essay on, mostly, genet & ponty

Nikhil Govind
Rhetoric 240G, Spring 2006


In this paper I wish to discuss how Merleau-Ponty’s work may serve as a powerful critique of existing liberal humanist politics predicated as it is on notions of citizenship and rights. The possibility of such a discussion can only be ensured by an overview of the philosophical issues that have shaped Merleau-Ponty’s work- so my paper will begin with such an overview. In view of the enormous density of the philosophical corpus that informs the mind of Meleau-Ponty, my overview can only be modest and schematic. Nevertheless, I believe such an approach to be indispensable- a precipitate interpretation of politics can never be more than superficial, and leads one up into almost as many blind alleys as when one began. After such an overview, and introduction to the salience that Merleau-Ponty’s thought may still have for us, I will use Jean Genet’s 1950 silent, black and white film Un Chant d’amour to open up a still more concrete pathway into Merleau-Ponty’s political thought. In this, I hope one may get a sense of Genet and Merleau-Ponty indirectly engaging each other in common concerns like the need to radically enlarge our universe by multiplying correspondences -we will see how Genet speaks of the autopsy as a sort of depth-photography that reveals a startlingly different world- and by soliciting the slippage of mastery rather than the Cartesian sovereignty of the subject as assuring a more durable route to an inclusive citizenship and democracy. For even if these two thinkers did not seem to engage each other directly, surely at least they were committed to the moment of the common historical trauma of the years immediately following the horror of the Second World War.
A chief concern of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre has consistently been to seek to articulate a jointure of the “subject” and the “world”(these terms in this paper should be read continually as being bracketed) where there is no priority or hierarchy of one or the other. For him, the most discussed modality of this jointure is vision- he takes issue with the Cartesian sovereign subject who “looks” at the world as if the world were a pure exteriority. For Merleau-Ponty, the world is joined to the eye- his concern, unlike Berkeley, is not to replace an objective with a subjective/idealist view, but rather to speak from precisely this jointure itself. It seems as if it is a sovereign visuality itself that radiates equally to the eye and the world. The case Merleau-Ponty wishes to make with this notion of visuality is that the visual bespeaks a network of secret correspondences between the subject (or consciousness, interiority etc- all these are terms of classical philosophy which Merleau-Ponty is engaged in radically investigation of) and the world. For Merleau-Ponty, it is this passing and sliding of visuality betwixt the objects in the world and interiority that constitutes the aesthetic- and this aesthetic is the most valued form of knowledge rather than either scientific objectivism or pure idealist subjectivity. It is the jagged hovering of the lines on the edges of the apple in a Cezanne still life that undermines a Cartesian fixity of gaze and objecthood -with its’ (i.e Cartesian) inexplicit claims to mastery- for this will to absolute mastery is the other side of the famed Cartesian doubt. But Merleau-Ponty refuses to hover infinitely in this unproductive anxiety of the binary subject and object. For him the achievement of the painter is precisely in making this visuality exhibit itself -the visuality whereby one cannot fix the outline, where the refractions of consciousness- like the shimmering of the pool (in the essay Eye and Mind)- is equally internal to the object as it is to consciousness. Or, still better, where questions of origin are admitted to be unknowable (and perhaps constraining and uninteresting), and what is to be valued is the exorbitance of a showing, an opening, a vision, which instructs us how copious and diverse the world is, incapable of either static fixity or static doubt. It is rather this diversity itself, one that can only be grasped when the “visual” in itself appears- or as Hannah Arendt would say, appearance is in itself being. Merleau-Ponty writes in the Visible and the Invisible-

“… an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general, in virtue of that primordial property that belongs to the flesh, being here and now, of radiating everywhere and forever, being an individual, of being also a dimension and also a universal” (1968:142).

