Action at a Distance

The governing figure of the Introduction to *Signs* (1960). Action at a distance names the relation that holds between philosophy and politics, philosophy and history, and between thought and its "outside" generally: neither subordination (Hegelo-Marxism's dissolution of philosophy into history, Sartre's engaged commitment) nor detachment (philosophy of "God-like survey"), but "intermingling and promiscuity" from "the depths of [their] difference" (p. 15). It is the political and methodological translation of the chiasma of the visible.

Key Points

  • The governing text: "The relationship between philosophy and history is less simple than was believed. It is in a strict sense an action at a distance, each from the depths of its difference requiring intermingling and promiscuity. We have yet to learn the proper uses of this encroachment" (Signs, Introduction, p. 15).
  • Not dialectical synthesis: Action at a distance is not the Hegelo-Marxist fusion of philosophy and politics in which philosophy is "realized and destroyed." Merleau-Ponty argues in 1960 that the Hegelo-Marxist identity has historically failed and that Marxism survives only as a "classic" or secondary truth (p. 10).
  • Not detachment: Equally, action at a distance rejects the "philosophy of God-like survey" (p. 21) that Nietzsche and the phenomenological tradition have demolished. Philosophy is never above its object; it is always in the situation whose sense it tries to articulate.
  • Structural figure: Action at a distance is the same structure that the chiasm names in the register of perception, that indirect-language names in the register of expression, and that coherent-deformation names in the register of style. It is MP's late ontology in its political-methodological clothing.
  • Ethical corollary: "We can act upon the world from a distance in a non-partisan fashion; and when it seems to us that our lives are at stake in the lives of others, we can commit ourselves passionately to their just cause without abandoning the critical honesty which compels us to search out our own faults and our enemies' merits. In this way we can hope to be simultaneously 'ironic and solemn, faithful and free'" (Intro, p. 22, quoting Montaigne).

Details

The Political Occasion

The Introduction to Signs was written between February and September 1960, in the aftermath of the 1956 Budapest uprising, the slow decomposition of the French Communist Party, the Algerian War, and the return of De Gaulle — all experienced by MP as the collapse of the political framework in which his own generation had been philosophically schooled. Sartre had just published his preface to Paul Nizan's Aden Arabie in the tone of "rebellion and despair" (Intro, p. 24), proposing that lost freedom can only be found by being reinvented and that the "same reasons take happiness from us and render us forever incapable of possessing it."

MP's Introduction is in large part a long response to this Sartrean preface. But the response is not a counter-thesis; it is a reframing of the form of philosophy's relation to its historical moment. The central argument runs:

  1. Marxism's political vehicle has failed. Those who left the Party did so "as Marxists" — by the same historical method they had been trained in (p. 14). Marxism is therefore now a "classic," a secondary truth, not the operative science of history.
  2. The Sartrean response — rebellion, despair — repeats the Hegelo-Marxist structure (the negative as saving, the negation of negation) without its content. It is therefore inadequate.
  3. What is needed is not a new total theory but a new figure for the relation of philosophy to its outside: "action at a distance" (p. 15).

What "Distance" Means

Distance here is not indifference or neutrality. It is the positive structural form of the encroachment between philosophy and its outside. MP says "each from the depths of its difference requiring intermingling and promiscuity" — philosophy is not less involved in politics for being at a distance; it is differently involved, in a way that respects the difference between philosophical articulation and practical commitment.

The Machiavellian and Montaignean precedents matter. Machiavelli's virtù is not cynicism; it is the capacity to "speak to these mute spectators gathered around [one]" from within the distance that political power structurally requires (A Note on Machiavelli, p. 218). Montaigne's "ironic and solemn, faithful and free" (Essays III, Reading Montaigne, p. 210) is the ethos of the self that is never wholly inside its commitments and never wholly outside them. MP reads both figures as precursors of the structure he wants to name.

