ABSTRACT:

There are many positions defending Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as a way of

conceiving an ontology. This paper argues that not only did he posed an ontology of a
certain, unique, style. Rather, I say that his ontology –or theory of being- is a way of giving
abnormality a value into his phenomenological equation: that reversibility and chiasmic
experience is, by definition, a primordial two-fold way of understanding the world and
being affected. Sense is both given and posited in a fleshly nature. Also, that in order to
speak about wild-being, one needs to take into account a precise understanding of being’s
structure and its behavior that traditional ontologies do not necessarily possess. Moreover,
various phenomena such as promiscuity, artistic creation and passivity come into play to
depict the so-called abnormal philosophy we are discussing alongside Maurice Merleau-
Ponty.
KEYWORDS: Phenomenology, ontology, Merleau-Ponty, reversibility, wild-being,
affection.

An abnormal theory of being: promiscuity, reversibility and verticality as ways

of feeling radically affected.

Bear with me because, knowingly, the title of this discussion is quite confusing to
anyone knowledgeable on these matters at first sight. I quite understand, knowingly, that to
use abnormal in the common sense means “deviated” or even “ill-minded”. This is surely not
the sense in which we talk of abnormality here. Also, that the abnormal here will emphasize
a characteristic of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, in which the radical affirmation is to
preserve an opening where ontology comports to a fleshly way of being affected. A rather
certain ambiguity must be preserved.
Merleau-Ponty himself insists in opting for ambiguity, as a philosophical method,
instead of clear, straightforward, assertion. In this way, our claim will be that the actual
abnormality of his theory of being resides in keeping up with this promise: to remain openly
and blatantly ambiguous, in order to let this or that appear as they are and, even more, to be
affected as we would. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological style –let’s say an attitude- that
often applies metaphors and imagination experiments to transport us to the unknown
questionings of the flesh, brute-being and a world of encroaching, encompassing,
landscapes, is fundamentally ambiguous in its strategy.
Agreeing with Alphonse de Waelhens, who noted that philosophies emerging from
a Cartesian or Spinozian background can only derive in positions giving weight or defending
either the in-itself or the for-itself1, our task here is to remain with an untethered –perhaps

1Alphonse de Waelhens, “Une philosophie de l’ambiguité”. La structure du comportment. Paris : Les Presses
universitaires de France, 1967, p. viii.
jolted- attitude. Of course Waelhens referred to his own contemporary French context of
ontological discussion: Both Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and, Sartre’s respectively inspired L’etre
et le neant landed in these categories; both texts were solutions that tried to respond to these
so-called ontological arrangements deriving from either Descartes or Spinoza. However, de
Waelhens argues that in Merleau-Ponty, one can truly find a defense of ambiguity, not as a
binary way of knowing, but as an affirming and possible way to describe, philosophically,
the true nature of our world. In these terms I argue for an abnormal theory of being which in
my perspective is the goal for Merleau-pontian reflections.
It is not coincidental that Merleau-Ponty’s attempt for an ontology grounded on the
flesh stuck in his mind until his unfortunate death in 1961. Even in his posthumously famous
Le visible et l’invisble, it is easy to find tracks that lead us to believe so. As he asserts in a work
note from May, 1960 that ontology must be defined in a kind of sedimentation of
structuration, he argues that:
“Being is the "place" where the "modes of consciousness" are inscribed as structurations of Being (a
way of thinking oneself within a society is implied in its social structure), and where the structurations of
Being are modes of consciousness. The in itself-for itself integration takes place not in the absolute
consciousness, but in the Being in promiscuity. The perception of the world is formed in the world, the test for
truth takes place in Being.” 2

