Time, Memory, Institution: Merleau-Ponty's New Ontology of Self

By David Morris

This collection is the first extended investigation of the relation between time and memory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought as a whole and the first to explore in depth the significance of his concept of institution. It brings the French phenomenologist’s views on the self and ontology into contemporary focus. Time, Memory, Institution argues that the self is not a self-contained or self-determining identity, as such; it is gathered out of a radical openness to what is not self, and that it gathers itself in a time that is not merely a given dimension, but folds back upon, gathers, and institutes itself.

Access to previously unavailable texts, in particular Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on institution and expression, has presented scholars with new resources for thinking about time, memory, and history. These essays represent the best of this new direction in scholarship; they deepen our understanding of self and world in relation to time and memory; and they give occasion to reexamine Merleau-Ponty’s contribution and relevance to contemporary Continental philosophy.

This volume is essential reading for scholars of phenomenology and French philosophy, as well as for the many readers across the arts, humanities, and social sciences who continue to draw insight and inspiration from Merleau-Ponty.

Contributors: Elizabeth Behnke, Edward Casey, Véronique Fóti, Donald Landes, Kirsten Jacobson, Galen Johnson, Michael Kelly, Scott Marratto, Glen Mazis, Caterina Rea, John Russon, Robert Vallier, and Bernhard Waldenfels

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780821444962

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Series in Continental Thought

Editorial Board

Ted Toadvine, Chairman, University of Oregon

Elizabeth A. Behnke, Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body

David Carr, Emory University

James Dodd, New School University

Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University

José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University†

William R. McKenna, Miami University

Algis Mickunas, Ohio University

J. N. Mohanty, Temple University

Dermot Moran, University College Dublin

Thomas Nenon, University of Memphis

Rosemary Rizo-Patron de Lerner, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima

Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy

Elizabeth Ströker, Universität Köln†

Nicolas de Warren, Wellesley College

Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University

International Advisory Board

Suzanne Bachelard, Université de Paris†

Rudolf Boehm, Rijksuniversiteit Gent

Albert Borgmann, University of Montana

Amedeo Giorgi, Saybrook Institute

Richard Grathoff, Universität Bielefeld

Samuel Ijsseling, Husserl-Archief te Leuven

Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University

Werner Marx, Albert-Ludwigs Universität, Freiburg†

David Rasmussen, Boston College

John Sallis, Boston College

John Scanlon, Duquesne University

Carlo Sini, Università di Milano

Jacques Taminiaux, Louvain-la-Neuve

D. Lawrence Wieder†

Dallas Willard, University of Southern California†

Time, Memory, Institution

...................................

Merleau-Ponty’s New Ontology of Self

Edited by David Morris and Kym Maclaren

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An earlier version of Coming and Going of Time, by Bernhard Waldenfels, appeared in Ortsverschiebungen, Zeitverschiebungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), 210–35.

An earlier version of "The Presence of the Artwork, a Past That Is Not Past:

Merleau-Ponty and Paul Klee," by Galen A. Johnson, University of Rhode Island, appeared in French in Alter: Revue de Phénoménologie 16 (2008): 227–42.

Printed in the United States of America

Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper. ™

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Time, memory, institution : Merleau-Ponty’s new ontology of self / edited by

David Morris and Kym Maclaren.

pages cm. — (Series in Continental thought ; No. 47)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8214-2108-6 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-4496-2 (pdf)

1. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908–1961. I. Morris, David, 1967– editor.

B2430.M3764T56 2015

194—dc23

2014039301

To time.

And to friendship, which takes time.

Abbreviations for Works by Merleau-Ponty

...................................

For the works listed below with both English and French editions:

• In citations where abbreviations are followed by numbers separated by a slash, the numbers before the slash refer to pages in the English translation, the numbers after the slash refer to pages in the French original.

• In cases where only one number is given, this refers to page numbers in the French.