And we can only grasp this appearance/presence/being for an instant before it passes away- and also, before it reappears. We cannot control this lighting and loss of being- if a painter seems privileged, it is only to a degree. For the vision of the painter is not a matter of his genius, control, training, technical excellence, self discipline etc. One cannot venture to ask if agency is entirely dissolved in Merleau-Ponty altogether, if there is a streak of “passivity” here. This is because, properly speaking, the question of agency is still too caught up in the vicissitudes of the question of the subject, and hence of a humanism that Merleau-Ponty urgently asks us to discard or shed. Instead, Merleau-Ponty asks us to dwell in the thrilling question of the world’s pressing curvature on the pupil, its demand/lure for total absorption, its rapture, its imperious demands, its implacability and its irrevocable rhythmic temporalities. There is a point at which the libido/eye/the scopic touches the world and is inflamed by it. Here the power of the Cartesian subject abnegates itself and is replaced by a wealthy vulnerability- and this is when an opening/a disclosure/an affirmation eventalises as the flesh of the world. For this vulnerability – which is also a self vulnerability, even, paradoxically, occasionally a vulnerability of a victim, one who turns his gaze away from an aggressor and turns instead to the more productive jointure of the self and world’s inflorescent possibilities. It is important to keep all this in mind before the political implications of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre become clearer. For this is the site of a new politics and a different sense of both justice and even desire, which, though erstwhile seen as contradictory, can now be grounded by this dual agency, this intersubjectiveity of visibility and the body whereby a mutation, a verticillation of everyday embodied experience and politics can finally take place.
Thus instead of the traditional view that cognition is dependent on a certain relation of the subject’s apprehension of the “object”- the Cartesian heritage of modern thought- Merleau-Ponty instead wishes to intertwine the eye and the hand, with cognition lining the interiors of each of these senses, and thus continuously opening new configurations of and for the world’s flesh. The visual is understood as a covering or fold that pre exists and even makes redundant categories of not just cause and effect but also subject/object- or the return to the subject via reflection on the object- this latter being the privileged pathway of German idealism. In Merleau-Ponty there is no return, there is only the limitless ontological is-ness of the visual. Furthermore, we cannot really ask if this visual itself is a simple given, for Merleau Ponty would reply: Given to whom? For the visual pre-exists the subject.
It remains for us to see what might be gained and staked by this first insistence on the pre eminence of the visible, before cognition may be said to divide itself into a subject and object for reflection. What is gained is, perhaps, to put it simply, a new and unimpeachable empire for the senses (including the body), an empire- and thus a sovereignty that cannot be taken away by some of the recognized limitations of a purely self reflective cognition. Since Plato, the senses have largely been seen as the seat of illusion, of a distracting, dissembling knowledge. By privileging the senses as originary, Merleau Ponty is not simply inverting the claim by saying that the senses speak the truth. What he is instead saying is that the sensible provides a constant nourishment for cognition, and that ultimately it exceeds the reflective powers of cognition. But he is clear to insist that this excess of the sensible cannot be relocated in a Subject. Thus the visual exists as a universe which “we” can access through our eyes. Yet this universe cannot be contained by our eyes- nor could we claim to have originated them, or even claim to potentially see the entirety of this universe. Indeed Merleau-Ponty is saying that we cannot lay claim or contain what we “know” either. The misunderstanding comes when we somehow think we own the sensory in a way we do not generally think we own cognition- I say “I see the Cezanne painting” but I can “see” as little of all its possible interpretations and truths as I can “know” it- as Merleau-Ponty writes, the first paintings still have much of their life ahead of them (1993:149), and that there is a long future to them after our death and the waning of the influence of our interpretations. It is misleading to say, as it is conventionally said, that I can “see” the painting in its entirety (as if “seeing” involved just our ability to miniaturize in our retinal screen a given arrangement of colors and tonalities and perspective within a rectangular frame) - but perhaps not “understand” it. Instead, Merleau-Ponty insists that we must understand ourselves to be as modest in our ability to see as in our ability to understand, and that seeing belongs as much outside of us as inside- just as cognition is ultimately non localizable “inside” a Subject.
