themselves in the neo-Cartesianisms of empiricism or intellectualism, no Western
philosopher has truly escaped solipsism because they have all emphasized the mind,
the cogito—with the exception, Dillon contends, of Merleau-Ponty.
Resonating with the work of Lacan, Merleau-Ponty’s vision of psychogenesis
depends as well on a mirror-stage through which the disordered perceptions of the
infant’s body are unified into a coherent whole. In concordance with Lacan that the
period before the ego is a time of ‘indistinction of perspectives, [in] which the mine
—alien or self—other distinction is absent’ (ibid.:119), Merleau-Ponty specifically
understood this period, which he called syncretic sociability, as a ‘first phase, which
we call pre-communication, in which there is not one individual over against
another but rather an anonymous collectivity, an undifferentiated group life’
(Merleau-Ponty 1964:119). Agreeing as well that the thematic structures of
consciousness arise out of this cognitive bedrock, Merleau-Ponty does depart from
Lacan in that he emphasizes perception over language:
to recognize his image in the mirror is for [the baby] to learn that there can be
a viewpoint taken on him.... By means of the image in the mirror he becomes
capable of being a spectator of himself. Through the acquisition of the
specular image the child notices that he is visible, for himself and for others....
The mirror image makes possible a contemplation of self.
(Merleau-Ponty 1964:136)Whereas Lacan emphasizes the specular image as a deceptive alienation that governs
the child’s entire psychic development, Merleau-Ponty posits it in terms of visibility
and the child’s emergent conceptualizations of space.
For Merleau-Ponty, though, the body image, otherwise known as the corporeal
schema, is more than just the barrier between the interior and exterior. It is the very
ground of intersubjectivity. For since ‘we have no idea of a mind that would not be
doubled with a body, that would not be established on this ground’ (Merleau-Ponty
1968:259), the corporeal schema itself, the body image, is representative of what it
means to be a human being, thus resituating the search for other minds as a search
for other bodies.
Encrusted with libidinal and cultural inscriptions, with fictions of identity and
power, the corporeal schema, according to Merleau-Ponty, determines the extent of
the individual’s ‘I-can’, i.e. the range of their movements and actions as psychically
and socially proscribed. Fluid and malleable, open to the incorporation of
instruments, clothing and prostheses, the body image in its plasticity is
conformative to the world, enabling us to develop a practical relationship to objects
and situations.^6 Synaesthestic, it allows the possibility of voluntary action inasmuch
as it ‘unifies and coordinates postural, tactile, kinaesthetic, and visual sensations so
that these are experienced as the sensations of a subject coordinated into a single
space’ (Grosz 1994:83).
What is crucial here is that the body possesses inherent corporeal knowledges,
awarenesses of its own kinaesthetic abilities and conformative relationships to the
THE FLESH OF RAVING 115