The beginning of this kind of thinking might be grounded at the very start of his post-
Phenomenology of Perception’s research and his breaking point with Sartrean
existentialism. In his trip to Mexico, where he presented two conferences on the Other,
L’Autrui, Merleau-Ponty shared his first explicit treatments on the concept of encroachment,
a phenomenon that already include a mixing of fleshly and socio-historical components. The
main point, however, for thinking being in an “abnormal” way comes from that intertwining.
Assuming this kind of declaration, the unusual wordings grow more deeply. What
are we to find in an ontology that values ambiguity, reversibility and pre-given, structural,
meaning into being? And to which point reversibility is fundamental for understanding
affectivity? The main goal of this paper will be to answer these two questions while
proposing that an ontology of being, in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, will only operate at the
fleshly level of worldly interactions.
One example in which I find some answers about affectivity is promiscuity.
Emmanuel de Saint-Aubert explains that promiscuity in Merleau-Ponty’s work is at the
basis of becoming an embodied being, due to the fact that, when we act upon our bodily
desires, we disclose a tendency of encroachment to and fro each other.3 This tendency,
merely physical at the beginning (biological perhaps), is dimensional and it includes our
unconscious drives, our reveries and our memories. To be promiscuous is not to be lacking
of moral grounds to act towards others in intimacy, but rather a propensity of human beings,
as fleshly existing, to appear nude to others. Nudity is, however, not merely physical but

2Maurice Merleua-Ponty. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1969, p. 253.
3Vid. Emmanuel de Saint-Aubert. La « promiscuité » Merleau-Ponty à la recherche d’une psychanalyse
ontologique”, Archives de Philosophie 2006/1 (Tome 69), pp. 12-13
rather metaphorical, and it reminds us of a primordial opening as the first characteristic of
our embodied natures. We are bore naked; we are born bare. Not strangely and rather
curiosly enough, the word promiscuous has its own description in its etymological origin
where pro in Latin stands as to put forward and miscous to mix or blend many apparently
dissonant elements into one thing.
The very possibility of accessing a community or Others, in general, resides in this
type of promiscuity. More deeply, it would imply observing our ontological basis as non-
static, rather, dynamically wandering about and roaming ecstatically. Being promises an
opening to other dimensions and also, it remains itself a dimension. This opening –
promiscuity as an ontologically grounded dimensionality of human beings- makes possible
a connection to what Merleau-Ponty calls “brute”, or “savage” being, in various places along
his oeuvre.
Slightly distant from giving a restrictive definition of <<brute being>>, Merleau-Ponty
appeals to a description of immanence of being that has three characteristics: 1) it doesn’t
show itself complete, it is always partial; it is partly visible, partly invisible: it is dimensional;
2) this dimensionality opens up not only horizontally, côte à côte amongst other beings, but
“vertically”4 or rooted up, it possesses a particular historicity, a provenance, yet this is always
in relation-from and not only in relation-to other beings. In other words, being carries a
common past opened by-and-to others; 3) Thus, being opens up a necessary reference “[to] a
field of experience”5. The field is not worked out or finished, it is always re-enacting
(Nachvollzug) and moreover, being acquires its most relevant characteristic, it ensures its own
existence because it is reversible. Reversibility here is the most abnormal of all
characteristics Merleau-Ponty attributes being because, by securing a double positioning,
being appears, always, as a re-enacted active-passive field of dimensionality. Therefore, this
immanence is not understood traditionally, it is an ambiguous property of being that is
revealed yet, at the same time, secured. I think Nietzsche had a similar view on savage being
as, towards his work, The Gay Science, he affirms that our intimate reality is to remain a
dancing, jolting, being. A philosophy that deals with a brute being, Merleau-Ponty says, “will
not admit a preconstituted world, a logic, except for having seen them arise from our
experience of brute being, which is as it were the umbilical cord of our knowledge and the
source of meaning for us”6.
What the latter means is that brute being –otherwise called vertical or wild- shows
itself as belonging to a different logic: its disclosure is incomplete; given its constitution is
layered out, sedimented, and moreover superposed. At the same time ‘it is and it is not’. The
duality or ambiguity of its nature makes brute being comport itself as wild: it is not
graspable, nor seizable, not subject to our disposition yet it is defining in our perception; it
is sneaky, and in being fleeting it ensures its remaining; in its ambiguity, it shows up to us.
Yet it is our only guarantee to pertain to a world, as an umbilical relation, that never ceases

4 Merleau-Ponty, op. cit., 1969, p. 178

5Ibid, p. 110.
6 Ibid, p. 157.
to exist during our lives, because “being” is, according to Merleau-Ponty, always rooted in
the incarnated experience that we are.
The abnormal being, brute or wild, that Merleau-Ponty pontificates for a new
ontology based in perception and, more truly, to experience and thusly grounded in our
carnal existence, always exists only in the corner of our eye. In The Eye and the Spirit, he
mentions this double nature of being for vision:
“All my movements in principle appear in a corner of my landscape, they are shown on the
map of the visible. All that I see in principle is within my reach, at least within reach of my eyes,
marked on the map of "I can". Each of the two cards is complete. The visible world and that of my
motor projects are all parts of the same Being.”7

