M. Merleau-Ponty (MP), Signs,
Gallimard, “NRF” collection, Paris, 1960, p. 365
Where Igniatius recounts the coming of Pinocchio the Other into his world, and how speech, almost imperceptibly, passed from one to the other.
Igniatius’s Notebook
It is difficult for me to say when my encounter with Pinocchio the Other took place. His name itself came later, when the resemblance to Pinocchio had already become strong enough to be recognised and insufficient enough for the difference to require marking, and it was probably at that moment that the Other imposed itself, not as a simple qualifier allowing one variation of the old character to be distinguished from another, but almost as a protest that did not come entirely from me and yet could pass only through me, as though this mouthless puppet, deprived of the ordinary organ of speech, had found in my own silence the space it needed to make heard what it had to say, not in the form of a prepared sentence, still less of a thought I might first have formulated in order to attribute it to him, but in that much more immediate thrust through which something declares itself before the one who utters it has even had time to decide whether he is its author.
I remember less having chosen that word than having felt it take its place with an obviousness quite unlike that of a name finally discovered after several attempts, for the Other did not merely designate a difference; it introduced a kind of refusal, as though the puppet were suddenly freeing itself from the figure that had made it possible and saying, through me who no longer spoke, that it was not that one, that it was not the Pinocchio we knew, that it was not a reprise, no more than an ill-fitting copy, but other, perhaps even the Other, with all that the word already contained of separation and birth.
What still troubles me today, when I return to that moment, has less to do with the fact that this speech arose than with the place from which it arose, for it came neither from a mouth drawn on the puppet’s face nor from some reserve of words I might have kept within me while waiting to be able to use them again, and yet it was taking place, it was passing, it was finding its way through the very person who, precisely, no longer spoke, so that the ordinary image of the puppet was overturned almost without my noticing, since I still believed myself to be the one who made it move, the one whose hands determined its positions and whose drawings fixed its form, whereas at the very moment when it declared itself other, something in that relation ceased entirely to obey me and placed me on the side of the one who receives the movement as much as on that of the one who produces it.
I did not experience this as a dispossession, nor as a struggle in which the creature had suddenly gained the upper hand over the person who had made it, because nothing was so theatrical. It was probably not even yet a matter of knowing what each of us possessed. It was much simpler, as though the centre had shifted silently towards the puppet and, in shifting, had drawn me into a movement I had not foreseen, as far as that strange point at which I no longer quite knew whether I was giving it a voice or whether it was borrowing mine, and where that distinction itself became less important than the infinitely more immediate fact that something had just been said.
I did not, then, learn to speak again, and I do not even remember thinking, at the time, that I was beginning to speak again, for that would have required me to return to myself, to verify what had just happened and compare that instant with those that had preceded it, whereas I was entirely caught elsewhere, in what this mouthless puppet had just made heard, in the way it had found of separating itself from the Pinocchio we knew by passing through a voice which, until then, no longer served any purpose.
It is only when I return to that scene today that I can see what was displaced within it, and even then I must be wary of giving it a coherence it did not possess while it was happening, for I was doubtless still attached at the time to the idea that speech belongs to the person who utters it, that it is born within him, takes shape somewhere before emerging, and that he is, if not its master, at least its point of origin, whereas what was happening with Pinocchio the Other suddenly made that geography far less certain, since his speech did not exist in a mouth he did not have, nor did it exist within me as a sentence awaiting its appointed hour, and yet it nevertheless appeared in that interval where his revolt was seeking a passage and where my silence, without ceasing to be my silence, could serve some purpose other than closing in upon itself.
I could not say at what moment I understood that it was my voice I was hearing, and it is even possible that the question did not arise until much later, for at the moment when something was saying I am other, or something close enough to it for those words to return to me today, I was not occupied with listening to myself, I was not lying in wait for the slightest sound as proof of anything whatsoever, I was with him, or perhaps already a little within him, sufficiently so, at any rate, for the voice to pass without first having to ask to whom it belonged.
That seems important to me now, because as long as I remain at the centre of the scene asking myself whether I am speaking or not speaking, everything that happens must necessarily be measured from me, whereas with Pinocchio the Other the centre of gravity had shifted elsewhere, towards that puppet which no longer accepted simply being Pinocchio and which, in order to say so, needed whatever was available around it, my hands perhaps, my gaze, my memories, and that voice too, which I no longer used but which had apparently not, for all that, ceased to be something through which another thing might pass.
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