The chapter on the “Body in its Sexual Being” must be understood as an elaboration of the notion of “motor power,” or “motor intentionality,” outlined in the chapter on “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motility.” That is to say, that if we took Merleau-Ponty seriously when he claimed that all motor action, or movement, has a background, or rather that the background is immanent within the movement itself, then it follows that in his treatment of sexuality he is making this background explicit. In other words the background exists as a field of significance, and rather than being some kind of representational projection, it would be a kind immanent intentionality operating in simultaneity with the body’s motility. The point Merleau-Ponty is attempting to make is that we do not simply encounter a world, as it were from some neutral perspective, but rather we are always already an opening onto the world from somewhere. When Merleau-Ponty says that there must be an ‘Eros’ or a ‘Libido’ which “breathes life” into bodily existence he is gesturing towards the inescapable fact that sexuality, or sexual life, is an ‘original intentionality.’ If we attend to the sexual field that is deployed in perceptual experience it becomes relevant to say that in desire, that is in a desirous moment of silence, we come to appropriate the world, and entities encountered therein, erotically. It seems to be the case, even further, that by engaging with the experience in this way, that is by naming the experience erotic, we have already taken leave of the experience and entered the realm of the objective where this field of experience seems unproblematic, or determinate. How can we speak of this realm of experience without distorting it, without abstracting from what it gives us? The body is simultaneously my ability to take up the sexual experience, as it is given in its ambiguity, and also my ability to step back from it and abstract, or speak of it making it manifest in the order of determinate things. It seems to be the case, therefore, that there is a sexual field deployed indeterminately, upon which, the objective, or determinate order is established. The only way to take up this pre-objective attitude, this ambiguous texture of experience, is to live it. The body is the site of the interweaving between existence and sexuality such that their limits overlap and intersect. We are, as it were, at the site of undecidability, that is, we have emerged at the place where it no longer makes sense to attempt to distinguish between the phenomenal, nor the sexual field, they are ambiguously co-present.
If metaphysics is“–the coming to light of something beyond nature–” then sexuality would have metaphysical significance. The body as it opens upon others is fundamentally sexual, that is it uncovers the world in the ambiguity of a sexual field. Desire, love, modesty and shame articulate a metaphysics of the world as it is uncovered in embodiment. We cannot isolate the sexual kernel from the general unfolding of experience it is part of the texture, the fabric, or the style of existence. In transcending ourselves when encountering the other in a movement of existence we come across the other as desirable, repulsive, as stimulating perhaps even in ways beyond our capacity to name The point is that these ways are simply operant in our perception such that it seems to be true to say that in order to adopt the rationalist, or idealist perspective we must completely forget the fact of our existing and ignore the metaphysics of the everyday layer of experience. The indeterminacy of existence is not some accident, or mistake in perception, it is the metaphysics of perception itself.
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