Claudio Rozzoni

Autour d’une question ‘inédite’ de Merleau-Ponty : Proust philosophe?Le présent essai tentera d’approfondir certains des aspects les plus significatifs des pages, toutes encore inédites, que Merleau-Ponty avait écrites en vue du Cours du jeudi de 1953-1954 au Collège de France sur Le problème de la parole. Il se concentrera en particulier sur la partie du cours dans laquelle Merleau-Ponty formule une question importante concernant l’auteur de la Recherche, ou plutôt là où il se demande si Proust est un philosophe. Il cherche à comprendre comment Merleau-Ponty répond à cette question, développant des aspects de sa propre pensée qu’on retrouvera de manière prépondérante dans l’oeuvre future. Les questions du «platonisme de Proust», du statut des «essences alogiques», de l’«entrelacement des choses et de notre vie» – pour en citer quelques-unes – enrichissent ces pages et contribuent à reproblématiser tant les articulations de réfl exions qui jouent un rôle décisif dans la constellation merleaupontienne que l’approche de la lecture du chef-d’oeuvre proustien. La Recherche du temps perdu, en effet, comme le suggèrent ces écrits merleau-pontiens (dix ans avant Proust et les signes) peut être vue comme une «recherche de la vérité». Une recherche de la vérité qui se décline ici, précisément pour dégager les pouvoirs de la parole, en une «reconquête de l’espace».About a Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Inedited’ Question : Is Proust a Philosopher?The present essay will attempt to deepen some of the most significant aspects of pages, still all unpublished, that Merleau-Ponty had written for the 1953-54 Thursday course at the Collège de France on The Problem of Speech. This essay will concentrate in particular on the part of the course in which Merleau-Ponty expresses an important question concerning the author of the Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherce du temps perdu), or rather where Merleau-Ponty wonders if Proust is a philosopher. This essay tries to understand how Merleau-Ponty responds to this question, developing aspects of his own thought which one will find in a predominant way in the future work. The questions of “Proust’s Platonism,” the status of “a-logical essences,” the “interlacing of things with our life” – in order to mention a few – enriches these pages and contributes to a reproblematization of the reflective articulations which play a decisive role in Merleau-Ponty’s constellation that the reading of Proust’s masterpiece approaches. Remembrance of Things Past, as indeed, these Merleau-Ponty writings suggest (ten years before Deleuze’s Proust and Signs), may be viewed as a “search (une recherche) for truth.” This is a search for truth that develops into, in order precisely to present the powers of speech, a “reconquest of space”.

