Merleau-Ponty: Institution-Ontology-Politics

Author(s): Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (ed.) Year: 2026 Type: edited volume (12 chapters + Introduction; 3 thematic Parts)

A Brill edited volume that proposes the institution-paradigm — not flesh, not chiasm — as the right way to read late Merleau-Ponty. Twelve chapters and an editor's Introduction work the institution-concept across three thematic Parts: institution and time/history (Popa, Pagan, Fava, Mendoza-Canales), institution and ontology of life/body/imaginary (Halák, Lanzirotti, Kaushik, Dufourcq), and institution and politics (León, Chouraqui, Larison, Caraus). The volume's strongest cross-chapter convergence — present in four chapters — is that revolution and institution are co-substantial: revolution is "another Stiftung," and the logic of putting-into-question (mise en question) is shared by both. The volume's editor is Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (Villanova); the volume sits in Brill's "Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology" series (vol. 30).

Core Arguments

The volume is multi-authored; what follows is the editor's framing argument plus the strongest cross-chapter syntheses. Individual chapter arguments are summarized under "Concepts Developed" below and detailed in .extraction-mendoza-canales-2026-institution-ontology-politics.md.

  1. Editor's framing thesis (Mendoza-Canales): The 1954–55 course on institution must be read as a direct continuation of the 1953–54 course on history — together establishing that for phenomenology to be authentically philosophical, it must engage the genesis of truth without falling back into the normativity of a teleology of reason. Because: Both course summaries end with structurally parallel "enigmatic" formulations (phenomenology as "metaphysics of history"; history as "the genesis of truth"); the institution-concept lets MP think historicity without Hegelian closure or Marxist teleology. Against: Readings that treat the institution course as self-contained / supplementary; phenomenology as "only an introduction to true knowledge, which remains alien to the adventures of experience."

  2. Volume-level synthetic claim 1 — institution-revolution co-substantiality: Across Pagan §4, Mendoza-Canales §4, Larison §2.2, and Caraus §3, revolution is read not as the opposite of institution but as "another Stiftung"; both are structured by the logic of putting-into-question (mise en question). Because: MP's own Institution and Passivity p. 13 ("the very general sense of institution is not the opposite of revolution; revolution is another Stiftung"); Adventures of the Dialectic p. 207 ("Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes"); Husserl at the Limits p. 66 (militant truth that puts constituted idealities in question). Against: Sartre's voluntarist Sinngebung; Trotsky's permanent revolution as future-presence; orthodox Marxist teleology; readings that take AdV as terminating MP's investment in the proletariat.

  3. Volume-level synthetic claim 2 — institution as paradigm shift, not Stiftung extension: León §4, Pagan §3, Mendoza-Canales §1, and Halák §2.1 converge on reading MP's institution-concept as a paradigm shift from Husserl's Stiftung, not merely a development of it; the difference is that the instituting subject cannot be inherently individuated independently of an institutional background, while the constituting subject can. Because: MP, Institution and Passivity p. 76 ("In the concept of institution we are seeking a solution to the difficulties found in the philosophy of consciousness"); p. 8 ("constituting is almost the opposite of instituting"). Against: Husserl-friendly readings that treat institution as a deepening of Stiftung; readings that domesticate MP's late ontology as continuous reform rather than transformation.

  4. Volume-level synthetic claim 3 — institution as 1953–55 middle term: Pagan, Mendoza-Canales, Larison, and Halák converge: the 1953–55 institution-concept is the philosophical middle term between MP's 1940s Marxist solution to "logic within contingence" and the late ontology of V&I's hyper-dialectic / wild Being. The dialectic-without-synthesis specifically articulated in I&P 58–62 is the seed of V&I 94–95's hyper-dialectique. Because: MP, Institution and Passivity 58 ("Endstiftung at the same time as Urstiftung"), 62 ("Reaction against Hegel… real synthesis"), 79 ("revision of Hegelianism"); V&I 94–95 (hyper-dialectic). Against: Developmental readings positing a sharp break between MP's phenomenology of perception and his later political work.

