In a journey through the perspectives of Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, I shall show how images – the images that from Plato on have been relegated by Western metaphysics to the role of mere copies – allow us to trace the direction of a new and non-dualistic thought, a direction opened up by desire, that is to say, by something exceeding any simplistic dualism and finding precisely in images its privileged channel. The specular image – conceived by Platonism as the simulacrum par excellence, as the emblem of the deforming, deceiving copy of a harmonious preliminary model – makes us see more than it actually shows: as Lacan remarked in a renowned essay published in 1949, since childhood, in front of the mirror, we discover ourselves as subjects of the world, but also – and inevitably – as subjected to the world. The ego – of which we are in-formed by the specular image – is turned, through that very image, into the obscure, uncanny chasm of the other, and, consequently, in the unfathomable vortex of the other’s desire. Indeed, if in the mirror we can embrace the whole of our body and catch with a single gaze its status of subject, by the mirror that very gaze is however returned – blind and insistent – as a partial object (objet a) summoning us as desubjectivized subjects, as castrated subjects ($), namely, as mere “stains” in the picture of the world. Quite paradoxically, the image fixed by the child in the mirror founds the traditional idea of the subject conceived as the dinamic pole of the relation between the ego and the world. In short, as Slavoj Žižek remarks commenting on Lacan, the dinamic capability of the subject is grounded on an excessive fixation of the image of the subject itself, fixation which finds its absent origin in the gaze meant as object a, namely, meant as that blind point of consciousness, that point of acquisition and loss which, by castrating the subject, opens the acies of the libidically throbbing wound of the unconscious and turns, to borrow a renowed Lacanian expression, man’s desire into the other’s desire. For long considered to herald illusions, images show us the truth of illusion itself: the world is deformation and reversibility and we – presumed subjects in front of its inert picture – are, on the contrary, its “stains”. In the same years in which Lacan was elaborating a theory of gaze, Merleau-Ponty, who was then a direct interlocutor of his, was articulating – by referring, as Lacan did, to the child’s behaviour in front of the mirror – a series of important reflections over the problem of the en-être, that is to say, over the problem of the reversibility of flesh, i.e., that differential fabric constituting us – animals and things – as variegated gatherings of a common horizon. For Merleau-Ponty, as well as for Lacan, according to such a perspective, the subject, far from being defined in a positive way, is defined by a gap in relation with its own self, that is to say, by a cut in the skin of consciousness, by a wound opening to the unconscious and to the desire spurting abundantly from the subconscious. To see in the mirror that, as the poet said, “I am an Other”, is to free images from the status of “second things” with which Platonism had dismissed them; it is, in other words, to inaugurate a non-dualistic thought. For his part, Deleuze will also engage in the same direction by theorizing a reversing of Platonism from the very standpoint of images in his 1966 essay Renverser le platonisme. The beginning of philosophy has historically matched with the search for an origin, namely, an arké. But in a world in which the relations inaugurated by desire trace unpredictable itineraries, in a world in which the ego and the other can no longer be distinguished, in a world in which the subject and the object know no more boundary lines, in a world in which model and copy cease to exist as the presupposition of one another, in such a world, I said, is it still possible to find an origin? By measuring himself with such a crucial question, Merleau-Ponty will theorize – once again from the standpoint of vision – an “originating in perennial explosion” instead of a narrow, pregiven origin. For his part, Deleuze will elaborate something similar (similar in a Deleuzian way, of course, that is to say, similar from the standpoint of a basic difference) in his reflection on cinema, which will keep him busy in the first half of the eighties, by capsulating the temporal dimensions in a mirror-image, i. e., a crystalline concretion in whose facets the world perennially becomes in an eternal differential return.
