xx. In Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Elizabeth Grosz argues for the continuity between the body schema and the flesh:
The notion of the body schema or postural model of the body outlined by Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception anticipates or provides the origins of the concept of the flesh in The Visible and the Invisible. The body is able to move, to initiate and undertake actions, because the body schema is a series, or rather a field, of possible actions, plans for action, maps of possible movements the body “knows" how to perform. The body schema is also the field in which the subject's cohesion and identity as a subject and its intimate incarnation in and as a particular body take place. The concept of the flesh is developed as an “ultimate notion” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 140), not the union or compound of two substances, but “thinkable by itself," an elementary or foundational term, which "has no name in any philosophy" (139, 147), an “exemplar sensible." While it does not displace perception as the thematic object of investigation, it is a more elementary and prior term, the condition of both seeing and being seen, of touching and being touched, and of their intermingling and possible integration, a commonness in which both subject and object participate, a single “thing” folded back on itself (Grosz 1994, 95).
xxi. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty goes on to suggest that such “postural impregnation" is necessary to avoid interoceptive solipcism:
My perception of my body would, so to speak, be swallowed up in a cenesthesia if that cenesthesia were strictly individual. On the contrary, however, if we are dealing with a schema, or a system, such a system would be relatively transferable from one sensory domain to the other in the case of my own body, just as it could be transferred to the domain of the other. (118)
This dimension of commonality will become crucial in our analysis later.
xxii. Here is Lacan's definition: "The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic" (Lacan 1977, 4).
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