Argumentative Movement

The volume is structured to enact a movement from time/history (Part 1), through ontology of life/body/imaginary (Part 2), to politics (Part 3). The order is not arbitrary: the first part establishes institution as the load-bearing concept of MP's philosophy of history (Popa: sense-institution; Pagan: "logic within contingence"; Fava: transcendental geology; Mendoza-Canales: adventures of experience); the second part extends institution into ontological domains MP himself thematized (Halák: organism; Lanzirotti: stylistic registers of VI; Kaushik: writing as ontogenetic; Dufourcq: imaginary as canon of Being); the third part returns to politics on the now-reorganized basis (León: language and sociality; Chouraqui: belief, faith, and post-truth politics; Larison: weft of politics-institution-time; Caraus: institution of the proletariat).

The volume thereby enacts a thesis it does not argue head-on: that institution is the right central concept for late MP. No chapter defends this against the rival flesh-paradigm reading, but every chapter operates within it; the volume's argumentative force is cumulative rather than polemical.

Key Findings

  • The volume is the first sustained Anglophone treatment of MP that takes institution (not flesh) as the load-bearing concept of late MP across all three of: history, ontology, politics.
  • Institution and revolution are co-substantial in MP's late thought (4-chapter convergence): revolution is "another Stiftung," and both share the logic of putting-into-question.
  • MP's institution-concept enacts a paradigm shift from Husserlian constituting subjectivity, not a mere extension (4-chapter convergence): the instituting subject cannot be inherently individuated independently of an institutional background.
  • Institution is the philosophical middle term between MP's 1940s Marxism and his late ontology (4-chapter convergence): the dialectic-without-synthesis articulated in I&P 58–62 is the seed of V&I's hyper-dialectic.
  • Trans-temporality — non-successive time in which the past is reopenable — is the operative ontological condition of MP's politics (Larison §2; with anchors in Mendoza-Canales' momentum, Pagan's never-completedness, and Dufourcq's vortex).
  • The chapter that clearest extends MP's institution to a new domain is Halák's "Organismal Institution," which argues that life is structurally interrogative (the "primordial establishment of the problematic") and that organismal teleology, on MP's reading, is not naturalizable — incompatible with autopoiesis and organizational closure.
  • Chouraqui's "Political Genealogy of Truth" pushes the strongest single-author claim in the volume: that MP is best read as positing a humanism of meaning-making rather than truth-seeking, with belief reducible to voir-selon / faith that has forgotten itself, and post-truth politics as the structural norm of political life.
  • Larison introduces Marilena Chauí's 2009 Brazilian USP-course reading into Anglophone scholarship: MP enacts an "unprecedented theoretical revolution" by inverting Aristotle's NE VI ranking of theory over praxis — theory henceforth points to the possible, praxis institutes the necessary.

Methodology

The volume operates within standard contemporary continental phenomenology: close reading of MP's primary texts (especially the lecture courses and working notes), triangulation against Husserl, dialogue with secondary literature (heavily French and Italian, less Anglophone-analytic), and selected cross-tradition comparisons (Bachelard for Dufourcq; Bloch and Simondon for Mendoza-Canales; Descombes for León; Lukács and Chauí for Larison). Several chapters (Halák, Fava) extend MP into contemporary debates (philosophy of biology, Anthropocene). The volume privileges the lecture courses (Institution and Passivity, Husserl at the Limits, Nature, Le problème de la parole) over VI alone — a methodological commitment most chapters share without arguing for explicitly.

Concepts Developed

This volume is primary on the following concepts (chapters do original work):

