Merleau-Ponty: In Memoriam

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1961 (10 pp.)-MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY-1961 Younger than Lacan and a professor at the College de France since 1953, the philosopher died suddenly in May 1961. Les Temps modernes, where he pub�lished from the beginning, devoted a special issue to him. Lacan's tribute is ambiguous, to say the least. The grandiloquence of the funeral oration at the beginning and at the end contrasts with a presentation numbered in twelve points, which is, for the main part, a critique of La Phenomen%gle de /0 perception (1945). Although he had praised him in 1953-1954 (26), as early as the following year (27), he had denounced Merleau-Ponty's humanist po�sition- "one can see where it leads him." Here, "his intention (is] covered and restrained by the properly academic link, even if impatiently put to the lest, even if broadened in public debate." One year after this text (SO) and then again in 1964, at the rue d'Ulm (55), Lacan started attacking again, to the great pleasure of the novice philosophers of the time. In any case, the present text-especially regarding the "body as sexed being" and "the body as expression of speech" -placed Merleau-Ponty among the backward think�ers of the metaphysics of the subject and of the body, as opposed to the innovators of the primacy of the signifier and of structure. Is this text a critical reading of Merleau-Ponty? Is its violence poorly veiled by the mask of argu�mentation? Or is it an irreparable misunderstanding? Rather, it otTers a presentation of Lacan's doctrine. Contrary to the philo�sopher's concept of the "sensible," improperly reduced to the traditional i i ) ."

184 00881 ER pcrceptum, Lacan asserts that the body has no place in psychoanalysis. Contrary to the philosopher's reading of Sade, Lacan gives his own, already sketched in L'Ethiqlle (43) and later to be developed in Kant avec Sade (51). There is even disagreement concerning the relationship between art and desire (in painting): "The eye is meant not to see"; the artist "gives us access to the place of that which cannot be seen: it would still remain to be named"-and this foreshadows Les QIICltre Concepts (55). To assert an opposition between psychoanalysis and philosophy would be simplistic. To assert an opposition between a quest for the "purity" of the signifier on the one hand, and a research grounded in the body and in a con�crete relation to the world on the other hand would be even more so. Further�more, Lacan refuses to bet on life against death; rather, he bets on the greatness of "between-two-deaths" against a radically devaluated life (43, 47). The fundamental positions of the two thinkers are irreconcilable.