ABSTRACT
Merleau-Ponty’s last, incomplete manuscript, The Visible and the Invisible, ends with a statement about fetishism. This statement is the culmination of the novel ways in which Merleau-Ponty rethinks the relation of mind and things. He integrates this rethinking with psychoanalysis, physics, and the “meaning of being,” calling for an “ontological psychoanalysis” based on the intertwined relation of man and thing. “Things” themselves become a way of thinking of the “flesh,” the materiality, of time, which would have to lead to new ways of thinking of unconscious processes as “immediate pre-reflective experience.” These new ways demand a “hyper-reflective” text, which bears a relation to Comte’s elaboration of a “neo-fetishistic” text, to Heidegger on the thing, and to Derrida on the relation of fetish and signature. Following Merleau-Ponty’s integration of psychoanalysis, physics, and ontology, the chapter ends with further considerations of uncertainty and complementarity from physics, and analogous formulations from contemporary brain science.