What Merleau-Ponty is ultimately speaking of when he speaks of a successful seeing is the seeing of the tear in the ontic tissue- but this seeing of the tear in the tissue cannot be learnt by discipline or talent. The opening of the tear is ontological, these are the citations received through the trespasses in the folded realms of the visible and the invisible. These are what produce what we may, with much qualification, possibly call the painter, the world etc. Merleau-Ponty is not simply asking or answering the old question of whether the painter produces the artwork or the artwork the painter? What interests him instead is the identifications of the signs of this ontological fissure- which to him is the sudden multiplication of equivalences. Indeed, it is in this bold valuation of proliferation and of irreducible multiplicity that we can foreshadow some his political significance.
If the visual then exists as a privileged “site” (or at any rate not an object) for an “intuition” then it is to some extent a given. Merleau-Ponty has been accused of a sort of ontological optimism. This may partly be because his work has often discussed canonical, “high” art- as for example his famous essays on Cezanne, rather than the visuality of say, horrific images of the atom bomb. But here the canonical serves chiefly as an occasion for intuition-this is surely misunderstood if it is taken to be an unreflective, or exclusive “optimism”. For of course canonical painting can be horrific- the affective mode of the purely horrific seems to be of relatively less priority to Merleau Ponty, partly because his concern would be more strictly ontological, only occasionally dipping into the psyche. But what is more overtly asserted is the insistence on the visual in its pre emptive, peremptory, originary quality of vision, the way it multiplies and opens equivalences. Merleau-Ponty is going further than simply speaking of the horror of man – and who needs to be told this after the Holocaust- what he is attempting to do instead is to be able to strike the first roots in a new way of conceiving the world in its entirety- the political would then serve as the necessary correlate of this.
The value is thus greater than simply the question of art or the aesthetic understood in the narrow sense. For what does this multiplication of equivalences bespeak if not the many ties of kinship between all humans, as well as the human and the natural and the cosmic, but also, the human and the artefactual- Merleau-Ponty is not conservative about means, and does not share Heidegger’s fears of technology, which many of Merleau-Ponty’s generation shared, especially after the technological horror of the War. Instead, he seems very open to some of the possibly visionary openings that the technological may yield to, and seems to suggest that a mechanical censoring of the technological or the artefactual will achieve nothing, and may even foreclose much for the human. If in Genet we then see the pastoral and the man made prison not so much as mutual exteriorities (for how then could one ever hope to reunite them?), but as an equivalence-in-difference, then we can see how they can open out to each other, how they open possibilities for both the warder (himself imprisoned in his role, in fact clearly more imprisoned than the prisoners- and hence the prisoners can rouse him carnally and politically), and the prisoners themselves. The meeting here of the gaze of the warder and the prisoner is not voyeurism, but an accordance of a haunting -for which prisoner is not haunted by the jailer, and which jailer is not haunted by his prisoners? This is not to say that there is no power relationship- the facticity of power is inescapable. But as Ferenczi is supposed to have remarked to Freud, in a line quoted in the Interpretation of Dreams, “every tongue has its own dream language”. And so the lovemaking in the film between the prisoners and the warder is not just rape and violence (which it doubtless and inexpugnably also is), but is also irreducibly a dream language- not just in the filmic content or “scene”, but in the very iteration of the haunting. Still more, it is also the special and singular dream language of a prison situation, with all its specific pleasures and perversities. The prison itself is a singular space in the modern world. This is not just due to the instrumental reason that prisoners have to be located somewhere- to believe in such utilitarian or common sense notions is, as Marx said, to let ideology play the ventriloquist. Rather, the prison is a specifically modern ideological constructure in the fact that it is the necessary constructed invisibility, the necessary counterpoint to the open, putatively fully visible public sphere of democracy. The prison’s secret and irreducible interiorities are thus necessary, and it haunts the modern project of citizenship and democracy in a way that, for example, and to be a little controversial, I think that traditional rights based immigration or minority discourse perhaps cannot really do- and again, perhaps precisely because the question of the visual is more acute and intractable and multivalent here. It is these more severe hauntings and invisibilities that cannot be easily