The chapter "The Body in its Sexual Being" ("Le corps comme être sexue") has been at the center of the ongoing debate over the usefulness or value of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological philosophy for feminism and feminist philosophy.

In this chapter from The Phenomenology of Perception (PhP), Merleau-Ponty introduces the theme of sexuality with a description of a pathological case:⁽¹⁾
 

... [F]or Schneider a woman's body has no particular essence: it is, he says, pre-eminently character which makes a woman attractive, for physically they are all the same. Close physical contact causes only a 'vague feeling', the knowledge of 'an indeterminate something' which is never enough to 'spark off' sexual behavior and create a situation which requires a definite mode of resolution. Perception has lost its erotic structure, both spatially and temporally. What has disappeared from the patient is his power of projecting before himself a sexual world, of putting himself in an erotic situation, or, once such a situation is stumbled upon, of maintaining it or following it through to complete satisfaction. The very word satisfaction no longer has meaning for him, since there is no intention or initiative of a sexual kind which calls up a cycle of movements and states, which 'patterns' them and finds satisfaction in them. (PhP 156)⁽²⁾
 

In sum, Schneider "no longer asks, of his environment, this mute and permanent question which constitutes normal sexuality" (PhP 156).

If this account of Schneider's dysfunction is taken as the contrary of normal sexuality, there appears to be much to criticize in Merleau-Ponty's approach. His interpretation or sensibility is perhaps summarized when he writes that for Schneider, "[o]bscene pictures, conversations on sexual topics, the sight of a body do not arouse desire in him" (PhP 155). In implicit contrast to Schneider, the signification of sexual transcendence seems bound up with the norm of hetero, male/masculine "projection," "initiative," and so on. If this is what Merleau-Ponty means by "erotic perception," all he would be saying is that a man's normal sexual transcendence begins in an objectifying gaze, at a woman's body which is essentially or pre-eminently the site of his projected satisfaction. If this is "erotic perception," then the reference to obscene pictures as sources of arousal is not a chance example, but the key to understanding man's normal sexual transcendence: erotic perception would be what Geraldine Finn calls "pornographic vision."

Worse, in the estimations of some, is the presumption of a neutral (neuter) anonymous body whose projections of intentionality give the world and others their meaning. Here there are two critical claims intertwined: first, of the foundationalism of the anonymous body, and second, of the solipsism of meaning-projection.⁽³⁾ On the basis of this critical interpretation, Merleau-Ponty's account of Schneider's abnormal lack of a projected sexual world is the lack of a world that is founded on Schneider's own (yet also anonymous) private (hetero-)sexual gratification. The hidden norm of sexuality in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the anonymous body-subject is, therefore, masculine, and hetero.

In my view, these are not necessary ways to read "The Body in its Sexual Being." Although pointing out his deficiency as an interpretor of sexual phenomena, I think these criticisms do not capture Merleau-Ponty's intent. The anonymous body is not the lived, personal body; projection of meaning always takes place in an already-meaningful situation rather than a solipsistic private world;⁽⁴⁾ and Schneider's case is not meant as a negative image of normal sexuality. But more to the point, the chapter is not a phenomenology of sex, sexual relations or sexuality; only abstractly or obliquely is sex discussed. Instead, the chapter consists of brief descriptions of Schneider and of a young aphasic anorexic woman (whose conditions are traced by Merleau-Ponty to her family's refusal to allow her to be with her chosen lover); a lot of talk about transcendence; references to Freud's extension of sexuality from a localized phenomenon to a general sphere of ideas, images, motivations, and so on; an exposition of Sartre's development of the master-slave relation through the concept of the gaze; and a lengthy concluding footnote on historical materialism. What is most immediately at issue in the chapter isn't sexuality itself, but sexuality as a sphere of meaning, a sphere of transcendence.⁽⁵⁾ The title is misleading, since the fundamental theme is not sexuality but "the birth of being for us," that is, "that area of our experience which clearly has significance and reality only for us, and that is our affective life" (PhP 154). Sexuality will be the term of analysis, not of sexuality itself, but of this "birth of being."

