ABSTRACT
From his early work, Phenomenology of Perception (1962) to his last, The Visible and the Invisible (1968) Merleau-Ponty worked at an archaeology of the perceptual world, that domain of experience which he called “être sauvage” wild being. His phenomenology was a return to beginnings, to those chaotic places which subtend the Cartesian dichotomy of subjective mind and objective world, to that landscape of experience where, as he said in “Eye and mind,” the painter, for example, takes his body with him, not in order to know the world, but to love it (1964:159-190). As a critique of that kind of “high altitude thought” which would survey the world from afar, his phenomenology always sought to restore the original dialogue between body and world. For the purposes of this essay it is important to remember that in the final analysis Merleau-Ponty understood that intertwining between the flesh of the body and that of the world to be one of desire, of eros, of love. If he conceived of that eros in primarily sexual terms, as the pivotal chapter on sexuality in Phenomenology of Perception indicates (1962:154-173) we should not forget that in his last writings the chiasm or crossing between body and world was enlarged to the point that he was calling for a “psychoanalysis of nature,” a call which makes sense only if one grants a fecund vitality which animates psyche and nature, only if one can imagine that Eros is the arc which holds the ensouled body and world together in an amorous embrace.1