disambiguated. The prison is singular in that it has a certain relationship and stake in the mutual undecidabilty of the visible and the invisible, a constant precipitation of each other into crises- and this singularity is perhaps what Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he speaks of philosophy as the constant conversion and reconversion of speech and silence to each other in The Visible and the Invisible (1968:129). The prison, like philosophy itself, is this special case of continual reconversion. Genet’s work opens a fold of this invisibility for us, and we glimpse through his art, for a distended moment, the dream language of prisoners -and perhaps more importantly, the warder, for in a sense he is one of the true interiorities of the apparatus- one who can conceptualize or bring to visuality the guilt of the entire political apparatus. Hannah Arendt had written that in premodern times the guilt of the death penalty was so heavy that the Athenians would rather plead with Socrates to drink poison himself rather than take on the guilt of murder. But today the minor Eichmanns follow orders in a bureacratised and instrumentalized world- instrumentalized especially (and hence especially ironically) in the name of justice and democracy. What greater compliment can we pay Genet than that he could even open for us the singular carnal dream language of Eichmann, that is of democracy and citizenship and science gone mad? Similarly, though in a different idiom, Merleau-Ponty offers us a deeper vision of human and worldly ethical togetherness than that claimed by the somewhat jaded claims- even more jaded today than in the aftermath of the Second World War - of an inclusive liberal humanism or multiculturalism. For Merleau-Ponty, this profound fraternity can only be excavated in an ontology that refuses to consider the subject of both science and citizenship as master. Merleau-Ponty does not seek to replace this mastery with a more sustainable one, or with a new set of tricks- rather, he resolutely speaks of “slipping away”, of a non localizability of subject and world (if these terms may be used at all), of instead an interanimation and braiding of objects and self, of the presences of equivalences and correspondences and correlates rather than hierarchy and priority, of reverberation and reciprocity, of the toleration, so inimical to Descartes, of incertitude, contingency and “accident”. Indeed, it is often this brush with mortality that quickens one’s awareness of these vistas of secret equivalences that so infuse and soak the world. It is up to political theorists now to be able to relate these new realms of possibility to the current discourse of citizenship. In Un chant d ‘amour, the warder is seduced by this new possibility- it is through the prisoner that he can re-imagine the pastoral and hence freedom and carnality itself- for even though as warder he has the discretion to leave whenever he wishes, he seems to understand that this freedom can only be re semanticized and materialized/visualized through the prisoner’s fantasy. It is this desperate wish to be able to feel this rapture again that causes him to whip the prisoner- so that he (the warder) can, through the cry of the prisoner feel the full force of the affect of the cry for freedom, a freedom that the warder, in taking for granted, has reduced to a conventionality that urgently needs to be released through an ontological fracturing. All this certainly seems to speak to the fate of routinized citizenship today, where we are all, more certainly than ever, enmeshed in a regime that has totally disarticulated the relationship between the citizen and the prisoner, in a polity that has reduced the prisoner to an inviolate invisibility. This invisibility of the prisoner partly accounts, for example, for some of the power of the scandal of Abu Ghraib- those photographs being indeed, to use Ferenczi’s powerful phrase, a dream language, emanating it would seem from the very navel of imperialistic power and desire, a whole prison corps of Cartesian subjects held fast to the thrall of mastery and utter domination. In all this it seems Merleau-Ponty and Genet were especially prescient, and the years following the horror of the War seem today to speak to us with a special intimacy and recognition.
Merleau-Ponty’s dominant temper is, however, not morose, and he does not write directly of, for example, the Holocaust. Yet he sees better than most how any attempted domination can only seemingly, or only fleetingly succeed. For everywhere an alternate and ultimately more powerful pleasure loiters. This other pleasure- stronger than the pleasure of domination- is the pleasure of the slipping away of mastery, and of receiving through this slippage, a newer and more universal kingdom of what had hitherto remained invisible. It is the pleasure of sight as it sees, only briefly, but with an almost eternalized impact, a new visibility for the first time in the history of the world- this is indeed the secret history, and pathway of humanity, the traces not of conquest (or subordination), but of disclosure and shift, a thrilling realignment and re coordination of the sensorium- I will quote at some length:

