Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism 9780742533370, 0742533379, 9780742533387, 0742533387

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MERLEAU-PONTY AND MODERN POLITICS AFTER ANTI-HUMANISM

MODERNITY AND

POLITICAL THOUGHT Series Editor: Morton Schoolman State University of New York at Albany This unique collection of original studies of the great figures in the history of political and social thought critically examines their contributions to our understanding of modernity, its constitution, and the promise and problems latent within it. These works are written by some of the finest theorists of our time for scholars and students of the social sciences and humanities. The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics of Morality by William E. Connolly Emerson and Self-Reliance by George Kateb Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics by Stephen K. White Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary by Tracy B. Strong Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom by Thomas L. Dumm Reading "Adam Smith": Desire, History, and Value by Michael J. Shapiro Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality, and Chastened Politics by Richard E. Flathman Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild by Jane Bennett G. W. F. Hegel: Modernity and Politics by Fred R. Dallmayr The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt by Seyla Benhabib William James: Politics in the Pluriverse by Kennan Ferguson

MERLEAU-PONTY AND MODERN POLITICS AFTER ANTI-HUMANISM

Diana Coole

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2007 by Diana Coole

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Coole, Diana H. Merleau-Ponty and modern politics after anti-humanism I Diana Coole. p. cm. - (Modernity and political thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-3337-0 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-lO: 0-7425-3337-9 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-3338-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-lO: 0-7425-3338-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Political science-Philosophy. 2. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961. 3. Existential phenomenology. 1. Title. JC261.M47C642007 320.01-dc22 2007011490 Printed in the United States of America ~TM

(!l; The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

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Acknowledgments Abbreviations

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Series Editor's Introduction by Morton Schoolman

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Introduction: Situating and Reading Merleau-Ponty as a Political Thinker

1

Part One: The Critique of Rationalism 1 A Crisis of Modernity? 2 The Critiques of Ideology) Liberalism) and Capitalism 3 Adventures and Misadventures of the Dialectic

23 41 63

Part Two: In Pursuit of the Interworld 4 5 6

Phenomenology as Critical Theory Living History) Practising Politics Negativity) Agency) and the Return to Ontology

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123 159

Part Three: The Politics of the Body, the Flesh of the Political 7

8

The Phenomenology of the Sexed/Gendered Body and the Metaphorics of the Flesh The Flesh of the Political after Anti-Humanism

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Contents

Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

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Acknowledgments

in Merleau-Ponty's work ever since I discov-

ered it as a doctoral student in Toronto. Needless to say, I've accumulated Imany debts along the way, in particular to the many friends and colleagues 'VE HAD AN ABIDING INTEREST

who've been exceptionally generous both in sharing their own work with me and in sharing their time for discussions of Merleau-Ponty's work and mine. Thank you all. lowe special thanks to Alkis Kontos, who first introduced me to MerleauPonty's ideas and who provided a framework for exploring them further. I'm also extremely grateful to Moira Gatens and Paul Patton, who were wonderful hosts at the University of Sydney where I started this book as a visiting research fellow. Between then and now, I've enjoyed many occasions mulling over Merleau-Ponty's significance with a range of scholars, sometimes in the seminar room or often over a glass of wine. In particular, I'd like to thank Elaine Stavro, Carrie Noland, Jane Bennett, Bill Connolly, Samantha Frost, lain MacKenzie, Ros Diprose, Sonia Kruks, and Jack Reynolds. Morton Schoolman has been an unfailingly patient and encouraging editor throughout. My PhD students at Birkbeck have been full of insight and their love of ideas has been infectious. Finally, as ever, thanks to Bob and Lucien.

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Abbreviations

A

LL REFERENCES TO MERLEAU-PONTY'S WORK are to the English translations, and they are included in the text. Abbreviations are used as follows:

AD CAL HT IP PhP PNP PP PW S SB SNS TL T&D VI

Adventures of the Dialectic Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language Humanism and Terror In Praise of Philosophy Phenomenology of Perception "Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel" The Primacy of Perception The Prose of the World Signs The Structure of Behaviour Sense and Non-Sense Themes from the Lectures Texts and Dialogues: On Philosophy, Politics, and Culture The Visible and the Invisible

My own text has been translated into American English. I have, however, kept one specifically British distinction. This concerns the difference between practice (as a noun) and practising (as a verb). It is important to my argument to be able to indicate this difference and to be able to emphasize the more active sense of practising that it makes possible.

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IANA COOLE'S Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism is the twelfth volume in the Rowman & Littlefield series Modernity and Political Thought, and follows publication of Kennan Ferguson's William James: Politics in the Pluriverse1 (volume 11) and the new editions of the original ten volumes in the series. 2 Initially designed to include only ten volumes, Modernity and Political Thought has been expanded to include, in addition to the works by Coole and Ferguson, forthcoming studies of Karl Marx by Wendy Brown, Aristotle by Mary Dietz, Thomas Aquinas by Shadia Drury, Thomas More by Peter Euben, Publius by Jason Frank, Sigmund Freud by James Glass, J. S. Mill by Kirstie McClure, John Rawls by Donald Moon, Friedrich Nietzsche by David Owen, David Hume by Davide Panagia, Carl Schmitt by Kam Shapiro, William Connolly by Kathleen Skerrett, Niccolo Machiavelli by Miguel Vatter, and Sheldon Wolin by Nicholas Xenos. Moreover, this list is expected to grow in the future. As those who are familiar with the previous works of these authors will expect, their studies adopt a variety of approaches and pose importantly different questions. As contributors to Modernity and Political Thought, their efforts also are commonly devoted to critically examining the contributions major political theorists have made to our understanding of modernity-its constitution and the problems, promises, and dangers latent within it. Diana Coole is very well known for her work in modern and contemporary political and social theory, especially for examinations of philosophical problems in Marxism and critical theory, existentialism and phenomenology, feminism and poststructuralism, and quite recently for political writings informed

D

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by theoretical arguments she has developed over the past decade. 3 Political theorists acquainted with her writing know that the thought of Maurice MerleauPonty has been long in the background of her own thinking and a philosophical ally and interlocutor when not the explicit focus of her work. While she has been writing this remarkable new study of Merleau-Ponty's political philosophy, she also has been developing its implications for contemporary democratic theory and practice in an important collection of articles, the first of which already have begun to appear.4 To grasp the significance of MerleauPonty for Coole, it would be useful briefly to consider problems on which she worked earlier and that directly led to the current study. While concepts are the currency of philosophical and theoretical discourse, it is often the case that they do not readily lend themselves to political discourse, even where they are the technical formulations of concepts already embedded in our ordinary language from which the terms of political discourse originally spring. Philosophical and theoretical concepts may perform considerable work in the positions crafted by philosophers and political theorists, in their schools, traditions, and the very history of philosophical and political thought. Yet the meaning for and bearing on politics of such important concepts may never have been flushed out adequately and, left unexplicated, for that reason may be taken by many to be greater than warranted and by others to be less so. In either case, the real political implications and power of concepts to an extent are lost despite the frequently weighty normative role they play for political theorists who adopt or contest them. In Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism, a work earning widespread attention, Coole pursues a systematic examination of one such concept, the concept of negativity. Negativity is one of the most important but also controversial concepts in modern, especially contemporary, political thought for the significant critical purchase political theorists have attached to it and, emphatically to the point for Coole's investigation, for a theoretical relation to politics that has been assumed more than established. As she puts it, "Rarely deployed with precision, much less defined, it seemed that there was both a vague and rather general way in which the term was being used and a constellation of meanings that supported this:'5 Accordingly, Coole sets out to answer two questions she believes ought to be fundamental to political theorists whose idea or ideal, revision or contestation of politics derives intelligence, strength, and energy from the concept of negativity or from arguments and other concepts that perform the work negativity performs. Namely, what is negativity and how does it relate to politics? Coole's project is somewhat daunting, for at its outset she recognizes that the concept of negativity intrinsically resists definition and clarification and perhaps is appreciated best by political theorists for that very reason. If nega-

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tivity's oppositional potency derives from its conceptual capacity to refer to that which stands outside of the "given:' whether the given are political institutions and practices, social relations, beliefs and understandings, forms of expression and forms of life, or thought itself, its critical stance is constituted in part by its indeterminacy. A serious challenge confronting Coole was to decipher the meanings of negativity without compromising its conceptual integrity, which would spoil her efforts to assess its relation to politics, the ultimate goal and arguably most philosophically rewarding aspect of her project. Consequently, she undertakes the work of exegesis with the utmost care, as though she were exploring a virgin terrain while at all costs trying to avoid harming its delicate biota. With this in mind, she concludes that negativity's "real or discursive status must remain ... undecidable:' This does not mean, however, that Coole relinquishes the difficult task of making negativity perspicuous. Rather, she adopts a methodology permitting her to ensure that the concept of negativity remains uncorrupted while being clarified. To this end she enlists interpretive strategies that arrive at meaning indirectly and circuitously, those which marshal allusion, metaphor, and invocation; which highlight conceptual ambiguity and openness; and which respect the differences and discontinuities among thinkers for whom negativity or the work of the negative are indispensable-Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, Foucault, Kristeva, and Deleuze, among others. Only by exercising such an interpretive sense and sensibility can Coole realize her essentially paradoxical intentions: to explicate without compromising the meaning of negativity for the purpose of assembling a robust constellation of interpretations that accounts for, enables, and disciplines its political efficacy. Among the many meanings of negativity that emerge from Coole's readings of modern philosophy and political theory, one that takes on a special importance for her own thinking, especially about politics, is generativity, a term that also will feature prominently in her study of Merleau-Ponty. Possessing a nonfoundationalist ontological character, for Coole generativity is an abiding force immanent to all social formations. It is a concrete, material property that is at once both creative and destructive, though in these two ways conventionally understood to be opposed to one another it is nevertheless affirmative and positive. Both give birth to new social forms, destruction no less than creation. As generativity, negativity's political dimensions are foregrounded for Coole and it likewise offers a basis for importantly distinguishing between the ways and extent to which negativity and politics are related productively. Negativity as generativity exemplifies a compelling pattern of insistence in Coole's thinking that is one of the defining qualities of her work-that the concepts of philosophical and theoretical discourse must have an efficacious relation to politics. Generally speaking, this means that there must be palpable political

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effects following from how such terms encourage and allow us to speak about politics. For it to have an efficacious relation to politics, Coole argues, "negativity must be implicated in the positive: at that place where positive and negative, form and excess, reason and its other are imbricated; where they meet and clash or incite one another:'6 It is at this point that Coole formulates what are perhaps the most serious issues in her discussion of the decisive relationship of negativity and politics. To guarantee that the critical standpoint of their concept of negativity is insulated from the "contamination:' as she expresses it, that regularly accompanies the positivity of social, political, and cultural institutions, theorists of negativity often push it in a "transcendental direction, where it becomes pure process: mobility, flows, the virtual." Coole's concern, shared by many contemporary political theorists, is that as a consequence of the fear of contamination by regressive political forces, a fear brought on by the specter of a modern world colonized by a totality of domination relations, the theoretical and practical distance between negativity and politics widens to a divide that cannot be traversed. Negativity's relation to politics is suspended utterly or at least becomes too abstract to be meaningful, allowing us, in her view, to neither imagine nor enact a politics. In effect, negativity has no political effects. Its efficacy is dissolved. Indeed, Coole's concern goes directly to the status of the political in recent continental and Anglo-American political thought. Although Coole contends that continental philosophy is the location of the "most defiantly negative processes:' it is there that it also "has become virtually impossible to elicit any meaningful sense of the political or any efficacious politics:' On the AngloAmerican side of the philosophical ledger, which in her estimation at the moment supports the dominant approaches to contemporary political theory, something like the converse is true, such that a more developed concept of the political keeps company with a correspondingly undeveloped notion of the negativity of politics. Politics is drained of the creative-destructive processes negativity entails, and is emptied of the instability and dynamism these processes connote. For Coole, politics at every level as levels now are definedlocal, national, international, or global-is always the "domain of collective life" and includes "the shared institutions, rules, customs, values and practices that facilitate coexistence." Coextensive with the activity that ensures collective life and that defines the rationality that sustains us all, politics is normative difference and disagreement, conflict and strife. To be sure, politics is also the negotiation and compromise that heal divisions and achieve accord. Yet politics never can do so without a political remainder of dissonance bred by the ineliminable complexities of intersubjectivity and by political resolutions themselves. Negativity is this political remainder engendered by the politics en-

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trusted with the continuation and unfolding of collective life, but that threatens to erupt in ways that all remedial politics only can partially contain. Politics is creative and destructive. It immediately is apparent that Coole's conception of the relation between politics and negativity is seriously at odds with long-standing models of politics. Liberalism, in particular, is a large and vulnerable target for criticism. In her view it shunts negativity off to an apolitical private sphere, leaving liberal politics to go about the business of forming public policy blissfully undisturbed by the negativity that politics ought to contend with and also engenders. At the other extreme from liberal models, the architects of which from the start define the political to exclude negativity, are counterpart philosophies, for the most part post-Nietzschean postmodern philosophical thought that takes as its point of departure a "pre-political" negativity privileging "heterogeneity and flux"-"pure" processes of negativity that cannot be translated coherently into politics or for which we cannot find political expressions at all. Such "wild" and "evanescent" forms of negativity, Coole explains, possessing a rhythm too mobile to interpret, are meaningless to a politics that requires "carving up the flux of social life, imposing boundaries, limits, laws that its apparatus then polices:' To the contrary, Coole prefers to think of negativity as owning rhythms that can be enacted politically, which she proposes must be grasped dialectically. It is precisely such a politicized negativity she attempts to retrieve dialectically from modern thought, for without it, she maintains, "politics tends to be reduced to aesthetics or ethics." Political theorists, it is to be expected, would marshal a variety of objections to Coole's assessments of these models of politics to which they show allegiance. Postmodern theorists no doubt would complain that there could be no real qualitative social transformation without attention to the arrhythmic forms of negativity, which, Coole argues, have little or no political purchase. In response, Coole certainly would argue that social change cannot even first be imagined without some positive concept of political efficacy in which episodic forms of negativity can find expression. Liberal theorists no doubt would object that the negativity Coole strives to conceptualize as politics would jeopardize the stability that liberal systems guarantee and that, anyway, liberal societies do not thrive by displacing negativity to the private sphere but respond aggressively to such challenges with legal/constitutional reforms. Coole would reply that liberal stability is illusory, for such positive institutional responses are incrementalist and neglect the brunt of negativity that"anyway"-continues to fester within the private sphere until it breaks out in crisis to provoke an authoritarian response. Coole's critiques of these two extremes of politics serve very nicely to isolate and clarify her own concept of politics and its relation to her conception of negativity. In contrast to the

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liberal model of politics, Coole's concept of negativity measures a need, demand, and possibility for social transformation greatly exceeding the political capabilities of liberalism. In contrast to the prepolitical philosophical models of negativity for which political representations are wanting, Coole circumscribes forms of negativity that can be articulated and engaged politically, which admits a concept of social transformation that can be politically-because theoretically-traversed. Although it is on this decisive matter of political engagement that Coole distinguishes herself from other philosophers of negativity, she stresses that the post-Nietzschean philosophies she takes to task for introducing a chasm between negativity and politics still resonate politically. Their affirmations of negativity uniformly and unequivocally stand in opposition to reified political and social institutions that perpetuate themselves by denying their contingencies, as do liberal institutions, for example. As she puts it eloquently, "to invoke negativity is thus to exhort political intervention while already performing a political act: it destabilizes illusions of perfection, presence, and permanence by associating the positive with petrified and illegitimate structures of power:'7 Clearly, Coole is quick to acknowledge the politics implicit in the oppositional stance secured by prepolitical philosophies of negativity. Yet she is not content to rest her standard of politics there, for it agrees neither with her commitment to a politics of engagement nor to a concept of negativity that is not alienated from political engagement. A negativity so articulated politically is Coole's standard-bearer relation of negativity and politics and, as we now will see by reviewing aspects of her analysis of Adorno's thought, it guides her critical examination of modern philosophy and political theory. No one who studies Negativity and Politics can miss Coole's special admiration for Adorno's work. If there were a political philosopher who would have had far more than good reason to abandon hope for an efficacious politics, as she understands it, Adorno surely would be that philosopher. Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Adorno coauthored with Max Horkheimer, was composed in 1944 in the wake of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, Roma ("gypsies"), homosexuals, and political opposition to Fascism. It records a history of violence toward difference, which they argue to be the consequence of a process of enlightenment that darkens the world with a disease of reason, a diseased reason that reduces all of politics, society, and culture to a deadening uniformity from which the possibility of an- alternative vision of the future seems to be unimaginable. Despite the despair and pessimism out of which their great work is born, in Coole's interpretation Horkheimer and Adorno find the intellectual strength and moral courage to begin anew and search for a politics that would enlist such a possibility, however remote it appeared to them to be.

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Coole's sensitive reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment discerns attempts on the part of its authors to uncover dialectical movement, the promise of dialectical movement, or dialectical signs of movement that would propel historical constellations beyond a regime of power relations defined by instrumental rationality. In her interpretation of this work the history of reason, including a universalistic instrumental reason, is a dialectical history and cannot be otherwise, if only dialectical in the emancipatory impulse that fueled enlightenment and that cannot but remain "lodged there as a possibility of freedom:' However, the dialectic does more than preserve the abstract idea of emancipation in times of universal bondage. To illuminate the more immediately materialist dimensions of Horkheimer and Adorno's dialectic, Coole recalls their attentions to the promissory moments contained in art of the memory of a nature whose meaning could not be utterly disenchanted by instrumental rationality and of a mimetic reason that valued particularity rather than equivalence in subject-object relations. She recalls, too, their interest in dimensions of mass culture that point beyond the reproduction of the social relations of production endorsed by the modern culture industry, and she recalls their complex understanding of happiness as intimately tied up with rather than simply opposed to repression and renunciation. In all these examples, in other words, Coole is careful to underline the dialectical features of Horkheimer and Adorno's reconstruction of enlightenment that flesh out its emancipatory potential and are most often missed by their critics, whose stress has been on their apparent preoccupation with enlightenment tendencies unilaterally contributing to domination relations. In true dialectical manner, Coole is not any less attentive to the latter. That is precisely the balanced appreciation of historical possibilities a dialectical approach to politics yields. However, to demonstrate that Horkheimer and Adorno have a dialectical conception of historical reason is not to show that the expressions of negativity this dialectic foregrounds are politically efficacious. Well aware of this possible shortfall in their argument, Coole proceeds to press the most difficult question. "Did Horkheimer and Adorno;' she asks, "envisage any different aesthetic, philosophical and political form emerging from this structure of domination?" To answer this question, she turns to Adorno's work as it later developed against the background of Dialectic of Enlightenment, whose main lines of argument he never wavered from but became more deeply attached to. Through an exceptionally deft analysis of several of Adorno's works, especially Negative Dialectics and the essays "The Actuality of Philosophy" and "Subject and Object," Coole persuasively shows how Adorno crafted a dialectics with practical intent, it might be said, a dialectic whose implications for praxis were in evidence. Coole grasps what often eludes even Adorno's most

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attentive students. As she understands him, Adorno worked out how a negativity actually modeling a rational form of social coexistence could be embodied in discursive practices that, by virtue of representing the connection between negativity and an alternative rationality, became politically efficacious. To express Coole's insight another way, Adorno structured philosophical discourse to reflect his conception of the dialectic such that discourses about negativity and politics were themselves representations of negativity, which raised them to the level of politics. In each iteration of theoretical argument Adorno dialectically constructed, the dialectic unfolds as a form of reasoning opposed to instrumental forms of reason. Adorno thus accomplishes what he has been accused of failing to do by Habermas and other critics, who have claimed repeatedly that his totalizing critique of enlightenment relinquishes any rational standpoint from which a critique of reason can be launched. More to the point for Coole is the way Adorno's reciprocal entwinement of dialectical content and dialectical form constitutes negativity with a political form. A negativity that is politically articulable is only one of several virtues Coole shows to be intrinsic to Adorno's dialectic. Philosophical discourse dialectically constructed also resists the reifications of instrumental thinking by turning back on itself reflexively to illuminate the incompleteness of its conceptual formulations, an incompleteness that cannot be extinguished by any global concept or collection of concepts assembled to capture the object of analysis. Adorno in no uncertain terms was hostile to the Hegelian conviction that thought could comprehend in its entirety the world and all that lies within it. Adorno, Coole reminds us, "denies that objects can be brought to full presence, or appear without remainder to rational subjects:' Yet Coole's Adorno is not a Kantian enemy of identitarianism asserting the existence of a noumenal realm that measures the limits of reason through reference to an in itself. On the contrary, in her view Adorno understands both subject and object to be materially constituted and to such an extent that they are materially"overdetermined:' Subjects and objects remain opaque to reason exactly because of the multiple layers of materiality that have been deposited by the long history of productive relations. And this history is not defined merely as the material (including cultural) activity of subjects on objects, but by their reciprocal constitution. The object created enters as much into the creation of subjectivity as it is created by subjects. Taken as a whole, the power of Adorno's dialectic also lies, on the one hand, in a reflexivity that enables subjectivity to know the object of thought while relinquishing its instrumentalist authority to impose identity upon it. This is to say that dialectics achieves but also is a model of reconciliation, a model of a nonviolent, nonrepressive relation between subject and object that avoids

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the conversion of difference to otherness. On the other hand, it is the materiality of subject-object relations that accounts for their opacity, but also for the coproduction of subjects and objects that makes the dualistic framework of a constitutive subject and a constituted object abstractions. As Coole proves, in every thought Adorno constructs dialectically, thinking works from within thought itself or "immanently" to overcome its own tendency to positivism while simultaneously exhibiting the work of immanent critique. As she explains, "there is, then" in Adorno's stylistic practices "an immanent critique of the reified totality which is at the same time a demonstration of its overcoming:' And the negativity of the demonstration of overcoming the totality of domination relations, it should be added, is what makes the demonstration political. That Adorno's method of critique is immanent, Coole reminds us, means also that he arrived at this concept of criticism by examining his own thinking from the inside to then engage in the practice with respect to all other thinking of his own and of others, all along turning thought back on itself to challenge its completeness. At no time, Coole insists, did Adorno "define and identify a subject-object dialectic from the outside, since this would itself be complicit in an act of mastery and insufficiently attentive to [the dialectic's] own reflective intervention." Adorno meets the demanding philosophical-political standard Coole adopts in her work to evaluate the contributions to our understanding of modernity and politics made by our most important modern Western thinkers. While Coole acknowledges that Adorno's critical philosophy often appears purely speculative, to focus narrowly on this would be to miss what is most promising in Adorno's thought. Adorno's achievement lies in the efficacious political work performed by the negativity of immanent critique, which as an alternative form of rationality to a universalizing instrumental reason offers a positive image of the reconciliation of humankind in its social relations and relations with nature, specifically of how in a rational society collective life can be lived in the future. The affirmative image of a future unencumbered by the imperative of mastery is insinuated by a process of critical thinking designed to disturb, disrupt, and provoke thinking wherever it reifies forms of life and the normative commitments that make forms of life possible. So by meeting the standard of creative-destruction through the work of affirmation and disturbance, disruption and provocation, Adorno's concept of negativity avoids the indistinct and wild prepolitical configurations of negativity that defy translation into politically efficacious forms of expression. As Coole importantly adds, though, immanent critique does not lay the groundwork for radical acts, nor does Adorno intend it to, for to include such tasks in the strategic interventions performed by critical thinking would risk its perversion by instrumental reason. Immanent critique thus meets its limit where questions of

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collective action are concerned, in part because such critique may offer a model of thinking unavailable to the majority, whose lives are regulated by instrumental reason, but in larger part because the emancipatory promise of this model is tied to its unequivocal opposition to instrumental rationality, which no society can dispense with entirely. Politically efficacious, Adorno's concept of negativity cannot be a « [collectivist, democratic] solution to social domination:' By considering Negativity and Politics, I have tried to bring out many of the concerns that have drawn Diana Coole to Merleau-Ponty and that instruct her approach to his thought. Not a few of the concepts and categories that surfaced in her interrogations of contemporary political theory's relation to politics and of Horkheimer and Adorno will appear again in her critical examination of Merleau-Ponty, a philosopher whom she admires greatly and whose affinity with the early critical theorists she explores in Negativity and Politics and in the current work. As a political theorist, Coole is an emphatically political thinker, one whose highest standard if not defining characteristic for what counts as political philosophy is the contribution that a thinker makes to our understanding of politics, to the need and possibilities for political engagement. Above all, such an intervention is measured by its capacity to exemplify an alternative to our modern ways of conducting politics and beingin-the-world through its critical interrogation of existing social, economic, and cultural forms. Hence Merleau-Ponty. Morton Schoolman State University of New York at Albany

Notes 1. Kennan Ferguson, William James: Politics in the Pluriverse (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). 2. William E. Connolly, The Augustinian Imperative: A Reflection on the Politics of Morality; George Kateb, Emerson and Self-Reliance; Stephen K. White, Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics; Tracy B. Strong, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary; Thomas L. Dumm, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom; Michael J. Shapiro, Reading "Adam Smith": Desire, History, and Value; Richard E. Flathman, Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality, and Chastened Politics; Jane Bennett, Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild; Fred Dallmayr, G. W. F. Hegel: Modernity and Politics; Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt. All new editions were published by Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Md., in 2002 with the exception of Benhabib, which was published in 2003. 3. See, for example, "Agency, Truth and Meaning: Judging the Hutton Report;' British Journal of Political Science 35 (July 2005): 465-85; Negativity and Politics:

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Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); "Cartographic Convulsions: Public and Private Reconsidered;' Political Theory 28, no. 3 (2000): 497-514; "Threads and Plaits or an Unfinished Project?: Feminism(s) through the Twentieth Century:' Journal of Political Ideologies 5, no. 1 (2000): 35-54; Women in Political Theory: From Ancient Misogyny to Contemporary Feminism (Boulder. Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1993). 4. In the essays to which I refer, Coole's point of departure is the interpretation of Merleau-Ponty she develops in this study. from which she elaborates further the implications for contemporary political theory of his ideas about agency, corporeality, embodiment, and the primacy of perception for an analysis of politics and gender. See Coole's "Philosophy as Political Engagement: Revisiting Merleau-Ponty and Reopening the Communist Question:' Contemporary Political Theory 2, no. 3 (2003): 327-50; "Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities;' Political Studies 53 (March): 124-42; "Dialectical Critical Realism and Existential Phenomenology: A Dialogue;' New Formations 56 (Summer): 121-32; "Experiencing Discourse: Gendered Styles and the Embodiment of Power;' British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 9.3 (2007); "Butler's Phenomenological Existentialism;' in Judith Butler's Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, ed. T. Carver and S. Chambers (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); "Gender, Gesture, and Garment: Encountering Embodied Interlocutors;' in Ethics, Dialogue, and Identity, ed. J. Brown (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); "The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of the Flesh:' in The New Materialism, ed. D. Coole and S. Frost (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007); and with Samantha Frost, "The New Materialism;' also in The New

Materialism. 5. Negativity and Politics, 1. 6. Negativity and Politics, 6. 7. Negativity and Politics, 11.

Introduction: Situating and Reading Merleau-Ponty as a Political Thinker

to present Merleau-Ponty as a profoundly political thinker. I also want to show why his work remains relevant for political theory and practice in the twenty-first century. Merleau-Ponty's interest in political matters is sometimes presented (or ignored) as a rather marginal aspect of his writing or as something that features only in his early work. I will argue both that his thinking is saturated with politics and that he was developing a coherent political philosophy throughout his career, although this is not always explicit nor is it confined solely to those works that deal directly with the political. I suggest that there is broad continuity between the early and late writings such that the final ontology retains important traces of his youthful commitments to dialectics, existentialism, and phenomenology. But I also claim that Merleau-Ponty avoided many of the problems later critics would ascribe to these apparently humanist approaches while anticipating some of their concerns in his own espousal of anti-humanism. If a reconsideration of his politics is timely today, this is primarily, I submit, because it suggests a way of returning to politics after poststructuralism, anti-humanism, and the demise of the subject. It is also because contemporary politics still entails many of the challenges he addressed. The book is divided into three parts. In the first part, I focus on MerleauPonty's critique of modernity as a rationalist mode of being-in-the-world that is in crisis. I suggest that from this perspective his work is best read in a tradition of critical theory. The second part examines his phenomenological approach to this crisis and explores the return to ontology it summoned. Here I find him exploring and experimenting with the possibility of a radical

M

y AIM IN WRITING THIS BOOK is

-1-

2

Introduction

transformation of theoretical and practical reason; a transformation he associates with new modes of political engagement and of social relationships more generally and which I label an interrogative ethos. In the final part of the book, I try to think with Merleau-Ponty about the political significance of the flesh, which is the emblem of his later ontology. Rather than approaching Merleau-Ponty's work from a chronological perspective, I have tried to emulate the way I think he envisaged himself working: as constantly reflecting upon and deepening his own interrogations of existence and coexistence. I cannot claim to discover a definitive Merleau-Ponty here, but I think he did leave us with criteria for reading him well. Like the world he described, his texts support or resist interpretations whose truth is measured by their fecundity in opening a field for further questions and explorations as an advent. For him there is always a deeper layer of truth to be excavated, but it is the process of verification that matters and this remains an inexhaustible, creative process of engagement. Just as the perceived world endures only through the reflections, shadows, levels, and horizons between things (which are not things and are not nothing, but on the contrary mark out by themselves the fields of possible variation in the same thing and the same world), so the works and thought of a philosopher are also made of certain articulations between things said. There is no dilemma of objective interpretation or arbitrariness with respect to these articulations, since they are not objects of thought, since (like shadow and reflection) they would be destroyed by being subjected to analytic observation or taken out of context, and since we can be faithful to and find them only by thinking again. (SI60)

The purpose of this introduction is to situate Merleau-Ponty in his own time and in ours. Placing him within the intellectual and political context in which he wrote is especially important for a philosopher who insisted on the embodied, engaged, and situated nature of thinking. Since it will emerge from this brief history that Merleau -Ponty produced almost all his writings during the 1940s and 1950s and that he was responding to the political events of these postwar decades, the question immediately arises as to why one should return to him now. This question is posed with especial intensity inasmuch as his intellectual and political commitments were to traditions that were already being criticized during his lifetime, resulting in their eclipse during the following decades. In asking why we should read Merleau-Ponty now, it will also be necessary to ask howwe should read him today. I will end this introduction by considering in what sense(s) he was a political thinker.

Situating and Reading Merleau-Ponty as a Political Thinker

3

I am certainly not alone in returning to Merleau-Ponty now. As the editors of a recent volume note, scholarship on Merleau-Ponty is "expanding at an extraordinary rate, and in a manner that is provocative and exciting:'l Yet a renewed interest in his politics has been far less evident. Even when political topics are included in anthologies dedicated to his work, they tend to be unusually unreconstructed. 2 This is not perhaps surprising inasmuch as the overtly political analyses suffer from the very concreteness Merleau-Ponty insisted upon. His problems and frames of reference no longer seem to be our own. Yet I believe that his entire project was motivated by political concerns and that returning to this aspect of his work is the most important reason for revisiting it now.

Situating Merleau-Ponty Maurice Merleau-Pontywas born in provincial France in 1908; his death was an unexpected event in 1961. The intellectual and political aspects of his situation during the two decades or so of his writing career are inseparable, since a crucial ambition during those years was to bridge the gap between these two registers. His early publications were composed during World War II, during which time he served briefly in the French army, experienced the German occupation, and participated in the Resistance. For many people in France, the occupation was a period of unavoidable choices during which politics affected everyday life in an intense way. It instilled in Merleau-Ponty an enduring realization that an understanding of politics cannot ignore this level of personal involvement. A further outcome of these events was a widespread sense that liberalism in France was bankrupt, since it had shown itself impotent in the face of fascist violence. Its corollary was a generation of French intellectuals who situated themselves on the left and who were determined to reconfigure philosophy and politics by developing an approach that would allow them to intervene in a more concrete way. One of their instruments here was the journal Les Temps Modernes, whose editorial committee Merleau-Ponty joined in 1945. Additional members included Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as other intellectuals known to Merleau-Ponty from the Resistance. Although he never joined the French Communist Party (PCF), many of his comrades were communists and the party enjoyed considerable popular support thanks to its antifascist work in the Resistance. Merleau-Ponty was responsible until 1950 for the journal's political editorials, resigning in 1953 following a now famous quarrel with Sartre, which revolved around their respective commitments to

4

Introduction

communism. How far his resignation and the quarrel coincided with a realignment of his political loyalties and philosophical approach, and how thoroughly these were revised afterward, remains controversial. But it is clear that the main issues that concerned Merleau-Ponty during this time were developments in the Soviet Union under Stalin and within Eastern Europe more generally; questions about the direction and possibilities of the liberal capitalist democracies; the unpalatable choice the main Cold War protagonists imposed when they insisted that third countries like France were either with or against them; and the relationship between the West and its others posed by colonialism and decolonization. To all these issues he brought a distinctive mode of questioning and analysis, the importance of which is again apparent as a new split opens between the West and its putative other. Merleau-Ponty was part of a generation that included Claude Levi-Strauss and Simone de Beauvoir (both born, like him, in 1908), Sartre (1905), and Camus (1913). Derrida (born 1930) would later distinguish it from his own generation, amongst whom he would include Barthes (1915), Althusser (1918), and Lyotard, Deleuze, and Foucault (born respectively in 1924, 1925, and 1926). Chronologically a mere seven years separate Merleau-Ponty from Barthes, but by the 1960s it looked as if an intellectual gulf had opened between the existentialists and phenomenologists who had rallied to Marxist humanism after the war and the generation of anti-humanists that were now rising to ascendancy. 3 While it is by no means obvious that Merleau-Ponty can simply be placed in the former camp, his supporters have consistently-and in my opinion rightly-argued that the criticisms his structuralist and poststructuralist successors leveled at his generation often miss their mark in his case. Merleau-Ponty's positioning with the earlier group will therefore be crucial in any moves to rehabilitate or reread him today. What is less controversial (and what surely divides him from our own generation) is that he belonged to a cohort that was profoundly suspicious of the prevailing Kantianism and embraced a Hegelian alternative. Merleau-Ponty's philosophical training had been dominated by Kantian idealists such as Leon Brunschvicg. Cartesian rationalism and Kantian moralism were indeed the dominant, even the official, ideologies of prewar France and it was against their continuing influence that he would direct much of his criticism. He was aided here by a revival of interest in Hegel during the 1940s. Crucially, whereas French rationalists subscribed to the Kantian idea that reason is a universal structure immune to history, Hegel had shown the historicity of reason and values. Reason for him was something that emerges over time, appearing where knowledge and social or material life interact. Such reciprocity suggested a way of approaching reason within history and this dialectic was something to which Merleau-Ponty would consistently subscribe. If he

Situating and Reading Merleau-Ponty as a Political Thinker

5

was never an uncritical reader of Hegel (he in fact suggests that there are "several Hegels" [SNS 63]), much of his political philosophy could be decoded as a protracted confrontation between Hegel and Kant. Merleau-Ponty was one of the participants in the renowned seminars on Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, run by Alexandre Kojeve during the 1930s and attended by figures who would become some of France's leading intellectuals, such as Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, and Jacques Lacan. His own reading of Hegel was further influenced by Jean Hyppolite who would, ironically, teach Hegel to some of Merleau-Ponty's later critics, among them Althusser, Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, all of whom would become resolutely anti-Hegelian (yet they were hardly untouched by the encounter). When Hyppolite declared that French philosophy from Descartes to Bergson had been predicated upon a refusal of history and had sought freedom merely in reflections of the subject upon itself, and when he defended Hegelian dialectics against such subjectivism, he found in Merleau-Ponty a receptive audience. 4 The reading of Hegel that was used to challenge French philosophical orthodoxy was inseparable from two other currents of then-contemporary French thinking: Marxism and a secular, phenomenological form of existentialism. It was within this triad that Merleau-Ponty came to philosophical maturity and he saw them as closely interrelated. While all the great philosophies of the past century had their beginnings in Hegel, he contended, "Hegel's thought is existentialist" although "we think he must be made much more Marxist" (SNS 63, 65, 81). Despite his eventual criticism of rationalist elements within all these strands of philosophy, Merleau-Ponty's thinking is never comprehensible outside their horizon. It informs his rejection of both liberal idealism and of the rationalism he identified with the more orthodox Marxism of the French Communist Party (PCF), which would bring him into direct disagreement with Althusser. Interestingly, Marxism had also been seized upon in France during the early 1930s as a means of counteracting the dominant Cartesian rationalism and Bergsonian vitalism. But it had soon accommodated itself to the French enlightenment tradition of scientific rationalism, which was the version endorsed by the PCE Marx's early writings, which had helped to spawn a more dialectical and critical Marxism elsewhere, were little read in France until after the war. It was in these youthful texts that an affinity with existentialism would now be discovered, as some of MerleauPonty's own early essays show. This affinity was hardly surprising, since Kojeve's Marxist reading of Hegel had already been mediated by Heideggerian existentialism, as Hyppolite's had been by Sartre's. It was Sartre who encouraged Merleau-Ponty in his studies of existentialism and phenomenology. During the early 1930s, Sartre had studied Husserl and Heidegger in Germany. He returned with a philosophy of existence and a

6

Introduction

sense of radical freedom, two themes that were to be united in the recognition that authentic freedom must be located within everyday life. The challenge would be to translate this into a politics. Merleau-Ponty would study, develop, and apply Husserl's phenomenological approach throughout his career, although Heidegger's influence is more evident in his later ontology. While he would consistently distance himself from what he saw as an abiding Cartesian ism in Sartre's (and the earlier Husserl's) thinking, existentialism would remain one of the main pivots of his own philosophy and would indeed dominate radical French thought for the next two decades. Arguably, MerleauPonty was much more successful than Sartre in sustaining a close relationship between existentialism and politics because he was less wedded to abstract notions of individual freedom or a philosophy of the subject. The two nevertheless shared the project of working out an open existential Marxism in opposition to the closures of rationalism and they would remain interlocutors throughout Merleau-Ponty's career. Foucault has offered his own gloss on the next stage of this intellectual history. He notes that after 1945 and "for a whole range of political and cultural reasons, Marxism in France was a kind of horizon which Sartre thought for a time was impossible to surpass. At that time, it was definitely a very closed horizon, and a very imposing one:'5 Foucault adds that it was within this Marxist horizon that both phenomenology and structuralism developed. He locates Merleau-Ponty within the subjectivist philosophy he associates with phenomenology and recalls that the combined resources of structuralism, Nietzsche, and the Lacanian unconscious would sweep it away during the 1960s. But Foucault also credits Merleau-Ponty with introducing the very structural linguistics that would result in the eclipse of existentialism and phenomenology. Essentially it concerned the problem of language. That, I think, was a fairly critical point: Merleau-Ponty's encounter with language ... I remember clearly some lectures in which Merleau-Ponty began speaking of Saussure who, even ifhe had been dead for 50 years, was quite unknown ... to the cultured public. So the problem of language appeared and it was clear that phenomenology was no match for structural analysis in accounting for the effects of meaning that could be produced by a structure of the linguistic type, in which the subject (in the phenomenological sense) did not intervene to confer meaning. 6

This was not quite Merleau-Ponty's own reading of Saussure, and his position here was undoubtedly more complex than Foucault's sketch suggests since he did not conform to the phenomenological subjectivism that Foucault condemns either. Two developments are however uncontentious. First, Merleau-Ponty was indeed taking an intense interest in structural linguistics, as well as in Levi-Strauss's structural anthropology, during the 1950s. This

Situating and Reading Merleau-Ponty as a Political Thinker

7

was occurring contemporaneously with his forging of a new anti-humanist ontology that would radically reconfigure notions of subjectivity, and there are undoubtedly structuralist elements within Merleau-Ponty's later thinking. It is important to keep in mind nonetheless that despite an increasing interest in language, he never took the linguistic turn that would subsequently orientate thinkers of quite diverse persuasions. For him, perception would remain primary and this would color his reception of all the philosophies he encountered. Secondly, however, and regardless of how far Merleau-Ponty actually moved towards anti-humanism or structuralism, the success of these philosophies in France would entail a rapid fall from grace of the humanist, existentialist, and phenomenological approaches with which he remained identified. If criticism was more typically and justly leveled at Husserl and Sartre, one consequence was that his own later ideas were largely ignored. In particular, the implications of these ideas for reconceiving politics remained largely unexplored despite important work by Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis. Structuralist and poststructuralist anti-human isms would themselves, then, comprise imposing but relatively closed horizons among radical thinkers for some time to come. It is indeed thanks in large part to a recent realization that MerIeau-Ponty anticipated poststructuralist ideas that interest in his later writing has been rekindled, although there has been little attempt at eliciting their political significance for or after poststructuralism. If the intellectual climate in France was profoundly contested during Merleau-Ponty's later years, then the later 1950s and early 1960s were also a politically difficult time for him. The postwar climate in France was one of economic stabilization, but as the euphoria that followed the Nazis' defeat waned, there was a sense of political drifting and loss of purpose. His frustration is evident in the later political essays, in which he signals the dearth of any clear direction or significance in history and the lack of leadership or innovation in successive French governments, apart from some brief hope aroused by the Socialist leader Mendes-France. The Fourth Republic was a postwar creation overseeing rapid economic development under conditions of ideological polarization, with large mass parties and frequent changes of cabinet but little political momentum. The political elite was increasingly discredited and the swan song of French colonialism was deeply divisive. The Fifth Republic, founded by de Gaulle in 1958, brought more stability but little comfort to those on the left. To some extent, MerIeau-Ponty's political reflections were specific to this French situation, but he was aware that its problems as well as his own political anxieties were also indicative of wider crises within European modernity and among all those modernists who still aspired to progress in collective life.