The fleeting nature of being is, presumably, one that grants its existence by linking
itself to our active-passive capacity to superpose the “I can”, the realm of possibility, to the
actuality of my active sight. This double-nature feature is, in principle, what reversibility
implies for a theory of being. Along with Merleau-Ponty, one cannot entirely acquire a
definitive, immutable, ontology. In fact, the ambiguity and reversibility are at the heart of his
descriptions not due a lack of comprehensive power, rather due a necessity to respect how
being is presented to us. This implies, obviously, to let our subjective self to embrace its own
reversibility, like in promiscuity, in a random, playful, reaching out onto being.
Brute being heeds back to a historical and contextual constitution. Also it obeys a
physical and sometimes biological setting. Brute being is pure innate creation, yet it is
construed to remain veiled in its own development. Brute being is purely a layered
structuration. Let us think in a living plant that shows its flowers at the middle of the spring
while hiding its whole functional root system, the circulation of its sap, its metabolic
processes, its signification in post-industrial western societies, its individual history of being
located there, etc. Our experience hides all of the latter to give way to the former: that the
tree is blooming in the spring. As Merleau-Ponty advances in this kind of description of
brute or savage being, he resembles more to the rizomatic thinking of Deleuze and Guattari.
One of the reasons for defending ambiguity is to remain open to the intertwining or
the interplay of the layers that either are constitutive or constituted, touching and touched,
effected and affected. How reversibility, verticality and promiscuity affect us?
In chapter four of The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty attempts to
define a philosophical method to reveal the true essence of brute being. Thereafter he
proposes to deal the structure of this reversible being by using the notion of the chiasmic
flesh. However, the notion of flesh is multiple and it does not account for an ontology in the
traditional sense. From Plato to Kant, ontology has tended to fixate being by using logical
categories, epistemic restrictions or even bounding sense and being. Not many philosophers
have recognized the value of ambiguity and openness, and the great majority are most
definitely post-Kantian; think of Husserl and Heidegger’s account of intentionality and

7
L’œil et l’esprit Paris : Les Éditions Gallimard, 1964, 95 pp.
Dasein ontological structuration. In this same thread of thinking, Merleau-Ponty tries to add
up a notion of reversibility to propose a renewed ontology: the concept of the flesh.
Thusly, flesh is entanglement -rapport to the world-, but it is also personal sensation
and bodily desire, personal affection. In Merleau-Ponty’s words, the “flesh is not matter, in
the sense of corpuscles of being which would add up or continue on one another to form
beings”8 it is an institutive phenomenon that makes the entanglement more complex; and
also the “flesh of the world (the "quale") is indivision of this sensible Being that I am and all
the rest which feels itself (se sent) in me, pleasure-reality indivision”9, meaning that the flesh
only functions as a reversible principle in which any act is correlated with a passive
reciprocal relationship. In Alphonso Lingis view “[t]he world is my flesh inasmuch as it is
the visible seer, the audible hearer, the tangible touch—the sensitive sensible: inasmuch as
in it is accomplished an equivalence of sensibility and sensible thing.”10. The insistence of
Merleau-Ponty is to think of flesh as a dimensional this11. In its dimensionality, brute being
recovers its genetic depth, its ontological status and its encompassing reach. Here the
emphasis changes, and the ontology becomes more abnormal than ever: rather than taking
about regions of being –in an Husserlian fashion-, the highlight is put in the relationship my
brute being has with everything, that is, my body understood as a universal this. The position
now becomes important, not only spatially speaking, but as a temporal determination. In its
nature, flesh is an affected field.
Merleau-Ponty’s abnormal theory of being is therefore a kind of ontology that values
reversibility as the main source of entanglement and, therefore, of being affected. The so-
called flesh is this: the transcendence of the subject-object dichotomy. Affection is
understood now as the moment where the world and our flesh are knitted together.
Reversibility preserves ambiguity and, by granting a depth, a verticality, a rooting up, and it
leaves being open to interpretation, as a matter of expression, and likewise grounded on a
temporal precedence. Promiscuity has a similar function to reversibility as it grants a being
that is always in its savage or brute event determination. It is indeterminacy in its oscillating
determinacy. Promiscuity and reversibility go hand by hand on a process in which one is just
the collateral affirmation of the other.
However, the main importance of reversibility in Merleau-Ponty’s project is to show
us how being affected is the first way of accessing the world. That is way the title of this
paper tries to prove the fundamental importance of reversibility to account for the problem
of affectivity. Being reversible is being affected by a world that somehow shows itself as part
of our own flesh.
Nevertheless: how are we to know the relevance of an abnormal theory of being
which seems more dynamical than the somewhat more stable theories of being or becoming.
Certainly Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy takes sides with Heraclitus and affirms,

