Heidegger's reversal of the primacy of the subject to the radical priority of
being as language, world, time, History ... is not possible for Merleau-Ponty
for fear of his stating the absolute primacy of a natural in-itself, a naturalism
which would contradict all phenomenological exigencies. The sensible itself
would be "universal" only if we possessed "intellectual intuition", which
would put us beyond the limits of our finitude. We have no way of knowing
if the in-itself is or is not sensible, if the essence of the flesh, "the dehiscence
of the seeing in the visible and the visible in the seeing", is or is not limited
to our corporeity. We have no means of knowing if this "dehiscence", as
perpetual, internal difference or non-absorption between the sensing and the
sensed, is or is not universalisable, if there is or is not a "natural generality of
my body and of the world." The Heideggerian model of the dispossession
of man is not applicable to the philosophy of flesh, because the latter -
which, not without analogy to being, oscillates between the thickness of the
"element" and the differential finesse of "the dehiscence" - would not, like
being, initiate anything, produce a "destinal sending", for which it is
necessarily incapable due to its non-historiality. Man can respond to being-thrown,
because the latter is historial, but how can he respond to the ageless
flesh which encompasses him?
