The Temporality of Life

The Southern Journal of Philosophy (2007) Vol. XLV

The Temporality of Life: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the Immemorial Past

Alia Al-Saji McGill University
Abstract
Borrowing conceptual tools from Bergson, this essay asks after the shift in the temporality of life from Merleau-Pontys Phnomnologie de la perception to his later works. Although the Phnomnologie conceives life in terms of the field of presence of bodily action, later texts point to a life of invisible and immemorial dimensionality. By reconsidering Bergson, but also thereby revising his reading of Husserl, MerleauPonty develops a nonserial theory of time in the later works, one that acknowledges the verticality and irreducibility of the past. Life in the flesh relies on unconsciousness or forgetting, on an invisibility that structures its passage.

What concepts of life inform Merleau-Pontys philosophy? In Phnomnologie de la perception, the study of the lived body (le corps propre or vcu) implies a particular understanding of life.1 Life is an intentional, yet operative, activity that brings the body into contact with objects in the world. In Le visible et linvisible, the concept of the lived body gives way to that of the flesh (la chair), which brings with it a different sense of life. 2 Life, in the flesh, is not limited to an individual body but radiates in several directions at once, encompassing the world and others. This life-force is both visible and invisible; perception and unconsciousness, activity and passivity, present and past intertwine therein. But whatever its sense, the concept of life

Alia Al-Saji (PhD Emory University, 2002) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. Her recent articles address Merleau-Pontys ethics (in Interrogating Ethics, Duquesne University Press, 2006) and Bergsons influence on Sartre (in ber Sartre, Turia+Kant, 2005). She has also written on memory in Bergson and Deleuze and on sensation in each of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. In addition to several anthologies, her articles have appeared in Chiasmi International, Continental Philosophy Review, and Philosophy Today. Her current work interrogates memory, vision, and ethics through Bergson and Merleau-Ponty.

177

Alia Al-Saji

remains behind the scenes in these texts. Whether because Merleau-Ponty is unable to find in the term life the precision he desires, 3 or because life itself is ambiguous, comprising several tendencies that cannot be integrated under one overarching concept, any philosophy of life drawn from Merleau-Ponty appears heterogeneous, even fragmentary. The concept of life has several currents in his work that remain unthematized. I will attempt to make these currents visible by focusing on the ways in which life deploys time in MerleauPontys texts. Time offers a unique and productive lens through which to study the life of the lived body and flesh.4 By inquiring into the temporality of life, my aim is to discover connections and discontinuities among Merleau-Pontys texts that are not visible otherwise. Light can be shed on the relation between temporality and life by borrowing some conceptual tools from Henri Bergson. Certain Bergsonian concepts will help frame my reading of Merleau-Ponty: namely, attention to life [attention la vie] and the past in general [le pass en gnral] from Matire et mmoire, 5 and the vital impetus [lan vital] of Lvolution cratrice. 6 These concepts define different aspects of life for Bergson, in some ways continuous and in others opposed. Though I will be drawing upon resonances between Merleau-Pontys texts and Bergsons, these will rarely be direct references. With the exception of passages addressing Bergsonian intuition and the past in Le visible et linvisible or in footnotes to Phnomnologie de la perception, such references are limited.7 Rather, I will elaborate upon tendencies hinted at, but not explicitly dealt with, in Merleau-Pontys writingsa certain unthought that is revealed when Merleau-Ponty is read in conjunction with Bergson.8 My contention is that the modulation and deployment of time by the lived body or fleshand thus the temporal sense of life and the way that past, present, and future relateshift from Phnomnologie de la perception to Le visible et linvisible. Though the earlier text presents bodily life mainly in terms of action and a perceptual field of presence, the later text goes beyond this to a life of invisible dimensionalities and immemorial depth. Hence, while the Phnomnologie remains for the most part in the grips of a philosophy of consciousness and presence, Le visible et linvisible opens the way to an original sense of the past and to the irreducible role of unconsciousness and forgetting.9 In particular, Phnomnologie de la perception seems to generally agree with Bergsons concept of attention to life, whereas Le visible et linvisible and later course notes and essays draw on the Bergsonian concept of an immemorial past. In parallel with this deepening Bergsonian influence, I will point to Merleau-Pontys revised approach to Edmund Husserl in his later works. There, Merleau-Pontys 178

The Temporality of Life

increasingly critical reading of On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time is accompanied by an intensified appreciation for later Husserlian texts, in particular The Origin of Geometry.10 I argue that while Merleau-Pontys early reading of Bergson is mediated by Husserls lectures on timeconsciousness, his later revised reading of Husserl is part of a different theory of time that takes seriously, and finds its echo in, Bergson. 11 This BergsonianHusserlian interplay can be witnessed in the weight accorded to forgetting and the past and the disruption of serial time in the later works. Hence, a guiding question of my essay: Can Merleau-Pontys concept of life in its various incarnationsas acting body or flesh accommodate and account for an immemorial dimension of pastness and thus a structural absence or alterity, irreducible to presence?

1. The Early Merleau-Ponty and Bodily Life as Action

My aim is to elucidate the notion of life in Phnomnologie de la perception by interrogating the temporality of the lived body. The body represents a current of intentional activity, but it is also subtended by what Merleau-Ponty calls prepersonal or natural lifecurrents of biological, habitual, or sensory existence (which I study elsewhere).12 For the purposes of the comparison with the later Merleau-Ponty, I will focus on the dominant current of life in the Phnomnologie: the body in action. In action, my body appears to me as an attitude directed towards a certain existing or possible task (PhP 100/116). The perceived world is primarily, though not exclusively, given by the practical and utilitarian attitude we adopt toward it. It is a world organize[d] in accordance with the projects of the present moment (PhP 112/130). The tasks toward which the body is oriented are not pure possibilities; they are inscribed within a field delimited by the bodys abilitiesby what Merleau-Ponty, following Husserl, calls its I can. Although Merleau-Ponty draws a distinction between actual, present action and virtual, possible or future action, the second is extrapolated from the first. To be precise, virtual action is an extension not simply of the bodys current occupations, but of its present capacities and sensations (built up through habit). Virtual action is felt in the body by the presence of a particular tension (PhP 109/126), through kinaestheses that prefigure future movements. By means of kinaestheses [t]he normal person reckons with the possible, which thus, without shifting from its position as a possibility acquires a sort of actuality (PhP 109/127). Hence, the field of possible actionthough not reducible to the actions of the body at the momentis opened 179

Alia Al-Saji

up according to the capacities and projects of the present moment and draws its efficacy from them (PhP 11112/129). Bodily action is centered upon the present and circumscribed by the possibilities of the now, with the result that what MerleauPonty calls virtual action takes the form of deferred presence. The futurity of the body has neither the sense of the unpredictable nor the merely imagined.13 It is rather projected from, and mirrors, the present. The vitality of the body is thus understood in terms of what it does or is capable of doing. The bodys life is its efficacy, which finds its reflection in the field of actions available to the body. That bodily life in the Phnomnologie is implicitly identified with action has been argued by other commentators. As Dorothea Olkowski shows, the lived body is not nave contact with the world but operates according to a hermeneutical principle of action or utility; although this principle structures the phenomenal field in the Phnomnologie, its role remains unacknowledged by the early Merleau-Ponty.14 Significantly, as I. M. Young has pointed out, bodily efficacy is measured and illustrated in the Phnomnologie by actions that are generally goal-oriented.15 [T]o move ones body is to aim at things through it, says Merleau-Ponty (PhP 139/161). In other words, action tends to be identified with the object at which it aims (PhP 11011/128). Action is based on an objectivating intentionality through which objects present themselves to the subject as poles of action call[ing] for a certain mode of resolution, a certain kind of work (PhP 106/123). It is this intentional arc that organizes, animates, and endows experience with its degree of vitality and fruitfulness (PhP 157/184)so that the life of the body is woven from things with which it is engaged in the world. Within this dialogue of subject and object, bodily unity mirrors the unity of the object-pole or single task to be performed (PhP 132/154). Bodily unity is thus accomplished in the teleology of action (PhP 101/117), that is, when [the body] escapes from dispersion, pulls itself together and tends by all means in its power towards one single goal of its activity one single intention (PhP 232/269). The unity of the senses discussed by Merleau-Ponty in the Sentir chapter serves as an illustration. Although the senses appear at first to be a heterogeneity, communicating synaesthetically, the presence of an object-pole in perception puts a term to this instability and imposes upon them an objective and external unity. The senses then appear to be united in translating aspects of the same thing; [they] intercommunicate by opening onto the structure of the thing (PhP 229/265). Their synthesis is not lateral and free-floating, but frontal and intentionally directed. In La philosophie de lexistence, a talk from 1959 published in Parcours deux, Merleau-Ponty notes that the definition of the body as that by which we act is already to be found in Bergson 180

