Abstract

Immediately after the publication of Phénoménologie de la perception, Merleau‑Ponty’s thought was regarded as a “philosophy of ambiguity” (Alquié, 1947), and he himself was sometimes considered as an «ambiguous philosopher». It was a major mistake. The theme of ambiguity pervades his first works, gradually losing ground in the last ones though never disappearing completely in the face of more positive themes such as those of the flesh, chiasm, or interlacing. Ambiguity, indeed, runs prominently through the whole of Merleau‑Ponty’s philosophical project and it silently shapes his analyses of perception, body, or language, as well as his readings of Descartes, Husserl, or even Bergson. The necessity and position of ambiguity can only be apprehended in the ultimate attempt at thinking the theme of the flesh. Against the urge of knowing, which eludes our primeval relation to the world, by only opening to the subject the field of an unending rivalry with the object, we are invited to acknowledge that the primeval sensible, in its origins, is neither tomb, nor source, of the mind, but the place and motive for its opening and blooming out. And this, because from the beginnings «we are of it», and because our intimate being prepares itself in the thick of the primeval flesh, an unnamed reserve of being, in which nothing can be discerned, before, both in their self-opening and dehiscence, each being, dares at last exist. It is this recess of being which we point to, in a movement upstream, as ambiguity, as this hidden transcendence of the primeval, obstinately denied, in which are mingled, exactly concurring, both the actuality and virtuality of any existence, and which still radiates and pursues its diffraction as much as in the play of expression as in that of perception, or when all contingency, and all liberty are unfurled.