8

Introduction

After the outbreak of the Korean War and the role the Soviet Union played in it, Merleau-Ponty abandoned any remaining vestiges of hope that a nonStalinist form of communism might be prefigured within the forces of the present. He began to reconsider the fundamentals of Marxism and to reappraise his own philosophy of history, in which context he turned to Saussure's theory of language. Despite his political pessimism, he was unwilling to abandon his belief that reason and progress were still feasible projects, since history is never wholly devoid of meaning and embodied social beings are ineluctably motivated to challenge suffering in their everyday lives. For the time being, he accorded a provisional allegiance to the noncommunist French left and tepid support to parliamentary politics. Yet there is a recurrent sense in his works that such institutions, in France especially, were playing out an anachronistic politics designed for the eighteenth century but increasingly moribund in a changing world. If France retained a significant peasantry even after the war, the country was finally modernizing and becoming more recognizably capitalist as well as technologically advanced. Merleau-Ponty continued to point out the inequities as well as the human and environmental costs of its economic system. Abroad, France was going through a painful process of decolonization epitomized by events in Algeria, which prompted him to wonder whether politics is "always these stupidities, this laisser-faire, these fits of hysterics:' Is this not, he wondered, "the politics of decadence, and are we not condemned to parody and unreality by a more serious illness which will rot tomorrow's institutions as well as yesterday's?" (S 337). His earlier optimism that philosophy and politics might be reconciled seemed increasingly to be shattering on the stubborn irrationality and opacity of political events. Without abandoning his philosophical insistence on their intertwinement, Merleau-Ponty began to emphasize the difference and distance between the philosopher and the political actor. His departure from Les Temps Modernes did not mean the end of his own political analyses. After 1954, he spent several years writing political commentaries for the weekly socialist magazine L'Express as well as broadcasting his views on the changing communist and colonial worlds during radio interviews. During the latter years of the decade, he also traveled widely, meeting with intellectuals from non-Western powers to discuss their common interests and speaking to audiences across Africa about colonialism, racism, and underdevelopment. 7 During an interview conducted early in 1958, MerleauPonty gloomily confessed that his opinions on Algeria amounted to no resolution but that anyway, "nothing proves that a given problem is soluble at any time whatsoever" (S 328). By 196.0, he was lamenting that in politics, "one has the oppressive sensation of blazing a trail which must be endlessly reopened. It is not just a question of chance and the unforeseen ... the situation is far

Situating and Reading Merleau-Ponty as a Political Thinker

9

worse than that. It is as if some cunning mechanism whisked events away at just the moment they appeared on the scene. Or as if history ... gave us a glimpse of truth only in brief moments of confusion" (S 3). A year later, in the preface to a book already dedicated to the memory of his late friend Merleau-Ponty, Levi-Strauss would dismiss the "so-called men of the Left" who still clung to "a period of contemporary history which bestowed the blessing of a congruence between practical imperatives and schemes of interpretation:'While directed explicitly at Sartre's humanist Marxism, these closing pages of The Savage Mind were more generally anticipating an eclipse of "this golden age of historical consciousness" and insisting that history is merely "a method with no distinct object corresponding to ie's In fact, Merleau-Ponty had always acknowledged that congruence between theory and practice represents a rare moment of historical clarity and had denied them any simple correspondence. Yet he had believed they are related. Were the hopes of the 1940s, then, no more than a privileged moment, even a dangerous illusion, within a chaotic and directionless sequence of events? This was certainly the view of the "posthistoire" that many intellectuals now embraced, with any faith in historical progress increasingly falling under the indictment of supporting imperialist metanarrative fantasies and dangerous teleological illusions.

Returning to Merleau-Ponty The foregoing account poses two related questions: why revisit Merleau-Ponty now and if we do, how should his work be approached? I have already suggested that he commended-and indeed practised-a particular approach to collective life, which I summarized as an interrogative ethos and associated with a transformation of rationality and of coexistence. Since we still inhabit the ruins and crises of a faltering modernity that calls for interpretation and intervention, his critique and his method of undertaking it retain considerable resonance, especially in light of the political dead end of so-called postmodernism. The exigencies of contemporary global politics, and the inability of Western states to negotiate this treacherous field, also suggest that MerleauPonty's existential understanding of political processes and practices might be especially timely. He observed the way political theories and regimes in the twentieth century oscillate perilously between idealism and positivism, principles and pragmatism, none of which allows them to grasp or to deal perspicaciously with the contingencies of collective life. Arguably, little has changed in the twenty-first century except for the details of these contingencies. Such enduring political relevance is not however the rationale that is typically offered for the current interest in Merleau-Ponty's work, nor is it the

10

Introduction

perspective from which it is usually approached today. What is driving this revival is more obviously his work's resonance for the anti-humanist discourses associated with poststructuralism. Here his commentators have variously exonerated him of the accusations leveled by structuralist and poststructuralist critics of phenomenology;9 revealed the actual indebtedness of those critics to Merleau-Ponty (Levinas, Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, and Deleuze all turn out to have incorporated elements of his thinking); and demonstrated the affinities between Merleau-Ponty's later work and poststructuralism itself.lo There had been earlier claims that Merleau-Ponty's interest in structuralism already freed him from the sort of subjectivism associated with Husserl's or Sartre's phenomenologies. ll But the success of poststructuralist critiques of structuralism coupled with the elusive ontology of Merleau-Ponty's later thinking have offered especially fertile ground for his most recent revival. Discourses of difference, alterity, the other, and the body find evocative anticipations in his later ontology of the flesh. They suggest a quite different MerleauPonty from he who was presented to the Anglophone world during the 1970s and early 1980s, when his political critiques of Marxism and liberalism were foregrounded. As Busch and Gallagher note, Merleau-Ponty's main ideas "take on a new meaning in relation to post structuralism and postmodern hermeneutics precisely to the extent that when we read Merleau-Ponty's texts today they go beyond their original intentions. In new contexts we are able to read Merleau-Ponty differently:' 12 While some have discovered in his concepts a foreshadowing or prefiguring of poststructuralist ways of thinking (and even a postmodern politics), others have gone so far as to declare that his was "arguably, the first genuinely poststructuralist philosophy:'13 Whether one finds in Merleau-Ponty a thinker who combined phenomenology with poststructuralist sensitivity or, alternatively, a poststructuralist avant la lettre will have a significant bearing on how one reads him today. My own feeling is that the second perspective is problematic. On the one hand, there are many more unambiguous poststructuralists, so why go to the trouble of reinterpreting him in this way, other than to set the philosophical record straight? On the other, do we not do a disservice both to Merleau-Ponty and to ourselves if we emphasize too strongly his poststructuralist credentials at the expense of his other ways of thinking? For while it is definitely important to acknowledge Merleau-Ponty's moves in this direction-both in order to liberate him from unwarranted neglect and because it is only now possible to read him after poststructuralism, and thus to appreciate how he anticipated some of its claims while avoiding others-what we surely want from him now is a resource for renewing discourses that are themselves looking politically problematic and philosophically tired, but without simply returning to earlier

Situating and Reading Merleau-Ponty as a Political Thinker

11

arguments they rightly rejected. The crucial issue, then, is whether MerleauPonty can help us return to politics after anti-humanism. Writing at the intersection of several discourses that were still engaged in a lively polemic the future of which was not yet decided, Merleau-Ponty offers a way of thinking about collective life that was already sensitive to the difficulties-in particular regarding subjectivity-anti-humanists were identifying, but still within a framework that is attuned to the demands of political engagement, everyday experience, and materialist analysis. The reason for rereading his work is not, then, that he was already a poststructuralist, but that he was trying to integrate elements now associated with poststructuralism with other traditions that maintain a more robust sense of politics, experience, and agency. He was therefore trying to avoid political shortcomings that critics (and even exponents) of poststructuralism have increasingly noted: its constructivist allergy to prediscursive existence, a coyness regarding "reality" or lived experience, a tendency to both relativism and abstraction, reservations about political engagement, virtual silence regarding political economy, a tendency to postpone decisions in the face of ineluctable undecidability, a proclivity for the neo-Kantian privileging of ethics over political action, and a troubled relationship with notions of agency. It is, then, my contention that the main reason for reading Merleau-Ponty today is to excavate a politics after poststructuralism but within societies that are still recognizably modern; a politics that does not dissolve the political and agentic into the ethical, the aesthetic, or the discursive. The sort of intervention and immanent critique I am foregrounding is sometimes dismissed today as a duplicitous politics that is irredeemably tainted by the messy conditions and assumptions it engages with and as a politics of ressentiment. Yet the French phenomenologist was rightly critical of a politics that refuses to get its hands dirty or to consider the material means and social forces that might bring relative, even radical, change within an ambiguous and violent present. At the same time, it is evident that one cannot simply return to an earlier Merleau-Pontyas if the last four or five decades of continental philosophy had never happened. Structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism have all brought about significant and widespread discursive changes and if some of their claims have turned out to be politically paralyzing, this does not invalidate their criticisms of earlier political thought (many of which Merleau-Ponty shared). Nor is it possible to rethink humanism without refracting it through those criticisms. Besides, there were several competent exegeses of Merleau-Ponty's political philosophy during the late 1970s and 1980s, when its ideological landscape still seemed more familiar, and there seems little point in repeating them now. 14 One cannot therefore read Merleau-Ponty today as one would have done then. But equally, we must not

12

Introduction

read him as if he were already our contemporary and had made with us the cultural, linguistic, or ethical turns that have orientated recent theory. How, then, should Merleau-Ponty be read today? It seems to me that one must begin by acknowledging the integrity of his way of thinking as an alternative to current Anglophone and continental traditions. IS What most obviously distinguishes his work from either is an antipathy towards Kantianism; his enduring commitment to a philosophy of existence predicated on the centrality of the body; his efforts at understanding and evaluating emerging phenomena; and his fidelity to a dialectical approach that recognizes the reciprocity and entwining of material and symbolic forms. Iris Young suggested that existential phenomenology complements poststructuralism by focusing on (first-person) experience: for example, it describes lived embodiment rather than simply thematizing bodies as texts. She categorized herself among other Anglophone social theorists who became sympathetic to postmodern ism but had regained interest in the French phenomenologists (and notably Merleau-Ponty) because they offer "a unique approach to theorizing subjectivity" and aim to speak "from the point of view of the constituted subject's experience" in a manner that supplements the more observational methods of poststructuralists like Butler or Foucault. 16 The value of this supplementaryapproach is evident from Young's own work on women's bodies and in her willingness to republish (in 2005) some older essays that she had written from a more phenomenological perspective. My only quarrel with her argument is that I think one of the primary aims of Merleau-Ponty's later phenomenology was to overcome this sort of alternative between interiority and exteriority. Young was undoubtedly right to see the value of thinking about social processes from within, but I will argue that what is distinctive about Merleau-Ponty's approach is his attempt at understanding social processes simultaneously from within and without. This is to practise the chiasm of which he wrote and unless this is recognized, his work remains vulnerable to poststructuralist suspicion regarding its latent subjectivism. From a rather different perspective, one can also find guidance within Merleau-Ponty's own work as to how philosophies from the past should be approached. Like past or alternative cultures, historical thinkers are not radically other but can be sources of inspiration, especially at those moments when leading paradigms or discursive fashions begin to look exhausted or to seem inadequate in the face of their own limitations or novel events. Merleau-Ponty did not therefore perceive the past as a graveyard or museum for ways of thinking or living that are now dead or surpassed. He did not subscribe to the linear view of history that presents the past as an immature version of our own present or as no longer relevant precisely because it has passed. His view of temporality emphasizes the extent to which the past remains alive: a rich

Situating and Reading Merleau-Ponty as a Political Thinker

13

fabric from whose ambiguities the present emerged, but without exhausting or taking up all its latent possibilities. Past philosophies are accordingly a resource with which we remain in communication and from which we can learn. "Philosophy:' Merleau-Ponty wrote, "is the taking over of cultural questions begun before our time and pursued in different ways, which we now 'reanimate' and 'reactivate' from the standpoint of the present" (PP 89). From this perspective, we may rediscover ideas that remained marginal or irrelevant in the context of their original appearance, for any original philosophy would have contained numerous elements and remains an ambiguous, lively body of ideas, some of whose themes and possibilities might only become apparent to future generations that think within different horizons and address new problems (S 128, 131). The challenge of return is consequently neither one of faithful exposition nor one of translating anachronisms into more current forms of expression. Rather, the contemporary philosopher struggles to think with and from within these philosophies once more; to grasp their style and way of expressing the world; to communicate with them in order to improvise upon them; and to elicit their "unthought" elements, thereby to rethink the problems of the present. They are thus granted a new fecundity, a new truth. This was precisely how Merleau-Ponty himself engaged his predecessors. His typical approach was to distinguish between their reified, inert (rationalist) elements and their more provocative, phenomenological insights (hence his "double" readings of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Bergson, Sartre, and Husserl). It is the latter aspect that he takes up and develops when he evokes their "unthought-of element" (S 160). It is from this perspective that we can still think with MerleauPonty about contemporary issues. In emphasizing the continuity of Merleau-Ponty's political philosophy, I am not subscribing to the current fashion of dividing his thinking into two periods,l7 According to this narrative, it was the earlier Merleau-Ponty who subscribed to a philosophy of consciousness and of subjectivism. This is the same Merleau-Ponty whose youthful political radicalism was associated with Marxism, with equivocation towards East European communism, and with a defense of revolutionary violence. But following the quarrel with Sartre and his self-criticism, so this comforting story goes, a mature and more congenial figure emerged: one who turned his back on phenomenology and existentialism in order to embrace structuralism, whose anticipation of poststructuralism resulted from a rejection of dialectics and subjectivism via fundamental criticisms of Hegel and Marx, and who surrendered his political radicalism to support liberal parliamentary politics and reform. Now, this story is not wholly inaccurate but it is misleading. I will argue that despite the self-criticisms and shifts in political allegiances, Merleau-Ponty's

14

Introduction

overall methodology and political commitments remained broadly unchanged. What occurred was only a deepening of his critical and interrogative project within an enduring phenomenological and existentialist approach and a repositioning within the shifting field of forces that his understanding of politics required. I will therefore maintain that while his thinking does undoubtedly evolve, this is towards a more radical level of phenomenological inquiry: one that encouraged him to rethink politics and Marxism as problems for his time (and for ours, too). Rather than becoming politically more conservative, he became philosophically more radical. A particular difficulty with the two-stage narrative, in addition to the continuity of many of MerleauPonty's arguments, is that it encourages us to ignore the earlier work. While I contend that many of his most important and enduring ways of thinking were developed there, this is also the period during which Merleau- Ponty was most obviously politically engaged. While it is still possible to elicit a political project and problematic from his last writings, their critical motivation and significance are eclipsed unless they are read in the context of the earlier work and its critiques. The outcome of such a reading is a Merleau-Ponty whose politics seem marginal or irrelevant to his broader philosophy, and it is indeed this largely apolitical Merleau-Ponty that we are in danger of appropriating today. This is why I am determined to retrieve instead an intensely political thinker.

Merleau-Ponty, Politics, and the Political But in what sense is Merleau-Ponty a political thinker? It is perhaps easiest to begin with the more familiar positions he does not occupy. He does not have an idealized or utopian model of the political as a distinctive arena (he did not, for example, glorify the ancient Greek ideal of citizenship and the public realm) although I will suggest that his later work implies a new ontology of the political. Nor does he advocate any universally desirable set of institutional arrangements or political principles. IS He did not begin, either, by taking for granted the existence and preeminence of the modern state and its apparatuses, but thought about politics more as a set of practices and processes within everyday life, in which coexistence ineluctably involves power and conflict as well as reason and communication. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty wrote about politics rather than the political; his concern was with practical reasoning and he judged modern states' actions from this perspective. For him, politics was primarily about collective life and the shifting field of forces within which relationships of power and change are negotiated. He sometimes refers to coexistence in this context, but it is a term I have taken up more widely and

Situating and Reading Merleau-Ponty as a Political Thinker

15

that I will sometimes use in the slightly ungainly form of (co )existence or (co )existential. My purpose in doing so is to emphasize the existential orientation of his political thinking, as well as the intersubjective premises and political concerns of his existentialism. In light of the above, it is not surprising that critics should conclude that Merleau-Ponty"did not write a systematic political treatise"19 or that "considerable obstacles face any interpreter who proposes to regard Merleau-Ponty's writings as an important contribution to political theory."2o He is perhaps better designated as a political philosopher-cum-social theorist than as a political theorist. For he did not write in a normative or analytical style and he does not therefore provide the sort of conceptual analyses of terms like justice, equality, or rights that one finds among Anglophone political theorists. This is not however a simple neglect by Merleau-Ponty to define his terms. He viewed the analytical approach as unhelpfully formal, abstract, and disingenuously apolitical. It was capable of yielding only the kind of inert significations and reproducing the sort of reified presuppositions that he believed the engaged political thinker must interrogate and renew. For he recognized that meanings are always situated, developing ambiguously within shifting fields of forces that include the theorist. As such, they require an ongoing interpretation of their emerging and often plural senses, and this must include the theorist's appreciation that this is itself an act of political intervention. Accordingly, Merleau- Ponty believed it is unhelpful and never ideologically innocent to analyze normative terms in separation from their material and political situation or to believe that definitions can be value free. This perspective goes well beyond an acknowledgment that political concepts are essentially contested, and while Merleau-Ponty never suggests that all concepts or value terms are reducible to power or merely relative, his approach to them does look more genealogical than analytical here. Merleau-Ponty was interested in the history of philosophy, including political thinkers like Machiavelli, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. But he expressed no interest in the tradition of liberal political thought that includes social contract theory and utilitarianism. It seems unlikely that he would have found its methodological individualism interesting. When he thought about individual freedom or commitments, he was more likely to look to existentialism, which he credited with restoring a sense of (situated) subjectivity missing from Marxist class analysis. But he never believed that politics might best be understood by starting with isolated individuals, nor did he perceive individual interests, intentions, developments, or rights as the primary goal or focus of political life. He recognized that structures of coexistence are negotiated within the dense texture of everyday experience and I contend that it was the social ontology of this field of forces, conceived as a thick intersubjectivity or

16

Introduction

interworld-the very flesh of the political-that he was trying to grasp. He came to believe that fidelity to this perspective would entail a fundamental transformation of modernity's conceptual apparatus and its political practices beyond the Cartesian presuppositions that have grounded modern political theory since Hobbes. As a consequence, Merleau-Ponty never uses what Foucault calls a juridicopolitical model.2 1 That is, he does not understand politics from a top-down or social contract perspective that emphasizes the state's legitimacy and an obligation among its citizens to obey the law. Instead, he notes the "passional and illegal origins of all legality and reason" (HT 37). He does not then suggest that constitutions, institutions, or legislation are the key to realizing political progress or understanding political power, although he does not believe they are irrelevant to them either. Merleau-Ponty prefers to speak of "regimes" rather than the state. This allows him to convey a more dynamic sense of the political power and processes that animate the state apparatus and to situate it within a broader field of domestic and international, ideal and material, visible and invisible forces. Like Machiavelli, Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault, he was aware that no state is comprehensible in isolation from this strategic field. A regime is comprised, furthermore, of cultural, ideological, and economic, as well as formally political, relationships. Together these exemplify a certain way of being-in-the world and it is on this basis that it is to be judged. This also then situates the state within a broader existential and normative field. MerleauPonty's inclination is accordingly to ask about the lived, intersubjective processes and negativities that engender and challenge social and political life and which always outrun any theory or organization of the state. It is not, in conclusion, surprising that the style, substance, and methodology of his political writings should be at odds with conventional political theory. But it is my contention that he did nonetheless develop a coherent political philosophy and that this is more rigorous than most political theories inasmuch as it explores the ontological and experiential basis of its own assumptions while exposing those of its rivals. Merleau-Ponty wrote two books with explicitly political themes: Humanism and Terror (1947) and Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). Both combine an interpretation of actual politics and power relations with a critique of the political ideologies that purport to understand and legitimize them. Various essays about political events or ideas are also published in Sense and Non-Sense (1948) and Signs (1960), and there are further articles written for newspapers and political journals. All were envisaged as acts of critical intervention, albeit on a variety of levels of political theory and practice. This lends many of Merleau-Ponty's political texts a concrete and immediate sense, and it is a paradox of this approach that it sometimes grants them a somewhat anachronistic ap-

Situating and Reading Merleau-Ponty as a Political Thinker

17

pearance for contemporary readers. Yet it is precisely this approach, I suggest, that remains most pertinent for us. For Merleau-Ponty, the role of the philosopher was not one of disinterested observation or analysis. It was rather one of critical engagement and clarification from a position within the political field. This follows from the primacy of perception and the embodied nature of intersubjectivity, which guarantee the situatedness of every thinker. It reveals an affinity with the interrogative role Foucault accords the intellectual when he writes that the "job of the intellectual does not consist in molding the political will of others. It is a matter of performing analyses in his or her own fields, of interrogating anew the evidence and postulates, of shaking up habits, ways of acting and thinking, of dispelling commonplace beliefs, of taking a new measure of rules and institutions ... it is a matter of participating in the formation of a political will, where (the intellectual) is called to perform a role as citizen:'22 It was from the perspective of such interrogations that Merleau-Ponty called for the invention of a new political terminology. There is a pervasive sense throughout his work of the need to begin again at the most fundamental levels in both politics and philosophy. If this was partly motivated by disillusionment with Marxist and liberal humanism, it was also underpinned by a deeper sense of crisis within the very foundations of modernity. In 1960, he wrote, "Everything we believed to be thought through, and thought through correctly-freedom and authority, the citizen against authority, the heroism of the citizen, liberal humanism, formal democracy and the real democracy which suppresses it and realizes it, revolutionary heroism and humanismhas all fallen into ruin" (S 23). Such challenges surely remain those of our new millennium, and MerleauPonty began to think through their political dimensions as radically as did any of his successors. It is this rethinking that comprises the politically less visible but more profound aspect of his texts, in which the ontological, epistemological, and normative resources for such a project are developed. This is where his thinking surely remains most evocative: for a politics after liberal and Marxist humanism but also after poststructuralism and anti-humanism. Notes 1. L. Hass and D. Olkowski, eds., Rereading Merleau-Ponty: Essays beyond the Continental-Analytic Divide (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2000),13. 2. See for example T. Carmen and M. Hansen, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Of two essays on his

politics, one covers the oft-rehearsed quarrel with Sartre and the other is an older piece by Claude Lefort about Merleau-Ponty's Marxist philosophy of history.

18

Introduction

3. Sonia Kruks identifies postmodernists in this context with "inter-generational rebellion:' She accuses them-rightly, I believe-of effacing and distorting but also tacitly continuing many of the arguments developed already by existential phenomenologists. S. Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca, N.Y. and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 5-6. 4. Jean Hyppolite, quoted in M. Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975),20. 5. M. Foucault, "Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: An Interview with Michel Foucault:' Telos 55 (1983): 197. 6. Foucault, Telos, 198. 7. K. Whiteside, Merleau-Ponty and the Foundation of an Existential Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988). 8. C. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 254,262. 9. See for example N. Crossly, The Politics of Subjectivity: Between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty (Aldershot, U.K.: Avebury, 1994); J. Schmidt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism (London: Macmillan, 1985); M. C. Dillon, "Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernism" in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. T. Busch and S. Gallagher (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1992), 129; and also other essays in this collection. 10. See for example N. Crossly, The Politics of Subjectivity; R. Cohen, "MerleauPonty, the Flesh, and Foucault," Philosophy Today (Winter 1984), also in Rereading Merleau-Ponty, ed. Haas and Olkowski; J. Carvalho, "Folds in the Flesh: MerleauPonty/Foucault:' in Rereading Merleau-Ponty, ed. Haas and Olkowski; M. C. Dillon, ed., Ecart and Differance: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Seeing and Writing (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997); M. Yeo, "Perceiving/Reading the Other: Ethical Dimensions:' in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. Busch and Gallagher, 50, note 12 (regarding Levinas); M.C. Dillon, "Temporality: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida" and M. Yount, "Two Reversabilities: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida:' in MerleauPonty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. Busch and Gallagher; D. Taylor, "Phantasmic Genealogy" in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. Busch and Gallaher; N. Holland, "Merleau-Ponty on Presence: A Derridean Reading:' Research in Phenomenology 16 (1986); D. Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Chapter 3 in K. Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); G. Johnson and M. Smith, eds., Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990) (regarding Levinas); C. Vasseleu, Textures ofLight: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). R. Gasche sees Merleau-Ponty as a forerunner of deconstruction in Inventions of Difference (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 29-30. D. Krell associates him with Derrida in The Purest of Bastards (Philadelphia, Pa.: Pennsylvania University Press, 2000) as does J. Reynolds in Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity (Ohio University Press, 2004); 1. Lawlor, Thinking through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003) compares Merleau-Ponty to Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze.

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11. See for example J. Schmidt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty; T. Carman and M. Hansen, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22. 12. Busch and Gallagher, Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, xii. 13. Hass and Olkowski, Rereading Merleau-Ponty, 21. 14. S. Kruks, The Political Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1981) remains an especially reliable guide here. 15. The subtitle of Hass and Olkowski's volume places Merleau-Ponty"beyond the continental-analytic divide." 16. I. M. Young, On Female Body Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),8. Kruks similarly appeals (in Retrieving Experience) to feminists to rekindle an interest in lived embodiment by supplementing concerns about discourse with the study of experience. 17. For example, in their introduction to The Cambridge Companion to MerleauPonty, Carmen and Hansen present the later work as a "major departure" from the earlier phenomenology. An older generation of commentators also favored this story of mounting political conservatism. See for example B. Cooper, Merleau-Ponty and Marxism: From Terror to Reform (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). 18. See for example Kerry Whiteside's illuminating comparison between MerleauPonty and Rawls under the heading "Kantian Politics Revisited" in Merleau-Ponty and the Foundation of an Existential Politics, 288-95. 19. Hass and Olkowski in their introduction to Rereading Merleau-Ponty, 26. 20. K. Whiteside, Merleau-Ponty and the Foundation of an Existential Politics, 4. 21. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1979),221-22. 22. M. Foucault, L'Expresso, July 15, 1984. Quoted in Michel Foucault: Remarks on Marx (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), lIff.

I THE CRITIQUE OF RATIONALISM

1 A Crisis of Modernity?

"It is not true that we have at any moment been masters of things, nor that, having clear problems before us, we have botched everything by our futility:' -S 34

is to locate Merleau-Ponty's political analyses within a critical theory of modernity. He offers us an immanent critique of a distinctively modern mode of (co )existence, which he judges incapable of realizing its material or normative aspirations because its fundamental assumptions are flawed. Merleau-Ponty saw his task as a phenomenological thinker as one of interrogating such presuppositions and of tracing their effects in everyday experience. He would conclude that a dualist ontology predicated on the severance of mind and body, together with the rationalist ethos derived from it, lie at the heart of modern thinking. But they are also played out across the various dimensions of modern life: in its culture, its ideology, and its economy, but above all in its politics. For, as Stephen White has more recently noted, although an ontological imaginary does not determine a particular ethical or political position, it does tend to engender "certain dispositions toward ethical-political life;' which affect cognitive and emotional orientations, too. I The three chapters that comprise part 1 examine different facets of this critique as the negative dimension of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy that adumbrates his overriding problematic. It explains his commitment to the process of critical interrogation that he associates with phenomenology and his conviction that nothing less than a new ontology is needed if coexistence is to be reconfigured. In this chapter, I examine the general premises of the critique of

M

y AIM IN THIS FIRST PART OF THE BOOK

-23-

24

Chapter 1

rationalism by examining its connection with an alleged crisis of modernity and by exploring how far modernity's philosophical foundations are responsible. This will pave the way for the more obviously political analyses in the next two chapters, which consider Merleau-Ponty's account of modern regimes as particularly dire manifestations of this crisis.

Criticisms of modernity constitute one of the more enduring themes in the history of political thought. Although its geographical and historical boundaries have remained almost as contested as its definition, the idea of modernity as a historical era radiant with emancipatory promise yet synonymous with pervasive forms of oppression has been central to the political imagination for the last three centuries. While postmodernists and antimodernists have challenged modernity's narratives of progress, many of its most trenchant critics have selfconsciously situated themselves within its horizons to accuse the modern age of failing to live up to its own idea. These last critics are generally more ambivalent regarding its balance sheet, not least because their own work relies upon the sort of critical reasoning they associate with modernity's unrealized potential. Yet the more radical among them acknowledge that the very process of critical reasoning is entangled with unwarranted presuppositions about reason and subjectivity, as well as with modernity's sense of being in permanent crisis. Continental philosophy has been defined here as a tradition for which "philosophy means to criticize the present, to promote a reflective awareness of the present as being in crisis:'2 Its ambition is to act as a catalyst for change. The crisis is manifest in an enduring conflict between modernity and tradition, criticism and authority, resistance and power. As a recent study has it, modernity" itself is defined by crisis, a crisis that is born of the uninterrupted conflict between the immanent, constructive, creative forces and the transcendent power aimed at restoring order:'3 Modernity emerges here both as incompletely emancipated from tradition and as itself vulnerable to stultification should its own modernizing traditions falter. Foucault notes, "The attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of'countermodernitY:"4 From this perspective, deconstructionists or genealogists continue work already begun by an earlier generation of critical theorists and phenomenologists, with the important proviso that the latter were determined to avoid cultural relativism or political paralysis by seeking a new basis for modernity's humanist ideals in its critical reflexivity. Merleau-Ponty belongs to this critical modern and continental tradition. In his attempts at understanding modernity as a distinctive mode of existing, he, too, identified its contemporary state as one of crisis. In particular, he distin-

A Crisis of Modernity?

25

guishes between forces that recognize contingency and its practical implications on the one hand, and those that seek control and stability on the other. This struggle might crudely be rendered as an opposition between openness and closure, which is implicit throughout his thinking. Merleau-Ponty was aware of an inevitable tendency for collective life to suffer, and indeed to require, a degree of routinization and inertia. But he also recognized that this tendency is overlaid by structures of power that benefit from the reification of social forms and that in modernity an especially dangerous type of closure is sustained by rationalism. Accordingly, this rationalism remains his primary target as emblematic of the modern mode of being-in-the-world.

Understanding Modernity and Its Others In order to criticize modernity Merleau-Ponty needed to understand what was distinctive about it. He endorsed Husserl's claim that in order to understand phenomena it is necessary to return to the lifeworld; that is, to the historical, intersubjective realm of experience. He did not therefore identify modernity simply as a set of abstract ideas. Rather, he wanted to grasp the ontological choice that marks its distinctive style of existence and which is expressed across its various dimensions. He spoke in this context of "intelligible nuclei of history" and "typical ways of treating natural being, of responding to others and to death;' where "religion, law, and economy make up a single history" within a "unitary web of human choices" (AD 16, 19). The task of the social theorist here is to "seek an understanding from all these angles simultaneously, everything has meaning, and we shall find this same structure of being underlying all relationships. All these views are true provided that they are not isolated, that we delve deeply into history and reach the unique core of existential meaning, which emerges in each perspective" (PhP xix). If rationalism summarizes the unique core of modernity, it should therefore be apparent in all its diverse spheres of social interaction. People do not, after all, live according to disciplinary boundaries; their orientation towards the world is expressed throughout their various activities and anchored in taken-for-granted horizons and habits as the "hidden principle" of a society's "overt functioning" (SI01). This principle is not a set of transcendent ideas or laws, but a patterning of relationships: the "particular way in which men ... coexist" (SNS 131; PP 52). It is concrete historical experiences that must be studied in order to discover this "spontaneous order;' and his investigations persuaded Merleau-Ponty that the identifying signature of modern existence is its rationalism, which he defines as "the resolve to take our condition in hand through knowledge and action" (AD 23).

26

Chapter 1

Anticipating objections that a later generation of postmodernists might raise at this point-that Merleau-Ponty is insufficiently sensitive to heterogeneous lifeworlds or culturally diverse societies-it is germane to note that when he insists that lives open onto one lifeworld, it is either in the context of restoring perceptual faith in the world as a counter to Cartesian skepticism or to insist on the existential denominator of all cultures. It is not to presume cultural uniformity. As far as modernity is concerned, moreover, what he describes is its typical way of organizing social relationships and basic beliefs. He does conclude that at a deeper level, all modernity's political regimes are expressions of its rationalist foundations and that towards its others this orientation remains dangerously hegemonic. But he also recognizes that there are existential variations among different classes, sexes, or religions, which evince groups' own ontological choices since "nations and class ... are modes of coexistence" (PhP 363; S 141; PP 103-4). These also need to be studied and assessed. Fredric Jameson's notion of a cultural dominant, which "allows for the coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate features" across a particular "forcefield:' is helpful here. 5

The Meaning of Modern Rationalism What, then, does modernity's distinctive rationalism entail? In a general sense, it suggests that reason is privileged as an approach to others and to the world. Now, inasmuch as this involves a reasoned approach to collective life-one that incorporates factors such as communication, critical reflection, and an evaluation of situations preparatory to action-Merleau-Ponty hardly judges it unfavorably. Nor is he opposed to science and technology within their own domains or enthusiastic about irrationalism. But he was profoundly suspicious of a particularly narrow, attenuated form of reason, especially where it becomes hegemonic and unreflexive. This kind of reason either claims certainty for its knowledge of nature, history, or society and uses it as a means to control them or, inversely, it sees such phenomena as inert forms immune to knowledge but available for subjection to the will. In either of these respectively realist or idealist forms, reason is for Merleau-Ponty profoundly problematic since it misunderstands its own genealogy. The term rationalism carries a further critical implication: that the use of reason is not only narrow but also excessive. Through his emphasis on corporeality, Merleau-Pontywas aware that reason is always entwined with the nonrational. "The highest form of reason borders on unreason" (SNS 4). This unreason is not without significance but it is other than cognitive rationality and prior to the rational/irrational opposition on which it insists. Excessive reason

A Crisis of Modernity?

27

here entails a denial of forces that elude rational control, yet which are inseparable from the emergence of rationality itself: contingency, ambiguity, the unintended consequences of collective acts, and the anonymity of bodily experience. Failing to recognize these elements impoverishes any theory, but Merleau-Ponty concludes that it is especially dangerous in politics. A more reasonable way of negotiating the force field of collective life would mean acknowledging and engaging with these adverse dimensions of (co )existence. But this requires a renunciation of the orientation to mastery that is intrinsic to rationalism. In associating modern reason with mastery, Merleau-Ponty was unwittingly rehearsing concerns that were being developed contemporaneously by the early Frankfurt School. There is no evidence that he was familiar with their work or vice versa. Interviewed some two decades after Merleau-Ponty's death, Foucault could still reminisce about his own youthful ignorance of these thinkers, lamenting that during his student years in France "absolutely nothing" had been known about this critical strand of Weber ian thinking despite its addressing a "problem in common:' namely reason. 6 Merleau-Ponty's work is nevertheless more methodologically congruent with the dialectical approach deployed by the early critical theorists than is Foucault's work. They, too, viewed societies as provisional totalities in which psychological, familial, cultural, and economic forms exhibit broad equivalence, while defining rationalism as the distinguishing mark of modernity. They further shared what Jane Bennett summarizes as a "narrative of disenchantment:' whereby the rationality unleashed by the Enlightenment as a means of emancipation becomes instead the instrument of various forms of experiential impoverishment and domination.7 Merleau-Ponty echoes here Adorno and Horkheimer's concerns that an exaggerated faith in subjective reason supports ambitions for moral, cognitive, and political control. This affinity is not surprising given these thinkers' common legacy from the writings of Marx, Weber, Husserl, and Heidegger. From Marx they had all learnt the importance of understanding the changing material conditions of modern life and witnessed the dehumanizing, exploitative effects of economies that apply calculating reason to the realms of nature and need. With Weber, they grasped modernity's sociologically rationalizing tendencies, witnessing the drift towards the "iron cage" of bureaucratization and positivist policymaking. They saw how rational plans and grand projects, even when their exponents sincerely espouse humanist intentions, once they are put into practice result at best in disorientation and at worst in excessive violence. They recognized the gradual rationalization of the small, mundane practices of everyday life-the colonization and disciplining of the modern lifeworld-and the relentless erosion of freedom it entails. Finally, from

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Chapter 1

Husserl and Heidegger they learned that humanism is itself implicated in an aggressive subjectivist culture that reproduces the hubris and existential impoverishment of the modern age, in which normativity as such succumbs to positivism and nihilism and Western norms translate into imperialism and colonialism. They all feared that such tendencies were being exacerbated in postwar Europe and in the United States. Although this rationalism is manifest across different facets of modern life, philosophy is especially important to all these critics both as a means of criticism and as the place where a new ontological choice predicated on a reconfigured relationship between subject and object (and between subjects) might emerge. Philosophy accordingly has foundational significance for MerleauPonty not because it has access to Truth but because it has existential significance. Its hegemonic form expresses and legitimizes those most basic presuppositions and orientations that permeate the unquestioned horizons of everyday life and underpin its dominant ideologies. If the lived significance of a social form "lies latent not only in language, in political and religious institutions:' but also in "modes of kinship, in machines, in production and, in general, in all modes of human commerce:' philosophy is also an architecture of signs that "constitutes itself in close relation with other modes of exchange which make up our historical and social life" (IP 56-57). However, thanks to philosophy's inherent reflexivity, it is in a privileged position to understand and contest the kind of relationships it entails and to question the assumptions on which these relationships rely. As well as indicating a general sense of privileging narrow and excessive reason, rationalism refers more precisely to specific philosophies that emerged during the seventeenth century and which laid the basis for the more practical orientations, as well as the cultural horizons, of modernity. These philosophies claimed nature as an orderly system comprehensible to the human mind when it uses reason correctly, especially when it deploys a mathematical model. In this form, rationalism is associated most obviously with Descartes, and Cartesianism was indeed Merleau-Ponty's most consistent philosophical target, although he found Kantian idealism sharing many of its assumptions and it therefore formed a supplementary target. Having identified these two philosophies as symptomatic of modernity's foundations, Merleau- Ponty was especially interested in their dualist ontology and the epistemology that follows from it. Insofar as their dualism expresses and supports a rationalist mode of being-in-the-world, it follows that reconfiguring modernity's typical "human bond" will require more than solely political or economic change. A radical transformation of the ontological prejudices in the shadow of which modern individuals think and live will also be necessary. In short, the only way to avoid repeating the dilemmas of modern politics would be to interrogate its

A Crisis of Modemity?

