About the flesh: Merleau-Ponty, reader of Descartes

This text analyze the statute of Descartes' thinking in Merleau-Ponty's work. The intention is to show how Merleau-Ponty constructs the reading on the cartesian dualism, and how he objected to its foundation. For this, we shall focus mainly on the references to Descartes present in the Phenomenology of perception and in the lesson "L'union de l'ame et du corps chez Descartes", present in "L'union de l'ame et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson "According to Merleau-Ponty, the steps given in the "Meditations" and fixed in the "Discourse of the Method" of Descartes culminate in a fertile problem at the moment in which, in the sixth meditation, the res cogitans lives in the world after having methodically explored it. For Merleau-Ponty, Descartes would have sighted the institution of what he will call, in his last ontology of flesh, a complete and sensitive cycle of overlapping between body and world, yet not the objective body nor the body thought by soul.