ABSTRACT
Confronted with the ordeal of inhumanity, why should we speak? In order to survive, to survive humanly, that is to say: in order to survive as speaking bodies, bodies prey to language. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, our life is specifically human insofar as it is entangled with inhumanity. To consider this, Merleau-Ponty encourages us to dream. He characterizes an “oneirism of wakefulness” which favors indistinctness against the differentiation of particular subjects and objects. This oneirism is our access to unconsciousness, which is, for Merleau-Ponty, the totality of possibilities – including the possibility for humans to be interweaved with the inhuman impersonal flesh. Jacques Lacan, however, could not follow Merleau-Ponty’s move towards the disintegration of singularity to the advantage of the generality of the flesh. On the contrary, the ethics of psychoanalysis requires that any dedifferentiation between subjects and between objects be countered. Dedifferentiation would absorb the subject into a generality that erases any proper name, while psychoanalysis rather works with the aim of singularizing the subject out of this undifferentiated mass. In particular, language is a humanizing practice insofar as speaking singularises one subject in distinction from a different subject, against their inhuman totalization. Inhumanity remains irreducible; yet, language is a knife that cuts our bodies out of the inhuman flesh.
