Argues that symbolism is an important and unique element of MerleauPontys phenomenology.MerleauPonty says in his Institution and Passivity lectures that he wants to consider criticism itself as a symbolic form instead of doing a philosophy of symbolic form. This invites the possibility of an unconventional thought If critical philosophy is a symbolic form it cannot disclose its own limits and is in fact uncritical. Furthermore the symbolic form can never itself be thought according to the terms of the criticism it produces but is always only constellated and matrixed within thema symbolic form within both reflection and what it reflects on within consciousness and the world. Thus as Rajiv Kaushik argues the symbolic form is another name for what MerleauPonty calls ontological divergence. Only now divergence introduces the question of a limit to both the subject and philosophy itself. This is nothing less than a psychoanalysis of philosophy.Kaushiks analyses of the matrices between spaceimagination lightdark awakeasleep and repressionexpression reveal this symbolism in its form of divergence its lack of origin and destination. Kaushik also argues that the phenomenology of symbolism must detour from the purely descriptive method. Drawing from MerleauPontys recently published course materials and attentive to his reliance on literature and literary language MerleauPonty between Philosophy and Symbolism continues the living force of MerleauPontys thought and develops his radical insight of the primacy of the symbolic form even in an ontology that claims to be about the sensible and its elements.