29

founding presuppositions, and these are most explicit and therefore best contested at the philosophical level.

The Crisis of Modernity In order to see why Descartes is judged the founder of modern rationalism and of its crisis, it is helpful to begin with Hussed's The Crisis of the European Sciences, a work that held an enduring fascination for Medeau- Ponty. Its title is misleading in that it was not science per se that Hussed considered to be in crisis. He acknowledged the enormous and continuing success of the sciences (Wissenschaften) in bringing prosperity, as well as the efficacy of their methodology. Like Heidegger, he recognized that new research was rendering natural science's classical ontology contentious,S but it was in the hegemony of one-sided scientific thinking-a thinking incapable of reflecting upon its own significance-that he identified a wider crisis of European culture. Hussed identifies rationalism here with objectivism and "absurd naturalism:'9 He writes of his certainty "that the European crisis has its roots in a misguided rationalism" and admits "the stage of development of ratio represented by the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment was a mistake." 10 Where science's objectifying method has taken over the human sciences and even philosophy itself, the outcome is a loss of normativity and of a broader, acausal way of thinking, which reflective philosophy had once practised. For Hussed such thinking had marked the identity and telos of Europe since the Greeks, and he hoped through his (transcendental) phenomenological inquiry into the ultimate sources of knowledge to restore this as "a new, higher stage of development"; a "new sort of historicity" under the guidance of normative ideas. I I The crisis of modernity entails, then, a loss of meaning as everything is reduced to deterministic laws and causal explanation, with positivist attention to the merely factual driving out existential, ethical, and political questions. What follows, Hussed warns, is a loss of freedom for cultural reinvention. Action loses its orientation according to broader existential norms and political action becomes especially irrational because it loses its normative ballast. Hussed describes the skepticism and disorientation that ensue and speaks of "the total meaninglessness" of Europe's modern "cultural life, its total 'existenz:"12 If this resembles the malaise Nietzsche had attributed to a nihilism originating in Socrates' faith in reason, Hussed in contrast blames Descartes. Here was the appearance of a new, integrated philosophy that would encompass all meaningful questions within a rigorous scientific methodology. But in founding modern rationalism, Hussed contends, Descartes also unwittingly put in place the ideas that would explode it.

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Husserl claims that when nature had begun to appear as a mathematical manifold in Galileo's work, this already marked a transformation in the entire framework of meaning. But Galileo had failed to reflect upon his meaningbestowing achievement, with its "surreptitious substitution of the mathematically structured world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception"; that is, the everyday lifeworld. Unfortunately, some "were misled into taking these formulae and their formulameaning for the true nature of being itself' This is especially the case once the Cartesian "world splits" into "two worlds: nature and the psychic world" as a consequence of the new method. Increasingly, experience and nature would be understood according to numerical symbols and causal laws, with reason's goal becoming that of an ever better representation of ultimate being. "What is new, unprecedented, is the conceiving of this idea of a rational infinite totality of being with a rational science systematically mastering it."13 For Husserl it was this slippage from methodological innovation to ontological truth that was the fatal step. Thenceforth, a factual world of determinate laws separated from the scientist-as-thinker would close off the path back to a more integrated, self-reflective science within a normative and existential horizon of meaning. The new rationalism would facilitate a more perfect mastery over the world and over humanity itself.14 This equation between modernity, scientific rationalism, and domination is echoed by many of modernity's critics. Heidegger condemns the way modern "science's way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces:'ls Adorno and Horkheimer focus on Bacon's anticipation of the scientific attitude as one where the human mind "is to hold sway over disenchanted nature. Knowledge, which is power, knows no obstacles: neither in the enslavement of men nor compliance with the world's rules."16 Horkheimer also echoes Husserl's concerns about a "crisis of reason" in which reason "has liquidated itself as an agency of ethical, moral, and religious insight."17 MerleauPonty, too, writes that along "with his growing more and more perfect cognitive power over the universe, man also gains an ever more perfect mastery over his practical surrounding world, one which expands in an unending progression. This also involves a mastery over mankind as belonging to the real surrounding world, i.e., mastery over himself and his fellow man" (PP 66). There are then three dangerous but interwoven elements in the Cartesian legacy, according to these critics. First, there is an occlusion of the lifeworld (dynamic, contingent, intersubjective) in favor of an abstract sign system (formal, determining) and an ideological elision of method with ontology. Second, there is a means and justification for subjects' domination over objects and other nonrational alterities, such as nature, the body, and other (embod-

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ied) subjects. Third, there is a positivist suppression of the normative dimension that might have criticized such developments. While Merleau-Ponty was sympathetic to such judgments, the complexity of his position would be underestimated if he were to be classified as unequivocally critical of Descartes or as sharing Husserl's attachment to a specifically European destiny. Merleau-Ponty's own work is full of references to crises in philosophy and the human sciences and he does often blame these on the success of the scientific method in undermining their foundations, subverting their legitimacy, and reducing truth to an effect of external conditions. He even cites such crises as "perhaps, the problem of our time" (PP 44).18 But it is the Cartesian legacy that is primarily blamed here, for having become a straightjacket that closed off Descartes's originally more open questioning. Descartes himself is credited with being a more complex and ambiguous thinker who was torn between radical doubt and edifying certainty. His ontological questioning and phenomenological intuition vied with his rationalism, although ultimately unsuccessfully. Indeed, Husserl had already acknowledged a "hidden double meaning" in Descartes's thinking. 19 When Merleau-Ponty discusses Husserl's genealogy of modern reason (in two essays now reproduced in Signs), he thus distinguishes between a rich metaphysical heritage of "major" rationalism and an impoverished "minor" version. It was the former that he associated with Descartes (and Spinoza), judging it to be "rich with a living ontology" because beneath the chain of causal relations, another type of Being that sustained it was still recognized. "All the problems that a scientistic ontology will omit by setting itself up uncritically in external being as universal milieu, seventeenth-century philosophy on the contrary never stops setting itself"(S 148). Descartes is presented here as an inspired thinker, since unlike his successors he still glimpsed the possibility of negative thinking by a mind that lacks positive certainty. In its early phases, modern philosophy still therefore remained relatively open. Descartes was not the only early modern thinker to privilege doubt. MerleauPonty also cites with approval Machiavelli's sense of contingency and Montaigne's unremitting skepticism. Unfortunately, however, Descartes did not remain faithful to this skeptical habit, and he used it as a means to establish certainty. We can follow MerleauPonty's judgment here by turning to the place where Descartes's questioning took a novel turn, as he explains it in his fourth discourse in Discourse on Method. Rejecting Aristotle's physics, with its basis in sense perception, Descartes shifts his attention away from the objects of doubt to the act of doubting itself, which causes his own existence to be inferred as the unavoidable condition of his doubting at all: cogito ergo sum. Because this "I think"

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was "so certain and so evident that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were not capable of shaking it, I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking."20 All else then followed from this principle, in particular the conclusion that since selfcertainty depends upon no external verification, mind must be separate from matter and thus from the body. Granting primacy to this rational consciousness did not mean that Descartes was uninterested in the external world, but it did open up the question of the best method for approaching it. Through his meditations on a piece of wax, he concluded that perception is a cognitive act of judgment. Although, moreover, the senses are an unreliable guide to nature, we can deduce that nature must be spatial and causal, that it has coordinates along which matter is geometrically extended, and that such matter is agitated by movements that obey mathematical laws. Nature is accordingly denuded of its forms and qualities to be rendered purely quantitative. This is the move Husserl would focus on as heralding the nihilistic turn to positivism. But what especially concerned Merleau-Ponty was the price of this epistemic certainty: ontological dualism. Being would thenceforth be divided into two radically heterogeneous substances: objective being in extension, res extensa, and thinking being, res cogitans. This is the fault line that Descartes and his successors were unable to cross and whose oppositions played themselves out disastrously across the political and material life of modernity. Descartes himself summoned God as the divine guarantor of their correspondence, but he also offered the metaphysical assurance that mathematical relations are identical for the understanding and for the world. The fissure could, he suggested, be crossed in one direction, provided the subject uses the correct method. When reason's natural light is so directed, it reduces problems (or indeed objects) to their simplest, self-evident principles (or parts) and then deductively reconstructs them. Thought, which is immediately present and transparent to itself, then grasps the objective world in terms of its clear and distinct properties. This is the methodology that would become hegemonic (it is one MerleauPonty attacked throughout his studies of perception and of politics), thereby destroying modernity'S reflexive self-questioning, according to Husserl, and reducing knowledge to positivism. As Thomas Langan summarizes it, Cartesian ism espouses a transcendental philosophy, but it also spawned positivistic psychology and empiricism and hence rationalism in its more superficial forms.21 This is why Merleau-Ponty is able to see idealist accounts of immanent consciousness and scientific positivism as two sides of one coin. In order to challenge the rationalist foundations of modernity and to restore an appreciation of contingency and intersubjectivity to its politics, MerleauPontywould need to contest Descartes's first principle and all that follows from

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it: the ontological split between mind and body and the accompanying epistemological opposition between subject and object; the primacy of a self-coincident, disembodied, rational consciousness (the cogito); the solipsistic ignorance of other subjects that follows from it; the rejection of the senses as valid sources of knowledge; the metaphysical guarantee of truth and the transcendental faith in certainty; the reduction of the phenomenal world to a homogeneous field of objects linked by quantitative relations; the methodological faith that it is possible or desirable to lay aside one's desires or situation in order to obtain a value-free overview of the world; the belief that mathematics is the privileged route to knowledge about nature; the methodological imperative to analyze complex problems by decomposing them into simple parts, then deductively resynthesizing them. On all these issues, he would argue that Descartes's doubting was insufficiently radical and that his unwarranted assumptions are pernicious. They survive as ontological prejudices the provisional nature of which it is the responsibility of the phenomenologist to expose by returning to the lifeworld that rationalism occluded, but out of which it emerges. Although Husserl had begun this process, Merleau-Ponty judged him still too Cartesian to carry it through. In fact, Cartesian assumptions are so insidious that he would discover their persistence even in his own work. MerleauPonty's strategy would nonetheless remain consistent: to challenge the primacy of reason with the primacy of perception. The key to resolving modernity's crisis lay, he was convinced, in a new understanding and practice of reason, which depends in turn upon a nondualist ontology. Its implications would be immense. Meanwhile, Descartes's will to truth had opened the door to a more dangerous and less equivocal form of "minor" rationalism. If by the eighteenth century major rationalism was dead and remains, Merleau-Ponty insists, unrecoverable, the rethinking of Cartesianism it demanded was blocked by a new scholasticism. Although Merleau-Ponty acknowledges that "no boundary marks the point where Descartes stops and his successors begin;' what he perceives is a process of narrowing that had culminated by 1900 in a "minor" rationalism, the logic of which was already present within, although by no means synonymous with, Descartes's philosophy (S 128; VI lSI). By the early twentieth century, a form of rationalist dogmatism had emerged wherein scientific method was presented as the key to unlock timeless, universal truths and its certainties had been replicated by political regimes. It is at this point that Merleau-Ponty's critique of modernity departs most radically from Husserl's critique. The latter had credited Kant's transcendental philosophy with beginning the radical task of restoring normativity. But Merleau-Ponty is much more Hegelian and Marxist in his suspicion of Kant's ahistorical and idealist morality. While Husserl wanted to restore the normativity driven out by positivism, Merleau-Ponty has a more Nietzschean suspicion

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of moralism. He believed that idealism replicates many of the same flaws as realism inasmuch as neither appreciates the interweaving of subjective and objective factors, whether in epistemology or in politics. He accordingly places realist and idealist approaches under the same heading of "traditional prejudices." "We do not have a consciousness constitutive of the things, as idealism believes;' he insists, "nor a preordination of the things to the consciousness, as realism believes (they are indiscernible in what interests us here, because they both affirm the adequation of the thing and the mind)" (VI 103). Both fail, on the one hand, to undertake a "genealogy of being" because they present objects (including the body) as devoid of attachment to time or space and devoid of any generativity of their own (PhP 47, 105, 129). On the other, they retain the fiction of an impartial, disembodied, atemporal, and decontextualized observer who, whether empirical or transcendental, stands outside inert reality to gain an objective and universal overview of it. It is an equivalent political judgment that will allow Merleau-Ponty to find liberal and communist regimes equally implicated in modern rationalism, insofar as they both oscillate between Kantian moralism and Cartesian positivism. While idealists oppose the hegemony of scientific ways of thinking, he concludes, they replicate its dogmatism if they look to transcendental forces or to an eternal human nature with truth and justice as innate or universal principles. Merleau-Ponty associates such idealism with a "shameless humanism" whose authoritarian social corollary is the capitalist state and the sanctity of marriage and family (5 226). To understand Merleau-Ponty's critique of modern rationalism fully, it is then necessary to add his critique of Kant to his critique of Descartes. While Kant had tried to overcome some of the difficulties he identified in the Cartesian account and had also aspired to reconcile rationalism with empiricism, Merleau-Ponty is critical of his transcendental solution because the structures of the phenomenal world are presented there as a priori categories of mind. Hegel had already taken issue with the lack of any dialectical interaction between thinking or moral subjects and the natural, historical, and social worlds they inhabit. He had pointed out that Kant's cognitive subject cannot achieve verification for its knowledge nor any novelty, since it fails to interact with or learn from its environment. But equally, its beautiful soul, with its moral imperatives and good conscience, is severed from the objective and intersubjective structures of ethical life that are necessary to sustain it. 22 Merleau-Ponty shares this assessment. As I will explain in chapter 2, it was borne out for him by the failings of the neo-Kantian state in France. The Kantian subject cannot learn from or recreate the world, he argues, because it never engages with or interrogates the objects on which it mechanically and monotonously imposes categorial form (PhP 28). Like Descartes, Kant robs both subjects and objects of generative vitality while failing to acknowledge the lifeworld wherein they

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3S

are inseparable. The transcendental subject is cast adrift, empty, its knowledge assumed to be in correspondence with the scientist's natural world. Its consciousness is transparent and ahistorical, an "un distanced presence in the world" lacking any secret recesses or alterity. For Kantians, reflection is thus installed in an "unpregnable subjectivity" untouched by being or time. Such rationalism cannot account for the quotient of nonsense, the variety of experience, or the opacity, passion, and temporality that disrupt subjective selfpresence. Like Descartes, however, Kant also emerges as a more ambiguous thinker than these criticisms suggest. In The Critique of Judgment, Merleau-Ponty finds a more congenial thinker, one whose account of aesthetic judgment seems to subvert his earlier rationalism. Here, he suggests, Kant was able to lay aside his prejudices and to glimpse the very process by which meaning appears in the world as contingent and ongoing formation. In this "lawfulness without law:' one recognizes that "association, or rather 'affinity' in the Kantian sense, is the central phenomenon of perceptual life, since it is the constitution, without any ideal model, of a significant grouping" (PhP 53). Reason does not impose order here, but is itself born from the formative vibration of the perceptual and existential field. The aesthetic proliferation of forms does not demonstrate (hypothetical) harmony between subject and object or between consciousness and the natural world, as Kant actually suggested, but emerges from their interaction as a process of becoming. It is not confined to experiences of beauty, but adumbrates the way that all meaningful forms (perceptual, cognitive, social, and political) emerge as provisional stylistic unities. Aesthetic reason thus suggests an alternative modulation to the cognitive and instrumental rationality that defines modernity.

Beyond Modernity's Crisis? In rehearsing Merleau-Ponty's criticisms of modern philosophy's basic presuppositions, I have argued that far more than just philosophy is at stake, since its founding oppositions exemplify and justify modernity's typical mode of beingin-the-world; a mode judged to be in crisis. Like other critical modernists, he recognizes internal contradictions, the symptoms of which are manifest in everyday life. The idea of a crisis, however, means more than a malaise worthy of criticism. It also suggests some imminent danger or destabilizing hiatus. If modernity was suffering a particular crisis in the mid-twentieth century, this was not then simply an effect of the nihilism endemic to its philosophical heritage. Rather, it was a sign of what Merleau-Ponty believed to be the imminent disintegration of rationalism, which was being exacerbated by its intransigence

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in the face of new knowledges and events. Even modern science was beginning to realize that its Cartesian ontology was only a contingent preference. But if developments in its postclassical phase are undermining this prejudice, science itself lacks the capacity to find an alternative. This is a catalyst, then, for an imminent breakdown in the foundations of knowledge, and Merleau-Ponty locates its solution in a re-cognition of contingency, where '''objective' and'subjective' are recognized as two orders hastily constructed within a total experience, whose context must be restored in all clarity" (VI 20). This suggests to him the reemergence of the sort of questioning and doubt he had identified in early modernity and which he now associates with phenomenology's rediscovery of the lifeworld. With its emphasis on radical contingency, existence, and corporeality, this inevitably disrupts established certainties. It will throw modernity into crisis as it opens its horizons to doubt about its formerly unquestioned premises. If Merleau-Ponty is nonetheless more circumspect and less pessimistic than Husserl (or Nietzsche or Adorno) regarding the decadence of modernity, it is because he senses that his mentor's call for a program of existential phenomenology in order to renew reason is bearing fruit. He confidently asserts in the Signs essays that the mythical nature of minor rationalism has now been recognized and that it is no longer plausible except, perhaps, within AngloAmerican logical positivism (he condemns analytical philosophy for its "deliberate retreat into a universe of thought where contingency, ambiguity, and the concrete have no place" [S 148, 157; T&D 9]). On a variety of occasions, he implies that modernity is moving into a critical (but potentially progressive) phase precisely because of the success of antirationalist philosophies. Here he cites existentialism, phenomenology, and critical Marxism as well as various artistic movements and research methodologies, such as those of Gestalt psychology and structural anthropology. The beginning of a resolution is accordingly to surrender minor rationalism's pursuit of certainty once and for all. Yet as the Signs essays also show, Merleau- Ponty recognizes the affinity and mutual support between the epistemic will to truth and a political will to power, since both thrive on the elimination of uncertainty and disorder. Resistance cannot therefore be underestimated, and there is no guarantee against modernity becoming either more defensive and oppressive or simply anarchic and barbaric. Furthermore, if the crisis of modernity is political and existential as well as philosophical, then acknowledgment of contingency must also be undertaken in collective life and its implications for social relations explored. However, Merleau-Ponty's analyses of politics would be far more pessimistic than his prognoses for philosophical change because modernity's dominant regimes looked more unambiguously rationalist and were heavily invested in by social and economic

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interests. As the 1950s yielded to a new decade, his hope that an antirationalist turn in philosophy might have significant political repercussions was tempered by a sense that modern politics was simply drifting towards chaos as a corollary of its failure to execute its ambitious plans in the face of adversity. There is a more pervasive sense here that political institutions and ideas are in crisis. Merleau-Ponty's analyses nonetheless fall short of the critical theorists' unequivocal presentation of late modernity as a one-dimensional, fully administered totalitarianism dominated by instrumental reason. The reason is twofold. First, the critical interruptions that could still be discerned in postwar France testified to a lesser degree of closure. Existentialism, a strong left with a reputation enhanced by successful resistance during the war, and widespread suspicion of unbridled capitalism and American power suggested a rather less closed situation than the critical theorists elicited from their experiences of Nazism and of exile in a United States gripped by anticommunist fervor. The Frenchman was still able to identify certain tensions, ambiguous zones, and critical events that seemed to members of the Frankfurt School to have been effectively eliminated. For them the problem was that there was no crisis, only monotonous repetition and stability. Nor was Merleau-Ponty entirely cynical about modernity's humanist values. If they were often used to legitimize or mask inhumane practices, they still suggested ideals that help illuminate the strategic and normative failures of the present. Secondly, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological commitments to ontological contingency and to the lifeworld mean that negativity is never entirely eliminated. Even in the face of adversity, there is an unpredictable generation of new expressions and an incitement of the kind of small, everyday resistances witnessed during the occupation. "Taken concretely, freedom is always a meeting of the inner and the outer ... and it shrinks without ever disappearing altogether, in direct proportion to the lessening of the tolerance allowed by the bodily and institutional data of our lives" (PhP 454). So while there is no guarantee of a more rational or progressive outcome, there are irrepressible forces that open fissures and tensions, perhaps bringing with them new opportunities for progress. The task of the radical thinker is to analyze events in search of this critical hiatus and to seek signs of transformative agency within the shifting field of forces.

Conclusion Despite new and hopeful developments in antirationalist philosophy, Merleau-Ponty believed that modern forms of existence remain for the most part

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dominated by Enlightenment paradigms. But the phenomenologist shows how these take for granted a more primordial upsurge, the rediscovery of which is throwing them into question. It is because rationalism lacks the discursive resources to grasp this dynamic and ambiguous mode of appearing that it is unable consistently to make sense of its own findings or practices and finds itself thrown into crisis. This is the tragedy of modern politics. In his last writing, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty would reiterate the need to "undertake a true reform of understanding" and speak of the necessity "of a return to ontology" (VI 3, 165). That he was still writing under the influence of Husserl's Crisis here is evident. "It is only by returning to the perceptual faith to rectify the Cartesian analysis:' he argues, "that we will put an end to the crisis situation in which our knowledge finds itself when it thinks it is founded upon a philosophy that its own advances undermine" (VI 26).

Notes 1. S. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 91. 2. S. Critchley and W. Schroeder, eds., A Companion to Continental Philosophy (Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), 12. 3. M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2000), 76,97. 4. M. Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" in Michel Foucault: Ethics; Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. P. Rabinow (London: Penguin, 2000),1:310. 5. F. Jameson, "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism:' New Left Review (1984): 56. 6. M. Foucault, "Structuralism and Post-Structuralism:' in Michel Foucault: Ethics; Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. P. Rabinow (London: Penguin, 2000), 200. 7. J. Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachment, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). 8. Thus we have Heidegger's observation that the structure of the human sciences "is today thoroughly questionable and needs to be attacked in new ways which must have their source in ontological problematics." M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1962),71. 9. Husserl, "Vienna Lecture," (1935), reproduced as Appendix 1 in E. Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970),298. 10. Husserl, The Crisis, 290. 11. Husserl, The Crisis, 275, 277. 12. Husserl, The Crisis, 12. 13. Husserl, The Crisis, 22, 44, 48, 60. 14. Husserl, The Crisis, 48.

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15. M. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology;' in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. D. Krell (London and New York: Routledge, 1978),302-3. 16. T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury Press, 1972),4. 17. M. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 18. 18. Here Merleau-Ponty anticipates many of Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard's conclusions in The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), whose subtitle and central concern, A Report on Knowledge, is often forgotten. 19. Husserl, The Crisis, 78ff. 20. R. Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1968),54-55. 21. T. Langan, Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Reason (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966),6. 22. See in particular the sections on "Understanding" and "The Beautiful Soul" in G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (London and New York: Harper and Row, 1967) and the section on "Morality" in Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1952).

2

The Critiques of Ideology, Liberalism, and Capitalism

I

Merleau-Ponty's antipathy towards

philosophical rationalism. The next two chapters explore the symptoms of Irationalism in politics. Here, too, Merleau-Ponty shows how failure to recogN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER,

CONSIDERED

nize the entwining of mental and material phenomena results in an oscillation between idealism and realism. In collective life, the outcome is frequently violent and often tragic. This is a politics riddled with myths and illusions of control, haunted by anxieties about insecurity and failure, and threatened by closure and irrationality. In the current chapter, I focus on a number of phenomena Merleau-Ponty associated with this politics: ideology, rigid personality types, liberalism, and capitalism. The next chapter considers his engagement with liberalism's communist adversary, while revealing their structural affinities. Overall, these two chapters show how pervasive Merleau-Ponty found rationalism to be within modern forms of coexistence. His conclusions suggest that a good deal of contemporary politics remains in its grip, combining the euphoria of constructivist fantasy and moralism with a realism too crude to engage efficaciously with the subtle complexities of global forces.

Although he makes occasional remarks about fascism, the internal processes of this phenomenon did not especially interest Merleau-Ponty. From his perspective, the unequivocal nature of its brutality denied it broader historical significance and rendered it simply false as a possible solution to coexistence. If progress is never guaranteed, he asserts, "we can at least see very clearly the -41-

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absurdity of an anachronistic tyranny like anti-Semitism and of a reactionary expedient like fascism" (SNS 152). He was more interested in liberal and communist regimes, whose existential significance and historical value remained more ambiguous and whose changing patterns therefore called for interpretation. Although these particular Cold War hostilities have now passed, the confrontation between Western liberalism and its other(s) has not and Merleau-Ponty's demand for mutual understanding and negotiation remains cogent. The opposing ideologies of liberals and communists, with the former emphasizing its humanitarian values and the latter its commitment to constructing a materially rational economy, seem to fit neatly with Merleau-Ponty's presentation of modernity's dualistic schema, since liberals typically stress the normative and subjectivist aspects of politics while communists emphasize its objectivist side. His aim was to show that although these antagonists might play out their rivalry in these terms, the nature of political life is such that neither could operate successfully in this one-sided way. Nor could the lived significance of these regimes be understood in such terms. For in collective life, facts and values are always interrelated and political goals can only be negotiated on this basis. Basically, then,-Merleau-Ponty did not think either side understood the nature of politics and therefore they did not know how to navigate the dense field of relationships that defines it. He wanted to show both sides their prejudices and limitations in the hope that each might become more open to the ambiguities of its other and more self-critical regarding its own provisional solutions. This is where the recognition of contingency in politics is effective in a practical way. Additionally, he wanted to discover the lived significance and relative historical worth of these rival forms of coexistence by grasping their internal logics. Comparison made on this existential basis could, he believed, alleviate the danger of relativism while furnishing a means for judgment. In undertaking these investigations, Merleau-Ponty understood that political regimes are composed of a number of interrelated components. In the case of liberalism, liberal ideology, the liberal democratic state, and a capitalist economy comprise a relatively unified sGcial formation. Marxist ideology, the Soviet state, and communist practices similarly constituted a lived totality that was another variant of the rationalist style. Ideology as a phenomenon nevertheless warrants especial attention because it is here that rationalism's dangerous separation between an ideal realm of values and material life is perpetuated in political contexts. Ideology connects philosophy and politics because through it the epistemological and ontological errors of rationalism become effective within configurations of power.

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Ideology, Power, and Truth Merleau-Ponty uses the term ideology frequently, although in two rather different senses: one more neutral and generic, the other more pejorative and specific to the regimes he condemns. I In both cases, however, the term is invoked to counter rationalist claims regarding the status of ideas and, especially in its second sense, it fits into a broader genre of ideology critique. However, since poststructuralists have subsequently declared the concept of ideology rationalistic and dependent upon the very dualisms Merleau-Ponty sought to expunge, his vulnerability to its charges will also need consideration. In its neutral sense, ideology suggests to him the taken-for-granted horizons of the lifeworld, where it operates at the level of familiar ideas or practices and accepted (often corporeal) habits (much like Bourdieu's habitus). In this sense, ideology is inescapable because thinking and acting inevitably occur within some ideological framework. The hope that ideology might one day be eliminated in favor of a transparent or universal society is from this perspective a rationalist chimera. Although ideological horizons inescapably operate at the unthematized level of the lifeworld, they may also be more or less clearly articulated as a set of ideas that motivates or legitimizes action. But such ideas still remain for Merleau-Ponty both relatively creative expressions of experience and caught within experience's prereflective horizons. Ideology in this broad sense cannot, then, simply mask or represent reality. It remains a mixture of preconceptual and conceptual elements, the lived and the thought, passion and reason. A particular ideology might reveal a good deal about the society in which it operates, but it cannot represent its truth as such. 2 It is from this perspective that Merleau-Ponty proposes a phenomenological interrogation of ideologies. Although none is true or false in relation to some putatively objective reality or teleological possibility, each does express a truth about the basic structure of a society and its typical mode of coexistence. "Even illusions have some sort of sense and call for deciphering because they always present themselves against the background of a lived relationship with the social whole and because they are thus not like something mental, opaque and isolated" (AD 42). Like philosophy, ideology therefore grants access to a society's "human bond" and the "forms of labor, ways of loving, living, and dying" it entails (HT xiv). "Should the starting point for the understanding of history be ideology, or politics, or religion, or economics? ... We must seek an understanding from all these angles simultaneously, everything has meaning, and we shall find this same structure of being underlying all relationships. All these views are true provided that they are not isolated, that we delve deeply

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into history and reach the unique core of existential meaning which emerges in each perspective" (PhP xix). Such claims about the equivalence of ideological and economic factors inevitably brought Merleau-Ponty into conflict with more orthodox Marxists, who insisted that the economy is the primary cause of appearances and the index of their historical truth. He responded by distinguishing between two different Marxist traditions, whose treatment of religion as ideology illustrates the distinction between their respectively reductionist and dialectical approaches. He rejects the former, "fleshless" Marxism that "refuses to 'understand' religion" or recognize its lived significance. But he does applaud a historical (and more Weberian) materialism that tries to understand what religious ideology conveys about a way of life and its lacunae. It is "a question not of denying religion all human significance but of treating it as the symbolic expression of the social and human drama" (SNS 127-28). Religion cannot then be reduced to mystification or false consciousness. It expresses and thereby reveals something about the fundamental desires and orientation of its practitioners. Its implicit ontological claims further express a perspective on Being that is quite different from rationalism and this serves to throw modern secularism into relief. Thus, "we must admit that faith reveals certain aspects of being, that thought ... does not 'tie it all up'" (S 141). For similar reasons, Merleau-Ponty finds it unhelpful to view liberal ideology simply as a mystification of capitalism. Along with the economy, it too reveals the fundamental existential choices that underpin bourgeois society. It is the medium through which participants experience and reproduce the typical patterns of their culture. This bourgeois orientation might subsequently be judged a poor or anachronistic solution to coexistence, but this evaluation is dependent on a prior understanding of the existential logic its ideology helps us to understand. Hence, economy and ideology (base and superstructure in conventional Marxist parlance) can no more be separated than can body and mind or nature and culture. Indeed, the economy is itself ideological, MerleauPonty argues, since it bears the symbols and habits of a particular way of being and serves as a material repository of its practical categories. If he does present it as relatively privileged as an index of coexistence, this is only because its materiality renders its symbols and practices especially prone to inertia. It is true that in a given society at a given moment, the way of working expresses the mental and moral structure just as a living body's slightest reflex expresses the total subject's fundamental way of being in the world. But economic life is at the same time the historical carrier of mental structures, just as our body maintains the basic features of our behavior beneath our varying moods; and this is the reason one will more surely get to know the essence of a society by analyzing

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interpersonal relations as they have been fIxed and generalized in economic life. (SNS 108)

In light of these claims, Merleau-Ponty's account of ideology is perhaps best considered in terms of three different controversies on which it touches. First, his position remains sufficiently materialist to contest liberal approaches that understand or judge societies solely according to their (ideological) principles. Second, however, he rejects the more economistic approach associated with orthodox Marxism. But third, his suggestion that economics is nonetheless a privileged indicator of society's overall orientation has encouraged at least one recent critic to accuse him of de facto Marxist reductionism on the grounds that he is insufficiently sensitive to cultural aspects of difference. Despite his including "ways of loving, living, and dying" as indices of a mode of coexistence, Nick Crossley argues that Merleau-Ponty overemphasizes labor relations to the exclusion of others.3 While Crossley is probably right to observe that in practice Merleau-Ponty's analyses do have relatively little to say about culture as a manifestation of ways of being, it is surely incorrect to deduce from this a deeper theoretical failing. Merleau-Ponty always insists on the multifaceted nature of social totalities. Indeed, one might turn this concern on its head and worry that those who have taken the cultural turn pay insufficient heed to political economy. At the same time, and as the quote above shows, Merleau-Ponty's materialism attends to the body as well as to economic structures, and both exhibit an important symbolic element. Where Merleau-Ponty's theory does seem at odds with more recent postmodern or multiculturalist approaches is in his claim that societies can be understood as meaningful totalities. His refusal of relativism, as manifest in his determination to develop existential criteria for evaluating the different forms such lived totalities take, is also quite different. An ideological constellation (such as modern rationalism) will here be judged false inasmuch as the mode of existence it expresses is internally impoverished and closed. A significant, although not the only, way this occurs is when the development of new expressions or kinds of social relationship are blocked. This brings us to the second, pejorative sense of ideology held by Merleau-Ponty, which does seem closer to traditional Marxism. Here he recognizes that ideologies are suffused with political significance insofar as they are an important ingredient within shifting configurations of power. In this sense, they are used to maintain privilege, especially where this means closing the status quo to change. The question in this case is whether Merleau-Ponty was able to sustain this negative sense of ideology within a fourth polemical context; that is, without falling victim to the rationalist presuppositions that poststructuralists identify in equations of ideology with false consciousness.

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So far, I have presented Merleau-Ponty's sense of ideology as expressive of a particular solution to coexistence and in this sense as conveying existential significance without being objectively true or false vis-a-vis an underlying reality. He does nonetheless maintain that ideology becomes false inasmuch as it functions as a set of ideas that deny the provisional nature of current arrangements. Then it denies contingency, forecloses change, and ignores the internal relationship between ideas and experience. It helps to preserve reified and anachronistic cultures. While rationalist ideologies therefore have their truth as expressions of modernity's basic orientation, they also work ideologically in this second (false) sense because they rip ideas out of their existential milieu and help thereby to preserve things as they are, including the interests they serve. In particular, when reason is presented as a wholly cognitive intellectual phenomenon, rationalism mystifies the way reason is entwined with nonreason and the way it is engendered hazardously and intersubjectively within history. In this sense, rationalist philosophy operates as a "class ideology" (HT 103), although its falsity lies ultimately in its ontological confusion about the status of ideas. This formulation is reminiscent of Marx's equation of ideology with idealism in The German Ideology. According to this argument, when idealists present values as abstract and formal universals they occlude their historicity and their relationship to specific socioeconomic formations, thereby denying their contingency or the possibility of transforming them through action. Philosophy is itself ideological in this pejorative sense, as "an abstract aspect of total historical life" that forgets its entwining with concrete experience (SNS 132; VI 165). Yet this has been, according to Merleau-Ponty, the fate of both liberalism and of Marxism itself. An exemplary Marxism operates for him as a phenomenological interpretation of historical contingency. But once it is used merely to defend state power in the name of historical truth, as was the case in the Soviet Union, it becomes "an ideology in the true sense of the word: a collection of a posteriori justifications:' Then the dialectic is reduced to "a point of honor, justification, and ideology" (HT 72, 155-56). Although liberalism is inherently more idealist and thus ideological, MerleauPonty similarly distinguishes between the sort of critical approach practised by, for example, the liberal Weber-where ideas are formed "in contact with the present and in order to understand it"-and the institutionalized liberalism that depends on "ideological tatters which we inherited from the nineteenth century and which poorly clothe the facts" (SNS 154). Many of the characteristics Merleau-Ponty identifies with this pejorative sense of ideology are congruent with Ernesto Laclau's post-Marxist account of its refusal to recognize the unstable and differential nature of any social formation. "The ideological would consist:' Laclau writes, "of those discursive forms

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through which a society tries to institute itself as such on the basis of closure, of the fixation of meaning."4 Yet in claiming that ideology may be false, does Merleau-Ponty not rely on the very rationalist oppositions he wished to eliminate? It is Foucault who most concisely expresses poststructuralist reservations about the concept of ideology when he argues that it relies on a philosophy of the subject because "it always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth:'5 Foucault's attack relies on his identifying various oppositions that a (Marxist) conception of ideology allegedly presumes: between reality and appearance, subject and object, base and superstructure, truth and error. Yet Merleau-Ponty's account surely avoids such dichotomies, all of which he rejects as manifestations of rationalist dualism. The only opposition he sustains concerns the distinction between truth and error (which is in fact the crucial one for Foucault), but his understanding of these terms surely exonerates him from Foucault's charge. At issue is whether subjects can acquire, in principle, true knowledge of their objective conditions (as prediscursive reality) free from ideological distortion (as false consciousness). Merleau-Ponty's neutral sense of ideology as the lived horizon all lifeworlds entail renounces this possibility as well as its premises. His criticisms of rationalism also commit him to a rejection of all correspondence or representational theories of truth. When he refers to truth, it is to describe a process of contingent genesis whereby intersubjective meaning emerges hazardously and ambiguously (he even toyed with the idea of calling his last work The Genealogy of the True). Thus, the "foundation of truth is not outside of time; it is in the opening of each moment of knowledge to those who will resume it and change its sense" (PW 144). In order to accommodate their judgment on different modes of (co)existence, Merleau-Ponty does accord provisional knowledge to phenomenologists who interrogate these modes' emerging internal logics from ambiguous signs and multiple details. But this, too, is an ongoing process of verification, as I explain further in chapter 5, and if the resulting evaluations do distinguish between truth and falsity, this is on existential rather than epistemological grounds. Merleau-Ponty's normative criteria here concern the fecundity or sterility of actors' engagement with the world and with one another. It is from a practical perspective that "false" structures are described as being "less open to a future in turn less rich" (TL 44). This criterion is derived from his studies of perception, where it is "in the name of a truer relation among things that their ordinary ties are broken" (PW 64). Truer in this context means relationships that are more complex and rich, more alive with differentiations and intensities. It is somewhat reminiscent of Nietzsche's distinction between ascending and descending forms of life, although it also retains a dialectical sense of negativities

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that delete errors (dead ends and non sequiturs) over time as they conflict with experience. Fecund lines of questioning that open a field to further exploration exemplify truth in the making; they do not reveal a metaphysical or teleological foundation of Truth. In sum, truth remains for Merleau-Ponty a historical and intersubjective phenomenon, not an epistemological category or metaphysical foundation. In this sense, it sidesteps Foucault's objections, but it also avoids the uncritical relativism or "cryptonormativity" with which Foucauldian genealogy is sometimes associated. 6

Psychological Rigidity I have shown that Merleau-Ponty understood societies as multifaceted lived totalities and it has also emerged that not all modes of coexistence are equally valuable for him. Exemplary forms are associated with openness towards ambiguity, complexity, and contingency-an orientation manifest in willingness to question, improvise, and explore. Modern rationalism has so far emerged as antithetical to this orientation, at least in terms of its philosophical, ideological, and economic aspects. In this section, I consider analogous conclusions Merleau-Ponty reached about the psychological dimension, and I want to emphasize the connection he saw here between rigid personalities and ideologies of closure. In other words, rationalism has its psychic equivalent, and analysis at this level helps further to strengthen the appreciation of how modern existence is experienced. Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology in his Cours de Sorbonne, now partly reproduced as "The Child's Relations with Others" in The Primacy of Perception. The first section is entitled "Psychological Rigidity" and from it we can infer not only that the rigidities of closed political regimes have an equivalent in certain personalities, but also that there is a more intimate political relationship between the two. Earlier I drew parallels between Merleau-Ponty's work and that of the early critical theorists. When the latter studied fascism, with its particular mix of excessive rationalism and irrationalism, they included among their analyses a study of personality types in order to explain who might be attracted to authoritarian and racist ideologies. One of the main works reporting their findings was The Authoritarian Personality, published jointly by Adorno and a number of American researchers, among them Else Frenkel-Brunswik. Merleau-Ponty introduces his discussion by citing an article published by Frenkel-Brunswik in 1949 and partially translated in Les Temps Modernes the following year.? Frenkel-Brunswik's article had associated psychological rigidity with an intolerance of ambiguity. This is one of the traits that Adorno et al. also use to

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help identify potentially fascist personalities, and Merleau-Ponty clearly found it provocative given his own interest in ambiguity. Psychological rigidity denotes subjects who dislike "clashing traits" and who prefer definitive answers and simple categories without ambiguity or uncertainty. Even perception, Merleau-Ponty notes, seems to be affected by this predisposition (PP lOO).According to the psychoanalytic account, such subjects are likely to be suffering from psychological turmoil. Their psychological rigidity is a reaction to and defense against anxiety (just as the authoritarian state responds to crises with violence, or as its citizens respond to insecurity by demanding clear rules and strong management, in the mistaken belief that this will restore certainty, guarantee order, and assuage social anxiety). Merleau-Ponty comments on further connections made by FrenkelBrunswik between growing up in an authoritarian family and a tendency to perceive social or moral issues in rigidly dichotomous terms. In particular, he notes (much as the critical theorists do) the prevalence of such types in authoritarian and socially marginal families, which are in turn associated with especially insecure classes: the newly rich in France, the newly poor in the United States. One might have hoped for some analysis of the changing structures of the modern family at this juncture, and it is a pity that Merleau-Ponty was unfamiliar with Erich Fromm's existentially inspired work on the sadomasochistic personality.8 It seems unlikely that he would have followed Adorno's explanation of the oedipal dynamics of personality formation, given existentialists' suspicions about the determining and naturalistic aspects of the Freudian unconscious. But he does share the critical theorists' broad conclusion that the social consequences of psychological rigidity are manifest in authoritarian and racist attitudes, especially where internal aggression is projected (externalized) onto others. AntiSemitism, French racism in North Africa, and misogyny as analyzed by Beauvoir are all cited by him as examples of this externalization process. Merleau- Ponty remarks on a further category of rigid personalities that are "perfectly 'liberal'" inasmuch as they overtly reject racist divisions yet refuse to recognize other differences related to diversity. "There is an abstract or rigid liberalism which consists in thinking that all men are identicar' (PP 106). This rigidity is implicitly aligned with the West's humanist ideology and its prejudices. Although psychological rigidity and racism correlate, Merleau-Ponty argues, the former is more generally associated with the manner in which one holds a political opinion, rather than with its content. A concern here is surely that the very sense of uncertainty Merleau-Ponty associates with the recognition of contingency will engender the conditions of anxiety that encourage vulnerable types to find solace in authoritarianism. Like Fromm or Adorno, he therefore suggests that openness to ambiguity and contingency requires congenial personality types.