AD Adventures of the Dialectic. Translated by Joseph Bien. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Originally published as Les Aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955).

CAL Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language. Translated by Hugh J. Silverman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Originally published as La Conscience et l’acquisition du langage, Bulletin de psychologie 236, no. 18 (1964): 226–59.

EM Eye and Mind. Translated by Carleton Dallery. In PrP. Where indicated, the translation cited is by Michael B. Smith in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Originally published as L’Oeil et l’Esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).

HLP Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology. Translated by John O’Neill and Leonard Lawlor. Edited by Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Originally published as Notes de cours sur L’Origine de la géométrie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998).

HT Humanism and Terror. Translated by John O’Neill. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Originally published as Humanisme et terreur: Essai sur le problème communiste (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).

IP Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955). Edited by Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort, and Stéphanie Ménasé. Translated by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. Originally published as L’institution dans l’histoire personnelle et publique / Le problème de la passivité: Le sommeil, l’inconscient, la mémoire: Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954–1955), ed. Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort, and Stéphanie Ménasé (Paris: Editions Belin, 2003).

N Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Translated by Robert Vallier. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Originally published as La nature: Notes, cours du Collège de France, ed. Dominique Séglard (Paris: Seuil, 1995).

NC Notes des cours au Collège de France, 1958–1959 et 1960–1961. Edited by Stéphanie Ménasé. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.

PhP Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1962. Originally published as Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945).

PhPL Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. New York: Routledge, 2012. Originally published as Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 2008).

PPOE In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by John Wild and James M. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Originally published as Éloge de la Philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1953); and Résumés de cours, Collège de France 1952–1960 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).

PrP The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Edited by James M. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

PW The Prose of the World. Translated by John O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Originally published as La prose du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).

S Signs. Translated by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Originally published as Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960).

SB The Structure of Behavior. Translated by Alden L. Fisher. London: Methuen, 1965. Originally published as La structure du comportement (Paris: Quadrige / Presses Universitaires de France, 1942).

SNS Sense and Non-Sense. Translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Originally published as Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948).

TD Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Politics, and Culture. Edited by Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry Jr. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992.

TL Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, 1952–1960. Translated by John O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Originally published as Résumés de cours, Collège de France, 1952–1960 (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). This collects the résumés that Merleau-Ponty wrote for his lecture courses. These résumés are also included in a number of the lecture note volumes listed here. Also note that the contents of TL are included in PrP.

VI The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Originally published as Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).

WP The World of Perception. Translated by Oliver Davis. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2004. Originally published as Causeries 1948 (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2002).

Acknowledgments

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We are grateful to all those who have contributed to this volume, for their remarkably thoughtful and diligent work, their patience, and their grace. John Russon, with his characteristic generosity and wisdom, also advised us during the review process; we are indebted to him for this, on top of many years of sound, thoughtful advice. From two anonymous reviewers we received constructive and appreciative feedback for which we are grateful; we are also extremely happy to have found ourselves in the competent and intelligent hands of series editor Ted Toadvine at Ohio University Press. In terms of funding, we would like to acknowledge various sources of support for both this book and the 2008 conference of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle, which we co-organized at Ryerson University and which inspired this collection.

Kym Maclaren is thankful for financial support of the conference by Ryerson University’s Department of Philosophy, Office of the Dean of Arts, and Office of Research and Innovation; she also acknowledges the Faculty of Arts Small Projects Grant for funding research assistants to aid in editing and preparing the manuscript.

David Morris is grateful for the support of the conference by the Office of the Vice-President of Research and Graduate Studies at Concordia University, and for Concordia’s Faculty of Arts and Science Chair Research Grant, which funded a research assistant to help with editing and manuscript completion. David would also like to acknowledge a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant for another project on Merleau-Ponty: research for this project greatly aided work on the introduction. We would both like to thank Jay Worthy, Niomi Anna Cherney, and Nahum Brown for their careful work in helping to edit the manuscript and track down references, and Donald Beith for his work on the index. Finally, we could not have seen this project through without the support, understanding, and philosophical encouragement of Emilia Angelova and David Ciavatta; we each thank them both.