But however we finally have to understand it [i.e. that ideality is not alien to the flesh], the “pure” ideality already streams forth along the articulations of the aesthesiological body, along the contours of the sensible things, and, however new it is, it slips through ways it has not traced, transfigured horizons it did not open, it derives from the fundamental mystery of those notions “without equivalences”, as Proust calls them, that lead their shadowy life in the night of the mind only because they have been divined at the junctures of the visible world. (1968: 152-153)

It may be useful to briefly distinguish Merleau-Ponty from thinkers like Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault. To speak schematically, Merleau-Ponty is not speaking in the name of a sadism or masochism, or transgression or negativity. Again, Genet can come to our aid- when the warder whips the prisoner, and the long pastoral dream sequence is precipitated, Merleau-Ponty would not say that this precipitation is occasioned as resistance or as, to indicate in a telegraphic manner what I will here call “perversions”- i.e. sado-masochistic fantasies on the part of the viewer or the characters in the film. Merleau-Ponty would not particularly prioritise the putative causal trigger. Rather, he would understand the intercalation on its own terms- as world disclosing, as “streaming forth along the articulations of the aesthesiological body, along the contours of sensible things… divined at the junctures of the visible world”.
Nothing in all this belies the political, but it invites us to consider not rushing with precipitate haste into transgression and simple reversal, but instead to first unmoor our conventional entanglement with the figure of mastery - and the thorny question of whether there can ever be resistance that can be completely disentangled from an alternate discourse of mastery. It seems that few people ask this difficult and precarious question as unflinchingly as Merleau-Ponty. The prisoner does indeed in his fantasy imagine a world outside the prison- but that new world is still chiefly a place that is open to love, and to a lover who is next door. Much links the new world of the pastoral to the old world of the prisoner- passions do not necessarily change in the same timeline as the contingencies of crime and punishment- as they together stream along the curvature of the same aesthesiological body. How, in an account of politics and ethics, even one which seemingly prioritizes the other over self (as for example in Levinas), is one to argue for a sensation of yielding mastery, of slipping away along the line of one’s own body, and thus opening new pores in a shared visual and bodied imagination? This is the radical politics that Merleau-Ponty would find congenial and hospitable to his thought- and it thus calls on all of us to fundamentally revise many of our shibboleths regarding notions of justice and resistance, ethics and the listening to solicitation. In the end of the shot sequence of the whipping of the prisoner in Un Chant d’ amour, it is the warder who is seduced into the fantasy of the prisoner- this is not a simple act of transgression, or reversal of power, or a simple accounting of oneself through the other- it is rather the strange (and strangely beautiful) violent sharing of the fantasy that makes for the liquid pleasure of the “slipping away” of mastery, and hence the difference in power and politics between the warder and the prisoner. Merleau-Ponty’s politics will insist with the need to factor in this dream language of power and desire and all the discomfiting or warm and plenitudinous horizons that are released. This is in contrast to a mechanical tallying of crime and punishment from a judge’s manual in bourgeois democracy. But equally it is also in contrast to messianic calls to, perhaps, a socialist utopia- one that too, in the name of justice being understood now as complete equality, would foreclose horizons by not allowing the free trade of the secret currency and constant mutual conversion of the visible and the invisible, of the equivalences that are not universal, of the fitful, uncertain and partial non coincidences that do make up much of the traffic between humans and the world.
In Un Chant d’ amour the lovers never see each other but are held in tension by the wide opened voyeuristic eye of the warder. Even the gaze of Lucien (the younger prisoner who is the object of the elder prisoner’s desire and fantasy) is directed elsewhere- this echoes Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the non localizability of water and color as he writes with regard to the shimmering pool in the Eye and the Mind. It is thus only the pure structure of a visuality- not localizable in a subject, or even an inter subjectivity- that provides the links as well as the narrative dynamism of the plot. The warder seems thus to take his eye, as it were in the palm of his hand, from shot to shot linking them. Finally, he cannot bear the swell of this visual-carnality any longer and must consummate it – even though no consummation can be total, nevertheless it must rise on the surface of the plot as a fold. So the warder takes out his gun and, in the simulation of fellatio, offers it to the mouth of the elder prisoner. It is clearly a sexual act as the warder throws back his head and closes his eyes in ecstasy. He then leaves, his locution in the world of the carnalised visual-embodiment over- the flowers that are intermittently being swung in various shots of the film (and was one of the opening shots of the film) are now caught. This particular event is over, and the warder moves on.
It is important not to reduce this triangulated sexual encounter. The encounter itself is polyvalent- it has as much to do with eyes as touch (and the lack of touch and sight- the prisoners do not see each other), with the man made body (the phallic gun) as with hands, with actuality as with long stretches of fantasy that interpose themselves in the actual, with the male member as with “feminised” orifices- the mouth of the elder prisoner, but also more significantly with the long ridged cylindrical surface at the end of which the warder’s voyeuristic eye emplaces itself as he stares “inside”. This muti folded encounter cannot be bound by a logic of a “thermodynamic” account of sex-one which believes that sex is a matter of a charged excitation which requires precisely an exact quantity of discharge that will then restore a normative equilibrium. In Merleau-Ponty, as well as in Genet (and in contrast to at least some of Freud’s writing), there is no mute point of equilibrium, or harmony- rather, all grapples with, partakes of, participates in, excess, exorbitance, a sort of exhibitionism of the bodied visible. The very train of the movement of “consciousness” is this sliding and slipping (and resultant friction) in and out of the lush ultramarine element of the visible. It is the texture of this velvet friction that causes the varied affects of thrill and the sense of an almost unexpected and subterranean planet of multivalent pleasures hidden beneath our skin. Of course one of the privileged sites of this equivalence of texture from seemingly widely divergent sources is the materiality of Merleau-Ponty’s prose itself. Here again, it is useful to turn to Genet’s film, which too, like Merleau-Ponty’s prose, is in itself a superbly apposite representation of this sentiment. Genet had written of the equivalence of disparate things (equivalence sometimes in opposition, as a sort of negative echo and mnemonic recall) in a manner that would deeply reverberate in Merleau-Ponty- and of the Valery Merleau-Ponty quotes in The Visible and the Invisible who had written that there is a type of blue so blue that only the red of blood could be more red. Likewise, in The Thief’s Journal, Genet had written, in partial explanation of the wide use of the motif of white flowers in so many of his writings throughout his career:

