Leonard Lawlor

This article is the third part of a trilogy investigating the relation between Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. All three essays are inspired by Foucault’s diagnosis of our epoch in terms of biopower. They therefore aim at the creation of a new concept of life. In ‘Un Ecart Infime (Part III)’, I lay out Foucault’s analysis, from the first chapter of The Order of Things, of Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas. By stressing what Foucault says about the ‘sagittal lines’ exiting the painting, one can show that that there are three major phases in Foucault’s analysis: locating the blind spot; multiplying the invisibility; and the diffraction of the multiplicity into singularities. More generally, we can see that Foucault’s analysis of the painting concerns the informal space in auto-affection; in other words, it concerns the ‘blind spot’ in the mirror relation, in the ‘psyché’. The blind spot in the ‘soul’ - and the ambiguity in the French word psyché between mirror and soul - is why we can say that Foucault’s analysis concerns life: being blind, life must be conceived as informal and unmappable. I show in the conclusion that the inability of mapping and of seeing this space in fact allows for the increase of power

This essay attempts to reflect on Bergson’s contribution to the reversal of Platonism. Heidegger, of course, had set the standard for reversing Platonism. Thus the question posed in this essay, following Heidegger, is: does Bergson manage not only to reverse Platonism but also to twist free of it. The answer presented here is that Bergson does twist free, which explains Deleuze’s persistent appropriations of Bergsonian thought. Memory in Bergson turns out to be not a memory of an idea, or even of the good, which is one, but a memory of multiplicity. Therefore Bergson’s memory is really, from a Platonistic standpoint, forgetfulness or, even, a counter-memory.

In this paper I examine how well Merleau-Ponty's philosophy can respond to Deleuze's challenge to phenomenology. The Deleuzian challenge is double, that of immanence and that of difference; in other words, the double challenge is what Deleuze calls the paradox of expression. I bring together, in particular, Deleuze's 1969 The Logic of Sense and Merleau-Ponty's 1945 the Phenomenology of Perception, and am able to discover a lot of similarities mainly centered around the notion of a past that has never been present. However, this comparison is not decisive; what alone can decide is an interpretation of expression in Merleau-Ponty's final, unfinished The Visible and the Invisible.