme de la libert dindiffrence.
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION AND CHAPTER 1 85
Cest un sophisme tout aussi naf quobissent sans le savoir les crivains qui font tout
moment le vide dans leur esprit, croyant le dbarrasser de toute influence extrieure.
See his 1904 Introduction to J. Ruskins La Bible dAmiens, in M. Proust, Contre Sainte-
Beuve, preceded by Pastiches et mlanges and followed by Essais et articles, ed. P. Clarac
with the collaboration of dY. Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), Bibliothque de la Pl-
iade, 140; my emphasis.
19. Even Garelli underlines that in the encounter described by Proust, not only
a spiritual overflowing takes place but also an ontological one, which has a kinship to the
Kantian one, which shows itself in the bottomless abyss of the aesthetic ideas, which forces
one to think infinitely more than what a predetermined conceptuality would allow you
to grasp (J. Garelli, Rythmes et mondes, 153154). In Garellis opinion, such a spirituality
characterizes the Cartesian attitude. For a historico-theoretical analysis of this conception
of the encounter, see also L. Althusser, Le courant souterrain du matrialisme de la ren-
contre, in Ecrits philosophiques et politiques (Paris: Stock/Imec, 1994), t. 1, 539576.
20. See G. D. Neri, Louverture della Crisi di Husserl [1976], in Il sensibile, la
storia, larte. Scritti 19572001 (Verona: ombre corte, 2003), 53.
21. Ibid.; my emphasis.
22. C. Sini, in his introduction to the Italian edition of M. Merleau-Ponty, La prose
du monde, trans. M. Sanlorenzo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1984), 15.
23. See M. Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours 19591961, Prface by C. Lefort, ed. by
S. Mnas, (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), specifically 191198. In this respect, Merleau-Ponty
asks himself in the pages from this course: Isnt this a general conception of ideas?
And a little further on he states: One speaks of Platonism, but these ideas are without
an intelligible sun (ibid., 193 and 194). A similar evaluation had already been offered
in the synthesis of the course Le problme de la parole (195354): In literature, ideas, as
in music and painting, are not the ideas of the intellect; they are never quite detached
from what the author sees; they are transparent, as unchangeable as persons, but not
definable. What has been called Prousts Platonism is an attempt at an integral expres-
sion of the perceived or lived world (RC, 40/25).
24. See G. Deleuze, Unit de A la recherche du temps perdu, Revue de Mtaphy-
sique et de Morale 4, 1963, 427442.
25. My emphasis. In this regard, see also J. Garelli, Rythmes et mondes, 154156.
1. NATURE: VARIATIONS ON THE THEME
1. See M. Merleau-Ponty, RC, 141/167.

2. Moreover, this is implicitly confirmed by the summary of the course whose Eng-
lish title is Philosophy as Interrogation. In this summary Merleau-Ponty announces:
we have decided to postpone until next year the continuation of the study we began
on the ontology of nature, and to devote this year to some general reflections on the
meaning of this inquiry and the question of the possibility of philosophy today (RC,
141/167). See also the corresponding NC, 3738.
3. Upon introducing those lectures, Merleau-Ponty states: the purpose of this
course is to try to formulate philosophically our ontology, which remains implicit, in
the air, and to do it through the contrast with Cartesian ontology (Descartes and suc-
cessors) (NC, 166).
4. Merleau-Ponty claims, in fact, that, [t]here is a circular relation between Being

and beings. We must take hold again of a common life between essence and existence
(N, 180/134). On this subject, see also the entire chapter entitled Interrogation and
Intuition in VI, 142171/105129.
5. It is important to recall that, according to Merleau-Ponty, Darwinian thought
is the artificialist philosophy . . . in its most developed forms, since it is based both on
an ultra-mechanism and an ultra-finalism (RC, 136/97; trans. modified).
6. Confronting what Uexkll theorizes in Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin:
Springer, 1909) and in Streifzge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und MenschenEin Bil-
derbuch unsichtbarer Welten (Berlin: Springer, 1934), Merleau-Ponty observes: These
two interpretations of the Natursubjekt are not what is most interesting in the work
of Uexkll. The first only takes up the Kantian solution, the second the intuitions of
Schelling. . . . There is however, something new: the notion of Umwelt (N, 232/177). An
introduction to the most important stages of Uexklls philosophical reflection appears
in Mondellas preface to the most recent Italian edition of the second text cited above:
see J. von Uexkll, Ambiente e comportamento, trans. P. Manfredi (Milan: Il Saggiatore,
1967), 977.
7. We must admit in the very fabric of the physical elements a transtemporal and
transspatial element of which we do not take account by supposing an essence outside of
time (N, 230/176). Merleau-Ponty synthesizes shortly below in the text: The notion of
Umwelt no longer allows us to consider the organism in its relation to the exterior world,
as an effect of the exterior world, or as a cause. The Umwelt is not presented in front of
the animal like a goal; it is not present like an idea (N, 233/178).
8. J. von Uexkll, quoted by Merleau-Ponty (N, 228/173; trans. modified). Mer-
leau-Ponty quoted Uexklls statement already in SC, 172/159, taking it from the article
by F. Buytendijk, Les Diffrences essentielles des fonctions psychiques chez lhomme et
les animaux, Cahiers de philosophie de la nature, IV (1930), 131.
9. These are the pages in which Proust describes Swann as having reached the
consideration of the musical motifs as actual ideas (R I, 349/379).
10. In this quotation, it is evident how Merleau-Ponty connects the musical mean-
ing and the biological meaning of the term theme.
11. On the importance of this question (given what I will later conclude, I could
say that its relevance is ontological), Merleau-Ponty states: [H]ow are we to understand,
then, this relation between the totality and the parts? What status must we give totality?
Such is the philosophical question that Coghills experiments pose, a question which is
at the center of this course on the idea of Nature and maybe of every philosophy (N,
194/145; trans. modified).
12. Moreover, F. Mondella underlines how Uexklls work should be seen against
the background of a crisis of biology which rendered the meaning of terms such as
variation problematic, immobilized between causalism and finalism: Were the varia-
tions a casual and passive process, determined by external factors, or the result of an
internal tendency of the organism which manifests itself in its adaptation to the environ-
ment? (F. Mondella, Introduzione to von Uexkll, Ambiente e comportamento, 14).
13. It is interesting to point out that Deleuze and Guattari also have in turn under-
lined that Uexklls conception is not a teleological conception but a melodic one (G.
DeleuzeF. Guattari, Quest-ce que la philosophie? [Paris: Minuit, 1991], 176; What is
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 87
Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell [New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1994], 185; my emphasis).
14. I quote the passage in its entirety: [a]t the end of the experience produced by
this ontology [i.e. the Cartesian one] European philosophy again confronts nature as an
oriented and blind productivity. This does not represent a return to teleology. Properly
speaking, teleology understood as the conformity of the event to a concept, shares the
same fate as mechanismthese are both concepts of artificialism. Natural production
has to be understood in some other way (RC, 117/151).
15. This statement, made about Portmanns study of the animal appearance (see
N, 244ff./186ff.), refers to the common inspiration that, according to Merleau-Ponty,
underlies the biological studies considered in his own lectures devoted to the study of
animal behavior (see N, 220ff./166ff.).
16. For example, he notes that London and Bauer . . . see in quantum mechanics
a theory of species, and they put in doubt the idea that every object has an individual
existence (N, 128/92).
17. See M. Merleau-Ponty, OE, 41/132.
18. In Eye and Mind, the English translation renders voyance as visualization.
19. See NC, 391. Merleau-Ponty synthesizes shortly below: [a]ll considered
Proust: the carnal essences; Valry: the conscience is not within the immanence, but
within the life; Claudel: the simultaneity, the most real is beneath us; St J Perse: the
Poetry as an awakening to the Being; Cl. Simon: the zone of credulity and the zone of
the sensible being.
There is an overturning of the relationships between the visible and the invisible,
the flesh and the mind; a discovery of a signification as nervure of the full Being; an
overcoming of the insularity of the minds (NC, 392).
20. G. Charbonnier, Le Monologue du peintre I (Paris: Julliard, 1959), 34. Max
Ernsts statement is already echoed in VI 261/208, and quoted in OE, 3031/128129.
On this subject, see my La visibilit de linvisible. Merleau-Ponty entre Czanne et Proust
(Hildesheim: Olms, 2001), 110118.
21. In its full ontological significance, it is necessary to understand the mean-
ing of simultaneity established by Eye and Mind as follows: beings that are different,
exterior, foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together (OE, 84/146). Regarding
the literary expression of simultaneity, Merleau-Ponty considers it particularly in the
conclusive sentence of the Recherche (about which, see NC, 197). As the quotation in
footnote 19 of the present chapter shows, he finds it also in the pages of Claudel (see NC,
198ff.) and in those of Simon (see NC, 204ff.) as well.
22. See NC, 170 and 173, as well as Eye and Mind, where it is emphasized that the
extraordinary overlapping [empitement] between vision and movement forbids us to
conceive of vision as an operation of thought that would set up before the mind a picture
or a representation of the world (OE, 17/124). David M. Levin recalls that like Heide-
gger, Merleau-Ponty uses phenomenology to contest the history of metaphysics, which
has reduced the thing to an object, reduced human beings to subjects, and posited the
object it has artificially constructed within a structure of re-presentation (Vor-stellung)
that relates it to a disembodied subject (D. M. Levin, The Philosophers Gaze: Modernity
in the Shadows of Enlightenment [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1999], 201. Christine Buci-Glucksmann points out in turn that, by the notion
of voyance, Merleau-Ponty elaborates a Seeing which excesses the sight, a visual freed
from the only optic-representative frame (C. Buci-Glucksmann, La Folie du voir. De
lesthtique baroque [Paris: Galile, 1986], 70).
23. Merleau-Ponty significantly defines the sensible universe as the oneiric world
of analogy in Eye and Mind (OE, 41/132).
24. See E. Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der
logischen Vernunft, ed. P. Janssen, in Husserliana, vol. XVII (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1974), 257. Originally published in Jahrbuch fr Philosophie und phnomenolo-
gische Forschung, X (1929). It ought to be remembered that Rimbaud, in turn, came to
theorize the poet becoming a voyant by a long, gigantic, and rational derangement of
all the senses (A. Rimbaud, Lettre du voyant [to Paul Demeny, written May 15, 1871],
in A. Rimbaud, Oeuvres-opere, ed. I. Margoni, [Milan: Feltrinelli, 3rd edition, 1971], 142;
A. Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters, ed. Wallace Fowlie [Chicago and Lon-
don: The University of Chicago Press, 1966], 307), on which Merleau-Ponty comments:
This does not mean not to think anymorethe derangement of the senses is the break-
ing down of barriers between themselves in order to find again their undivisionAnd
therefore not my thinking, but theirs (NC, 186; my emphasis).
25. VI, 272/218. Here, the specific reference is to Paul Klees painting, as we can
conclude from NC, 56, where Merleau-Ponty again uses the expression the skin of
things, this time speaking precisely of Klee.
As for the parallelism between contemporary music and painting, Merleau-Ponty
develops it in NC, 6164. See esp. NC, 6162: Generalization (and purification) of
music as well as of painting: there were some privileged forms of tonality. . . . All this [is]
not physically suppressed, but rather reintegrated into [a] wider range of musical pos-
sibility, according to which the privileged structures constitute only a few of the possible
variants of the 12-tone series.
26. See the letter written to Mersenne on November 20, 1629, in R. Descartes,
uvres philosophiques, ed. F. Alqui (Paris: Bordas, 1998), vol. I, 227232.
27. This equivalence was previously claimed in OE, 44, note 13/389, note 22: [t]he
system of means by which painting makes us see is a scientific matter. Why, then, do we
not methodically produce perfect images of the world, arriving at a universal art purged
of personal art, just as the universal language would free us of all the confused relation-
ships that lurk in existent languages?
28. See NC, 189.
29. See NC, 186 and, about the quotation from Rimbaud, the letter Georges
Izambard [May (13) 1871], that is considered a draft of the Lettre du voyant, in Rim-
baud, Oeuvres-opere, 334.
30.
31. For the reference here and hereafter to the Proustian pages, see R I,
349350/379381.
32. I already discussed the commentary that The Visible and the Invisible develops
on these pages in the fifth chapter of my La Visibilit de linvisible, to which the reader
can refer.
33. See VI, 198/151.
34. In this perspective, moreover, we could read the overall inspiration that pro-
gressively orients the theories of Uexkll, whoMondella claimsin his last years
of study, tried more and more to express the knowledge of the harmonic plan which
realizes itself in the unity between the animal subject and the individual world, as the
knowledge of a meaning. This means the knowledge of a relation which is not express-
ible through a connection between cause and effect, but rather between the entirety and
its parts. Such a relation of the entirety and its parts is not explainable, according to the
author, through any abstract knowledge of a conceptual kind, but rather it is obtainable,
as we have seen, through a form of a perceptual knowledge (Mondella, Introduzione to
von Uexkll, Ambiente e comportamento, 69; my emphases).
35. We are not here proposing any empiricist genesis of thought: we are asking
precisely what is that central vision that joins the scattered visions, . . . that I think that
must be able to accompany all our experiences. We are proceeding toward the center, we
are seeking to comprehend how there is a center, what the unity consists of, we are not
saying that it is a sum or a result (VI, 191/145).
36. Here, he echoes what Uexkll stated, for example, in 1909: [i]n a melody there
is a reciprocal influence between the first and the last tone, and we can therefore say
that the last tone is possible only because of the first, but, in the same way, that the first
is possible only because of the last. The procedure is the same for the formation of the
structure in plants and animals (von Uexkll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, 2324).
37. It is in this way that things happen in the construction of a living being. There
is no priority of effect over cause. Just as we cannot say that the last note is the end of the
melody of it, and the first is the effect neither can we distinguish the sense apart from the
sense in which the melody expresses itself (N, 228/174; trans. modified).
38. In reference to the theories of E. S. Russell and R. Ruyer, and even to those
of Uexkll, Merleau-Ponty synthesizes: [o]ne can, therefore, speak of a presence of
the theme of these realizations, or say that the events are grouped around a certain
absence: thus, in perception, the vertical and the horizontal are given everywhere
and present nowhere. Totality is likewise everywhere and nowhere (N, 23940/183;
trans. modified; my emphasis). Furthermore, we have already seen Merleau-Ponty
compare the orientation which underlies animal behavior according to Uexkll,
with that of our oneiric consciousness toward certain poles that are never seen for
themselves, but which are, however, directly the cause of all the elements of a dream
(N, 233/178; my emphasis).
39. This excess is indicated by Proust emphasizing that [w]hen he [i.e. Swann]
had sought to disentangle from his confused impressions how it was that it [i.e. the little
phrase] swept over and enveloped him, he had observed that it was to the closeness of
the intervals between the five notes which composed it and to the constant repetition
of two of them that was due that impression of a frigid and withdrawn sweetness; but
in reality he knew that he was basing this conclusion not upon the phrase itself, but
merely upon certain equivalents, substituted (for his minds convenience) for the myste-
rious entity of which he had become aware . . . when for the first time he had heard the
sonata played (R I, 349/380). For Merleau-Pontys commentary on this passage, see VI,
197/150, as well as NC, 193195: in this passage, both texts find the description of the
relationship between sensible ideas and ideas of the intelligence. Therefore, Proust
seems to describe here a double excess: that of the sensible ideas with respect to their
presentation, but also with respect to their conceptualization.
40. P. Gambazzi, La Piega e il pensiero. Sullontologia di Merleau-Ponty, Aut Aut
262263 (1994), 28.
41. For the characterization of the relationship between sensible and intelligible
that we have synthesized here, see in particular the working notes of The Visible and the
Invisible entitled The sensesdimensionalityBeing and Problem of the negative
and of the concept, Gradient, respectively dated November 1959 and February 1960,
VI, 271272/217219 and 290291/236238.
42. We do not possess the musical or sensible ideas, precisely because they are
negativity or absence circumscribed; they possess us (VI, 198199/151).
43. On this subject, we are reminded of the critique of Husserls myth of a dis-
incarnated Wesensschau operated by a pure spectatora critique that Merleau-Ponty
develops in the previously quoted chapter Interrogation and Intuition of The Visible
and the Invisible (see VI, esp. 155/116). Moreover, in a working note of the same text, he
writes: seeing is this sort of thought that has no need to think in order to possess the
Wesen (VI, 301/247).
Thus, if Buci-Glucksmann wrote that the voyancewhich renders present to us
what is absentdefines at the same time the place of art and the access to Being, the
simultaneous arising of an aesthetics and of an ontology (C. Buci-Glucksmann. La
Folie du voir, 71), at the same time we can also see a gnosiology emerging here, for
with voyance Merleau-Ponty also defines a Wesensschau of carnal essences: a totally
virtual Wesensschau and, at the same time, always already working in the intuition (or
in the vision, or, more generally, in the apprehension) of this or that phenomenon.
Marc Richir, Essences et intuition des essences chez le dernier Merleau-Ponty in Ph-
nomnes, temps et tres. Ontologie et phnomnologie (Grenoble: Millon, 1987), 79. This
text was developed from a paper given in 1983 at the Merleau-Ponty Circle, held at the
New School for Social Research in New York.
44. In relation to the synaesthetic configuration of Wesensschau that Merleau-
Ponty seems to propose, we should not forget that he also characterizes it as ausculta-
tion or palpation in depth (VI, 170/128). In addition, as to the problem of the unity
of the senses, it should be pointed out that to conceive such a unity does not imply the
presupposition of their original indifferentiation, but instead points out that Transponi-
erbarkeit for which each sense is a world, i.e. absolutely incommunicable for the other
senses, and yet constructing a something which, through its structure, is from the very
first open upon the world of the other senses, and with them forms one sole Being (VI,
271/217).
45. This deals with Lil coute (Paris: Gallimard, 1946). Regarding Merleau-
Pontys observations, see NC, 198201.
2. THE MYTHICAL TIME OF THE IDEAS
1. M. Ferraris, Estetica razionale (Milan: Cortina, 1997).