The Temporality of Life

and constitutes a space in which their philosophies meet. According to Merleau-Ponty, this view of the body as action emphasizes the dimension of the present, because Bergson defined the present as that upon which we act, and we evidently act through our body.16 Though I will have occasion to question this reading of Bergson, it is useful to first elaborate the connection that Merleau-Ponty is trying to make. Indeed, the first chapter of Matire et mmoire presents the body as a sensori-motor schema, a center of action and affection. This body exists in the present and its memory is that of repetition and habit. The body is understood along organic and functional lines. It is an organism whose complexity leads to indetermination and hence hesitation and the ability to choose. The bodys perceptions are the reflection onto things of the bodys possible actions on them, its possible uses of them. Conscious perception is discernment in view of utility and action; it is the ability to detach a figure that interests the body from the background of indifferent images. The richness of this perception comes from the intensity of ones attention to life (MM 7). Attention la vie thus designates a life that is defined by practicality and interest in the present. Phnomnologie de la perception resonates with this view of bodily life centered on the present. The body, from the point of view of action, is here and now.
Just as it is necessarily here, the body necessarily exists now; it can never become past, and if we cannot retain in health the living memory of sickness, or, in adult life that of our body as a child, these gaps in memory merely express the temporal structure of our body. (PhP 140/163)

Though this could be taken to mean that the body lives an instantaneous existence of discontinuous acts, Merleau-Ponty does not wish to draw this implication. He points simply to the privilege of the present in the way in which the body lives time. Notably, the body secretes time project[ing] round the present a double horizon of past and future (PhP 23940/277). This projection takes place on the basis of the implications contained in the present (PhP 181/211) and spreads out from the present in the form of a network of intentionalities (PhP 417/477). Bodily temporality originates, and takes its energy, from the presentbeing itself constituted as a field of presence17 (PhP 416/47576). This rectilinear and formal view of time owes much to Husserls lectures On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time.18 But it also presents us with problems that arise once past and future are conceived in terms of the presentdifficulties that cause Merleau-Ponty to revise this picture of time in the working notes to Le visible et linvisible (as we shall see). Three problems can be noted at this

181

Alia Al-Saji

juncture: (1) The past, however remote, differs from the immediate past only by its place in the temporal order. Both remote and immediate past are retrievable and representable in principle due to the positions they occupy as former presents (PhP 416/47576). There is no sense of pastness as an original dimension of being that is not derived from the field of presence. (2) There is no way to explain the discontinuous nature of forgetting (VI 194/248). Forgetting may be understood as an ordered fading-away that occurs on the horizon beyond a certain arbitrarily designated point in the temporal order. Or forgetting may be conceived as an intentional act, performed in bad faith, by which a memory continues to be possessed but is held at a distance.19 But, in both cases, the latency and unconsciousness of forgetting are elided. Forgetting is sidestepped as a phenomenon, but also as a structural dimension of time itself. (3) As a corollary, the status of the present is not questioned. As the nave presence to self and world, the present is left without articulation or depth. What at once grounds the present and makes it pass remains unthought. This view of time is accompanied in Phnomnologie de la perception by a largely critical reading of Bergsonian dure. Since both Renaud Barbaras and Leonard Lawlor have shown this to be a misreading of Bergson, I will limit my discussion to what this reveals of the privilege of the present and of the Husserlian framework that mediates Merleau-Pontys reading of Bergson in the Phnomnologie. 20 Notably, Merleau-Ponty tries to fit Bergsonian duration into a flat and linear Husserlian picture of time (specifically that of the Time-consciousness Lectures)thus suppressing the dimension of original pastness that can be found in Matire et mmoire. Viewed serially, duration becomes a haphazard accumulation of preserved presents (PhP 415n/475n). The critique is twofold: Bergson fails to account for the ordered passage, and retention, of the present. And he misses the genuine consciousness of absence, the negativity, that constitutes the past, since preserved perceptions continue to coexist with the present (PhP 413/473). In Merleau-Pontys reading of Bergson, all of duration is squeezed into a present with no possibility of transcendence or passage (PhP 79n/9394n). However, since Bergsonian duration is not modeled on retention, the attempt to understand it from within this Husserlian schema results in a misreading. MerleauPonty may note, with disapproval, the fusion and fluidity of consciousness that he takes to be characteristic of duration (PhP 276n/319n). But this picture of fusion is not surprising, given that the organizing dimension of past in general, and the difference in kind that it installs, are not acknowledged in Merleau-Pontys reading of duration. Even when Merleau-Ponty presents a sympathetic account of Bergson, a similar misreading often takes place. In La philoso182

The Temporality of Life

phie de lexistence, Merleau-Ponty makes the following surprising claim: [T]he analysis that Bergson carried out in Matire et mmoire, for example, shows that if we consider time, we must take into account, within time in particular, the dimension of the present.21 But to read Matire et mmoire as privileging the present is to limit oneself to the first chapter of the book. Though it is true that duration is contracted into the present in the context of actionthe past being only selectively allowed in and actualized to mold to present intereststhis is not all there is to duration for Bergson. Here, Merleau-Ponty again elides the dimension of past in general or pure memory so central to Matire et mmoire. Without memory, the body can only be understood as a zero-point in space (a center of action and affection) (MM 1112), while perception remains instantaneous and fleeting, the superficial reflection of the bodys possible actions on objects around it (what Bergson calls pure perception) (MM 31, 3335). But these presentations of body and perception are only preliminary; Bergson revises both and spends much of Matire et mmoire arguing why memory must in fact already inform any concrete theory of perception. First, because the body has a more complex relation with the past. Not only does habit form a kind of bodily memory, but each body expresses a particular rhythm of duration or hold on time (MM 24950). Bodies are not external envelops indifferent to duration, and duration is not exclusive or internal to consciousness. Second, pure perception is only a hypothetical construct (MM 31). Not only does concrete perception take time and thus already contract the immediate past, but memories, more proximate and more remote, are actualized in every perception, informing and completing what is perceived (MM 68). This reading of Bergson tells us more about Merleau-Pontys own early view of time than it does Bergsons. 22 It shows a conceptualization of bodily life centered on the present, of efficacy limited to action, wherein the force of the past remains a blindspot. For Bergson, however, it is this elided dimension of originary pastnessirreducible to any representational memoryimage or present perception because different in kind from themthat makes possible the flow of time and the passage of the present. In what follows, I will explore productive openings to such a dimension in Merleau-Pontys later course notes and texts.23

2. The Later Merleau-Ponty and the Life of the Flesh

In the immemorial depth of the visible, something moved, caught fire, and engulfed his body; everything he paints is in answer to this incitement.24 Thus Merleau-Ponty inscribes the 183

Alia Al-Saji

immemorial past as invisibility in the structure of the flesh. In this section, my aim is to discover the sense of life at work in Merleau-Pontys later texts by again broaching the question of temporality, in this case that of the flesh. 25 The flesh is a difficult but central concept of Merleau-Pontys later philosophy one for which no adequate definition is supplied. In this context, we find that the bodily field of presence has broken up, revealing the ground upon which it is institutedan immemorial or invisible abyss. Here, the invisible is alternatively referred to by Merleau-Ponty as the depth or lining [doublure] of the visible (EM 187/85). These descriptions point to an immemorial that is neither lost presence, nor distant past; as both ground and abyss, the immemorial is a past that accompanies and makes possible the present. This insinuation of the past into the present, we shall see, lies at the heart of what MerleauPonty means by describing the flesh as visible and invisible. Central to Merleau-Pontys project is a reconsideration of both Bergson and Husserl on time. In conjunction with a critical rereading of Husserlian time-consciousness, Merleau-Ponty draws on both Bergsons concept of the past in general and Husserls later notion of institution in order to think the dimension(s) of invisibility that open up the life of the flesh. The immemorial is presented in Le visible et linvisible as originary nonpresence; it is, to echo Husserl, Nichturprsentierbar (VI 239/292). Merleau-Ponty notes that we find in our experience a movement toward what could not in any event be present to us in the original and whose irremediable absence would thus count among our originating experiences (VI 159/ 211). But this originating breaks up (VI 124/165), so that the sense of the immemorial is not an original integrity, a secret lost and to be rediscovered (VI 122/162). It is neither an empirical past, once present and now forgotten, nor a layer of positivity, underlying experience but hidden from view (VI 158/ 20910). The immemorial is, Merleau-Ponty says, an impossible pastone that has never been present and that cannot be made present in a representation or act of recollection (VI 123/ 164). It registers within experience as an original forgetting or blindspot that does not derive from, and cannot be overcome in, direct perception (VI 248/301). Merleau-Ponty echoes Bergson when he insists that only a special kind of vision or memory can allow us to catch a glimpse of this dimensionnot to hold [it] as with forceps, or to immobilize [it] as under the objective of a microscope, but to let [it] be and to witness [its] continued being (VI 101/138).26 This memory rejoins the past through its constitutive distance, without seeking to nullify that distance (VI 124/166). In Merleau-Pontys invocation of an immemorial depth of the visible, we can hear the echo of Matire et mmoires past in general. Although Merleau-Ponty still sometimes regards 184

