The Visible and the Invisible

Introduction

Merleau-Ponty was working on this book when he died suddenly in 1961. Claude Lefort edited the roughly 150-page manuscript, a first draft of the opening part, together with working notes, and published it in 1964. The text questions reflection, dialectic and intuition as methods of philosophy and argues that they all presuppose an earlier openness to the world. In the chapter “The Intertwining – The Chiasm” he develops his late ontology from the example of one hand touching the other, which can switch between touching and being touched. The working notes show how he was rethinking his own Phenomenology of Perception. The concept of flesh has been widely discussed since, for instance critically by Luce Irigaray.

Connections

Builds on

• Phenomenology of Perception1945 · Maurice Merleau-Ponty

More works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

• 1945Phenomenology of Perception