  • institution — paradigm shift from Husserlian Stiftung; institution-revolution co-substantiality; institution as 1953–55 middle term to late ontology (Pagan, Mendoza-Canales, Larison, Caraus, León, Halák — multi-chapter contribution).
  • stiftung — Halák's de-emphasis of Urstiftung and rejection of Endstiftung; institution as Stiftung-becoming rather than Stiftung-foundation (Mendoza-Canales' coinage).
  • institution-of-the-proletariat — Caraus's coinage; the proletariat freed from party/dictatorship persists as a unique institution whose function is intensifying the question.
  • organismal-institution — Halák's coinage; life as institution; "form-generating logic inherent to life itself" expressing "proto-historicity and proto-culturality"; organismal teleology as not naturalizable.
  • transcendental-geology — Fava's elevation of MP's late working-note phrase into central interpretive paradigm; l'a priori est sol; the Earth as Ur-Arche / "structural a priori"; geological institution as Anthropocene paradigm.
  • voir-selon-vivre-selon — Chouraqui's systematized term for pre-doxastic faith; "belief is merely faith that forgets its own nature as faith"; political agency as extension of vivre-selon.
  • interdependence-claim — León's signature coinage; bidirectional reciprocal-foundation thesis between langue (instituted language) and parole (speech).
  • adventures-of-experience — Mendoza-Canales' editor-chapter title-concept binding genesis, institution, and historicity; "to (ad)venture beyond"; Bloch's Überschreiten as structural parallel.
  • transtemporality — Larison's development of MP's term as ontological condition of the theory/praxis inversion; "the past that could have been otherwise."
  • political-genealogy-of-truth — Chouraqui's chapter coinage; MP's career-spanning project (PP 1945 → SNS 1948 → Note on Machiavelli 1949 → VI/EM 1960) as a single tripartite genealogy of truth.
  • diacritical-ontology — Kaushik's most explicit working-out (extending his 2019/2021 books); diacritical ontology circumvents (rather than elaborating) Heidegger's ontological difference.
  • ontogenetic-vortex — Dufourcq's elevation of MP's tourbillon to the structural figure of Being; vortex as complexification of Nietzschean eternal-recurrence circle.
  • dialectical-imagination — Popa's contribution; imagination's dialectical function (alongside eidetic-variational and hyletic-modal) as ideology-critique instrument.
  • membrure — Lanzirotti's reading of membrure (architectural ribbing/skeleton/human-body structure) as the synthetic stylistic-ontological term in VI.
  • hermeneutical-reverie — Kaushik's chapter is now the primary source on this concept.

Concepts Referenced

The volume references and extends these existing wiki concepts without primary work:

Terminology

This volume operates primarily in English but cites French and German technical terms. Key bilingual attestations:

German / French English translation Attestation locations Translation notes
Stiftung institution / foundation passim across chapters MP retains the German alongside French institution; chapters distinguish primal (Urstiftung), secondary (Nachstiftung), final (Endstiftung)
Sinnstiftung / Sinnbildung sense-institution / sense-formation Popa §1; cited from Crisis Popa thematizes the relation as crystallization-of-process
Sinngebung donation of sense / meaning-bestowing Pagan §3, Mendoza-Canales §1, León §4 Husserl's term; the constituting-subject's act
écart divergence / deviation / spread Pagan §3, Kaushik §1, Lanzirotti §6 Saussurean inheritance; "primary player" of MP's diacritical ontology (Kaushik)
Rückfrage / Reaktivierung backward-questioning / reactivation Popa §1, Caraus §3 Husserl's terms; Caraus identifies Rückfrage with permanent revolution
bougé primary blurring / primary motion / oscillation Dufourcq §2 MP's term for primary motion (cf. V&I working notes)
membrure framework / ribbing Lanzirotti §6 Lanzirotti rejects "framework" as inadequate; nautical/architectural origin
l'a priori est sol the a priori is ground/soil Fava (chapter title) Late MP working note; Fava's title-thesis
Spielraum play-space / field of action Fava §5, others Husserlian; Fava's bridge term for Anthropocene
voir-selon / vivre-selon seeing-according-to / living-according-to Chouraqui §3.2.3 Chouraqui's systematized technical term for pre-doxastic faith
mise en question putting-into-question Caraus §3, Pagan §3 Caraus's title-thesis vehicle
tourbillon vortex Dufourcq passim Operative figure of Being for Dufourcq
fond / arrière-plan background León §4 Slippage between Husserlian Hintergrund and MP/Descombesian fond (silent key per León extraction)
Wahlverwandtschaft affinity / elective affinity Pagan §1, Mendoza-Canales Weber's term; prefigures MP's "logic within contingence"
Überschreiten venturing beyond Mendoza-Canales §5 Bloch's term; structural parallel to MP's "adventure"
Auseinandersetzung / Endstiftung / Urstiftung / Nachstiftung confrontation / final / primal / secondary institution passim Husserlian Stiftung-triad

Key Passages

"Either phenomenology is only an introduction to true knowledge, which remains alien to the adventures of experience, or phenomenology dwells entirely within philosophy." (MP, Institution and Passivity, 79; cited Mendoza-Canales p. 93) — anchors editor's framing.

