Essential Prematureness of Revolution

Merleau-Ponty's claim in Chapter 4 of *Adventures of the Dialectic* (1955), against Marxist theories of revolution-as-maturation: revolutions are not "anticipations" of conditions that will one day be mature; they have an essential prematureness as part of their structural form. MP's analogy: like an infant's birth, a revolution is always "a wrenching-forth and a re-creation" however late and well-prepared. The concept refuses the Marxist dream of a revolution that would arrive at its proper time (when "objective conditions" are present) and resolve itself without violence. It frames revolution as intrinsically a birth trauma in political history — "a rupture and a re-creation," never a smooth unfolding of a pre-formed future.

Key Points

  • The governing passage: "Proletarian revolution in a backward country could be called, if one wished, 'premature,' but in the sense that psychoanalysts say that an infant's birth is premature: not that, had it come later, it would have been 'fully natural' but, on the contrary, that, however late and well prepared it may be, birth is always a wrenching-forth and a re-creation. Revolution and revolutionary society would be premature — they would possess an essential prematureness — and their analysis should therefore be redone from that point of view" (AD 116).
  • Against maturation: Marxism's classical framing — revolution as the "hatched egg" of capitalism, the fulfillment of ripening objective conditions — is rejected. Revolutions do not ripen; they break out.
  • The "internal mechanism" of revolution: "through the 'internal mechanism' of a conflict which has grown by itself to the point of destroying the social structures in which it had appeared" (AD 116). The internal mechanism is what MP will later call the interworld's capacity for ignition (interworld).
  • Not only in backward countries: the argument generalizes. "Revolution is no longer history's fulfillment; it also takes shape in societies which did not 'hatch' it; it is always there and also never there, since even in mature societies it can be indefinitely late, and even in the revolutionary society it must always be repeated" (AD 117).
  • Implication for permanent revolution: the thesis of permanent revolution was the Marxist attempt to accommodate the essential prematureness — if revolutions are always premature, then the revolution must always continue. MP argues the accommodation fails: permanent revolution tries to institutionalize what is structurally discontinuous, turning essential prematureness into a perpetual state. See revolutions-true-as-movements-false-as-regimes.

Details

Why Marxism Cannot Admit the Concept

The Marxist dialectic (as MP reads it in Chapters 2–4 of Adventures of the Dialectic) places the possibility of revolution in the object — in the capitalist mode of production that "creates its own gravediggers," in the historical maturity that brings forth the proletariat. This framing requires that revolutions arrive when the conditions are ready. A "premature" revolution, in this framing, is a revolution that arrived before its conditions were ready — a pre-hatched egg, an anticipation of the canonical form.

MP's essential-prematureness thesis reverses the framing. Revolutions are not fulfillments of a prior development; they are breaks in that development, moments at which the "internal mechanism" of a conflict overwhelms the social structures that produced it. On this reading, a revolution in a "backward" country (Russia 1917, China 1949) is not an aberration that Marxism must explain away; it is the paradigm. Every revolution is a birth-trauma in political history; every revolution is premature; none of them arrive smoothly.

This is fatal to the Marxist teleology. If every revolution has essential prematureness, then there is no mature society "ready" for its revolution; the revolutionary transition is always a break, a re-creation, a creation-out-of-rupture. Marxism imagined that in advanced capitalist countries revolution would arrive "fully natural" — this is the illusion the essential-prematureness thesis dissolves.

The Birth Analogy

The analogy to infant birth is philosophically loaded. MP says revolutions are premature "in the sense that psychoanalysts say that an infant's birth is premature." This is a reference to the theme of prematureness in Wallon and Lacan, developed in MP's 1950–51 Sorbonne course on child development and revisited in the 1954–55 Passivity course.

The human infant is essentially premature in the biological sense: it is born before it can walk, feed itself, regulate its body temperature, coordinate its vision. Its prematureness is not a birth that should have happened later — at no later point would the infant have arrived "ready." The infant is constitutively unfinished, and its subsequent development is a continuous incorporation and re-elaboration of what it was born into without being able to master.

MP's transposition to politics: a revolution is constitutively unfinished. It is born into conditions it cannot master. Its subsequent development (the regime-phase, the institution-building, the stabilization) is a continuous wrenching-forth in which the revolutionary society learns to inhabit itself. There is no "mature" moment when the revolution will have been what it was destined to be.

The psychoanalytic register also carries the other piece of the essential-prematureness claim: "birth is always a wrenching-forth and a re-creation." Birth is not a passage from one state to another; it is a traumatic separation that institutes the separated subject as the separated one. Revolution is not a passage from capitalism to socialism; it is a traumatic re-creation that institutes the revolutionary society as the society born of that trauma.

The "Internal Mechanism"

MP's phrase "internal mechanism" is borrowed from Guérin (who borrowed it from Trotsky). It names the dynamic by which a conflict generates its own acceleration — "a conflict which has grown by itself to the point of destroying the social structures in which it had appeared" (AD 116). The internal mechanism is not an external cause; it is the dialectical pressure that a system's own contradictions exert on the system itself.