2. Ibid., 333.
3. Ibid., 345.
4. Ibid., 304.
5. M. Richir, Phnomnes, temps et tres (Grenoble: Editions Jrme :Millon,
1987), 84.
6. Ibid., 7879. Richir subsequently explains that, due to the illusion delineated by
the first pole, the phenomenon is individuated as a pure fact (ibid., 84).
7. Ibid., 79.
8. Ibid.
9. See M. Ferraris, Estetica razionale, part III, chapter 3, 330350. The reference is
to Jacques Derrida, Introduction to Edmund Husserl, LOrigine de la gomtrie, trans.
Jacques Derrida (Paris: P.U.F. 1962).
10. See M. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et linvisible, in particular a working note
from December 1959 entitled Leibniz (222223), as well as R. Barbaras, De ltre du
phnomne. Sur lontologie de Merleau-Ponty (Grenoble: Millon, 1991), 263, and P.
Gambazzi, Monadi, pieghe, specchi. Sul leibnizianesimo di Merleau-Ponty e Deleuze,
in Chiasmi 1, 1998, 27. It is well known that Deleuze acknowledges Merleau-Pontys
understanding of Leibnizs philosophy in later works than those we will examine: see G.
Deleuze, Le pli. Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: d. de Minuit, 1988), 36, footnote 27; The
Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1993), 146, footnote 28. Regarding the general philosophical horizon of these
problems, see E. Franzini, Arte e mondi possibili. Estetica e interpretazione da Leibniz a
Klee (Milan: Guerini e Associati, 1994).
11. See in particular P. Gambazzi, Monadi, pieghe, specchi. Sul leibnizianesimo di
Merleau-Ponty e Deleuze, 29, 3536. The English translation of Le visible et linvisible
renders it total part rather than whole-part (see for example M. Merleau-Ponty, VI,
158/118).
12. The concept, the signification are the singular dimensionalized (ibid.,
291/237).
13. This termthe French verb ramasseris used by Deleuze at the end of the
chapter entitled Antilogos (see PS, 139/115), which is included in the second French
edition of Marcel Proust et les signes (1970). In the subsequent chapter, entitled Cells
and Vessels, Deleuze examines the relation between the part and the whole, as it is out-
lined in the Recherche, focusing on the fundamental figure of complication defined as
. . . the coexistence of asymmetric and noncommunicating parts (ibid., 141/117).
14. See M. Heidegger, Logos, in Vortrge und Aufstze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954),
199221; Early Greek Thinking, trans. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper
& Row, 1975), 5978.
15. Style is not the man, style is essence itself (G. Deleuze, PS, 62/48).
16. J.-F. Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971, 19783), 22.
17. As Furio Jesi writes, in Homeric mythology a certain historicity allows, or
rather enforces, the bond between the present and the past. It is the paradoxical histo-
ricity of those cultures in which the past anticipates, consecrates and makes the present
true (F. Jesi, Mito, [Milan: Mondadori, 1973, 19892], 21). In the above-quoted passage,
Merleau-Ponty invites us to locate precisely such a historicity in our personal and pub-
lic history, just as the Proustian work was able to (M. Merleau-Ponty, VI, 43/24). In this
respect, on many occasions, Merleau-Ponty also stresses the importance of Bergsons
contribution. As an example of the relation between that paradoxical historicity and
ideation, see, for example, the following passage from loge de la Philosophie (1953):
. . . Bergson suggests, in speaking of a retrograde movement of the true, that it is a ques-
tion of a fundamental property of truth. To think, or, in other words, to think an idea
as true, implies that we arrogate to ourselves the right of recovering the past, either to
treat it as an anticipation of the present, or at least to place the past and the present in
the same world (M. Merleau-Ponty, loge de la Philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 35;
In Praise of Philosophy, trans. J. Wild and J. M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1963), 29.
18. See also Merleau-Ponty, NC, 197. In particular the reference is to the following
phrase in Prousts Du ct de chez Swann, Whether it is because the faith which creates
has ceased to exist in me, or because reality takes shape in the memory alone, the flow-
ers that people show me nowadays for the first time never seem to me to be true flowers
(R 1, 184/201).
19. In fact, Merleau-Ponty underlines that in Prousts Recherche . . . time, in any
case, becomes something other than succession: a pyramid of simultaneity in M. Mer-
leau-Ponty, NC, 197.
20. While listening to beautiful music: the impression that this movement that
starts up is already at its endpoint, which it is going to have been, or [that it is] sink-
ing into the future that we have a hold of as well as the pastalthough we cannot say
exactly what it will be. Anticipated retrospectionRetrograde movement in futuro: it
comes down towards me entirely done (M. Merleau-Ponty, Deux notes indites sur la
musique; Two Unpublished Notes on Music, trans. Leonard Lawlor, Chiasmi Interna-
tional 3, 2001), 18.
21. Merleau-Ponty comments on the first of the two above quoted Proustian sen-
tences: Facts and dimensionsSingulars and general like the sensible, indestructible
for life . . . M. Merleau-Ponty, NC, 194.
22. . . . the Proustian corporeity as guardian of the past (VI, 297/243).
23. The elements of such an assimilation are repeatedly indicated in Merleau-
Ponty, NC, 193, 196.
24. Regarding the expression notions without equivalent, see M. Proust, Du ct de
chez Swann, R 1, 344/381.
25. See ibid., 80/64: . . . memory [viz. involuntary memory] unites two objects
that still depend on an opaque substance and whose relation depends upon an associa-
tion. Thus essence itself is no longer master of its own incarnation, of its own choice,
but is chosen according to data that remain external to it: essence thereby assumes that
minimum of generality of which we spoke above.
26. Deleuze describes a kind of hierarchy which, according to him, governs the
lines of time in the Recherche in the following way: From one line to another, the rela-
tion of sign and meaning becomes more intimate, more necessary, and more profound.
In every instance, on the higher line, we recover what remained lost on the others. It is
as if the lines of time broke off and fit into each other. Thus it is Time itself that is serial;
each aspect of time is now itself a term of the absolute temporal series and refers to a Self
that possesses an increasingly vast and increasingly individualized field of exploration.
The primordial time of art imbricates all the different kinds of time; the absolute Self of
art encompasses all the different kinds of Self (ibid., 108/88).
27. See also G. Deleuze, PS, 7577/5961.
28. See G. Deleuze, DR, 160, note 1/122, but also PS, in which Deleuze observes,
This is no longer the Combray of perception nor of voluntary memory. Combray
appears as it could not be experienced: not in reality, but in its truth; not in its external
and contingent relations, but in its internalized difference, in its essence (G. Deleuze,
PS, 76/6061).
29. In his The End of Phenomenology: Expressionism in Deleuze and Merleau-

