If language duplicated externally a thought…
it would not be our element as water is the element of fish.
Merleau-Ponty
Abstract
Although Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology of perception and his essays on art, politics, and language already showed an affinity between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and style and the political and cultural dynamics of society at large, this paper specifically focuses on his late theorizing of the notion of flesh and its relevance to his late understanding of politics and democracy. The emergence of flesh as a concept was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty’s break with Marxism as a philosophical model and with revolutionary dialectics as a political project. It is by showing that such a break was consistently grounded on his theorizing of the being flesh of both the body and of society that this paper shows Merleau-Ponty’s unique contribution to democratic theory and to contemporary political philosophy. In the course of this analysis, it will become clear that in philosophically breaking with the position of a “no that is a yes”—i.e. the model of the revolution, which implies a total negation of the given that becomes a total affirmation of the new order (dictatorship) once in power—he would politically embrace the Weberian “heroic liberalism”—or his “non-communist left”—of parliamentary democracy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Merleau-Ponty (1995, p. 207).
Ibid.
Merleau-Ponty (1997, p. 139).
Ibid., p. 84.
Merleau-Ponty (1998, p. 17).
Merleau-Ponty (2007, p. 334).
In his statement for his candidacy to the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty presented his research plans for what turned out to be the last decade of his life in the following way: “Communication arouses… The writer’s thought does not control his language from without; the writer is himself a kind of new idiom, constructing itself, inventing ways of expression, and diversifying itself according to its own meaning. […] Great prose is the art of capturing a meaning which until then had never been objectified and of rendering it accessible to everyone who speaks the same language… […] Hegel said that the Roman state was the prose of the world. I shall entitle my book Introduction à la prose du monde. In this work I shall elaborate the category of prose beyond the confines of literature to give it a sociological meaning.” Merleau-Ponty (2000, pp. 8–9).
A centrality that springs from the fact that, as Diana Coole has recently put it, according to Merleau-Ponty, a “democratic style of politics might be progressive as a new ethos of coexistence.” Coole (2007, p. 149). This ethos, however, should not be confused with a moralizing politics. On this, Coole, in distinguishing Merleau-Ponty from postructuralism, says that it was the latter’s “ethical turn” that made it unable to “come to grips with politics and intersubjectivity, the fleshy interworld which, as Machiavelli and Weber insisted, is a domain distinct from the moral realm. In any case, Merlau-Ponty’s focus was not ultimately on epistemology or ethics, but on ontology, and here, it is the choreography of intermundane (co)existence that he tries to describe” (Ibid., p. 221).
Merleau-Ponty (1997, p. 13).
Ibid., p. 32.
Ibid., p. 29.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid., p. 173 and 185. And also, in his course notes Institution and Passivity, he says: “Time is the very model of institution: passivity-activity, it continues, because it has been instituted, it fuses, it cannot stop being, it is total because it is partial, it is a field.” Merleau-Ponty (2010, p. 7).
Merleau-Ponty (1995).
Merleau-Ponty (1995, p. 94).
Merleau-Ponty (1997, p. 90).
Merleau-Ponty (1997, p. 38).
Merleau-Ponty (1998, p. 20).
Merleau-Ponty (1995, p. 207) My italics.
Lefort (Lefort 1988).
Merleau-Ponty (1998, p. 118).
Merleau-Ponty (1997, p. 259).
In the Foreword to the English edition to Merleau-Ponty’s Course Notes: Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, one of the last courses taught by him before his unexpected death, Leonard Lawlor insists that this vocabulary, originally introduced in Phenomenology of Perception, remains central to Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of speech and language in his late work: “In the Course Notes, Merleau-Ponty indeed defines speech in terms of the dative, as ‘speaking to’ (BN 40). He defines speech in this way because he is trying to understand language that is not ‘ready-made’ but language ‘in the making.’ Here, of course, Merleau-Ponty, is utilizing a distinction that he developed in earlier works: the well-known distinction between ‘speaking speech’ and ‘spoken speech.’” See Lawlor (2002, p. xxviii).