Introduction

...................................

This collection of essays elucidates Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of time, memory, and the institution of meaning, and develops their implications for understanding the self and its ontology.

A central point of the collection and this introduction is that the self is not what it is as some already, determinately given identity, or a self-contained nucleus of being. Far from an ideal identity or a classic substance, in Merleau-Ponty’s account the self is ongoingly generated out of differences; it is gathered out of a radical openness to what is not self. What the self is most of all open to and gathered out of is time. But time, too, lacks an already given identity. Time, too, is what it is through an ongoing gathering. The self and time can thus shed light on each other—and on an ontology that they share.

In this ontology identities are not fully present, determinate, or consolidated, but only emerge through ongoingly generative differences. But this does not mean that there is no such thing as an identity. On the contrary, meaning and meaningful identity—sense—is at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. It is just that his philosophy, in ever-deeper ways, shows that sense never was something given as fully determinate in advance, or derived from ready-made resources. Sense, and the sense of an identity, always arises in a generative movement that is open to difference and disturbance, turning out otherwise. (Expression is an exemplary case.[1]) While a self or its identity is thus never already or fully given, the openness of difference nonetheless does give identities. Indeed, there is no other way for an identity, or a self, to be.

Identities that arise this way hinge on memory and the institution of meaning. These are operations that jointly allow something to stabilize and endure in and through the openness of differences and time. But, as several chapters in this collection emphasize, for Merleau-Ponty, these operations are not merely in our heads. Memory and institution are at issue and occur in our living engagement with the world, for example, on a prereflective level that extends beyond us into the places, built and natural, that we inhabit, into the things we use, and into our relations with others. And memory and institution as experienced in this way are telltales of and draw on a memory and institution already operative in a deeper ontology of being itself.[2]

This deeper ontology is what Merleau-Ponty was working toward in his later writings. The collection shows, though, how themes of this ontology can already be found in and resonate with his earlier work. The collection thus exposes a new ontology that weaves throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work, in which being, selfhood, and identity are not already determinately given or fully consolidated, but are generative phenomena—generated via time, memory, and institution. The book thereby suggests a repositioning of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in relation to other currents of philosophy, the reception of his philosophy, and common conceptions of phenomenology. It does this by helping us understand how his phenomenology is not rooted in an already given subject or self, but in a new and radical ontology. As discussed in section 2 below, this changes the sense of phenomenology.

The first section below surveys and connects in a bit more detail the above themes of self, time, memory, and institution, in their relation to ontology, to help orient the reader and sketch an overarching context for the chapters that follow. The second section situates, in relation to current scholarship, a picture of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that emerges through common themes and tendencies of the chapters, suggesting how the book as a whole repositions Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. The third section maps the essays in the collection in terms of their conceptual organization around the central themes of time, memory, and institution.

1. the self and time, memory, and institution

It has become a commonplace in philosophy, especially since the identity philosophy of figures such as Schelling and Fichte, that the I and also the self are not simple substances or unities, but identities that are what they are only through difference. These philosophers, for example, argue that the self is what it is only by positing or affirming its identity as a self: the self is only through self-relation. Such a self-relation entails a difference within the self: the self that does the affirming (as subject), and the self that it comes back to (as object) and posits as self, must be different—even though being a self precisely entails positing these two selves as an identity. If these two selves were immediately identical, there would in fact be no room for the sort of positing constitutive of a self—a being that posits its identity. Hegel pushes this point even further, by making explicit how the experience of the self reveals that the self’s relation to itself in fact entails a complex return to self from an other. This means that the identity of the self is rooted not just in a difference within the self, a difference that the self might itself be able to posit, constitute, or encompass on its own, but in a difference with otherness.