Ponty [1998], Thinking through French Philosophy: the Being of the Question (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 8094, Leonard Lawlor has drawn attention
to the recurrence of a similar expression at the conclusion of the chapter of Phnom-
nologie de la perception which Merleau-Ponty dedicates to sense experience (see M.
Merleau-Ponty, PP, 279280/242). The dynamic described by Merleau-Ponty is here, in
fact, similar to the one considered by Deleuze. It is about the movementhere referring
to the anonymity of perceptionthat gives a past to the present and directs it towards
a future in such a way that it ratifies and renews in us a prehistory (ibid., 277/240),
which is experienced as active and at the same time unattainable.
30. See note 18.
31. Merleau-Ponty uses similar terms in the working note from The Visible and
the Invisible entitled Einstrmen-Reflection,!Syntax Error, LA which is dated February
1959, where he speaks of my past . . . such as it was (and not such as I reconquer it by
an act of evocation) M. Merleau-Ponty, VI, 227/173.
32. It should be noted that Deleuze locates one of the fundamental dynamics of the
Recherche in the development of the meaning enveloped in the signs (for example, see G.
Deleuze, PS, 140142/116118).
33. Here, with regard to an affirmation of Uexkll who compares the Umwelt to a
melody that is singing itself, 228/174, Merleau-Ponty observes, [a]s Proust says, a mel-
ody is a Platonic idea that we cannot see separately since it is impossible to distinguish
the means and the end, the essence and the existence in it (N, 228/174). In this respect, I
would like to draw attention to the third chapter of my book, The Thinking of the Sensible.
Merleau-Pontys A-Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 2838.
34. See also G. Deleuze, DR, 154/117, here the differenciator is defined as . . .
an in-itself . . . by virtue of which the different is gathered all at once . . .. In the same
respecti.e., with regard to the temporal difference which as such reunitessee also
a working note from The Visible and the Invisible dated November 1960 and entitled
Time and chiasm (M. Merleau-Ponty, VI, 321/267268).
35. In this respect, see also the chapter entitled Tracce di non. Variazioni sul
tema dello stile of my book entitled, Di alcuni motivi in Marcel Proust (Milan: Cor-
tina, 1998), 77.
36. Merleau-Ponty connects the remembering of the high school building as
being sedimented in a certain odor to Wesen, in the sense that, says Heidegger, this
word has when it is used as a verb. M. Merleau-Ponty, VI, 154, footnote 1/115, foot-
note 2, see also 300301/247. See Heidegger, Einfhrung in die Metaphysik (Tbingen:
Niemeyer, 1953), 2526; Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard
Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 3536. On Merleau-Pontys reading of
the Heideggerian notion of Wesen, in the verbal sense, see M. Richir, Phnomnes,
temps et tres., 6869, 8687, 95, 100102, see also P. Gambazzi, La piega e il pensiero.
Sullontologia di Merleau-Ponty, aut aut 262263, 1994, 4b, 39.
37. See P. Claudel, Loeil coute (Paris: Gallimard, 1946).
38. As Merleau-Ponty precisely recalls, Heidegger suggests that we ought to inter-
pret the notion of essence (Wesen) in the verbal sense, and in doing so Heidegger aims
to name the unfolding of the essence of Being. The latter is in turn thought according to
the Greek term which he maintains properly designates it, namely , a term which,
in his opinion, says what emerges from itself (for example, the emergence, the blossom-
ing, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming into appearance in such
unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in appearancein short, the emerging-
abiding-sway (M. Heidegger, Einfhrung in die Metaphysik, 11/15). In the verbal sense
of Wesen, Heidegger is searching for a new way to think and say the blossoming of the
essence of Being itself.
39. See H. Maldiney, Lart, lclair de ltre. Traverses (Seyssel: d. CompAct, 1993),
333.
40. M. Richir, Phnomnes, temps et tres, 85. In virtue of this subtletyRichir
subsequently explainseach and every phenomenon is always simultaneously, or in
the same movement, a phenomenon that illusorily appears as isolated and indivisible,
and as an undefined multiplicity of phenomena, reciprocally insularized in the same
illusory manner (ibid.).
41. Richir emphasizes that Merleau-Pontys cosmos is not simply constituted like
the Greek cosmos, i.e., by four elementsalthough, in a certain sense, it can refer to it-
since within it there are as many elements as the very modulations of the flesh are, the
very appearances of the phenomenality of the phenomena (ibid., 90).
42. The Egyptologist, in all things, is the man who undergoes an initiationthe
apprentice (PS, 112/92; my emphasis).
43. Merleau-Ponty notes, instead: Space, we speak less of Prousts notion of space,
nonetheless there is something analogous to the temporal simultaneity that he thereby
detects. M. Merleau-Ponty, NC, 197. On the issue of space in the Recherche, see the clas-
sic contribution by G. Poulet, Lespace proustien (Paris: Gallimard, 1963, 19822), who
puts forward the thesis according to which, If Bergsons thought denounces and rejects
the metamorphosis of space into time, Proust not only accommodates himself to it and
even dwells within it, pushing it to its extreme and ultimately he makes it one of the very
principles of his art (ibid., 10).
44. . . . essence is realized in involuntary memory to a lesser degree than in art; it
is incarnated in a more opaque matter. First of all, essence . . . is a principle of localiza-
tion rather than of individuation (G. Deleuze, PS, 77/61).
45. Moreover, see the working note entitled Activity: PassivityTeleology, dated
November 1960: . . . for me it is no longer a question of origins, nor limits, nor of a
series of events going to a first cause, but one sole explosion of Being which is forever.
Describe the world of the rays of the world beyond every serial-eternitarian or ideal
alternative (VI, 318/265; my emphasis).
46. Such a state turns out to be subordinate to that philosophical myth of ori-
gin on which Platonism is founded. On the basis of Merleau-Pontys course notes from
195859, part of which were entitled Heidegger: la philosophie comme problme (see
M. Merleau-Ponty, NC, 91148), Fabio Ciaramelli has retraced and criticized such a
form of Platonism even in Heidegger and opposed it to Merleau-Pontys conception
of the explosion of the originating. See F. Ciaramelli, Loriginaire et limmdiat.
Remarques sur Heidegger et le dernier Merleau-Ponty, in Revue philosophique de Lou-
vain 96(2), May 1998: viz. 225231.
47. See P. Ricoeur, Temps et rcit. II, La configuration dans le rcit de fiction (Paris:
Seuil, 1984), 195. Time and Narrative, vol. II, trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 131.
NOTES TO CHAPTERS 2 AND 3 95
48. Being no longer being before me, but surrounding me and in a sense travers-
ing me, and my vision of Being not forming itself from elsewhere, but from the midst of
Beingthe alleged facts, the spatio-temporal individuals, are from the first mounted on
the axes, the pivots, the dimensions, the generality of my body, and the ideas are there-
fore already encrusted in its joints (ibid., 154/114).
49. Time is that body of the spirit Valry used to talk about (M. Merleau-Ponty,
Signes, 21/15), see also the previously mentioned working note from The Visible and the
Invisible, which is dated November 1960 and entitled Time and chiasm, which is worth
quoting here in full: The Stiftung of a point of time can be transmitted to the others
without continuity without conservation, without fictitious support in the psyche the
moment that one understands time as chiasm[.]
Then past and present are Ineinander, each enveloping-envelopedand that itself
is the flesh (M. Merleau-Ponty, VI, 321/267268).
50. See G. Deleuze, LS, viz. the Tenth and Twenty-Third series.
51. M. Ferraris, Estetica razionale, 177.
3. DEFORMATION AND RECOGNITION
1. E. Cassirer, Eidos und Eidolon. Das Problem des Schnen und der Kunst in
Platons Dialogen, Vortrge der Bibliothek Warburg, II, 192223, part I (Leipzig-Berlin:
B. G. Teubner, 1924), 127. Hereafter referred to as Eidos und Eidolon.
2. Ibid., 5. Cassirer explains immediately afterwards: . . . pre-Socratic philosophy
also endeavored to conceive being as the unity of form, as being dominated by a univer-
sal formal lawbut it was unable to express this law without attributing to it again and
again the tint of being. Thus, the Ionian philosophy of nature locates the origin of being
in a single concrete entitybe it water, air or fire [ . . . ] It is firstly in Plato that every
sensible schematization of the pure concept of being is overcome once and for all (ibid.,
56). The same affirmation appears in his work entitled From Thales to Plato (1925).
3. See D. Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact. Interviews with Francis Bacon 196279
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1980), 168 (my emphasis).
4. E. Cassirer, Eidos und Eidolon, 3.
5. Ibid., 4.
6. U. Boccioni, C. D. Carr, L. Russolo, G. Balla, G. Severini, Manifesto tecnico
della pittura futurista, in L. De Maria, Per conoscere Marinetti e il futurismo (Milan:
Mondadori, 1973), 54 (my emphasis).
7. G. Braque, Penses et rflexions sur la peinture, Nord-Sud, December, 1917, 13.
8. See D. Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon 19621979, cited and under-
lined by M. Kundera, Le geste brutal du peintre, prsentation de Francis Bacon, Por-
traits et autoportraits (Paris: Les Belles Lettres/Archimbaud, 1996), 9; The Painters
Brutal Gesture, trans. Linda Asher in Francis Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits (New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 820. For a philosophical treatment of the theme of
deformation and, more generally, the painting of Bacon, see G. Deleuze, FBLS. With
respect to this theme, allow me also to refer to the chapter entitled Tracce di non.
Variazioni sul tema dello stile, of my book Di alcuni motivi in Marcel Proust (Milan:
Cortina, 1998), 77.
9. P. Klee, ber die moderne Kunst [1924] (Bern: Benteli, 1945); On Modern Art,
trans. Paul Findlay with an introduction by Herbert Read (London: Faber and Faber,
1987), 45.
10. M. Duchamp speaks in analogous terms about his own work in the years that
immediately precede his arrival in America in 1915. See M. Duchamp, The Great Trou-
ble with Art in this Country, in The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art XIII(45),
(New York, 1945), 1921. For Matisse, on the contrary, it is Leo Stein who speaks about
forced deformations, as is recalled by Jack D. Flam in his text devoted to Matisse and
the Fauves in the catalogue published by W. Rubin, in Primitivism in 20th Century Art:
Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, The Museum of Modern Art, (New York, 1984),
2 vols., I, 223.
11. See M. Butor, In forma di introduzione [to the Italian edition], in 6 saggi e
6 risposte su Proust e sul romanzo, Italian trans. Carla Ghirlandi and Enrico Chierici
(Parma-Lucca: Pratiche, 1977), 9.
12. See ibid., 8. In this respect, with regard to the literary domain, let us recall
the example of Kafka, to which G. Scaramuzza refers, Deformazioni incrociate (Milan:
CUEM, 2002). Scaramuzza focuses especially on the connection between deformations
and oblivion, explaining that it is not only present in the world of Kafkas images, i.e.,
in some of his typical figures and situations, but can also be found in some qualities of
his writing (especially regarding the decline of narration) (ibid., i).
13. See M. Butor, In forma di introduzione [to the Italian edition], in 6 saggi e 6
risposte su Proust e sul romanzo, 7.
14. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le doute de Czanne, Fontaine 47, 1945, 80100, and
after in Sens et non-sens, 1333; Czannes Doubt, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics
Reader: Philosophy and Painting, trans. Michael B. Smith and ed. Galen Johnson (Evan-
ston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 5975. With respect to Czannes pictorial
deformations, see in particular 7175. Czannes name is equally associated by Merleau-
Ponty with deformations in the notes gathered in NC, 51.
15. These considerations are indebted to the paper by Antonello Negri entitled
Czanne: il classico moderno (I & II), presented at the State University of Milan on
October 12 and 26, 1998, in the framework of an interdisciplinary seminar dedicated to
Il Czanne degli scrittori, dei poeti e dei filosofi. See, in the proceedings of this semi-
nar, A. Negri, Classico moderno (e gotico). Alle fonti dellarte del Novecento, eds. G.
Cianci, E. Franzini, and A. Negri, Il Czanne degli scrittori, dei poeti e dei filosofi (Milan:
Bocca, 2001), 1519.
On the more philosophical questions concerning the modern and the classic in
Czannes work, see the chapter entitled Lombra di Merleau-Ponty: lintenzionalit di
Czanne by E. Franzini, Arte e mondi possibili. Estetica e interpretazione da Leibniz a
Klee, 129. See also E. Franzini, Fenomenologia del invisibile (Milan: Cortina, 2001).
16. We deform precisely in order to grasp the form in its birth, (NC, 5758),
as Merleau-Ponty remarks when commenting on the statement by Paul Klee, which is
reported by Grohmann: The work of art is about the necessity of deforming. Such a
necessity imposes itself when one penetrates into the specific dimensions of form. This
is because the rebirth of nature reaches this point. (NC, 58, footnote 1). For the affirma-
tion of Klee, which in turn appears in W. Grohmann, see Paul Klee (Genve: ditions
des Trois Collines & Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1954), 182.
17. For this example, as the one before, see E. Panofsky, Idea: Ein Beitrag zur
Begriffsgeschichte der lteren Kunstheorie (Leipzig and Berlin, 1924), 3; Idea: A Concept
in Art Theory, trans. J.J.S. Peake, (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 5. In Eidos und
Eidolon, Cassirer refers to this text by Panofsky as a development of his own text (see
E. Cassirer, Eidos und Eidolon, 27, note 1).
It is interesting to recall, at length, the anecdote about the competition between
Phidias and Alcamenes for the statue of Athena, an anecdote that Gombrich suggests
that we take up as an emblematic beginning of the adventures of deformation: The
Athenians intending to consecrate a beautiful image of Minerva upon a high pillar, set
Phidias and Alcamenes to work, meaning to chuse the better of the two. Alcamenes
being nothing at all skilled in Geometry and in the Optickes made the goddesse won-
derfull faire to the eye of them that saw her hard by. Phidias on the contrary . . . did
consider that the whole shape of his image should change according to the height of
the appointed place, and therefore made her lips wide open, her nose somewhat out of
order, and all the rest accordingly . . . when these two images were afterwards brought
to light and compared, Phidias was in great danger to have been stoned by the whole
multitude, untill the statues were at length set on high. For Alcamenes his sweet and
diligent strokes being drowned, and Phidias his disfigured and distorted hardness being
vanished by the height of the place, made Alcamenes to be laughed at, and Phidias to
bee much more esteemed (cited from F. Juniuss The Painting of the Ancients in E. H.
Gombrich, Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Lon-
don: Phaidon Press, 1960, 1977), 162.
18. See E. Panofsky, Idea, 23/45 (my emphasis).
20. This is dealt with in the Republic, 605c and also in the Sophist, 233e. Cassirer
had already stressed the connection between such passages (see E. Cassirer, Eidos und
Eidolon, 1314).
21. Regarding the general meaning of and in Greek culture, see
K. Kernyi, , , , Italian trans. O. M. Nobile, Archivio di Filosofia,
1962, in particular, 168170. It is interesting to point out that in a certain sense Ker-
nyis reconstruction integrates the characterization of the notions of and ,
which Deleuze will later extract from Plato, while in another sense it distinguishes itself
from it.
22. Plato, Sophist, 236a.
23. Plato, Sophist, 235d-e. For a reading of the Sophist which focuses on these
themes, see S. Rosen, Platos Sophist: The Drama of Original and Image (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1983), but also for the specific problematic background,
see M. Villela-Petit, La question de limage artistique dans le Sophiste, in P. Aubenque,
Etudes sur le Sophiste de Platon (Rome: Bibliopolis, 1991), 5590.
24. So dont those craftsmen [] say goodbye to truth, and produce in
their images [] the proportions that seem to be beautiful instead of the real
ones? (Plato, Sophist, 236a). In this respect, see the above-cited article by M. Villela-
Petit, in particular, the sections entitled Platon et lart de son temps and Le paradigme
de la sculpture, 6784.
25. Plato, Sophist, 236b. It should be stressed that Panofsky alludes to the impor-
tance of the distinction between and for the history and theory of art in
the modern age in Idea, 7980, note 60/189, note 44. For his reference to the anecdote of
Phidias and Alcamenes in relation to Plato, see ibid., 3/56.
26. See E. Cassirer, Eidos und Eidolon. See also A. Pinotti, Il prestigio del
far vedere, in Pittura e idea. Ricerche fenomenologiche sul cubismo (Florence: Alinea,
1998), 27.
27. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Erster Band (Pfullingen: Gnther Neske, 1961),
240242; Nietzsche, vol. I, ed. and trans. D. F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1979),
208209.
29. Implicitly referring to the passage of the Sophist, quoted in note 24, Erwin
Panofsky explains, with regard to the perspectival construction of art, that Plato con-
demed it already in its modest beginnings because it distorted [verzerre] the true pro-
portions of things. E. Panofsky, Die Perspective als symbolische Form, Vortrge der
Bibliothek Warburg, hrg. von F. Saxl, 192425 (Leipzig-Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1927), 290;
Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. with an introduction by Christopher S. Wood (New
York: Zone Books, 1991), 71.
31. See also DR, 167/128: . . . they [the simulacra] produce an external effect of
resemblance, this takes the form of an illusion, not an internal principle . . ..
32. The first section of this essay was originally entitled Renverser le platonisme
and published in Revue de mtaphysique et de Morale 71, no. 4 (Oct.Dec. 1966). Sub-
sequently, it has been revised and included, under the title Plato and the Simulacrum,
in The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy, which is the first appendix to The Logic
of Sense.
33. See also DR, 153/114.
34. Ibid.
35. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche I, 242/209.
36. The similar and the simultaneous have the same root, simul (G. Didi-
Huberman, Similaire et simultan in Phasmes. Essais sur lapparition [Paris: Minuit,
1988]), 21. With regard to this matter, the following remark by Deleuze proves espe-
cially important: The essential point is the simultaneity and contemporaneity of all
the divergent series, the fact that all coexist. From the point of view of the presents
which pass in representation, the series are certainly successive, one before and one
after. It is from this point of view that the second is said to resemble the first. How-
ever, this no longer applies from the point of view of the chaos which contains them,
the object = x which runs through them, the precursor which establishes communica-
tion between them or the forced movement which points beyond them: the differen-
ciator always makes them coexist. We have encountered several times the paradox of
presents which succeed one another, or series which succeed one another in reality,
but coexist symbolically in relation to the pure past or the virtual object (DR, 162/124;
my emphasis).
37. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche I, 242/209.
38. Ibid.
39. M. Richir, Phnomnes, temps et tres (Grenoble : Editions Jrme Millon,
1987), 78.
40. See F. Ciaramelli, Loriginaire et limmdiat. Remarques sur Heidegger et le

