Histoire Et Politique Dans La Pensee De Maurice Merleau Ponty

Some of the most exciting and innovative work in the humanities is occurring at the intersection of intellectual history and critical theory. This volume includes work from some of the most prominent contemporary scholars in the humanities.

Influenced by Kojève's interpretation of Hegel as well as his direct political experience of the second world war, Maurice Merleau-Ponty abandoned the religious and philosophical position he had assumed in the 1930s and turned to Marxism. This is the first critical study of the French philosopher's political ideas and the context in which they evolved. In its origin and its development, Merleau-Ponty's political thought expressed a subtle dialectic between ongoing political events and the apparent truths of Marx's analysis. With the onset of the cold war, the discovery of the Soviet concentration camps, the repression of Eastern Europe, the Algerian crisis, and the founding of the Fifth Republic, Merleau-Ponty began to take a critical look at Marx's ideas of the genesis of humanism in the light of these disturbing political realities. His reconsideration of the basis of Marxism and his conclusion that it had lost contact with history led to a fundamental reorientation of his attitudes. No longer sympathetic to the use of violence to end violence, he criticized Sartre's external justification of communist violence as 'magical' and advocated instead a new liberalism combining parliamentary democracy with an awareness of the social problems of industrial capitalism. Barry Cooper's study of this important contemporary thinker gives context for an understanding of Merleau- Ponty's politics and, in so doing, brings together the complex issues and ideas that have shaped modern European political and philosophical thought.

Bringing to light the essential philosophical role of Marxism within Merleau-Ponty's reinterpretation of transcendental phenomenology, this book shows that the realization of this project hinges methodologically upon a renewed conception of the proletariat qua universal class-specifically, that it rests upon a humanist myth of incarnation which, substantiated by Merleau-Ponty's notion of 'heroism', locates an objective historical purposiveness in the habituated organism of the modern subject. Foregrounding the phenomenological priority of history over corporeality in this way, Smyth's analysis recovers the 'militant' character of Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology. It thus sheds critical new light on his early thought, and challenges some of the main parameters of existing scholarship by disclosing the intrinsic normativity of his basic methodological commitments.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is the giant phenomenologist of his time in the entire French-speaking world. He is not an epistemologist nor a moralist. For him, the beginning of the beginning is human flesh; the flesh becomes word, the word becomes flesh, and both die. There is science, and there is experience/perception. The mother is the latter. They aren't contradictory, but complete and depend on each other. With regard to language, for him, there are words, and there is grammar. A word is never empty, but carries its own weight; even a lie is full of meaning. Liberty resides in grammar, an individual function and independent from books. It's in the grammar where singularity lives. Thinking and talking are the same. Wherever there is human life, there is meaning, and that is irrespective of age, culture, religion, education or social position. Merleau-Ponty is not a Marxist nor a communist. According to him, history is blind; it has no mind. He also finds a flaw in Freudianism. Flesh is an infinite universe full of stars and black holes. Following Merleau-Ponty, verity is devoiler, and devoiler is verity, but verity is never absolute. One must take a step back. There is light and there is shadow; they never coincide in human life. The shadow is always first, and no matter how one tries to run, he will never catch his shadow.

In April 1994, two as-yet-unreleased letters by Sartre and one by Merleau-Ponty were published in the Magazine Littéraire. Their publication sparked new interpretative hypotheses on the political and philosophical motivations behind the break of the relationship of mutual esteem, friendship, and fruitful intellectual collaboration between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. The bright tone of their personal contrasts testified the profound theoretical differences between the two thinkers, both at philosophical level and political praxis. This volume covers the period between the launch of the magazine Les Temps Moderns in 1945, and Sartre’s decision to no longer accept Merleau-Ponty’s contributions in 1953, offering a detailed analysis of the respective position of the two philosophers and of an irreducible intellectual distance between them.