For our purposes it is better to speak of such differences as disparities. This helps indicate that the sorts of terms in question (e.g., self as subject vs. object) arise in relation to one another: they are in disparity only by being disparate with one another. This is the sort of relationship at stake in what Merleau-Ponty calls écart, divergence, in which terms become what they are by diverging from one another—but only by way of a relation that couples the diverging terms. The word disparity helps capture the point that these terms do not add up in a neat sum total or fixed unity: they always remain disparate.

The chapters below that study the self in Merleau-Ponty imply that disparity is ontologically constitutive of the self. Something other than me opens me up and determines me as a self, first of all reveals me to myself and thereby realizes me as the self that I am. I thus find myself fundamentally inhabited and haunted by otherness—but this does not undermine me. Indeed, as Jacobson argues, this otherness shelters me, lets me find and be myself; it is only by being inhabited, sheltered, and discovered by that which is not in me, that which is disparate with me, that I am me, myself. (See also Russon, Marratto, Behnke.)

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, though, deepens this point into an even stronger ontological claim. This is because the various disparities constitutive of the self are not disparities between the self and some other thing that would, unlike the self, be nondisparate, fully given, unified, all together. Disparity also haunts the beings that shelter, inhabit, and discover the self. Indeed, these beings are akin to the self in being disparate with themselves.

This is most of all apparent when we turn to time, to temporality and its role in the self. If disparity is constitutive of the self, then that which is not in me in fact shelters and is crucial to me. What is most of all not in me, though, is the very temporality through which I come to be a self. Without this temporality that exceeds me, there would be no latitude for the self to come back to itself. Temporality is crucial to the self, and it is crucial as something other than the self. Yet, ontologically, temporality, despite not being in me, despite being other than me, is the central matter of my self, since right now I am who I am by virtue of what I am yet to be (my futurity) and what I will have been (my pastness).

Merleau-Ponty captures this kinship between my self and time when he writes, I am myself time (PhPL, 445/483). But he also adds that the originary temporality at issue in this time is clearly not the juxtaposition of mutually external events; rather, originary temporality is the power that holds them [the events] together by separating them from each other (PhPL, 445–46/484). That is, as several chapters below show, Merleau-Ponty is not only saying that I am myself time, but that the sort of disparity that is ontologically constitutive of self is constitutive of temporality, too.

This disparity is the power that holds originary temporality together—but not as a given time-dimension with an established sequence or metric. Such a given time-dimension would be like a river that is already set up, waiting to flow by us—a typical image of time. As Mazis suggests, following Merleau-Ponty (and Proust), a better image for temporality is perhaps a wind that first gathers itself in gusts. Temporality gathers and institutes its metrics, rhythms, tensions, sequences, and pace of unfolding, on the fly. Futurity and pastness remain openended, rather than being already given destinies or histories. Indeed, the being of this temporality is thus (and this is a difficult point that requires study, e.g., of Waldenfels’s essay in this book) the being of disparity, noncoincidence, nongivenness.

In temporality we thus find a deep ontological echo of the being of the self. Merleau-Ponty himself wrote in the Phenomenology that time must be understood as a subject, and the subject must be understood as time (445/484). In saying that time must be understood as a subject, he meant, as above, that time is not a given dimension, but rather something that powers its own holding together through a disparity that is never overcome, a disparity that is rather the ongoing condition for this power of temporality. This echo between temporality and the self is at work in several chapters in this book, suggesting ways in which, for Merleau-Ponty, on both methodological and ontological levels, the self and temporality illuminate and resonate with each other. The self and temporality alike are not given or unitary phenomena; each marks an ontological operation or structure in which difference is generated within being, via disparity, from differences that are not yet given. (See, e.g., Waldenfels, Kelly, Rea, Landes, and Mazis.)