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"In subjects whose intellectual ambiguity is strong;' Merleau-Ponty concludes, "it often happens that the emotional foundation is much more stable than in other subjects" (PP 105). Here he draws on Melanie Klein's distinction between a pathological form of infantile ambivalence that leaves psychic conflict unresolved, and an acceptance of ambiguity that signifies maturity (PP 102-3). These latter personalities, Merleau-Ponty concludes, are likely to be "truly liberal" in their tolerance of cultural and historical differences because they accept the complexities of their attitudes. Something of their nature can be further inferred from his account of the child's development by reference to Lacan's mirror stage. Merleau-Ponty diverges from Lacan by his insistence that in a healthy process of maturation, infantile dimensions of the psyche are never closed off entirely. A mature subject is in this sense more like Julia Kristeva's subject-in-process: still in touch with (semiotic) rhythms that speak directly to the body before individuation and the acquisition of language. It can then be surmised that this psychic dialectic of personal and prepersonallevels sustains a degree of familiarity with alterity (the uncanny) that allows more open, liberal types to confront existential insecurity and psychic ambiguity without anxiety, rather as Adorno, Fromm, and Kristeva suggest. This is consonant with Merleau-Ponty's approval of ideologies and regimes that favor openness. It also echoes Kant's identification of the mature individual as one who has the confidence to question authority.

The Critique of Liberalism Modern politics manifests an especially recalcitrant form of rationalism according to Merleau-Ponty. When he called for a "concrete" study of liberal regimes made "on the ground of human relations;' he did so in the belief that liberal systems lack the critical resources or will to appraise their own logic (HT xv). This was an especially urgent task during the Cold War, because Western Europe was being called upon to align itself unequivocally with the United States. Merleau-Ponty felt there was as yet inadequate information about alternative modes of coexistence and an insufficiently critical evaluation of liberalism itself. In particular, he distrusted the way discussion in the West was always undertaken from the perspective of the latter's principles and the fact that nations like France were being called upon to make unequivocal choices within an ambiguous situation. "The right to defend the values of liberty and conscience is ours;' he insisted, "only if we are sure in doing so that we do not serve the interests of imperialism or become associated with its mystifications" (HT xxiii). The task of the critical intellectual was to examine the lived experiences that liberalism entails for its own citizens and for others

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who are affected by the actions of the liberal state (the existentialist analysis), to measure these experiences against its principles (an immanent critique), and to compare it with other regimes on the same existential basis (the phenomenological process). Merleau- Ponty's criticisms of liberal ideology draw mainly on his narrower, pejorative sense of the term. Liberalism is identified here as a form of idealism that rips principles from their material context while reducing politics to impotent moralism or a clash of civilizations. Its dependence on universal principles allows the liberal state to deny its own contingency and violence but to condemn its opponents unequivocally. Merleau-Ponty's concerns here are prescient. "There is already a warlike attitude involved in democratic liberties taken as the sole criterion of judgment upon societies, or in democracies absolved of all the violence they perpetuate here and there because they recognize and at least internally practice the principles of liberty" (HT xlv). Because liberalism remains a primarily moral orientation, Merleau-Ponty argues, it fails to understand itself or its opponents. "Principles are mystifications unless they are put into practice; it is necessary that they animate our relations with others" (PP 25-26). He accuses liberal ideology of hiding the system's violence by operating at the level of formalities and ideals, thereby protecting itself from (self- )criticism and change. As Sonia Kruks observes, Merleau-Ponty not only made the standard Marxist point that liberalism ignores the realm of labor and production, he also noted its failure to recognize the bodily, half-submerged ground out of which values are forged. He realized that liberalism attempts to impose principles it derives from a logical standpoint-a "rationalistic idealization"-rather than from the world itself.9 As a consequence, it remains imprisoned within its own abstractions, which are in turn derived from a raft of unacknowledged presuppositions about human nature. The purpose of questioning such presuppositions was to challenge liberal hypocrisy. In the then -current context this meant by "not ceasing to explicate the liberal mystification wherever it arises-in Palestine, in Indochina, or even in France." Inasmuch as humanist values were universally applauded, they must speak in the name of a practical freedom applicable to all, the Vietnamese or Palestinian as much as the Western individual. "We must remember that liberty becomes a false ensign ... as soon as it becomes only an idea and we begin to defend liberty instead of free men" (HT xxiii-xxiv). MerleauPonty dismisses the humanism that is merely an abstract morality because it ignores the concrete conditions it is implicated in and has no strategy for changing them. This follows from its belief in "the inner man which finds no difficulty in principle in his relationships with others, no opacity whatsoever in the functioning of society. and which replaces political cultivation by moral exhortation" (S 223). The responsibility of intellectuals is accordingly

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to confront the Western democracies with the contradiction between their values and the conditions they condone, because even if their principles are humane, their daily life is not (HT 179-80, 186). Many of their practices are violent and dehumanizing, with the economically exploited and the colonized being particularly obvious victims. "Formal equality of rights and political principles mask rather than eliminate relations based on force. And the political problem is then to institute social structures and real relationships among men such that liberty, equality, and right become effective. The weakness of democratic thinking is that it is less political than moral, since it poses no problem of social structure and considers the conditions for the exercise of justice to be given with humanity" (SNS 103). Simply espousing principles of justice is deemed inadequate unless structural changes are made. This means engaging with material relations of power and privilege, where a good conscience is insufficient and even an obstacle. Keeping one's hands clean is, moreover, "a meek way of ignoring others and ultimately despising them" because it changes nothing (S 217). Once politics is reduced to the morality of the inner self, structural violence remains uncontested. Merleau-Ponty was especially critical in this context of the Kantian liberalism that had dominated prewar France, and which demonstrated the practical shortcomings of Kantian philosophy. It had not wanted to dirty its hands with the kind of compromised acts that politics requires if ideals are to be realized. It had ignored the Machiavellian wisdom that "in historical action, goodness is sometimes catastrophic;' as well as the Marxian insistence that no "effective freedom exists without some power" (S 216; SNS 148). Failing to engage with the complexities of its times and lacking political virtuosity, French liberalism had been paralyzed in the face of adversity. In part, Merleau-Ponty thinks, this stemmed simply from a refusal to be guided by unpalatable facts of which it was in denial, and he admits that this happy consciousness had gripped an entire nation. Reflecting on his generation's wartime experience from the vantage point of 1945, he recognized his own complicity. "We did not know that this was to live in peace, in France, and in a certain world situation." Instead, this dream world without historical or geographical specificity appeared to be "the natural lot of men" (SNS 140). But this bad faith was compounded by Kantian assumptions that ethical subjects are free and autonomous, which overestimate the efficacy of dialogue and the ease of consensus. ''Among Kantian consciousnesses harmony can always be taken for granted" (SNS 32). MerleauPonty describes this "optimistic philosophy, which reduced human society to a sum of consciousnesses always ready for peace and happiness;' as typical of a liberalism that fails to recognize the fragility of its historical supports or that liberties are contingent and hazardous historical constructions that require vigilance.

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Yet even when these liberal idealists are moved to act, Merleau-Ponty believes that they lack the means for interrogating and learning from the complex force field in which they must operate. They play the game of politics poorly because convictions substitute for realistic interpretations. Few are more dangerous, he argues, than those who wish directly to advance to principles and who thus set themselves up as authorities on truth without appreciating the political labyrinth through which values must travel if they are to be realized in practice. This is for him a true politics of the subject, where interiority is severed from the exteriority of embodied, collective life. Hegel's association of the beautiful soul with Jacobean terror ("Kant produces Robespierre"; the French revolutionary terror was "Kant put into practice:' [HT 119, 149]) captures this important truth about Kantian liberalism for Merleau-Ponty: that even when it tries to engage with the world, it is unwittingly but internally allied with violence. It is Machiavelli who recognizes the important difference between the person of good conscience and the actor who exercises moral flexibility and political virtuosity, and who is accordingly able to engage efficaciously in collective life rather than merely suffering the blows of capricious fate. This is why Merleau-Ponty concludes, "Machiavelli is worth more than Kant" (HT 104). For as he never tires of reminding us, "there is no freedom without risk" (S 210). Unfortunately, "violence will not be expelled by locking ourselves within the judicial dream of liberalism" (HT 34). This unrealistic politics is associated with what Merleau-Ponty calls the philosophy of the yogi: the sort of disembodied Cartesian freedom described by Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon and criticized in Humanism and Terror, or Alain's "Politics of Understanding" that appears in Adventures of the Dialectic as representative of the dominant form of French liberalism. In this philosophy, the dense fabric of power relations and mediations that constitute politics is replaced by an opposition between pure conscience and singular events. This "inflexible manner of leaving a pure value and a factual situation face to face" means that such a politics lacks criteria for making strategic decisions about the forces with which it allies. In short, this idealist politics is just as irrational and disoriented as its positivist alternatives, because it is not grounded in real events and conflicts. If liberal ideology exhibits the fault lines of its Cartesian and Kantian heritage, what about liberalism as a mode of coexistence and the mode of beingin-the-world that its idealism expresses? Once one looks beneath its selfpresentation, what is its existential worth as a solution to the problem of peaceful coexistence? Merleau-Ponty's comments in 1947 are sketchy but uncompromising. "Its nature is violent, nor does it hesitate to impose itself through violence in accordance with the old theory of the secular arm" (HT xxiv). Western liberalism rests on the forced labor of the colonies, on smashing strikes, on

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war. It institutionalizes violence and despite its attacks on Soviet terror, it is less vocal when it comes to its own atrocities (HT 1). In postwar America, MerleauPonty notes, anti-Semitism, racism, lynching, and strikebreaking remained endemic (HT 169, 174). In Europe, liberal freedoms were bought at the price of colonial violence. Belgian affluence relied on its African colonies; British democratic socialism depended on global exploitation. Regardless of "how real and precious the humanism of capitalist societies may be for those who enjoy it, it does not filter down to the common man and does not eliminate unemployment, war, or colonial exploitation" (HT 175). A good deal of this violence is blamed by Merleau-Ponty on the capitalist and imperialist systems from which liberal states and values have been historically inseparable. During the 1940s, especially, he accepted that the "Marxist critique of capitalism is still valid" (HT xxi) and consistently presented himself as a critic of "free enterprise:' While he offers no detailed analysis of the market economy, the nub of his antipathy towards it is clear. In exploiting indigenous and colonized proletariats, it reproduces class inequality and abnegates its own humanist principles of recognizing the equal worth of all persons. It falls short of its avowed Kantian imperative to treat others as ends, not means. As Merleau-Ponty wrote in 1947, "One may doubt that all history's violence stems from the capitalist system. But it is difficult to deny that as long as the proletariat remains a proletariat, humanity, or the recognition of man by man, remains a dream or a mystification" (HT 155). Merleau- Ponty accused Gaullism of being antidemocratic and reactionary in its anticommunist fervor, because it closed off certain choices while only pretending to respect opinions contrary to its own (HT 35, 158). Anticommunism, he concluded in 1947, retains the brutality of fascism. If he was able to condemn the French state both for its passivity in the face of fascism and for its bellicosity in light of communism, it was because it neither tried to understand the internal significance of its protagonists' regimes nor assessed the complex field of forces in which they collectively operated. Merleau-Ponty's increasing skepticism towards the communist experiment would nevertheless prompt a realization that the capitalist and communist systems must be judged more strictly on their respective merits. By the mid 1950s, he was concluding that one could only choose according to the relative merits of two flawed regimes. Now "the disgraces of both systems are entered on a complex and 'probabilistic' balance sheet, and a critique of one of the systems cannot by itself ground one's choice of the other" (AD 181). In Adventures of the Dialectic, he argues that the lived situation of the least privileged, and the economy's potential to improve it, must comprise the main criterion for judgment. But this must be confirmed empirically, not evaluated based on economic or philosophical abstractions. "Whether there is a Marxist critique

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of capitalism which is still valid and which is not a moral judgment-this remains to be seen" (AD 180,225,227). If the sociology of communist regimes was "entirely left to be done" (AD 224), however, it now seemed that a similar task was necessary for postwar liberal regimes, too. Unfortunately, Merleau-Ponty would mainly leave this task to others. Given his growing affinity with Weber, he could have paid more attention to the sort of bureaucratic rationalization that postwar liberal states were undergoing, but which he still identified as a primarily communist problem. Again, familiarity with critical theory might have helped him understand liberal capitalism's shifting significance. Instead, his comments would remain critical but very general. Thus 1960 would find him chastising the West for its failure to find a democratic way of managing its economy. An "extraordinary disorder" marks industrialized society, he warns. "Capitalism haphazardly extends its giant branches, puts the economies of nations at the mercy of dominant industries which choke their towns and highways, and destroys the classical forms of the human establishment" (S 4). In the spirit of French socialism, he maintained that if a centralized, bureaucratic economy offered no solution, then a well-regulated one was preferable to the laissez-faire version propounded by liberals. The struggle for control and management of the economic apparatus had become in his view "the order of the day" (S 12). Two decades later, he would probably have agreed with Derrida's identification of ten "plagues of the 'new world order;" although Derrida's account is scarcely less abstract or more phenomenologically robust than Merleau-Ponty's.lO Politically, however, the situation in France did briefly appear more congenial inasmuch as the government of Mendes- France seemed relatively sympathetic to a more open-minded consideration of different systems, and this earned parliamentary socialism Merleau-Ponty's tentative approval. Perhaps liberal politics might after all be uncoupled from unqualified support for capitalism, since "political freedom is not only, and not necessarily, a defense of capitalism:' But the requisite openness would only be possible inasmuch as "capitalism is no longer a rigid system with its politics and its ideologies, and its imperious laws of functioning and if, under cover of its contradictions, another politics than its own can pass" (AD 227). As in the case of political institutions, Merleau-Ponty realized that economic arrangements could not be properly evaluated as long as they were understood ideologically as natural, sacred, or moral, or if they were defended dogmatically in terms of states' interests. The genealogical challenge was to recognize that economies are only provisional solutions to existence, "invented for a definite purpose:' despite finding themselves "little by little burdened with an entirely different function. A complete analysis of this change in meaning has to be made" (AD 227).

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The shift in Merleau-Ponty's political allegiance towards the parliamentary left and Weber's heroic liberalism has encouraged some commentators to infer that this signaled that he had abandoned his antagonism towards liberalism. G. B. Madison, for example, asserts that he now "affirmed his solidarity with the West" and "adhered steadfastly to the essentials of the traditional liberalism of our Western democracies, based as it is on the idea of the autonomous and responsible individual."ll Yet Merleau-Ponty's support for the democratic left remained a provisional response to changing conditions that fell far short of steadfast adherence. The return to ontology prompted by his disillusionment with Marxism would also deepen his objections to the humanist philosophy of the subject that underpins autonomous individualism. In fact, despite his changing political fidelities, Merleau-Ponty's underlying position remained remarkably consistent. What had changed was his political situation, and it was consonant with his phenomenology that this should have summoned a reappraisal of the political forces at work and a reassessment of their potential to practise a less dogmatic politics. Insofar as representative democracy demonstrated an interrogative orientation to open-minded debate, he supported it. But he remained profoundly skeptical that the institutions of the liberal state could sustain such practices. Thus his assertion that "parliament is the only known institution that guarantees a minimum of opposition and truth" is qualified by the recognition that this "is not 'a solution' and we know it full well" (AD 226,227). In 1960, Merleau-Ponty was still noting the continuation of class struggle in the Old and New Worlds while complaining that the new economic climate was rendering "the old way of parliamentary and political life decrepit" (5 12). As his attention moved from the Cold War to the question of France's North African colonies, he worried that the "present is bounded by phantoms:' He was again thinking about a recreation of the French Republic, "free of its rituals and obsessions, in the light;' even while he conceded, "there is little chance of a rebirth of true democracy;' given the play of political forces (5 340, 347). If the crisis into which the French state was plunged demanded a formally liberal solution, with a renewed separation and balance of powers, the problem was that no powers, no action, and no initiatives seemed to exist. Lacking leadership, France seemed to be adrift and in need of political reinvention. "We are living on the leftovers of eighteenth-century thought, and it has to be reconstructed from top to bottom" (5348). Like those of modern science, the state's classical foundations had become quite inadequate. What was needed was not simply parliamentary opposition, but the creation of a new politics. The immediate task Merleau-Ponty set for the parliamentary left was "an effort of enlightenment" vis-a-vis Cold War protagonists, in a situation where "communism's nostalgia and the neurosis of anti-communism

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join forces to promote ... equivocation ... and to forbid any direct and frank view" (AD 224). But on a deeper level, he realized that at best this effort would be fought out using anachronistic ideological tools. "Under the cover of philosophies that date back a century or two, the established powers are building something entirely different. In the vices as in the virtues of the two systems there are so many geographical, historical, or political conditions which intervene that the philosophies they claim are clearly mere ornaments. If we want to abandon our daydreams, we must look at the other thing these ornaments are hiding and put ourselves in a state of methodical doubt in regard to them" (AD 225). A "new liberalism" would jettison its anachronistic ideology and its rigid adherence to capitalism. It would let "even what contests it enter its universe, and it is justified in its own eyes only when it understands its opposition" (AD 226). Yet it seems unlikely that even representative legislatures could maintain the standards of self-doubt and openness that Merleau-Ponty calls for. How to institutionalize a genuine opposition without co-opting or alienating it remains indeed a perennial puzzle for politics, whether parliamentary or revolutionary. In the epilogue to Adventures of the Dialectic, he explains the sense in which he alludes to a new liberalism. "It is not a question of returning to an optimistic and superficial philosophy which reduces the history of a society to speculative conflicts of opinion, political struggle to exchanges of views on clearly posed problems, and the coexistence of men to relationships of fellow citizens in the political empyrean. This kind of liberalism is no longer practiced anywhere" (AD 225). Like the minor rationalism of 1900, the old liberalism was moribund, and Merleau-Ponty laments a failure of imagination in inventing new ways for negotiating collective life. He no longer believed in revolutionary politics as an alternative or panacea to liberal capitalist inertia. But he did recognize that the critical capacities of institutionalized oppositions remain vulnerable, while even the most open parliamentary debate is unlikely to assuage broader negativities that emerge within everyday experience. Realistically, he concluded, "there will be revolutionary movements" and they are even "justified by their own existence, since they are proof that the society in which they arise does not allow the workers to live." He accordingly accepted revolutions, not as an incarnation of historical truth but as a contingent "useful menace, as a continual call to order" (AD 226). If liberals "overestimate the freedom of this world," then "the "barometer of revolution" will say so" (AD 227). MerleauPonty felt it was a pointless exercise in political rationalism to rule out revolutionary violence on solely moral grounds. The task is rather to understand the phenomenology of collective life and to study lacunae in everyday experience. Only when political actors learn to navigate the reversals and folds of the

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political field more adroitly might they actually minimize its endemic violence where positive and negative meet. I will return to this politics in chapter 5.

Rationalism in Politics Postwar criticism of rationalism was not confined to the political left. Liberals like Berlin, economic liberals like Hayek, and conservatives like Oakeshott were also condemning rationalism in politics. They, too, were anxious about a combination of moral perfectionism and social engineering, which they associated with closure, authoritarianism, and a dangerous narrowing of reason. For Berlin, rationalism meant value monism and an authoritarian quest for perfection, which he associated with a tradition stretching from Spinoza via Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx to Stalin. His famous essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" is as much a critique of rationalism as it is a defense of negative liberty. 12 For Hayek, collectivism and centralized economic planning were threatening the individual freedom that nineteenth-century liberalism had championed. Interestingly, he draws on a theory of perception that has marked similarities with Merleau-Ponty's and like him, he identifies rationalism with a dangerous desire to eliminate contingency-to "dispense with the forces which produced unforeseen results"-although in his case, these forces are identified with unregulated markets. 13 Oakeshott's work comes closest to Merleau-Ponty's, inasmuch as he traces modern rationalism back to Bacon and Descartes and to their conviction that the techniques and methods of reason are the sole reliable guides to knowledge and the route to certainty. He, too, fears that such rationalism is closing knowledge off from experience and thus promulgating the illusion that reason can escape contingency, while dooming itself to a repetition that precludes innovation or learning. Oakeshott also recognizes that liberal democracy is a mode of existence as well as a set of ideas, a complex tradition that exhibits a particular, if dangerously instrumental, solution to the problem of coexistence. If he is willing to accord it superior status, this is only because he associates parliamentary government with premodern skepticism regarding perfectionism or transparency.14 What unites all these critiques and lends them an affinity with the left perspective of critical theory or Merleau-Ponty is their fidelity to contingency, openness, and pluralism, plus their conviction that these are under threat from twentieth-century authoritarianism. What is nonetheless distinctive about the leftist version is its insistence that liberalism and communism are equallyexpressive of this rationalism. In Merleau-Ponty's case, he recognized that modern regimes tend to oscillate between moralistic and positivist, subjectivist and

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objectivist extremes, but without being able to reconcile them. This allows him to identify a crisis in modernity's foundations, which is played out across political rivalries and which cannot be resolved by siding with any particular point on the ideological spectrum or by narrowly political or economic solutions. His relentless interrogation of rationalism's presuppositions suggests ontological problems that will have to be addressed if collective life is to be finessed in a more satisfactory manner. It also invites the rejection of solutions predicated on methodological or ethical individualism, simple value pluralism, unregulated (or centrally planned) markets, or nostalgia for premodern institutions. In the end, only a new (non-dualist) ontology and new styles of theoretical and practical reasoning predicated on it could transform modernity's crisis-ridden foundations and its excessive violence. If anxieties about rationalism were prevalent during the mid-twentieth century, are Merleau-Ponty's criticisms of liberalism still relevant some fifty years later? Were they ever in fact generalizable outside France? These are questions his own approach, with its emphasis on the historical and geographical situatedness of the thinker, encourages us to ask. Negative responses would not necessarily invalidate the criticisms he made of postwar French politics, and they might merely suggest to his followers the necessity of applying his interpretive approach to contemporary conditions. But such responses would render his political criticisms very specific and without much purchase on liberalism today, whereas Merleau-Ponty seemed to be advancing rather broader arguments about modernity and its trajectories. Obviously, it is impossible to explore contemporary liberalism in any detail here. But sufficient, if scattered, observations can be garnered to suggest that concerns about liberal rationalism still linger and remain pertinent. For some of his critics, Merleau-Ponty's account of liberalism never did correspond very closely with its main exponents' views and at best seemed too narrowly focused on a particularly idealist form of iLlS Yet liberal political theory, at least, seems more than ever to exemplify a formal, normative approach that is almost entirely severed from considerations of historical or material conditions. This development has been encouraged by the reemergence of Kantian approaches, which have eclipsed earlier revivals of Hegelian or Marxist dialectics. As Richard Rorty notes, "Kant is the philosopher to whom such contemporary liberals as Rawls and Habermas ask us to remain faithfuI:'16 He is also the philosopher to whom poststructuralist thinkers such as Lyotard or the later Foucault have returned. Lamenting the myopia of political theory from the perspective of the new millennium, Raymond Geuss argues that while classical liberalism "did not wish to be an all-encompassing worldview but merely a political program aimed at eliminating specific social and political evils;' it has been hijacked by the "theocratic ethics" of KantianismY

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Summarizing the latter as a "purely normative standpoint» that abstracts "strictly from the real world and the empirical accidents of concrete situations:' Geuss evokes Dewey's warning against "the quest for certainty.»18 Axel Honneth similarly complains that there "is a growing tendency today for social criticism to be practiced in a form that is without a component of sociological explanation:' because it is considered "sufficient to expose certain injustices in society on the basis of well-founded values or norms.»19 All these critics share Merleau-Ponty's concerns about a form of abstract moral reasoning that is cut off from intellectual or practical engagement with the material contingencies of the present. Inasmuch as Merleau-Ponty's political concerns were galvanized by the anachronisms of the postwar French state, he would surely find a depressing familiarity in the regularity with which commentators pronounce the Fifth Republic moribund and in the grip of a profound political malaise due to its entrenched elites, its inability to respond to a plethora of social problems, and its failure to sustain a distinctive form of leftist republicanism in the face of neoliberal challenges and global forces. A contemporary constitutionalist exhorts the state's reinvention in terms strikingly reminiscent of MerleauPonty's when he calls for new political perspectives and instruments that have yet to be invented; a "vast programme, of which not a single element can for the moment be seen on the horizon:'2o The eruption of the banlieues and mass demonstrations by workers and students during 2005-2006 have done nothing to quell this sense of crisis. Outside of France, it is germane to remember that Merleau-Ponty saw both idealist and instrumental approaches as equally rationalistic and that he noted the modern state's tendency to oscillate between them. It is their inability to combine these approaches in a principled pragmatism or enlightened efficacy that undermines their politics. So if commentators argue that modern states have become increasingly dominated by a utilitarian orientation that reduces politics less to ethics than to economics, this does not obviate Merleau-Ponty's critique. It only suggests that aspects of rationalism that he associated more specifically with communist positivism are now applicable to liberal regimes as well. The intensification of rationalizing procedures that ensnare individuals in economic calculations, bureaucratic organizations, and disciplinary processes would have looked familiar. In the liberal state's recent incarnations, too, are we are not witnessing a reversion to the more idealistic Kantian form of politics where moralism and conviction politics flourish?2! It is notable how readily democracy as a moral imperative replaces the difficult task of engaging with a complex, ambiguous field of geopolitical forces. In a world dominated by one superpower rather than two, Merleau-Ponty might have noticed, too, how determination to impose liberal political and economic

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forms on the West's others is still coupled with a denial of liberalism's contingency while it vies with a multicultural relativism whose focus on culture serves ideologically to distract citizens from the material indignities and injustice they quietly endure in their everyday lives. None of these sketchy remarks, Merleau-Ponty might plausibly have argued, adds up to an understanding of late modernity as a lived totality. But together they would surely have suggested to him that so-called postmodern society still remains mired in the rationalist premises and practices of the modern age.

Conclusion In considering Merleau-Ponty's critique of liberalism, I have emphasized his insistence that liberal regimes must be understood and judged as living totalities whose overall signature is a rationalist mode of being-in-the-world. Situating humanist values within this intersubjective lifeworld reveals their particularity and provisional nature. Humanism's contextualization within the liberal capitalist state and its geopolitical activities also shows its affinity with violence and reification. Liberal values emerge here as rationalist abstractions that operate ideologically to prevent the liberal state from understanding itself, its others, or the nature of politics. I criticized Merleau-Ponty's account for remaining too meager in its sociological analysis and suggested that it remains too dependent on nineteenth-century Marxism. But this caveat is only made because he alerts us himself to the importance of grasping the existential dimensions of regimes as these are experienced and navigated within daily coexistence. In this chapter, I considered Merleau-Ponty's use of Marxism and existentialism to develop an immanent critique of liberal humanism. In the next chapter, I will show how his critical engagement with Marxism pushed him towards a deeper criticism of humanism itself.

Notes 1. I initially developed some of these ideas in D. Coole, "The Dialectics of the Real," in Ideology After Postructuralism, ed. S. Malesevic and I. MacKenzie (London: Pluto Press, 2002). 2. Merleau-Ponty's sense of ideology here is rather closer to that of Ernst Bloch than it is to orthodox Marxism. See E. Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986). 3. It is for this reason that Crossley finds Merleau-Ponty's analyses of modern power less useful than those of Foucault or the post-Marxism associated with Laclau and Mouffe, in his Politics of Subjectivity, 66, 97,103.

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4. E. Laclau, "The Impossibility of Society:' Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 7 (I 983): 24. 5. M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 118. 6. J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), Lecture X. 7. T. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950). Merleau-Ponty cites his sources as two articles by Frenkel-Brunswik in Journal of Personality, one of which ("Some Personality Factors in Anti-Semitism") was partially translated and published in Les Temps Modernes 60 (October 1950). 8. E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Avon Books, 1941). Fromm's own analysis draws heavily on Sartre's work on freedom. 9. S. Kruks, Political Philosophy, 67 10. J. Derrida, Specters of Marx (London and New York: Routledge, 1994),81-82. 11. G. B. Madison, The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and Themes (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1988),72. 12. 1. Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty" in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 13. F. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1944), 15. See also Busch and Gallagher, Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, 100-1, n. 16. 14. M. Oakeshott, "Scientific Politics:' in Religion, Politics, and the Moral Life, ed. T. Fuller (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 109. Quoted by P. Franco in "Oakeshott, Berlin, and Liberalism:' Political Theory 31, no. 4 (August 2003): 499. I have leaned towards Franco's interpretation of Oakeshott's critique of rationalism in my own argument. 15. See for example Kruks in Political Philosophy, 67-68, 73-74; Whiteside, Mer-

leau-Ponty and the Foundation of an Existential Politics, 103-4. 16. R. Rorty, "The Sunlit Uplands:' London Review of Books 24, no. 21 (October 31, 2002): 15. 17. R. Geuss, "Liberalism and Its Discontents:' Political Theory 30, no. 3 (June 2002): 333. 18. Geuss, "Liberalism and Its Discontents:' 329, 330. 19. A. Honneth, "The Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory:' in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. F. Rush (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004),345. 20. Y. Meny writing in Le Monde following the 2002 French elections and quoted by J. Wolfreys in his analysis of the crises besetting the contemporary French state in J. Wolfreys, ''A Grin without a Cat: The French Right Returns to Office:' Radical Philosophy 115 (September/October 2002): 2. 21. See J. Bennett and M. Shapiro, The Politics of Moralizing (London and New York: Routledge, 2002) and W. Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), chap. 2. Brown equates recent liberal democratic moralism with (Nietzschean) ressentiment and political righteousness as responses to political impotence.

3 Adventures and Misadventures of the Dialectic

N THE LAST CHAPTER, I RECONSTRUCTED Merleau-Ponty's rather sketchy observations about liberalism. His politics is probably better remembered, however, for its interventions during the Cold War and for the criticisms of communism and Marxism in which they culminated. This can seem like the aspect of his work that has least stood the test of time, but my aim in this chapter will be to show its enduring relevance as an example of the kind of political engagement he advertised. The chapter falls into two related parts. In the first part, I present MerleauPonty's seemingly tortuous analysis of communist regimes as exemplifying the kind of critical reflexivity he associated with the public intellectual. We also learn more here about his views on the art of politics and the ontology of the political, as well as finding another example of political rationalism at work. l The second part investigates Merleau-Ponty's theoretical engagement with Marxism and dialectics. While he explored some of the intimate linkages between Marxist philosophy and communist practices, he would eventually trace the latter's failings to a residual rationalism within Marx's own work and track the failure of successive dialectics to their inability to avoid philosophical dualism. It was this discovery, I will argue, that motivated the return to ontology and the turn to anti-humanism.

I

Like many of his generation, Merleau-Ponty had hoped that postrevolutionary societies in Eastern European might put in place the material conditions -63-

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and political processes needed for humanist progress. He was also convinced that dialectical reasoning, with its insistence on the historicity and reciprocity of ideas and material conditions, represented the solution to rationalism. So both existentially and philosophically, he had invested a good deal in Marxism as the route out of modernity's crisis. Discovering that the politics it inspired and the ontology it presupposed were both profoundly implicated in rationalism would result in some painful self-criticism, but also in a salutary deepening of his phenomenological investigations. The critiques of communism and liberalism are structurally similar. This is not surprising since the two regimes were in many ways mirror images of one another and represented the two sides of modern rationalism. MerleauPonty noted how liberals unfavorably compared communist realism with their own humanist morality, whereas communists dismissed liberal ethics as bourgeois ideology that legitimizes socioeconomic injustices. Yet if "the moral man does not want to dirty his hands" and politics is impossible on this basis, it is "necessary from the start to recognize as a moral claim the Communist's preoccupation with the role of objective factors" (SNS 147; HT 22). Merleau-Ponty's observations convinced him that in collective life the dualism of ideal values and material consequences is unsustainable in principle. Regimes that fail to integrate these domains are doomed to play out the tragic consequences of their severance. As a corollary, he was also trying to understand the choreography of the political interworld where these two dimensions are entwined and to elicit from it a less violent or "chronic" way of making history.

Communism as an Emerging Mode of Coexistence Communist regimes best exemplified the objectivist side of rationalism for Merleau-Ponty. The instrumental rationality demonstrated by their approach towards social and economic reconstruction was complemented by a causal account of history, and both these aspects of their objectivism were treated in a scientific way. Yet in both cases, he argued, what communists were actually practising was a politics of the subject dressed up in an ideology of objective truth. Their use of Marxism was then entirely ideological: "not a philosophy of history-but Kant in disguise" (AD 232). Given the utilitarian and bureaucratic tendencies of the postwar liberal state, there were clearly affinities between the two regimes. What Merleau-Ponty might therefore have hoped to bequeath to liberal intellectuals is an interest in rediscovering existential significance in the communist experiment (1917-1989) that outruns its dismissal as simply totalitarian.