But I am far from certain that this provides Merleau-Ponty an adequate defense. An underlying criticism remains unanswered: What makes sexuality significant in this context? The very notion of a mute and permanent question of normal sexuality ignores the genealogy of that question, its deployment of a set of juridical categories establishing the power of compulsory heterosexuality. After all, Merleau-Ponty assumes the givenness of sexed bodies and their givenness in two sexes, one of which appears as the proper object of desire for the other. Judith Butler raised this criticism in an early essay directly challenging the "normal" and "natural" sexuality in the Phenomenology of Perception (Butler 1989 [1981]). Beyond the issue of this hidden heterosexual normativity is Merleau-Ponty's ignorance of the production of sexuality itself, a critical position that draws indirectly from Butler's later work, especially Gender Trouble. If there are sexed bodies, it is only because they have been sexed, and the crucial questions are by what or whom and how the sexing is done.

While these criticisms clearly exceed the scope of "The Body in its Sexed Being," they fundamentally challenge the chapter and call for a re-interrogation of the significance (if not also the signification) of the question of sexuality. What exactly is this mute and permanent question? Does the question still stand? How can it be said that bodies "have" sexuality as an attribute, a mode of existing, being situated and transcending? What does it mean to say that this "sexuality" is "at all times present there like an atmosphere" (PhP 168)? How can "normal" be said to describe this sexuality?

Why sexuality? The chapter's criticism of physiological and representational thinking about sexuality suggest an answer. These reductive accounts construe affectivity as "a mosaic of affective states, of pleasures and pains each sealed within itself, mutually incomprehensible, and explicable only in terms of the bodily system" (PhP 154). A choice is forced between the so-called natural body of physiology and a realm of ideas and images, and in either case the lived experience of meaning is unaccounted for. Sexuality, in that case, would be constituted as a series of bodily responses on the one hand, and a set of ideas and representations on the other. Freud's contribution is to show that sexuality is not strictly genital or instinctual but is, instead, "the general power, which the psychosomatic subject enjoys, of taking root in different settings, of establishing itself through different experiences, of gaining structures of conduct" (PhP 158). Sexuality is one direction of the body-subject's transcendence, its "act of taking up a de facto situation" and transforming it (PhP 169).

And yet: why sexuality? The "mute and permanent question" suggests a naive assumption of the givenness of sexuality, regardless of how problematically or transcendingly that sexuality is said to be lived through. The ambiguity of Merleau-Ponty's position is clear from the final paragraph of the chapter:
 

Everything in man is a necessity... On the other hand everything in man is contingency in the sense that this human manner of existence is not guaranteed to every human child through some essence acquired at birth,⁽⁶⁾ and in the sense that it must be constantly reforged in him through the hazards encountered by the objective body. Man is a historical idea and not a natural species. In other words, there is in human existence no unconditioned possession, and yet no fortuitous attribute. (PhP 170)
 

Nothing is accidental about the given structuration of the objective body, yet the objective body does not determine human existence. This could mean that the universally necessary given body is always already transcended, as we are born into some contingent, particular culture. But this interpretation is resisted by the text that follows:
 

Why is our body, for us, the mirror of our being, unless because it is a natural self, a current of given existence, with the result that we never know whether the forces which bear us on are its or ours -- or with the result rather that they are never entirely either its or ours. (PhP 171)
 

Is this to say, paradoxically, that we give to ourselves the bodies that we always already are? How could a historical idea be a natural self?