This operation of disparity that generates difference from not-yet-given difference, the determinate from the not-determinate, identity from nonidentity, is a key point of Merleau-Ponty’s new ontology. In virtue of this it might look like this ontology leaves no room for a real identity of the self. But, crucially for Merleau-Ponty, this does not preclude there being identity; indeed, the self and temporality most obviously do exhibit an identity.[3]

To understand how this is possible, we first need to bring in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of institution. According to Merleau-Ponty, institution is an operation that can generate new meaning or identity, sense. But institution does not do this by actively constituting or synthesizing meanings or identities from a ready-made source. Institution rather involves events in an experience which endow the experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, will form a thinkable sequel or a history (IP, 77/124).

Such an instituting event arises in a flux of moments that turn out to be seeking a new sense, but do not already contain within themselves the durable dimensions and new sense to which they happen to give rise. It is not even the case that the moments are atomic units that already contain the elements of this new sense, where the moments only need to be combined in a new way for new sense to arise. In such a combinatory solution to generating new sense, the problem of the new sense is well defined: the solution is simply fitting together pieces of an already defined puzzle. But for Merleau-Ponty, institution is much more radical and creative. The problem is not already defined. It is not even the case that the moments are proceeding in any specific direction, that they are geared to a problem they may turn out to solve. The problem itself is muddled, it is only clarified retrospectively as what turns out to have been steering things. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, using the example of the institution of love in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (and speaking in the voice of Proust’s narrator), "I have not believed in my love because it was in the ‘volatile state’: I had believed in it when it is crystallized by Albertine’s departure" (IP, 35/71). It is only after this departure that love crystallizes and that it becomes clear that love had been the problem being worked on (note Merleau-Ponty’s shifts in tense). There was no clear problem being worked on before the departure, the issue was not even there in a volatile state. This means that when the instituting event arises in the flux of moments and institutes durable dimensions, it not only sets up a way forward to a thinkable future (e.g., one in which love will always be an issue), it also makes sense of the past as having posed a problem (e.g., the problem of love) that is now (provisionally) resolved, but was not clear prior to the instituting event.

This operation of institution can be illustrated on a finer-grained scale, which gives more insight into how institution works, by considering dancers who have been improvising with one another—and discover that in their improvising they have in fact choreographed a new dance, or perhaps even generated a new style of dancing. Each of the moves the dancers bring to their improvisation is an example of a moment. The dancers do not yet have their dance in mind, nor is it already contained in the moments; it is precisely unforeseen. The dancers do not even know that they are working their way to a new dance. Yet when these moments happen in contact within one another, in their concrete embodiment and succession, they can eventually latch onto and into one another, modify one another, fit together in a new way of moving that makes new sense. There is a moment when it all clicks together in a new way, and dancers, musicians, artists, can feel such things. This moment is an event that, for the dancers, will have endowed their moving experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, will form a thinkable sequel or a history (IP, 77/124). Their improvising will have choreographed a new way of moving forward together, a way they can repeat as showing a new sense, a new dance, or even dance style.[4]

It is important to emphasize that institution, like the self, is not generated out of already given sources or resources, but openness to temporality. This follows from Merleau-Ponty’s key point that institution is not an active constitution or synthesis of sense (and it leads to the importance of passivity, the topic of a course given in parallel to the institution course). Institution is a generation of new sense out of openness to something beyond what currently makes sense, and this is most of all temporality, as the very power that holds together and apart the events out of which institution arises. Temporality grants enduring institution, but does so precisely as what is radically open and does not endure, as disparate with itself, all the way down into its very depths. There is no bottom to time, some source where it all starts or is all given; temporality and thence the self have no already given source. This is what leaves room for giving identities and new sense.

We have seen that institution does not arise out of an already given source, and it is not a solution to an already given problem. If the solution or problem were already there in institution’s past, then institution would be entirely steered by this past, and institution would be a kind of constitution of solutions to already given problems via already given powers (and would not manifest passivity). Institution must be open to and anchored in something beyond it, to temporality and a flux of moments that will have (contingently) turned out to eventuate an event that steers institution. This raises a new problem to which we must now turn: How can this happen if what institution is ultimately open to is temporality as disparate with itself, all the way down? How does any sort of anchorage or steering happen?