"There is no history where the course of events is a series of episodes without unity, or where it is a struggle already decided in the heaven of ideas. History is there where there is a logic within contingency, a reason within unreason." (MP, Themes from the Lectures, p. 29–30; Pagan p. 37) — anchors Pagan's titular formula.

"Institution is not the opposite of revolution; revolution is another Stiftung." (MP, Institution and Passivity, 13; cited in Pagan, Caraus, Larison, Mendoza-Canales) — anchors the volume's strongest cross-chapter convergence.

"Every institution involves this double aspect, end and beginning, Endstiftung at the same time as Urstiftung." (MP, Institution and Passivity, 58; Pagan p. 45) — anchors institution-as-middle-term thesis.

"[T]he earth as 'Noah's Ark' = bearing the living and the thoughts above the Flood = it is not the physical earth. It is the earth as a mass, inertia and flying beneath all of us = (barbarous principle)." (MP, Husserl at the Limits, pp. 68–69; Fava p. 81) — anchors Fava's earth-as-barbarous-principle identification.

"[I]n the concept of institution we are seeking a solution to the difficulties found in the philosophy of consciousness." (MP, Institution and Passivity, 76; cited León lines 3613, 3861, 3929; Mendoza-Canales) — anchors institution-as-paradigm-shift thesis.

"Marxism is less and more than that. It is an immense field of sedimented history and thought where one goes to practice and to learn to think." (MP, Signs 12; Caraus p. 283) — anchors Caraus's "Marxism unabandonable" thesis.

"It is quite superficial to say that Marxism unveils the meaning of history to us... When Marxism focuses everything through the perspective of the proletariat, it focuses on a principle of universal strife and intensifies human questioning instead of ending it." (MP, AdV 57; Caraus p. 292) — anchors Caraus's "intensification" thesis.

"I would be hard pressed to say where the painting is I am looking at. ... Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it [je vois selon ou avec lui]." (MP, "Eye and Mind" 126; Chouraqui p. 235) — anchors Chouraqui's voir-selon thesis.

"the individual grows through the very gifts he makes to those in power [l'individu s'accroît des dons mêmes qu'il fait au pouvoir]." (MP, "Note on Machiavelli" 215; Chouraqui pp. 215, 270) — anchors Chouraqui's politics-of-distraction.

"Replace the notions of concept, idea, mind, representation with the notions of dimensions, articulation, level, hinges, pivots, configuration—The point of departure = the critique of the usual conception of the thing and its properties… signification as a separation (écart)." (MP, VI 224, December 1959 working note; Lanzirotti p. 160) — anchors Lanzirotti's "style of structure" register.

"the imaginary sphere of the Body ... [is] the true Stiftung of Being of which the observation and the articulated body are special variants." (MP, VI 262, November 1960 working note; Dufourcq p. 196) — anchors Dufourcq's primacy-reversal.

"Human existence will lead us to revisit our usual notion of necessity and of contingency, because human existence is the change of contingency into necessity through the act of taking up." (MP, PhP 174; Larison p. 247) — anchors Chauí-Larison theory/praxis-inversion thesis.