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach to this question sets aside the natural attitude and its presupposition of the reality of the world, leaving only a field of meanings for a body-subject that is given along with that field. For Merleau-Ponty, a body is not a possession of a mind expressing univocally (if approximately) those thoughts that mind wills to have it express; neither does a body have its own independent direction: "Neither body nor existence can be regarded as the original of the human being, since they presuppose each other, and because the body is solidified or generalized existence, and existence a perpetual incarnation" (PhP 166). Bodily existence is indeterminate, ambiguous, yet factically given as situation. The anonymous, universal givenness of body-subjectivity makes no claim whatsoever about human beings in the real world of the natural attitude. No one's body is the body-subject; no one's body is anonymous. To say that we are body-subjects is to say that we are those beings for whom bodies are in question; analyzing this body-subject is articulating the conditions of possiblity of the question of our bodies. In other words, as long as we are asking questions about the particularity of lived, personal sexuality, our sexual histories or identities, we are asking questions from the standpoint of the natural attitude. But Merleau-Ponty's concern in this chapter is to understand how such a task could be possible: how is it possible that human persons live in sexual worlds?

But again: why sexuality? If the body-subject is the condition of possibility of experience and meaning, and if Merleau-Ponty's approach to this issue is outside the natural attitude, then what grounds the concern with sexuality? It seems clear that body-subjects are not sexed beings, but the beings that become sexed. The givenness of sexuality and that contingent sexing are attributes of personal historical bodies and subjects, but the necessity that persons be sexed is not clear at all. For whom is this mute and permanent question normal?

Geraldine Finn claims that sexuality operates normally (that is, in our present culture) as a mysoginistic gaze that seeks to enslave and objectify, in not only literally pornographic images but everywhere in our culture: "Our current visual environment, for example, is saturated with images of women presented specifically as sights for the viewing pleasure of a spectator who is presumed to be male and is thus constituted as male in the very production and reproduction of those images" (Finn 37). The central place of sexuality in our culture empowers those who are sexually empowered in a vicious circle of relations of enslavement and objectification, through the production of unreal, artifactual, man-made "women." In this context it is difficult to see how the term sexuality could operate other than in service to male sexuality and its voyeurism, fetishism and narcissism. Then again, for Merleau-Ponty, the fundamental possibility of violence is not rooted in any particular aspect of the body-subject. The body-subject as such is open to violence, regardless of its sexuality, because saying I have a body is "a way of saying that I can be seen as an object and that I try to be seen as a subject, that another can be my master or my slave,..." (PhP 167). In other words, only because we are body-subjects is it possible for us to be objectified or to suffer the violence of being made by man⁽⁷⁾.

The phenomenology of the body-subject cannot answer the question, "Why sexuality?" except by ostensive assertion of the fact that sexuality is there, that it exists. What appears as the normal condition of the body-subject in this chapter is the possibility of taking up its existence as human, living through meaning, and being directed into the world. If sexuality exists for us, it must be possible for us in our body-subjectivity.⁽⁸⁾ Even if by "exist" we mean to say that sexuality is a current matrix of cultural power or discourse, the body-subject is still the site of this sexuality. If the primacy of perception is a primacy of ambiguous meaning, the body-subject need not bear sexual significance -- but it does, for us, by way of a certain use of its/our own means. Because the situation always has several meanings, the decisiveness of "sexuality" in a particular situation is impossible to establish. The question of the legitimacy of interpretations can only be raised from within the ambiguous situation, where existentially a direction has always already been taken. The normally mute question of sexuality is enunciated from within a situation where a commitment has been made to sexuality as the decisive factor. But because the situation is ambiguous, no factor functions as a master key for understanding. Particular factors "are effective only to the extent that they are lived and taken up by a human subject, wrapped up, that is, in ideological shreds by a process of self-deception,⁽⁹⁾ or rather permanent equivocation, which is yet part of history and has a weight of its own" (PhP 172). For sexuality to be a mute and permanent question, it must also be an effective ideological self-deception, a permanent equivocation.
 

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.
 

--. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge 1999 (1990).
 

--. "Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description." The Thinking Muse. Ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young. Bloomington, IN: Indiana U. Press, 1989.
 

Finn, Geraldine. Why Althusser Killed His Wife. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996.
 

Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. The Primacy of Movement. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999.
 

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la Perception. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945.
 

--. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1962.
 

O'Neill, John. The Communicative Body. Evanston, IL: Northwestern U. Press, 1989.
 

Stoller, Silvia. "Reflections on Feminist Merleau-Ponty Skepticism." Hypatia 15,1: 175-182.
 