dernier Merleau-Ponty, Revue philosophique de Louvain, 96: 2, 1998.
41. In virtue of this original distortion of the phenomenon, Richir explains, [t]
here surely is, in a certain sense, an intuition of essences (Wesensschau), as well as an
intuition of facts which is inseparable from the former. Nonetheless, this intuition,
which is not a disembodied vision, is neither simply true nor simply false (illusory),
because illusion is as much an integral part of its truth, as truth is an integral part of its
illusion (Phnomnes, temps et tres, 78).
42. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche I, 246/213. With regard to this, see the entire section
entitled, The New Interpretation of Sensuousness and the Raging Discordance between
Art and Truth (ibid., 243254/211220).
43. M. Richir, Phnomnes, temps et tres, 78.
44. F. Nietzsche, Die Frhliche Wissenschaft, Smtliche Werke, Kritische Studi-
enausgabe (KSA), Band III, eds. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1980), 352; The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of
Songs, trans. J. Nauckhoff and ed. B. Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 8.
45. The conception of mimesis affirmed by Plato comes to be characterized in these
terms by W. Tatarkiewicz in his Dzieje szeciu poj (Warszawa: PWN, 1975); A History
of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics (The Hague: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1980), 267.
In relation to the issues here raised, see S. Ijsseling, Mimesis. On Appearing and Being
(Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1997).
46. See also G. Deleuze, DR, 155, and FBLS, 75/6869. In reference to the Prous-
tian experiences, Deleuze writes: . . . it is still a question of two series, that of a former
present (Combray as it was lived) and that of a present present. No doubt, to remain
at a first dimension of the experience, there is a resemblance between the two series
(the madeleine, breakfast), and even an identity (the taste as a quality which is not only
similar but self-identical across the two moments). Nevertheless, the secret does not lie
there. The taste possesses a power only because it envelops something = x, something
which can no longer be defined by an identity: it envelops Combray as it is in itself, as a
fragment of the pure past, in its double irreducibility to the present that it has been (per-
ception) and to the present present in which it might reappear or be reconstituted (vol-
untary memory). This Combray in itself is defined by its own essential difference [ . . . ]
It is this difference which, by enveloping itself, produces the identity of the quality which
constitutes the resemblance between the series (G. Deleuze, DR, 160, note 1/122).
47. I will return to the question of the model of art in the twentieth century; spe-
cifically in the last chapter of this work.
48. It seems to me that the convergence of the respective conception of the term
structure points toward the above suggested analogy between Merleau-Ponty and
Deleuze, as, with regard to Deleuze, M. T. Ramrez Cobin has clearly suggested in his
article Deleuze y la Filosofia in Revista de filosofa 33(97), 2000, 5486. With regard to
the fact that von Uexklls concept constituted a point of reference not only for Merleau-
Ponty but also for Deleuze, see note 13 of the first chapter of the present work.
49. H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, J.C.B. Mohr (Tbingen: Paul Siebeck,
1960), 119; Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edition, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall
(New York/London: Continuum , 1989), 103.
50. See also W. Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas, 266, where Gadamers above
evaluation returns: the Aristotelian concept of mimesis was closer to the original (ibid.,
267268).
51. H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 118/112.
52. Ibid., 119/113.
53. . . . operative in artistic presentation is recognition, which has the character
of genuine knowledge of essence; and since Plato considers all knowledge of essence to
be recognition, this is the ground of Aristotles remark that poetry is more philosophical
than history (ibid., 120/114).
54. Ibid., 121/115.
55. Indeed, on the one hand in the affirmation I did not know, we can hear the
joy of knowing more than is already familiar, while on the other hand in the affirmation
I have always known it, there seems to echo the affirmation that is how things are, or
its variant And finally I have discovered it.
It is with these words, in the famous pages of La chambre claire, explicitly inspired
by Proust, that Roland Barthes expresses the recognition of the essential identity of
his recently deceased mother in the photo of her as a child, that is, in a photograph
that significantly presents her in a way that he could never have known her. See R. Bar-
thes, La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 105110; Camera
Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,
1981), 6671. For a commentary on the characterization of memory offered in the above
work in relation to Husserl and Proust, see R. Bernet, La vie du sujet. Recherches sur
linterprtation de Husserl dans la phnomnologie (Paris: P.U.F., 1994). 259265.
56. See G. Deleuze, DR, 187, note 1/210, footnote 10.
57. See G. Deleuze, FBLS, in particular the chapter entitled Painting and Sensa-
tion, 3946. I have dealt with such a critique in my article entitled Il Czanne dei
filosofi francesi: da Merleau-Ponty a Deleuze, in Il Czanne degli scrittori, dei poeti e dei
filosofi, eds. G. Cianci, E. Franzini, and A. Negri, 243262.
58. See CC, 4049/2735.
59. A. Rimbaud, respectively A Georges Izambard (written May 13, 1871) and
Lettre du voyant (to Paul Demeny, written May 15, 1871), in A. Rimbaud, Complete
Works, Selected Letters, ed. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1966), 303 and 307, quoted by G. Deleuze with the following translation: To
attain the unknown by disorganizing all the senses . . . a long, boundless, and system-
atized disorganization of all the senses (CC, 47/33).
60. As Cassirer underlines, it is a testimony to Platos extreme linguistic power
that he was able, in a single variation, and with a subtle nuance of expression, to fix a
difference of meaning, which is unrivalled in its systematic incisiveness and pregnancy
(Eidos und Eidolon, 5).
61. It is evident that form consequently manifests itself as formation. In this
respect, Goethe opposes the notion of Gestalt, which designates the form as abstracted
from that which moves, to that of Bildung in order to indicate precisely formation
in its dynamics and in its classical orientation toward its fulfillment. With respect to
the historical and theoretical questions connected to this, see R. Pettoellos introduc-
tion to the Italian translation of E. Cassirer, Goethe e il mondo storico [1932] (Brescia:
Morcelliana, 1995), 744; see also M. Mazzocut-Mis, Deformazioni fantastiche (Milan:
Mimesis, 1999), 916. It should be also stressed that in the twentieth century, Paul
Klee introduces the notion of Gestaltung, i.e., formation moving along the infinite way
(Weg) of incompleteness.
62. In this sense, the twentieth century appears as the century in which modern
thought finds its highest expression: modern thoughtDeleuze explains in his preface
to Diffrence et rptitionis born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identi-
ties, and of the discovery of all the forces that act under the representation of the identi-
cal. The modern world is one of simulacra (G. Deleuze, DR, 1/xix). It is interesting to
point out that Jean-Franois Lyotard sees the system of representation based on the
conception of the object as a symbol which points back to a referent, and functions as
the fulfillment of a need as progressively disappearing in the West, beginning in the last
twenty years of the nineteenth century. See J.-F. Lyotard, Freud selon Czanne, in Des
dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Union Gnrale dditions, 1973), coll. 10/18, 7194. In
such a way, what Lyotard later defines as postmodern is the most extreme, yet coher-
ent, product of the transformations, which in his opinion found its first expression in
painting in the subterranean principle of de-representation (ibid., 82) embodied in the
work of Czanne, as well as its correspondence to the Marxian concept of the work force
and in the Freudian concept of the libido.
63. Among the many commentaries on this passage, see those of R. Shattuck,
Prousts Binoculars. A Study of Memory, Time, and Recognition in la Recherche du
temps perdu (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964), 32. See also M. Ferraris, Bal de ttes.
Btes, btise e identit nella Recherche, in aut aut 206207, 1985, 23. When I had
already finished writing the present book, the work by P. Ricoeur entitled Parcours de
la reconnaissance, 101103 (The Course of Recognition, trans. D. Pellauer [Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005]) appeared. Unfortunately, I could not take its
various contributions into account. I will limit myself to saying that some of its pages
deal with the Bal de ttes, and in such a way confirming its relevance for the examina-
tion of the theme in question. Moreover, in light of what has emerged up until now, i.e.,
in relation to the fundamental character of the connection between recognition and
knowledge in the philosophical tradition, one cannot help being surprised by the affir-
mation with which Ricoeur opens his book, according to which in philosophy a theory
of recognition worthy of this name does not exist in the same way in which one or more
theories of knowledge exist (ibid.).
64. Shortly after, Proust writes, All these new features of the face implied new
features also of the character (R 3, 504/965).
65. M. Ferraris Bal de ttes. Btes, btise e identit in Ermeneutica di Proust
(Milano: Guerini e Associati, 1987).
66. Des poupes, mais que pour les identifier celui quon avait connu, il fallait lire
sur plusieurs plans la fois, situs derrire elles et qui leur donnaient de la profondeur et
foraient faire un travail desprit quand on avait devant soi ces vieillards fantoches, car
on tait oblig de les regarder en mme temps quavec les yeux avec la mmoire.
67. A peine, [ . . . ] pouvait-on trouver dans lArgencourt vrai celui que javais vu
si souvent.
68. For the recurrence of such a term, see R 3, 502/963 and 504/966.
69. Regarding Prousts knowledge of contemporary artistic debate, see espe-
cially P. Placella Sommellas Marcel Proust e i movimenti pittorici davanguardia (Rome:
Bulzoni, 1982), which retraces in the Recherche several signs of consonance with the
post-impressionistic aesthetics, especially of futurism and cubism. Of the latter, it is