In his Themes from the Lectures, for example, he states: “What we understand by the concept of institution are those events in experience which endow it with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will acquire meaning, will form an intelligible series or history—or again, those events which sediment in me a meaning, not just as survivals or residues, but as the invitation to a sequel…” Merleau-Ponty (1970, pp. 40–41).
Lefort (2010, pp. x–xi).
Low (2000, p. 101).
Paul Ricoeur (2009, p. 19).
Dastur (2009, p. 263).
Merleau-Ponty (1973, pp. 12–13).
Ibid., p. 14.
Ibid., p. 142.
Ibid., p. 145.
His first political notions found their main expression in Humanism and Terror. For his rejection of some of the assumptions driving this text, see Adventures of the Dialectic, “Epilogue”.
Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic and Signs.
See “The Question of Democracy” in Democracy and Political Theory and his prefaces to The Prose of the World and The Visible and the Invisible, and Claude Lefort, Sur une colonne absente. Ecrits autour de Merleau-Ponty.
And although I am in agreement with Diana Coole when she says that Merleau-Ponty did not “advocate any universally desirable set of institutional arrangements or political principles,” I want to nonetheless suggest that in the works I am about to discuss, political action and parliamentary democracy did become the center of the dynamic of self-institution characteristic of the flesh of the social—the “auto-schematizing”, as Merleau-Ponty also puts it, central to the institution of society. See Coole, p. 14.
Merleau-Ponty (1998, pp. 211–223).
As Coole puts it, despite his “recognition of radical contingency, accidents, and violence in history, Merleau-Ponty does not then emphasize singularity and the aleatory to the same degree as Foucault (or Deleuze) and his project is not only deconstructive. He inclines rather to the Machiavellian formula whereby fortuna governs half our lives and remains susceptible to interpretive and practical virtuosity.” Coole (2007, p. 116).
Merleau-Ponty (1998, pp. 216–218). Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis. Translation modified.
In his Merleau-Ponty Vivant, Jean Paul Sartre, referring to Merleau-Ponty's essay Eye and Mind, says that it "says it all, provided one can decipher it." I make the same claim for this fragment of "A Note on Machiavelli" regarding Merleau-Ponty's political thought. See Sartre (1998, pp. 565–626).
Ibid., p. 212.
Ibid., p. 214.
Ibid., p. 39.
It is on this point that Merleau-Ponty criticizes even Lefort, who in those years went further than Trotsky in his belief in the ineluctability of the proletarian’s fate. To Merleau-Ponty, Lefort became Trotsky’s Trotsky—Lefort himself would later recognize his inability to relinquish his trust in the proletarian’s role in history in his early writings.
Merleau-Ponty (1995, pp. 97–98).
Ibid., pp. 109–110. In a footnote included in the page of the text, Sartre says: “It is true that the C.P. is nothing outside of the class; but let it disappear, and the working class falls back into dust particles”.
Ibid., pp. 116–118. Sartre never offers any alternative to this other than “‘concessions, accommodations, compromises,’ or perhaps, when they are not possible, pure action, which is to say, force” p. 122.
Ibid., p. 151.
Ibid., pp. 129–130.
Ibid., p. 3.
Merleau-Ponty (1995, p. 204).
Ibid., p. 9.
Merleau-Ponty (2000).
Ibid., p. 22.
Ibid., p. 16.
Ibid., p. 17.
Ibid., p. 25.
Ibid., p. 120.
In contrast, Habermas does underline that it is only the “pressure to decide”—as opposed to Merleau-Ponty’s ontological condition of pluralism—that makes majority decisions acceptable. See Habermas (1999b).
In Between Facts and Norms, for example, Habermas insists that a valid utterance “should be able to gain the rationally motivated agreement of the interpretating community as a whole.” Habermas (1999a, p. 14). Emphasis added. Or, later in the same text, he says that “majority rule retains an internal relation to the search for truth inasmuch as the decision reached by the majority only represents a caesure in an ongoing discussion…. To be sure, majority decisions on questions that have been treated discursively certainly do not draw their legitimating force from the changeability of majority proportions per se.” Ibid., p. 179. Emphasis added. And Merleau-Ponty’s and my point is that yes, they do draw their legitimacy from the changeability of majority proportions per se—i.e. from their hyperdialectic character.
