Browse — tag-politics

Tag: politics

Pages tagged with politics.

70 pages

• 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 (H…

• Action of Unveiling vs. Action of Governing

  Merleau-Ponty's distinction, in Chapter 5 of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), between two orders of historical action: the action of unveiling — the writer's, journalist's, artist's, or philosopher's domain of showing, analyzing, exposi…

• Adventures of the Dialectic Maurice Merleau-Ponty (trans. Joseph Bien), 1955

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty (trans. Joseph Bien, Northwestern UP 1973) Year: 1955 (original French: Les Aventures de la dialectique, Gallimard) Type: book

• Agnosia (Merleau-Ponty)

  Visual agnosia is the clinical condition that gives Merleau-Ponty the case of Schneider in Phenomenology of Perception — Schneider, the WWI veteran whose shrapnel injury produced an inability to perceive the world as a field of possibility…

• Arthur Koestler

  Hungarian-born British novelist and journalist (1905–1983); communist 1931–38; broke with the Party after the Moscow Trials and the Hitler-Stalin Pact; author of Darkness at Noon (1940, written in German as Sonnenfinsternis; first publishe…

• Capital as Concrete Phenomenology of Spirit

  Merleau-Ponty's reading of Marx's Capital as a Phénoménologie de l'esprit concrète — the economic-historical structure of capitalism read as the real-world unfolding of phenomenological structure. Capital is not a work of political economy…

• Changement de quantité en qualité (degeneration thesis)

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947–49 articulation of how stalinism emerges from leninism without revolutionary rupture: through a change of quantity into quality, of means into end ("changement de quantité en qualité, de moyen en fin"). What was an exc…

• Claude Lefort

  French political philosopher (1924–2010), Merleau-Ponty's student, literary executor, and principal editor of the posthumous course notes and working manuscripts. In the wiki's context, the editor of The Visible and the Invisible (1964) an…

• Coexistence

  Merleau-Ponty's term in Phenomenology of Perception for the structural togetherness of bodies, points, sensations, and selves that is not built up from prior atomic units but is presupposed in the unity of any experience. Coexistence names…

• Conditioned Freedom

  Merleau-Ponty's doctrine of freedom in Part Three Ch III of Phenomenology of Perception — a doctrine positioned against Sartre's "total freedom" of Being and Nothingness (1943) without ever naming Sartre. The slogan MP extracts and rejects…

• Conférences en Amérique, notes de cours et autres textes — Inédits II (1947–1949) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 2022

  Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) Year: notes 1947–1949 (composition); 2022 (posthumous critical edition) Type: notes (manuscript notes for course, conferences, and reading-notes)

• Conférences en Europe et premiers cours à Lyon — Inédits I (1946–1947) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 2022

  Author: Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) Year: notes 1946–1947 (composition); 2022 (posthumous critical edition) Type: notes (manuscript notes for conferences and courses)

• Contingency of the Future

  Merleau-Ponty's name for the structural condition of historical time as it bears on political legitimacy and political guilt. There is no science of the future: every political reading of a situation is unavoidably a wager that may turn ou…

• Daniel Guérin

  French historian, anarchist-communist activist, and political writer (1904–1988); author of La Lutte des classes sous la Première République (2 vols., 1946), Fascisme et grand capital (1936), Où va le peuple américain? (1950), and many wor…

• 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 premature…

• Faith and Good Faith (MP's 1946 formulation)

  Merleau-Ponty's resolution of the apparent opposition between faith (unreserved commitment going beyond what is given) and good faith (sincerity in saying what one thinks). Developed in the 1946 essay "Faith and Good Faith" (Chapter 12 of…

• Georg Lukács

  Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary theorist, and political figure (1885–1971); author of Die Theorie des Romans (1916), Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1923 — the single most important work for MP's engagement), Der junge Hegel (19…

• Healing Schneider

  Chouraqui's 2025 name for the positive side of Merleau-Ponty's ethical project: opposing and undoing the agnosiastic tendencies that MP diagnoses across clinical, political, existential, and ontological registers. The project is not buildi…

