The Rhetoric of Ecocriticism

Maurice Merleau‐Ponty was in his last years deeply concerned with the problems of bioethics and the flesh of the world in the biota. Merleau‐ Ponty expressed his interests in the symbiosis of all the living beings by the rhetorical figure of chiasmus. For him chiasmus is a bridge interconnecting two seemingly dissimilar things or thoughts into interdependence and co‐existence. Though Merleau‐Ponty does not openly claim consciousness for animals, he denies Darwinian evolutionism which places man at the peak of the life world: for him man is in a horizontal relationship, not a vertical one, with other living things. By emphasizing the mutual inter‐dependence of a body‐world affecting each other, he deconstructs the traditional Western metaphysics of logocentricism. Merleau‐Ponty’s “chiasmic ontology” suggests the intertwining of all the living beings in the biosphere. His new bioethics expresses itself by the chiasmic reversibility of the inside into the outside, and vice versa. It is the chiasmic reversibility in Merleau‐Ponty that bridges over discrimination and the personal onto integration and the impersonal. For him the rhetorical figure of chiasmus is a sign of analogical imagination and wit that ramifies its branches to the four‐folds of the symbiotic world. Even when we exist as a monadic fragment, we are in a dynamic relationship of the living whole with the world. Merleau‐Ponty’s eco‐poetic imagination in terms of reversible chiasmus is the language and thought that transcend technological modernism to the vegetable and animal biosphere of green ideas and a unified vision. The reversible chiasmus in Merleau‐Ponty represents his refusal to admit the priority of man in the biosphere and his strong faith that all the livings exist in interanimation.