261 martina Ferrari THE IMMEMORIAL TIME OF GENDER: MERLEAU-PONTY’S POLYMORPHIC MATRIX OF ORIGINAL PAST m.c. diLLon award 2015 In this paper, I tend to the concept of “immemorial past” or “time before time” and argue that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s turn in The Visible and the Invisible—a turn toward the conceptualization of time as chiasm and an ontology of the invisible—provides a rich resource for theorizing sexual difference, for the investigation of gender’s “original past,” that is, the polymorphous dimension of gender that grounds and coexists with the personal and present manifestations of gender. 1 I primarily engage with Megan Burke’s work on the anonymous temporality of gender. 2 I argue that, although useful to conceive as temporal the processes through which gender is sedimented, Burke’s account falls short in accounting for the different kind of temporality that the immemorial institutes, a temporality that is generative of meaning and signiication. Burke’s blind spot prevents her from conceptualizing gender as emerging through self-differing; from thematizing the immemorial as the condition of possibility for the sedimentation of gender habits. As I will argue, shifting attention from the sedimentation and presence of gender habits to the fecund lack that grounds such sedimentation allows us to account for the structure that makes gender production, institution, and differing possible in the irst place. Such a structure is a “fecund negativity,” a polymorphous ield or depth, that points to the inherent instability and multiplicity of gender, to the fact that gender formation can be traced back to a plural and ambiguous ground that comes to expression in cultural-historical-linguistic manifestations. Furthermore, reckoning with the immemorial time of gender and, in turn, with gender’s ever-evolving and ever-becoming, lays the ground for a powerful critique of heteronormativity. 1. The Immemorial Écart of the Flesh To understand the immemorial past of gender, we irst need to grapple with Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the lesh. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of lesh as an attempt to develop a non- dualistic ontology that bridges the divide between self and world, subject and object, without erasing the speciicity and difference of the two poles. 3 Self, others, and world emerge via self-divergence from lesh—an anonymous, impersonal tissue that generates differences “by dehiscence or ission of