Flesh and Écart in Merleau-Ponty and Nancy

In this chapter, I ask whether Nancy’s critical comments about phenomenologies of the lived body apply to Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology of the flesh. After I assess the biographical and textual evidence that might confirm a relation between the two thinkers and review Merleau-Ponty’s description of self-sensing the Phenomenology of Perception, I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s discussions of the flesh and the chiasm in The Visible and the Invisible. I focus on passages where Merleau-Ponty speaks of flesh as divergence (écart) and of the hiatus between the two leaves of my body to see whether they allow us to reconceive the embodied self as radically opened or exposed. I show that even though in these passages Merleau-Ponty comes very close to Nancy, who also very often speaks of écart or spacing, he does not conceive of the dehiscence of the flesh as an ontological cut or void but rather as an encroachment, overlapping, and promiscuity. I conclude that each thinker’s understanding of écart provides a helpful corrective for a tendency found in the other.