Mauro Carbone

The Mythical Time of the Ideas: Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze as Readers of Proust

Thus begins one of the densest working notes from The Visible and the Invisible, dated April, 1960 and entitled “‘Indestructible’ past, and intentional analytic – and ontology.” Here we find Merleau-Ponty rendering the Husserlian notion of “Stiftung” as “initiation,” which designates, according to him, “the unlimited fecundity of each present which, precisely because it is singular and passes, can never stop having been and thus being universally ...”. Therefore, this present has opened up, once and for all, a “dimension” pregnant with promises and anticipations. And it is precisely this “initiation” which is defined in another passage from The Visible and the Invisible as “the opening of a dimension that can never again be closed, the establishment of a level in terms of which every other experience will henceforth be situated” (VI 198/151) This passage, which refers to Proust’s Recherche, continues by stating that: “the idea is this level, this dimension ... it is the invisible of this world ... the Being of this being” (VI 198/151). In order to better understand the implications of such a conception, it may be useful to refer to a book by Maurizio Ferraris entitled Estetica razionale. As a matter of fact, what Ferraris specifically defines as “the chiasm between empirical and transcendental”, i.e. “the empirical genesis of the transcendental”, seems to be already implied in Merleau-Ponty’s above formulation. What Merleau-Ponty describes seems in other words to configure itself as an empirical – not empiricistic – initiation to the transcendental, which does not exist prior to experience, but finds in our openness to experience the condition of its opening, hence revealing that openness as “the transcendental condition of the transcendental” itself. With respect to experience, then, the transcendental can in fact be defined – in MerleauPonty’s terms – as “the invisible of this world” and, as such, it transcends experience according to that “transcendence of the same type as that in

The Time of Half-Sleep: Merleau-Ponty between Husserl and Proust

While Proust’s Recherche interested Merleau-Ponty throughout his career, the progressive development of this interest raised questions that led him to deepen his own thought. In the Phenomenologie de la perception, first of all, this interest is concentrated on the “body’s function in remembering.” In fact, Merleau-Ponty’s observations on this subject, like Proust’s, reveal a tendency to accentuate the corporeal tonality of temporal experience in comparison with Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. But at this stage of Merleau-Ponty’s meditation, the difference between his perspective and that of Husserl is not yet explicit. Such a difference is thematized and developed in the last phase of Merleau-Ponty’s thought on the basis of motifs of reflection provided once again by Proust’s Recherche, leading him to a critique of Husserl’s analysis of temporality as well as the ontology that subtends it.