There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter. My sexual excitement is of the oscillation from one to the other. Should I have to portray a convict- or a criminal- I shall so bedeck him with flowers that, as he disappears beneath them, he will himself become a flower, a gigantic and a new one. (1985:61)

It is worth staying with some other passages from Genet’s extended oeuvre to simply inhabit, for a little while longer the subtle concurrent beauties of the world he- and Merleau-Ponty- evoke. In The Miracle of the Rose Genet had written of how, in photographing a band of half stripped youthful pirate sailors, the photographic plate would itself simply register a rose. Furthermore, the autopsy of a condemned murderer would reveal a gigantic rose in place of a heart even as his shackles are transformed into a bouquet. In Notre Dame des fleurs, he had written:

The big, inflexible, strict pimps, their members in full bloom- I no longer know whether they are lilies or whether lilies and members are not totally they”. (1991: 62)

Though unfortunately this is not a theme I can develop in this particular paper for lack of space, we can see how deeply insightful Genet was in understanding twentieth century technologies of visual representation. Though the visual technology itself may be from sources as diverse as medicine, nevertheless they may be said to have a special type of power, providing links unthinkable in the conventional everyday surface world of the subject. To see the world in terms of the links autopsies and x rays and the continually developing fields of imaging technology (predominantly medical today) provide is to open ourselves up to the possibilities of more profluent visual architectures- in other words, to repeat Genet, not only to see members as lilies but also lilies and members as this continually limitless, open landscape of the “they”.
This concern with serendipitous, even surreptitious linkages is critical for Genet, as for Merleau-Ponty. These are what provide the inner links, operating at a more subliminal sense -if one can is careful to use that word in the ontological or visual sense- as they always are for Merleau-Ponty. Even though Genet published much more literature and made only one completed film, it is clear how his writings are more filmic and visual than print-centric. To read any of Genet’s novels is to realize how closely he was working with the visual staple of the auteur, especially of his time- the collage, the flashback, the close up. Genet was known to be obsessed with cinema throughout his life and has more unpublished pages of film scenarios than any other, purely print-centric, genre. This is evident in his elaborate notes on filming La Bagne- I quote it here to further illustrate my previous point of his persistent search for ingenious ways of initiating us into how the world exhibits and confers itself as sameness in difference through the linking eye of the camera:

