2014 Alterity and Maternal Flesh. Paper presented on the 29th August at the 39th Annual Conference of the Merleau-Ponty Circle at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. (original) (raw)

In 1990 Galen Johnson and Michael Smith edited Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, which published a debate that had originally grown out of a Distinguished Lecture presented by Claude Lefort to the Merleau-Ponty Circle in 1987. Johnson identifies the essence of the issue with the following question: “Is the reversible alterity of sensing-sensed that we discover within our bodies sufficient for understanding the alterity of other persons and of nature, or are we confronted in these cases with an alterity of a wholly different kind” (1990, xxii). For Lefort, Merleau-Ponty’s flesh ontology cannot properly recognise the irreducibility of otherness because it is not wholly based upon the experience of sensible reversibility. This can most clearly be discerned, Lefort argues, when one attempts to describe the development of alterity in the child and in particular, the emergence into the sensing sensed relation that is the flesh. For the majority of responses to Lefort that support Merleau-Ponty’s position, and here I draw primarily upon Mat Dillon (1990), Gary Madison (1990), David Michael Levin (1990) and Jack Reynolds (2002), there is no requirement for the infant to developmentally enter into the reversibility of the flesh because she is always and already there, always and already enclosed within a “circuit of reversibilities in which the bodies order is manifest” (Levin 1990, 37) and this is the case from at least the time of birth and likely even before. In this paper I contribute to this debate in two ways. In the first instance I identify that the above responses to Lefort, rather than fully answering the question, merely reposition the problem such that the question now becomes when and how does the foetus enter into the reversibility of the flesh. Not only is this question important in terms of understanding the ontology of being that Merleau-Ponty proposes, it also carries a heavy political weight. Should the zygote be self-forming through “dehiscence or fission of its own mass’’ (VI 146) and not an aspect of the maternal flesh, then we will perhaps need to ethically rethink our conceptions of when it is that we come into being and subsequently the policies and practices surrounding abortion and maternal consent. Should the zygote be one with the mother then we must admit a point in development were divergence occurs and then we have the same problem that Lefort originally identifies, albeit rather earlier in the developmental trajectory then he suggests. In the second instance I propose a positive thesis which responds to this issue. Working through a phenomenology of gestation, I identify that the maternal body is a particular and necessary ontological alterity that initially moulds foetal ipseity and then scaffolds the development of infant alterity. I conclude that although Merleau-Ponty was correct to suggest that the flesh is a precondition within the sensible itself which renders us in need of alterity in order to flourish, he underestimated the role and importance of the maternal body as a necessary and primary alterity.