Key Arguments

• He notes that 'Sexuality hides from itself under a mask of generality, it ceaselessly attempts to escape from the tension and the drama that it institutes.', raising the question whether it remains the subject of our life or is simply transcended.
• He identifies two errors: 'The first is to fail to recognize in existence any content beyond its manifest content spread out in distinct representations, as do philosophies of consciousness; the second is to double this manifest content with a latent content, also made up of representation, as do psychologies of the unconscious.' Both overlook non-representational, atmospheric presence.
• He then states his own view: 'Sexuality is neither transcended in human life nor represented at its core through unconscious representations. It is continuously present in human life as an atmosphere.'
• In dreams, sexuality is not first represented then translated: 'The dreamer does not begin by representing the latent content of his dream to himself – that is, the content that will be revealed through the “second telling” and with the aid of adequate images; nor does he begin by perceiving clearly the stimulations of a genital origin as genital in order to subsequently translate this text into a figurative language.'
• Instead, 'for the dreamer, who is detached from waking language, such a genital stimulation or such a sexual drive is immediately this image of a wall being scaled or a cliff being climbed that is found in the manifest content. Sexuality is diffused throughout images that retain from it only certain typical relations, only a certain affective physiognomy. The dreamer’s penis becomes this serpent represented in the manifest content.'
• He extends the point beyond dreams: 'What we have just said of the dreamer is also true of that always obscure part of ourselves that we sense beneath our representations, that individual haze through which we perceive the world. This haze contains confused forms and privileged relations, which are not at all “unconscious,” and of which we know unquestionably that they are seedy, that they have a relation to sexuality, without explicitly evoking that relation.'
• Thus, 'Sexuality emanates like an odor or a sound from the bodily region that it occupies most specifically.' It is experienced atmospherically rather than as a clear representation.
• He connects this to the 'general function of tacit transposition' already identified in the body schema: just as 'When I bring my hand toward an object, I implicitly know that my arm stretches out. When I move my eyes, I take account of their movement without gaining an explicit consciousness of it', so 'sexuality can motivate privileged forms of my experience without being the object of an explicit act of consciousness.'

Source Quotes

Indeed, we cannot. [g. Sexuality cannot be “transcended.”] * Sexuality hides from itself under a mask of generality, it ceaselessly attempts to escape from the tension and the drama that it institutes. But again, from where do we draw the right to say that it hides itself from itself, as if it remained the subject of our life?

The first is to fail to recognize in existence any content beyond its manifest content spread out in distinct representations, as do philosophies of consciousness; the second is to double this manifest content with a latent content, also made up of representation, as do psychologies of the unconscious. Sexuality is neither transcended in human life nor represented at its core through unconscious representations. It is continuously present in human life as an atmosphere. The dreamer does not begin by representing the latent content of his dream to himself – that is, the content that will be revealed through the “second telling” and with the aid of adequate images; nor does he begin by perceiving clearly the stimulations of a genital origin as genital in order to subsequently translate this text into a figurative language.

It is continuously present in human life as an atmosphere. The dreamer does not begin by representing the latent content of his dream to himself – that is, the content that will be revealed through the “second telling” and with the aid of adequate images; nor does he begin by perceiving clearly the stimulations of a genital origin as genital in order to subsequently translate this text into a figurative language. But for the dreamer, who is detached from waking language, such a genital stimulation or such a sexual drive is immediately this image of a wall being scaled or a cliff being climbed that is found in the manifest content.

The dreamer does not begin by representing the latent content of his dream to himself – that is, the content that will be revealed through the “second telling” and with the aid of adequate images; nor does he begin by perceiving clearly the stimulations of a genital origin as genital in order to subsequently translate this text into a figurative language. But for the dreamer, who is detached from waking language, such a genital stimulation or such a sexual drive is immediately this image of a wall being scaled or a cliff being climbed that is found in the manifest content. Sexuality is diffused throughout images that retain from it only certain typical relations, only a certain affective physiognomy. The dreamer’s penis becomes this serpent represented in the manifest content.19 What we have just said of the dreamer is also true of that always obscure part of ourselves that we sense beneath our representations, that individual haze through which we perceive the world. This haze contains confused forms and privileged relations, which are not at all “unconscious,” and of which we know unquestionably that they are seedy, that they have a relation to sexuality, without explicitly evoking that relation.

Sexuality is diffused throughout images that retain from it only certain typical relations, only a certain affective physiognomy. The dreamer’s penis becomes this serpent represented in the manifest content.19 What we have just said of the dreamer is also true of that always obscure part of ourselves that we sense beneath our representations, that individual haze through which we perceive the world. This haze contains confused forms and privileged relations, which are not at all “unconscious,” and of which we know unquestionably that they are seedy, that they have a relation to sexuality, without explicitly evoking that relation. Sexuality emanates like an odor or a sound from the bodily region that it occupies most specifically.

This haze contains confused forms and privileged relations, which are not at all “unconscious,” and of which we know unquestionably that they are seedy, that they have a relation to sexuality, without explicitly evoking that relation. Sexuality emanates like an odor or a sound from the bodily region that it occupies most specifically. Here we discover the general function of tacit transposition that we have already recognized in the body when studying the body schema.

When I move my eyes, I take account of their movement without gaining an explicit consciousness of it and I understand through this movement that the upheaval of the visual field is only apparent. Similarly, sexuality can motivate privileged forms of my experience without being the object of an explicit act of consciousness. Thus understood as an ambiguous atmosphere, sexuality is coextensive with life.

Key Concepts

• Sexuality hides from itself under a mask of generality, it ceaselessly attempts to escape from the tension and the drama that it institutes.
• Sexuality is neither transcended in human life nor represented at its core through unconscious representations. It is continuously present in human life as an atmosphere.
• The dreamer does not begin by representing the latent content of his dream to himself – that is, the content that will be revealed through the “second telling” and with the aid of adequate images; nor does he begin by perceiving clearly the stimulations of a genital origin as genital in order to subsequently translate this text into a figurative language.
• such a genital stimulation or such a sexual drive is immediately this image of a wall being scaled or a cliff being climbed that is found in the manifest content. Sexuality is diffused throughout images that retain from it only certain typical relations, only a certain affective physiognomy. The dreamer’s penis becomes this serpent represented in the manifest content.19
• that individual haze through which we perceive the world. This haze contains confused forms and privileged relations, which are not at all “unconscious,” and of which we know unquestionably that they are seedy, that they have a relation to sexuality, without explicitly evoking that relation.
• Sexuality emanates like an odor or a sound from the bodily region that it occupies most specifically.
• Similarly, sexuality can motivate privileged forms of my experience without being the object of an explicit act of consciousness.

Context

Beginning of subsection [g. Sexuality cannot be “transcended.”], where Merleau-Ponty rejects both purely conscious and unconscious-representational models of sexuality and instead articulates sexuality as an ever-present atmosphere operating through tacit transpositions in dreams and in the body schema.