The 1955 Political Ancestor

Though the Signs Introduction (1960) is the governing text, the phrase "action at a distance" appears five years earlier in *Adventures of the Dialectic* — in a pejorative register, as the diagnostic name for what Sartre's commitment actually amounts to:

"Today, as yesterday, commitment is action at a distance, politics by proxy, a way of putting ourselves right with the world rather than entering it; and, rather than an art of intervention, it is an art of circumscribing, of preventing, intervention." (AD 217)

The 1955 deployment is the mirror image of the 1960 affirmation. In 1955, action-at-a-distance names what the writer-sympathizer cannot avoid when he tries to make his unveiling into governing — it is a diagnostic of Sartre's philosophical condition, not yet MP's own positive figure. In 1960, the same phrase names the productive form of the philosophy/politics relation — the figure for philosophy's proper posture toward its outside.

The genealogy is philosophically consequential. The 1960 transformation of the phrase is not an accident of vocabulary but a reworking of what the phrase names. In 1955 MP thinks of action-at-a-distance as a failure (the failure of pure commitment to enter history); by 1960, he has come to think of it as a structure (the structure of any thought that refuses both engulfment and abstraction). The pivot is the 1954–55 institution courses and the developing ontology of the chiasm: once MP has worked out that the proper relation of any term to its other is through "encroachment" rather than through either identification or pure separation, "action at a distance" is no longer a failure but the form of the interworld. What in 1955 was Sartre's trap becomes, by 1960, Montaigne's virtue.

The 1955 register is also audible in the Signs Introduction's own text. When MP writes "we can act upon the world from a distance in a non-partisan fashion" (Signs p. 22), he is explicitly distinguishing his affirmative version from the pejorative 1955 sense: not the action-at-a-distance of the writer who refuses to enter the world, but the non-partisan action of a writer who has understood the form of the philosophical/political relation. The Signs Introduction is, among other things, MP's public rehabilitation of a phrase he had used critically against Sartre five years earlier.

As Ontological Principle

Action at a distance is not only a political-methodological figure; it is the structure of perception, speech, history, and intersubjectivity in the late MP. In the Introduction itself MP makes the extension explicit: "thought thinks, speech speaks, the glance glances... between the two identical words there is the whole spread one straddles in order to think, speak, and see" (p. 21). The distance between the I that sees and the seen-thing is the same distance that holds between the philosophy that speaks and the politics it speaks about.

This is why "action at a distance" is the sibling concept of chiasma of the visible. Both name the productive non-coincidence through which a self can relate to what exceeds it. The chiasm is the figure in the register of incarnate perception; action at a distance is the figure in the register of historical praxis.

MP's Wave / Crest / Sea (per Sartre 1961)

Sartre's 1961 manuscript-draft eulogy (sartre-1984-merleau-ponty-vivant p. 149) reports a self-figuration MP used in conversation: "He liked to compare himself to a wave; it is a crest among others, and it is the whole sea drawn up which changes itself into a rim of foam." The figure is structurally an action-at-a-distance image. The self is locally a crest (a determinate, individuated wave-form) and globally the whole sea drawn up (the totality of the historical-natural milieu) becoming a rim of foam (the place where the individuating wave meets the world). The metaphor refuses both pure individuality (the crest is of the sea) and pure submersion (the sea individuates into a crest); it is the structure of action-from-within-one's-own-difference applied to the self's self-understanding.

The wave-figure is also MP's polemical alternative to Sartrean voluntarism: where the early Sartre's self is a "creation ex nihilo" (per his own 1961 retrospective), MP's self is a wave that emerges as the whole sea drawn up. The contrast is structurally the same as that between spontaneity and liberty applied to the self.

Against the "God-like Survey"

MP names his own opposite as "the philosophy of God-like survey" (philosophie de survol) — the intellectualism that imagines itself to see the world from above, and thus to judge it. In the Introduction, this is represented by the philosopher who thinks the "historical process" passes through his study (p. 18). In V&I, the survol is represented by reflection. In the Courses, by the "absolute knowledge" that phenomenology either rejoins or is merely propaedeutic to.

