Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, depth, and the body, almost almost concluded

I forgot how long this essay was... I ended last time with the idea that, for Derrida, what we see in a drawing always prompts us to redraw what we see. This means that what we don't see (what is not visible) does not disappear from our vision and become merely the negation of visibility, but--and this thesis is surprisingly like that of Freud's in his "Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad,"--rather is simply replaced by something that we see again. In short, the withdrawal that made a line a presence, a depth, a phenomenon in the most technical sense of the term, for Derrida is not itself indifferent to its own activity but leaves a trace, a trace that itself takes over and supplants the phenomenality of this presence (this has the effect of rendering the phenomenon that would have appeared a trace as well). I asked, then, whether this means "that Derrida seems to have a radically different idea of the visible than Merleau-Ponty? " Here we begin to find out, but first we need recall Merleau-Ponty and him a little further:

But does this mean, then, that Derrida seems to have a radically different idea of the visible than Merleau-Ponty? As soon as I see, Merleau-Ponty said,

it is necessary that the vision (as is so well indicated by the double meaning of the word) be doubled with a complementary vision or with another vision: myself seen from without, such as another would see me, installed in the midst of the visible, occupied in considering it from a certain spot (VI, 134).

This, we said, indicated that vision itself was visible, that vision would intertwine itself into the visible just as much as the visible intertwined itself into vision (in depth, for example)—indeed, we can suppose that this is the meaning of that word “intertwine.” But we do not yet know how this intertwining of the former would be possible by virtue of the powers of vision itself. Vision would have to view itself, it would have to see itself seeing. This is the “enigma,” as Merleau-Ponty said earlier, and he solves it not by saying that the vision gains an added force that would allow it to blast itself outside of itself merely by becoming more intense, but by saying that vision itself supposes an invisibility dispersed throughout the flesh that allows this intertwining to be possible, that allows heightening vision to supersede or comprehend itself above and outside itself by dissolving into what is not itself.
This invisible would hold together vision and the visible underneath the flesh that we thought united vision and visible sufficiently (and does, except for this one crucial instance), remaining just that extra element which allowed the former to flip into the latter. In short, it would be the opposite of what Merleau-Ponty saw in birth, and we already see in characterizing it that way that it would therefore have to be one of the oddest and least natural (and therefore most technical) moments in bodily experience (supposing that birth is the most natural for Merleau-Ponty—most certainly a questionable presupposition). Merleau-Ponty therefore turns to the phenomena of the “double touch,” that Husserl (to take only one person who describes this phenomenon, but whose account of it is of course always within Merleau-Ponty’s mind) observed at length in the second book of his Ideas:

Touching my left hand, I have touch-appearances, that is to say, I do not just sense, but I perceive and have appearances of a soft, smooth hand, with such a form. The indicational sensations of movement and the representational senses of touch, which are Objectified [Merleau-Ponty would say, made visible] as features of the thing, “left hand,” belong in fact to my right hand. But when I touch the left hand I also find in it, too, series of touch sensations, which are “localized,” in it, though these are not constitutive of properties (such as roughness or smoothness of the hand, of this physical thing). If I speak of the physical [i.e. visible] thing, “left hand,” then I am abstracting from these sensations (a ball of lead is nothing like them and likewise for every “merely” physical thing, every thing that is not my Body). If I do include them, then it is not that the physical thing is now richer [i.e. more visible, by becoming more intense, as we said above], but instead it becomes Body, it senses [i.e. becomes the vision in the body]… The hand that is touching [i.e. the right], which for its part again appears as a thing, likewise has its touch sensations at the place on its corporeal surface… (Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Tr. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Collected Works, III. London: Kluwer, 1989. p. 152-3, §36. In On Touching Derrida meticulously reconstitutes the logic of this movement between the visible and the tactile constantly at work in Merleau-Ponty that we—for the sake of convenience, but inexcusably—are reduplicating here. Suffice it to say that the movement is not so easy: one either posits, in accomplishing it, a) a synesthetic experience between not just these two senses but also all of them or b) an anesthetic experience that would allow the two senses to communicate (but again, also all of them) though their suspension. See his “Tangents” II and III, OT, 159-215.)

