The second chapter turns to Merleau-Ponty to see how, working through a number of issues with Sartre, phenomenology, and modern thought more generally, he deepens Sartre’s engagement with immanence and elaboration of the subject-body and perceptual consciousness as the condition of meaning, negativity, and action. Through tracing this development, the chapter elucidates the way in which it sets basis for Merleau-Ponty’s later work. In moving away from the subject-body or an exploration of the phenomenal body to a more direct ontological enquiry into the appearing of the visible-tactile (the actual) field itself, the later works develop an anti-humanist ontology that locates perceiving bodies within a meaning-generating flesh, where the reversibility of Being as ‘flesh’ establishes a generativity which is always immanent to it and as such beyond any notion of a metaphysical transcendent Outside or transcendent Other. It is here that the Outside/Other is first construed as a disjunctive fold of immanence itself. Critically, through this, Merleau-Ponty provides a conceptual language that avoids the theoretical snares of the traditional dualist language evoked by Sartre, and lays much of the groundwork for the ‘pure’ immanence of Foucault and Deleuze.
Perceptual consciousness plays no epistemic role
