L'INSTITUTION DU CORPS À L'ÉPREUVE DE L'IRRÉFLÉCHI ENTRE MERLEAU-PONTY, FREUD ET LACAN
BECOMING FLESH: THE INSTITUTION OF THE BODY AND IRREFLEXIVITY IN MERLEAU-PONTY, FREUD AND LACAN

Summary/Abstract: Becoming Flesh: The Institution of the Body and Irreflexivity in Merleau-Ponty, Freud and Lacan. The author compares the institution of the body in the flesh and the institution of the body according to Freud’s theory of secondary narcissism and Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage. Reflexivity in the ontology of the flesh is the way the subject institutes the body: sensoriality is organized in a body-sensoriality through its reflexivity. The author demonstrates to what extent Merleau-Ponty’s ‘flesh’ and therefore his interpretation of the body can be read from psychoanalytic point of view. She stresses that, like the ontology of the flesh, Freud and Lacan’s theories regard the body as an institution and give primacy to vision in its institution. However what is called “blindness of the flesh” in Merleau-Ponty finds a very different echo in Freud and Lacan. Reading the institution of the body together with these three authors helps to understand the function of sensoriality and its intertwining with the death drive or, in Lacanian words, with the Real. These last notions are crucial to understand how psychic suffering (and for instance, anxiety) enters the relationship between soma and psyche.

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