The Temporality of Life

Bergsonism as a philosophy that locates the secret of Being in an integrity that is behind us (VI 124/165), in a former present which has been preserved (VI 122/163), I also find a positive re-reading of the Bergsonian past in Le visible et linvisible. In this reading, the pure past is reinscribed as an invisible.
[I]f in being inscribed within me each present loses its flesh, if the pure memory into which it is changed is an invisible, then there is indeed a past, but no coinciding with itI am separated from it by the whole thickness of my present. (VI 122/163)

This reevaluation of Bergson is accompanied in Merleau-Pontys later works by a re-reading of Husserl on time. Merleau-Pontys focus shifts from the lectures on time-consciousnesstoward which he becomes increasingly criticalto later Husserlian texts, in particular The Origin of Geometry. Rather than reading Bergson through Husserlian time-consciousness, Merleau-Pontys interest in Husserl now seems to have a Bergsonian inflection. 27 Without overstating this influence, a mutual re-reading of Bergson and Husserl appears to take place in the later worksmotivating, in my view, Merleau-Pontys rethinking of the past and of life.28

2.1 Re-reading Husserl

The immemorial is described by Merleau-Ponty as a vertical past, which disrupts the serial or linear order of time (VI 244/ 297). He says: The wild or brute being is introducedthe serial time, that of acts and decisions, is overcome (W.N. January 1959; VI 168/222). This corresponds in Le visible et linvisible to a reversal of the Phnomnologies dominant picture of time, seen in the acting body and its field of presence. This reversal is made apparent in Merleau-Pontys multiple attempts in the working notes to revise Husserls theory of time-consciousness. Indeed, as Renaud Barbaras and Mauro Carbone have shown, this criticism of Husserl is part of Merleau-Pontys critical rethinking of the Phnomnologies reliance on a philosophy of consciousness and presence. 29 Significantly for Merleau-Ponty, Husserls error is to have described the [retentional] interlocking starting from a Prsensfeld considered without thickness, as immanent consciousness (W.N. February 1959; VI 173/227). In Husserls theory, the past exists only as consciousness of the past; its being is derived from the act of consciousness that constitutes it (IP 33). Time is reduced to a succession of punctual acts intentionally tied back to a primordial-impressional consciousness, what Husserl calls the source-point of time-consciousness. Though Merleau-Ponty attempts to re-read the lectures on time185

Alia Al-Saji

consciousness beyond this picture of life as punctuality (VI 195/ 248), it remains a core problem of Husserls account (VI 244/ 297). For Husserl, primordial-impressional consciousness grounds, gives life and meaning to, the present (and hence to the past and future as modified and dependent dimensions). It is the absolute self-possession and self-presence of this consciousness that is supposed to guarantee the evidentiary and vital givenness of perceptual presence.30 But this self-coincidence not only excludes any original dimension of unconsciousness or forgetfulness (VI 194/248), it also dictates the punctuality of primordial-impressional consciousness and makes its passage inexplicable. Hence, while the present becomes an abstract idealization, an absolutely positive instant with no influence of Zeitmaterie on Zeitform (VI 184/238), the past remains a mystery to such a philosophy of time founded on consciousness (IP 123). In place of the rectilinear flow of lived experiences, connected in succession by retentions and protentions, the immemorial institutes a different kind of temporality of lifewhat MerleauPonty calls a time before time (W.N. April 1960; VI 243/296). In his reading of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty leave[s] the philosophy of Erlebnisse and pass[es] to the philosophy of our Urstiftung (VI 221/275). The verticality of time was already a central theme of Merleau-Pontys course on The Origin of Geometry, Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (195960); and it can be discerned even earlier in the two courses from 195455, LInstitution, La Passivit. Thus, it is through Husserls unthought on institution (HLP 1415), as it is through Bergson, that Merleau-Ponty comes to rethink time.31 Opposing institution and constitution, Merleau-Ponty notes that time is the very model of institution. 32 In this sense, time cannot be reduced to constituting consciousness, nor can it simply be divided along lines of activity and passivity (IP 37). To understand time as institution is to recognize the verticality of the pastits originality and alterity, but also its inaccessibility as it was to present consciousness. This is the surplus of the past to representation (VI 253/306). In this sense, perception is borne by the past as massive Being without exhausting it (VI 244/297). Merleau-Ponty emphasizes in his reading of Husserl that this past in general is not a positivitythe in-itself conservation of the pastbut a hollow or circumscribed negativity (HLP 20). This negativity is understood not as lack but precisely as surplus, as more than Being (HLP 49; IP 168). It is an absence that Merleau-Ponty describes as fecund (VI 263/ 316), that counts in the world (VI 228/281). The past hence continues to have an effect and to leave a trace, but not through the efficacy of action; its efficacy or generativity is, as we shall see, that of an unconscious. By instituting itself as past, each 186

The Temporality of Life

event opens a dimension.33 It makes possible a different kind of futurein which it is not just a particular action that becomes possible, but a new style or field of activity is opened up (IP 38, 124). The instituted past sets up a level, a different norm of meaning, according to which we experience or see differently (IP 41).34 Institution means opening a register, says Merleau-Ponty echoing Bergsons Lvolution cratrice (EC 16/16; IP 40). Curiously, although Merleau-Ponty finds the notion of institution in Husserl, his elaboration brings several Bergsonian concepts to bear. (I will explore the role of the past in general below, but the image of time as an open register [registre ouvert] and Bergsons famous retrograde movement of the true should also be noted.) At the same time, the institution of the past means the ineluctuable passage of the present: Husserl has used the fine word Stiftungfoundation or establishmentto designate the unlimited fecundity of each present which, precisely because it is singular and passes, can never stop having been and thus being universally (Signs 59/7374). This passage, paradoxically, both forgets and conserves; it is a noble form of memory (Signs 59/74). It is neither conservation as the accumulation of in-itself presents; nor is it forgetting as an indifferent succession of mutually exterior moments, one replacing the other without trace. Rather, what Husserl calls sedimentation and Merleau-Ponty terms simultaneity in depth, are attempts to articulate this difficult temporal structure of life. It is unclear, however, that Husserl fully thought through the implications of institution; what is missing is a theorization of forgetting that acknowledges the unconscious and irrecuperable nature of the past. Though Merleau-Ponty finds forgetting interspersed in Husserls texts (e.g., not only in The Origin of Geometry but also in Ideas II), it is left to Husserls readers to recognize both its irreducibility and fecundity; forgetfulness remains for Husserl a lack that could ideally be filled.35 Here the Bergsonian unconscious, as past in general, comes to inflect MerleauPontys reading of time. To see this, I will turn to MerleauPontys conception of time before time, prior to explicitly investigating its resonances with Bergson.

2.2 Time as Chiasm

There are several ways of understanding the anteriority involved in Merleau-Pontys reference to a time before time. Time before time preexists the linear time of presence, where past and future are derived from the present moment. Because this time is not based on presence, its past is not formed after having been present; rather it comes into existence as always already past, as preexisting the present in general. Time before time is therefore a temporality that inscribes a structure of 187

Alia Al-Saji

preexistence or asymmetry; it is organized around a past that has never been present. But there is another sense to this anteriority, for the temporality, which Merleau-Ponty is trying to highlight, undergirds and makes possible the passage of the present that characterizes linear time. Time before time hence coexists with phenomenal time as flow, just as depth coexists with and provides the structural condition for things to be things, or as a background coexists with the figure that it puts in relief. In this sense, time before time inscribes a structure of coexistence, whereby the past that has never been present forms the ground for the existence and passage of the present. But these two senses of anteriority, temporal and structural, must be thought together. According to Merleau-Ponty, time before time exists by piling up, by proliferation, by encroachment, by promiscuity (VI 115/155). It is a time structured by virtual envelopment or coexistence rather than succession. In the working notes to Le visible et linvisible, Merleau-Ponty refers to this as the simultaneity of past with present (VI 243/297; also IP 124). He notes that the present or the visible landscape under my eyes is not exterior to, and bound synthetically to other moments of time and the past, but has them really behind itself in simultaneity, inside itself and not it and they side by side in time (VI 267/321). This coexistence is not, however, coincidence. There is a constitutive distance, or difference, that holds past and present together, but prevents the past from simply becoming present.36 What is given, says Merleau-Ponty, is not the past itself such as it was in its own time, but rather the past such as it was one day plus an inexplicable alteration, a strange distance (VI 124/166). This distance is one of difference in kind for Bergson, one of chiasm for Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty first hesitates to call this a difference in kind or to use the philosophical categories of the homogeneous and heterogeneous (IP 19495)by the time of Le visible et linvisible he recognizes that the true difference in kind is that of chiasm. 37 Crucially, the chiasm institutes an irreversibility. The relation of past and present is asymmetrical, since one of the terms appears to forever preexist the other. But it is also a reversibility (VI 148/194), since there is preexistence of the past in general only in connection with the present.38 Moreover, the present continues to pass, to incorporate itself into and transform the past, as the past continues to coexist with and insinuate itself into the present. Simultaneity is, then, one with the irreversible passage that defines time (VI 243/297). For Merleau-Ponty, the apparent positivity of the present thus incorporates and relies on a negativity of the pastjust as the visible spectacle includes an invisibility in principle. It is useful to explore this analogy between past-present and invisible-visible a little farther. The invisible plays a crucial role 188

