La phénoménologie de l'expérience corporelle au dèla du sujet et de l'objet.

ESTEBAN ANDRÉS GARCÍA

Chiasmi International. Publication trilingue autour de la pensée de Merleau-Ponty

Vrin/Mimesis

Lugar: Paris/Milano; Año: 2007 vol. 9 p. 381 - 411

The return to the "lived body", proposed by Merleau-Ponty´s philosophy, has frequently been interpreted as a return to a new originary foundation on which it would be possible to construct a gnoseology and an ontology. Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, has maintained that the philosophical "return" proposed by the epoché, meant in fact a "departure." The recognition of the corporeal rootedness of consciousness means to rediscover its insurmountable difference with itself, its impossibility to coincide with itself, its essential opening to the world, to time and to the others. In this sense, the originality of Merleau-Ponty´s philosophy resides in the fact that it formulated within phenomenology the concepts which other philosophies will brand decades later, paradoxically, as critiques against phenomenology. Nevertheless, we can ask ourselves if Phenomenology of Perception is not still tributary to a philosophy of consciousness and of the subject which only the ontology of the flesh of the later Merleau-Ponty will put in question. We show here that the bodily subject of Phenomenology of Perception represents, counter to this interpretation, a critique of each one of the characteristics that define what the modern tradition understood by consciousness and subject: the body-subject is not self-transparent, it is not the primary certitude, it is not autonomous, it does not accomplish the synthesis of time, it is not transcendental and does not constitute the sense of the world. It is solely a dimension of a structure, a moment of a wider movement. This weakened and relational redefinition of the subject does not disappear in the later ontology of the flesh, but is reiterated in terms similar to those of Phenomenology of Perception, revealing thus the continuity of Merleau- Ponty´s thought. Finally, the unveiling of experience, proposed by Merleau-Ponty, supposes also a redefinition of the perceived thing as a sensible structure correlative to behaviorial, corporeal possibilities. This Gestaltist and pragmatic definition of the perception of objects not only dilutes certain classic Husserlian distinctions, but also aims necessarily at the experience beyond the objects. The internal horizon relations, which give form to the reality of the thing, proceed from the previous and inexhaustible horizon of the world or of nature, which defies the organization of the corporeal schema and its motor or behavioural habitudes.