Upon reading this description, we understand, now, that this inclusion or exclusion of the localized touch sensations is where intertwining would occur: it is where the body becomes, in its vision, visible, and at the time where the body becomes, in its being visible, vision. The leap is accomplished from one to the other and back again, based on the perspective that we assume towards it. Furthermore, this perspective—this stance towards my own touching or vision—is only accomplished via the body’s motility, its movement through the visible as vision and vice versa. Thus we can finally understand that sentence which begins Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on painting: “that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.” Furthermore, we can understand fully how the painter lends himself to the visible: he looks at the world as if the world itself, the things in it, were looking back at him as if they were not just potentially seeing, but actively seeing, bodies—which, as we know, they already are. Merleau-Ponty says this all explicitly in a concise formulation: “inevitably the roles between him and the visible are reversed. That is why so many painters have said that things look at them.” This is what is meant by that point of view within the visible that would be “myself seen from without, such as another would see me:” one hand in a sense sees another as if it were foreign to it, precisely when it is able to also intertwine itself with the experience of sensing itself (as a system of two hands). It is in the reversing of the sensing and the sensed here between the hands that the intertwining is lodged.
But if this is the case, we now also know that it is in this reversing that something more than visible comes in. For in this flip between the vision and the visible, what sustains the identity of the body? We can understand, because of something like birth, how the visible might come to attain vision (though even this is just as problematic when we begin to think about that point at which one turns into the other). But it is absolutely unclear how the dispersal of a view outside of itself can retain the same power of vision, without some structure that would keep these two visions together: if we really think about it, how could any point among things really lend itself to a view “such as another would see me” while still remaining oneself? Merleau-Ponty helpfully points us to the case of the two eyes (which Husserl broached also in Ideas II): their overlapping of view, however, seems less natural. Merleau-Ponty, however, tries to inscribe it back into the bodily precisely as a structure that would merely be its non-technical extension, though of a radically different element than it: how is he able to do this?
He is able to accomplish this by conceiving of the reversing as precisely reversibility—as an ideal potential or structure that subtends the intertwining or always remains immanent with respect to it:

We spoke summarily of a reversibility of the seeing [or vision] and the visible, of the touching and the touched. It is time to emphasize that it is a reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact. My left hand [Merleau-Ponty switches the hands with respect to Husserl’s description] is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching… but I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization, and one of two things always occurs: either my right hand really passes over to the rank of touched, but then its hold on the world is interrupted; or it retains its hold on the world, but then I do not really touch it—my right hand touching, I palpate with my left hand only its outer covering… I am always on the same side of my body; it presents itself to me in one invariable perspective. But this incessant escaping, this impotency to superpose exactly upon one another… this is not a failure (VI, 147-8, emphasis added).

Because I can never actually witness the moment when vision is changed into the visible, this change or intertwining takes place. Though the logic may sound dubious at first, phenomenologically the description is exact. The question then becomes whether we can map on this phenomenon of the lack of coincidence of vision in the visible, its eclipse, with that of the reversibility beyond it that makes it possible. Obviously, we cannot: the reversibility itself is, properly speaking, a non-phenomenon, an ideal, only immanent and never realized in fact. This is why Merleau-Ponty calls it the invisible.
But how can one then be sure that this invisible reversibility of the flesh actually makes vision view itself? Merleau-Ponty attempts to think it as rigorously as possible so that it can get installed not just anywhere apart from the visible—in the realm of the transcendental, in a space that could be known without the visible—but right upon the back of the visible, such that it becomes “its lining” (VI, 149). In other words, Merleau-Ponty tries to think of how the invisible sustain the flesh such that, if the flesh were removed in order to grasp this invisible more clearly (even in our thought about it), “it is then that [it] would be inaccessible to us” (VI, 150). In doing so, he outlines two types of invisibility: precisely those that Derrida quotes in Memoirs of the Blind and then transfers to The Gift of Death. They appear most schematically in Merleau-Ponty’s working notes, though we could specify many places in his oeuvre where either one or the other sense is being used (indeed each time we have tried to talk about intertwining and even before about some aspects of the motile body, there in Merleau-Ponty one or another sense is present—thus our lengthy reconstitution of its logic). Of course they will be what we have already seen specified in The Gift of Death: the “visible in-visible” and the “absolutely invisible.”

(To be concluded...)