SOURCE: Flynn, Bernard Charles. “Textuality and the Flesh: Derrida and Merleau-Ponty.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 15, no. 2 (May 1984): 164-79.

In the following essay, Flynn suggests what he terms “correspondences” between Merleau-Ponty's late writings and certain features of the work of French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida.

The title of this essay obviously suggests a comparison, a comparison which at first glance seems highly unlikely. Merleau-Ponty is the author of an essay entitled “The Primacy of Perception,”¹ and Derrida is the author of the statement, “I don't know what perception is and I don't believe that anything like perception exists.”² Furthermore, in Derrida's thesis defence, “The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations,” when he is discussing the itinerary of his thought, he speaks of the importance of transcendental phenomenology for the development of his thinking but “not—especially not—in the versions proposed by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty which were then...