An Ungraspable Urstiftung: Being as Dehiscence

Being is what makes the world, individuals, and thought possible. Ontology sets out in search of the Urstiftung of all institutions. Now, precisely because everything is institution, which is to say, downstream, infinite fecundity and open history, a symmetrical abyss has to open up when we turn back, upstream, toward the origin of beings. The Urstiftung cannot be an absolute and rigid foundation. As was clearly prefigured by Husserl’s thought, phenomenology finds, as the fundamental “support” of every being, a floating that refers much more to the model provided by the imaginary than to the one constituted by objective things. Merleau-Ponty’s ontological reflection will largely confirm these premises. Its quest for the Urstiftung always leads back to pluripresence and to a universal flesh which is in no way a solid ground, and is instead defined through its transformation and its imaginary. Being will thus be defined as dehiscence, a wild power of uprooting, and “the imaginary of the body” will be defined as “Stiftung of Being.” It will then appear that, contrary to all expectations, Merleau-Ponty makes Husserl one of the main sources of inspiration for such an ontology. He focuses very precisely on those notions that were in fact the most subversive in Husserl’s seemingly idealist approach: the dimension of verticality that haunts every moment and every thing, the Heraclitean flow, the groundless soul, and the Realm of Mothers.