- PRÉSENTATION
INTRODUCTION
PRESENTAZIONE - MERLEAU-PONTY CINQUANTE ANS APRÈS SA MORT
MERLEAU-PONTY FIFTY YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH
MERLEAU-PONTY A CINQUANT’ANNI DALLA MORTE - MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY, OU LE PARCOURS D’UN PHILOSOPHE. ELÉMENTS POUR UNE BIOGRAPHIE INTELLECTUELLE
- MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY, OR THE PATHWAY OF PHILOSOPHY. DESIDERATA FOR AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY
- MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY, O IL PERCORSO DI UN FILOSOFO. ELEMENTI PER UNA BIOGRAFIA INTELLETTUALE
- ESSAIS
ESSAYS
SAGGI - UNE COURTE NOTE SUR LE PLI. « UNE HISTOIRE COMME CELLE DE MERLEAU-PONTY »
A SHORT NOTE ON THE FOLD. «A STORY LIKE MERLEAU-PONTY’S»
BREVE NOTA SULLA PIEGA «UNA STORIA COME QUELLA DI MERLEAU-PONTY» - UN INÉDIT : COURS VINCENNES - SAINT DENIS (20/01/1987)
AN UNPUBLISHED TEXT : COURSE VINCENNES - SAINT DENIS (20/01/1987)
UN INEDITO: CORSO VINCENNES - SAINT DENIS (20/01/1987) - « CHAIR » ET « FIGURE » CHEZ MERLEAU-PONTY ET DELEUZE
- PHILOSOPHY OF STRUCTURE, PHILOSOPHY OF EVENT:
DELEUZE’S CRITIQUE OF PHENOMENOLOGY - LO SPAZIO ESTETICO.
IL «ROVESCIAMENTO DEL CARTESIANISMO» IN DELEUZE E MERLEAU-PONTY - LA CHAIR COMME « PLISSEMENT DU DEHORS ».
LA LECTURE DELEUZIENNE DU DERNIER MERLEAU-PONTY - MERLEAU-PONTY AND DELEUZE ASK «WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?»
- THE NAÏVETÉ OF THOUGHT AND THE INNOCENCE OF THE QUESTION - - SPECCHIO, SPECCHIO DELLE MIE BRAME.
SULLA SOGLIA DELLA REVERSIBILITÀ, L’ARDORE LIBIDICO DELLE IMMAGINI - DELEUZE, UNE ANTI-PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIE ?
- DEPTH AND TIME IN MERLEAU-PONTY AND DELEUZE
- VARIAZIONI SUL SORVOLO.
RUYER, MERLEAU-PONTY, DELEUZE E LO STATUTO DELLA FORMA - LOGIC AND EXISTENCE: DELEUZE ON THE «CONDITIONS OF THE REAL»
- VARIA
DIVERSE
VARIA - MERLEAU-PONTY : DE LA PERSPECTIVE AU CHIASME, LA RIGUEUR ÉPISTÉMIQUE D’UNE ANALOGIE
- TEMPORAL THICKNESS IN MERLEAU-PONTY’S NOTES OF MAY 1959
- LA MAGIE ÉMOTIONNELLE. APERÇU D’UNE PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIE DES ÉMOTIONS CHEZ MERLEAU-PONTY
- MERLEAU-PONTY, VARELA, NAGARJUNA. UNA TRIANGOLAZIONE POSSIBILE
- POSITION ET CRITIQUE DE LA FONCTION SYMBOLIQUE DANS LES PREMIERS TRAVAUX DE MERLEAU-PONTY
- DE L’EXPÉRIENCE À L’« ÉVÉNEMENT » : LES ENJEUX DE LA PENSÉE D’UN « SYMBOLISME ORIGINAIRE »
- REVOLUTION BY OTHER MEANS.
FEMINIST POLITICS AS REINSTITUTION IN MERLEAU-PONTY’S THOUGHT - NIETZSCHE ET MERLEAU-PONTY :
PROFONDEUR DES IMAGES ET PENSÉES DE L’ÉTERNEL RETOUR - COMPTES RENDUS
REVIEWS
RECENSIONI