noteworthy to remember the spontaneous convergence from different sides, underlined
by phenomenology, specifically in relation to the themes that I am referring to right
now: The descriptive impatience, mentioned by Eluard in relation cubism, would be
directed to the essence (eidos), and in such a sense we could accept the formulation of
eidetic cubism proposed by Guy Habasque, as long as we do not accept the confusion
between Platonism and phenomenology, since the Husserlian grasping of essence most
certainly does not correspond to the (always imperfect) attempt to know truths which
are in themselves accessible only to a soul without a body or to a divine intellect (Il
prestigio del far vedere, in Pittura e idea. Ricerche fenomenologiche sul cubismo, ed. A.
Pinotti [Firenze: Alinea, 1998], 25). In relation to the question of the fourth-dimension
in the culture between the nineteenth and twentieth century, and with particular refer-
ence to cubism, see T. Gibbons, Cubism and The Fourth Dimension in the Context of
the Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Revival of Occult Idealism
in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes XLIV(44), 1981, 130147.
70. Jean-Paul Sartres critique of the intellectualism of certain Proustian descriptions
is well known, see J.-P. Sartre, Ltre et le nant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 216/168169.
71. Proust writes a few pages earlier that those present at the bal de ttes appeared
. . . so totally transformed that, without having ceased to exist, indeed just because they
have never ceased to exist, they no longer in any way resemble what we observed them
to be in the past (R 3, 505/966).
72. Comparing these effigies [developed by Time, the artist] with those that the
eyes of memory could show me, I preferred the latter (ibid., 513/978).
4. THE WORDS OF THE ORACLE
1. A. Hesnard, Luvre de Freud et son importance pour le monde moderne (Paris:

