Merleau-Ponty and the Fold of the Flesh

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.

Deleuze and the Micropolitics of Desire

Deleuze combines the essential elements of the three previous thinkers to make an improved politics of immanence, which is to a certain extent more perspicuous, by virtue of being consistent and systematic, specifically with its penetrating account of interiority. Certainly, Deleuze overcomes a number of remaining ambiguities, in particular through addressing an affective and ethical issue evident in Foucault – by turning to schizoanalysis and the incorporation of desire as will to power – pushing the politics of immanence to its ultimate. This argument contends with the misleading but no less prominent view that Deleuzian desire is a pre-symbolic libidinal flux, an asocial essentialist category of idealism and bourgeois ethics. It is argued that Deleuzian desire is both instigated by and utilises the ontogenetic conceptual schema of Deleuze’s metaphysics (transcendental empiricism) – as derived from an engagement with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Foucualt – in which thought and desire are construed as immanent to the real that provokes them, such that they can only have a productive nature.

Foucault and the Force of Power-Knowledge

Foucault’s position is initially developed through a productive misreading of their predecessors; presenting a parodied, misleading vision of French phenomenology as meaning-giving (sens) and using it as a theoretical springboard for his study of discourse, placing the human subject in immanent relations of production and signification. Such relations entail a Nietzschean conception of force, the development of which in Foucault’s thought allows him to account for the conditions under which phenomena are generated, or their ontogenesis. It is argued that this radicalises the decentring of the subject and directly leads to and informs Foucault’s later political engagements, wherein the self is placed in relations of transitive, unstable, virtual forces constituting actual formations of power, carried out by the formed or stratified relations which make up knowledge (as in formed matters or substances) and relating to extensive processes of organisation and strategy (i.e., bio-power). This, at its most basic, refers to the double-conditioning between the micro and the macro, as described earlier. Contra those who wish to read Foucault within a deeply Althusserian conjecture (i.e. Žižek and Laclau), the nature of this network must be understood according to the immanent logic of dispersion and disjunction underpinning discursive formations in Foucault’s earlier work, a logic heavily rooted in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the fold and one that makes strategic possibilities and lines of flight (or lines of escape by which one can exercise a practice of freedom), synonymous with folding, by virtue of being the very excess or discontinuities of the network itself.

From Immanence to Micropolitics

Taken together, the four thinkers of ‘pure’ immanence offer a new take on ethicality, political analysis and political practice; moving the centre of gravity of analysis and action away from the political traid, toward a subjectivity-without-a-subject, one where we no longer look for a transcendent Outside or rupture in/of immanence to ground resistance in spite of our condition (i.e. dialectical excess), but rather work through our condition and its entangled lines of immanence and ‘three’ folds of disjuncture, through an affirmative ethics of self-experimentation. When read within a contemporary setting and so within the context of post-industrial capitalism, it offers a unique critique of it, bested in its refreshing radicality only by its accompanying a-systematic (as opposed to anti-system, i.e. dialectical materialism) political praxis. A praxis that, very much in the vein of Gramsci’s ‘passive revolution’, urges us to work throughcapitalism, in order to truly overcome it strictures and all that relates to it. What some might view as a self-indulgent Renaissance bourgeois concern of playing with one’s sense of self outside of politics, is in fact actually the site where the political is most at stake. Politics begins here.

Introduction

The introduction begins by arguing that political theory has been driven by base assumptions concerning the agency and transparency of the subject. Such assumptions are what were challenged by Marxist thinking, which, through the failure of the revolution to materialise in industrialised nations, instigated a more refined turn to ideology in the works of the neo-Marxists. Arguing this turn is limited in its focus on pre-conscious interests, I outline post-Marxism as an attempt to move towards an analysis of unconscious libidinal investments, which also signifies a turn to human ontology. The ontological turn faces a split, however, been transcendence on the one hand an immanence on the other. In exploring the two positions, it is argued that immanence has been rejected to the point of vindicating of transcendence as a necessary position in order to conceptualise the political. The chapter ends by arguing that this rejection and the related vindication, is premised a gross misreading and misunderstanding of immanence; that immanence is the ontological centre of micropolitics as that which precedes the politics of identity and representation. Moreover, this is an ontology that, at least insofar as it concerns the political, starts with Sartre and is developed by Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Deleuze.

Sartre and the Instigation of Immanence

This chapter investigates how Sartre instigates the first few moves of ‘pure’ immanence. Through following the progression of Sartre’s thought, there is shown a deepening engagement with immanence, which ultimately sets the foundation upon which the later thinkers build. In his early period, Sartre reworks Husserlian intentionality to bring about a repudiation of the transcendental ego. Following from this, in Being and Nothingness and the Critique, he develops a dialectic in which consciousness, while relating to an ‘outside’, is construed as also thoroughly embedded in that outside through the subject-body of the flesh and relations of desire. From this comes a conceptualisation of the In-itself and For-itself as simulacra or topological variations of a more primordial intertwining or fabric of univocal Being. In this sense, we are immediately taken away from the subject of social contract theory, insofar as this presumes an asocial self, and the notion of identity as the sine qua non of politics, insofar as this presumes the terrain of an inexplicable transcendent Other. This brings with it a new take on politics as an ethical practice – one that will be taken up and extended by the other three thinkers – in which we do not look for a transcendent outside or fracture/break in immanence through which to ground resistance, but rather work through and experiment with our situation or condition.