8
Ibid. P.139.
9
Ibid, p. 255.
10
Ibid, Translator’s preface, p. liv.
11
Ibid, p.260, my emphasis.
paradoxically, that being μεταβάλλον ἀναπαύεται12 -by changing it rests- and that the basic
property of our consciousness, taking into account the “dimensional this” is somehow
determined in its openness to the permanent unveiling of events that always are incarnated
in our personal sphere.. Is it perhaps that an ontology such as this resembles to a “physical
ontology”? Is it that being is “material”? Is it “mind” too?
Those questions are very intricate and difficult to respond in this occasion. However,
the possibility to discuss promiscuity, wild being, reversibility and verticality as sources to
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy make us wonder on how this abnormal ontology is affecting
other ontological frameworks. We said that a reversible ontology guarantees the dissolution of
a subject-object division; that by presenting a verticality of being it appeals to a historicity
and a rooting up. It was mentioned too that promiscuity is a jolted, more spasmic, way in
which our flesh interacts with its surroundings creating a perpetually dynamic
entanglement from which the inside and the outside blend. However, it is true that also
some kinds of phenomenology (Husserlian and even Heideggerian) assure the same sort of
conclusions. For Husserl, for instance, intentionality is not only a transcendental decision
against the natural attitude, however he rarely argues about veritcality13; in Heidegger, a
linkage between the world and the subject is never forgotten, either through Mit-Sein or as
appearing as Vorhandenheit or Zuhandenheit, the connection is never dissolute.
In this sort of inquiry, where does Merleau-Ponty’s ontology play a role and to which
extent is it not only replicating already worked out philosophies? Our answer will be
twofold: 1) Merleau-Ponty solves the problem of a subject-object division by totally
eliminating the kind of linking that this relation has, therefore, he will pose chiasmic
reversibility as a foreground for any ontological remark. 2) Merleau-Ponty will save
expression14 and a kind of hermeneutics that is not concerned by how we give meaning to a
world only actively, but also passively; in this sense, our flesh is already a living-lived
meaningfulness. It’s affected by providing effective meaning, and vice versa, effected by
affective meanings.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that the most relevant attribution of Merleau-Ponty is
yet again his defense of reversibility. I would also say that even when reversibility is a
complexity of intentionality, due it portrays the fundamental tension between the subject
and the world, the core acknowledgement of such concept (reversibility) is that every active
sensory data has a double that corresponds to a passive sensory data; moreover, it embodies
the discussion of the for-itself and in-itself, and fills it with a dimensionality. Reversibility is
radical intentionality and thusly it produces an even more radical affection. For every
sensation, it holds its reverse. For every judgment or statement, it affirms its inverse. Duality
is the main characteristic of a reversible ontology. And it does not only affect the Ego, but it
encompasses the Alter. For every touching hand that touches there is the hand that is

12
Heraclitus, [F52] (DK: B84a)
13
He obviously purposed a very complex and powerful concept of horizon and, in this sense, a kind of
historicity or precedence of an horizon appear at the 5th Cartesian Meditation and in some bits of his
posthumously published bits about Earth as the ark of our consciousness.
14
This position is highly inspired by Donald Landes’ Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression.
touched. Whereas one sight sees the eyes of the other, the others are being the sight that sees
them. It’s not only the flesh that gives birth to another flesh, rather the newborn flesh that
is born in the one who bore it. These are just examples of such an ontology’s potentials.