• Healing Schneider: On Merleau-Ponty's Ethical System of Play Frank Chouraqui, 2025

  Author: Frank Chouraqui (Leiden University) Year: 2025 Type: paper (Philosophies 10:1, 3)

• Historical Responsibility

  Merleau-Ponty's name for a positive philosophical category that exceeds liberal "intention/circumstance" distinctions: the political agent is responsible for the role he plays as it is read by his victims and his inheritors — for what othe…

• Homme en porte-à-faux

  Merleau-Ponty's 1946 figure for the structural cantilevering of human existence — being-and-rien, being-here-and-nowhere, voué-à-l'être-and-défaut-dans-l'être, néant-et-être all at once and not in turn. Articulated in the Brussels conferen…

• Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1969

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1947 (French original); 1969 (English translation by John O'Neill, Beacon Press) Type: book

• Humanism in Extension / Humanism in Intension

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947 political distinction between two senses of "humanism." Humanism in intension ("intensive") is the love of humanity as embodied in a few — the guardians of Western culture who preserve its "treasure" and whose status i…

• Individu de classe

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947–48 reading of Marx's Idéologie allemande: the individu de classe is the On (impersonal "one") that mediates the historical subject and the historical-economic conditions — "porté à la fois par conditions matérielles et…

• Institution

  Merleau-Ponty's counter-concept to Husserlian constitution, developed in his 1954–55 Collège de France course "Institution in Personal and Public History." For a constituting subject, "there are only the objects which it has itself constit…

• Institution of the Proletariat

  Tamara Caraus's coinage for Merleau-Ponty's reabsorbed proletariat: the proletariat freed from party, dictatorship, and historical-mission persists as a unique institution whose distinctive function is the intensification of the question w…

• Interworld

  The interworld (l'intermonde) is Merleau-Ponty's name, in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955, Ch 5), for the middle order between men and things: "history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made" (AD 200). It is the order that Sartre's ontology of cog…

• Is Phenomenology of Perception already the break with Sartre?

  Yes — philosophically, if not socially. Part Three Ch III of Phenomenology of Perception — the chapter on freedom that closes the book — is a chapter-length rejoinder to Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943). Sartre is never named. Every c…

• Jean-Paul Sartre

  French philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual (1905–1980). Merleau-Ponty's closest philosophical interlocutor through the 1940s and early 1950s, co-founder with MP of Les Temps Modernes (1945), and the addressee of the Introduction…

• Joseph Stalin

  Soviet politician (1878–1953); General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death; effective ruler of the USSR from the late 1920s; principal author of the doctrine of "socialism in one country" and arch…

• Karl Marx

  German philosopher, economist, and political theorist (1818–1883); co-author with Friedrich Engels of The Communist Manifesto (1848); author of Capital (Vol. I 1867), the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (published 1932), The G…

• Leon Trotsky

  Russian revolutionary and Marxist theorist (1879–1940); leader of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War; principal Bolshevik opponent of Stalin after Lenin's death; expelled from the USSR in 1929; founder of the Fourth International in 193…

• Man, the Hero (the Contemporary Hero)

  Merleau-Ponty's existential-ethical figure of the post-1940 hero — the figure "condemned to follow out fragile meanings without either the triumph of an absolute or the relief of despair." The concept is given its concentrated statement in…

• Mariana Larison

  Argentinian phenomenologist working on Merleau-Ponty's institution-concept, philosophy of history, and dialectic. Author of L'être en forme (2016) and Vers une phénoménologie de l'institution. Avec et au-delà de Merleau-Ponty (Zetabooks 20…

• Marilena Chauí

  Brazilian philosopher (USP — University of São Paulo); a major Lusophone interpreter of Merleau-Ponty's politics. Her 2009 USP course manuscript Merleau-Ponty e a política — unpublished, preserved in tapescript form with original paginatio…

• Marxist Machiavellianism

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947 coinage for the form of political action distinctive to Marxism: a dialectical politics that names its detours and subordinates them to a general definition of the phase, distinguishing it from "pure" Machiavellianism…

