Merleau-Ponty’s reading of André Breton, Paul Claudel, and Claude Simon allows us to shed some light on the relations between Being and Flesh in his philosophy, as well as how these relations promise a genuine poetic art. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, inseparably, a poetic of the flesh (poetic of the body and desire), a poetic of mystery (which is not primarily what is hidden, but what expresses itself inexhaustibly), and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. These three dimensions touch respectively on the overdetermination Merleau-Ponty gives to the questions of desire, expression, and perception—and are deployed in their corresponding horizons, the first more anthropological, the next more epistemological, and the last more ontological. The bold and broad inspiration that Merleau-Ponty finds in André Breton, Paul Claudel, and Claude Simon is a particularly rich leading thread in the exploration of this poetic, which plunges us into the heart of the unfinished work site of the philosopher’s last manuscripts, some of which are not yet published.
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