L’istituzione, il processo, l’inconscio. Merleau-Ponty e Paci ai limiti della fenomenologia

Abstract

This essay investigates the contribution that Enzo Paci and Maurice Merleau-Ponty offer to a phenomenology of the unconscious. Beginning from their reflections on the problem of phenomenological reduction – particularly with regard to the subject’s impossibility of observing its own transcendental operation – the essay argues that, for both thinkers, a radicalization of Husserlian phenomenology is required, one that opens it toward a dialogue with psychoanalysis. By comparing Paci’s account of transcendental schematism – conceived by Kant as the hidden art that enables mediation between the sensible and the ideal – and Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the unconscious as the sedimentation of instituted forms at a pre-categorical level, the paper advances the thesis of a Gestaltic unconscious. This phenomenological conception of the unconscious departs from the classical view of the unconscious as a dimension beneath or behind consciousness, in order to propose a form of unconscious that unfolds in front of consciousness and within the interval between things: an invisible background upon which every determinate act of seeing depends.