The Temporality of Life

in Merleau-Pontys later philosophy of life, for it designates the absence, negativity, or difference that he takes to be constitutive of being or flesh.39 Most importantly, the invisible permits Merleau-Ponty to conceptualize this difference as an irreducible part of all experience. The visibility of a spectacle involves clear zones, clearings, and intervals that are themselves unperceived but make possible the articulation and formation of a perceived (VI 148/195). Though intervals between things are not seen for themselves, they serve to differentiate and define what is seen (VI 180/234). The invisible is thus not an in-itself, but rather the lining [doublure] or reverse side of the visible (EM 187/85). Visible and invisible are inseparable terms for Merleau-Ponty, without being coincident (VI 152/200). They are not opposed, but belong to each otherso that we must speak of an invisible of the visible. (VI 247/300) But the relation of visible and invisible also involves an asymmetry. For the invisible is, according to Merleau-Ponty, that which makes visible. This account of the power and generativity of the invisible is clearly illustrated by Merleau-Pontys example of depth in Lil et lEsprit. Depth is not merely an objective and measurable third dimension, but that which generates dimensions. To see in depth is to see material objects in their place despite, or rather because of, the fact that they overlap with each other (EM 180/64). Depth makes possible not only the coexistence of visible things in space, but lived space itself as a diacritical and heterogeneous locality in which distinct objects can appear to, and coexist with, my body. It is from this spatiality that measurable dimensions are abstracted (EM 180/65). But depth itself cannot be seen; what is visible is the play of things one behind the other, movements closer and farther, and shifts within space. What is made visible is thus not a copy of the invisible, for the invisible is not a thing or idea. The invisible is a power of differential creation. It opens the dimension of visibility. It creates diacritical differences within the world and in this way makes the world visiblevision being the discernment of difference in the perceptual field.40 Just as visible and invisible require one another, just as they are different but coexistent terms, so are past and present. To understand the invisible as an invisible of the visible (VI 247/ 300) is hence to understand time as chiasm (W.N. November 1960; VI 267/321). However strange it may seem to describe past and present in these termsto say that the past not only preexists the present but also coexists with and makes present this is Merleau-Pontys position in Le visible et linvisible. The inscription of an immemorial dimension in lifeof a vertical past of institutionresults in a time where, as Merleau-Ponty says, [t]he past and the present are Ineinander, each enveloping-envelopedand that itself is the flesh (VI 268/321). The immemorial appears as a constitutive dimension of the 189

Alia Al-Saji

present and the flesh, just as the invisible opens for us visibility. This is because Merleau-Ponty has come to understand time differently in Le visible et linvisible: not as succession, but as a structure requiring the negativity of pastness to make possible the existence and passage of the present. The present is no longer privileged. Rather, the present appears at the intersection of lines of force and dimensions that are not themselves present, but that make present (VI 114/153). (It is rethought beyond punctuality, as we shall see.) Time before time does not therefore designate a temporally prior origin, an integral and in-itself past. It points, rather, to a time that is the structural condition of all temporalizing movementthe ground of the passage of time as well as the possibility of remembering. In this vein, the immemorial should not simply be understood as a remote past. It is both closer to the present, as the ground that makes it present and allows its passage, and farther from the present, since this ground was never itself present. Drawing on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty describes this ground as an abyss.41 The immemorial past is not a thing or a collection of memories (VI 236/289); it is the constitutive distance or difference, the negativity, that structures time itself. Rather than being comparable to any given object set off in the distance opened up by depth, the immemorial is akin to depth itself.

2.3 Bergsonian Inflections

Like the invisible that is revealed as that which makes visible, Merleau-Ponty seeks within time a negativity that will make possible its organization and its passage. As we saw, MerleauPonty uncovers this verticality in part by interrogating Husserls unthought in The Origin of Geometry; time as chiasm is also Stiftung (VI 267/321). But the understanding of pastness, and even the reading of Husserl, in the later works shows Merleau-Pontys renewed attention to Bergson. That the past is not negativity for Bergson, but virtuality, and that he sometimes speaks of it as though it were in-itself, does not prevent the later Merleau-Ponty from reading Bergsonism as the insinuation of negativity into being or life. 42 We find in Merleau-Ponty the same motives that led Bergson to see duration as coexistence of the past with the present (in the cone of pure memory in Matire et mmoire), after he had theorized it as succession and flow in Les donnes immdiates. 43 What Gilles Deleuze will later call Bergsons paradoxes of time mean that the past must already coexist with the present, already be held within it. 44 In order for the present to pass, there must be both a past of the present that allows it to be retained and recalled, but also a dimension of original pastness that destabilizes the present and ensures its passage. This original or immemorial past preexists the present in general, just as it 190

The Temporality of Life

coexists with and permits the passage of each present. Without this dimension, the present would have no internal reason for passing. The only way for the present to pass, says Bergson, is if it passes while it is presentif the past is given along with the present and internally implicated in it.45 (Hence, Merleau-Ponty will point to the simultaneity of past and present.) But in order for this coexistent dimension to be past and not merely a duplicate of the present that is, this dimension cannot itself be present. It must be instituted along with the present as a past which has never itself been present, different in kind from the present. (Hence, Merleau-Ponty will insist on a difference that internally connects past and present, a chiasm, which is obstacle and connection.)46 For Bergson, this is not a particular, dateable and recollected past, but the virtual element of the past in general. Merleau-Ponty will add another paradox to this Bergsonian picture of time. In the working notes to Le visible et linvisible and in his lectures on La Passivit, we find that both memory and perception require forgetting. The past should not be understood as a container that preserves all memories intact ready to be recalled. Nor is the past reducible to a construct of consciousness. Both conservation and construction fail to address what Merleau-Ponty in La Passivit calls the problem of memory (IP 231). This problem is badly posed if forgetfulness is understood as an inability to remember, or a difficulty to be overcome. Merleau-Pontys innovation comes in seeing forgetting as the solutionas a necessary and original structure of time (IP 256). As we saw with institution, in order for the past to be conserved, it must be forgotten; it must be unconscious (HLP 31; IP 257). Merleau-Ponty notes that it is this inaccessibility of the past that makes it past (IP 257; VI 122/163), so that the past exists in the mode of forgetfulness.47 The error is to believe that the past in general was first consciously present and only then passed. Rather, the past is an originary forgettingimperception or blindspotthat accompanies every present, an immemorial 48 (VI 247/300). The past is already insinuated in every present, as the invisible ground of every perception (VI 194/248). Forgetting is, however, not absolute negationthe erasure of the past as if it never was (IP 256). Forgetting is distance, difference, or transcendence of the past, which means that there is no possibility of coinciding with it in recollection. Only in this way is memory possible according to MerleauPonty: Forgetfulness that is memory, transcendence of the past that drives into me its arrow like a wound, that which separates is also that which unites.49 It is in this sense that Merleau-Ponty, in his reading of Husserlian institution, calls forgetting a secret or noble memory (IP 256; Signs 59/74). Sedimentation, notes Husserl, leaves our capacities and energies free for production (rather 191