L’espace esthétiqueLe « renversement du cartésianisme » chez Deleuze et Merleau-PontyCet essai se propose de développer le rapport entre Deleuze et Merleau-Ponty à partir de la tentative des deux philosophes français d’aller au-delà du courantde pensée qu’on pourrait qualifi er, comme le fait Merleau-Ponty lui-même, de « cartésianisme ».Nous commençons notre itinéraire avec la critique que les deux philosophes adressent à la notion cartésienne de « ligne » – passage obligé pour penser, à travers Leibniz et sa notion de « point », la ligne en tant qu’« ensemble de points ». On cherche ensuite à penser une ligne qui ne serait plus tracée dans un espace objectif présupposé, mais plutôt qui « se trace » dans un « espace expressif ».Un tel renversement de la « ligne cartésienne » produit, comme on le verra, des effets qui intéressent également la représentation de la ligne du temps. Émanciper cette dernière du modèle cartésien signifi e la penser par-delà toute référence chronologique, toute dépendance du temps de Kronos. On peut lire dans ce sens la tentative des deux philosophes pour penser le temps de l’événement, le temps de l’Aion. On verra enfin comment, d’un espace et d’un temps anticartésiens, doit naître, pour Merleau-Ponty et Deleuze, une nouvelle grammaire porteuse d’une nouvelle compréhension de la métaphore. Ni l’idée de métaphore proposée par Merleau-Ponty, ni le concept de devenir créé par Deleuze ne concernent une ressemblance fondée sur une identité donnée. Si la métaphore merleau-pontienne et le devenir deleuzien doivent être en mesure de restituer l’essence d’une chose, une telle essence se trouve, ou mieux se crée,à partir d’un mouvement vers « ce que la chose n’est pas ». C’est précisément dans ce sens que Merleau-Ponty lit la métaphore proustienne et que Deleuze cherche à rendre compte des ressemblances créées dans l’oeuvre de Gombrowicz.The Aesthetic SpaceThe “Reversal of Cartesianism” in Deleuze and Merleau-PontyThe present essay proposes to explore the relationship between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty from the attempt they make to go beyond the current of thought thatwe may qualify, like Merleau-Ponty does it himself, as Cartesianism. We begin our itinerary with the critique that both philosophers direct at the Cartesian notion of the line. The passage through the Cartesian notion of the line is “obligated” in order to think – by means of Leibniz and his notion of point -- the line as a “set of points.” The Cartesian passage is obligated moreover in order to think a line which could no longer be drawn in a presupposed objective space but, rather, which would be “drawn” in an “expressive space.” Such a reversal of the Cartesian line, as we shall see, produces effects that concern also the representation of the line of time. To emancipate the line of time from the Cartesian model means we must think beyond all chronological references, beyond all dependence on the time of Chronos. We are able to read, in this way, both philosophers’ attempt to think the time of the event, the time of Aion. Finally we shall see how, for Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze, a new grammar carrying a new understanding of the metaphor must be born from an anti-Cartesian space and time. Neither the idea of metaphor proposed by Merleau-Ponty nor the concept of becoming created by Deleuze speaks of a resemblance founded upon an identity that is given ahead of time. If Merleau-Ponty’s idea of metaphor and Deleuze’s concept of becoming must be able to produce the essence of a thing, such an essence finds, or better, it iscreated on the basis of a movement toward “what the thing is not.” It is precisely in this sense that Merleau-Ponty reads Proust’s metaphors and that Deleuze will seek to give an account of created resemblances in the work of Gombrowicz.

The recent publication of Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage, the preparatory notes for Merleau-Ponty’s “Monday course” at the Collège de France in 1953, provides further evidence of the turning points of the French philosopher’s reflections during this period. This course, on the style of expression in the work of Stendhal and Valery, is interesting in that it truly reveals to us a unique perspective on the questions that, on the one hand, are related to research made during the previous period at the Sorbonne; and that, on the other hand, find a new echo, a new development in the course on “The Philosophy of Proust” given by Merleau-Ponty in the following year, also at the Collège of France. The problem of the intersubjectivity of the work of art in particular finds a crucial complement in this course. Starting from the work on literary language, this offers a path toward thinking the chiasm between author and reader in an unprecedented way that avoids falling back into the fruitless opposition between two poles: one represented by a purely subjective point of view, with its solipsistic excesses, and one that tries to take into account the communication between two subjects, author and reader in this case, by thinking them as an “already given” unity before the gesture of writing and the experience of reading.

By drawing on Husserl’s manuscripts on Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, this paper aims to shed light on some of the primary concepts defining his notion of image—such as “belief,” “presentification” and perzeptive Phantasie—and endeavours to show how such concepts could be profitably developed for the sake of a phenomenological description of film image. More in particular, these analyses aim to give a phenomenological account of the distinction between positing film images, presupposing a claim to reality—for example the ones we experience in a documentary attitude—and quasi-positing film images involved in artistic creation. The latter, despite their photographic relation to reality, are capable of giving rise to filmic “image-worlds” having intersubjective existence.

In a well-known course he gave in 1904-1905, Edmund Husserl developed a ‘threefold’ notion of image revolving around the notion of depiction [Abbildung]. More specifically, the phenomenological description allows a seeing-in to emerge as an essential characteristic of the image consciousness, in which an image object assumes the role of a representant [Repräsentant] in order to allow us to see the image subject in the image itself. Nevertheless, our paper – focusing particularly on what might be called the depictive art par excellence, that is the portrait – aims to show that it would be erroneous to read the Husserlian notion of image exclusively on the basis of this earlier course: things seem to change significantly when Husserl develops a different notion of phantasy, and artistic images, in particular, are not to be thought of as resembling something else, but rather as expressive images producing their own model.