This ontological signification of the body explains why the radicalization of the body-world transduction that is constitutive of the flesh—which is also a radicalization of the écart—coincides with a passage back from the phenomenal domain of sensory separation (common sense) to the infraempirical domain. As the protodivision of primary tactility, the écart generates a protoreversibility—a reversibility prior to and independent of any actual terms to be reversed—that forms the sensible-transcendental condition for sensation.
In the wake of this radicalization of the flesh and of the écart of primary tactility, Merleau-Ponty is led to abandon the parallelism of touch and vision that holds sway throughout the chapter on the chiasm and the working notes directly related to it. Although this appears only by implication in the working notes, it emerges as a decisive motif of Merleau-Ponty's exploration of the human body in the third and final lecture course on Nature. What is firmly established in the working notes, however, is the derivation of vision from tactility on which the lectures build.
Thus, for example, we see Merleau-Ponty continuing the same note just cited (and cited earlier at the beginning of Section 5) by correlating vision with touch (or better, with tactility as the agent of embodied selfaffectivity). He observes:
The flesh is a mirror phenomenon and the mirror is an extension of my relation with my body. Mirror = realization of a Bild of the thing, and I-my shadow relation = realization of a (verbal) Wesen: extraction of the essence of the thing, of the pellicle of Being or of its “Appearance"—To touch oneself, to see oneself, is to obtain such a specular extract of oneself. I.e. fission of appearance and Being—a fission that already takes place in the touch (duality of the touching and the touched) and which, with the mirror (Narcissus) is only a more profound adhesion to Self. (255–256, some emphases added)
We can now understand this passage in its full profundity: it expresses the rootedness of touch and vision as differentiated (and nonoverlapping) senses from a more primordial self-relation of the body that is at the same time (because of its noncoincidence) a self-transcendence: primary tactility.
BODIES IN CODE
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