"In his incomplete and posthumously published The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty criticizes Sartre for maintaining the subject-object distinction in his description of sexuality and bodily existence. In the place of a social ontology of the look, Merleau-Ponty suggests an ontology of the tactile, a description of sensual life which would emphasize the interworld, that shared domain of the flesh which resists categorization in terms of subjects and objects. It may well be that by the time Merleau-Ponty undertook that study at the end of his life, he had achieved philosophical distance from the sexual Cartesianism of his phenomenological colleagues, and that the reification of voyeurism and objectification that we have witnessed would no longer conform to that later theory. At the time of The Phenomenology of Perception, however, Merleau-Ponty accepts the distinction in a limited but consequential way. As a result, he accepts the dialectic of master and slave as an invariant dynamic of sexual life. ...the greatest obfuscation consists in the claim that this constructed theoretical vocabulary renders lived experience transparent."