Merleau-Ponty and Correlationism

I’m often surprised at the supposed radicality M-P is supposed to hold. I deeply appreciate his writing, and the influence he had on others in his orbit cannot be understated (e.g., Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Sartre…). But if you want the definition of correlationism, it’s M-P. Harman writes:

Take Merleau-Ponty, for instance. There are good aspects to M.-P., but contrary to popular belief, he is not an especially original ontologist. Merleau-Ponty says the world looks at me just as I look at it. But that’s the very definition of correlationism. You don’t “overcome Kant” by saying that human and world always go together rather than being separate, you have to do it by no longer treating human and world as the two poles that are always in question.

My point is quite simple. For M-P, space is for us, time is for us,and his attempt to overcome dualism ends up being a none-too-secularized Flesh enfolding the world and human being in a co-relation. In other words, if you need a go-to quote for representing what Meillassoux, Harman, and Bryant are critiquing, M-P offers ample resources. (This is corollary to those who think M-P is some deconstructionist avant la lettre. I just don’t see it. His view of time as fully “present” is enough to question thinking of him as such.) This is not to doubt M-P’s influence on philosophy’s return to the body, but M-P’s body does not equal “text” (for those who think M-P’s “interrogation” is a quasi-Derridean move), nor does it equal “real.”

Which is to say, I’m on tap to teach quite a bit of him in the fall. Who doesn’t love “Cezanne’s Doubt”?