I can perceive, across the visual image of the other, that the other is an organism, that that organism is inhabited by a "psyche," because the visual image of the other is interpreted by the notion I myself have of my own body and thus appears as the visible envelopment of another "corporeal schema."(118)xxi
This ontological privileging of the body schema over the visual image of the body ultimately informs Merleau-Ponty's refunctionalization of Lacan's famous "mirror stage" and, with it, the entire role of the specular (of which the mirror image is only a particular concrete dimension). Lacan, as is well known, posits the mirror stage—the concrete experience of seeing in the mirror image—as the crucial moment in the complex transition of the infant from a "fragmented body image" into an “orthopaedic" totality.xii This accomplishment yields a net gain in organization and a concomitant development of the ego (and super-ego); however, it also marks, or at least prefigures, the advent of “paranoic alienation," the alienation of the imaginary ego that occurs as this latter is "deflect[ed] ... into the social"—that is, subjected to the symbolic order (Lacan, 5). From this point onwards in Lacan's picture, the subject enters into a perpetual struggle for recognition in the eyes of others which is equally to say, a struggle against its lack, its dependence on the symbolic, and, finally, its fundamental or essential incompleteness.
In his comments on the specular image and on Lacan's theory specifically, Merleau-Ponty makes clear the extent of his agreement with Lacan: he too recognizes that self-alienation arises in the passage from the fragmented body to the unified body image, the body image as form or gestalt. What distinguishes Merleau-Ponty's commentary, however, is his effort to understand this alienation, not as an inaugural source of paranoia, but as a productive and ongoing dimension of the phenomenal body—what I have earlier called the imaging power of the organism.
Two principles are fundamental in Merleau-Ponty's analysis—the nonidentity between the interoceptive and the specular and the primacy of the former as the source of their relation. Not surprisingly, these two principles emerge as the "solutions" to two concrete problems faced by the infant as she seeks to understand the discord between her "natural" and necessarily incomplete view of her body and the complete view given by the mirror imagexxii:
BODIES IN CODE
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