The answer is memory. In virtue of memory, the self, in its disparity with itself, nonetheless holds on to its past self, in the name of a self that it wants to be. This requires remembering the past—and in a peculiar way the future, too, as Vallier points out. Memory, in this sense, is that in virtue of which the past, present, and future, even though disparate, operate together. In virtue of this operation of memory, which weighs the now with past and future, institution can arise, not as constituting sense, but as instituting it out of a passivity to what memory carries along.

One of the things the book shows, though, is that such memory is not a merely human, psychological, or personal phenomenon, but has an ontological dimension to it: in temporality’s very operation as what does not endure, there is nonetheless a sort of perdurance, a depth that weighs the present and futurity with pastness (see Mazis, Landes, Vallier). That is, memory is manifest in temporality’s own power of holding events together by separating them from each other (PhPL, 446/484). Temporality itself hinges on a sort of memory in being, in virtue of which past, present, and future moments can, right now, resonate in one another, weigh one another down.

Memory and institution thus operate together in letting meaning, identity, and selfhood arise in temporality. In this cooperation, though, memory and institution have distinguishable roles. Memory is what lets a past (and future) operate in and weight the now. Institution is what works up the weight of this past to lay out an already intelligible sequel. Institution thus tends to obscure its past, because this past is precisely absorbed into institution as now steering the way things go. Yet this past, even when absorbed into steering the present, is still at work in the present. This becomes explicit in memory proper. Consider Proust’s example of the narrator dipping his madeleine into the lime tea in a particular way. The past is there in this ritual, steering ways of dipping and tasting, as well as what is felt in this ritual. But until the narrator explicitly remembers when it was he first did this, the past is simply absorbed in steering the ritual. When he does explicitly remember, the present moment is doubled or overlaid with the past that he is now remembering. Memory proper makes the past stand out as distinct from the present that it steers. But even when we are not explicitly remembering, in virtue of other memorial phenomena such as habit and body memory, the past is still operative in the now, steering it.

The point that the past can steer the now, even when this is not explicit or explicitly remembered, is quite important. It shows that the past is alive and maintained in the present, via memory and institution; the past is not dead and gone, behind us. The past drives us. But this does not mean that the past drives us in fixed ways. Such a claim would in fact be another version of the claim that the past is dead and gone, already fixed. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, institution and memory bring the past into operation in a much more labile way. The point that institution reworks the past was already suggested above: we saw that instituting events retrospectively clarify the problems they turn out to have solved, and in doing so they also rework the past and how it steers us. The institution of love reveals to Proust’s narrator that his past jealousies were anticipations of love. They could be this sort of anticipation only once love is instituted. But once they are this sort of anticipation, the past and its drives change.

Memory and institution thus overlap, with memory tending to keep the weight of the past going in the now, and institution tending to work up or rework the way this past weighs and steers the now. This relation between institution and memory is well captured in an image that Merleau-Ponty deploys four times in the passivity lectures, that of a volant. Volant has several meanings, among them steering wheel and flywheel. A flywheel is a large circular mass that is used to store momentum and kinetic energy. It takes work to get a flywheel spinning, but once it is spinning, it keeps on going. You can experience this with the flywheel of a spin-bike in the gym. In mechanical gyroscopes, the spinning flywheel tends to keep the gyroscope pointed in a constant direction: spinning up the flywheel gives its mass an angular momentum that tends to keep the flywheel from diverging (in technical language, precessing) from its orientation. Similarly, the wheels of your spinning road-bike keep you from falling over; they tend not to precess from their upright direction of travel. In all these flywheel phenomena, the momentum of the past, and energy used in the past, continues to well up in the present, and in doing so, steers things.