Alia Al-Saji

than endlessly engaged in the task of reactivation to secure self-evidence) (HUA 37374). But Husserls use of intemporal formulas in The Origin of Geometry leads to reservations on Merleau-Pontys part (HLP 20, 3032). For the unconditioned general validity [unbedingte Allgemeingltigkeit] that Husserl seeks implies the ability to ultimately overcome forgetfulness (HUA 366, 385). In this regard, the past would be an in-itself origin that could be recovered, or coincided with, in principle. The inability to completely reactivate the past would reflect the limits of our individual capacities and social communication (HUA 375), rather than a structural or ontological element of the past itself. Husserls ambivalenceconceding the necessity of forgetfulness but still desiring coincidence with the entire instituted pastmeans that the fecundity of forgetting is finally elided (HLP 20). It is left to Merleau-Ponty to draw the implications of this Husserlian unthought. Though it is unclear whether he intended to take this route, Merleau-Pontys insistence on the unconscious nature of the past recalls Bergsons concept of pure memory. One may speculate, then, that the Bergsonian past helps Merleau-Ponty save institution from the presence of origins.50 What Bergson calls pure memory [souvenir pur] is not a passive imprint on the mind. Pure memory has a power (puissance), which is not that of efficient causality but of suggestion.51 What it suggests is not a copy of the present from which it was formed, but a different way of living timea particular rhythm of duration or intensity of life that characterizes a plane of pure memory. Pure memories are not atomistic or separable moments, but planes in which the whole past coexists at different levels of tension (corresponding to sheets in Bergsons famous image of a cone) (MM 181). Each plane instantiates a different style or configuration of pastness, a different perspective of the past. Each opens, to use Merleau-Pontys terms, a dimension or level according to which the present is experienced and has meaning. It is thus artificial to speak of individual, dateable pure memories. 52 Pure memory is not the empirical or factual content of the past, but its dimensionality not recollection, but what sets the tone, or style, of our recollections and perceptions. In actualization, the suggestive richness and complexity of this past is reduced in light of utility and indexed, as memory-images, relative to the present (MM 156). What was a fluid and polyphonous networkwhere events interpenetrated and were over-inscribed with meaningis decomposed. But as an interconnected, open, and endlessly detailed whole, the past in general is unconscious; it cannot be represented as such. Pure memory therefore lies outside consciousness and the present; it constitutes an original kind of forgetting. 53 (Deleuze describes it as extra-psychological, an ontological unconscious.)54 192

The Temporality of Life

This unconsciousness points to the peculiar spontaneity that belongs to the pastif, as Stphanie Mnas suggests, we understand spontaneity as a surging forth (surgissement) that lies outside the control of consciousness and hence is not opposed to passivity.55 But, as Merleau-Ponty makes clear, such spontaneity cannot be understood as a cause of consciousness (IP 181). The weight of the past forms another power [une autre puissance] of life, one that he tries to articulate in his later work beyond the dichotomies, not only of subject-object, but also of activity-passivity (IP 251). 56 The past in general reveals a deeper current of life, which incarnates the force of time, not the efficacy of action. As we saw with institution, this past is theorized by Merleau-Ponty as a fecund absence or circumscribed negativity (HLP 20, 29). But the full sense of the fecundity of the past can only be understood by taking forgetting and unconsciousness seriouslyby reconceptualizing the invisible as that which makes visible (as seen above). Merleau-Ponty appeals to Bergson in this context: Bergson: unconscious, lacuna of consciousness, and lacuna which is not only non-being, emptiness, but operative emptiness, active.57 It is by opening a dimension, a register, that the instituted and forgotten past makes a difference for, and in, the present. The key to the generativity of the unconscious thus lies in its invisible dimensionality, its making visible. Forgetting leaves a trace (IP 99; HLP 29) that calls for an indefinite search or elaboration (IP 124), which depends upon [the forgotten] and goes farther. 58 In this regard, the unconscious functions as a pivot (VI 189/243), as hinges of our life (VI 221/274), or articulations of our field (VI 180/234). In Merleau-Pontys later works, I find at least two ways in which this dimension is invisible or unconscious. (i) It is the level according to which one perceives, and as such cannot itself be perceived. What are perceived are figures upon levelsperception requiring, for Merleau-Ponty, the differentiation of a Gestalt structure (VI 189/243). It is in this sense that perception is ignorance of itself, imperception (VI 213/267), for it forgets the openness or dimensionality that makes it possible. This may shed light on Merleau-Pontys description of forgetting as indifferentiation in the working notes (VI 197/250). Although this indifferentiation seems, at first, to simply be the result of a lack of separation (specifically that of figure-ground)a fusion that destroys the pastthe notion of dimension suggests another interpretation. The indifferentiation of the past would not be lack of difference, but the multiplication of differences that connect laterally and nonoppositionally, without selection. The past would be a polysemic and overdetermined matrix, a mixed life that can suggest divergent futures (IP 269) Could this be an attempt to understand difference, the articulation of our field, beyond the frontal structure of the Gestaltand to reinterpret 193

Alia Al-Saji

the Gestalt itself (VI 205207/25860)as winding, or lan vital? (ii) Every level or dimension is the deformation of an already established level; it is divergence with respect to a norm of meaning, difference. 59 The old level is destabilized, redistributed, and reorganized in order to create the new (IP 24950). Before the new level has been established, it therefore appears as a disarticulation of the previous order (VI 197/250). It is in this additional sense that the opening of a new dimension always involves an initial, structural blindness of consciousness (VI 225/278); perception begins in imperception and forgetfulness of what was previously given, only to take this up differently (IP 99). While, as instituted, the past will give the new norm or articulation of the field of experience, as instituting it represents a change of direction (virage) from the already given norm (IP 87)a disarticulation that, in the case of matrix-events [vnements-matrices] (IP 44) or traumatic events (IP 250), registers as nonsense with respect to that norm. This open-ended movement is described by MerleauPonty as decentering and recentering, zigzag, ambiguous passage. 60 It is in this sense that life is a winding [serpentement], he says citing Bergson (VI 194/247). 61 This winding designatesin language that immediately predates that of the flesha lateral, dynamic, and diacritical differentiation. It suggests a transcendence without subject or object, whereby perception is formed in the things and not imposed upon them (VI 194/247).62 Merleau-Pontys clearest account of this probably comes in Lil et lEsprit. Again drawing on Bergson, he understands the latent line in painting as a generating axis, or lan, that institutes a new index of spatial curvature by means of its inflectionrendering things visible through its self-differentiation (EM 183/724). Whether as line-become-level or vector, point-become-center of forces (VI 195/248), or color-becomeneutral lighting (VI 247/301), the winding points to a duration that grounds the process by which dimensions are opened up. It is hence through a certain disorder, which creates a new order, that dimension is installeda process which itself takes time. In the shift, boug, between instituting and instituted, the present is opened up to duration and passage (IP 88); its supposed punctuality and self-presence are shattered. Rethinking the past demands such a reconceptualization of the present, according to Merleau-Ponty (IP 252). The dimensional present, thus understood, is unlocalizable or ungraspable in the forceps of attention (VI 195/249). Its passage cannot be understood serially, as a succession of instants with defined contours that replace one another (VI 184/238). To say that the present passes is to say that it has no locus between the before and the after (HLP 9). But this does not mean that the present is nothing; it has thickness or verticality, since the past is 194

The Temporality of Life

simultaneous with the present, as we have seen (VI 24344/ 297). The living present is a swelling or bulb of timea cycle that Merleau-Ponty understands by means of the Husserlian notion of horizon (VI 184/238): Through the horizon, there is still a double circulation of the past toward the future and the future toward the past (HLP 32). It is in this context that Merleau-Ponty brings together Husserls institution and Bergsons retrograde movement of the true63 (IP 91, 9394). To be precise, the present becomes something only as past for a future; it gets its date only afterward (HLP 31). The futural horizon promises forgetfulness, and conservation, of the present; the productivity of the present as dimension is felt in the future(s) it makes possible. 64 Yet dimension, once instituted, appears to have always preexisted itself (IP 94). This is the retrograde movement by which the dimensional, instituted present is reflected back onto its instituting process, bringing into focus the present as an event. But since the future is divergence with respect to the present, this reflection is also a refraction of sense; the present is not given in-itself. Despite Bergsons hesitations, this noncoincidence is not an illusion for Merleau-Ponty but the structure of meaning by which an event has to become what it is.65

2.4 Life, Flesh, and a Plurality of Invisibles

As a result of this reconceptualization of time, the life of the flesh is not limited to the here and now, to the field of presence of the individual body, but radiates beyond itself (EM 186/81). There is a flesh of time (VI 112/150)a temporalizing movement, without displacement, a movement by vibration or radiation (EM 184/77). Merleau-Ponty notes:
As the formative medium of the object and the subject, [the flesh] is not the atom of being, the hard in itself that resides in a unique place and moment: one can indeed say of my body that it is not elsewhere, but one cannot say that it is here and now in the sense that objects are. (VI 147/193)

The difficulty in rendering this radiation or dimensionality appears in Merleau-Pontys repeated attempts to articulate the flesh: what we are calling flesh, this interiorly worked-over mass, has no name in any philosophy (VI 147/193). Midway between the material individual and the universal idea, though coincident with neither, the flesh comes into contact with Bergsons lan vital (VI 13940/184). The sense of life as winding that we find in the flesh recalls Bergsons philosophy of life in Lvolution cratrice. Like the past in general, life is a virtual multiplicity of tendencies or rhythms, at times incompossible (EC 258/259). Due to this unstable balance of