• Max Weber

  German sociologist, political economist, and philosopher of history (1864–1920); author of Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1905), Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (posth. 1922), "Politik als Beruf" (1919), and methodol…

• Merleau-Ponty [I] (manuscript draft of 'Merleau-Ponty Vivant', 1961/1984) Jean-Paul Sartre, 1984

  Author(s): Jean-Paul Sartre Year: Manuscript dated July 1961 (referenced internally: "two months of absence" from MP's death on 3 May 1961); JBSP translation published 1984 Type: philosophical-biographical essay (eulogy / memoir)

• Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy Emmanuel Alloa, Frank Chouraqui, Rajiv Kaushik (eds.), 2019

  Author(s): Emmanuel Alloa, Frank Chouraqui, Rajiv Kaushik (eds.) Year: 2019 Type: Edited volume (14 essays + epilogue), SUNY Press

• Merleau-Ponty: Institution-Ontology-Politics Ricardo Mendoza-Canales (ed.), 2026

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

• New Liberalism

  Merleau-Ponty's programmatic political stance, formulated in the Epilogue of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). A "sort of new liberalism" (AD 224) that (a) refuses the dictatorship of the proletariat, (b) accepts Communist action and rev…

• Niccolò Machiavelli

  Italian political theorist and diplomat (1469–1527), author of The Prince and the Discourses on Titus Livy. In Signs' "A Note on Machiavelli" (1949, originally given to a Rome-Florence conference on humanism and political science), Merleau…

• Nikolai Bukharin

  Russian Bolshevik and Marxist theorist (1888–1938); editor of Pravda (1918–29); General Secretary of the Comintern (1926–29); author of The ABC of Communism (1920, with Preobrazhensky), Historical Materialism (1921), The Economics of the T…

• No man's land (1949)

  Merleau-Ponty's political diagnosis of the 1947–49 bipolar conjuncture: the world has become a No man's land in which neither classical Marxism nor classical liberal capitalism applies. The USSR ≠ socialism (the proletariat is not the lead…

• Pente de l'histoire

  Merleau-Ponty's term — first explicitly named at his Brussels conference "L'individu et l'histoire" (14 March 1946); first published in compressed form in Sense and Non-Sense's "Battle over Existentialism" (Les Temps modernes No. 2, Novemb…

• Period vs. Epoch (Péguy distinction)

  Merleau-Ponty's 1947 working political-philosophical distinction (borrowed from Charles Péguy) between two modes of historical time. In a period, political man administers established law and one may hope for a history without violence. In…

• Play as Political Virtue

  Chouraqui 2025's name for the existential-attitudinal form of Merleau-Ponty's ethics: the practical virtue corresponding to hermeneutic freedom. Play is not the absence of seriousness; it is the higher seriousness that takes responsibility…

• Politics (Merleau-Ponty)

  MP's political thought develops across Humanism and Terror (1947), the "Note on Machiavelli" (1949), Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), the inaugural lecture (1953), Signs (1960), and the late ontology of V&I and Eye and Mind (1959–61). T…

• Recognition and Institution

  Chouraqui 2025's name for the structural form of agency in Merleau-Ponty's mature ethics: action is the simultaneous unity of recognition (taking the object as a standard, responding to what is) and institution (actively assigning meaning,…

• Revolution as Another Stiftung

  The structural-parallel thesis — anchored in Merleau-Ponty's cardinal formulation at Institution and Passivity p. 13, "the very general sense of institution is not the opposite of revolution; revolution is another Stiftung" — that revoluti…

• Revolutions are True as Movements and False as Regimes

  The slogan-formula of the Epilogue of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). Merleau-Ponty's settled diagnosis of the revolutionary dialectic: revolutions enact a truth in their movement — the passage in which a fallen class no longer rules a…

• Sara Ahmed

  Independent feminist scholar (formerly Goldsmiths, University of London; Lancaster University), working at the intersections of feminist theory, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonialism, and phenomenology. Author of Queer Phenom…

• Saturated Attention

  "Saturated attention" is Frank Chouraqui's coinage for the perceptual-political mechanism by which legitimate political order operates: the active management of the perceptual / attention field so that the question of truth-grounding never…