Payot, 1960); this work is not currently available in English translation. As for Mer-
leau-Pontys Prface,which is now collected in Parcours deux (19511961), dition
tablie par J. Prunair (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2000), 276284, I quote here from the original
French edition.
2. Concerning this course, see the summary in M. Merleau-Ponty, RC, 171
180/124131, as well as the preparatory notes in M. Merleau-Ponty, N, 263ff./201ff.
3. For the note that refers to them, see M. Merleau-Ponty, NC, 65, note 1.
4. See also M. Merleau-Ponty, VI, 219/165.
5. It is the December 1960 working note whose complete title is Body and flesh
ErosPhilosophy and Freudianism. See M. Merleau-Ponty, VI, 323324/269270.
6. S. Freud, Das Interesse an der Psychoanalyse, in Scientia 14, (31 and 32),
1913, trans. under the general editorship of J. Strachey, The Claims of Psychoanalysis
to Scientific Interest, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, vol. XIII (London: Hogarth Press, 195374), 165190, here 187.
7. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le doute de Czanne, in Fontaine 47, 1945, later repub-
lished in Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948), 43; Czannes Doubt, in The Merleau-
Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, trans. Michael B. Smith and ed. Galen
Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 75.
8. Ibid., 41/74. Shortly thereafter, he confirms this: How can we deny that psycho-
analysis has taught us to notice echoes, allusions, repetitions from one moment of life
to anothera concatenation we would not dream of doubting if Freud had stated the
theory correctly? (ibid., 42/74; my emphasis).
9. See ibid., 41/74.
10. S. Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci, Gesammelte
Werke, Band VIII (Werke aus den Jahren 190913), S. Fischer (Frankfurt a. M. 1943),
128211, trans. under the general editorship of J. Strachey, Leonardo da Vinci and a
Memory of His Childhood, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, vol. XI (London: Hogarth Press, 195374), 63137.
11. See respectively S. Freud, Zur Genese des Fetischismus [Minutes from the
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Scientific Meeting held on February 24, 1909], On the
Genesis of Fetishism, ed. and trans. with an Introduction by L. Rose, Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, LVII, 1988, 147166, as well as Fetischismus, Almanach der Psychoanalyse,
1928, Wien 1927, 1724, trans. under the general editorship of J. Strachey, Fetishism,
in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI
(London: Hogarth Press, 195374), 152157, in particular 153, note 1.
12. See S. Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, 63.
13. Ibid., 82. Concerning the translation of nibbio (kite) as Geier (vulture) by
Freud, see Editors Note, ibid., 5962.
14. Ibid., 107.
15. For the use of this verb, see the working note to The Visible and the Invisible
entitled Problem of the negative and of the concept, Gradient and dated February
1960, in which Merleau-Ponty writes: the concept, signification are the singular dimen-
sionalized (VI, 291/237).
16. Once more in the working note dedicated to Body and fleshErosPhilos-
ophy of Freudianism, confirming his rejection of the notion of layer [Schicht] that
he sets in opposition in his later philosophy as much to Husserlian phenomenology
as to Freudian psychoanalysis, Merleau-Ponty writes: There is no hierarchy of orders
or of layers or of plans (always grounded in individual-essence distinction), there is a
dimensionality of any fact and a facticity of any dimension (ibid., 324/270). Concern-
ing the occurrence of the term Schicht in Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da
Vinci, see S. Freud, Gesammelte Werke, Band VIII, 207; trans. Leonardo da Vinci and
a Memory of his Childhood, 227.
17. See M. Merleau-Ponty, Le doute de Czanne, in Sens et non-sens, 43;
Czannes Doubt, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 75. See also Un indit de
Maurice Merleau-Ponty [1952], ed. M. Guroult, Revue de Mtaphysique et de Morale,
LXVII(4), October 1962, 406; An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Pro-
spectus of His Work, in The Primacy of Perception, trans. Arleen B. Dallery and ed.
James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 8.
18. I cite here the working note to The Visible and the Invisible entitled Rays of
past. of world and dated March 1960 (see ibid., 293294/240241), which offers sev-
eral references to Freuds writing, Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose [1914],
in Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre (Wien: Heller, 1918), 578717, trans.
under the general editorship of J. Strachey, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,
in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII
(London: Hogarth Press, 195374), 7122.
M. Richirs comments in his text Essences et intuition des essences chez le dernier
Merleau-Ponty are very important for understanding this working note and its Freud-
ian references (as well as the other note devoted to the Philosophy of Freudianism), see
Phnomnes, temps et tres (Grenoble : Editions Jrme Million, 1987), 65103.
19. The associations of psychoanalysisMerleau-Ponty writes following the
working note to The Visible and the Invisible we evoked in the preceding footnoteThe
associations of psychoanalysis [ . . . ] are in reality rays of time and world (ibid.). By
making reference to the Freudian text entitled From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,
Merleau-Ponty then emphasizes that there are not here three memories [ . . . ] associ-
ated, but there is an overdetermination of the association (VI, 294/240).
In this context, I recall also Freuds critique regarding associationism as a specific
explanation of fetishism, located in the note he adds in 1920 to the first of his Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality, in which fetishism reveals itself to be a screen-memory:
Deeper-going psychoanalytic research has raised a just criticism of Binets assertion.
All the observations dealing with this point have recorded a first meeting with the fetish
at which it already aroused sexual interest without there being anything in the accom-
panying circumstances to explain the fact. [ . . . ] The true explanation is that behind the
first recollection of the fetishs appearance there lies a submerged and forgotten phase
of sexual development. The fetish, like a screen-memory, represents [vertreten] this
phase and is thus a remnant and precipitate of it (S. Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur
Sexualtheorie (Leipzig-Wien: Deuticke, 1905), trans. under the general editorship of J.
Strachey, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition of the Com-
plete Psychological Works, of Sigmund Freud, vol. VII [London: Hogarth Press, 195374],
154, note 2).
20. M. Merleau-Ponty, Cinq notes sur Claude Simon, Mdiations 4, winter,
196162, then Esprit 66, June 1982, 66; Five Notes on Claude Simon, in Texts and
Dialogues, eds. H. J. Silverman, J. Barry, M. B. Smith (New Jersey, Atlantic Highlands:
Humanities Press, 1992), 143 (trans. modified).
21. In the previously cited working note to The Visible and the Invisible, entitled
Rays of past, of world,!Syntax Error, LA dated March 1960, Merleau-Ponty writes:
Overdetermination always occurs: the retrograde movement of the true (= the pre-
existence of the ideal) . . . furnishes always still other reasons for a given association
(M. Merleau-Ponty, VI, 294/240). Concerning the Bergsonian expression retrograde
movement of the true, see Merleau-Pontys own important explanation: Bergson took
account that there was not necessarily a fault in retrospection, and in the introduction
to The Creative Mind, posterior to the work, he no longer speaks of the retrospective illu-
sion, but of a retrograde movement of the true: when we think something true, it is only
retrospectively that the true appears to us as true (M. Merleau-Ponty, N, 101/69).
22. S. Freud, On the Genesis of Fetishism, 151.
23. Ibid., 155; my emphases.
24. Ibid., 157.
25. Ibid., 157158.
26. In this connection we can understand how it is that the objects to which men
give most preference, their ideals, proceed from the same perceptions and experiences
as the objects which they most abhor, and that they were originally only distinguished
from one another through slight modifications. Indeed, as we found in tracing the ori-
gin of the fetish, it is possible for the original instinctual representative to be split in two,
one part undergoing repression, while the remainder, precisely on account of this inti-
mate connection, undergoing idealization (S. Freud, Die Verdrngung, Internationale
Zeitschrift fr rztliche Psychoanalyse 3(3), 1915, trans. under the general editorship of
J. Strachey, Repression, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV [London: Hogarth Press, 195374], 150).
27. See S. Freud, On the Genesis of Fetishism, 155156.
28. See ibid., 156157.
29. S. Freud, Fetishism, 352.
30. See ibid., 355.
31. Indeed, we know the extent to which, starting with The Structure of Behav-
ior, the 1928 text by the Franco-Hungarian philosopher Georges Politzer, the English
translation which is entitled Critique of the Foundations of Psychology: The Psychology of
Psychoanalysis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 2004), will consistently play the role of mediator
between Merleau-Ponty and psychoanalysis.
32. One can also recall the conclusion of the working note to The Visible and the
Invisible entitled Rays of past, of world and cited earlier: In general: Freuds ver-
bal analyses appear incredible because one realizes them in a Thinker. But they must
not be realized in this way. Everything takes place in non-conventional thought (VI,
294/241).
33. The reference to Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood in Freuds
Fetishism is linked to the following passage that is worth citing in its entirety: To put
it more plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the womans (the mothers) penis that the
little boy once believed in andfor reasons familiar to usdoes not want to give up (S.
Freud, Fetishism, 352).
34. On this matter, see for example the summary of the course given by Merleau-
Ponty at the Collge de France in 195455 on The Problem of Passivity: Sleep, the
Unconscious, Memory, in M. Merleau-Ponty, RC, 66ff./114ff., especially 6970/116
118. From Merleau-Pontys perspective, as Pontalis explains, the analysis of the visible-
seeing body should lead us to overcome the alternative between the conscious and
the unconscious, which is itself dependent, in spite of everything, on a philosophy of
consciousness, as Freud already observed (J.-B. Pontalis, Prsence, entre les signes,
absence, LArc 46, 1971, 62).
35. See I. Kant, Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes in Phi-
losophy [1763], in Theoretical Philosophy (17551770), trans. and ed. David Walford
in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
207241. I have discussed Merleau-Pontys references to this Kant essay in the sixth
chapter of my book La visibilit de linvisible. MerleauPonty entre Czanne et Proust
(Hildesheim: Olms, 2001), 151170, to which I refer the reader.
36. This is how it is formulated in the conclusion of Merleau-Pontys intervention
in the discussions that took place over the course of the sixth Bonneval conference,
devoted to the unconscious, in October 1959, according to the summary that J.-B. Pon-
talis wrote following the sudden death of its author. See H. Ey (under the direction of),
Linconscient (VIe Colloque de Bonneval) (Paris: Descle de Brouwer, 1966), 143.
With respect to the Merleau-Pontian conception of the relation between the con-
scious and unconscious, and in reference to the Kantian model of negative magnitude,
Gambazzi does not merely write of a correlation, but of a deeper and more essential
connection of co-originariness and of Zusammengehrigkeit (see P. Gambazzi, La
piega e il pensiero, aut aut, 262263, 1994, 34). It is therefore through this characteriza-
tion of the Kantian concept that Gambazzi suggests (see ibid., 35) that one read Merleau-
Pontys reflections in the last part of the working note to The Visible and the Invisible
devoted to the Philosophy of Freudianism: see M. Merleau-Ponty, VI, 324/270.
37. It was Marc Richir who first called attention to the sense of the expression
poetic and [ . . . ] oneiric powers of the flesh in the later Merleau-Ponty. See M. Richir,
Phnomnes, temps et tres, 91, 9495 and especially 102103.
38. See also the working note to The Visible and the Invisible, cited earlier, on the
Philosophy of Freudianism: Hence what Freud wants to indicate are not chains of
causality; it is, on the basis of a polymorphism or amorphism, what is contact with the
Being in promiscuity, in transitivism, the fixation of a character by investment of the
openness to Being in an Entity (M. Merleau-Ponty, VI, 323/270).
39. This prodigious intuition of exchanges [ . . . ] this universal of promiscuity,
Freud has sometimes described in a language made to order [ . . . ]; but he also fre-
quently simply makes allusions using terms from the medicine and psychologies of his
time (PH 6/68; trans. modified), but see also Merleau-Pontys critique with respect to
the Freudian conception of the unconscious in VI, 285/232.
40. The unconscious is a perceiving consciousness and it operates as such through
a logic of implication or promiscuity (M. Merleau-Ponty, RC, 71/118).
41. See also M. Merleau-Pontys previously cited intervention, ed. H. Ey (under the
direction of), Linconscient (VIe Colloque de Bonneval).
42. M. Richir, Phnomnes, temps et tres, 102.
43. Plato already characterized the mythologein as an activity that enters into
the domain of poiesis, as F. Jesi reminds us in Mito [1973] (Milan: Mondadori, 19892),
14, citing on this subject Republic, III, 392a; there exists no English translation of the
Jesi text.
44. See also the commentary on the working note to The Visible and the Invisble
entitled the Philosophy of Freudianism that F. Ciaramelli provides, in reference to
these themes, see F. Ciaramelli, Loriginaire et limmdiat. Remarques sur Heidegger et
le dernier Merleau-Ponty, Revue philosophique de Louvain, 96:2, 1998, 230231.
45. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le doute de Czanne, in Sens et non-sens, 42; Czannes
Doubt, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 75.
46. At least according to F. Jesis characterization of the Homeric myth, which I
have already referred to in Chapter 2, footnote 17.
5. HOW CAN ONE RECOGNIZE WHAT ONE DID NOT KNOW?
1. Milan Kundera, Le geste brutal du peintre, prsentation de Francis Bacon,