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He was himself fascinated with this still quite novel regime, because he felt its significance as a new kind of lifeworld remained ambiguous and unstable. His critics sometimes present him as a rather naive apologist for Stalinism, but what he was actually practising was a phenomenological inquiry into communism's emerging style of coexistence. As we have seen, he was sympathetic to the Marxist argument that humanist values must translate into material conditions and so he was sympathetic in principle to the communist project. But like liberalism, it had to be measured according to its real achievements. The real question was therefore whether communism as it actually existed was "still equal to its humanist intentions" (HT xviii). What was at issue was not whether it was fulfilling a historical destiny, but whether history was being made in a reasonable way: that is, by interrogating sedimented structures of power and ideological presuppositions, reflecting on strategies in light of principles for constructing a materially more egalitarian society, and communicating with the masses who make history as the unintended outcome of everyday acts of resistance and desire. "The question is then to know whether the struggle is still a Marxist struggle, whether we are not witnessing a separation of the subjective and objective factors that Marx wishes to unite in his conception of history" (HT 123, n. 22). Merleau-Ponty was already skeptical when he wrote Humanism and Terror in 1947. He acknowledged that it "becomes possible, on the basis of facts that as far as we can establish are correct, to construct a picture of Soviet life which is the opposite of proletarian humanism" (HT 136). Yet he still insisted that this picture remained unclear, varying according to one's ideological perspective. If the crucial test of a Marxist society was the relationship between the economy and proletarian power, then the Soviet case still seemed too "complex" and "occult" to be judged definitively. Furthermore, even if emergent communist regimes were not in accordance with Marxist humanism, neither did they seem simply to be replicating capitalist hierarchy. So in the complex balance sheet of relative progress, Merleau-Ponty wanted to gauge what sort of novel "human bond" was developing and what its prospects might be (HT 138-41). He wondered whether "we shall see a new type of society, which has yet to be studied" (HT 142) and demanded investigations of non-Soviet communist states, such as Romania or Yugoslavia, where structural problems were being tackled and an ambiguous mix of progress and reactionary elements could be discerned. As he would later point out, his hopes were increasingly pinned on such non-Soviet models and on a more democratic mode of politics that just might be practised by a working class that had no interest in defending traditional privileges or in the obfuscations on which they rely. Proletarian success would, from this point of view, be marked not by a seizure of power as such, but by an immanent self-transformation of society

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achieved under historically specific conditions. This is why Lefort suggests that the working class occupies a similar role in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of history to that of the body-subject in his theory of perception. 2 Both emerge contingently over time, interpreting and transforming themselves from within through an immanent negativity. If the workers might have presaged a more humanistic style of relationships, this was not because they have a historical mission-that would be pure rationalism-but inasmuch as their collective agency was emerging under material conditions where solidarity and shared suffering might have engendered a new social ethos with an unusual degree of solidarity and reflexivity. Merleau-Ponty ascribes the praxis associated with it to an order of "communication, exchange, and association" where the present works itself out. Praxis is not then merely instrumental or pragmatic action directed towards an end, but an interdependence of means and ends, being and doing: a "manner" of existing (AD 50, 57; PNP 93). It suggests a dialectical way of making history. Any regime created in the name of the working class would have to be assessed according to the style of its interpersonal relations and collective practices, and praxis suggests a normative criterion for cautious optimism. Even when he was closest to Marxism, Merleau-Ponty admitted that "the pure proletariat" remained a "limit case" that must not be invoked idealistically (HT 117). But in 1947, the existence of an exploited and dehumanized class remained for him an index of Marxism's validity as critique, and the proletariat a possible agency of the praxis that represented a crucial test of communist politics. He was adamant that any ideal must find material support in potential social forces and that socioeconomic as well as political inequality must be challenged. Political style and material outcomes were both important but also inextricable, and this is what the conception of praxis is intended to convey. If it is politically democratic, it suggests something of the discursive process located by Habermas within civil society. But in addition to intersubjective deliberation (a subject-subject relationship), praxis also requires a more militant intervention in the way material, and especially economic, life is organized (the subject-object relationship) while suggesting a postbourgeois style of coexistence. It was according to such criteria that Merleau-Ponty's assessment of communism changed. As more facts and statistics emerged and postrevolutionary practices became routinized, everyday life assumed a more distinctive pattern. The class background of the Soviet elite, wage levels, laws on abortion and family life, and renewed religious support all pointed in the same direction: towards reestablishing prerevolutionary ideology and privilege coupled with a postrevolutionary version of rationalist domination in the form of bureaucratic positivism. Weber, whose Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is

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cited at length in Adventures of the Dialectic, had already described bureaucracy as the organizational equivalent of philosophical rationalism and explicitlyassociated it with the sort of calculating reasoning and uncritical, nihilistic attitudes that Husserllinks to positivism. For Weber, too, bureaucracy and its political equivalents represent a fatal splitting of means and ends, formal and substantive reason, and when he refers to the "mechanized petrification" it brings, this is precisely the configuration Merleau-Ponty now saw emerging in Eastern Europe. It is not then surprising that he quotes Weber's poignant anticipation of "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart:'3 This is an ethos quite at odds with dialectical or democratic praxis. Merleau-Ponty discerns a similar danger in Hegel's endorsement of state bureaucrats as the universal class-an identity explicitly but ironically ascribed by Marx to the proletariat, in the name of whose universal suffering a new bureaucracy was now being erected. What Marx took from Hegel in Capital, Merleau-Ponty argues, was his rationalism, now "used for the benefit of "matter" and "ratios of production:' which are considered as an order in themselves, an external and completely positive power" (AD 63). Remarking on Lenin's understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat, MerleauPonty wonders whether this is not "very close to the Hegelian concept of the state, that is, a system which in the last analysis reserves to a few the role of subjects of history, the rest remaining the objects of this transcendental will" (HT lO7). Hegel's officials already "survey history's meaning for everyone else and create humanity through force and war. In a word, Hegel institutionalizes Terror" (HT 150). From this perspective, Hegel is no better than Kant. This, then, was the reality manifest in Soviet practice, where the present was seen naturalistically as the outcome of a chain of causes and effects rather than as a dialectical milieu to be interpreted and changed from within. Collectivization and centralized planning had become fetishes (AD 84). Society was now understood as a second nature, controlled by the same technical procedures and judged by the same criteria of efficiency as first nature. Transformative praxis was replaced by merely mechanical technique-"the type of action a technician would make, like that of an engineer who builds a bridge" (AD 63,95). Politics was replaced by the administration of things, because a process that proceeds via communication and explanation involving the masses becomes frustratingly inefficient and dangerously contingent. If this reified bureaucratic procedure resembles the future predicted by Weber rather than Marx, for Merleau-Ponty it only marks another twist in the itinerary of rationalism in action. He realizes that all modern regimes combine a will to dominate first and second nature with an idealist ideology that justifies their acts in the name of higher values. This is the constellation that throws modernity into crisis, since in its instrumental aspects it is unable to evaluate its

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technocratic means or its broader ends, while a moralizing or determinist understanding of society and history is unable in either case to guide the implementation of values. Yet it was precisely this dilemma that dialectics since Hegel had tried to overcome by insisting on the interweaving of subjective and objective factors. It is why their split was so disappointing, especially in the Marxian dialectic that promised to bring ethical life into being by instantiating it within a society that is materially egalitarian as well as abundant. By 1950, any benefit of the doubt Merleau-Ponty had accorded to communist regimes on the basis of their needing to respond to prerevolutionary exigencies had been replaced by a recognition not only that their signature was one of bureaucratic rationalism, but also that their repressive apparatus had become institutionalized as terror. In "The USSR and the Camps:' he acknowledges that "if there are ten million concentration camp inmates-while at the other end of the Soviet hierarchy salaries and standard of living are fifteen to twenty times higher than those of free workers-then quantity changes into quality. The whole system swerves and changes meaning; and in spite of nationalization of the means of production, and even though private exploitation of man by man and unemployment are impossible in the U.S.S.R., we wonder what reasons we still have to speak of socialism there" (S 265). As one might anticipate from Merleau-Ponty's reading of Machiavelli, he does not simply rule out the use of violence on moral grounds, provided it is used strategically and reflexively to overcome a greater structural violence. But it must be deployed self-critically, openly, and in light of an ongoing public interpretation both of its rationale and of its changing significance. Above all, it must never be used hypocritically, disguised as something else, or justified by transcendental laws or values. Once institutionalized, revolutionary violence became merely terror. When a regime demonizes rather than recognizes its opponents it "foreswears its own audacity and its own hope" (HT xxv, n. 4). Terror for Merleau-Ponty is violence used by the state as its modus operandi, and he saw how this had become institutionalized as a substitute for a more communicative, reflexive politics. It differed from revolutionary violence inasmuch as the latter uses its violence economically, continuously reassessing its justification and significance relative to its ends. But Merleau-Ponty saw how readily abstract humanist values can become complicit with state terror and he began increasingly to recognize, too, that revolution as a political means is inimical to self-criticism or acknowledgment of contingency. It is difficult to justify using violence against persons for merely relative and only probable ends. Yet how had hierarchy and terror resulted from "so much lucidity, intelligence, and sacrifice"? What does this tell us about the nature of the political? It would be facile to blame it on a few evil individuals, and Merleau-Ponty al-

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ways insists on distinguishing communist terror from fascist brutality. The explanation he proffers is that the fledgling Bolshevik regime had surrendered its self-critical reflexivity under pressure from events and had been diverted by its ideological commitment to historical Truth. In Machiavellian terms, it had been overwhelmed by fortuna because it had exercised insufficient virtu. "It seems probable that the evolution which leads from October 1917, to millions of slaves, and which beneath the permanence of forms or words gradually changes the system's meaning, happened little by little without deliberate intention, from crisis to crisis and expedient to expedient, and that its social significance escapes its own creators ... They go on without understanding that the undertaking is changing beneath their hands (S 266). Unable to respond to its changing situation or to exercise sufficient flexibility, the leadership had ceased communicating with the masses or trying to understand the ambiguous vectors of their situation. Instead, it had resorted to a mixture of expediency and idealism, where its materialism was "scarcely dialectical at all" (S 267). If the party's actions were justified by appeals to historical truth, this remained in fact a subjectivist politics because "nothing in the facts points in an obvious way to the time when one should bow before them or, on the contrary, do violence to them" (HT 93). The logic of history had still to be interpreted and by ascribing to it objective laws severed from experience, this vulgar materialism foreclosed the processes of interrogation and verification that dialectical practice requires. So "realism ends by substituting a simple schema of progress for the difficult reading of the anticipations and delays of history and for the rigorous examination of revolutionary society" (AD 71). In considering Merleau-Ponty's judgments on communist regimes, I have tried to reconstruct the logic that underpins his critique. What he was investigating was the way such regimes play out the political consequences of modernity's founding presuppositions. Philosophical rationalism does not of course cause political failure, nor can the latter simply be deduced from the former. But ontological presuppositions are replicated in collective life, where ideas become diffused across lifeworlds as taken-for-granted horizons for thought and action and a particular orientation is manifest across different dimensions of experience. The problems Merleau-Ponty had identified with mind-body or subject-object dualisms are lived out and worked out in social relations; they are not simply textual puzzles for theorists. In the case of communism, he saw how such oppositions operate on a variety of levels, ranging from an instrumentalist approach to nature and a determinist understanding of history to an ideological politics rendered impotent by the adversity of political forces with which it was unable and unwilling to engage. A broken "dialectic in action responds to adversity either by means of terror exercised in the name of a hidden truth or by opportunism" (AD 95). Any

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belief that history's laws of development can be grasped rationalistically from a position outside history, much less anticipated and imposed upon a recalcitrant population, mistakes the nature of historicity itself. For history, according to Merleau-Ponty, is an ongoing process that emerges where collective action takes shape from a plethora of acts and communications. This is the intersubjective interworld, the political flesh whose ontology he was trying to grasp. In trying to make sense of communism as it took form, Merleau-Ponty was trying to assess its significance within this shifting field from a position that was itself self-consciously situated within it.

Negotiating the Field of Cold War Politics While he was concluding on the basis of his phenomenological inquiries that communist societies were failing to create a more humane mode of coexistence, Merleau-Ponty was also aware of a second, reflexive level on which the engaged philosopher must act. His judgments were not after all made or presented within some isolated intellectual domain, but occurred in a political situation in which power relations were constantly changing and to which his own interventions contributed. His careful negotiation between criticism and commitment had acquired new meaning once it entered the public realm and it was therefore necessary periodically to reappraise it to ensure that concepts or positions did not become reified or anachronistic. This is where political flesh folds back over itself. If in -1947 it had still seemed feasible to look for signs of relative progress in communist regimes, this wait-and-see attitude was no longer tenable when Merleau-Ponty wrote Adventures of the Dialectic during 1953-1954 (AD 228). The political situation that brought his concerns to a head was the Soviet Union's role in the Korean War, which he interpreted as the act of a nationalist and imperialist power. This was also the occasion for his political quarrel with Sartre, who remained a communist sympathizer. This quarrel has been examined in considerable detail. 4 Lydia Goehr summarizes the interlocking facets of their political disagreement succinctly: "In 1953, against the complex background of a severe disagreement over editorial policy for Les Temps Modernes, the Korean War, their continuing theoretical allegiance to a humanist Marxism in the face of its Soviet corruption, and the demand that they respond as "public intellectuals" to concrete political situations, Merleau-Ponty enters into a private correspondence of urgent but courteous recriminations regarding the choice between involvement and retreat (and whether in fact it is a genuine retreat):'s Like many who have been fascinated by their argument, Goehr focuses on Sartre's complaint that Merleau-Ponty's refusal to write more about these

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events in the face of their obdurate brutality was a relinquishment of his responsibilities as an intellectual and on Merleau-Ponty's apparent retreat into silence on political events. But it is important to put this silence in context. Merleau-Ponty's approach means that events have to be understood in context and over time. He merely reiterates a longstanding view when he tells Sartre that too immediate a response to every event is bad faith and that "comprehensive studies" are preferable to "hastily taken positions:'6 The intellectual has to sustain some distance in order to discern emergent patterns and underlying presuppositions, a patience he had counseled from the start regarding communism. The war in Korea obliged Merleau-Ponty to reflect on how changing conditions had altered the significance of his arguments. Under conditions of war, the critical and nonaligned space he had formerly occupied had disappeared and, with it, the opportunity for hesitant sympathy. As philosophical nuances of ambiguity and patience were swallowed up in the either/or politics of war, equivocation looked like support. "Marxist wait and see became communist action" (AD 229, 230). Yet Merleau-Ponty's overall position remained entirely consistent here. He had always warned against allowing political loyalties to become dogmatic fidelities. To avoid this, they must constantly be questioned and revised. His abiding commitment was, after all, to the critical reflexivity he associated with a dialectical way of making history and to the forces that might practise this, not to the communist state per se. This was also the basis on which he had lent provisional support to parliamentary politics. He had explicitly resisted the Manicheanism whereby criticism of one regime becomes by default an endorsement of its opponent. But it was just this space that had now closed down as a position from which to speak. While American anticommunism had jettisoned "every kind of radical temper" by using its anticommunism to avoid self-criticism (lacking "any political ideas" beyond American prosperity and world hegemony, the United States was refusing to evaluate its own shortcomings although "the colonies are the democracies' labor camps" [S 268-70]), the communists emulated this closure. The Communist Party's uncompromising attitude towards noncommunists and its unwillingness to negotiate with its others was paralyzing democratic debate even in France. In Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty had eschewed the stark opposition of Cold War choices, asserting that it was "impossible to be an anti-Communist and it is not possible to be a Communist" (HT xxi). Now it was necessary to commit oneself explicitly to not being a communist, a position that was subtly but importantly different from anticommunism and associated in Adventures of the Dialectic with a form of agnosticism that translated into support for the noncommunist left.

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If the discursive space Merleau-Ponty had formerly occupied no longer existed, then equally important was the demise of its political equivalent. His hesitation, he now explained, had been tied to real geopolitical possibilities in "neutral zones" like Czechoslovakia and Korea, where a nonaggression pact had operated. He had still spoken in 1947, too, of the "permanent possibility in every country of a proletarian movement" and urged "waiting for a fresh historical impulse which may allow us to engage in a popular movement without ambiguity" (HT xxiii, 158). Concrete liberty could, he insisted, have formed the platform of the French Communist Party after the war, and its failure had been to surrender dialectical intervention to dogmatic support for the Soviet state (HT xxvi). As he would summarize these earlier views in

Adventures, However "grand" Soviet "politics" may have been, we observed that the struggle of communist parties is in other countries the struggle of the proletariat as well, and it did not seem impossible that Soviet politics might be brought back to the ways of Marxist politics. We said that the U.S.S.R. is not the power of the proletariat, but the Marxist dialectic continues to play its role throughout the world. It jammed when the revolution was limited to an underdeveloped country, but one feels its presence in the French and Italian labor movements ... Since adherence to communism was, we thought, impossible, it was all the more necessary to have a sympathetic attitude which would protect the chances of a new revolutionary flow ... let us watch for the signs of a renewal of proletarian politics, and let us do what we can to help it. (AD 228-29)

Merleau-Ponty's political position here had not been unusual among Western Marxists. Max Horkheimer had called in 1940 for a similar suspension of judgment while fledgling communist societies worked through the exigencies of their difficult emergence.? But Merleau-Ponty recognized that such hopes could not indefinitely ignore concrete developments unless one retreated into the sort of idealism he identified with Sartre. He had always insisted that "we ought to define a concept of communism, a method and style of Communist action, to know by and large where we are going and why:' while adding that a regime deserves the title of communist only "if it advances toward community and communication, not towards hierarchy" (HT 146). To meet these criteria, communists would have needed to place their actions in context and to show how their violence and hierarchy differed from mere opportunism or "a kind of neo-Communist pragmatism:' They would have had to abandon the privilege they claimed of advancing historical truth and "secularize" their commitments. Under these conditions, an agnostic response from their critics would also have been appropriate, beginning with "the promise to examine, without fervor and without disparagement, all that one can

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know" about Soviet society. "Agnosticism, despite the word, is here a positive behavior, a task:' even if it "remains to be clarified what politics can be deduced from this position" (AD 184-85). This had in fact been Merleau-Ponty's position throughout and it is the task he accords the intellectual: to "define a practical stance of comprehension without adherence, of free study without disparagement" (HT 148). But in the brutality and arrogance of war, no one seemed to be listening to such reflections and Merleau-Ponty concludednotably in the context of writing further political editorials for Les Temps Modernes--that silence on more immediate events was, for the time being at least, the only option. As the 1950s advanced, communism more typically became the choice of semicolonial or premodern regimes as a route to modernization, rather than a stage in the fulfillment of a historical telos. As its significance shifted again, so did fresh existential questions arise regarding communism's relative merits and its "real contours" as a solution to problems of coexistence (AD 224). As Khrushchev's program of de-Stalinization proceeded into the 1960s, MerleauPonty continued to encourage "sharp eyes to see that Soviet society is getting involved in another epoch" and evolving new but as yet unrecognizable forms of power (S 5). If, after 1989, communist regimes would undergo changes that were more fundamental, he would surely have advised a similar project of discovering the lived directions, ethos, and potential of Eastern European states by trying to interpret them from within, rather than through the ideological lenses (and practical interests) of the West or through anachronistic assumptions associated with Soviet Marxism. In exploring Merleau-Ponty's analysis of communism and his engagement with Cold War politics, I have tried to situate his particular judgments in the context of a general approach that I find enduringly relevant. I have suggested here that it is precisely his immersion in his times and his determination to make sense of their changing trajectories and lived significance that defines his investigations as those of the engaged philosopher. Such a role entails an interrogative stance and critical distance, but it also eschews relativism. It does not shy away from making judgments, but it does so by interpreting empirical evidence about the way populations live together and the typical structure of their everyday lives. It investigates the deeper ontology that underwrites different lifeworlds. It acknowledges the provisional and situated nature of its conclusions and is prepared to revise them in light of new information and changing contexts. Merleau-Ponty's insistence that theoretical frameworks and political commitments must be interrogated (and if necessary revised) as the field of political forces shifts equally eschews mere opportunism or pragmatism and conviction politics. This politics surely remains as urgent a task in the twenty-first century as it was during the Cold War.

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The Critique of Marxism If Merleau-Ponty's political reorientation was a response to shifts in the geopolitical field that closed the more neutral space he had tried to inhabit, there was another space that had also been evacuated, and its consequences were far more radical for him. This was the intellectual space of Marxism. He had always been critical of the more determinist version of Marxism, the origins of which he detected in the later writings. Inasmuch as he recognizes an epistemic break around 1845, his loyalty is therefore the reverse of the structuralist one represented by Althusser.8 His adherence to Marxism had always been to the young, Hegelian Marx. But Merleau-Ponty now began to suspect that flawed ontological and anthropological presuppositions resided even in this apparently more dialectical Marx and were responsible for errors in the later work. He thus moved from his original division-between a good, dialectical Marx and a poor, rationalist one-to a new distinction wherein the young idealist Marx and the later realist one are associated with rationalism and both versions are opposed to a hyperdialectics consonant with the chiasms of flesh. If the Marxian dialectic was thoroughly contaminated by vestiges of rationalism, this explained why Marx's philosophical heirs had found themselves, like Marx himself and like the communist state inspired by his philosophy, playing out the vicissitudes of realism and idealism rather than advancing dialectically. This made Merleau-Ponty doubt that any future revolution made in Marx's name would be successful in realizing its humanism: there is "something in the critique itself that germinates the defects in the action" (AD 231). "To say, as we did, that Marxism remains true as a critique or negation without being true as action or positively was to place ourselves outside history, and particularly outside Marxism, was to justify it for reasons which are not its own, and, finally, was to organize equivocalness. In history, Marxist critique and Marxist action are a single movement" (AD 231). If Merleau-Ponty had privileged Marxism, this was because he believed it went further than any other approach in exploring the labyrinth of intersubjective life. But its failure to sustain negativity at the ontological, theoretical, or political levels suggested that it had not gone far enough. Having examined the reasons for this failure, he would conclude that it was necessary to return to ontology, to locate negativity at this most fundamental level of Being, and to rethink from the beginning the practices associated with dialectical reasoning. In the process, he would be obliged to eliminate residual elements of Cartesianism from his own work. But it would be a mistake to claim that Merleau-Ponty simply abandoned Marxism or dialectics in his later work. The task that emerges at the end of Adventures of the Dialectic is one of reappraisal rather than rejection tout court.

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Merleau-Ponty's interrogation of Marxism provides a fine illustration of his phenomenological strategy of working through successive levels of analysis until he arrives at their ontological presuppositions. Having recognized failings inherent in communist practice, he investigates lapses in dialectical thinking among its ideologues. Lukacs, Lenin, Trotsky, and Sartre are the key figures here. While the middle two figures are found to introduce realist aberrations, the last brings full circle the idealism that Lukacs (and MerleauPonty) had found in Hegelian Marxism. The next task would therefore be to investigate whether these idealist assumptions can be traced to the young Marx, and to see whether these are in turn derived from the Hegelian dialectic or were introduced by Marx himself. The critiques of Lenin and Trotsky can be dealt with quite briefly, since the outline of Merleau-Ponty's antipathy towards the metaphysical materialism or naturalism he associates with their objectivism was considered in chapter 1. Naturalism is an offshoot of Cartesian ism that explains history as it does the natural, causal world, where "man is nothing but an effect of nature and ... driven by external causes, he cannot claim responsibility or impose it on himself» (AD 75). Merleau-Ponty argues that such an assumption is evident in Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism, which affirmed dialectical materialism by espousing a predialectical sense of materialism. According to the latter, external reality causally reproduces itself as images in the brain, a position Merleau-Ponty had already dismissed in his studies of perception. When Lenin presumed separation yet coincidence of subject and object, he placed history in the mode of understanding appropriate for the physical world, which locates "the knowing subject outside the fabric of history.» Thus, he subscribed to a representational (correspondence) theory of truth. Dialectics is no longer negativity here, but "a massive positivity.» Although Merleau-Ponty acknowledges that Lenin subsequently returned to a more Hegelian dialectics and renounced this crude ontology, he is nevertheless left with a number of concerns. First, he thinks that communism did actually institutionalize this positivist, determinist sense of materialism. Second, while conceding that Lenin's work might have been merely a tactical maneuver designed to furnish communism with the simple ideology needed in a precapitalist country, Merleau-Ponty doubts the wisdom or efficacy of using a precritical epistemology to advance the dialectic. This leads him, finally, to the worrying conclusion that if Lenin felt obliged to play so fast and loose with Marxism, then some internal difficulty must reside within the latter (AD 59-62,68). Trotsky had already been discussed in Humanism and Terror, in a chapter entitled "Trotsky's Rationalism.» Merleau-Ponty had chided his refusal to recognize history's ambiguity or therefore to interpret its possibilities in

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terms of his situation. As a consequence, his thinking "becomes rationalistic and his ethics become Kantian" (HT 74, 79). By working for a future predicated on desire rather than one engendered by working through the contingencies of the present, the violence he sanctioned became illegitimate (HT 80). These are flaws Merleau-Ponty also attributes to Sartre. In Adventures, however, Merleau-Ponty takes Trotsky as an exemplary figure of the genuine dilemmas that communism faced in practice. He is the nemesis of Lenin's theoretical ambivalence. Merleau-Ponty recognizes that if "there is a theoretical equivocalness of materialism and of dialectic, it should appear in action; and by finding it again there, we shall obtain an indispensable crosscheck" (AD 74). When it came to action, he suggests, Trotsky was sensitive to dialectical complexity and was never merely mechanistic or instrumental. He had realized that in revolutionary action, the means must be conducive to their ends and the ends must themselves be constantly reassessed. The process had therefore to be explained to the working class as it unfolded, since communism could only be made with its participation and assent. This is of course Merleau-Ponty's own position. But he concludes that Trotsky's exemplary revolutionary dialectics was sabotaged by the undialectical philosophy predicated on naturalism. This "naturalist myth" can sustain a variety of moral positions and for Trotsky, as for Lenin, it supported his humanism. But for Merleau-Ponty, it is a counterproductive myth since it cannot offer any guidance for acting within the messy contingencies of the present. This is precisely what Trotsky's conundrum demonstrates. In order to challenge the revolution's degeneration he would have had to resist its theoretical justification, which put the dialectic in things. But then he would have had to admit the contingency of history and to surrender his justification for revolutionary violence. Nor was the problem his alone: "more than in Trotsky, the contradiction and the ambiguity are in the Russian Revolution and, ultimately, in Marx's realism" (AD 85). It is thus the objectivism presumed by a naturalist theory of society and a determinist account of history-both of which rely on the knowledge of a disengaged (Cartesian) subject who surveys objective laws and posits collective agency-that undermine the Marxist dialectic in practice. This suggested to Merleau-Ponty that dialectics and ontology require fundamental reconsideration, in particular regarding the negativity that generates change. The challenge here was to avoid equating the negative with consciousness, which would not restore the dialectic but simply espouse a form of idealism. What was needed instead was an appreciation of immanent negativity. This is why the philosophical debate with Sartre was so crucial.

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The Problem of the Negative It is at the end of the dialectic's adventures that Merleau-Ponty encounters Sartre. Because of their professional relationship and common intellectual heritage, Sartre is Merleau-Ponty's most worthy but troublesome interlocutor and one to whose work he returns time and again. By positioning Sartre at the end of the dialectic's rupturing, Merleau-Ponty recognizes-in the long concluding chapter of Adventures entitled "Sartre and Ultrabolshevism"-both that the fundamentals of dialectics will have to be rethought and that this will require a profound engagement with Sartre's errors. It is therefore no accident that this critique is complemented by a lengthy discussion of Sartre's philosophy of the negative in The Visible and the Invisible, immediately prior to the introduction of an exemplary "hyperdialectics:' More significant than their political disagreement but underlying it, there is a profound philosophical disagreement between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre that concerns negativity, dialectics, and ontology. In Adventures, Merleau-Ponty discusses Sartre's The Communists and the Peace (originally published in Les Temps Modernes during 1952) and applauds its phenomenological approach to communism as a study that describes what it is actually doing, as opposed to its ideological self-presentation. ''As a description of existing communism, Sartre's anti dialectic appears to us to be hardly questionable" (AD 165). But Sartre gives the game away: he faithfully records communism's retreat into idealism, but what he discovers there is a rationalism that mirrors his own. When he articulates the truth of Stalinism, he expresses his own idealism. Merleau-Ponty concludes that Sartre moves on the terrain of morality rather than of history. He replaces the dialectic with voluntarism-"absolute creation amidst the unknown"-and envisages the creation of humanist society ab initio, without tracing its supports within existing historical forces. This moral commitment is quite different, MerleauPonty insists, from political commitment, which requires not "only our good will and our choice but our knowledge, our labor, our criticism, our preference, and our complete presence" (AD 232). Sartre's idealist dialectic is traced back by Merleau-Ponty to his Cartesian ontology. His political dualism of will and history only replicates the dualism that had structured Being and Nothingness, where the pour-soi of consciousness as pure negativity had confronted the unbroken plenitude of the en-soi, the indifferent objectivity of the in-itself. Unable to cross the gulf between them, the Sartrean subject imposes its projects on the world through acts of unadulterated freedom and, where it remains in good faith, it proceeds in a permanent ferment of creative transcendence. Sartre cannot then sustain the

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dialectic because there is no mediation by things in this philosophy of the cogito. Consciousness intervenes historically only as a "sovereign legislator" and Sartre himself remains on an abstract ethical or literary level when he speaks of freedom or commitment. This is exacerbated by Sartre's lack of any real sense of intersubjectivity: his remains a philosophy of the subject where there is only "a sheaf of irreconcilable perspectives which never coexist and which are held together only by the hopeless heroism of the I." It is at the same time an intuitive philosophy that wants to see meaning immediately and thus lacks a sense of temporality. There is no sense here, Merleau-Ponty complains, of meaning emerging over time via the labor of the negative and through the passage from one perspective to another (AD 158, 188ff, 205). The criticism echoes his attacks on Cartesian and Kantian idealism. "Ultrabolshevism" is the political manifestation of this rationalism, where "meaning, seen as wholly spiritual, as palpable as lightning, is absolutely opposed to being, which is absolute weight and blindness" (AD 124). The Communist Party as Sartre conceives it is equivalent to this transcendental subject: it posits an idealized proletariat rather than investigating and guiding the hazardous emergence of collective agency within the ambiguities of history. As such, it is released from the task of interpreting facts and communicating with the masses. "The will believes only in itself, it is its own source" (AD 107). It leaves no scope for recognizing proletarian opposition to the party, since the working class has no existence for it outside its own imagination. But equally, there is no support either for the party's acts within the density of history. It thus lacks the means to navigate or solicit intersubjective life when it tries to translate values into facts or to link means to ends. Its politics is reduced to magic or madness. Once the dialectic's adventures return in theory and in practice to this idealist philosophy, it comes full circle and reaches an impasse. "To be sure, this extreme subjectivism and this extreme objectivism have something in common: if the social is a second nature, it can be modified, like the other, only by a technician, in this case a sort of political engineer. And if the social is only the inert and confused residue of past actions, one can intervene and put it in order only by pure creation" (AD 98). Merleau-Ponty concludes that the philosophies of pure object or subject "are equally terroristic" because they both fail to engage with the intersubjective lifeworld and try instead to impose their will upon it: hence, the intrinsic link between rationalism and violence. This attack on Sartre was not of course uncontested. Once they entered the public realm, Merleau-Ponty's critiques of Marxism, like his analyses of communism, were thrown into an intersubjective force field where they attracted some robust responses, among them Beauvoir's defense of Sartre9 and Sartre's own reappraisal of dialectics in his Critique de la Raison Dialectique (1960),

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the first chapter of which is entitled "The Dogmatic Dialectic and the Critical Dialectic:'10 But Merleau-Ponty himself clearly felt that he had not yet settled accounts with Sartre's philosophy, since he returned to a rather more respectful engagement with it in the second chapter of The Visible and the Invisible. If Adventures had considered the political limitations inherent in Sartre's idealist philosophy of the cogito, Merleau-Ponty had nonetheless recognized his equation of consciousness with negativity as a much-needed counterweight to the positivist and determinist versions of Marxism. He therefore acknowledges that "the thought of the negative provides us with what we are searching for" (VI 64-65). But Sartre's main shortcoming remained. Like other dialectical misadventurers, he had been unable to integrate the movement of negativity into history. It had remained an abstraction in his philosophy, unable to enter immanently into the density of things. The question of the negative had now emerged as the central problematic of Merleau-Ponty's political analyses, as the hinge where the political and the ontological meet. It had surfaced on a number of levels. Politically, first, there was the practical difficulty of how to accommodate criticism in politics. The last chapter found Merleau-Ponty broaching this issue in the context of parliamentary politics, registering his doubt that genuine opposition would be accorded a voice and fearing its cooption if it were. We have also encountered his skepticism regarding the Marxist presentation of revolutionary action as self-criticism in action. "What happens when, instead of wandering through the social body, negation and criticism are concentrated in power? When there are functionaries of negativity? What happens is that the criticism is only nominally self-criticism" (AD 137, n. 77). Merleau-Ponty doubts that a permanently revolutionary regime-"of a life without lasting attainments and without rest"-is even imaginable, much less practicable. There is an inevitable inertia in collective life and the difficulty is how to routinize this in collective practices without succumbing to the organizationallogic of Weberian rationalization or reproducing class privilege. When the Communist Party claimed the revolutionary mantel, it only exemplified these political difficulties surrounding the negative. "When it has become an element of power, criticism must stop at the moment at which it becomes interesting, when it would evaluate, judge, and virtually contest the power in its totality" (AD 206). For «a government, even a revolutionary one, a party, even a revolutionary party, is not a negation:' In order to insinuate themselves historically, such institutions must act positively and "from all the evidence, there is no positive equivalence of negativity" (AD 89). Postrevolutionary politics thus faces similar institutional challenges to liberalism. Negativity as such cannot be a force of governance, yet it does need to be accommodated within structures of power if they are to avoid becoming

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ossified and anachronistic. Once political structures become unresponsive to problems and desires that emerge within the daily experiences of the masses, moreover, they court the dangers of confrontation by more intransigent forces of negation and the temptation to suppress them. This is the chronic cycle of violence, of the positive versus negation, which Merleau-Ponty observes in modern regimes. Progress is possible, he concludes, "only from a conscious action which will confront itself with the judgment of an opposition" (AD 226). Negativity would manifest itself here as interrogation, criticism, and self-reflection: that is, as a process or ethos immanent to power but sufficiently empowered to contest it effectively. Merleau-Ponty does not take us any further in imagining the institutional arrangements that might be congenial to this political flesh, but focuses instead on the styles of political behavior that might be conducive to practising negativity in politics. One can imagine Habermas's model of deliberative democracy appealing to him here, although with certain misgivings, which I discuss in chapter 5. A second sense of negativity in politics is associated less with opposition than with the contingencies of collective life as such. This is what renders any politics a hazardous process. What follows from Merleau-Ponty's ontology and from the primacy he accords to perception is the contention that ambiguity, contingency, adversity, and nonreason are intrinsic to (co )existence. Any politics that ignores these negativities does so at its peril. Yet arguably, this question of the fortuitous, the accidental, the unexpected, the equivocal, the opaque, and the unintended remains one of the least theorized aspects of modern political thought. Where it is considered, this negativity tends either to be formalized as a problem of collective action amenable to rational choice and probability calculations, or it is separated from everyday life and invoked as radical alterity, the aleatory, event, even as evil. Among political thinkers, Merleau-Ponty implies that only Machiavelli had really appreciated this dimension of collective life, in his conception of fortuna and its imbrication with virtu. Only a politics that recognizes this dialectic will, he concludes, be capable of navigating the dense fabric of political forces. This, too, will warrant further consideration in chapter 5. Finally, but most importantly, there were the ontological failures to grasp negativity, to which the political lacunae could be traced. This is where Merleau-Ponty kept encountering the familiar problem of philosophical dualism. As we have seen, the dialectic fell apart in his view because it gravitated to a sense of negativity that was either idealistically associated with consciousness or objectified as a natural or historical force. He discerned within Marxism a tendency to intuit an unassailable negativity that gnaws at history, throwing it into periodic crises and manifesting itself in permanent revolution, where there is "a continued negation immanent in the internal mechanism of his-

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tory" that can be "tapped like a spring or a subtle matter" (AD 88-89). In fact, it seems to me that Merleau-Ponty's own political philosophy-and indeed much of the critical tradition since Hegel-relies on some similar assumptions regarding a restless, ineluctable negativity that is associated with freedom and resistance or with permanent forces of deterritorialization. 11 The problem lies in identifying the ontological status of the negative and in liberating it from any grand narrative. This entire issue of the connection between negativity, agency, history, and politics would therefore need to be rethought. Merleau-Ponty became convinced that this must entail a return to ontology, where he would try to make sense of negativity as an immanent, generative process. It was in this context that he then returned to Sartre-and eventually to Marx and Hegel-as a prelude to describing the flesh. The criticisms in The Visible and the Invisible accordingly continue where those in Adventures of the Dialectic left off. "From the moment that I conceive of myself as negativity and the world as positivity, there is no longer any interaction" (VI 52). This is the flaw in Sartre's ontology, where "dualism has been pushed so far that the opposites, no longer in competition, are at rest the one against the other, coextensive with one another" (VI 55). While Sartre earns credit for thinking philosophically about existence and negativity, his philosophy is judged remote from them: it is a high-altitude thought that fails to think within Being. The challenge is to sustain philosophy's immersion in the things themselves but in Sartre's case, "the thought, precisely as thought, can no longer flatter itself that it conveys all the lived experience: it retains everything, save its density and its weight. The lived experience can no longer recognize itself in the idealizations we draw from it" (VI 87). Not only must reason be anchored within existence, then, it must also be practised in conformity with this ontological insight. This is what lies at the heart of the phenomenological wager for Merleau-Ponty. It is aerial or high-altitude thinking that is also the ruin of Hegel's and Marx's dialectics.

Returning to Marx and Hegel As Merleau-Ponty explored the tensions within communism and the Marxian dialectic, he became increasingly convinced that these were not after all travesties of Marx's philosophy but expressions of it. Adventures of the Dialectic still distinguishes between the younger and older Marx, and Merleau-Ponty retains some affection for the Hegelian Marx of 1843-1844 inasmuch as he still finds him grappling with the dialectical reciprocity between consciousness and being while attending to sensuous, embodied existence. But once he identifies a failure of the dialectic even in this youthful Marx, he realizes that

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there remains no acceptable Marxism to which he can retreat and that any survival of Marxist philosophy will depend upon a fundamental reappraisal of its fundamental premises. He does not lose faith in dialectics nor in the kind of interrogative engagement with history he had consistently endorsed and associated with historical materialism. He does realize that even the early Marx made certain anthropological, naturalist, and humanist presuppositions that must now be challenged. This task is mainly undertaken indirectly in Adventures, with early work by Lukacs standing as a proxy for the Marx of the early 1840s (and for Merleau-Ponty's own thinking in the late 1940s). The focus here is on Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness (1923), a work that had anticipated the more Hegelian early Marx even before he was known. Although subsequently Lukacs had adopted the "naIve realism" of scientific socialism (having been obliged by the communist orthodoxy to repudiate his earlier views [S 261]), in 1923 he was seen by many Western Marxists as an exemplary dialectician. Yet Merleau-Ponty now suspects both that there were already problems in the 1923 studies that perhaps paved the way for Lukacs's capitulation, and that these were already present in Marx's early work. They revolve around abstract assumptions made by Marx about the proletariat's capacity, as a class that is universally wronged, to heal the alienation that has persisted throughout class-divided history. Lukacs's own privileging of the working class as history's universal meaning and truth is, according to Merleau-Ponty, the work of philosophical consciousness rather than historical genealogy. For Lukacs in 1923, as for Marx in 1843, the proletariat is an idea without a historical equivalent (the very point at which the dialectic will eventually come full circle with Sartre). Once Marx and Lukacs were idealistically committed to the proletariat as the bearer of a unique historical mission and the living achievement of subject-object identity, history was interpreted from this perspective and the manipulation of society was sanctioned. So the mistake of the early work was that it rationalistically conjured up an agent of historical transformation in response to an abstract notion of wrong, rather than seeking signs of emergent agency within a contingent field of forces. "The Marxism of the young Marx as well as the 'Western' Marxism of 1923 lacked a means of expressing the inertia of the infrastructures, the resistance of economic and even natural conditions, and the swallowing up of 'personal relationships' in 'things: History as they described it lacked density and allowed its meaning to appear too soon" (AD 64). Lukacs would himself later admit that his "too supple and too notional dialectic did not translate the opacity, or at least the density, of real history:' since it lacked an appreciation of the objective world's weight (AD 66; PNP 85, 95). But its corollary was the scientific socialism whose function was to find guarantees of proletarian success within history's objective development.