Action at a distance is the positive replacement for survol. It insists that philosophy is neither above its object nor collapsed into it.

Connections

  • is the political-methodological translation of chiasm — the same structure in a different register
  • rejects nonphilosophy as "refuge of uncertainty" — the Marxist pseudo-non-philosophy that "deprives itself of philosophy in order to preserve itself as a way of thinking" (Signs, Intro, p. 13)
  • extends institution — the historicity of instituted meaning is what allows philosophy to act on history without controlling it
  • presupposes indirect-language — language does not transmit content but "acts on language" to produce meaning at a distance
  • is grounded in intentional-transgression — the body and the other are given through encroachment, not grasp
  • contrasts with philosophy-of-reflection — the philosophie de survol MP's whole late work rejects
  • is refracted through Montaigne and Machiavelli — Signs reads both as precursors
  • has a 1955 pejorative ancestor in *Adventures of the Dialectic* (AD 217) — the phrase first appears as the diagnostic name for Sartre's failed commitment before being rehabilitated in 1960
  • enacted by MP's wave / crest / sea self-figuration (per Sartre 1961, sartre-1984-merleau-ponty-vivant p. 149) — the wave is of the sea and individuates the sea into the foam: structurally the action-at-a-distance image applied to the self
  • contrasts with high-altitude-thinking — the structurally opposed mode of philosophy-from-above; action-at-a-distance is survol's positive complement

Open Questions

  • Is the inference from "perception is chiasmic" to "the right political posture is action at a distance" a valid deduction or an analogical transposition? MP never formally bridges the two registers.
  • Is action at a distance compatible with any actually-existing political commitment, or does it structurally commit only to the form of commitment and not to particular causes? The Signs Introduction is cautious on this point; later commentators (Lefort, Merleau-Ponty's own Adventures of the Dialectic) have disagreed about whether the figure has political teeth.
  • How does action at a distance relate to seinsgeschichte? Both are non-linear conceptions of historicity; both refuse teleology. Signs and the Heideggerian tradition converge here but from different directions.

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1964-signs — Introduction, pp. 15 (governing text), 18 ("the philosopher who maintains that the 'historical process' passes through his study is laughed at"), 21 ("thought thinks, speech speaks, the glance glances... the chiasma of the visible is the exact opposite of a philosophy of God-like survey"), 22 (the Montaignean "ironic and solemn, faithful and free"); A Note on Machiavelli, pp. 218–222 ("a principle of communion" within the "distance" of political recognition); Reading Montaigne, pp. 207–210 (the Montaignean ethos).
  • merleau-ponty-1961-eye-and-mind — §3: Descartes' Dioptric "removes action at a distance and relieves us of that ubiquity which is the whole problem of vision" by modeling vision on the blind man's cane (touch = contact). MP's counter-move (§3, end): "Light is viewed once more as action at a distance... light must have its imaginaire. Light's transcendence is not delegated to a reading mind." This is the perceptual-physical register of the concept that Signs' Introduction develops in the political-methodological register: action at a distance names the non-contact communication that both vision and political action require.
  • merleau-ponty-1955-adventures-of-the-dialectic — the 1955 political ancestor of the phrase at AD 217. Deployed pejoratively in 1955 as the diagnostic name for Sartre's failed commitment ("action at a distance, politics by proxy"); the same phrase is reworked affirmatively in the 1960 Signs Introduction. The 1955 ancestor confirms that "action at a distance" is not a new coinage of 1960 but a phrase MP rehabilitates after its initial critical use.
  • sartre-1984-merleau-ponty-vivant — manuscript p. 149: MP's wave / crest / sea self-figuration as reported by Sartre. Structurally the action-at-a-distance image applied to the self: the crest is of the sea (locally individuated) and the sea is the whole sea drawn up (globally integrated). The figure is MP's polemical alternative to Sartrean voluntarism's "creation ex nihilo."