Continued (even further) from last time. I had just remarked that "The interval between the vision and the visible, precisely as a relation of material space, is a positive thickness like the water—and this thickness is flesh, the way this space continually becomes part of the vision. And, as Merleau-Ponty continues to say, 'this internal animation, this radiation of the visible is what the painter seeks under the name of depth' as well:"...With this last statement, we understand how we might be coming closer to grasping how the painter “lends his body to the visible”—that is, the opposite phenomenon of how vision, via its participation in the flesh, turns into the visible. The painter simply figures precisely what the eye actually accomplishes in its vision: the turning of the visible into what itself is seeing. In other words, he lends the vision of his body to the bodily nature of the visible—the flesh in which the body itself, as also visible, participates in. And though this “lending” is also what happens in normal perception, in painting we get figured this becoming-vision of the visible as such. This is the only difference, and Merleau-Ponty expresses it in even more concrete terms:
it can be said that a human is born at the instant when something that was only virtually visible, inside the mother’s body, becomes at one and the same time visible for itself and for us. The painter’s vision is a continued birth (167-8).
In other words, the newborn is the visible become capable of vision as well as become more visible to us as an independent body (that is, not of its mother’s body). In short, this amounts to saying that it has just become more fleshly. This is all the vision of the artist does—and indeed it is only what it properly does, though continually. We understand now that if there were to be a painting of the pool, then, its depth would be precisely a revealing of the fleshly nature of the thickness of the water which our vision normally perceives: depth, then, is one particular aspect of painting that nicely brings out for us how things like perspective and volume and thickness (that is, the things that we say make up depth within the sphere of painting) are only abstractions that originate in this more primordial phenomenon of the flesh which is actually out there in the world of our vision. Because there is a livable space for the body and for vision figured in depth (I can jump in the water), the same is true of the depth in the painting—and this goes for all aspects of painting more generally. Thus a painting is not so much a series of techniques—depth is not a trick of perspective or math—so much as that becoming-vision (or becoming-more-fleshly, the coming-to-itself of the visible qua flesh) of the arrangement of things in the visible:
It cannot be merely a question of an unmysterious interval, as seen from an airplane [i.e. the interval or space of physics], between these trees nearby and those farther away. Nor is it a matter of the way things are conjured away, one by another, as we see happen so vividly in a perspective drawing. These two views are very explicit and raise no problems. The enigma, though, lies in their bond, in what is between them. The enigma consists in the fact that I see things, each one in its place, precisely because they eclipse one another, and that they are rivals before my sight precisely because each one is in its own place. Their exteriority is known in their envelopment and their mutual dependence in their autonomy (“EM,” 179-80).
What we are understanding, then, is that depth in paintings does not merely resemble the depth that we might say we perceive in the thickness of something like the water or the arrangement of trees in the landscape before us, but that it actually is in a sense this very same depth (qua depth—it is actually a totally different piece of space) showing itself as such to us—that is, showing itself as flesh. We now know that the painting itself plays upon those “the double meaning of the word” vision that Merleau-Ponty so loves: “the painters vision” that is a continued birth is precisely this because it is both this vision of the body of the painter lent to the visible as well as the artwork which is the creation or concentration or figuring of this very vision. When it comes to painting something like depth, then,
obviously it is not a matter of adding one more dimension to those of the flat canvas, of organizing an illusion or an objectless perception whose perfection consists in simulating an empirical vision to the maximum degree. Pictorial depth (as well as painted height and width) comes “I know not whence” to alight upon, and take root in, the sustaining support. The painter’s vision is not a view upon the outside, a merely “physical-optical” relation with the world. The world no longer stands before him through representation; rather, it is the painter to whom the things of the world give birth by a sort of concentration or coming-to-itself of the visible (“EM,” 181).
We begin to see, then, the immense implications of Merleau-Ponty’s analysis for any theory of representation: representation disappears simply into the fleshly presence constituted by vision and the visible. But we still do not wholly understand the particular “intertwining” of vision and movement—the flipping or reversing of the visible into vision and back again—that makes this presence into the body and the fleshly itself. Indeed, in a sense we have skipped over precisely that crucial phenomenon of how the painter “lends” his body to the visible in understanding the new role of painting in Merleau-Ponty. That is, we have only described the painter, already from the standpoint of a visible thing, turning the visible back into vision. The real question is: how does he get to be a vision in the midst of the visible in the first place? For this, we have to return to that confusing passage where Merleau-Ponty says the particular type of vision that things participate in as visible is like “myself seen from without, such as another would see me.” And it is here that the invisible, as well as Derrida, will intervene.
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