The Specularity of the Flesh. On the Sense of the “Ontological Turn” in Merleau-Ponty’s Le visible et l´invisible

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to clarify the way in which the last developments of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology try to approach the problem of the split between conscience and objectivity that had remained unsolved in the French thinker’s first works. In this discussion the notion of “flesh of the world” plays a decisive role since Merleau-Ponty builds around it —in his posthumous and unfinished work Le Visible et l’invisible— a narcissistic theory of perception that can be interpreted at the same time as a specular ontology in which Being, “the flesh of things”, grasps itself through the human perception of the world —which makes it an ontology of reconciliation between the objective and the subjective.