195

Alia Al-Saji

tendencies, vital impetus is divided between various directions (EC 98/99). In actualization, only some rhythms can come into existence to the detriment of others. Life is in this sense a finite principleone that is blind, since Bergson does not posit a goal to life, but that is also creative. The generativity of life means that it can be conceived under two aspects: as invisible vital impetus and as visible actualizations or offshoots of that impetus. Life is at once a continuous vital force and the discontinuous, material sedimentations of that force. It is at once an instituting lan, or winding, and the instituted dimensions, forgotten along this winding and sedimented in the form of organisms. It is both the drive to see and the eyes that see (EC 9194/92 95).66 Like Merleau-Pontys invisible, life is generative of difference in the visible world; the evolution, or actualization, of life goes toward increased differentiation and divergence according to Bergson (EC 117/118). Like Bergsons concept of life, the flesh appears to overflow the bounds of the present and to hold within its folds the invisible trace of a past which has never been present and the virtual memories of other lines of differentiation, other rhythms or invisibles (EC 118/11920). But the concept of life in Lvolution cratrice also pretends to harmonize these rhythms within the unity of a virtual origin (EC 117/118 19). While the diversity that Bergson describes in the development of lan vital resonates with Merleau-Pontys idea of the flesh, Merleau-Ponty dismisses any original unity that would hold together the invisibles of the flesh, be it virtual or otherwise. We are therefore left, in Merleau-Pontys theory of the flesh, with a heterogeneous multiplicity of invisible dimensions. In this essay, I have pursued the parallel between immemorial past and invisible in Merleau-Pontys later works, and thus avoided relegating the immemorial to the sphere of presence or positivity, to a remote but once present past or a past initself. The immemorial, then, is a kind of invisible, a dimension of invisibility of the flesh. But it is not all the invisible. There is more to the invisible for Merleau-Ponty than the past in general, and in this he differs from Bergson.67 For [t]he originating is not of one sole type, it is not all behind us (VI 124/ 165). And [t]he reversibility that defines the flesh exists in other fields (VI 144/189). Not only is the present also dimensional for Merleau-Ponty, but the flesh is a spatializing-temporalizing vortex (VI 244/297). It is not possible to give an exhaustive list of the invisible, since it is not a homogeneous or univocal dimension.68 The invisible proliferates with the being of which it is the condition and the reverse side. This is reflected in the impossibility of coinciding with the invisible, of holding it with forceps as Merleau-Ponty says, for there is always a further invisible dimension within what we grasp as well as behind it. There is heterogeneity of the invisible, as there is heterogeneity of life and in the flesh for Merleau-Ponty. 196

The Temporality of Life

But there are also ways in which these invisibles intersect, in which the flesh of the visible and the flesh of time come together. Significantly, it is by appealing to the heterogeneous nature of life that the two temporalities of life presented in this essay acting body and fleshcan meet.

3. Conclusion
We began with a conception of life, framed by the activities and interests of the body in the present. We have arrived at an understanding of life, no longer as a field of presence or action, but as flesh inscribing an invisibility or pastness in principle. These two senses of life appear at first to be unbridgeable. Their difference would be insurmountable if it were simply a shift in concepts, a discontinuity between different periods of a philosophy. But the shift and the heterogeneity are here within life itself. This offers us a means of bridging the two concepts not by reducing one to the other, but by situating them within the general impetus of life that holds together incompossible tendencies or directions. Our access to life in Le visible et linvisible came through the immemorial, but Merleau-Ponty offers another route to the concept of life in his later work, a route that proceeds by way of vision. In Bergson se faisant, Merleau-Ponty reads the Bergsonian concept of life as a prehuman or total act of vision (Signs 187/235). Here Merleau-Pontys analysis connects the lan vital of Lvolution cratrice with the discussion of perception in Matire et mmoire (Signs 186/23435). MerleauPonty notes that the main illustration of lan vital is to be found in the example of the formation of the eye in Lvolution cratricewhich is not an arbitrary example. There is continuity between individual perception, as it is presented in Matire et mmoire, and the inner workings of life as a kind of vision. But behind this continuity lies a deeper sense of life than Merleau-Pontys account suggests. The analogy between vision and life is a complex one for Bergson, since they are not only parallel structures or tendencies, but enjoy a relation of part to whole. The description of life as a kind of vision owes to the sense that life has for Bergson in Lvolution cratrice: life is, more than anything else, a tendency to act on inert matter (EC 96/97). He adds: the rle of life is to insert some indetermination into matter (EC 126/127). Action, for Bergson, is not the performance of a predetermined behavior; it involves indetermination and a rudiment of choice (EC 96/97). For this to occur, the possibilities of action of a living body must be marked out in advance in terms of its environment. This is visual perception: the things surrounding my body present to me the outline of my possible actions upon them (EC 96/9798). Vision is thus not an innate principle, but a drive that is immanent to 197

Alia Al-Saji

life as action. However paradoxical it may be, there is a drive within lifea tendency to actionthat carries us away from the virtuality and pastness inscribed in life. Bergson calls this drive attention to life. However, once indetermination is inscribed in the flesh, once a distance or gap is installed between body and world, other lines of development are opened up. Vision is also hesitation and discernment. It is the ability to refrain from immediate action and to take up alternate paths that may no longer obey the imperatives of utility, in other words, to see differently. In this sense, vision can also be affective, intuitive or aesthetic. Most importantly, these paths are opened up because the hesitation, which constitutes vision, allows the virtuality of the past to surge into the present. Useful, actualized memories are then selectively allowed into the present, molding to and deepening our perception of it. But other memories can also contaminate the present, reverberating as traces of a dimension of pastness hitherto forgotten (MM 90). The flow of life is thus sustained by an immemorial depth, which life covers over in its push toward action, but which is recalled when life turns to other ways of seeing. Vision is therefore a figure for both senses of life outlined in this essay: vision is perception in view of action, but vision can also be an auscultation or palpation in depth, a special vision or intuition that glimpses the immemorial dimensionality, invisibility, or winding of life without reducing it to presence (VI 128/170). Indeed, vision is only perception and action by relying upon and forgetting this depth. Both senses of life and of vision are present in Merleau-Pontys texts as they are in Bergsons. 69 It is through this optics that the two senses of life, presented in this essay, can be seen to converge.

Notes
I wish to thank Leonard Lawlor for his insightful and detailed comments on an earlier draft. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Le Fonds qubcois de la recherche sur la socit et la culture and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962); Phnomnologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). Henceforth cited as PhP, with English then French pagination. 2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. C. Lefort, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968); Le visible et linvisible, suivi de notes de travail, tabli par C. Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Henceforth cited as VI, with English then French pagination. 3 In a discussion with Ortega y Gasset in 1951 concerning Diltheys use of the term Leben to express historicity, Merleau-Ponty notes the relative imprecision of the term life. Cf. Lhomme et

198

The Temporality of Life ladversit, in Parcours deux, 19511961 (Paris: Verdier, 2000), 376. 4 If, as Merleau-Ponty notes, [c]oncepts for a philosopher are only nets for catching sense, then the workings of time in his texts will tell us something about the concept(s) of life operative therein. Cf. Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. L. Lawlor and B. Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 53; Notes de cours sur Lorigine de la gomtrie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 64. Henceforth cited as HLP. (The English version will be primarily used.) 5 Henri Bergson, Matire et mmoire: Essai sur la relation du corps lesprit (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1896), 7 and 148. Henceforth cited as MM. Gilles Deleuze calls the past in general a pure past, borrowing the term from Bergsons concept of souvenir pur. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Le bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), 54. I will employ both formulations as equivalent in what follows. 6 Henri Bergson, Lvolution cratrice (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1907), 88; Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998 [1911]), 87. Henceforth cited as EC, with English then French pagination. 7 Here I should add the various texts in which Merleau-Ponty pays homage to Bergson or revises his early, mainly critical, reading: Bergson in the Making, in Signs, trans. R. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964); Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), henceforth cited as Signs, with English then French pagination. loge de la philosophie et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1953); La Nature: Notes, Cours du Collge de France, tabli et annot par D. Sglard (Paris: Seuil, 1995); and La philosophie de lexistence, in Parcours deux, 19511961 (Paris: Verdier, 2000). 8 Though I find recent studies of the explicit comparisons and influences among Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and other authors very useful, my approach differs in that it seeks to use Bergson to develop Merleau-Pontys thought (or unthought, HLP 1415) further. Notable among these recent comparisons are Florence Caeymaex, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson: Les phnomnologies existentialistes et leur hritage bergsonien (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2005), and Mark Muldoon, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur in Search of Time, Self and Meaning (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006). I find inspiration for my own approach in the work of Renaud Barbaras, Ed Casey, and Elizabeth Grosz, who show how Merleau-Ponty can be productively read through Bergson. See Renaud Barbaras, Le tournant de lexprience: Recherches sur la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 3361; Edward S. Casey, Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty, Man and World 17 (1984): 27997; and Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 11329. 9 This is one of Merleau-Pontys famous criticisms of Phnomnologie de la perception: the fact that in part I retained the philosophy of consciousness (W.N. February 1959; VI 183/237). This criticism has been elaborated by several commentators, notably Renaud Barbaras, Le tournant de lexprience, 4446. 10 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (18931917), trans. J. B. Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), and The Origin of Geometry, in The Crisis of European