As Rehg and Bohman put it: “[The] fact of pluralism is what makes majority rule necessary to conclude deliberation.” See Rehg and Bohman (2002, p. 40).
Coole (2007, p. 144–145).
Merleau-Ponty (1997, p. 176).
Merleau-Ponty (2000, p. 183).
Although Habermas's first major work, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, in which most of his program—veritas non auctoritas facit legem—was already outlined, was published almost at the same time as the books we are now discussing (in 1962, as opposed to 1960 for Signs and 1955 for Adventures of the Dialectic).
As Arendt suggested the idea of the revolution seems to be interesting only in its link with the foundation of polities—particularly of democratic republics. The question of the revolution in the traditional sense remains central for the western left; a left that continues to be intuitively revolutionary in a context in which this attitude constantly forces it to withdrawing from the political realm in its existing form. A theory of democratic political speech and action is important because the latter becomes fundamental once the revolution institutes the regime that comes to terms with the flesh of the social. See Arendt (1990).
Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato refer to this subject in this way: “Democracy’s only possible legitimation lies in a principle contrary to the revolutionary logic, namely, the lasting institutionalization of a new power accompanied by limits to even the new forms of power in terms of rights.” Cohen and Arato (1997, p. 454).
Merleau-Ponty (2007, p. 349).
Merleau-Ponty (1997, p. 9).
Ibid.
Ibid., 102.
Merleau-Ponty (1995, p. 207). His emphasis.
Ibid., p. 226.
Merleau-Ponty (2007, p. 308).
Ibid., pp. 316–317. Merleau-Ponty concludes his Adventures of the Dialectic quoting an—imaginary?—heated dialogue with somebody who rejects his democratic turn. I chose to re-inscribe parts of this same dialogue here. The next few lines come from there.
References
Arendt, Hannah. 1990. On revolution. New York: Penguin Books.
Cohen, Jean, and Andrew Arato. 1997. Civil society and political theory. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Coole, Diana. 2007. Merleau-Ponty and modern politics after anti-humanism. Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Dastur, Francoise. 2009. The body of speech. In Merleau-Ponty and the possibilities of philosphy, ed. Bernard Flynn, Wayne J. Froman, and Robert Vallier. New York: SUNY Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1999a. Popular sovereignty as procedure. In Deliberative democracy. Essays on reason and politics, ed. James Bohman, and Rehg William. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1999b. Between facts and norms. Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Lawlor, Leonard. 2002. Verflechtung: The triple significance of Merleau-Ponty’s course notes on Husserl’s “the origin of geometry”. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Husserl and the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. Leonard Lawlor, and Bettina Bergo. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Lefort, Claude. 1988. Democracy and political theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lefort, Claude. 2010. Foreword. In Institution and Passivity. Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Low, Douglas. 2000. Merleau-Ponty’s last vision. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1970. Themes from the lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1973. The prose of the world. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1995. Adventures of the dialectic. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1997. The visible and the invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1998. Signs. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2000. The primacy of perception. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2007. Preface to signs. In The Merleau-Ponty reader, ed. Ted Toadvine, and Leonard Lawlor. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2008. Phenomenology of perception. New York: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2010. Institution and Passivity. Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Rehg, William and Bohman, James. 2002. Discourse and democracy: The formal and informal bases of legitimacy in Between Facts and Norms. In Discourse and Democracy. Essays on Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms, eds. Von Schomberg, René and Baynes, Kenneth. Albany: State university of New York Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. 2009. Homage to Merleau-Ponty. In Merleau-Ponty and the possibilities of philosphy, ed. Bernard Flynn, Wayne J. Froman, and Robert Vallier. New York: SUNY Press.
Sartre, Merleau-Ponty Vivant. 1998. The debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, ed. Steward, Jon. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Plot, M. Our element: Flesh and democracy in Merleau-Ponty. Cont Philos Rev 45, 235–259 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-012-9213-1
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-012-9213-1