Portraits et autoportraits (Paris: Les Belles Lettres/Archimbaud, 1996), 11; The Painters
Brutal Gesture, trans. Linda Asher in Francis Bacon: Portraits and Self-Portraits (New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 1112.
2. See, respectively, Plato, Meno, 80d81e and 81e86c.
3. (PS, 136/112).
4. See PS, 127139/105115.
5. See PS, 131139/108115.
6. PS, 138/114; trans. modified.
7. See Plato, Timaeus, 28c, and Republic, 500e.
8. See Plato, Republic, 592b.
9. Here is Chateaubriands phrase as it is translated in Deleuzes Proust and Signs:
A fine and sweet odor of heliotrope . . . was brought to us not by a breeze of our native
land, but by a wild wind of the New World, without relation to the exiled plant, without
sympathy of recollection and of voluptuousness (G. Deleuze, PS, 137/114; trans. modi-
fied; Deleuzes emphasis).
10. This is always the case in Proust, and this is his entirely new or modern con-
ception of recollection: an associative, incongruous chain is unified only by a creative
viewpoint that itself takes the role of an incongruous part within the whole (PS 138/114;
trans. modified).
11. Paul Klee, Schpferische Konfession, Tribne der Kunst und Zeit, ed. Kasimir
Edschmid, vol. XIII, Erich Reiss, Berlin, 1920; reprinted in P. Klee, Das bildnerische Den-
ken (Basel: Benno Scwabe & Co., 1956), trans. Ralph Mannheim, Note Books, vol. 1, The
Thinking Eye (London: Lund Humphries, 1961), 76.
12. Deleuze emphasizes how the novelty of Prousts conception of recollection is,
by all accounts, intimately tied to an equally novel characterization of the idea in relation
to the Platonic conception: . . . essence, in turn, is no longer the stable essence, the seen
ideality that unites the world into a whole and introduces the perfect mean into it. Essence,
according to Proust, . . . is not something seen but a kind of superior viewpoint, an irreduc-
ible viewpoint that signifies at once the birth of the world and the original character of the
world (PS, 133/110). On this point, see the second chapter of the present book.
13. J-.P. Vernant. Aspects mythiques de la mmoire, in Jean-Pierre Vernant,
Mythe et pense chez les Grecs (Paris: Maspero, 1965; 2nd ed., Paris: La Dcouverte, 1990),
107136, trans. Janet Lloyd with Jeff Fort, Myth and Thought among the Greeks (Lon-
don-Boston-Melbourne-Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 75105.
14. J-.P. Vernant, Mythe et pense chez les Grecs, 111/76. See in particular Hesiod,
Theogeny, 52ff. and 915ff. On the close bond between the Muses and Mnemosyne, see
Massimo Cacciari, Dellinizio (Milan: Adelphi, 1990), 235ff, with which the following
considerations resonate closely.
15. M. Richir, Phnomnes, temps et tres (Grenoble: Editions Jrme Millon,
1987) 102.
16. J-.P. Vernant, Mythe et pense chez les Grecs, 111/75.
17. Ibid., 112/77.
18. Ibid., 116/80.
19. Ibid., 115/79.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 112/77.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 116/80; my emphasis.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 117/81.

26. Ibid., 129/90.
27. See ibid., 117, 129/81, 90.
28. It is in this sense that Cacciari can in turn hold that the truth of Mnemosyne
would thus not consist in liberating us from forgetting, but in the unveiling of the Imme-
morial qua Immemorial, in making us see (or know) the Forgetting (Dellinizio, 253).
29. J-.P. Vernant, Mythe et pense chez les Grecs, 117/81.
30. Ibid., 118/82.
31. Ibid., 136/95.
32. Ibid., 135/94.
33. Thus the repressed unconsciousness would be a secondary formation, con-
temporary with the formation of a system of perceptionconsciousness . . . (RC,
179/131).
34. See S. Freud, Die Verneinung, Imago 11(3), 1925, 217221; Negation, in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIX
(London: Hogarth Press, 195374), 235ff.
35. Regarding the analogizing virtues of the sensible, I have addressed these in
particular in the sixth chapter of my book La visibilit de linvisible. Merleau-Ponty entre
Czanne et Proust, 164ff., as well as in the fourth chapter of my book The Thinking of
the Sensible: Merleau-Pontys A-Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
2004), 3334.
36. See M. Ferraris, Limmaginazione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996), in particular
Introduzione, 726.
37. See I. Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft [1790], trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Mat-
thews, Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 49, 192. Regarding time immemorial as constitutive figure of the temporality
of feeling in Kants third Critique, and with particular reference to the aesthetic idea,
see E. Ferrario, Il lavoro del tempo (Milan: Guerini e Associati, 1997), 131ff.
38. See I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 49, 194.
39. It is pertinent to recall how Deleuze remarks that the Idea is necessarily obscure
in so far as it is distinct, all the more obscure the more it is distinct, after having specified
that it will be necessary to reserve the name of Ideas not for pure cogitanda but rather
for those instances which go from sensibility to thought and from thought to sensibility
(G. Deleuze, DR, 190191/146).
40. It is worth noting that Deleuze defines the diagram as the operative set of
traits and color-patches, of lines and zones (G. Deleuze, FBLS, 66/83).
APPENDIX
1. E. Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne. Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie (Ber-
lin: Springer, 1935), 341; The Primary World of Senses. A Vindication of Sensory Experi-
ence, trans. Jacob Needleman (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1963), 323.
2. The Image of Thought is the title that Deleuze gives to the Conclusion of the
first edition of Proust and Signs and to one of the chapters of Difference and Repetition.
NOTES TO APPENDIX 109
3. Laplanche and Pontalis define what Freud calls the object-choice as the act
of selecting a person or a type of person as love-object. See J. Laplanche et J.-B. Pon-
talis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, sous la direction de D. Lagache (Paris: P.U.F., coll.
Quadrige, 19671, 19982), 64; The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-
Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1973, 1988), 277.
4. See S. Freud, Beitrge zur Psychologie des Liebeslebens (191017 [1918]) in Stu-
dienausgabe Bd. V, S. 224f., trans. under the general editorship of J. Strachey, Five Lec-
tures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works, in The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XI, (London: Hogarth Press
and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1957) 205.
5. J. P. Sartre, Ltre et le Nant. Essai dontologie phnomnologique (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1943), 434; Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology,
trans. Hazel E. Barnes, (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 478.
6. Ibid.
7. See A. Dufourcq, Institution et imaginaire: la rflexion merleau-pontyenne sur
les illusions amoureuses, in Chiasmi International 6, 2005, 303335, 306.
8. J. P. Sartre, Ltre et le Nant, 439/484.
9. Ibid., 438/483.
10. This parenthesis remains open in Merleau-Pontys notes.
11. The Love of Albertine differs from the preceding loves as the septet does from
the sonata. See Merleau-Ponty, IP, 75 (note *).
12. From this point of view, it was timely remarked that Proust is wrong when
he makes the Narrator say, about Vinteuils little phrase: it is perhaps [ . . . ] the only
Unknown Woman that it has ever been my good fortune to meet. In fact, the little
phrase does not give itself more positively than Albertine (see A. Dufourcq, Institution
et imaginaire, 326; the above statement refers to M. Proust, R 3, 260/262).
13. See G. Gould, The Goldberg Variations [1956], in The Glenn Gould Reader,
ed. Tim Page (New York: Faber and Faber, 1984), 22ff.
14. [H]istory does not work according to a model; it is in fact the very advent of
meaning (AD, 29/17).
15. But his libido should not remain fixated to these first objects; later on, it should
merely take them as a model, and should make a gradual transition from them on to
extraneous people when the time for the final choice of an object arrives. S. Freud, Five
Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works, in The Standard Edi-
tion of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XI, 48; my emphasis.
16. See R. Barthes et al., Table ronde, Etudes proustiennes II; Cahiers Marcel
Proust 7 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 102.
17. For me it is no longer a question of origins, nor limits, nor of a series of events
going to a first cause, but one sole explosion of Being which is forever (VI, 318/265;
emphasis mine).
18. See Luigi Pirandello, Uno, nessuno e centomila, Feltrinelli, 1993; One, No One,
and One Hundred Thousand, translated by William Weaver. New York: Marsilio, 1990.
19. The initial part of this passage reminds one of the following sentence by Proust:
In exchange for what our imagination leads us to expect . . . , life gives us something
which we are very far from imagining (M. Proust, R 3, 501/511), a sentence which
Merleau-Ponty cites some pages earlier (see M. Merleau-Ponty, IP, 72).
20. When commenting on the novels by Claude Simon in his last course, Merleau-
Ponty remarks: the decision is not ex nihilo, it is not made now, always anticipated,
because we are everything, everything is complicit within us. We do not decide to do,
but we let it be done (M. Merleau-Ponty, NC, 214).
21. See M. Proust, R 1, 352/382383, Its cries (viz. the cries of the little phrase)
were so sudden that the violinist must snatch up his bow and race to catch them as they
came in.
22. I dealt with this inception in the second chapter of the present work. I refer the
reader to this chapter.
Index
A posteriori, 20, 24, 37 Cacciari, M., 107, 108

