This understanding of the necessary correlation of body and world— and thus of the écart—as a function of the reciprocal impossibility of pure reflexivity and pure corporeity goes together (at least on Barbaras's account) with a privileging of vision as the most noble of the senses. Indeed, Barbaras begins his reconstruction of The Visible and the Invisible by positing the “primacy of vision." He claims:
Vision alone gives us access to the world as world... In hearing or touch, the object does not have access to this exteriority and autonomy: in touch, occurring through physical contact, the thing is experienced “at the tips of the fingers" rather than outside of the one sensing, and I hear the sound “in the ear" rather than situating it in space. In the two cases, the perceiving body is referred back to itself; it fails to forget itself in favor of a pure exteriority. (149)
Things are otherwise in the case of vision: "there is," claims Barbaras, "more world’ in vision, since the sensed is given vision only as split off from sensibility, as resting in itself." (149)
As compelling as such an analysis would appear to be, it does not fully accord with the role Merleau-Ponty assigns touch—or, rather, the double sensation of tactility—in some of the final working notes included in The Visible and the Invisible. Thus, despite his insistence that vision and touch are fundamentally divergent, that they disclose or construct distinct, nonsuperposable universes, Merleau-Ponty accords to both an irreducible openness, a fundamental access, to the world as world:
To touch oneself, to see oneself ... is not to apprehend oneself as an object, it is to be open to oneself, destined to oneself (narcissism) Nor, therefore, is it to reach oneself, it is on the contrary to escape oneself, to be ignorant of oneself, the self in question is by divergence (d’écart), is Unverborgenheit of the Verborgen as such, which consequently does not cease to be hidden or latent. (249)
In both cases, moreover, this openness or access to world as world emerges because of the asymmetry that lies at the heart of the reversibility constitutive of double sensation. That is why the écart is the condition for the transduction of body and world that informs Merleau-Ponty's conception of the flesh. "In fact," continues the same working note:
I do not entirely succeed in touching myself touching, in seeing myself seeing, the experience I have of myself perceiving does not go beyond a sort of imminence, it terminates in the invisible, simply this invisible is its invisible, i.e., the reverse of its specular perception, of the concrete vision I have of my body in the mirror. The self-perception is still a perception, i.e., it gives me a Nicht Urpräsentierbar (a non-visible, myself), but this it gives me through an Urpräsentierbar (my tactile or visual appearance) in transparency (i.e., as a latency). (249-50)
BODIES IN CODE
73