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Marx "continually increased the weight of the objective factors of history, and the beautiful parallelism in the young Marx between the realization of philosophy and the realization of socialism was destroyed by "scientific socialism" to the benefit of the infrastructures" (AD 84). Although it is possible to reconstruct the gist of Merleau-Ponty's doubts about the young Marx from Adventures, there is little textual analysis provided there to support them. A more detailed engagement is apparent in his notes for a course presented in 1961, Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel. The focus of this analysis is Marx's claim that the realization of philosophy would be its destruction. This allows Merleau-Ponty to interrogate the relationship Marx saw between thinking and experience, and thus to go to the core of Marx's ontology. He identifies two crucial errors here. On the one hand, there is Marx's failure to sustain early insights regarding the dialectics of existence within his own thinking. On the other, there are erroneous anthropological presuppositions about a human essence. Both result in a loss of negativity. When Marx called for the destruction of philosophy, this was contingent upon its criticisms being resolved in practice. Even so, this implied that a communist society would have no need for further criticism and that the end of history would mark the end of negativity, dialectics, and change. Given Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the provisionality and contingency of all modes of coexistence, his skepticism regarding a teleological philosophy of history, and his experience of how this was translated by communists in power, he was eager to contest this formula. If he had concluded that politics and philosophy must maintain a respectful distance from one another, their relationship must not be broken altogether. "Truth and action will never communicate if there are not, along with those who act, those who observe them, who confront them with the truth of their action, and who can aspire to replace them in power" (AD 207; S 8). Philosophy, moreover, is part of human existence, an expression of an imaginary that has real historical functions, and so it cannot be simply destroyed or overcome, even dialectically. What must be challenged is its idealist propensity to become severed from everyday life. Merleau-Ponty recognizes that Marx's formulation does encapsulate an important critical insight regarding the status of philosophy and the ontology of thinking. As he had written in a much earlier essay, it "would be consistent with the purest Marxism to say that all philosophy is idealistic because philosophy always presupposes reflection, i.e., breaking with the immediate, and therein lies the condemnation of philosophy" (SNS 78). As such, philosophy is a type of estrangement, disengaged from the world. "Marxism's strongest argument against a philosophy of the subject is therefore an 'existential' argument" (SNS 79). In 1961, Merleau-Ponty still believed the young

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Marx appreciated this difficulty and that it remained an enduring problem. Philosophy evinces "bad ambiguity" inasmuch as it is "overview 'thinking: exhaustive, possessing the thing 'in thought:" For then philosophy, in "wanting to be all, is nothing; it does not inhabit the things it discusses" and so it "is not even opposed to that which it criticizes" (PNP 97). This is the problem with Sartre's aerial idealism, which thinks about existence and the negative but thereby reduces them to second-order idealizations. What is needed instead is the creation of "a concrete philosophy that is truly concrete"; "a conception of the negative that does not transform nature, man, and history into abstractions" (PNP 97, 100-1). This relationship between philosophy and nonphilosophy goes to the core of ontological dualism, where negativity is the challenge that persists at the heart of a genuinely existential or phenomenological way of thinking. This is why we find MerleauPonty lamenting in a comment in the first working note to The Visible and the Invisible: "Our state of non-philosophy-Never has the crisis been so radical." It is in the same note that he rejects a "bad dialectic:' which identifies opposites, and an "embalmed" schematic one that is no longer dialectical at all. It is where he concludes, too, with the necessity of returning to ontology (VI 165). It is in this returning that he begins to develop his notion of flesh. Towards the end of the 1961 course notes, he even attributes a sense of this flesh to Marx. But in order to appreciate Marx's valiant failure here, Merleau-Ponty insists that it is necessary to reexamine his relationship to Hegel. The course notes for Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Hegel begin with a reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind (1807), which is inflected through Heidegger's reading of its introduction and through Nietzsche's ruminations on philosophy in the -Gay Science. Hegel's phenomenology is also implicitly read through the lens of Merleau-Ponty's existentialist understanding of Husserl and a similarity is proffered between the "good" phenomenologies of the early Hegel and the later Husserl (PP 92). When Hegel is credited with surpassing the opposition between the thing and the idea in his "analysis of the Third Term" (PNP 73), this is an allusion to the entwining of a fleshy interworld that Merleau-Ponty believes Husserl glimpsed in his later allusions to a third dimension of the between. This text is therefore a complex one. The Hegel of the Phenomenology, according to Merleau-Ponty, had understood that experience is the reciprocal interaction and mutual transformation of objectivity and consciousness and, where there is genuine exchange and reversibility, coproduction. "This dialectic is an intertwining of subject and object, because they are abstract moments of an 'experience:" such that philosophy becomes "an entering into phenomena in order to take part in their maturation and in experience:' It thereby participates in the advent of knowl-

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edge rather than reflecting upon it from outside (PNP 57-58). This conclusion harks back to a much earlier essay Merleau-Ponty had written, "Hegel's Existentialism:' in which he had argued that the Hegel of 1807 was a philosopher of existence rather than an idealist, as Marx had supposed. This Hegel was credited with exploring multiple facets of the mind at work, in philosophy but also in customs, economic structures, and legal institutions, and with describing the internal workings of the social body where absolute knowledge "is perhaps not a philosophy but a way of life" (SNS 64). Scarcely distinguishable from Merleau-Ponty himself, this Hegel tries to bring historical periods back to life by allowing himself to be guided by their inner logic, rather than fitting them into a preestablished system. 12 Experience here is no longer Kant's contemplative contact with the sensible world, but ways of fleeing or confronting the hazards of (co )existence, whose restless struggle Hegel tries to understand. In order to advance this interpretation, three assumptions or achievements by Hegel are implied. First, and unlike Sartre's perennially unhappy consciousness that is forever denied the solidity of the in-itself, Hegel's consciousness is presented as intentionally projecting itself into a world beyond itself from which it learns but which it also interacts with and transfigures. Second, an ambiguity is identified within Phenomenology regarding the status of absolute knowledge. Here, there is "experience of knowledge and knowledge of experience" (PNP 81). Hegel leaves open the question of whether history ends, since philosophy as absolute knowledge might be understood as a particular, contingent mode of existence in which reason and knowledge predominate (i.e., modern rationalism as a contingent social formation). Finally, Hegel must achieve-and does so briefly-a dialectical relationship between concept and experience in which the phenomenon is neither subject nor object, but their relatedness (PNP 63). Here the dialectic is not a contribution by the subject, nor an objective movement, but" a movement of content, that is, of our new ontological milieu:' This dialectic is not a property of consciousness; "rather consciousness is a property of dialectic" (PNP 71). In other words, this begins to look like an anti-humanist ontology inasmuch as negativity operates as an immanent generativity, and dialectic is "self-movement of the preobjective and presubjective content" (PNP 69). "The problem of a philosophy that might be non-philosophy remains in toto as long as one thinks consciousness or 'object'" (PNP 73). For in a genuinely "dialectical philosophy, what is surpassed is the very opposition between the thing and the idea:' and Hegel approximates this in 1807 (PNP 85). "The negativity of the Phenomenology of Mind, which does not reappear again in the same role in subsequent writings, is a negativity which works, which is negativity only when it is in practice and which eliminates the immanence-transcendence alternative in philosophy.

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Philosophy is the recognition of this negativity, which is only a negativity when at work: that is, when in contact with the Being that sets it to work" (PNP 80-81). Unfortunately, by the time Hegel's Encyclopedia and Logic appeared, the subject-object reciprocity he had tried to sustain had given way to "the enveloping thought of the 'positively rational:" with philosophy now converted into "contemplated significations": a philosophy of identity. This is the Hegel whose system would be denounced by Kierkegaard as a "palace of ideas" in which all contradictions are overcome and Hegel stops taking his own historical situation into account or "seeking the principle of surpassing and of negative work within itself" (SNS 64; PNP 80, 86, 92). Instead, he sums up the truth of historical development from a position outside it. The reason for returning to Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of Hegel here is not only that it gives us some insight into the kind of existential and still dialectical negativity he was seeking in returning to ontology, but also because his most explicit criticisms of Marx are developed in the context of assessing his relationship with Hegel. Merleau-Ponty now concludes that on the one hand, Marx followed Hegel's itinerary from dialectics to rationalism and on the other, even his earlier dialectic fell short of Hegel's. The second part of the course, delivered in the spring of 1961 and one of Merleau-Ponty's last contributions, is devoted to Marx and focuses primarily on A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843) and The 1844 Manuscripts. It explains how Marx traveled a similar itinerary to Hegel: not from philosophy to science or idealism to materialism (as Marx claimed), but "from 'direct' philosophy (man, nature, Feuerbach) to another conception of philosophy (man, and nature which achieves itself through the experience of capitalism):"'The claim that experience introduces itself at this second order is the greatest dogmatism" (PNP 84). Marx criticized Hegel in the name of sensuous humanity and nonphilosophy, yet it was from this direct philosophy (a phenomenology "not far from the concrete"; a philosophy of "man incarnate" [PNP 94, 95]) that he later distanced himself, rather than from Hegelian idealism. The criticism of this later Marx is already familiar, but what is more interesting here is Merleau-Ponty's assessment of the early writings. He remains sympathetic to these inasmuch as he finds Marx maintaining something of the dialectical existentialism identified in Hegel. He is trying to make criticism worldly by identifying it with action, where praxis suggests a noninstrumental manner of coexisting that recreates society (PNP 94). In trying to maintain a sense of negativity that is not reduced to thought, Marx also attempts a history of Being where nature, history, and humanity are understood dialectically "as movements without a locatable discontinuity, where the other is always involved" and there is "no cleavage between matter and idea, object and subject,

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nature and man, in-itself and for-itself, but a single Being where negativity works:' This Marx seems to have glimpsed the more Heideggerian ontology Merleau-Ponty was developing. "History in this sense is the very flesh of man:' with nature and society "coupled:' Hegelian negativity "descends into the flesh of the world" (PNP 101, 103). But unfortunately, there are also naturalist assumptions, the persistence of which undermines Marx's insight. From this perspective the young Marx was already less dialectical than Hegel. In Adventures, Merleau-Ponty had identified The German Ideology as the text where Marx began straying towards a cruder materialism and a desire to destroy philosophy in order to grasp the real world more immediately. Marx's thinking was thereby torn "between dialectical thought and naturalism" (AD 64). But now Merleau-Ponty discerns anthropological presuppositions operating in 1844, suggesting that perhaps after. all it is Hegel who "maintains more of a sense of negativity and tension" (PNP 105). Marx's invocation of a prehistorical, nonalienated relation of humanity with nature (where needs were satisfied under a mythic primitive communism) suggests an origin without negativity that will again be instantiated at the end of history. "Marx is a positivist for a far off future, beyond communism. Communism is a negation of the negation depending upon a future positivism:' This is the basis of teleological Marxism as a metanarrative, where negativity relies upon-and is positioned between-primordial and ultimate positivism, with humanity and nature being reconciled in a "blossoming of man's 'true essence'" (PNP 95, 103). It is this naturalist anthropology that ruins the ontology of the early works and requires the rationalism of the later ones. Marx's primary and unexpurgated presupposition, according to this humanist reading of the dialectic, is of humankind in equilibrium with itself. "Positive simple nature is not only at the origin but also at the end" (PNP 104; S 8). It is this tension between existentialist and rationalist ontology in the early Marx that summons a profound rethinking of Marxist humanism for MerleauPonty: "'errors' are to be found in the fundamental formulations or ontology of Marxism" (S 10). This "direct thought" of unmediated experience colors Marx's entire dialectic and motivates the objectivism found in Capita~ where becoming-conscious yields to becoming-truth. This is why there is no point in returning to Marx to correct communism, nor to the young Marx to correct the later one. Because Marx had already envisaged history's telos in its origin, his philosophy became detached from events once they failed to take the prescribed course. From this point of view, Capital is not a science but an audacious idealist philosophy: one that "hides itself in 'things' and which is marked by an apparent positivism" (PNP 95). Marxism thereby surrendered the more contingent, concrete, dialectical engagement with history that practising historical materialism implies and which Merleau-Ponty still endorses. If dialectics is to be

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salvaged, and if modernity is to be saved from crisis, then it will be necessary to develop a nonanthropological and anti-humanist ontology in order to restore negativity as immanent to experience and to practise philosophy as a critical thinking congruent with it. The final note in The Visible and the Invisible finds Merleau-Ponty reminding himself that although the visible "has to be described as something that is realized through man:' it "is nowise anthropology (hence against Feuerbach-Marx 1844)" (VI 274). This resembles Heidegger's comments about Dasein in Being and Time.

Conclusion: Marxism after Marxism Despite all his criticisms, Merleau-Ponty still insists in the introduction to Signs (1960) that Marxism remains valuable as a perspective on history and as an instrument of analysis, once cleansed of all metaphysical privilege. It is only one route into historical understanding, but still a valuable one. "There are situations of class struggle, and we may if we wish formulate the world situation in terms of bourgeoisie and proletariat; but this is no longer anything but a way of speaking, and the proletariat but a name for a rationalistic politics" (S 13). This is the secularized, agnostic Marxism he had called for earlier, shorn of its claims to have grasped the truth of history. As a perspective on history, historical materialism nonetheless retains methodological value for MerleauPonty. It can still "inspire and orient analyses and retain a real heuristic value" as a "matrix of intellectual and historical experiences" and an "immense field of sedimented history and thought where one goes to practice and to learn to think" (S 9, 10, 12). Furthermore, the dialectic is not myth. But it was an illusion "to precipitate into a historical fact-the proletariat's birth and growthhistory's total meaning, and to believe that history itself organized its own recovery, that the proletariat's power would be its own suppression, the negation of the negation. It was to believe that the proletariat was in itself the dialectic and that the attempt to put the proletariat in power ... could put the dialectic in power" (AD 205). It is worth mentioning here that most of the reasons poststructuralists give for rejecting Marxism-its humanism, its teleological grand narrative, its claims to have discovered the truth of history-are already anticipated by Merleau-Ponty's criticisms and are pursued by him with considerably more rigor. Yet Merleau- Ponty did not advise simply abandoning the dialectical tradition. Even in Adventures of the Dialectic, he insisted only that the "Marxist critique must therefore be taken up again, re-exposed completely" (AD 231). Its underlying presuppositions must be interrogated more vigorously in order to reappraise its ontology and to transform dialectical practice. Interviewed in

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1960, Merleau-Ponty opined that Marxism had become reified and that in philosophy "everything remains to be done or undone:' He still expressed this task in terms of overcoming traditional subject-object dualism, as Hegel and Marx had failed to do adequately, and he insisted that the "ontological problem posed by Heidegger and Sartre is now more than ever the order of the day:' Philosophy's traditional means are no longer adequate to "express what the world is now living through" (T&D 9-10). This is why it is necessary to start all over again. In part 2, my focus will accordingly shift from Merleau-Ponty's more direct political analyses and their critique of rationalism to his phenomenological method and ontology of the flesh. This is where he was trying to reconfigure reason and collective life in order to put his own political philosophy on a nonrationalist basis. Following Marx, guided by Husserl and Heidegger, he was determined to reenter the labyrinthine interworld where the flesh of coexistence is engendered as that "single Being where negativity works."

Notes 1. I develop this argument and its implications in more detail in "Philosophy as Political Engagement: Revisiting Merleau-Ponty and Reopening the Communist Question;' Contemporary Political Theory 2 (2003). 2. C. Lefort, "Flesh and Otherness;' in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, ed. G. Johnson and M. Smith (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 12. 3. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), 182. Quoted by Merleau-Ponty in AD 23. For a more fulsome critique of the bureaucratic machine see Weber's essay "Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order;' in Weber; Political Writings, ed. P. Lassman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 158. Merleau-Ponty was also familiar with Trotsky's concerns about bureaucratization. 4. See for example M. Whitford, Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Sartre's Philosophy (Lexington, Ken.: French Forum Monographs, 1982); J. Stewart, The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998); L. Goehr, "Understanding the Engaged Philosopher: On Politics, Philosophy, and Art;' in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); D. Archard, Marxism and Existentialism: The Political Philosophy ofSartre and Merleau- Panty (Ulster: Blackstaff Press, 1980), chap. 6. 5. Goehr, "Understanding the Engaged Philosopher:' 323. 6. Merleau-Ponty, "Sartre, Merleau-Ponty: Les lettres d'une rupture:' Magazine Litterature, no. 320 (April 1994). Quoted by Goehr, "Understanding the Engaged Philosopher:' 7. M. Horkheimer, "The Authoritarian State;' in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato et al. (New York: Continuum, 1982), 102. Simone de Beauvoir

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would recall, "It was not possible to decide without reservation in favour of the USSR when so many half-public, half-concealed dramas still continued to succeed one another in all the Stalinist countries:' Force of Circumstance (London: Penguin, 1963),209. 8. In citing various PCF Marxists who endorsed and exemplified the Marxism he rejected, Merleau-Ponty included Althusser's 1953 article "Note sur Ie materialisme dialectique" (AD 63, n. 12). 9. S. de Beauvoir, "Merleau-Ponty et Ie Pseudo-Sartrisme;' Les Temps Modernes 1955:114-15. Merleau-Ponty's protegee Claude Lefort came to his defense, resulting in further exchanges between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Camus also fell out with Sartre over his politics. Meanwhile, and not surprisingly, members of the French Communist Party attacked Merleau-Ponty from a rather different perspective. 10. Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1960). 11. See G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994), 100, 177. For these authors, revolution is associated with absolute deterritorialization and with immanent libertarian utopias. But it is necessarily a brief interlude before the reterritorializing process begins again. "The success of a revolution resides only in itself;" its victory "is immanent and consists in the new bonds it installs between people, even if these bonds last no longer than the revolution's fused material and quickly give way to division and betrayal" (177). 12. For Merleau-Ponty there are (at least) two Hegels: the rationalist and the existentialist ones. See S. Kruks, "Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, and the Dialectic;' Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 7, no. 2 (May 1976): 96-110.

II IN PURSUIT OF THE INTERWORLD

4 Phenomenology as Critical Theory

N PART

I, I FOCUSED on Merleau-Ponty's critique of modernity as a mode of

I being-in-the-world whose distinctive rationalism has plunged it into crisis.

Although this crisis is especially chronic in the political realm, it turned out that nothing short of a new ontology, a different mode of reasoning consonant with it, and a new ethos of existence would be needed to address it. The three chapters that comprise part 2 explore this attempt at developing a postrationalist way of thinking and being. To do so, they reconstruct the philosophical underpinnings that support, yet remain implicit within, MerleauPonty's political analyses. In the current chapter, I argue that his project remained inherently phenomenological and claim that his particular version of existential phenomenology is best understood as a critical theory that is intrinsically political in its challenge to modern regimes of power. In the next chapter, I consider what it actually means to practise a phenomenological approach to and within political life. Chapter 6 will then focus on the return to ontology that the interrogation of dialectics had summoned, a task that was arguably implicit all along in the phenomenological inducement to return "to the things themselves;' but which was motivated in Merleau-Ponty's case by explicitly political concerns.

Returning to Husser! Paul Ricoeur would describe Merleau-Ponty as the greatest of the French phenomenologists. l Intended as an act of homage, the accolade would nonetheless -93-

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condemn him in the minds of his anti-humanist successors who have associated phenomenology with idealism, subjectivism, and humanism. 2 While sympathetic critics sometimes counter these charges by suggesting that MerleauPonty moved away from phenomenology towards structuralism or even poststructuralism, it seems to me that he rather assimilated or anticipated elements of these approaches within an enduring phenomenological framework. 3 He was fully aware of the triptych of criticisms, and his response was to deepen his phenomenological inquiries until they became redundant, not to abandon his approach. Putting philosophy on a new basis was, after all, intrinsic to the phenomenological project and inasmuch as the latter remained idealist, subjectivist, or humanist, it was failing in its own radical ambition to interrogate all presuppositions, including its own. If a phenomenological vocabulary of origins, truth, consciousness, and progress would fall into disrepute, MerleauPonty was himself constantly reworking these terms to rid them of unwarranted assumptions. 4 His hesitation in using at least some of them was evident by the late 1950s, when his phenomenological inquiries would culminate in his own anti-humanist turn. S Reading Husser! Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach is incomprehensible without considering his relationship to Husser!' He engaged with the work of the phenomenological movement's founder throughout his career, in particular during the late 1930s and 1940s and then again in the late 1950s, when he reread Husserl's work in preparation for lectures on his "The Origin of Geometry."6 The preface to The Phenomenology of Perception offers his clearest statement of his own phenomenological approach. Yet even this text progresses through an implicit dialogue with Husserl that is picked up again in his last work, The Visible and the Invisible, where the working notes insist that the first part of that study must be "conceived in a very direct, contemporary manner, like the Krisis of Husserl" (VI 183), because phenomenology must renew its interrogation of modern rationalism even more radically. A series of articles published in The Primacy of Perception and Signs further ponders the relationship between phenomenology and the (human) sciences, with reference to Husserl's thinking on the matter, while Husserl's writings are more directly addressed in "The Philosopher and his Shadow" and "Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology:' These works sometimes defend Husser! against idealist interpretations, but sometimes acknowledge them in order to mark MerleauPonty's departure from phenomenological orthodoxy. They often emphasize the existentialist-and even dialectical-orientation of Husserl's own work, but Merleau-Ponty also concedes that he sometimes exploits a merely latent

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direction of Husserl's thinking here and even pushes it beyond its author's intentions. One reason for this repeated return to Husserl surely lies in part in the practical difficulties of reading him at all. Most of his work remained untranslated and unpublished when Merleau-Ponty discovered it. Much existed as little more than a mass of shorthand or handwritten pages, which were being transcribed after Husserl's death. During the war these textual difficulties were compounded by geopolitical ones since, as a Jew, Husserl's work was banned and even destroyed in Nazi Germany. His surviving manuscripts were brought to Louvain in Belgium, where an archive was established.7 Reading Husserl during these years was thus caught up in political circumstances, especially as the shifting geography of the occupation in Europe precluded free travel across borders. In 1939, Merleau-Ponty was in fact the first researcher from outside Belgium to visit the archives, and he read a variety of manuscripts there, including Ideas II and most of The Crisis. Only in 1944 would he gain access to the complete (if unfinished) longhand version of the latter work, which would not be published for another decade (T&D 155). Because of these difficulties, his reading was limited and unsystematic, yet his access also placed Merleau-Ponty in a privileged position to present Husserl's ideas to the French public.8 As more scripts became available, too, there was considerable scope for reinterpretation. Merleau-Ponty always favored the later work and sometimes interpreted it rather freely. But his fidelity was anyway to a broad program of inquiry rather than to any rigid set of procedures. He insists that "phenomenology can be practised and identified as a manner or style of thinking" that preexisted its self-awareness as a philosophy, and he includes Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, as well as painters like Cezanne, among its sometime practitioners (PhP viii, xxi). What they share is a determination to express the lifeworld afresh, rather than relying upon established conventions that obscure the upsurge of existence. From Transcendental to Genetic Phenomenology Husserl had initially envisaged phenomenology as a rigorous science. Its aim was to suspend all theoretical presuppositions or commonsense preconceptions about the world in order to describe faithfully phenomena as they appear to consciousness. This would entail a return to the things themselves (zu den Sachen selbst) in order to describe their way of appearing. What fascinated Husserl here was the way objective knowledge and enduring meanings are distilled from the flux of consciousness to constitute a stable world. Phenomenology was to be the science of this consciousness, its aim being to discover the inner core of subjectivity. By suspending first our scientific judgments and then

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our naturalistic attitude towards the world (as something simply given, out there), the phenomenological reduction would enable a focus on the intentional structures and essences of consciousness. Eager to avoid merely psychological explanation, he espoused a transcendental phenomenology that describes a purified, intentional consciousness-a transcendental ego--and its constitutive acts of bestowing meaning. This is therefore distinguished from empirical subjectivity and in order to reach experience, the latter is put in brackets. Although Cartesian elements are still evident in this project, Husserl's aim was to think more radically through some of the presuppositions Descartes had left unquestioned, in particular those concerning the thinking subject itself. This aspect of his work is thus commonly read as a form of radical Cartesianism. 9 Husserl relies here on a notion of intuition, whereby experience is first given in intuition that as yet knows none of the precision philosophical or scientific categorization will bring. As Bergson had put it, by "intuition is meant the kind of sympathy by which one places oneself within the object in order to coincide with that which is unique in it and consequently inexpressible:'lo In bringing the object to life, memory and imagination are both modes of such intuition, but it is perception that Husserl privileges. It is then by reflecting upon this intuitive experience that the essence of consciousness is to be grasped. Following his study of Ideas I, Levinas would explain, "in intuition we relate directly to the object, we reach it." But he also notes his concern that even the perceptual act seems to suggest the presence in the mind of intuitive contents rather than real objects. This would render consciousness still representational, with the things themselves being retrieved only through a theoretical act. 11 So worries about phenomenological idealism were evident from the start. It was not to empirical objects or even to everyday life that the phenomenologist seemed to be returning, but to the givens of intuition as the a priori essences needed by consciousness for the constitution of ideal objectivities. Endorsing the more existentialist approach being developed by Heidegger, Levinas asks whether the world is not rather "presented in its very being as a center of action, as a field of activity or of care."12 Merleau-Ponty would similarly demand an approach that puts practical, embodied consciousness back in the world. In his later work, The Crisis in particular, Husserl himself appears to have been driven by the logic of his investigations to reconsider this earlier idealism. He now moved closer to Bergsonian vitalism and away from his faith in consciousness as self-presence. Already in Ideas II, he had recognized that consciousness is particularized as temporal, embodied, and historical. By The Crisis, it would be situated within an intersubjective lifeworld (Lebenswelt), and Husserl acknowledges that an ego abstracted from this shared, historical

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world of experience would be simply empty. As a consequence, the study of static essences and constitutive acts would have to yield to a genetic phenomenology that studies meaning in its genesis. It is this aspect of Husserl's mature thinking, where returning to the things themselves becomes a (re)turn to existence, that Merleau-Ponty insists upon and develops. Although the question remains unsettled as to whether Husserl intended to subsume the genealogy under the transcendentalism once it had done its work,13 it is the way Merleau-Ponty develops the genetic approach, rather than his fidelity to Husserl, that is important here. It is also the political importance of this approach that I want to emphasize. I have already discussed Husserl's claim that modernity is suffering a nihilistic crisis and noted its influence on MerleauPonty. Now I focus on their agreement that phenomenology is the route out of this crisis because of the kind of reasoning it epitomizes. While investigating what this mode of phenomenological reasoning entails, I want especially to ask about its credentials as a critical theory and to explore its implications for political analysis and change. Escaping the Crisis There are some interesting parallels between The Crisis and The Visible and the Invisible. Both remained incomplete and were published posthumously, having been interrupted by their authors' deaths. Each invokes a radically new way of reasoning that will have far-reaching existential and political consequences beyond philosophy itself. Both manuscripts are especially evocative in their unfinished state, since they reveal a novel and experimental process of thinking as it gropes its way beyond a philosophical language that is steeped in dualist assumptions. It is in The Crisis that Husser! defines philosophy's major task as one of offering a thoroughgoing critique of modern rationalism, eschewing the "bad;' "lazy;' "narrow-minded" reason of the dominant positivism without succumbing to the irrationalism he associated with Heidegger. While parts 1 and 2 of The Crisis explain modernity's surrender of normative or critical judgment to positivism and nihilism, phenomenology is presented as a panacea, and this leads in part 3 to the difficult task of returning to the lifeworld, where reason and subjectivity first appear. The challenge here is to describe the latter's genesis without reliance on traditional scientific or philosophical categories and assumptions. Only then, Husser! argues, will the way be cleared for a "new age" that is able to overcome skepticism by the "radicalism of its new beginning:' Phenomenology will thus facilitate a "complete reorientation of view" and point to "new dimensions" wherein novel questions will arise and with them, a complete transformation of philosophy, which is now engaged in an urgent practical task as a "functionary of mankind:'14 The

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aim is to reintroduce normativity into reasoning and hence to restore its evaluative, reflexive dimension by locating reason and its genesis within the lifeworld. The lifeworld is the intersubjective habitat of embodied consciousnesses; it is what they experience. When the Greeks reduced truth to objective knowledge, Husserl contends (reminiscent of Nietzsche's argument in The Birth of Tragedy), they separated this lifeworld of "prescientifically intuited nature" from truth. Modern science covers it over even more definitively. Yet the lifeworld is still experienced as the horizon of all quotidian practices and remains the basis for all knowledge, despite its being merely taken for granted by philosophical or scientific discourses. 15 "The life-world, for us who wakingly live in it, is always already there, existing in advance for us, the "ground" of all praxis whether theoretical or extratheoretical. The world is pregiven to us, the waking, always somehow practically interested subjects, not occasionally but always and necessarily as the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon."16 It is through disclosing the "intuitive surrounding world of life," where reason originates that its modern crisis is to be overcome. This is "the task of selfreflection which grows out of the 'breakdown' situation" of science and of the age, a task that calls for "the kind of thinking which everywhere tries to bring 'original intuition' to the fore-that is, the pre- and extra-scientific lifeworld:' It is only by returning to this prediscursive experience, Husserl believes, that the naivete of objectivist thought and the historical prejudices that arise from the obscurities of traditional thinking can be dispelled,17 This is why Merleau-Ponty will entitle the introduction to his Phenomenology"Traditional Prejudices and the Return to Phenomena:' If he is less convinced than Husserl is about Europe's humanist destiny in this project, he does accept that Husserl's ambition to "lay a new foundation for reason" by returning to lived experience is crucial. Genetic phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty opines, is the route to "a new type of reflection from which we await the solution to our problems:' This is why "the theory of knowledge has to be begun all over again" (T&D 161; PhP 241). Something approaching a new enlightenment is envisaged here. Husserl concludes that all reflection "undertaken for 'existential' reasons is naturally critical" since it entails "a radical inquiry back into subjectivity:' While the strategy of returning to origins must engender an entirely new reflexive vocabulary, its main purpose is to encourage critical reflection on existing discourses. Although Kant was on the way to this critical inquiry he still, like Descartes, interrogated the knowing subject insufficiently and thus failed to recognize its being-in-the-world. Kant "has no idea that in his philosophizing he stands on unquestioned presuppositions and that the undoubtedly

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great discoveries in his theories are there only in concealment ... What he offers demands new work and, above all, critical analysis." 18 Transcendental phenomenology accordingly begins with what Kant took for granted: subjectivity's embeddedness in the lifeworld. Philosophy can make its final turn, Husserl argues, only when "we ourselves shall be drawn into an inner transformation through which we shall come face to face with, to dired experience of, the long- felt but constantly concealed dimension of the 'transcendental:"19 Where Kant's fear of merely psychological explanation drove him to the confused, counterintuitive myth of the transcendental subject, Husserl now proposes a "thoroughly intuitively disclosing [erschliessendel method" in which intuition is understood as the "original self-exhibition" of a new sphere of being. 20 Yet even while he "reproaches rationalism for neglecting questions which should have been fundamental:' Husserl aims to grasp "the subjective structure of our world-consciousness."21 It is Heidegger who recognizes the practical, "thrown" nature of this consciousness and who insists that phenomenology must interrogate its own presuppositions more radically. "Philosophy:' he writes, "will never seek to deny its 'presuppositions: but neither may it simply admit them. It conceives them, and it unfolds with more and more penetration both the presuppositions themselves and that for which they are presuppositions."22 It is the critical challenge posed by Husserl but inflected through Heidegger's existential sense of primordial Being prior to any subject-object splitting that Merleau-Ponty will take up as a dialectical project of recovering existence and negativity. He describes the exploration of the pretheoretical realm as our "archaeology" and it is here, where the subjectobject distinction and rational subjectivity itself are problematized, that "a subterranean history" of "the genesis of ideality" is pursued (IP 183). Husserl was himself at pains to point out the real difficulty and radicalism of such inquiries, since they must eschew all the theoretical frameworks and concepts usually available. "There has never been a scientific inquiry into the way in which the life-world constantly functions as subsoil:' "We are absolute beginners, here, and have nothing in the way of a logic designed to provide norms; we can do nothing but reflect:' engrossed in the task while taking care to avoid all prejudice or "alien influences"; open to the "essential strangeness and precariousness" of the ideas involved. Such is his critical method and it is conveyed in quite apocalyptic tones by Husserl, who claims that this phenomenological attitude will effect a complete personal transformation comparable to a religious conversion, one whose broader significance is "the greatest existential transformation" ever offered to humanity.23 He identifies two steps in the task ahead: carrying out the actual investigations of the lifeworld-the intentional analysis-and a second step of reflecting on the right method. Here the phenomenologist can shift between a variety of attitudes, sometimes gazing at the

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lifeworld with its a priori forms and sometimes looking at the genealogies whereby particular forms appear. It is important to keep in mind that MerleauPonty also operates on these two levels. Husserl sometimes refers to the lifeworld as a new or third dimension, a realm rich with previously unnoticed phenomena. 24 It is in this context that Merleau-Ponty proclaims his intention "to invoke this unthought-of element" in Husserl, by exploring this "third dimension" as the intersubjective and intercorporeal realm that unfolds between the oppositions traditionally reproduced by science and philosophy (SI62; IP IS3). If it was Husserl who alerted him to the importance of the perceiving body here, I will argue later that flesh was Merleau- Ponty's term for the ontology of this third dimension-the "single Being where negativity works" (PNP 101)-as an interworld where meaning and materiality are simply inseparable. It was when Husserl invoked this third dimension, he contends, that his predecessor glimpsed the enigma of the sensible as things plus the virtual (S 172). This is where Merleau-Ponty finds negativity-qua invisible traces, relationships, mediations, difference, the virtual, meaning, and folds-as immanent to an emergent phenomenal world. He credits Husserl with awakening "a wild-flowering world and mind;" a "jointing and framing of Being" (S lSI). We can see by this stage how radically at odds are the lively Sachen selbstto which the phenomenologist returns, with Kant's noumenal thing in itself [Ding-an-sich] or the inert Sartrean in-itself [en-soi]. The intriguing question that will haunt Merleau-Ponty's later work is the significance that returning to this wild Being, this third dimension, might have for understanding the flesh of the political as collective life in the interworld. Merleau-Ponty's assessment of how far Husserl actually moved in this direction is nonetheless variable. He writes effusively, "Husserl's thought is as much attracted by the haecceity of Nature as by the vortex of consciousness" (S 165). Yet towards the end of Phenomenology he had maintained that even the later Husserl was still drawn towards the elucidation of a transparent world and evinced "many throwbacks to the logicist period:' even though Merleau-Ponty had mentioned Husserl's attraction to a genetic or even a constructive phenomenology in the preface to the same work (PhP vii, 365, n. 1), The transcendental Husserl is not a fiction, he concedes, yet it is a reified version of the philosopher who from Ideas II on had escaped the idealist relation between a pure subject and things (S 163). It seems likely that the more deeply MerleauPonty entered the third dimension-and the more convinced he became that this was the way to resolve both the crisis of rationalism and the misadventures of the dialectic-the more he glimpsed it in the interstices of Husserl's thinking as its truly phenomenological moment. It is surely not gratuitous that one of his most unequivocal statements about this direction of Husserl's work oc-

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curs towards the end of Adventures of the Dialectic, where his mentor is judged to have come "to the threshold of dialectical philosophy" in the active/passive stance he finally associated with subjectivity. "It was only at the end of his career that he propounded as primordial fact that the constituting subject is inserted within the temporal flow ... ; that it is even his permanent condition; that consequently, when he withdraws from things in order to reconstitute them, he does not find a universe of ready-made meanings, rather he constructs; and that, finally, there is a genesis of sense' (AD 138, n. 78). It is this temporal and historical process, as active making and response, that Merleau-Ponty associates with politics but also with reasoning in a "hyperdialectical" way. Merleau-Ponty's Existential Phenomenology Returning to the Lifeworld Merleau -Ponty would grapple with the challenges posed by returning to the existentiallifeworld throughout his career. Working through the new way of reasoning it requires begins in his Phenomenology of Perception, whose preface opens with the claim that some fifty years after Husserl first wrote, the question of what phenomenology is remains unanswered. The book is itself a defense of the sort of existentialist version Merleau-Ponty practises. Four key phenomenological themes are identified in the preface and he shows how each contains a tension between (bad) rationalist residues and (good) existential sensitivity. First, there is the study of essences. If Husserl's initial aim had been to grasp the essence of consciousness, perception, imagination, and so on, as they occur, Merleau-Ponty insists that phenomenology, as an existentialist philosophy, puts essences back into existence and begins with human and worldly "facticity." Their emergence from the body's interactions with the world must therefore be described. Second, Merleau-Ponty considers intentionality, which is "too often cited as the main discovery of phenomenology." I discuss the term more fully later, in the context of ontology. Suffice it to mention here that his primary concern is to replace the idealist sense of intentionality as a cognitive activity of the subject with a notion of "operative intentionality" as a process whereby corporeal significance is engendered through a dialectical relationship with the bodysubject's milieu (PhP xvii-xviii). Third, phenomenology is a transcendental philosophy inasmuch as it challenges naturalistic assertions. Yet it is a philosophy for which the world is always already there, prior to reflection, and in which we have perceptual faith.

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The purpose of returning to the things themselves is not then to ask about the conditions of possibility for the world's constitution by consciousness, as in Kantian transcendentalism. Rather, "all its efforts are concentrated upon reachieving a direct and primitive contact with the world" (PhP vii). Recognizing the impossibility of philosophical coincidence with this inexhaustible lifeworld, however, phenomenology embarks on a ceaseless process of trying to grant philosophical status to the lived, even as it recognizes the impossibility of representing its alterity discursively.25 Its expressions enrich rather than mirror Being. That reason can even attempt to express the nondiscursive is due to the fact that although the latter remains noncognitive, and other to intellectual reason in this sense, this is not the radical alterity of the impossible Real or Other to which poststructuralists allude. 26 Rather, it is the perceptual experience with which the embodied thinker already has practical familiarity, an existential realm resonant with lived significance. Finally, if Husserl presented phenomenology as a rigorous science, its account of space, time, and world is not the objective one offered by science, since it is the way they are experienced that it tries to describe. It follows that phenomenology is not interested in causal explanations of these phenomena but offers a genetic, direct description of them as they appear. Accordingly, the "first philosophical act would appear to be to return to the world of actual experience which is prior to the objective world" (PhP 57). A "phenomenological or existential philosophy assigns itself the task ... of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world which precedes all thought about the world" (SNS 28). The challenge is to rediscover "the layer of living experience through which other people and things are first given to us, the system 'selfother-things' as it comes into being:' yet from within it and without reducing it to reason (Hegel's shortcoming) (PhP 57). Philosophy must therefore avoid the trap whereby an apparent return to the lifeworld is really a rationalist imposition of concepts upon it from the outside (Sartre's shortcoming). "Coming after the world, after nature, after life, after thought, and finding them constituted before it, philosophy indeed questions this antecedent being and questions itself concerning its own relationship with it. It is a return upon itself and upon all things but not a return to an immediate" (VI 123). So there are two interwoven levels of inquiry here: the archaeological account of the evolution of structures of consciousness (or ideality) within embodied experience and a hyperreflexive folding back that interrogates philosophy's own conceptual presuppositions (in particular those regarding subjectivity) on an increasingly profound level. "Radical reflection amounts to a consciousness of its own dependence on an unreflective life:' always aware that "the world is not what I think, but what I live through" (PhP xiv,

xvi-ii).

