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I recently took my graduate students through Discipline and Punish (DP), a text often cataloged as Foucault’s “genealogy of the prison” but which is, to me, more notable for its account of the emergence of liberal individualism as a specific and contingent tactic of disciplinary power. Moving slowly through this text with the French Suveiller et Punir beside me—and bracketing my disgruntlements elicited by the infelicitous translation[1]—I found myself pulled back to the general project and tone of Mearleau-Ponty’s (MMP’s) texts, Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. In both texts, MMP patiently critiques the subject-object logic of the two primary philosophical lines of thought determining coursework and knowledge production in the twentieth century: intellectualism (idealism) and objectivism (scientific empiricism). Just as Foucault’s DP charts how the plasticity and pliability of human bodies open bodies to the constraints and training of disciplinary power, so MMP theorizes the falsity of unqualified individuality through a double intertwinement, first of consciousness with embodiment, and second of embodied consciousness with the world. Humans are not conscious beings, but embodied consciousnesses, and our intwined consciousness-body itself intwines with the general body (later, flesh) of the world. My body is both mine and an opaque, inexhaustible generality that functions as my unique insertion-point in and with the world’s opacity, ambiguity and inexhaustibility. By this double intwining, each body shares ‘flesh’—or elemental generality—but does not completely share its historically acquired and sedimented perspective.

My students and I discussed MMP’s notion of narcissism in “The Intertwining—the Chiasm” as a necessary and irreducible particularity of bodily perspective. We speculated on how this narcissism might function to protect the borders of both persons and things, how this phenomenological narcissism might be grasped as an incipient phenomenological ethics of non-appropriation. For MMP, the opacity and ambiguity of our own bodies encounter the inexhaustibility and ambiguity of the world—a fact that explains not only how we can remain mysteries to ourselves and others, but also how the general continuities of lived experiences across places and times necessarily coexist with profound differences.

Similar to Constance Furey’s critique of the individualism rampant in religious studies and her bid for scholars to return to a more Augustinian modality of intimacy and relationality,[2] MMP assumes a common world that is striated with uncommon and incompatible perspectives, but which can be fruitfully examined through specific relations, and then reconciled—or, at least, MMP seems to present the possibility that the phenomenological task of science, ethics, or politics is to work toward such reconciliation. MMP implies such an reachable goal of harmonious perspective in “Intertwining—the Chiasm” when he relates Peter and Paul’s shared experience of the green of a landscape, followed, without pause, with the example of how a customs agent sees in a traveler the very depiction of a wanted man. In other words, MMP is quite aware of the life-altering functionings of social roles and social norms, but he is not yet ready to theorize them differently from the more existential question of whether my friend and I truly see the “same” green.

Point One: Bodies are general, opaque, and ambiguous. Bodies are the means for grasping the crucial falseness of theorizing from an ideal or empirical split between subject and object. The facts of embodied life are why scholars need to theorize from an ontological inter-relationality. Because bodies share generality and “flesh” with each other and with the world, scholars can claim a shared or common world but scholars also should tarry with how and why this commonality is never achieved.[3] The fact of commonality does not generate the means to reduce body to body, body to world, or world to body, but is instead a generality or field that persists beneath each body’s unique perspective, an ontological subtending that might be the incipient urge toward a laborious ethics of perspectival reconciling.

[1] It is unconscionable that Vintage or Random House has not funded a new translation, updated by the publication of Foucault’s Lectures from the Collège de France. Sheridan’s translation is not false, but it is bad in many places—missing Foucault’s sly intellectual interlocution with Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Althusser (at the least). Also, many times, Sheridan inserts Foucault’s footnotes in the text or as parentheticals in the text, both of which change the reception of the footnoted details. More, Sheridan sometimes mutates Foucault’s incomplete sentences that stand as taglines or signposts into questions or complete sentences, again changing the rhythm and tone of the discourse. Finally, sometimes (but rarely) Sheridan’s word choice is simply wrong. Sheridan performed a crucial and excellent feat for the 1970s; but this translation has outlived the translator and we now need an updated, smarter translation of this text.

[2] Furey, “Body, Society, and Subjectivity in Religious Studies,” JAAR, 2012, Vol. 80, No. 1, pp. 7-33.

[3] See Judith Butler, What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (New York: Columbia UP, 2022), p. 77, where she aptly cites Ferreira da Silva on this point: “the common is striated with both distinctness and overlap. A common world, as we know, does not mean that we share in it equally or that we are exposed to the same degree of toxicity or contagion. This is what Denise Ferreira da Silva refers to as ‘difference without separability.’”