Merleau-Ponty and the Chiasmus

The Body Politics: Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: The Intertwining－The Chiasm

Challenge to the idea that there is actually a subject and an object realtionthip and that self is self-identical and object is out there
Instead, he wanst to use as a metaphor is your hand grasping the other hand - we can recognize visually and instinctively (what is sight and what is touch - distinction falls apart)
Fundamentally, position fully within and as the world: in order to acknowledge our existence in the world, we create a fiction of distance in place of the reality of connection
The concept of self is in your existence in the world
Everything is relational and in this thickness, we may not perceive the reality of it but there is a reality (perception isn’t the truth test) → perception often gets things lost
Reality of existence is in identification with the other
Form of relationality (which implies two distinct things), he wants to find a metaphor to describe a holistic entity (there is no distinction, it’s all the same)
Pg. 249 name as repeated index → name is just a reiteration of founding error, and names are integral to understanding of self as difference

Pg. 249 the problem of vision is that it comes from the eye to the object, thus reinforcing our relationship as subject to object

Instead of thinking about sight as something we generate, what if we were to understand sight as a mode of connection, recognition, not separate from the world but fully with and within it
There is no separation - we are not generating the vision but it’s all around us, we made the mistake of thinking that bc we are picking it up, we are generating it (but we are just connecting to an already existing circuit)
We have to immediately challenge the idea of sight as a relationship to subject-object relationships

Pg. 250 color: we think we know what something is, but something only exists within the field of difference (meaning only exists in the field of difference)

We think it’s the only way something can be meaningful
What Merleau-Ponty wants to do is substitute difference and commonality - see it all as a part of it
Fundamentally it’s a question of stress (emphasize what it is not OR emphasize the connection and spectrum) → emblem of commonality not difference

Everything is part of the flesh - history (our notion of time should be continuous, and the idea of the past is built in the present in order to distinguish now from the past)

Truth of connection and sameness replacing with difference → chiasm: jumping that gap and recognizing that we are deeply connected

Pg. 250 the question becomes, what our attitude is: what divides can connect (a straight is a stream of water between two countries which can both divide and connect)
Pg. 251 the thing that perceives is coterminous to thing that is being perceived - things are woven together, not separate

We’ve tended to understand others as different we are the same (much like the straight) - we have emphasized their difference not their sameness

Pg. 251 you are feeling and touching at the same time, but the very fact that you can touch the other object is that it isn’t different from you but it’s incorporated in your visual perception - touch is not something out there but it’s the relationship

There is no other, bc we can’t understand self without recourse to the notion of the other (binaristic form replaced, tissue of connection between things - flesh)
Surface of things: flesh (much like the straight)
Drawing a line (circumscribe the totality of the object but also relationship between the inside and the outside) - one implies the other

Pg. 252 accurate way of describing vision is thickness of everything and everything’s relationship to another - seeing is touching and touching is seeing for Merleau Ponty (relationship of connection, sense of relationality)

To understand everything is connected doens’t mean sight = touch but they imply one another and mapped over one another - the difficulty here is to say they are connected and separate
Your back: tactile reality that is correlated to but not coterminous to seeing
Mutuality of things - fact that i see something establishes my coreporeality and the fact that/the thing becomes visible in its relationship to the seer and the seer becomes visible in its relationship to the thing

Pg. 253 we are two dimensional being (we think of our surface) and we see others dimensionally even as we are ourselves as pure surface

If we credit a relational view of the world, we re-conceive of our dimensionality (we are constantly in a relationship and we are restored to dimensionality bc they see us dimensional)
We have this false idea of our flatness which is continuously challenged by the idea of how others challenge us

Pg. 253 surface of a depth: constantly engaged in recognition of what we see isn’t all but there is more to see

Pg. 254-255 constantly shifting series of relationship in which everything is connected

There is no two sides of beings bc being is always relational, always changing
The way we are in the world we see
As we move through space, atoms move in and around us - we are constantly defoming with our presence, always moving relationally to other things

Pg. 256 two mirrors - two is the smallest unit of being (kaja silverman)
one's sense of self only exists in relationality (in relationality, we understand the self--through differentiation and similitude)
Pg. 256 flesh is not a thing (bc the thing is boundary) but element is form of connection to another - what afterall is water or air is the material that connects things to one another

It’s the chiasm, between things; flesh is that chiasm, connection, relationality, in which things that are woven together
It’s not a thing but the substance of all things

MIN PARK