Institution and Passivity Quotes

“The unconscious is not someone in me who clearly thinks a life of which I have only the appearance. By definition it is not an other. It is what I resist, of which I know that it is me, in relation to whom I organize my imperceptions. Consciousness and unconsciousness make but one divided being.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Project" not in the ordinary sense of anticipated future, positioned at a distance, chosen from non-being; but rather being rising up toward, balancing itself on what is not yet--The present is the cradle of a future.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“The trans-phenomenal reality of love would be, not that of a positive being who is without doubt, but that of...a lack...the other person as occupying the entire horizon of my life and not as a positive being. Love is the same thing as privation.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Love is clairvoyant; it addresses us precisely to what is able to tear us apart.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“To constitute...is nearly the opposite of to institute: the instituted makes sense without me, the constituted makes sense only for me and for the 'me' of this instant...The instituted straddles its future, has its future its temporality, the constituted depends entirely on the 'me' who constitutes (the body, the clock).”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“What is essential to the unconscious is that out life, precisely because it is not a consciousness of others, in indifferent balance, but a node of significations which are traces of events, consisting of excrescences and gaps, forms a baroque system. Exactly as an adult or elderly body has its dynamic, its privileged positions, its style of gestures, and its syntax, an implex has its wrinkles and its own balancing processes, and the unconscious is our practical schema, where everything is inscribed in shillings and pence.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Love and identification are mixed in hysteria…There is even always something of one in the other, because to give and to receive, masculinity and femininity, are never absolutely distinct.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Dreams: Not (linguistic) signs offering equivalent of signification, but images, imaginary surface...which...expresses by condensation. Condensation is not only a procedure for masking from the eyes of the censor. It is the distinctive procedure of the dream, required by oneiric consciousness.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“The nature of sense as divergence or non-identity, truth as aletheia, which does not prevent error.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Freud's value: analysis does not turn the patient into an object, but ultimately a new subject, who is not carried by the driving force of the master's prestige.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Institution is the transformation which preserves and surpasses.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“At a certain point, doesn't the mask become the truth?”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Blind logic, logic which creates on the way.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Love is not created by circumstances, or by decision; it consists in the way questions and answers are linked together--by means of an attraction, something more slips in, we discover not exactly what we were seeking, but something else that is interesting”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Love is a hollow in us, not the presence of the other.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Love entails a beyond oneself, the very beyond of the false desire of possession...At the mystery: how one can be non-self with all of one’s strength.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“The unconscious: excess of the perceptual over the notional.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“There must be a presence of the past which is absence.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“There is passivity right there in activity...And there is activity right there in passivity.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Psychoanalysis is, indeed, in the final analysis, existential psychoanalysis, but not in Sartre's sense, that is to say, as revelation of a position taken by 'freedom,' but as revelation of intercorporeality, of the ego-others assembly such as it is realized by each, of the symbolic system set up in our machine for living.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“The 'unconscious'...is simply the pre-objective, oneiric background of all perception.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Each perception is a vibration of the world, it touches well beyond what it touches, it awakens echoes in all my being in the world, it is super-significant.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“The contact with the perceived is not ignorance and is not knowledge.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“What dreams in us is our existential field.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Consciousness of something is always consciousness of a difference between terms that are not given positively.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“There is not the whole of being on one side, the whole of nothingness on the other, but no more are we specialized, conditioned nothingness. Consciousness is not the flux of lived experiences, but consciousness of lacks, of open situations.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“The horizon is what, behind the thing, enables it to be a thing: gaps, ellipses, allusions to the sensible world, divergence, variation, difference of the 'world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“What there are, are totalities that 1) are not a fortuitous gathering of parts, 2) are not prior to all causal conditions. The totalities are exactly as perception offers them: imperfect and incomplete or less perfect totalities...Gestalten...The thing is...a hollow plenitude: presence, but absence. Its content is infinite, it is essential to it to present itself through adumbrations, therefore always to be beyond.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Truth of perception: there is no objectivity without a point of view, in itself: i.e., an observer is necessary, with his 'levels,' his 'soil,' his 'homeland,' his perceptual 'norms,' in short, his 'earth' (which is not fixed in the sense of the pre-Copernicans, but not simply a moving object within a system of relative movements)...The 'earth' is archē: it bears the possibility of all being above the nothingness, above the flood--seed of the threatened world, on the basis of which everything blooms again. It is 'nature' in the sense of perceptual cosmogony, neither in itself nor for God, but our horizon. It is 'in itself' and in a certain manner for itself (i.e., attached to itself, as its appearance in my experience proves) without which it would be in the sense of percipere, of synopsis: it is this 'preparation for perception' that the Husserlian endpoint of teleology designates.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955

“Natural being presupposes us as a spectator, authentically only such as it is offered within as field of perception. Hence, the world without humans or prior to humans: Laplace's nebula. We have said that the nebulousity is within the cultural world, not within 'Nature,' i.e., within the absolute in-itself; and in fact, if one placed it within the in-itself, it would be necessary to remove it from the in-itself through scientific progress...And how to understand birth within this in-itself of a human and a consciousness? The world prior to humans like the moon without inhabitants, i.e., spectacle for X and for us...If there is emergence, this means that humans will never be able to think a world without humans, and ultimately that the pure in-itself is a myth. Every cosmogony is thought in perceptual terms. Therefore, truth is not prior to us--and not through us alone, either--but the exchange between a world ready to be perceived and a perception that relies upon it. This exchange is what we were calling perception, and it is why perception is central in the ontology. The rationality of science is to be conceived as particular case of the logos of the perceptual world--past truth, truth to come, emergence.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France, 1954-1955