people, the all-encompassing vibration of the bass, even the feel of the grainy
dirt on my palms when I sit down on the floor for a rest.
(Catherine 1998)Perception: the hidden depth of fleshAn elaboration of the concept of the tacit cogito, the ontology of the flesh was
developed in opposition to traditional ontologies that presuppose ‘a bifurcation of
being into disjunct and mutually exclusive spheres of immanence (the sphere of
consciousness, subjectivity...) and transcendence (the sphere of things,
objectivity...)’ (Dillon 1997:154). Hovering ambiguously between dualism and
monism, flesh is a phenomenological ontology that holds that all dichotomies are
actually subtended by an encompassing unity that makes difference not only
possible, but also necessarily interdependent. A fabric of ‘divergence and non-
coincidence’ (Grosz 1994:100), the flesh interweaves subjects and objects, bodies
and their world, into an unfolding and dynamic unity permeated with difference
and alterity. All things, whether the ‘visibles’ of bodies and objects or the ‘invisibles’
of subjectivity and thought, interweave and intersect within a flesh that presents
itself to us as the world’s perceptible surface.
Unifying perception and existence through its thesis of reversibility, the ontology
of flesh states simply that nothing, no one, can perceive without first being
perceptible:
the flesh of the world perceives itself through our flesh which is one with it.
Just as the worldly thing must touch my body for my body to touch it, so, in
general, must my perception of the world be correlated with my own
perceptibility.
(Dillon 1997:105)Hinged on the critical and self-evident realization that perception requires distance
—that there must be a gap between the perceiver and the perceived— the thesis of
reversibility requires an inherent alterity within the flesh: subjects and objects must
be distinct, separate; they cannot coincide. At the same time, though, for them to
‘perceive’ one another they must also exist within the same flesh, the same world.
It is ultimately this distance, or chiasm, that allows us to recognize Merleau-Ponty’s
approach as a philosophy of depth: for while one might be likely to examine the
ontology of flesh as a philosophy of exteriority, of surface phenomena, perception
requires a distance through the depth of flesh’s ‘invisible’ underside. Not a pure play
of superficial phenomena, the flesh has depth: folding over itself to create ‘hollows’
and ‘enclosures’, the flesh creates ‘invisibles’ such as the mind, thought and
language, fleshy interiorities that are irrevocably embodied.
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