I have a few stipulations for the way in which it is to be filmed. The close ups should be very dark. No close ups of faces, but those of gestures, which without the immodesty of the camera would stay unseen…In a certain situation, a clenched fist can move us enormously, if the eye registers the texture of the skin, a black nail here, a wart, and the furtive caress of a finger on the palm that we wouldn’t have seen at the theater, for example- and perhaps which the characters ignore. In effect the cinema is basically immodest. Let us use this facility to enlarge gestures. The camera can open a fly and search out its secrets…The enlarged appearance of a ball of saliva in the corner of a mouth can, as the scene unfolds, arouse an emotion in the viewer which would give a weight, a new depth to this drama (quoted in Giles 1991:80).

By way of conclusion, I wish to briefly return to the question of mastery in Merleau-Ponty and Genet. Max Weber has famously defined the bureaucratic, instrumentalised modern state as that which monopolises power and violence- he was referring particularly to the standing army and the police. For Merleau-Ponty, this totalitarianism at the origin is what needs to be fatally undermined. He understands well the bureaucrat- that disembodied mind of science and technocracy who thinks that there are no limits to human sovereignty and the exploitation of the world- here the world is reduced, to use Heidegger’s language, to pure standing reserve awaiting the exploitation of man. In an indirect sense, then, one may read Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Valery’s Leonardo- this “pure man of mind”. Merleau-Ponty does think that this is a misguided interpretation of Leonardo, even of Leonardo the scientist. Nevertheless, such a pure man of mind provokes much discussion in Merleau-Ponty and may be said to be his indirect way of commenting on bureaucratic state machinery. In Genet the link is clear- the warder is the instrument of the state. The alternatives Merleau-Ponty and Genet pose is the dissolution of such power – this dissolution may be is indexed as a vulnerability to difference, fascination and adventure. The warder is seduced by the prisoners and Merleau-Ponty’s Leonardo accepts his limitations and goes on to produce great art. Merleau-Ponty writes in Cezanne’s Doubt, before introducing the section on Leonardo to illustrate this very point regarding the necessity to understand the relation of freedom and limitation–
Two things are certain about freedom- that we are never determined and yet that we never change …It is up to us to understand both these things simultaneously, as well as the way freedom dawns in us without breaking our bonds with the world. (1993:72) The world then is emphatically not to be reduced to standing reserve for it has a higher destiny than to be reduced to anthropomorphisms.
Let us follow the argument in some more detail. Merleau-Ponty cites Valery’s remark on how purely intellectual Leonardo was, a “man of mind”, a “monster of freedom” (1993:72). He then questions this interpretation of Valery by suggesting that even in a painting like Saint Anne, the Virgin and Child, there is yet a secret and violent history. He then uses Freud’s reading of the fellatio fantasy, though wishing to go even further, suggesting the eternalized childhood of Leonardo, who had been abandoned by his father and brought up only by his mother, a peasant girl, for four years. I bring this partly to show how largely congenial Merleau-Ponty’s reading would be to psychoanalysis- indeed he spends the last pages of the essay defending psychoanalysis, telling the reader how close it is to his project of proliferating the channels of communication between ourselves and our kin. But to me the equally interesting effect would be to try and use it in further interpreting Un Chant d’amour. The lines of eroticism in the film would have a wholly different quality if it were just a love story between two prisoners who never see each other- the particular quality of the film is attained only by the linking eye (like the auteur and the reader’s) of the warder. The warder may perhaps be read as the Censor of psychoanalysis, both a punitive super ego but also the frozen ego. In a sense then, in this inverted bildungsroman, it is the warder who is educated out of his place as the citizen-censor of the criminalized prisoners, and who is allowed an opening into a wholly different and multi faceted domain. As censor, like Valery’s Leonardo, he seems to be all mind, a disembodied, punitive figure of the law. The narrative momentum is sustained only as he cedes control- and this is finally visually accomplished, as in Freud’s interpretation of Leonardo’s dream, through fellatio (in the warder’s case by the gun, in Leonardo’s by the screen of the dream-reality itself). The warder, from being the bourgeois provider of order, becomes, like Leonardo, infantilized, and following Freud and Merleau-Ponty, in need of nursing, of the mother- but this realization is enabling, educative and productive. Merleau-Ponty writes-

