merci beaucoup, Shiloh Whitney, Noah Moss Brender, David Morris, Tristana Martin Rubio, Lisa Guenther, Don Landes, and Dan Landreville.
This project was born alongside several true friendships, and among this field of bright stars shine Aaron Pinnix, Shiloh Whitney, Oran Magal, Noah Moss Brender, Marianne Pelton, Iain Macdonald, Anna Ezekiel, Zachariah Ezekiel, Elaine Chukan Brown, Enoch Guimond, Sean Wood, Jean-François Desjardins, Clinton Debogorski, Roli Wilhelm, Harmony Page, Cherilyn Keall, Laura McMahon, and Jeff Morrisey. Respect to Peter, Marcus, Sean, Jon, and Andrew—friends from a time before time. I am lucky to have the support and love of Erin and Ronan O’Kane. I could not have undertaken this project without the love and generosity of my family: Mary Anne, Donald, Connie, Emma, Nick, Tashina, and, most of all, Jadyn River and Harper Jude.
ABBREVIATIONS
For the citation of all translated quotations from Merleau-Ponty’s works, I include the English pagination followed by the French (e.g., PP, English page number/French page number). For the lectures on Institution and Passivity, I cite Merleau-Ponty’s original pagination numbers from the Belin edition. When using primary texts from other philosophers translated from French or German, I similarly provide dual pagination. Works by Merleau-Ponty are abbreviated as follows:
| AD | Adventures of the Dialectic. Translated by Joseph Bien. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Originally published as Aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). |
| CP | Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures, 1949–1952. Translated by Talia Welsh. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. Originally published as Psychologie et pédagogie de l’enfante: Cours de Sorbonne 1949–1952 (Paris: Verdier, 2001). |
| IP | Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–55). Translated by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. Originally published as L’institution, la passivite: Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954–1955), ed. Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort, and Stéphanie Ménasé (Paris: Belin, 2003). |
| N | Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Translated by Robert Vallier. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Originally published as La nature: Notes, cours du Collège de France, ed. Dominique Séglard (Paris: Seuil, 1995). |
| PP | Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge, 2012. Originally published as Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). |
| S | Signs. Translated by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Originally published as Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960). |
| SB | The Structure of Behavior. Translated by Alden L. Fisher. Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 1963. Originally published as La structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942). |
| SNS | Sense and Non-Sense. Translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Originally published as Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948). |
| VI | The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alfonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Originally published as Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). |
INTRODUCTION
IN THE SHADOW OF PHILOSOPHY
THE PROBLEM OF PASSIVITY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MERLEAU-PONTY
Therefore let there always be non-being
so we may see their subtlety;
And let there always be being
so we may see their outcome.
These two are the same.
But after they are produced, they have different names.
—Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching
The renewal of the world is also the renewal of the mind, a rediscovery of that brute mind which, untamed by any culture, demands to create culture anew. From this point on the irrelative is not nature in-itself, nor the system of apprehensions of absolute consciousness, and not humanity either, but that «teleology» Husserl, writing and thinking in brackets, speaks of, that jointing and framing of Being realizing itself through humankind.
—Merleau-Ponty, Signs (181/179)1
Life unfolds according to an inverse logic. Rather than emerging from preexisting causes, purposes, or conditions of possibility, life is a movement that puts itself en route by taking up and shaping the very conditions that make it possible. Conditions of possibility of sense must, paradoxically, happen in order to become possible. In both nature and culture, birth marks the way that life, vital or conscious, neither purely constitutes itself nor is constituted by outside forces—life is a becoming-true of conditions and possibilities, a whirlwind of sense that, once it touches down, will have had a formative natural, personal, or historical past. This book is an attempt to uncover these hidden workings of life, what Maurice Merleau-Ponty terms a logic of institution, which lets us think of the past in deeper, existential terms as an unfinished reality on the move; and, thereby, to think of life and culture as inheriting and transforming this radical past. By studying becoming in nature and culture, we can thus unearth this lost sense of an original past, and also definitively account for not only how living sense emerges from nonsense, but also how nature emerges from culture and the person emerges from the body and intercorporeal life.
To do this work requires thinking life and culture as originally passive, but this passivity is not inertness, but rather a generative temporal openness, where meaningful structures or institutions of activity take time to developmentally unfold. Our becoming active as bodies and persons, then, is a process of birth and a growing into being that must happen in order to have become the condition of our being. This, we will see, has implications not only for phenomenological attempts to naturalize consciousness, but also for complicating and rethinking the shared, temporally embedded, and intercorporeal nature of ethical responsibility and political action.
These central questions of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy concern the natural origins of the living body and human subjectivity. As he explains at the outset of his writings, he has a “goal to understand the relations of consciousness and nature” (SB, 3/1). Revealing ambiguity in these relations, these studies also uncover irreducible meaning in both life and consciousness. Yet this early work genealogically discloses the traces within life and experience as a prevital and preconscious past from which these structures emerge. Commonplace interpretations of Merleau-Ponty’s development hold that while his early work is premised on a “philosophy of consciousness,” he later shifts from a phenomenological to an ontological method of a sense-making in nature.2 I do not share this view. Merleau-Ponty’s earliest thinking already locates a developmental passivity of consciousness and has a signal ontological concern for the natural underpinnings of consciousness.