A priori, 24, 26, 37, 62, 65 Cassirer, E., 3336, 38, 95, 9798, 100
Absence, 4, 21, 56, 7778, 8990, 105 Czanne, P., 3435, 43, 5354, 58, 67, 87, 96,
Activity, 9, 15, 17, 21, 82, 94, 106 100103, 106, 108
Aesthetics, 3334, 36, 90, 96, 99, 102103, Charbonnier, G., 87
106 Chateaubriand, F.-R., 6162, 107
Ain, 31, 6466 Chiasm, 2324, 27, 29, 31, 93, 95
Alcamenes, 9798 Ciaramelli, F., 94, 99, 106
Analogy, 17, 57, 67, 88, 99 Clairvoyance, 16, 63
Animal, 14,15, 20, 84, 8687, 89 Claudel, P., 16, 21, 29, 87, 94
Appearance, 36, 3839, 46, 77, 87, 94, 104
Aristotle, 39, 63, 65, 100 da Vinci, L., 17, 53, 56, 58, 103, 105, 109
Art, 5, 17, 2527, 3031, 3436, 43, 4647, Deformation, 10, 3439, 43, 4546, 60, 67,
5962, 67, 72, 74, 76, 88, 90, 92, 94, 9597
9699 Deleuze, G., 4, 711, 23, 2531, 3646,
6064, 6667, 6971, 74, 7981, 8586,
Bacon, F., 3334, 38, 41, 43, 60, 67, 95, 106 9195, 97101, 107108
Barbaras, R., 24, 91 Derrida, J., 24, 91
Barthes, R., 79, 100, 109 Descartes, R., 68, 1718, 8485, 88
Being, 9, 14, 1718, 2021, 2324, 25, 29, Desire, 31, 51, 7072, 7475, 81
3033, 36, 38, 5155, 58, 63,7273, 75, Dialectic, 65, 72, 78
8687, 90, 9395, 99, 106, 109 Didi-Huberman, G., 37, 98
Benjamin, W., 5, 8, 83 Difference, 25, 42
Bergson, H., 62, 71, 91, 94, 104 Dimension, 1920, 23, 2627, 3031, 45, 54,
Bernet, R., 83, 100, 34, 95 57, 62, 74, 7879, 92, 9596, 99, 102103
Body, 13, 27, 31, 41, 4546, 49, 5053, 5557, Distortion, 3435, 3738, 60, 99
59, 60, 7475, 95, 102103, 105 Duchamp, M., 96
Braque, G., 34, 95 83,
Breeur, R., 83 Eidetic Intuition, 46, 8
Buci-Glucksmann, C., 8788, 90 Eidos, 5, 10, 3335, 43, 45, 66, 70, 95, 9798,
Butor, M., 34, 96 100, 102
Buytendijk, F., 86 Empirical, 21, 2324, 31
111
Encounter, 6, 8, 1920, 2627, 29, 35, 37, 39, Invisible, 9, 1820, 2326, 2829, 3132,
43, 45, 54, 66, 78, 8182, 85 45, 50, 5257, 6365, 7475, 7780, 82,
Epoch, 6, 89, 84 8788, 9091, 93, 95, 103106
Ernst, M., 1516, 87 Izambard, G., 41, 88
Essence, 1, 35, 810, 1416, 2021, 2531,
3340, 43, 45, 5455, 61, 70, 74, 76, 83, Jesi, F., 91, 106
8687, 9094, 99100, 102104, 107 Junius, F., 97
Ferraris, M., 2324, 32, 9091, 95, 101, 108 Kant, I., 14, 40, 42, 46, 56, 66, 105, 108
Flesh, 52 Klee, P., 34, 62, 88, 91, 96, 101, 107
Form, 4, 10, 14, 27, 3340, 4245, 64, 67, 70, Kundera, M., 60, 95, 106
80, 88, 93, 96, 98, 100,
Franzini, E., 91, 96, 100 Lacan, J., 49
Freud, S., 43, 4953, 5557, 61, 65, 71, 79, Laplanche, J., 109
101106, 108, 109 Lawlor, L., 9293
Freudianism, 49, 52, 5556, 102106, Lefort, C., 85
Leibniz, G.W., 91, 96
Gadamer, H-G., 4940, 4243, 99100 Lyotard, J-F., 26, 91, 101
Gambazzi, P., 24, 29, 91, 93, 106
Garelli, J., 8485 Maldiney, H., 6, 30, 83, 94
Generality, 15, 19, 20, 21, 27, 92, 95 Matisse, H., 96
Gombrich, E., H. 97 Melody, 1415, 1720, 27, 39, 89, 93
Grohmann, W., 96 Memory, 1, 4, 7, 10, 2728, 31, 40, 44, 46,
Guattari, F., 86 5355, 57, 6166, 80, 92, 94, 99, 100105
Merleau-Ponty, M., 911, 1321, 2332,
Hegel, G.W.F., 13, 27, 52 34, 3637, 3943, 45, 4959, 61, 6567,
Heidegger, M., 1718, 26, 2930, 3638, 44, 7182, 8596, 99100, 102106, 108110
81, 87, 91, 9394, 9899, 106 Misosophy, 8
Hesnard, A., 49, 5152, 5658, 102 Model, 10, 15, 3536, 3943, 4546, 56,
Homer, 63, 91, 106 5962, 6667, 7980, 99, 106, 109
Husserl, E., 6, 89, 13, 17, 24, 51, 8385, 88, Music, 1920, 34, 50, 69, 7071, 7478, 82,
9091, 100 85,-86, 88, 90, 92
Mythical, 4, 10, 23, 2628, 3032, 37, 40, 49,
Ideas, 4, 911, 1819, 2628, 3031, 3334, 5758, 6365
37, 49, 62, 6667, 74, 7678, 8082,
8496, 89, 90, 95, 99100, 108 Nature, 1, 3, 1315, 1718, 20, 29, 36,
Ideation, 91 3940, 4950, 57, 5960, 62, 70, 7879,
Identity, 3637, 41, 44, 46, 69, 76, 80, 99, 100 8487, 9596
Ijsseling, S., 99 Negation, 20, 77, 108
Illusion, 24, 28, 36, 38, 71, 7375, 79, 90, Nietzsche, F., 10, 36, 38, 9899
9799, 104
Image, 46, 8, 17, 27, 3436, 38, 40, 42, 44, Oblivion, 10, 96
45, 59, 60, 6970, 80, 88, 9697, 108 Oneiric, 15, 5758, 65, 67, 8889, 106
Imagination, 25, 31, 40, 42, 66, 109 Ontology, 9, 1317, 21, 2324, 26, 28, 32,
Imitation, 35, 39, 46, 6061, 67 5152, 82, 85, 87, 90, 109
Initiation, 1920, 2324, 27, 3032, 54, 64,
74, 78, 82, 94 Painting, 1618, 3335, 38, 41, 43, 46, 50,
Institution, 71, 74, 7879, 8182, 109 67, 74, 85, 88, 9597, 100102
Intelligible, 9, 1617, 19, 2021, 34, 78, 80, Panofsky, E. 9798
85, 90 Passivity, 9, 15, 17, 21, 50, 56, 58, 82, 94, 105,
INDEX 113
Past, 4, 23, 26, 2829, 40, 4445, 49, 52, Shock, 56, 8, 84
58, 60, 6264, 7879, 82, 84, 9193, 95, Simon, C., 16, 5455, 57, 87, 104, 100
9899, 102105 Simulacrum, 36, 38, 98
Perse, S.J., 16, 87 Simultaneity, 17, 21, 26, 37, 56, 87, 92, 94, 98
Phidias, 3536, 46, 9798 Singularity, 19, 27, 83
Picasso, P., 34 Sini, C., 85
Placella Sommella, P., 101 Socrates, 39, 60
Plato, 10, 3336, 38, 43, 46, 59, 61, 67, 69, 73, Species, 1415, 1920, 29, 39, 80, 87
77, 80, 95, 97100 Stein, L., 96
Platonism, 10, 31, 3639, 60, 6971, 75, 80, Straus, E., 6, 6970, 83, 108
85, 94, 98, 102 Sylverster, D., 33, 95
Poietic, 57, 58, 63, 6566 Symbolic Matrix, 7880
Politzer, G., 50, 56, 105 Symbolism, 10, 50, 56
Pontalis, J.-P., 105, 109
Poulet, G., 94 Tatarkiewicz, W., 99100
Psychoanalysis, 10, 4952, 54, 5658, 70, Time, 20, 23, 2632, 37, 39, 4447, 49, 58,
102105, 109 6365, 69, 72, 7879, 81, 86, 88, 9295,
101102, 104, 106, 108
Ramrez Cobin, M.T., 99 Trans-spatial, 29
Recognition, 10, 24, 3947, 59, 6667, 72, Trans-temporal, 29
100101 Transcendental, 9, 21, 2324, 3132, 40, 63,
Recollection, 46, 5964, 104, 107 66, 81
Representation, 45, 18, 40, 43, 62, 83, 87,
97, 98, 101 Unconscious, 23, 25, 40, 43, 4950, 5657,
Resemblance, 10, 3639, 43, 46, 59, 60, 67, 59, 61, 6566, 72, 81, 105106, 108
80, 9899
Richir, M., 24, 30, 3738, 63, 90, 9394, Valry, P., 16, 31, 87, 95
9899, 104, 106107 Variation, 15, 20, 34, 6971, 7880, 8586,
Ricoeur, P., 31, 94, 101 100, 109
Rimbaud, A., 1619, 4142, 88, 100 Vernant, J.-P., 6366, 107108
Rosen, S., 97 Virtual, 29, 78, 90, 98
Rubin, W., 96 Visible, 9, 1720, 2326, 2829, 31, 3435,
Ruskin, J., 7, 8485 44, 50, 5257, 62, 6465, 74, 7679, 82,
8788, 9091, 93, 95, 103106
Sartre, J.-P., 7173, 79, 102, 109 Vision, 8, 17, 19, 21, 2425, 37, 45, 63, 87,
Scaramuzza, G., 96 8990, 95, 99
Schelling, F.W.J., 14, 86 von Krafft-Ebing, R., 55
Schopenhauer, A., 46, 8, 83 von Uexkll, J., 1415, 1720, 39, 86, 8889,
Sensation, 3, 7, 29, 41, 100 93, 99
Sensible, 6, 810, 1621, 2532, 35, 3738,
41, 4546, 49, 57, 6567, 7478, 8081, Warburg, A., 95, 98, 102
8790, 9293, 95, 108 Whitehead, A.N., 33
PHILOSOPHY
mauro carbone
c a r b on e
French novelist Marcel Proust made famous involuntary memory, a pecu-
liar kind of memory that works whether one is willing or not and that gives
a transformed recollection of past experience. More than a century later,
the Proustian notion of involuntary memory has not been fully explored An Unprecedented
nor its implications understood. By providing clarifying examples taken
from Prousts novel and by commenting on them using the work of French
philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Italian philoso-
Deformation
pher Mauro Carbone interprets involuntary memory as the human faculty
providing the involuntary creation of our ideas through the transformation
of past experience. This rethinking of the traditional way of conceiving Niall Keane, Translator
ideas and their genesis as separated from sensible experienceas has been
done in Western thought since Platoallows the author to promote a new
theory of knowledge, one which is best exemplified via literature and art
much more than philosophy.
Mauro Carbone is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Milan,

Italy. He is the author of several books, including The Thinking of the Sensible:
Merleau-Pontys A-Philosophy.
Niall Keane is a postdoctoral researcher at the Husserl-Archives: Centre

for Phenomenology in Leuven, Belgium.

contemporary italian philosophy
Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors and

contemporary continental philosophy
SUNY
P R E S S
SUNY

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PHILOSOPHY

Mauro Carbone is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Milan,

Niall Keane is a postdoctoral researcher at the Husserl-Archives: Centre

a volume in the suny series in

a volume in the suny series in

SUNY SERIES IN CONTEMPOR ARY CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

state university of new york press

2010 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner

For information, contact

Production, Laurie Searl

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carbone, Mauro, 1956

AD Les Aventures de la dialectique (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1955); Adven-

PriP Le primat de la perception et ses consquences philosophiques (Lagrasse:

CC Critique et clinique (Paris: ditions Minuit, 1993); Essays Critical and

R la recherche du temps perdu, 3 vols., eds. Pierre Clarac and Andr

Seek? More Than That: Create.

moins en moins de force, ce mme tmoignage que je ne sais pas interprter

I would like to develop my textual analysis of these pages from a philosophical

In other words, eidetic intuition brings about the suspension of my individual-

This passage enables us to specify that the shock in question is to be quali-

Descartes above statement seems to be echoed in a part of the passage

encounter with something in the world [which] forces us to think, as Deleuze

transcendental epochin a spiritualistic sense.20 Nevertheless, Husserl tends

an operation which the Proustian Narrator defined, while correcting himself

Nature: Variations on the Theme

I. NATURE AND ONTOLOGY

II. MELODY AND SPECIES

Merleau-Ponty sees a contribution to this kind of emptying of evidence in

drawing on a metaphor according to which Uexkll (with an explicit reference

We might look for an answer to these questions in the preparatory notes of

As a result of the fact that it offers this characterization of seeing, voy-

IV. GENERALITY OF THINGS

We find here an explanation for why Merleau-Ponty insists on the importance

The Mythical Time of the Ideas:

I. THE CHIASM BETWEEN EMPIRICAL AND TRANSCENDENTAL

The Freudian idea of the unconscious and the past as indestructible, as

Merleau-Ponty describes seems, in other words, to configure itself as an empir-

influence is recognizable in Prousts Recherche, whose protagonistin getting

II. DIVERGENCES: ART AS THE TRUTH OF THE SENSIBLE

Instead of the prospectivism and expressionism of perception, which seem to

Yet if this systematic consideration unavoidably tends to emphasize the

III. CONVERGENCES: THE SENSIBLE IDEA OF COMBRAY

In Difference and Repetition the in-itself of Combray comes to be identified in

to what Heidegger apparently had in mind in Introduction to Metaphysics, to

IV. THE BODY OF THE IDEAS

To think in this direction means to avoid affirming, in the reading of Prousts

Deformation and Recognition:

I. THE ADVENTURES OF DEFORMATION

If it is trueas Alfred North Whitehead affirmedthat the entire history of

the intelligible world, which he conceived as true, in opposition to that of

a defect in sight. In reality, precisely the term deformation can effectively

II. YET WHICH REVERSAL OF PLATONISM?

Marc Richir attributes decisive importance to the consideration of this

In the characterization of the sensible idea, form appears to be thought as

[b]ut we do not understand what recognition is in its profoundest nature if we

III. DELEUZE AND THE MODEL OF RECOGNITION

However, this is not the conception of recognition to which Deleuze refers. It

in the judgment of the sublime56is a properly aesthetic common sense in

However, let us return to the faculties in Kants Critique of Judgment which,