At the height of his freedom he was, in that very freedom, the child he had been; he was free on one side only because bound on the other. (1993:74, italics Merleau-Ponty’s)

It is partly through such heuristic moves that one may bring the feminine (and perhaps thus the heterosexual too)- as the viscous inception and and not so much as a repression- into a “gay” film. The warder thus re founds and re launches himself, from the illusion of being the monster of pure freedom -the bourgeois self righteous citizen, but also the ego or “internal” super ego frozen in the posture of moral righteousness- to someone questioning his work, and someone in dialogue and not in authority and judgment over his fellow citizen-prisoner. And this may be the opportune and optimistic note to conclude this paper with- by returning to hope- not naïve, but not skeptical either- and one always prospecting for fissures in the wall of the calcified political-ontic. Genet’s citizen-warder seems some way along the line to becoming closer to the ideal of Merleau-Ponty as Merleau-Ponty eloquently summarizes with regard to the perennial refusal of mastery in Cezanne-

That is why he questioned the picture emerging beneath his hand, why he hung on the glances other people directed toward his canvas. That is why he never finished working. We never get away from our life. We never see ideas or freedom face to face. (1993: 75)

Indeed, it is this impossibility, this viscosity that is resistant to too hasty a representation (mastery) - of a self-righteous political sort or otherwise- that can open the door to a differently furnished human democracy and solidarity that is not simply a return to a rights- based liberal humanism or a now routinized multi culturalist notion of citizenship or community.









BIBLIOGRAPHY



Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Barnes and Noble, 1994.

Genet, Jean. Miracle of the Rose. New York: Grove Press Inc, 1951.

Our Lady of the Flowers. New York: Bantam Books, 1943.

Un Chant d’amour [Video Recording]. No date.

The Thief’s Journal. London: Penguin. 1985.

Querelle. New York: Grove Press.1989.

Giles, Jane. The Cinema of Jean Genet: Un Chant d’amour. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1991.

Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Johnson, Galena A. (ed.) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. New York: W.W.Norton and Company, 1981.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984.

Saint Genet. London: Pantheon Books, 1983.

Silverman, Kaja. World Spectators. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

The Threshold of the Visible World. London: Routledge, 1995.

the finger branches of the rose tree stand upright, 15 feet tall, watching
mother give her child khathingla the last red biscuit. pigs and fowl/watch
too. for days they had worked for the festival. at best she would survive
four more hours.she bends over, a-tip in her delirium, kissing her little daughter.
the daughter in her sleep pushes her away. one last short fairy tale has made her eyelid heavy in motion. somewhere the prisoner is happy,/ and the rice plants stout and heavy

poem-

kombat kamba


headless warriors dance wordlessly / through the night- their trunk still pierced by arrows.

large jackals stalk the streets with saliva monkeys overrun the palaces and groves/ prattling advice and victory

outside the ocean brims with lotus and swans sport with their loves. the fisherwomen gaze into night’s glare over ocean/ eyes and hope blurred with a still waiting.

the full moon floats out of the mouth of the stippled serpent. the sea is a sacrificial pit, the shark and snake the grass and ghee.


the water god’s tresses trail fire