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Merleau-Ponty remains adamant here that phenomenology eschews any aspiration to return to some naive level of immediate experience or origin. On the one hand, a concrete philosophy is never positivist: it "must stick close to experience, and yet not limit itself to the empirical" (S 157). Facts and events have to be interpreted as they emerge within the filigree of ideal and material relationships that comprise existence. This is accordingly an interpretive, creative act as well as one of discovery; what it describes is "a past which has never been a present" (PhP 242). On the other hand, the philosopher remains aware that the lifeworld that is returned to is already infused with layers of cultural sedimentation, to which her own interventions contribute, and that the process of return is always therefore mediated by accumulated sediments of the past and perspectives of the present. At the same time, the corporeal and intercorporeal engendering of meaning that occurs within the lifeworld is not an origin that is later surpassed, but is an ineluctable dimension of even the most abstract thought or communicative action. It thereby sustains a measure of volatility or inertia, of opacity and nonreason, within even the most apparently rational relationships. In short, there are a plethora of meanings and folds, multiple layers of reflexivity, and a complex temporality, all of which must be negotiated in this inexhaustible dialectics of return. There is no discursive-nondiscursive opposition here, only a series of tiers and reversals. Above all, there is an ongoing process of interrogation. The text and notes from The Visible and the Invisible show Merleau-Ponty struggling with such questions to the last. He worries lest "the resolution to ask of experience itself its secret" is "an idealist commitment." But as he moves in an increasingly anti-humanist direction, he concludes that his interrogation of experience is not idealist because it makes no reference to an ego or to an intellectual relation to Being. Rather, his aim is precisely to discover how experience opens us to the other and to what is not ourselves, not to reduce it to thought (VI 159). Post structuralists would be especially critical of phenomenology's allusions to the nondiscursive or prediscursive. Favoring a more uncompromisingly constructivist approach, genealogical thinkers such as Michel Foucault or Judith Butler argue that the idea of a prediscursive origin or cause serves to naturalize what is in fact a discursive effect.27 Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach in fact anticipates their commitment to interrogating all discursive regimes. But what it also explores is the phenomenology of discursive capacities themselves. Its aim in tracing these back to prelinguistic, corporeal activities is not to propose a biological foundation (naturalism) or to romanticize a beginning devoid of power, but to show that reason never outruns its prereflective, presubjective origins in existence. If there is no definitive distinction between prediscursive and discursive, it is because both are resonant with

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meaning and remain thoroughly entwined. The disadvantage of radical constructivism from this point of view is similar to that of idealism: it surrenders an investigation of or engagement with experience to an analysis of discourse (or representation). It is therefore unable to question, learn from, or intervene in the lifeworld. Merleau-Ponty enters this labyrinthine, intermundane space in pursuit of a way of thinking that puts situated, embodied reflection back in the world, and he struggles to express its emergence in nonanthropological terms. As we have seen, moreover, he recognizes that the process of returning remains a highly mediated critical process, and it is precisely because it is aware of its own discursive contribution to what it describes that it must remain hypercritical. Phenomenology as Merleau- Ponty practises it is not, then, as Foucault alleges, a philosophy of self-certainty and a metaphysics of presence. 28 It is a process of critical reflection in which the capacity to reason is itself problematized. A Philosophy of Existence What makes Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology both distinctive and of enduring importance for political inquiry is its inflection through existentialism and dialectics. These are the approaches he would identify as the two essential philosophical themes of the twentieth century (S 155). It was his way of reading Husserl through their lens that allowed him to avoid his predecessor's idealist and subjectivist proclivities. Merleau-Ponty would identify himself with a generation dedicated to "calling the narcissism of self-consciousness into question" in order to advance "the real:' "our own and the world's factual existence as a new dimension of enquiry" (SI55). In identifying phenomenology as the philosophy of existence par excellence, he had in mind its way of describing the appearance of lived meaning over time, its determination to suspend familiar sign systems that have covered over experience, its emphasis on corporeality, and its unceasing efforts at reasoning from within, rather than from outside, existence. In his earlier work he locates himself within the existentialist movement, despite reservations about Sartre's ontology in Being and Nothingness, but later he would distinguish between his enduring commitment to a "philosophy of existence" arid existentialism as a movement that had flourished during the 1930s.29 He would lament that not much remained of Sartrean existentialism as a political project, in part because attention had shifted to Heidegger, whose philosophy is "not a thought directly in contact with everyday events" (T&D 139). Although Heidegger recognized that consciousness must be put in the context of being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty complains that his philosophy does not itself inhere in facticity (PP 92). It was clear to him that this could only be addressed by a more engaged, materialist

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approach. As he had noted in Humanism and Terror, the strength of existentialism is that in politics it "awakens us to the importance of daily events and action;' rather than focusing on universal principles or abstract structures (HT 188). The novelty of phenomenology lies, Merleau-Ponty contends, in "finding a different basis" for experience "than does classical rationalism" (PhP 294). This basis is the intermundane realm where matter and meaning are inextricably entwined and are experienced as such. Despite disillusionment with the existentialist movement, he therefore insists upon his enduring fidelity to an existentialist style of thinking that abandons any foundation in rational subjectivity (or metaphysical materialism) to think instead from the perspective of corporeal situatedness within a historicallifeworld. The value of this existentialism, he maintains, is the way it appeals to existence as a way of rethinking the human condition in terms of its embodied directedness towards the world (its operative intentionality). It refuses to reify consciousness as ontological substance or interiority, but its account of phenomena also describes something other than the inert realm of objects or anonymous structures that science presents. For existence, Merleau-Ponty explains, is "the very process whereby the hitherto meaningless takes on meaning" (PhP 169). Since this first occurs in a practical, corporeal way, it is important to focus on its facticity and its temporality rather than on idealized essences (VI 45). In an early work, "The Battle over Existentialism;' Merleau-Ponty summarizes existentialism's central question as "that of man's relationship to his natural or social surroundings" (SNS 71). Although he will gradually move away from this humanist formula, he will consistently recognize that it is in this dense space that the conflicts and experiments of coexistence are played out. It is here that he locates the intersubjective engendering of meaningful structures and the ambiguous appearing of agency that are analyzed in the political investigations. This is why he is disappointed that Sartre's high-altitude thinking loses touch with existence, of which it offers an account but not an engagement (VI 75, 87). But this is also the crisis of the dialectic and the paradox of a philosophy that "must plunge into the world instead of surveying it" (VI 38-39). Focusing on existence entails an entirely new way of thinking because it challenges the fundamental principles of modern epistemology and ontology. It is from this existentialist perspective that Merleau-Ponty wonders how meaning and reason are introduced into a world that is not predestined for them, how transcendence occurs within immanence. His mood of wonderment here is at odds with a gloomier strand of existentialism that focuses on the anguish aroused in subjects by recognition of the world's contingency and the self's mortality. His existents are not individuals thrown into anxiety by

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the responsibility of an untrammeled freedom, but forms of living matter animated by a practical intentionality that engenders lived meaning. To exist is to inhabit a dynamic milieu that vibrates with questions and possibilities that have resonance, first, for the body. Existents are generative; they cannot help but weave significance in their practical acts; they hum with agentic capacities. Caught in a tissue of relations with others and with their environment, they are "condemned to meaning:'30 Because existents are always situated, their freedom is both constrained and facilitated, since although no situation is entirely open, neither is it fully determining. This is not then the abstract, unencumbered liberty of the subject. Existence proliferates as a richly textured process; it describes an ontological upsurge whereby corporeal, expressive life flourishes. From this perspective, existence is no longer a solely anthropological term. The lifeworld becomes a self-generative existential field (the "Being where negativity works"). Returning to this dimension unveils, Merleau-Ponty proclaims, "a wholly new face of the world:' Existence traps, seduces, and surrenders to freedom. It describes "a landscape full of routes and roadblocks:' immune to being surveyed as "simply the theater of our understanding and free will" (S155). It is this hazardous existential upsurge that the phenomenologist describes (plunges into) and it is its more specific emergence as a dense field of forces that the political philosopher must trace. So the trick is to describe the general logic of this upsurge as well as its particular genealogies, without losing contact with the specific ways it is experienced and expressed by those whose actions sustain it. In short, the phenomenologist writes where existence folds over itself. Critics of philosophies of existence often contend that returning to experience is a naIve and untenable procedure because it relies on claims subjects make about their lives and therefore ignores the ideological forces that have shaped (or constructed) their experience and their understanding of it. It seems to ignore discursive power and to rely on the erroneous (Cartesian) assumption that subjects enjoy self-presence. Opinion is accused here of masquerading as knowledge. As Deleuze and Guattari write, "all opinion is already political:'31 For example, in a chapter entitled "Against Phenomenology:' and in a (Deleuzean) context where she opposes Merleau-Ponty's version in particular, Dorothea Olkowski rehearses feminist concerns that "blind acceptance of the concept of 'experience' as the point of view from which knowledge is constructed is dangerous." She argues that the "acceptance of experience as an unproblematic criterion for the assessment of knowledge overlooks the fact that experience is already determined by the cultural and theoretical milieu, and thus is not ideologically free:'32

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But this is surely from Merleau-Ponty's perspective an entirely valid concern, rather than a criticism of his approach. Do not his refusal to equate experience with immediacy, and his critique of ideology in its pejorative sense, endorse Olkowski's concerns while at the same time suggesting that experience can nonetheless be investigated from a more critical perspective? His acknowledgment of the inescapability of ideology in its more neutral sense as a horizon of the lifeworld, and his view that experience is mediated by rather than determined by culture, show indeed why it is crucial to interrogate experience if one is interested in politics. For as Iris Young put it (again in the context of discussing Merleau-Ponty), "the body as lived is always layered with social and historical meaning and is not some primitive matter prior to or underlying economic and political relations or cultural meanings:'33 The key point here is that experience, corporeal or otherwise, is not some epistemological ground zero, but it is the realm where politics begins and, to a significant extent, remains. It is in experience that discourses, ideologies, and sedimented practices are reproduced, and it is in lived experience and perceptions of dysfunctions and lacunae that resistance is first motivated and appears. If this is overdetermined by ideology, then it is important to engage with it and to weigh experience against the more structural and genealogical studies upon which Merleau-Ponty also insists. But this is precisely the labyrinth into which an engaged politics must plunge. For if it neglects the perspectives-the interiority-of emergent agencies that make politics, political analysis is doomed to high-altitude thinking. Then it loses contact with the very stuff of the political and surrenders any basis for critical judgment. As Linda Martin Alcoff argues, experience "does not provide 'incontestable evidence' for any single interpretation, but unless it is the basis for explanation, the outcome is epistemological skepticism."34 Again, it is dialectical mediation, not radical constructionism, that is the key to finessing relationships of power.

Phenomenology as Critical Theory The pieces are now in place for understanding how phenomenology became for Merleau-Ponty not a subjectivist, humanist, and idealist philosophy, but a dialectical, posthumanist, yet existentialist critical theory. In the following section, I will begin by considering the way it allowed him to overcome the flaws he had detected in the Marxian dialectic by describing a hyperdialectics. In order to assess its contemporary relevance as radical philosophy, I will then compare this phenomenological approach with that of genealogy.

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Marxism, Historical Materialism, and Dialectics Part 1 of this book ended with Merleau-Ponty's conclusion that Marxism is fundamentally marred by dualist ontology, Kantian normativity, and methodological rationalism. Yet I argued that it would be wrong to infer that he simply eliminated Marxism from his political philosophy. What he had rejected was the anthropological theory of human essence that the early Marx posited at the origin of history, the identification of the proletariat as the privileged agency of human redemption, and a teleological or deterministic account of human progress. What is obsolete, he had concluded in Adventures of the Dialedic, "is not the dialectic but the pretension of terminating it in an end of history" (AD 206). While he holds the latter responsible for the positivist methods, crude ideology, and violent politics perpetrated in Marx's name, its separation from a "good" dialectic is indicative of Merleau-Ponty's reluctance to abandon historical materialism or dialectics as ingredients of his own critical thinking. The way historical materialism is described in his early work reveals its affinity with his existential phenomenology; his sketches of a hyperdialectics in the late writings suggest that he still saw his work as inherently dialectical. Alongside his alleged humanist essentialism in 1844, Marx had recognized that although "thinking and being are ... no doubt distinct, they are at the same time in unity with each other."35 This Marx had appreciated that the body is active and passive, a configuration of forces that changes over time through interaction with its environment and with others. He had described the body relating to the world of objects in a sensuous way-"seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving"-and insisted on the historicity of its sensuality: "the forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present." It is the production of new objects that engenders new modes of perception and vice versa. But this is also a critical account of how the bourgeois obsession with possessing property cuts us off from a rich world of objects that might otherwise be enjoyed with all the senses, rather than being reduced to commodities whose only quality is their exchange value. 36 It is this Marx who compels Merleau-Ponty to remember that his central ontological figure-the practical, perceiving body-is situated in socioeconomic and historicocultural contexts to which it responds and which transfigure it. This enables him to combine corporeal and historical materialism. Inversely, what renders historical materialism inherently phenomenological for Merleau-Ponty is the way it describes the phenomena of collective life as they appear over time within changing lifeworlds. As such, historical materialism and phenomenology equally demystify naturalistic claims about the necessary structure of things. They reveal them as historical but also as caught up in relations of power. It is their determination to interrogate ideological or

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discursive presuppositions and to identify the material interests they serve, as well as their ability to identify structures that block social change, that define them as critical theories. Furthermore, Marx did not simply describe metastructures or rely upon a historical metanarrative for his studies of capital. He investigated the empirical details of bourgeois life by studying numerous details and reports about economic relationships under capitalism, in order to understand how they become systemic. "This concrete thinking, which Marx calls 'critique,'" Merleau-Ponty asserts in an early essay, "is what others propound under the name of 'existential philosophy'" (SNS 133). This is no "embalmed" dialectic, but a concrete history of practices and experience that had allowed Marx to flesh out the dialectical relationship between values and facts and between political ideals and their historical situation. Here, the term concrete is not just a synonym for material but also the antidote to aerial or empiricist thinking. It eschews abstract accounts that present isolated, inert subjects or objects without explaining the mediations-the dense dialectic of invisible relationships- that engender and make sense of them. This is why Merleau-Ponty commends historical materialism as a "concrete conception of history" that restores to its manifest content (such as the formal, juridical status of citizenship) its latent content: "the relation between human persons as they are actually established in concrete living" (PhP 171). Merleau-Ponty was attracted to Marxism because alongside its more formulaic elements it seemed to glimpse the third dimension and thus to encourage its practitioners to plunge into the labyrinth of (co )existence, to offer a reading of history as it unfolds. What this Marx had tried to identify were situated antagonisms and contradictions, contingent negations and conflicts, which thrive within particular configurations of forces. This is the Marxism, I suggest, that Merleau-Ponty never surrendered and could not abandon because he had assimilated it into his own approach. "The dialectic;' he concludes in Adventures of the Dialectic, "is the continued intuition, a consistent reading of actual history, the re-establishment of the tormented relations, of the interminable exchanges, between subject and object" (AD 6, 32). It is this dialectical Marxism that keeps in touch with the facticity surrendered by Sartre or Heidegger as an ongoing process of critical engagement in the material and symbolic reversals of collective life; that is, "not primarily a system of ideas but a reading of ongoing history" (HT 52). Later this would be elided with Weberian Marxism, applauded by Merleau-Ponty as "a rigorous and consistent Marxism which, like Weber's approach, was a theory of historical comprehension ... and of creative choice, and was a philosophy that questioned history" (AD 29). This Marx is not a dualist thinker or weaver of metanarratives, but a phenomenologist for whom there is a "coming-to-be of meaning in institutions;'

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where history is a "mixed milieu" of persons and things, intentions and structures, interiority and exteriority (AD 124). It is in this form that Marxism remains faithful to a "good" dialectic as a "permanent interrogation" that "presents empirical history as the genealogy of truth" where the present is worked upon by self-criticism (AD 57). This Marxism cannot claim to represent history's Truth-it only offers a perspective on a complex development that has multiple dimensions and sources of meaning (S lOff)-but it does plunge into this dense and ambiguous history in a way that idealist or scientific approaches to collective life simply cannot. "Nothing is more foreign to it:' Merleau-Ponty concludes, "than the Kantian conception of an identity of the world which is the same for everyone" (AD 204). Although Marxism does have a perspective, if it is faithful to its own methodology it is incumbent upon it to interrogate its presuppositions and to recognize the provisionality of its conclusions. This is where dialectics becomes hyperdialectical. Merleau-Ponty's enduring fidelity to the critical, concrete approach he associates with historical materialism and dialectical analysis is one of the markers that distinguish him from a later generation of poststructuralists. Its exponents have been less inclined to distinguish between Marxism's "grand narrative" and its critical methodology, but they have anyway been suspicious of appeals to experience, especially in its more socioeconomic aspects. Derrida, for example, acknowledges the indispensability of the spirit of Marxist critique, while distinguishing it not only from "Marxism as ontology, philosophical or metaphysical system" but also from "Marxism as historical materialism or method:'37 As far as Merleau-Ponty is concerned, however, it makes no sense to endorse a critical spirit or ethos without also practising a historical and materialist approach that plunges into concrete coexistence, whence it deciphers trajectories and possibilities that emerge within lived relationships that are corporeal and economic as well as linguistic and discursive. Hyperdialectics In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty outlines the mode of reasoning that is congruent with-indeed immanent to-his ontology of the flesh. He refers to it as a "good" dialectic or hyperdialectic ("il n'est de bonne dialectique que l'hyperdialectique" [VI 94]).38 The latter term is introduced in the context of continuing the criticism of Sartre begun at the end of Adventures of the Dialectic. As noted in the previous chapter, the return to ontology summoned by Marxism's deficits required a renewed engagement with the status of negativity as simultaneously philosophical and ontological. Hyperdialectics recognizes the dialectics of existence, but it is also self-critical, so it operates simultaneously on several levels. It is not rationalist formula imposed

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on Being but a practising where existence folds over itself. It is "a sort of hyperreflection [sur-n!flexionl" because "the philosopher is always implicated in the problems he poses" and so philosophy must "take itself and the changes it introduces into the spectacle into account" (VI 38, 90). This imperative arises from the initial observation that the embodied thinker is ineluctably situated, as a perspectival, intentional, and efficacious actor, but also from the realization that reason has its own genesis in nonreason. Its corollary is that philosophy must remain "autocritical:' denouncing significations that are cut off from experience and avoiding its own reification. This, after all, is the critical imperative of phenomenology asserted by Husserl.lt is where Hegel and Marx had ultimately failed and it is why "there is no good dialectic but that which criticizes itself and surpasses itself as a separate statement" (VI 94). Despite its previous misadventures this is still, then, dialectical reasoning. Merleau-Ponty is careful nonetheless to distinguish it from the bad or embalmed dialectic, the residual rationalism of which he had rejected, and he confesses some reluctance to continue using the term because of its poor reputation and paradoxical nature. Naming the dialectic is risky not only because of the term's political legacy, but also because once named it is readily reduced to an inert schema (for example, the triangularity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; the logic of progress towards totality [AufhebungJ; the identity or contradiction of opposites). Because "the dialectic is unstable, if one wishes to maintain its spirit it is perhaps necessary to not even name it. The sort of being to which it refers, and which we have been trying to indicate, is in fact not susceptible of being designated positively ... One of the tasks of the dialectic, as a situational thought, a thought in contact with being, is to shake off the false evidences, to denounce the significations cut off from the experience of being, emptied-and to criticize itself in the measure that it itself becomes one of them" (VI 92). This is why the program and justification for a hyperdialectical phenomenology, once it has been understood, must give way to its practise rather than issuing in a fixed program or rigid method. As an ongoing practice, hyperdialectics emulates the fleet relations and reversals that stream within and between phenomena, where they are distributed over several planes and within a complex temporality, which defies any simply linear path. "Dialectical thought by principle excludes all extrapolation, since it teaches that there can always be a supplement of being in being" and that consciousness is "always deceived by the event" (VI 94). This is not therefore "a thought that follows a pre-established route but ... a thought that traces its own course, that finds itself by advancing, that makes its own way, and thus proves that the way is practicable. This thought wholly subjugated to its content, from which it receives its incitement, could not express itself as a reflection or copy of an

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exterior process; it is the engendering of a relation starting from the other. Being neither an outside witness nor a pure agent, it is implicated in the movement and does not view it from above" (VI 90). While such a dialectics recognizes "reciprocal actions and interactions" over time as hyperdialectical, it must also take into account the multiple entries into and perspectives on Being. It must be aware of the complex traversals and reversals that cannot be summed up all at once in a positive synthesis, since all surpassing remains "concrete, partial, encumbered with survivals, saddled with deficits" (VI 89, 95). It is into this lively, intermundane space of relationalitya "complex totality" that is a "swarm of relations with double meaning, incompatible and yet necessary to one another"-that the philosopher or political actor plunges, where the flesh describes a dense temporal field of visible phenomena subtended by invisible forces and reflexive folds. Because Being has many facets and dimensions that unfold over time, so it requires thinking that traverses it over time. Each time thinking crosses existence, it is affected by its past crossings and anticipates future returns. The process must always be undertaken afresh, making its way forward while taking into account the effects of its own interventions and reflecting upon its own genealogy. Far from tracing any predestined itinerary of reason, this is then reason in the making, forging its own path and weaving sens within the density of the real. If philosophy cannot be nonphilosophy, it can emulate the chiasm of thinking and being that is flesh. If it remains methodologically a mode of reflection, it can maintain the most intimate relationship with non philosophy by practising a series of reversals and cross checks, in which there is an incessant back-and-forth between immersion and distance, reflection and experience, interiority and exteriority, which remains immanent to the flesh as it folds over itself. As Pierre Bourdieu will write of a reflexive sociology that is heavily indebted to Merleau-Ponty, in social science, progress in knowledge requires knowledge of its own conditions and thus "each doubling-back is another opportunity to objectify more completely one's objective and subjective relation to the object."39 It is now possible to see how the invocation of a hyperdialectic responds to the political challenges described earlier and summarized as a crisis of modern rationalism. It practises subject-object (or better, interiority-exteriority) reciprocity in its reflections, while recognizing their imbrication already within existence. This is the philosophical approach that is consonant with the non-Cartesian, anti-humanist ontology sketched in the later work, but it also responds to the basic oppositions Merleau-Ponty had discovered underlying political rationalism. In the epilogue to Adventures of the Dialectic he comments that the formulae typically associated with dialectical movement are only illuminating when they are grasped within experience, at specific con-

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junctions of "a subject, of being, and of other subjects:' where there is "a perpetual genesis" of a "plurality of levels or orders" and actual exchanges or conflicts occur (AD 203-4,206). If the dialectic cannot therefore deliver the presence of the whole, it can recognize "the global and primordial cohesion of a field of experience wherein each element opens onto others" (AD 204). Accordingly, it must traverse this temporal field of collective life as it is made, interpreting its vectors and emergent forms while placing their moments of closure or inertia under interrogation. This is a process already undertaken by Merleau-Ponty in his political studies, but still (according to his later selfcriticisms) without the requisite reflexivity to guard them against unwarranted (subjectivist) presuppositions. Hyperdialectics challenges the narrowness of modern reason inasmuch as in its instrumental or positivist forms the latter is incapable of criticizing itself, while in its idealist mode it is incapable of engaging with existence. In tracking the ambiguous genealogy of material and symbolic structures; in grounding its interventions in corporeal existence; in ret1ecting upon its own concepts and perspectives, it avoids the corrosiveness of a will to truth that issues in nihilism or relativism. Instead, it weaves truth and meaning within the density of the real and always returns to question their significance. In short, this is integral to history as the intermundane site where collective life is made. In Being and Time, Heidegger insists that the phenomenological maxim "to the things themselves" means letting things manifest themselves, with the term phenomenon deriving from the Greek verb to show itself.40 If truth (Aletheia) involves uncovering and disclosing, he argues, this does not entail a subjective, instrumental imposition of form but a listening, questioning, and openness that lets the Being of entities show itself. What I want to suggest in closing this section-albeit hesitantly since it pushes Merleau-Ponty further than he actually goes-is that this Heideggerian orientation might outline a mode of being-in-the-world that is an alternative to modern rationalism. For if we take seriously Merleau-Ponty's account of a social totality as a mode of (co)existence with a signature that is replicated across its different dimensions, it would follow that a new philosophical way of finessing the relationship between thinking and being -one that is interrogative and dialectical rather than mastering and dualistic-implies, or is prefigurative of, an equivalent transformation across other aspects of the modern lifeworld. I have already referred to this alternative as an interrogative ethos. When he describes hyperdialectical engagement, Merleau-Ponty is certainly explicit regarding its interrogative nature: it "remains a question, it interrogates the world and the thing, it revives, repeats, or imitates their crystallization before us." It is surely Heidegger whom he has in mind when he praises philosophy as that which "opens a space for manifestation" and thinking as

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"self-manifestation, disclosure, in the process of forming itself" (VI 91). The philosopher's manner of proceeding here is no longer one of cognitive mastery, he tells us, but one of witnessing and letting be (VI 100, 101). It was, after all, Heidegger who had fleshed out Husserl's concerns about the nihilist implications of positivism by associating the latter with modernity's technological "enframing" reduction of nature to the ready-to-hand as calculable stuff available for manipulation. 4! These were certainly the kind of implications Marcuse would elicit in describing an aesthetic dimension attuned to pacification or reconciliation with nature, rather than with its domination, and in anticipating a social revolution beyond alienation. I do not want to suggest that this alternative manner of relating to nature and to others marks a utopian element in Merleau-Ponty's thinking after all. Rather, I want to suggest that this existential alternative to rationalism is already exemplified by his phenomenological style of reasoning as it engages interrogatively and critically with its other, and that it might therefore itself be interpreted as indicative of a progressive potential within modern existence towards the sort of openness Merleau-Ponty seeks. Phenomenology and Genealogy Genealogy, especially in its more recent poststructuralist guise, is commonly presented as antipathetic to phenomenology or dialectics. Despite some important differences, however, I suggest that there are significant affinities between Foucault's version of the former and Merleau-Ponty's version of the latter, not least because both are presented as critical theories associated with an interrogative ethos. The recent popularity of genealogy owes a good deal to Foucault's rediscovery of Nietzsche, which occurred in the context of deepseated hostility towards Husserlian or Hegelian phenomenology and Marxian dialectics. When Foucault glosses Nietzsche's approach in his essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History:' he begins by noting that genealogy "opposes itself to the search for 'origins:"42 Whether prelapsarian or prediscursive, origins suggest to the genealogist metaphysical beliefs regarding "the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession:' If Platonic essences were Nietzsche's main target here, Foucault's more capacious criticism is intended to embrace his own rejections of both Husserl's transcendental aspiration to return to the things themselves43 and the metanarratives that begin with an idealized origin prefigurative of historical telos, such as in Marx's anthropology.44 He points out the theological structure of this redemptive humanist fable. In order to subvert the history that records this linear progress, Foucault emphasizes violence and dispersal, describing geneal-

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ogy as a mode of analysis that patiently investigates small details and apparently insignificant events. It elicits random, ad hoc occurrences and refuses to subsume them under "a monotonous finality:' It focuses, he tells us, on history without a soul, on its discontinuities and ruptures, "its jolts, its surprises:'45 . In order to see where Merleau-Ponty stands here, it is helpful to distinguish in Foucault's account between his attack on history as a discipline that imposes meaning on allegedly singular events (a will to truth) and "effective" history as the accumulation of such events over time, where the everyday exercise of discipline is ubiquitous (will to power). Now, as far as discursive history is concerned, Merleau-Ponty surely eludes Foucault's concerns. He maintains that existence comes before essence and he eschews teleological accounts of historical necessity or idealized origins. As a consequence of his insistence on embodiment and contingency, he acknowledges that every account remains perspectival. So where Foucault cites Nietzsche's complaint that historians "take unusual pains to erase the elements of their work which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place:'46 Merleau-Ponty proclaims the provisional, situated nature of all knowledge. He has no significant disagreement, either, with Foucault's contention that historical emergence "is always produced through a particular stage of forces" in what Nietzsche referred to as "an extended battle against conditions that are essentially and constantly unfavorable:'47 This is just the contextual but restless negativity Merleau-Ponty observes in collective life as a volatile field of forces. Nor does he have any quarrel with claims Foucault attributes to Nietzsche: that reason is born from nonreason and violence, and that (the discourse of) liberty is invented by ruling classes. These are lessons Merleau-Ponty had learnt from Weber and Marx. It is on the issue of "effective" history that the two approaches seem more at odds. "Power relations underwrite all Foucault's genealogies:' one of his commentators explains. "This translates 'history' from a project of meaning and communication toward a 'microphysics of power:"48 Although MerleauPonty does not believe history has any single or predetermined sense, he does follow Weber in maintaining that it is meaningful for those who make it. In other words, it has a degree of interiority (it is folded) and this makes a difference to the way actors respond to their conditions. It should also make a difference to the way the historian proceeds, since it is possible to learn from this lived history and to discern provisional trajectories there. A further distinction made by Foucault is relevant here, because he denies that it follows from a rejection of (intrinsically) meaningful history that history as such is incomprehensible. "History has no 'meaning: though this is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent:' It is intelligible in terms of its struggles and strategies. 49 But without practising any dialectical reciprocity between lived and recorded

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history, what criteria can the historian use to support this intelligibility? The structural account that emerges has no internal contact with those who make history; it remains high-altitude thinking. But Merleau-Ponty goes further. He recognizes "certain effective problems present at the core of history" (SNS 105) that grant it a certain negative logic inasmuch as history is a "process of elimination": "the quest, through always atypical cultural devices, for a life which is not unliveable for the greatest number" (CAL 102; S l31). The quest is no destiny, but it is driven by the myriad refusals and contestations that emerge within the everyday experience of embodied actors. The phenomenologist pays attention to the motivations and efficacy of these agencies as well as to the structural consequences of collective acts that engender sens (meaning and direction) not in or on history, as if this were some alien thing with a life of its own, but as history. This is what allows Merleau-Ponty to flesh out that "essential obstinacy on the part of the principles of freedom" that Foucault can only invoke in passing,50 and to present (co )existence as the genealogy of truth. For if effective history is "a profusion of entangled events:'51 as Foucault claims, there is also an incessant weaving of provisional forms where actors' lives intersect. As the phenomenology of perception teaches, we "witness every minute the miracle of related experiences" (PhP xx). Despite his recognition of radical contingency, accidents, and violence in history, MerleauPonty 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. Despite his disavowal of "the pretense of systematic works" in favor of "samplings, probings, philosophical anecdotes, the beginnings of analyses, in short, the continual rumination which goes on in the course of reading, personal meetings, and current events" (AD 3), Merleau-Ponty never signals the abandonment of a hermeneutical approach towards history as it is made. He only came to realize that it is more difficult, because historical reason is often more elusive, than he had initially appreciated. If he disagrees with genealogy (a term he often indeed uses himself as more or less synonymous with a genetic phenomenology) it is not because he is an exponent of history as grand narrative. It is because he sees within the dust of facts a contingent, existential choreography whereby singularities and events are continuously woven into a broader fabric and significance wells up where they intersect. Meaning and rationality are not for him solely discursive constructs but emerge in the thickness of the flesh. This is why Merleau-Ponty could only partly have agreed with Foucault that "knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting."52

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However, if one focuses on them as critical theories, there is considerably more agreement between Merleau-Ponty's and Foucault's work. Both thinkers are motivated by resistance to reified practices or structures that entail closure. Their work is critical because it exposes the tendency of power to naturalize or render invisible its operations by insinuating them into the taken-forgranted horizons or unquestioned practices of everyday life. When Wendy Brown summarizes Nietzsche's genealogical project as being "to create some kind of distance between us and our knowledge, unsettling what we think we know, defamiliarizing the familiar, defamiliarizing us with ourselves:'53 then the affinity becomes clear. For is it not precisely this quest of rendering the taken-for-granted strange that Merleau-Ponty and Husserl place at the heart of phenomenological interrogation of presuppositions and prejudices? If genealogy is perhaps more limited here, it is only because its focus on morality, values, discourses, and subjectivity confines it to a cultural analysis that ignores political economy, and because its constructionist withdrawal from the nondiscursive precludes its engagement with this level of existence. Foucault's antipathy towards phenomenology means he is unable to investigate normalized existence as it is experienced. This is where phenomenology permits a turning inside out of historical details and structures of power, to discover their significance for those who live them and whose motivation to resist constitutes the stuff of history and the agonism of politics. When he writes, "for power relations we had no tools of study:' the form of Foucault's lament is strikingly reminiscent of Husserl's concerns about describing the lifeworld or of Merleau-Ponty's regarding the interworld. 54 It is also tempting from this perspective to interpret Foucault's genealogies of power as a form of radical Weberianism, inasmuch as what they describe is an intensified rationalization of modernity that is traced through the minutiae of thoroughly colonized, disciplined, and reconstructed lifeworlds. The techniques and capillaries of power on which Foucault focuses could indeed have considerably enriched Merleau-Ponty's studies of rationalist regimes, and it is notable that in explaining the twentieth century's interest in power Foucault cites the way fascism and Stalinism used "the ideas and the devices of our political rationality:'55 The resultant task he accords philosophy here again reveals the affinity between genealogy and phenomenology as critical theories whose job it is "to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality" since the "relationship between rationalization and excesses of political power is evident."56 If Foucault rejects the broader narrative of reason succumbing to instrumentalism, which he associates with the Frankfurt School's Weberianism, his invocation of a plurality of rationalities and resistances always at work in a mobile field of forces still requires the sort of continual analysis and engaged critique that Merleau-Ponty commends. The "task of

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philosophy as a critical analysis of our world:' Foucault argues, "is something which is more and more important." The "analysis of power relations in a given society"-regarding their historical formation, their potential for transformation, the sources of their strength and fragility, and their resistance-is designated a "permanent political task:'57 But is this not precisely the dialectical undertaking that Merleau-Ponty exemplifies in his political analyses? In ascribing to philosophy the task of an engaged critical analysis of its times, Foucault associates it with a particular enlightenment ethos that is an alternative inheritance of the Enlightenment, alternative to the inheritance of modern govern mentality. Earlier I equated Merleau-Ponty's understanding of phenomenological reasoning with an interrogative ethos indicative, perhaps, of a new enlightenment. Foucault traces the ethos he commends back to Kant, whom he credits with recognizing modernity as a critical, reflexive attitude that is at once ethical (an obligation to question) and political (a public critique of authoritarian institutions and a reflection on what constitutes the very humanity of human beings).58 By "attitude:' Foucault explains, he means "a mode of relating to contemporary reality ... in the end a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving" that manifests a "relation of belonging" and a "task" "a bit like what the Greeks called an ethos:' As such, the modern critical ethos is more than just philosophy: it is an entire mode of existence, one that practises "a permanent critique of our historical era:'59 Is this not similar to the ethos that Merleau-Ponty describes as an interrogative style and which is an existential-ethical alternative to modern rationalism, that other legacy of the Enlightenment?60 Is there not, moreover, a further echo of Husserl's phenomenological project in Foucault's exhortation to pursue a "historical ontology of ourselves" while remaining "always in a position of beginning again" in relation to our knowledge and its limits?61 It only remains to add that for Merleau-Ponty this investigation must include, alongside the discourses and games of truth that configure particular subjectivities, an examination of how and how much "subjectivity" or "agency"-as contingent negativities or capacities-emerge within corporeal existence and are played out within an intersubjective lifeworld. This ontological inquiry will be considered in chapter 6, but first it is necessary to put more flesh on the phenomenological ethos as political critique and practice. Notes 1. Paul Ricoeur, "The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of Semiology," in

The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 247 n. 7.

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2. See for example M. Foucault, "Structuralism and Post-Structuralism:' in Michel Foucault: Ethics; Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. P. Rabinow (London: Penguin, 2000), 197-98; M. Foucault, The Order of Things (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1970), xiv; G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 149-51; D. Olkowski, Rereading Merleau-Ponty, chap. 3. 3. I agree here with Eric Mathews when he writes, "If we are to understand Merleau-Ponty properly, we have to see him above all in relation to phenomenology, and even the other influences on his thought were filtered through his conception of phenomenology:' E. Matthews, The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Chesham, Bucks: Acumen, 2002), 23. 4. As James Schmidt notes, much of the suspicion was anyway generalized from an attack on Husserl and Sartre, and tended to ignore Merleau-Ponty's development after the 1940s, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 4-5. Keith Ansell Pearson writes, "We need to note ... that the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty as it unfolds becomes more resilient to Deleuze's criticism of its subjectivism:' Germinal Life, 71. 5. Habermas has argued that phenomenology is incapable of self-renewal because it has not achieved the "postism" associated with other post-metaphysical approaches. But as J. A. Amason points out, Merleau-Ponty is conspicuously absent from Habermas's account of its failed expositions while his "sustained and seminal" contributions in this direction are ignored. J. Habermas, Post-Metaphysical Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 3; J. A. Amason, "Merleau-Ponty and Max Weber: An Unfinished Dialogue:' Thesis Eleven 36 (1993): 82-98. 6. The notes for this course are now published with commentary by L. Lawlor and B. Bergo, eds., Merleau-Ponty: Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002). 7. The narrative of the archives and of Merleau-Ponty's access to them has been detailed by H. L. Breda in his "Merleau-Ponty and the Husserl Archives at Louvain:' reproduced in Texts and Dialogues 150-61. I have drawn on this account here. 8. Parts 1 and 2 of Husserl's Crisis had been published in Belgrade in 1936, while "The Origin of Geometry:' which also excited Derrida, among others, was published in the Revue Internationale de Philosophie 1, no. 2 (1939). The essay is now reprinted as an appendix to The Crisis of the European Sciences, 353-78. For a useful recent overview of Husserl and of his phenomenological legacy among thinkers such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Derrida, see D. Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London and New York: 2000). 9. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Phenomenology (1954 as La Phenomenologie, repro Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1991), 42. Lyotard argues that the Cartesian dream of a Mathesis Universalis was reborn in Husserl, who was seeking the foundations of scientific knowledge minus its Kantian a prioris. With this aim, he was still led by a "rationalist bent:' but one that could equally flip over into irrationalism in its concern for the prereflective (32-33). 10. H. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hume (London: Macmillan, 1913), 6-7. 11. E. Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology (1930; repr., Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 67, 71, 94. Derrida discusses

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Levinas's encounter with Husserl in "Violence and Metaphysics:' Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978),84-87, where he notes that Levinas's insistence on "those aspects of Husserlian phenomenology which take us to the inner and outer reaches of the 'subject-object correlation'" (85) eventually obliged him to leave Husserl behind despite an enduring methodological indebtedness. Here he allegedly remained faithful to the meaning of experience and to intentionality, but in terms of transcendence toward the other where intentionality becomes desire. 12. Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology, 119. 13. Gadamer and Derrida both note unresolved tensions between transcendental and genetic phenomenology, and there is a widespread judgment that Husserlcontra Merleau-Ponty-intended to subordinate the latter to the former, thereby sustaining his idealist approach. See Derrida, "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology:' Writing and Difference. Marcuse's summary of the Crisis simply presents it as a mode of transcendental Kantianism. H. Marcuse, "On Science and Phenomenology:'

The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. 14. Husserl, The Crisis, 15-17. 15. Husserl, The Crisis, 49-50, 121. 16. Husserl, The Crisis, 142. 17. Husserl, The Crisis, 58-59,72-73. 18. Husserl, The Crisis, 103. 19. Husserl, The Crisis, 97-98,111. 20. Husserl, The Crisis, 116. 21. Husserl, The Crisis, 103. 22. Heidegger, Being and Time, 358. 23. Husserl, The Crisis, 124, 134, 137. 24. Husserl, The Crisis, 112, 123. 25. Merleau-Ponty's interpretation avoids and responds to the kind of accusations Marcuse levels at even the later Husserl of The Crisis. Marcuse throws doubt on the possibility of getting behind scientific and pre-scientific mystification through the phenomenological reduction, as well as voicing skepticism regarding Husserl's ability to match his challenge to empiricist reification, with an equivalent challenge to Kantian subjectivism. The key weakness he identifies here is a failure to recognize the subjectobject dialectic of experience. H. Marcuse, "On Science and Phenomenology:' 475. 26. Morton Schoolman's statement offers a good illustration of this claim when he writes, '''Difference' is being that lies forever outside thinking, being that is non-identical with thinking, whose identity, in aesthetic terms, is unknown and unknowable." M. Schoolman, Reason and Horror (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 51. Although Merleau-Ponty agrees that being is irreducible to thinking, his argument is that it is not however simply "unknown and unknowable:' precisely because of the noncognitive capacities for meaning and expression that inhere in the body. 27. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York, Vintage Books, 1978); J. Butler, Gender Trouble (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), ix. 28. Foucault, The Order of Things, xiv. 29. In this context, Merleau-Ponty mentions the importance of the avant-garde Catholic journal Esprit, which aimed to link political events with philosophical judg-

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ment and in which he would have come across, inter alia, Levinas's reflections on the Nazis. See H. Caygill, "Levinas's Political Judgement: The Esprit Articles, 1934-1983:' Radical Philosophy 104 (NovemberlDecember 2000): 7. 30. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 361-62. 31. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 145. 32. D. Olkowski, Rereading Merleau-Ponty, 61-62. 33. Young, 7. 34. L. M. Alcoff, "Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Theory on Experience" in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of the Flesh, ed. F. Evans and L. Lawlor (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY, 2000),262. 35. K. Marx, The 1844 Manuscripts, ed. D. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1973), 138. 36. Marx, 1844, 138-41. 37. Derrida, Specters, 68. 38. Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l'invisible (Paris: Gal1imard, 1964), 128 (VI 94). 39. P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 1. 40. Heidegger, Being and Time, 49-51. 41. M. Heidegger, ''An Essay Concerning Technology" in M. Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. D. Krell (London and New York: Routledge, 1978). 42. M. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History:' in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Selected Essays by Michel Foucault, ed. D. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 140, 142. 43. Given Foucault's affinity with Deleuze, it is instructive to note his more explicit identification of a phenomenological metaphysics, which they also see as a transcendental folly. "It, too, goes in search of original opinions which bind us to the world as to our homeland (earth):' "Phenomenology wanted to renew our concepts by giving us perceptions and affections that would awaken us to the world ... by right, beings whose proto-opinions would be the foundation of this world:' Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 149-50. 44. When Foucault writes that in "placing present needs at the origin, the metaphysician would convince us of an obscure purpose that seeks its realization at the moment it arises:' ("Nietzsche, Genealogy, History:' 148), he echoes Merleau-Ponty's rejection of Marx's naturalist anthropological assumptions regarding essential human need. See also Lyotard's identification of Hegelian dialectics as one of modernity's two major metanarratives in The Postmodern Condition. 45. Foucault, "Nietzsche:' 139, 144-45. 46. Foucault, "Nietzsche:' 156. 47. Foucault, "Nietzsche," 149. 48. T. Flynn, "Foucault's Mapping of History:' in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. G. Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 35. 49. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 114. 50. Foucault, "The Subject and Power" in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982),225.

