Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Pessoa: the driving shattering of vision

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7917.2015v20n2p98

This article shows how some themes that Merleau-Ponty and Lacan have in common are poetically treated in the poem Ode Triunfal by Álvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa). It is an attempt to exemplify how literature can express in its own way many ideas and positions that philosophy reach theoretically. I explain the concepts of flesh and wild Being that Merleau-Ponty introduces in order to avoid the century-old dualisms of philosophy. Moreover, I sketch how he discusses, in his late work, the visible and the invisible within the same strategy of rehabilitation of sensibility that he had employed in his first writings. After this, I show how Lacan appropriates such ideas in order to point out the existence of a certain kind of vision, full of driving elements, that comes from the things and precedes the gaze of the viewer. According to Lacan, the viewer submits with sacrificial pleasure to such vision and annihilates himself in it. Finally, I comment on some parts of Pessoa’s poem to exemplify these issues.