The concept is crucial because it distinguishes MP's account of revolution from two alternative accounts:

  1. External causation: the revolution is caused by external factors (war, famine, foreign intervention). MP's internal-mechanism thesis says such factors can precipitate a revolution only because the internal mechanism is already at work.
  2. Conscious planning: the revolution is caused by the Party's strategic decisions. MP's internal-mechanism thesis says the Party responds to and redirects the internal mechanism; it does not create it.

The internal mechanism is the 1955 name for what the 1954–55 course calls the "ignition" of an institution and what the later ontology will call the "reversibility" of the flesh. It is the moment at which a symbolic-historical field finds its own momentum and outruns its producing conditions.

Relation to Permanent Revolution

If revolutions have essential prematureness, what about "permanent revolution"? MP's answer is that permanent revolution is the attempt to institutionalize prematureness — an attempt that cannot succeed.

"Permanent revolution is this myth, the underground work of the negative which never ceases" (AD 114). The myth is that the wrenching-forth of the revolutionary moment could be sustained as a permanent condition of the revolutionary society. On MP's analysis, this cannot work: any permanent arrangement is an institution; an institution cannot be a continuous rupture; the attempt to institutionalize permanent rupture produces either violence (the ruling elite's imposing of rupture against the governed's will) or illusion (the pretense that a stabilized regime is still "really" in its revolutionary movement). The Soviet case exemplifies both — Terror under Stalin as the imposition of continued rupture; the fiction of the withering-away of the State as the pretense of permanent revolution.

Essential prematureness is the honest name for what permanent revolution falsely claimed to institutionalize. Revolutions are premature, always and constitutively; the regime cannot be premature; the attempt to be so is the source of revolutionary violence.

Anticipations and Descendants

The essential-prematureness thesis is continuous with MP's broader thought on natal time, generative passivity, and the institution:

  • Generative passivity (the 1954–55 course): the living subject is generated by its own openness to what it cannot yet receive. Essential prematureness is the political form of this structure.
  • Natal time (V&I and Nature): the subject is born into a world that precedes it; its being is always-already late, always-already early. Political revolutions have the same structure.
  • Institution as "event that opens a field": the institution of a field is always an inauguration that cannot be reduced to its preceding conditions; there is always a rupture-inaugurating moment. Revolution is the political institution par excellence.
  • The 1950–51 Sorbonne course on child development: MP's engagement with Wallon and Lacan on the pre-maturation of the human subject (see specular-image, transitivism). The essential-prematureness thesis is the political echo of this developmental thesis.
  • Beith's Birth of Sense (2018): the generalization of the natal-time thought to the whole philosophy of life. Revolutions as premature births fit naturally into Beith's framework.

Positions

  • Classical Marxism: revolutions arrive when conditions are ripe; backward-country revolutions are aberrations. MP rejects.
  • Trotsky: revolutions in backward countries can happen through the "internal mechanism" of permanent revolution. MP partially endorses (Trotsky saw the problem) but thinks Trotsky's own Marxism cannot accommodate his insight.
  • MP (1955): all revolutions are essentially premature, backward-country or not. The concept of "essential prematureness" generalizes Trotsky's permanent-revolution thesis while removing its Marxist naturalism.
  • Later MP: the essential-prematureness thesis is continuous with the philosophy of natal time and of generative passivity — revolutions as premature births are a case of the constitutive unfinishedness that characterizes all living beings.

Connections

  • generalizes the human-infant pre-maturation thesis of Wallon and Lacan to political history — see specular-image for the 1950–51 development
  • is continuous with generative-passivity — the generative openness that precedes any constituting activity is the structural form of revolutionary prematureness
  • grounds the critique of Marxist maturation in Ch 4 of Adventures of the Dialectic
  • is the philosophical warrant for revolutions-true-as-movements-false-as-regimes — revolutions are true as movements because they are essentially premature; false as regimes because they pretend to be mature
  • refuses the Marxist dream of a "ready" revolution
  • is the political form of natal time (see V&I)
  • partly vindicates Trotsky's permanent-revolution thesis (at the level of insight) while rejecting its Marxist framing
  • is the 1955 political register of what the 1954–55 courses work out as institution (as event that opens a field)
  • anticipates the V&I account of "institution" as always a rupture rather than a continuation

Open Questions

  • Does the essential-prematureness thesis imply that revolutionary violence is unavoidable? MP does not draw this consequence explicitly, but the logic seems to suggest it: a wrenching-forth is traumatic, and political wrenching-forth involves violence.
  • How does essential prematureness relate to the retrograde-movement-of-the-true? Both claim that a later moment retroactively reorganizes the sense of earlier moments without that sense having been already there. Are they the same structure in different registers?
  • If revolutions are essentially premature, what is the difference between a revolution and a mere rupture? What distinguishes a premature-birth-revolution from other political crises that do not become revolutions? MP does not fully develop the criteria.
  • The birth-analogy is psychoanalytically loaded; but MP develops it with relatively little engagement with the clinical phenomena of birth and the earliest weeks of life. A fuller working-out might strengthen the analogy — or might show its limits.
  • Can essential prematureness be institutionalized in a non-violent form? The new-liberalism of the Epilogue implies it can: parliamentary institutions give a form to the contestation that the essential-prematureness thesis names. But this claim is programmatic rather than worked out.

Sources