Sullivan, Shannon. "Domination and Dialogue in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception." Hypatia 12, 1: 1-19.
 

Sullivan, Shannon. "Feminism and Phenomenology: A Reply to Silvia Stoller." Hypatia 15,1: 183-188.
 

Weiss, Gail. "Body Image Intercourse." Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World. Ed. Dorothea Olkowksi and James Morley. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999. 121-143.

1. ¹In The Primacy of Movement, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone raises the issue of Merleau-Ponty's reliance on pathological cases for his phenomenology of the body. Although it serves to bracket the presumptive (and presumably "normal") taken-for-granted attitude toward embodiment, it does so at the expense of considering how it is to live one's own body - that is, the perspective Merleau-Ponty takes remains a third-person, objectivist stance. See Sheets-Johnstone, pp. 285ff.

2. ²The translation will be altered on the basis of the French text without explicit reference.

3. ¹According to Shannon Sullivan, the anonymous body suggests a "shared commonality" that could ground intersubjective community. But Merleau-Ponty describes this "normal" anonymous body, in contrast to the example of Schneider, as a body that "projects" meaning into the world and onto others, reducing the dialogical possibility of community to the one-sided imposition of meaning. Of Schneider, for instance, it could also be said that "[s]ince his partner's experience was an important part of the meaning of the encounter, then a vanishing erection did not signal a 'half-fulfilled desire,' but rather indicated a desire that had been satisfied in the mutual pleasure found in the partner's orgasm. In that case, the result of the sexual encounter was not a failure of projection on the part of the man, but a success in constructing a meaningful situation on the part of both parties involved" (Sullivan 1997, p. 16).

4. ²See Silvia Stoller's criticism of Sullivan's essay in "Reflections on Feminist Merleau-Ponty Skepticism," Hypatia 15, 1: 175-182. Sullivan responds in "Feminism and Phenomenology: A Reply to Silvia Stoller," loc. cit., pp. 183-188, by reiterating her initial claims.

5. ³John O'Neill emphasizes the meaningfulness of sexuality as a direction and its complexity: "There can be no question, then, of reducing existence to embodiment or the latter to sexuality. Existence is not composed in any such way. What is fundamental is the metaphysical structure of the body that renders it an object for others and a subject for itself and makes it the ambiguous setting of mastery and servitude, desire and shame, autonomy and dependence. The metaphysical realm is therefore an opening in the world that is there first of all through the body rather than the mind. Our sexuality, then, is rather like a general dimension of this metaphysical body, a capacity for assuming specific sexual states and relationships. By the same token, our sexuality is always our own since it is inseperable from our own body; yet it is always something else since our own body is never totally within our conscious grasp." (The Communicative Body, 9)

6. ⁴Note that in the discussion of Schneider quoted above, one aspect of his abnormal sexuality is that for him "a woman's body has no particular essence" (PhP 156). And yet this is not a contradiction. "A woman's body" is not her posession at birth -- indeed, there is no guarantee that "she" will acquire "a woman's body." So instead of assuming sexuality as tied to a given anatomical form, Merleau-Ponty suggests here that even given a particular anatomical form, it's full repertoire of "human" characteristics are not given.

7. ⁵This can quickly become equivocal. Each person is founded upon the anonymous level of the body-subject. From the phenomenological standpoint Merleau-Ponty takes, this means the lived situation is open through the body-subject as the possibility of there being a situation; through this openness, as we live through it, the situation is always already meaningful and always already our own. Only loosely speaking can we be said to be or to have body-subjects.

8. ⁶Gail Weiss, in discussing Butler's conception of the process of identification, notes that the "phantasmatic" body image need not deny materiality of the body. Even if the body is a figment of the cultural imaginary, it isn't a merely imaginary body, since "the imaginary, unlike imagination, does not designate a particular realm of faculty, but permeates our entire perceptual life..." (Weiss 138). The body which is our openness onto the world and meaning subtends its identification according to "sex" or "gender."

9. ⁷In the French text, the term is "mystification." (Phénoménologie, 201)