199

Alia Al-Saji Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 35378, cited as HUA with German pagination. 11 Bergson and Husserl are, of course, not the only authors whom Merleau-Ponty re-reads in his later works. A study of the working notes to Le visible et linvisible and the course notes from the Collge de France from 195455 and 195861 shows that Heidegger and Freud are also important in this regard. My focus on Bergson and Husserl comes from the complex mirroring that characterizes Merleau-Pontys re-reading of these authors and their significance with respect to his understanding of the past. 12 See my manuscript A Past Which Has Never Been Present: Toward an Alternative Theory of the Prepersonal in Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception. 13 Virtual action in the Phnomnologie does not share the Bergsonian or Deleuzian sense of the virtual (a generative, productive, always self-differentiating power). It is more in line with what Bergson calls the possible in La pense et le mouvant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1938), i.e., it is conceived on the basis of the real (10912). 14 Dorothea Olkowski, Merleau-Ponty and Bergson: The Character of the Phenomenal Field, in Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting, ed. V. Fti (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996), 2930. 15 Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl: Twenty Years Later, in Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 28889. 16 [Bergson] a dfini le prsent comme ce sur quoi nous agissons, et nous agissons videmment par notre corps (Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux, 252, translation my own). 17 For the relation between this field of presence and the central problem of the Phnomnologie, that of subjectivity, see John Sallis, Time, Subjectivity, and the Phenomenology of Perception, The Modern Schoolman 48 (May 1971): 34357. (Merleau-Ponty famously criticized this philosophy of subjectivity later in his career (VI 200/ 253). But decisive, in my view, is how the Phnomnologies desire for subjectivity as presence limits its ability to think the originary nature of the past.) 18 As evidenced by Merleau-Pontys close reading of that text in the Temporalit chapter of the Phnomnologie. 19 The latter option appears as Merleau-Pontys provisional solution in Phnomnologie de la perception: Forgetting is therefore an act; I keep the memory at arms length, as I look past a person whom I do not wish to see (PhP 162/189). 20 Cf. Barbaras, Le tournant de lexprience, 4142; Leonard Lawlor, Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 8990. 21 [L]analyse laquelle Bergson sest livr dans Matire et mmoire, par exemple, montre que si nous considrons le temps, il faut considrer, dans le temps en particulier, la dimension du prsent (Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux, 252, translation my own). 22 It also reflects, as Elizabeth Grosz points out, Merleau-Pontys anxiety with respect to Bergsonian influence (Time Travels, 116). 23 There is a location in Phnomnologie de la perception that offers

200

The Temporality of Life such an opening: Merleau-Pontys reference to a past which has never been present at the end of the Sentir chapter (PhP 242/280). Although it foreshadows discussions of the invisible and unconscious in later texts, the prepersonal temporality opened up by this reference remains marginal to the dominant current of bodily lifethe primacy of perception and actionthat runs through the Phnomnologie. I analyze this temporality elsewhere (see my paper A Past Which Has Never Been Present: Toward an Alternative Theory of the Prepersonal in Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception). 24 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, trans. C. Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 188; Lil et lEsprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 86. Henceforth cited as EM, with English then French pagination. 25 The texts concerned are Le visible et linvisible and Lil et lEsprit, as well as some of the published notes from Merleau-Pontys lectures at the Collge de France, in particular Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, La Nature, and LInstitution, La Passivit, Notes de cours au Collge de France, 19541955 (Paris: Belin, 2003), cited as IP. 26 Also VI 128/170. Merleau-Ponty is drawing here on Bergsons La pense et le mouvant, 4. The relevant passage is referred to by Merleau-Ponty in a working note from May 20, 1959 (VI 193/247). 27 More generally, the importance of Husserl for the later MerleauPonty has been demonstrated by Marc Richir, Le sens de la phnomnologie dans Le visible et linvisible, Esprit 66 (June 1982): 12444. Also see Claude Lefort in an essay written after MerleauPontys death collected in Sur une Colonne Absente: crits autour de Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 844. For an excellent account of Bergsons growing influence on Merleau-Ponty (especially on his later critique of Husserlian eidetic phenomenology), see Barbaras, Le tournant de lexprience, 3361, 7173. 28 Other important influences for the later works are, of course, Freud (cf. LInstitution, La Passivit and Working notes to VI, e.g., VI 243/296) and Heidegger (cf. Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology and Notes des cours au Collge de France, 19581959 et 19601961, tabi par S. Mnas [Paris: Gallimard, 1996]). The later MerleauPontys reading of Heidegger is a complex question, which I must defer to others (cf. Richir, Le sens de la phnomnologie, 13738, 14042; Lawlor, Foreword, HLP). Interestingly, this reading is itself mediated by his interpretations of Husserl and Bergson (for Bergson, Notes des cours, 195859, 103 and, for Husserl, HLP 5354). 29 Renaud Barbaras analyzes Merleau-Pontys critical re-reading of Husserls early theory of time in The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Pontys Ontology, trans. T. Toadvine and L. Lawlor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 21823, especially 219. Mauro Carbone presents this re-reading in light of Merleau-Pontys reading of Proust, see The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Pontys A-Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 113. 30 For the importance of self-presence to Husserl, see Rudolf Bernet, Is the Present Ever Present? Research in Phenomenology 12 (1982): 105106, and, of course, Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phnomne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 67. 31 For a detailed analysis of Merleau-Pontys course LInstitution, see Robert Vallier, Institution: The Significance of Merleau-Pontys 1954 Course at the Collge de France, Chiasmi International 7 (2006):

201

Alia Al-Saji 281302; while for Merleau-Pontys reading of The Origin of Geometry, see Franoise Dastur, Chair et Langage: Essais sur Merleau-Ponty (Fougres: Encre Marine, 2001), 17790. 32 Le temps est le modle mme de linstitution (IP 36, translation my own). 33 Whether this applies to every present or only to those presents we may designate events (vnements-matrices, IP 44, or even traumatic events, IP 250) is a more complex question. 34 For dimension in the later Merleau-Ponty, see Barbaras, Being of Phenomenon, 17481, and Carbone, Thinking of the Sensible, 3637. 35 Cf. Signs 173/218. What appears mentioned in passing by Husserl (Selbstvergessenheit in Ideas II) is read by Merleau-Ponty as a structure. Marc Richir describes this reading as a fecund infidelity that draws on Husserls concrete analyses (Le sens de la phnomnologie, 136). (Cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer [Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989], 55.) 36 Renaud Barbaras elaborates this idea of constitutive distance in Merleau-Pontys later philosophy in Le tournant de lexprience, 5356. 37 In a working note from May 20, 1959, Merleau-Ponty criticizes Bergson for being conceptually unable to sustain a genuine difference in kind: Inadequacy of the Bergsonian representation of a soul that conserves everything (this makes it impossible that the perceived imaginary difference be a difference in nature) (VI 194/247). This is a markedly ungenerous reading of Bergson. But it shows, in reverse, what Merleau-Ponty is trying to arguethe true difference in kind being that of chiasm. Moreover, in Notes de cours, 196061, MerleauPonty describes the relation of past and present as [c]ohsion par lincompossibilit, again criticizing Bergson for not going far enough (199). 38 For an analysis of the reversibility of time, see Glen Mazis, Merleau-Ponty and the Backward Flow of Time: The Reversibility of Temporality and the Temporality of Reversibility in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. T. W. Busch and S. Gallagher (Albany: SUNY, 1992), 5368. I would add to this, however, that time as chiasm must be understood not only in terms of reversibility but also irreversibility. 39 For the invisible in the later works, see Marc Richir, Phnomnes, Temps et Etres: Ontologie et phnomnologie (Grenoble: J. Millon, 1987), 8285. 40 Although depth appears as first dimension in Merleau-Pontys account, other differentiationssuch as color, line, Gestalt, and movementalso contribute to the deflagration of Being that renders vision and visibility possible (EM 180/65). 41 For Merleau-Pontys appropriation of Heideggers Abgrund, see HLP 49, 52. In Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty is reading closely Martin Heideggers Language (Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter [New York: Harper & Row, 1971]). There, Merleau-Ponty uses Bergsons famous argument about nothingness to show that the Heideggerian abyss is not a lack of Being, but more than Being (HLP 49). (For the play between ground and abyss in Merleau-Pontys thought, see Rudolf Bernet, La vie du sujet:

202

The Temporality of Life Recherches sur linterprtation de Husserl dans la phnomnologie [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994], 169.) 42 Le vrai sens de la philosophie bergsonienne nest pas tant dliminer lide de nant que de lincorporer lide dtre (MerleauPonty, La Nature, 97). 43 Henri Bergson, Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1889). 44 Deleuze, Le bergsonisme, 5357. 45 Henri Bergson, Lnergie spirituelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1919), 13031. 46 The full text reads: Le temps nest pas enveloppant et pas envelopp: il y a de moi au pass une paisseur qui nest pas faite dune srie de perspectives ni de la conscience de leur rapport, qui est obstacle et liaison (Proust) (IP 36, above translation my own). 47 Le pass existe dans le mode de loubli (IP 272, translation my own). 48 On originary forgetting, see Bernhard Waldenfels, Time Lag: Motifs for a Phenomenology of the Experience of Time, Research in Phenomenology 30 (2000): 115. 49 Oubli qui est mmoire, transcendance du pass qui plante en moi sa flche comme une blessure, ce qui spare est aussi ce qui unit (IP 258, translation my own). 50 Merleau-Pontys reference to partial coincidence in the context of the Bergsonian past in Le visible et linvisible, and his reading of Husserl and Bergson together there, seem to support this (VI 122/163). 51 Bergson, Lnergie spirituelle, 99, 133. 52 Il na pas de date et ne saurait en avoir; cest du pass en gnral, ce ne peut tre aucun pass en particulier (Ibid., 137). 53 In this regard, I disagree with Rudolf Bernets characterization of Bergson as having no genuine sense of forgetting (A Present Folded Back on the Past (Bergson), Research in Phenomenology 35 [2005]: 5576). Though Bernets phenomenological reading of Bergson offers substantial insightin particular into the relation of perception and memory (6668)it remains that by identifying the pure past with the virtual consciousness of it, Bergson is assimilated to philosophies of consciousness (63, 7374). (One question would be whether MerleauPontys description of forgetting as imperception is open to the same criticism.) My reading of pure memory thus comes closer to Leonard Lawlors analysis in The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (London: Continuum, 2003), 5459. A consequence (which I do not have the space to develop) would be the following: If forgetting is also a kind of death, then life for the later Merleau-Ponty must already be intertwined with death. (For my reading of Bergson, see The Memory of Another Past: Bergson, Deleuze and a new theory of time, Continental Philosophy Review 37(2004): 20339.) 54 Le bergsonisme, 50, 69. In his study of memory in La Passivit, Merleau-Ponty was already concerned with the philosophical, or ontological, significance of forgetting (IP 167). 55 Stphanie Mnas, Passivit et cration: Merleau-Ponty et lart moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), 134. 56 For an elaboration of how Merleau-Pontys time before time contributes to overcoming the dichotomy of activity-passivity, see Carbone, Thinking of the Sensible, 1213. 57 Bergson: inconscient, lacune de la conscience, et lacune qui nest

203

Alia Al-Saji pas seulement non-tre, vide, mais vide oprant, actif (IP 222n, translation my own). 58 To quote the full text: La sdimentation est cela: trace de loubli et par l mme appel une pense qui table sur lui et va plus loin (IP 99, above translation my own). 59 [Ce sens interne] est cart par rapport une norme de sens, diffrence (IP 41, translation my own). 60 [D]centration et recentration, zigzag, passage ambigu (IP 87, translation my own). 61 Bergson, La pense et le mouvant, 264. Elizabeth Grosz sees in this winding the distinctly Bergsonian inflection of Merleau-Pontys later ontology (Time Travels, 12627). 62 Mauro Carbone describes this as complying with, from within, the showing of the sensible itself, or seconder (Thinking of the Sensible, 37). See also Mauro Carbone, La visibilit de linvisible: Merleau-Ponty entre Czanne et Proust (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2001), 177 and 185. 63 Cf. Barbaras, Being of Phenomenon, 99n. 64 It is in this way that the newness of the present is given: as negativity, experienced in opening up the future, or Vorhabe (HLP 21), not in the positivity of presence (VI 267/32021). 65 The full note reads: [C]e qui est et demande tre: il a devenir ce quil est (IP 36, margin, above translation my own). 66 For vision is opened up as a diacritical dimension through the two eyes (cf. VI 217/270). 67 There are other invisibles in Bergsons texts, e.g., unperceived spatial objects, but these play a minor role (MM 15861). 68 See Vronique Fti, Visions Invisibles: Philosophical Explorations (Albany: SUNY, 2003), 74. 69 Bergson theorizes concrete perception, or attentive recognition, as a form of action and contrasts this to intuition, which detaches from action and sees life in terms of dynamic tendencies and rhythms of duration (EC 17677/178). Merleau-Ponty distinguishes between objectifying, profane vision and the painters vision, which sees the visible from within and expresses, instead of representing, the work of invisibility (EM 165/25).

References
Al-Saji, Alia. A Past Which Has Never Been Present: Toward an Alternative Theory of the Prepersonal in Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception. Manuscript. Barbaras, Renaud. The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Pontys Ontology, trans. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. . Le tournant de lexprience: Recherches sur la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1998. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998 [1911]. . Lnergie spirituelle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1919. . Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1889.

204

The Temporality of Life Bergson, Henri. Lvolution cratrice. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1907. . Matire et mmoire: Essai sur la relation du corps lesprit. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1896. . La pense et le mouvant. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1938. Bernet, Rudolf. Is the Present Ever Present? Research in Phenomenology 12 (1982): 85112. . A Present Folded Back on the Past (Bergson). Research in Phenomenology 35 (2005): 5576. . La vie du sujet: Recherches sur linterprtation de Husserl dans la phnomenologie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994. Caeymaex, Florence. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bergson: Les phnomnologies existentialistes et leur hritage bergsonien. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2005. Carbone, Mauro. The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Pontys APhilosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004. . La visibilit de linvisible: Merleau-Ponty entre Czanne et Proust. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2001. Casey, Edward S. Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty. Man and World 17 (1984): 27997. Dastur, Franoise. Chair et Langage: Essais sur Merleau-Ponty. Fougres: Encre Marine, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles. Le bergsonisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966. Derrida, Jacques. La voix et le phnomne: Introduction au problme du signe dans la phnomnologie de Husserl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. Fti, Vronique. Visions Invisibles: Philosophical Explorations. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989. . On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (18931917), trans. J. B. Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. . The Origin of Geometry in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970, 35378. Lawlor, Leonard. Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. . The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics. London: Continuum, 2003. Lefort, Claude. Sur une Colonne Absente: crits autour de MerleauPonty. Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1978. Mazis, Glen. Merleau-Ponty and the Backward Flow of Time: The Reversibility of Temporality and the Temporality of Reversibility in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. Thomas

205

Alia Al-Saji W. Busch and Shaun Gallagher. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992, 5368. Mnas, Stphanie. Passivit et cration: Merleau-Ponty et lart moderne. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. loge de la philosophie et autres essais. Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1953. . Eye and Mind, trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964, 15990. . Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, Including Texts by Edmund Husserl, ed. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002. . LInstitution, La Passivit, Notes de cours au Collge de France, 19541955. Paris: ditions Belin, 2003. . La Nature: Notes, Cours du Collge de France, tabli et annot par D. Sglard. Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1995. . Notes de cours sur Lorigine de la gomtrie de Husserl, suivi de Recherches sur la phnomnologie de Merleau-Ponty, sous la direction de Renaud Barbaras. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. . Notes des cours au Collge de France, 19581959 et 19601961, tabi par Stphanie Mnas. Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1996. . Lil et lEsprit. Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1964. . Parcours deux, 19511961. Paris: Editions Verdier, 2000. . Phnomnologie de la perception. Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1945. . Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. . Signes. Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1960. . Signs, trans. R. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. . Le visible et linvisible, suivi de notes de travail, tabli par C. Lefort. Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1964. . The Visible and the Invisible, ed. C. Lefort, trans. A. Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Muldoon, Mark. Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur in Search of Time, Self and Meaning. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006. Olkowski, Dorothea. Merleau-Ponty and Bergson: The Character of the Phenomenal Field. In Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting, ed. Vronique Fti. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996. Richir, Marc. Le sens de la phnomnologie dans Le visible et linvisible. Esprit 66 (June 1982): 12444. . Phnomnes, Temps et tres: Ontologie et phnomnologie. Grenoble: Jrme Millon, 1987. Sallis, John. Time, Subjectivity, and the Phenomenology of Perception. The Modern Schoolman 48 (May 1971): 34357. Vallier, Robert. Institution: The Significance of Merleau-Pontys 1954 Course at the Collge de France. Chiasmi International 7 (2006): 281302. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Time Lag: Motifs for a Phenomenology of the Experience of Time. Research in Phenomenology 30 (2000): 10719. Young, Iris Marion. Throwing Like a Girl: Twenty Years Later. In Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Donn Welton. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1998, 28690.

206