In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty identifies the corps propre or lived body, not a purified consciousness, as the seat of all human relation to the world. Prior to the reflective turn, we grasp the world via a bodily sensorimotor intentionality, pragmatic, ambiguous and pre-thetic in nature. The primacy of embodiment and the primacy of perception that Merleau-Ponty advances are usually understood as one and the same thesis. Yet, I would contend that this identification of the body primarily with its perceptual faculty signals a limitation in Merleau-Ponty's project. Admittedly, perception is understood by him in the widest possible fashion; it is inextricably linked with the "I can" of voluntary movement, the pervasive atmosphere of sexuality, the expressiveness of language. Yet such functions hardly exhaust the breadth and depths of the human body. Beneath the surface body, perceiving and perceived, acting and acted upon, lies an anonymous visceral dimension which this paper will address.
My sensorimotor being-in-the-world rests upon a set of vegetative functions hidden from myself no less than others. Within me proceed circulatory, digestive and respiratory pathways which resist the apprehension and control of the conscious 'T' and yet, like Descartes' God, sustain the 'T' at every moment. Moreover, I discover this viscerality not only within my spatiofunctional depths but in the depths of my past. The perceptual subject is a later thing, arising out of a fetal state of impersonal circulatory and metabolic exchanges. Nightly, in deep sleep, I slip back into this existence, abandoning my sensorimotor sheath. By referring only in passing to the visceral functions, pre-natality, sleep, Merleau-Ponty, in the Phenomenology of Perception, never fully articulates the impersonal horizons that in all directions outrun the body-as-perceiver.
In the working notes collected in The Visible and the Invisible he criticizes this earlier work, "due to the fact that in part I retained the philosophy of 'consciousness '" (1968:183). 1 He is now seeking to escape more thoroughly the limits of an analysis based on intentionality and