• Sense and Non-Sense Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1964

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1948 (French original); 1964 (English translation) Type: book (collection of essays, 13 chapters + author's Preface + Translators' Introduction)

• Sense vs. Respect

  Merleau-Ponty's distinction between sens du réel (sense of the real) and respect du réel (respect for the real), drawn from "On Indochina" in Signs (p. 520). Chouraqui 2025 §3.1 foregrounds the contrast as the perceptual face of hermeneuti…

• Signs Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1960

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1960 (French, Gallimard); 1964 (English, Northwestern UP, trans. Richard C. McCleary) Type: book (collection of essays + a new Introduction)

• Sublime Point

  A figure Merleau-Ponty borrows from Breton and deploys recurrently in Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) for the dreamed-of moment in which "matter and spirit would no longer be discernible as subject and object, individual and history, pa…

• Tamara Caraus

  Contemporary phenomenologist working on Merleau-Ponty, Marxism, the proletariat, and the question. Contributor of chapter 12 — "Intensifying the Question: Merleau-Ponty and the Institution of the Proletariat" — to Merleau-Ponty: Institutio…

• Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Politics, and Culture Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1992

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1992 (English collection); pieces span 1933–1961 Type: book (anthology)

• The Absolute as Moral Catastrophe

  Merleau-Ponty's diagnostic that the philosopher's claim to Absolute Knowledge is not merely an epistemological error but a moral catastrophe whose political form is purges. Developed in Sense and Non-Sense's "The Metaphysical in Man" (Chap…

• The Birth of Sense: Generative Passivity in Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy Don Beith, 2018

  Author(s): Don Beith Year: 2018 Type: book (Ohio University Press, Series in Continental Thought No. 52)

• The Body and Embodiment: A Philosophical Guide Frank Chouraqui, 2021

  Author(s): Frank Chouraqui Year: 2021 Type: book (philosophical guide / textbook, Rowman & Littlefield)

• The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays Maurice Merleau-Ponty (ed. James M. Edie), 1964

  Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty; edited and introduced by James M. Edie Year: 1964 (English); original pieces 1946–1961 Type: collection (book)

• Trotsky's Horse

  A recurring image in Merleau-Ponty's writings on politics, drawn from Leon Trotsky and quoted at least four times in MP's Inédits 1946–1949 (Mimesis 2022; see Chouraqui 2025 §2.2 and footnotes 8–10): "one learns to ride a horse by mounting…

• True Humanism (Merleau-Ponty)

  MP's "true humanism" / "humanisme réel" / "vrai humanisme" names a humanism without an a priori human substratum: humanity cannot be conceived prior to the practices of communication and communion. The locus classicus is the "Note on Machi…

• Two Historicities

  Merleau-Ponty's distinction (in Signs, "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence") between two modes of historicity: (1) the cumulative historicity of advent, in which works communicate across time by the reactivation of their expressiv…

• Ultrabolshevism

  Merleau-Ponty's coinage, in Chapter 5 of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), for Sartre's position in Les Communistes et la paix (1952–54). Ultrabolshevism is Bolshevism without the dialectic: it keeps every Bolshevik demand (pure action,…

• Virtu (Merleau-Ponty's Machiavelli)

  Merleau-Ponty's redeemed reading of Machiavellian virtu in the "Note on Machiavelli" (1949, collected in Signs as "Note sur Machiavel") — not as the cynical political objectivism that Koestler diagnosed in The Yogi and the Commissar (1945)…

• Vladimir Lenin

  Russian revolutionary and Marxist theorist (1870–1924); leader of the Bolshevik faction from 1903, of the Russian Revolution from 1917, and head of the Soviet government until his death. Author of What Is To Be Done? (1902), Materialism an…

• Voir-Selon / Vivre-Selon

  Frank Chouraqui's systematized technical term for Merleau-Ponty's most accomplished formulation of pre-doxastic faith — a "style of seeing/living" that is partial both in its arbitrary focus and in its structural incompleteness, where beli…