In Merleau-Ponty’s image of the volant, we can think of institution as what spins up the weight of the past, and memory as what keeps this weight operating in the present. In doing so the weight of the past is absorbed into this spin. This spun-up weight steers how things lead into their sequel, as when the gyroscope stays pointed in a certain direction. Memory and institution together constitute the volant: memory provides the weighing past without which the volant would lack steering heft; institution provides and maintains the spin that lets the hefty past now steer things. It is because institution keeps maintaining the spin, and memory keeps weighting things, that an institution can lead to its own reworking. In the summary of the passivity lectures, Merleau-Ponty writes that "to be conscious is to realize a certain divergence, a certain variation in an already instituted existential field, which is always behind us and whose weight, like that of a flywheel [volant], intervenes up into the actions by which we transform it" (IP, 206/267). The volant intervenes up into our action by memory’s maintaining the weight of the past that diverges behind us; and in virtue of institution having spun this weight up in a particular way, the past does not just weight us down, but now steers us, points us toward a particular sensible sequel. In virtue of this, he then writes, To live, for humans, is not merely to impose significations perpetually, but to continue a vortex of experience which is formed, with our birth, at the point of contact between the ‘outside’ and the one who is called to live it (IP, 206/267).[5]This is the point that the self is what it is by openness to what shelters it, most of all, to temporality.

The joint operation of memory and institution as volant lets us understand how the radical openness and disparity of temporality can generate sense and a sense of self. Merleau-Ponty writes (in a critical discussion of Freud) that somatic sexuality is neither the prior cause nor the subsequent effect of our psychic formation; rather, somatic sexuality "is a flywheel [volant], a grain of sand on which the oyster makes its pearl with time" (IP, 185/242).[6]This gives an image for the connections sketched here: the joint operation of memory and institution as volant (of prior and subsequent temporality) is the sand out of which the self makes itself with time.

We must remember, though, that such a self is not a fixed, stable identity. The self is, as it were, always built on the shifting sands of time that have no bottom. We can now understand, though, how memory and institution jointly operate to enable a tension to arise in and out of bottomless time, a tension in which some pearl of identity, sense, or dimension appears as if already and fully given—yet it appears only by being generated out of a disparity that is not already given. It is this tension that enables and is at the heart of the self: the self appears as the most fixed, stable core of our being, yet it is what it is only through disparity. The heart of the self is a tension of the fixed and disparate, enabled by the joint operation of memory, institution, and time.

Here it is worth emphasizing that the tension between the fixed and the disparate belongs to time itself. Originary temporality, as the power of holding events together through a memory that operates in being itself, also is the power that enables institution. And linear temporality, with one event already lined up as leading to another, is perhaps the most basic institution, the most basic durable dimension. Merleau-Ponty himself remarks in The Visible and the Invisible that time is not an absolute series of events, a tempo—not even the tempo of the consciousness—it is an institution (184/238); and in the institution lectures, he remarks that time is the very model of institution (IP, 7/36). He means by this that time is not an already given dimension; that time, like the self, institutes (rather than already having) its flowing identity; but he also means that time does institute an identity, does become durable. Time is the model of institution because it is what most of all manifests the way that stability is instituted out of instability: if we could not encounter time as a stable flow, we would not encounter time; but if we encounter it as an already and fully stabilized flow, we also do not encounter time itself in its happening, we encounter a bad image of it. The paradox is this: what is fundamentally disparate with itself, time, institutes a durable identity; yet it has this durable identity only through its more fundamental ontological disparity.

This point about time is worth emphasizing here because it is key to grasping the new ontology of the self implied by this book. We can help capture the issue, and what this collection is trying to do, by putting Merleau-Ponty’s new ontology of the self in terms of a different image. Our bodies give off flows of hot, humid air that cling to and wrap around our bodies. For the most part we do not directly feel or encounter the atmosphere beyond us, but rather feel and encounter a thin bubble of