What's Not Obvious

Three things about this volume that would not appear in a conventional summary or review:

  1. Castoriadis is conspicuously absent. Dufourcq's chapter is titled "The Imaginary Institution of Being" — a title whose echo of Castoriadis's Imaginary Institution of Society (1975) is unmistakable to any reader of 20th-century continental philosophy. Yet Castoriadis is not cited or named anywhere in the chapter, nor in the bibliography. This silence is structural, not accidental: the volume operates within a Husserl-MP-Bachelard genealogical line and methodologically seals itself against the possible Castoriadis-MP / radical-imaginary literature. A reader wanting to position MP against Castoriadis on the imaginary-institution question must look elsewhere. (Verified at extraction: Dufourcq §§1–7, p. 185–202; bibliography pp. 202.) This connects to the volume's similar absence of engagement with Foucault on genealogy (Chouraqui §3) and its very thin Heidegger-engagement (Kaushik §1, who states a "circumvent" thesis without arguing it head-on).

  2. The volume's strongest thesis runs through four chapters but is never argued for as such. Pagan §4, Mendoza-Canales §4, Larison §2.2, and Caraus §3 all converge on reading "revolution is another Stiftung" (I&P 13) as the load-bearing claim that institution-revolution are co-substantial — and they all anchor in the same MP passage (I&P 13, with a secondary anchor at AdV 207). Yet no chapter cross-references the others' use of this passage, no chapter argues for the convergence as a thesis, and Mendoza-Canales' editor's introduction does not flag the convergence as the volume's organizing finding. The convergence is enacted but not argued. This is significant because if the convergence stands, it constitutes a substantial revisionary reading of late MP's politics — and would tell against the standard "abandonment of Marxism" narrative — but the volume does not present it as such.

  3. The volume privileges the Institution and Passivity lecture course (1954–55) over V&I and uses MP's working notes as primary text. Multiple chapters (Halák, Mendoza-Canales, Pagan, Larison, Caraus) place I&P at the center of late MP; only Lanzirotti and Dufourcq foreground V&I, and even Dufourcq gives the November 1960 working note centrality over V&I's main body. Lefort's preface to I&P itself frames the course as transitional — an explicit caution the volume does not adjudicate. The privileging is methodologically consequential: it pushes MP's late thought toward a 1953–55 institution-paradigm rather than a 1959–61 flesh-paradigm, and reorients the corpus's textual centroid by roughly five years. This positions the volume against (but in dialogue with) the Saint Aubert / Carbone / Barbaras strain of recent scholarship that orbits V&I / Eye and Mind. The privileging is not argued; it is performed.

Critique / Limitations

  • Castoriadis-shaped silence (Dufourcq §8): see "What's Not Obvious" item 1. The chapter's title invites engagement that does not occur.
  • Cross-chapter convergence not argued (Pagan/Mendoza-Canales/Larison/Caraus on revolution-as-Stiftung): see item 2. The volume's strongest thesis is left implicit.
  • One-source dependency in Larison §1–§2: Chauí's 2009 USP-course manuscript is unpublished; the chapter's central interpretive thesis is anchored in non-publicly-available source. Real artifact-conservatism concern (per Larison extraction Coverage Notes).
  • Performative-paradox unresolved (Kaushik §3, Dufourcq §6): both Kaushik and Dufourcq concede that their theses border on performative paradox (Kaushik: "ontogenesis so open that it cannot itself be a referent"; Dufourcq: ontology of imaginary as "essentially disappointing and evanescent"). Neither resolves this; they argue the unresolution is itself the position. A reader unsympathetic to the performative reading is given little traction.
  • Heidegger-engagement thin throughout: Kaushik names "circumvent the ontological difference" without engaging Heidegger directly; Chouraqui draws on "genealogy" without naming Nietzsche; Mendoza-Canales' Bloch parallel does not argue for its philological grounding. The volume operates through several "implicit" engagements that a Heidegger or Nietzsche scholar would want made explicit.
  • Volume does not adjudicate institution-paradigm vs flesh-paradigm reading of late MP: as the editor's framing thesis (Mendoza-Canales) implies but does not defend, the institution-paradigm is the volume's organizing commitment. The flesh-paradigm reading (Saint Aubert, Carbone, Barbaras) is not engaged head-on.
  • Anglophone-analytic phenomenology underrepresented as interlocutor: Zahavi appears (in León) as foil; otherwise the volume's analytic-phenomenology engagement is thin. This is a stylistic choice of the series (Brill Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology), not a fault per se, but it bounds the volume's reach.

Connections