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51. Foucault, "Nietzsche;' 149. The reference is to Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. 52. Foucault, "Nietzsche;' 154. 53. W. Brown, 95. As David Owen concludes following a review of four recent books on genealogy, its philosophical function is typically identified with "enabling us to free ourselves from the grip of a perspective-say, a way of thinking politically-in order to take this perspective as an object of critical assessment and evaluation." D. Owen, "On Genealogy and Political Theory;' Political Theory 33, no. 1 (Feb 2005): 119. 54. M. Foucault, "The Subject and Power;' 209. 55. Foucault, "The Subject and Power;' 209. 56. Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 209-10. 57. Foucault, "The Subject and Power," 210, 211, 216, 223. 58. Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" in Michel Foucault: Ethics; Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. P. Rabinow, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1997),305-6. 59. Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?" 309. 60. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xvi. The "critique of enlightenment is intended to prepare the way for a positive notion of enlightenment which will release it from entanglement in blind domination:' 61. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 318-19.

5

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I

Merleau-Ponty's use of phenome-

nology as a critical theory and his commitment to it as indicative of the Itransformation of modern culture and its most basic power relations. As such, N THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER,

CONSIDERED

phenomenology remained for him profoundly and intrinsically political. In this chapter, my aim is to flesh out his understanding of phenomenological practice in its application to politics. I want to show how it yielded him methodological guidance for understanding collective life, as well as a way of describing exemplary political conduct as a phenomenological art. This will allow me to make more explicit the theoretical presuppositions that were merely taken for granted in part 1, but which oriented the political analyses described there.

Understanding Social Ontology While Merleau-Ponty presented phenomenology as a style of thinking and remained suspicious of anything that might harden into methodological formalism, he did need to consider rather more precisely what such an investigation entails. In taking up Husserl's imperative of examining the general structures of the lifeworld and of analyzing some of its specific genealogies, he needed to develop new approaches and concepts. He was aware that this is initially the case for "all notions which make their appearance at turning points in scientific advance. They can be fully developed only through a reform of methods;' in which it is "their immanent development which bursts the -123-

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bounds of methods hitherto used" (PhP 98). However, what emerges is less a precise method than an overall approach that draws on a number of promising conceptual frameworks, which are bent and assimilated to MerleauPonty's needs. Here he ruminates on the inductive methods of the natural sciences and draws on a variety of frameworks associated with the human sciences, in particular gestalt theory, structuralism, and Weberian sociology. Philosophy and Science Because Merleau-Ponty was concerned with concrete analyses of social phenomena, he realized that he could not rely on philosophy alone. He may have been less adept at using empirical information than his approach warrants, but in principle, he insisted on a close working relationship with the sciences as sources of information. Given his materialist and political concerns, he was far less eager than Husserl or Heidegger (or than Deleuze and Guattari more recentlyl) to make a strong claim for the separation of philosophy from science. The logic of his existential phenomenology, with its dialectic of facts and meaning, indeed requires an equivalent relationship between empirical and interpretive approaches and hence cooperation between science and philosophy. Merleau-Ponty was not simplistically advising philosophers to pay more attention to unreconstructed science or vice versa. He saw how each disciplinary field challenges the other's undialectical proclivities. Thus every positive science needs both "to understand itself" as a "construction based on a brute, existent world" and to incorporate hermeneutical sensitivity by discovering in facts their "spontaneous order, a meaning, an intrinsic truth, an orientation:' Equally, philosophy "must not be purely conceptual in detaching itself from facts" (PP 52-53,160; S 99,157). Merleau-Ponty believed, moreover, that despite the threat positivism poses to critical reasoning, scientists were beginning to doubt the epistemological and ontological certainties that they had formerly taken for granted. Recent debates within neuroscience exemplify the continuing currency of this insight. Political science did not exist as an autonomous discipline for MerleauPonty, but the relevance to it of his arguments can readily be discerned inasmuch as its own structure tends to replicate the science/philosophy split he rejected, specifically in its separation of political science from political theory. A tendency of the former to rely on formal modeling, positivist data collection, or behavioralism, and of the latter to focus on abstract conceptual or normative analysis, would have seemed to him especially unpropitious inasmuch as this division of labor precludes any real grasp of politics as it unfolds where facts and norms mesh. The more reflexive and dialectical approach he advocated has since been more evident in sociology. It is not therefore surprising

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to see Bourdieu being described as Merleau-Ponty's sociological heir, nor to find Anthony Giddens prefacing his Central Problems in Social Theory with a quote from Merleau-Ponty that laments the failure of philosophy and sociology to comprehend one another, and which charges their segregation with bringing culture into a state of permanent crisis. 2 But the study of politics has remained more resistant. Merleau-Ponty sometimes likens the more interpretive aspects he commends to the sciences to Husserl's intuition of essences. He insists that rather than being an idealistic pursuit of unchanging truths, his is a search for generalities within the contingencies of experience, one that takes facts and events beyond their singularity but without imposing unwarranted universality upon them. Essences are understood here as inexact, "morphological;' "probable:' He suggests that Husserl's eidetic intuition should be recognized as closer to induction (whereby provisional laws emerge out of manifold observations) than to deduction (where expectations are inferred from a prior system), provided induction itself is recognized as an "illumination" of phenomena rather than a mechanical procedure (PP 69-70; PhP 114-15). "This dialectic of form and content is what we have to restore;' he argues, although even the dialectical notion of reciprocal action is sometimes judged too complicit with causal or contradictory logics (PhP 126). On the other hand, it is important that science and philosophy should remain distinct, and MerleauPonty argues that the latter is no more nor less than "the vigilance which does not let us forget the source of all knowledge" (PP 63; SIlO). As phenomenology, philosophy's task is to keep the lifeworld and its implications at the forefront of inquiry, thereby preventing the reification of conceptual categories, ontological presuppositions, or the empirical given. As the previous chapter established, this remains a quintessentially critical imperative. Gestalt Theory In trying to grasp the upsurge of the lifeworld, Merleau-Ponty made extensive use of the concept of gestalt (form) developed by gestalt theory. He was not uncritical of gestalt theory, since he believed it ignored the implications of its own radicalism in failing to call for the "complete reform of understanding" that its findings invite. Even its leading exponents are charged with failing to name the "third term" that is needed to realize their aspiration of avoiding mind-body dualism (PhP 47ff, 122; VI 20-21). But it does offer clues to the way lived, preintellectual significance appears on a practical, corporeal level. It thereby indicates how structures and capacities that will be erroneously imbued with substance and reified in concepts like consciousness, subjectivity, or agency actually emerge. In other words, it was gestalt theory

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that gave Merleau-Ponty his first sense of immanent, existential negativity as a formative process of contingent emergence. The paradigmatic case here is perception, and this retains its primacy throughout his work, since its basic structures are never outrun. In its studies of perception, and by "revealing 'structure' or 'form' as irreducible elements of being:' Merleau-Ponty contends, Gestalt Psychology has "put into question the classical alternative between 'existence as thing' and 'existence as consciousness: has established a communication between and a mixture of, objective and subjective" (SNS 86). It is not therefore surprising that the gestalt should have played so important a role throughout his work, not only as a conceptual tool but also as an ontological category. Indeed, he found gestalt theory so useful as a means for grasping the phenomenology of experience that he regretted Husserl's failure to take up its central themes of configuration and form in his own work (PhP 51, n. 1). What gestalt experiments reveal in perception is that "the whole is irreducible to its parts in virtue of its own law of intrinsic organization" (HT 162). It is the invisible but relatively open relationship between parts that is crucial here, since it sustains a contingent sens (meaning and direction) or style that goes beyond, but is nothing without, its constituent elements. It is the gestalt that shows the "miracle of the real world" where "significance and existence are one" (PhP 323). It is this figuration, I suggest, that not only anticipates the relationship between the visible and the invisible that will inform the later ontology of that "strange zone" of the intermundane, but which also prefigures the more specific flesh of the political as a field of forces. For it is gestalt theory that draws attention to "the tensions which run like lines of force across the visual field and the system: own body-world" (PhP 48-49). It thereby suggests both a fairly formal, synchronic way of grasping the structure of the lifeworld, and a diachronic or historical sense of the way provisional forms emerge (or atrophy) and the invisible lines of force that support (or subvert) them. The figure of the gestalt thus helped Merleau-Ponty to understand the appearing of meaning and rationality per se, because it describes how the patterning of provisional syntheses expresses an immanent significance that is achieved through a contingent blending of perspectives or cohesion of parts. This choreography of sense is indeed emblematic for him of the very ontology of becoming. Phenomenology of Perception also presents something of a methodological schema for Merleau-Ponty's studies, including those of politics, where he pits idealist and empiricist understandings against one another only to conclude that they are two sides of one rationalist coin and share similar failings. In the case of perception, empiricism fails to recognize the irreducible relationships ("transfactuals"3) that stream between parts to yield the perceptual form, while idealism attributes them to mind.

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These precognitive forms defy ontological dualism and the Cartesian approaches derived from it. What we find instead is a species of emergence theory that foregrounds relationality and that is compatible with a genetic phenomenology. It is this formative logic, which is more aesthetic than causal, that also describes the choreography of sociohistorical structures for Merleau-Ponty. It is because the rhythms of social ontology are similar to those of perceptual appearing that emergent social and political forms are susceptible to the same kind of existential analysis, as so many (co)existential unities exhibiting a relatively distinctive ethos. The gestalt of a society is thus the "particular way in which men ... co-exist" (SNS 131). It is this figure that underpins the studies of historical forms like modernity and casts light on relatively novel social phenomena like communism. It explains the immanent but provisional significance of such existential totalities. This is what allows Merleau-Ponty to retain a Hegelian sense of recognizable historical periods with relatively distinctive signatures, and hence meaning in history, while also acknowledging the importance of accidents and events. For it is an entirely contingent affinity between them that magnetizes parts into open, provisional totalities. This is the sort of historical affinity Weber had recognized in constructing his ideal types, but which Merleau-Ponty also describes as '''affinity: in the Kantian sense." This is, he suggests, "the central phenomenon of perceptual life, since it is the constitution, without any ideal model, of a significant grouping" (PhP 53). Using this aesthetic sense of lawfulness without law helps the phenomenologist to understand lived totalities: to take in the total intention-not only what these things are for representation (the "properties" of the thing perceived, the mass of "historical facts;' the "ideas" introduced by the doctrine)-but the unique mode of existing expressed in the properties of the pebble, the glass or the piece of wax, in all the events of a revolution, in all the thoughts of a philosopher. It is a matter, in the case of each, of finding the Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is ... , the formula that sums up some unique manner of behaviour towards others, towards Nature, time and death: a certain way of patterning the world which the historian should be capable of seizing upon and making his own. (PhP xviii)

In sum, the real is made real over time through unpredictable affinities whereby longstanding habits or unexpected events, including, for example, piecemeal political resistances, are incorporated into constellations whose overall significance is a consequence of internal relationships and whose shifting patterns might result in a gradual mutation but also in a more sudden gestalt switch if their ordering principle changes. Such forms are first recognized and taken up by the body as modes of existing. They also form the basis

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of particular lifeworlds, with their practical and ideological habits that tend to be unthinkingly reproduced (but sometimes challenged) in everyday life. Structuralism Although the advent of structuralism has frequently been cited as the death knell of the sort of totalizing, existential analysis Merleau-Ponty conducted, he integrated key aspects of it into his approach. Whether he actually became a structuralist for a while is indeed an important issue among his critics. 4 But he never surrendered the phenomenology of meaning to a formal analysis of universal binary codes and his notion of structure was used to advance, rather than to suppress, the dialectical sense denied by the movement's more orthodox exponents. In his earlier work, he often in fact used the term structure interchangeably with form and he notes that it was originally used by gestalt theorists "to designate the configurations of the perceptual field" (S 117). It is true that he would later associate it more closely, as would the structuralists themselves, with Saussure's structural linguistics. But as critics often note, Merleau-Ponty's Saussure was not really the one of structuralism at all,S and his suggestion that Saussurean structures converge with Husserl's phenomenology provides a clue to his distinctive understanding of the term structure (PP 84; S 106). Because he continued to interpret structures as gestalten, he was able to associate structuralism with the phenomenological project of overcoming subject-object dualism rather than with its more overt ambition of eliminating the subject (SNS 87). What Merleau-Ponty did nonetheless find valuable in Saussurean linguistics was the differential relationship it established between signs, which he now used to enrich his sense of a mobile, relational interworld. In reading Saussure, he found confirmation that meaning is differential and negative, not substantial and positive. The "terms of language are engendered only by the differences which appear among them" (S 39). Here was the immanent generativity he had found in dialectical notions of mediation and in the gestalt relation between figure and ground, now rendered more fleet and complex. The multiplicity and volatility of differences that subtend unstable signs suggest a far denser field than the more binary logics invoked by orthodox structuralism or "embalmed" dialectics. Merleau-Ponty was already anticipating a more Derridean sense of differance here, where structural linguistics would help him to conceptualize that dense fabric of the flesh-the spatial and temporal network of relations that crisscross the existential field-that hyperdialectics must traverse. However, rather than abandoning the figure of the gestalt, it was simply re-described as "a diacritical, oppositional, relative system" (VI 206). In sum, what I am suggesting Merleau-Ponty primarily gained from

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Saussure is a fluid and relational sense of rhythms of appearing that look more poststructuralist than structuralist. Here was the choreography of a lively, immanent generativity. Still, it is important not to get carried away here. Saussure had no sense of the lifeworld, whereas for Merleau-Ponty it is intercorporeal existence that first emerges through a differential play of relationships. So if he paraphrases Lacan to suggest that perception is structured like a language (VI 126), it is because this linguistic model is useful in describing the structure of perception, not because perception is modeled on language or surrenders its primacy to it. Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty never accepts that language is an entirely selfreferential system devoid of reference to extralinguistic experience. He points out that language retains onomatopoeic residues in its expressions of the world. And it signifies not solely due to the internal relationship between signifiers, but also because nonlinguistic existence is already meaningful and remains in a dialectical relationship with expressive language. Despite his fascination with the choreography of linguistic structures, Merleau-Ponty never subscribed to the structuralist argument that it is the logic of structures that determines meaning and constructs subjects. Although he eventually embraces an anti-humanist ontology, he does not relinquish a phenomenological sense of emergent agency, which is why his work remains politically engaged. What he espouses here is reciprocity between langue and parole; that is, between the structure of language and speech. This is in fact quite antithetical to Saussure's more dualist model. As Giddens argues, "Saussure did not show what mediates between the systematic, non-contingent, social character of langue on the one hand, and the specific, contingent, and individual character of parole on the other."6 Although his own focus is on precisely this mediation, it is therefore rather curious that Merleau-Ponty should have invoked Saussure's complicity in his more dialectical account. According to this version, speakers are born into a grammatical and expressive order and are thereby constrained in what they can meaningfully say; in dutifully replicating these structures, they reinforce existing institutions. But because such structures are relatively open gestalten-networks of differences that leak into experience-speakers can also improvise upon them, deforming their overall patterning to suggest new ways of expressing the world. This is how meaning and change are engendered and it is in expressing themselves that subjectivities, too, are forged. Levi-Strauss's social anthropology is glossed by Merleau-Ponty in analogous terms, with social structures again being described as existential totalities. While they catch actors in their mesh and rely upon their repetitions to maintain them, participants can modify structures with which they have lived familiarity (5 117). Beyond the most elemental structures, Merleau-Ponty

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contends, even Levi-Strauss appreciated the importance of a historical genesis that renders structures more complex and less determining as a second nature (S 123). Historically meaningful forms remain "knots of significations which will be unraveled and tied up again in a different way in a network of knowledge and experience" (S 143). In sociological terms, what Merleau-Ponty is describing here is a dialectic between structure and agency, one that replicates the reversals between interiority and exteriority espoused in other contexts. Here institutions rely upon actors that in turn internalize and carry them forward. It is a bidirectional relationship but one where there is room for slippage, creativity, and dissonance. Of course, there will sometimes be de facto closures as a result of power or inertia (as in the case of rationalism), so the relative efficacy of structures or agents will vary empirically. But this shifting equation is a subject for political investigation, not a theoretical a priori. This dialectic of structure and agency will be developed further by Bourdieu, but both thinkers look to the anthropologist Marcel Mauss for this relational approach, where relatively open structural relations accommodate limited freedom? Merleau- Ponty argues that sociology becomes social anthropology once it admits that the social, like the human, has two facets: it is both lived as meaningful and its processes become generalized as constraining, even constituting, structures (S 114). Like Bourdieu with his notion of habitus, Merleau-Pontyinvokes a "lived equivalent" of structure, which he attributes to Mauss. The methodology that follows from this dialectical account recognizes that "actual thinking moves back and forth between experience and intellectual construction or reconstruction" (S 119): that is, between first and third person accounts, between induction and deduction. This is one of the points where I identified a discrepancy between phenomenology and genealogy. "For the philosopher, the presenc-e of structure outside us in natural and social systems and within us as symbolic function points to a way beyond the subject-object correlation which has dominated philosophy from Descartes to Hegel. By showing us that man is eccentric to himself and that the social finds its center only in man, structure particularly enables us to understand how we are in a sort of short circuit with the socio-historical world" (S 123). It is on this basis that Merleau-Ponty alludes to the possibility of using Saussure to develop a new philosophy of history. "The question is always:' Merleau-Ponty had written in his Phenomenology, "how I can be open to phenomena that transcend me, and which nevertheless exist only to the extent that I take them up and live them" (PhP 363). He responds several years later. "The theory of signs, as developed in linguistics, perhaps implies a conception of historical meaning which gets beyond the opposition of things versus consciousness" (IP 54). In language, he explains, the

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will to communicate leads to new inventions that are systematic but not deliberate, thereby yielding a "lived logic" that engenders rationality within contingency and a possibility of nonlinear progress. This is where the Saussure who allegedly appreciated the reciprocal relationship between langue and parole "could have sketched a new philosophy of history" (IP 55). Earlier, Merleau-Ponty had attributed a sense of this dialectic to Marx, but he now suggests that although the relationship between linguistic structures and expressive speech broadly corresponds to the relation between the forces and forms of production, and to the relation between historical forces and institutions more generally, it sustains a better sense of the way meaning and contingency are interwoven than had Marxism (IP 55). The merit of Saussurean linguistics is that it liberates history from historicism without condemning it to randomness (PW 23). The irony here is that Merleau-Ponty is using a Marxian framework to (mis)interpret Saussure, and then applying it as a correction to Marxism inasmuch as the latter fails to sustain the requisite degree of reciprocity and contingency. Furthermore, the structures he has in mind are the existential forms (rather than linguistic structures, which he had elsewhere described as the "fundamental choice" or "dimensions" of history, where each is "a symbol system that the individual takes over and incorporates as a style of functioning, as a global configuration, without having any need to conceive it at all" (PhP 454). From this perspective, it is difficult to see that Saussure actually contributes very much. However, what I think Merleau-Ponty is keen to convey is not just a new philosophy of history, but a new mode of historicity. The history of linguistic or philosophical change suggests a reflexive engagement with past, present, and alternative modes of expression; a willingness to interrogate, learn from, and integrate lessons that is quite at odds with the "chronic" historicity typically associated with political developments and with their vicissitudes of stubborn closure and violent negation (SNS 87; PW 25, 37, 39; S 130; CAL 101). If different cultures are all provisional solutions to the problem of coexistence and therefore share a "common denominator" (PP 10), languages are so many solutions to the challenge of expression. The mode of historicity assumed by the latter seems, however, more attuned to a primordial temporality where time "is not a line, but a network of intentionalities" that proliferate across a field, "which draws along in its wake its own horizon of retentions, and bites into the future with its protentions" (PhP 416-17). It is then this existential commonality and this temporality that permit communication across differences and the possibility of progress within contingency. It is perhaps helpful to think of this rhythm of historicity as the temporal dimension of the interrogative ethos, where the reversals and reflexivity of the fold are enacted.

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Weberian Sociology In understanding social totalities as gestalten, Merleau-Ponty still needed to explain how their internal logic might be grasped. His solution is exemplified by the strengths and weaknesses he discerned in Weberian sociology. This methodological example is important because Weber tried to overcome the kind of dualisms Merleau-Ponty was rejecting and this spilled over into Weber's advice to political actors; who must practise a rather similar mode of engagement with the present to the one exercised by the historian in relation to the past. At first, Merleau-Ponty explains, Weber approached the past as a Kantian constructionist, recognizing on the one hand the subjectivity of the historian's perception of it and, on the other, the objectivity that comes from following certain rules (AD 10). His ideal types look from this perspective like constructs that are imposed upon the past from outside it. Even though Weber was aware of their provisionality, he worried lest the past defy understanding, or lest it be arbitrarily reconstituted through the lens of the present. He was also concerned from this perspective that while the historian is able to suspend judgment and to maintain a critical distance from the past, the actor who takes on the present has no such luxury, but must make decisions that are absolute yet unjustifiable. In resolving the first problem, of historical method, Merleau-Ponty believes he was able to reappraise the nature of political action and thus to address the second, too. Over time he came, in effect, to a more dialectical and phenomenological understanding of the genesis of historical forms and of his relationship with them (although Merleau-Ponty concedes that Weber "has nowhere given this formula" [AD 11]). By recognizing the continuity between past and present Weber was able both to refine his methodology and to outline an exemplary mode of political engagement, since he realized that the "historian's condition is not so different from that of the man of action" (AD 11). Drawing on a rather free rendition of Weber's account of the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism, Merleau-Ponty explains how Weber discerned recognizable social forms or epochs emerging when scattered historical elements acquire an "elective affinity:' He saw how reversals of cause and effect wove religion and economics into one fabric, the rationalizing principles of which became expressed in modern art, science, the state, and so on. In isolation, the empirical facts of each dimension mean nothing: it is only through their encounter with one another that a rationalist system comes into being in its own right. There is, then, both a historical process at work and a similar theoretical one, whereby the theorist elicits and provisionally composes the essence of an age from its ambiguous signs. Weber began by choosing certain facts simply because they looked interesting or important: this was

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his creative moment. But it transpired to be a fertile choice because these facts revealed "a certain logical structure which is the key to a whole series of other facts:' Initially he could not have known this would be the case; he only anticipated certain results of which he had an "inkling:' an "initial intuition." "He is not sure that they designate essences" and at first they are selected only through awareness of a certain "style" (AD 12-13). But as the selected dimensions threw light on other facts, their choice was vindicated by their fecundity (they were "true" in the sense of opening a field for further investigation rather than as representing the past in itself). What Weber was trying to do here, according to Merleau-Ponty, was to grasp the past as it had been lived in order to specify its interiority as an existential choice that was meaningful and hence motivational for its participants. Abandoning a sense of the past as simply a spectacle, his ideal types now resembled gestalten. He tried to decipher "the total meaning of what has been done" regarding both its objective content and its internal significance. In trying to understand "the basic structure of the facts" that made sense of appearances, he restored "the anonymous intention, the dialectic of the whole" (AD 14). Thus the "historical imagination" that weaves together developments in different facets of life (religion, economy, culture, etc.) until they reinforce each other to take on a significance in their own right, is matched by the historian's imagination in eliciting this overall style of being: on both levels there is a similar advent of meaning. "The meaning of a system in its beginnings is like the pictorial meaning of a painting, which not so much directs the painter's movements but is the result of them and progresses with them" (AD 17). It is through this combination of inspired intuition, empirical investigation, and creative synthesis that the historian engages with the past to thematize its lived significance. s In this way, the emergence of historical forms is recognized as both meaningful and contingent, while understanding them emerges in turn through an engagement of the present with the past. Weber's phenomenology is thus distinguished from Hegel's more systematic version because it is more reflexive (AD 24). Weber was able to make sense of other lifeworlds, according to MerleauPonty, because he did not simply use rational tools to understand them. He also had a lived sense of his own age as a particular existential choice, and he was able to use this as a way of recognizing both its own genesis within the past and the past itself as merely an alternative solution to similar dilemmas of (co )existence. He saw that each epoch becomes ordered around "a questioning of human possibility" and has its own formula (AD 24). Thinking philosophically about the past means, as Merleau-Ponty explains elsewhere, "to understand this past through the internal link between it and us. Comprehension thus becomes a coexistence in history" (PP 89). Weber thus used

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his experience as well as his knowledge to access other ontological choices. Yet his intervention has still to be taken into account when knowledge folds back reflexively over the past, if the dialectical reversals of past and present are to be fully set in motion. The modern scholar inhabits a rationalist milieu that expects history to make sense and to be amenable to rational methods. It is therefore necessary to acknowledge and reflect upon the particular cultural perspective this involves, in which modernity's rational quest for knowledge is an expression of its own existential style: a particular way of approaching the world through knowledge and action. Because encountering other cultures historicizes and thus relativizes our own, this approach shows modern rationalism up as a provisional and partial response to existence. It thereby invites rational modernity to ponder its own gains and losses and puts the present back into history. In his more generous moments, Merleau-Ponty ascribes a similar sensitivity to Hegel's Phenomenology. But this is where Weber the parochial bourgeois faltered politically. His astute historical recognition of the past-present dialectic was not matched by a critical political engagement in a present-future one. In his openness to other views and his realistic assessment of liberalism's violent provenance, Weber represented a new and progressive form of liberalism that was open to "the spirit of investigation" (AD 9) (the "new liberalism" endorsed by MerleauPonty) rather than being committed to a dogmatic defense of the liberal state. But where he failed was regarding a future-oriented imagination beyond this particular solution. He was unable to recognize, for example, that as World War I ended a new historical significance was emerging as an alternative fundamental choice to the partiality of the liberal capitalist solution and its shortcomings-that of proletarian praxis. Paradoxically, it was because he was not sufficiently relativist in appreciating history as so many provisional but temporally interwoven solutions to existence (including his own), that he was in the end unable to escape the epistemological relativism of his original Kantianism, and worried that he was locked in a vicious circle that precluded real truth (AD 30). The absolute that saves us from such relativism is not, Merleau-Ponty argues, absolute knowledge. Rather, it is the recognition that every historical age is "the unique milieu of our errors and our verifications" (AD 31). If each is gauged immanently, in terms of its own logic, history is also restored as permanent interrogation. This is an ongoing reflexivity because just as there are no ideal solutions to coexistence, there are also no definitive accounts of its multifarious meanings. "The intelligible wholes of history never break their ties with contingency, and the movement by which history turns back on itself in an attempt to grasp itself, to dominate itself, to justify itself, is also without guarantee:' As such, history includes dialectical facts and adumbrative sig-

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nifications; it is not a coherent system but it can fold back over itself, as language or philosophy show (AD 24). Modernity and Its Others Merleau-Ponty's critical reconstruction of Weber's approach to the past in

Adventures of the Dialectic is put into perspective once it is read in conjunction with his discussions about understanding nonmodern cultures, in particular his 1956 essay "Everywhere and Nowhere" (Signs). Similar methodological challenges are described here but now in the context of Husserl's phenomenology. This issue had considerable political salience for MerleauPonty in the context of French colonialism and the war in Algeria, but it is also the model he uses for understanding the relationship between self and other more generally. The task here is to understand others without, on the one hand, reducing them to the same (the self) or, on the other, presenting their alterity as so radical that it precludes all mutual understanding. His solution therefore remains highly relevant for our own time. Husserl had already sketched a solution-the one Merleau-Ponty partially attributes to Weber-when he described all cultures as "anthropological specimens" of one lifeworld and as variations that serve to throw our own into perspective. "If we were able to grasp in their historical and human context the very doctrines which seem to resist conceptual understanding, we would find in them a variant of man's relationship to being which would clarify our understanding of ourselves, and a sort of oblique universality" (S 139). Husserl did believe that the West has a special task, which is to understand other lifeworlds. But he was also obliged to admit the impossibility of possessing these lifeworlds conceptually and he concluded that the West redeems its own worth only if its inquiries about others result in "new creations" and a profound self-questioning. This is where Weber had been insufficiently radical. As Merleau-Ponty glosses Husserl, as a historical phenomenon, the destiny of modernity is "to re-examine everything, including its idea of truth and conceptual understanding and all institutions;' in order to face up to their crisis of nihilistic disenchantment (S 139). There are therefore two related components involved. First, the methodological challenge of understanding the other and second, the political implications of recognizing one's own cultural relativity through this encounter. It is because all cultures have an existential core that they can be compared, according to phenomenology. "Historical epochs become ordered around a questioning of human possibility, of which each has its formula, rather than around an immanent solution, of which history would be the manifestation" (AD 24). Diverse cultures are mutually comprehensible inasmuch as they are

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all variations on the theme of coexistence and remain provisional, imperfect solutions as "archetypes and variants of humanity and of life" (VI 116). There is thus a common denominator that permits an appreciation of other cultures, because there are "certain effective problems present at the core of history" and each represents a possible solution to the riddle of coexistence (SNS 105). Merleau-Ponty commends Husserl's strategy of eidetic variation here, but he insists this cannot be the purely imaginary task Husserl intended. Rather, the facts of coexistence must be studied empirically and their patterning deciphered. It is through their lifeworlds that diverse societies are grasped as equivalents: "the communication from one constituted culture to another occurs through the wild region wherein they all have originated" (VI 115). In examining other concrete ways of coexisting and their philosophical expression, one glimpses "a variant of man's relationship to being:' We do not then reach universality by imposing it on others or by abandoning our own particularity. We can use the latter to reach them since we live our respective lifeworlds at least partially on a preobjective level, the generality of which is shared by and grants us access to others. Provided one has had ethnographic experience of a culture other than one's own, Merleau-Ponty thought, one can appreciate this "lateral" or "oblique" intercorporeal universality that all cultures share (PP 53, 82; PhP 362; S 120). Once we experience the particularity and relativism of our culture's solution, we can "regain possession of that untamed region" that is unincorporated into any specific culture and communicate with others through it (S 120). For a hermeneutical space-a pre- or transcultural interworld-is now opened, wherein all cultures can communicate and be recognized, not as self and other, but as so many experimental variations on an existential theme. This is not necessarily a dialogical space. The social scientist's studies of the hidden principle of a culture's overt functioning or human attitude are advanced through a combination of empirical observation, creative induction, intuition, self-reflection, and comparison: that is, through communication with a way of being rather than with others as such. There is accordingly a degree of objectivity that avoids the difficulties of ideological distortions of experience. Although communication is desirable between cultures, this is primarily then an epistemological rather than an ethical relationship. It does require openness to the other and a certain humility regarding the same; it is even the precondition for political or ethical relationships with others. But it is not in and of itself a practice of tolerance or recognition. Its political payoff is that in learning about others, we recognize the provisional and relative nature of our own existential choices and are therefore encouraged to be self-critical. We are thus able to compare and to evaluate cultures, including our own, according to common criteria (as Merleau-Ponty had attempted with liberalism and

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communism), "by clarifying the one by the other, criticizing the one by the other:' by "disclosing, rectifying each by the other, the exterior datum and the internal double of it:' which is possible because as sensible sentients we "know" this interweaving of facts and ideas, experience and structures (VI 116). For example, "Indian and Chinese philosophies have tried not so much to dominate existence as to be the echo or the sounding board of our relationship to being. Western philosophy can learn from them to rediscover the relationship to being and the initial option which gave it birth, and to estimate the possibilities we have shut ourselves off from in becoming 'Westerners' and perhaps reopen them" (S 139). Without understanding so-called primitive or oriental cultures, Western modernity would remain "enmeshed in our preconceptions and would not even see the meaning of our own lives" (S 138). Merleau-Ponty accordingly describes ethnology as a "remarkable method" that challenges the prejudices of Western humanism (S 120). So this is the second, political, component of his inquiry. All cultures are existentially equivalent as so many ways of modulating space and time, production and reproduction, order and liberty, where their real and imaginary bonds reveal a "basic theme" that is their distinctive solution to "the problem of man's relation with nature and with other men" (SNS 90). It does not follow, though, that they are equally valuable. It is on the basis of the actual social relationships they sustain that they are to be compared and judged. If there is no transcendent standard against which to measure a culture, each can be judged immanently in terms of whether its basic structures paralyze or vitalize relationships with others. In relativizing each there is moreover an invitation (again as the comparison of liberalism and communism had advocated) to weigh up gains and losses in a more circumspect way than a self-versus-other dichotomy allows. As far as rationalism is concerned, for example, this approach has the benefit of undermining any suggestion that modernity's others might be simply immature or inferior forms destined to replicate their own patterns. As Weber had seen, demystification has to be weighed against disenchantment. "Mythology and ritual are replaced in modernity:' as Merleau-Ponty puts it, "by reason and method, but also by a wholly profane practice of life, which is accompanied moreover by shallow little compensatory myths" (S 125). When asked specifically about modernity's superiority, he was appropriately circumspect. He credits it with certain advantages regarding its techno-material advances ("what will one day enable all men on earth to eat") and its potential to replace violence with communication. He balances this against its socioeconomic and political shortcomings (in particular where it falls short of its own potential). Yet he is more resolute in denying it moral superiority, not only because of the violent practices that are interwoven with its proclaimed

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humanism but also because its rationalism forecloses recognition of its own contingency (5 139, 336). In any case, he concludes, Western superiority would be a task rather than a right, and this is a task that would always need testing (against its willingness to be self-critical and open to others) while remaining incomplete and not tied to the West as such (there is no "geographical frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy" [5 138]). It is now possible to summarize the key points of Merleau- Ponty's application of phenomenology to understanding the political. He begins with an existential analysis of emergent forms as provisional totalities that are more than the sum of their parts, where this is more their intrinsic significance as styles of (co)existence. This yields a social ontology that is also a choreography of the way collective life unfolds and a basis for judgment. Its theoretical equivalent is found in the phenomenologist's attention to facts as well as lived significance and its normative aspect is grounded in the vitality and openness of, hence the truth of, the experiences it supports. This allows the theorist to make sense of diverse cultures as so many ways of tackling the dilemma of (co )existence. However, once this contingent but meaningful historicity is recognized, modern rationalism is itself relativized as a particular mode of being and as a relative solution to existence, with strengths and weaknesses that need assessing. As such, the theorist is drawn to an interrogative, critical stance visa-vis the present, whose privilege as present is displaced onto an interworld wherein all cultures are grasped as equivalents. Lessons can now be learnt from other examples that participate in a lateral universality rather than being ranked within a linear history. If there is no absolute measure or guarantee of progress here, there are criteria for judgment. It is at this point, and as continuous with these investigations, that the theorist is obliged to engage with the present and moves closer to the political actor, who takes up similar imperatives but on a more practical level.

The Realm of Politics My analyses of Merleau-Ponty's politics so far have attributed to him the ambitions of understanding how rationality emerges hazardously within collective life and of considering how its appearing might be negotiated in a more reasonable way. In this second part of the chapter, I consider how political actors might practise this exemplary negotiation. Merleau-Ponty begins from the premises that "man has no rights over the world" and the species is "thrown into an adventure whose happy end is not guaranteed" (HT xlii). It is because there is no transcendent promise of progress, nor any universal value to guide it, that neither Hegelianism/Marxism nor Kantianism (modernity's dominant meta-

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narratives according to Lyotard) are in the end credible. "Political action is of its nature impure, because it is the action of one person upon another and because it is collective action" (HT xxxii, xxxvi). If the challenge for the philosopher is to figure out this "impure:' contingent field, it is the responsibility of the political actor to finesse it. Since politics must "translate values into the order of facts:' this figuring and practising remain impossible processes for the rationalism that is predicated on oppositions between "principles and the inner life" or "external and everyday life"; between "intentions and deeds:'" behavior and the thought behind it:' or "conscience and politics" (HT xiv, xvxx, xxi). Reason and Violence In Humanism and Terror Merleau-Ponty had confronted the internal relationship between this interiority and exteriority by examining the dilemmas it poses for individuals committed to freedom or revolution under conditions where "a dialectic whose course is not entirely foreseeable can transform a man's intentions into their opposite" (HT 64). It was in order to think more deeply about the nature of this reversible political interworld with its thick, intersubjective flesh that he would eventually return to ontology. Meanwhile he anticipates this ontology by invoking the idea of an intermundane "third dimension:' in order both to explain how existence entails an irreducible intercorporeity or intersubjectivity and to suggest that the reflexivity and structure-agency reciprocity found in the history of language might support a new philosophy of history. This helps him to grasp the political as a distinctive but dangerous field of collective action. A reliance on intersubjectivity and language has, however, been cited by some critics as a sign of depoliticized thinking, since they allegedly encourage neglect or underestimation of power relations and of the violence endemic to politics. According to such criticisms, the irreducible intersubjectivity that an embodied dialectic entails looks too harmonious, while the linguistic model seems too consensual. Foucault is eloquent here. Although he does not mention Merleau-Ponty, he writes, '''Dialectic' is a way of evading the always open and hazardous reality of conflict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton" while '''semiology' is a way of avoiding its bloody and lethal character by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and dialogue:'9 The latter concern has additional resonance as a proxy criticism of Habermas's ideal speech situation with its ambition of consensus undistorted by power or ideology. It therefore looks as if Merleau-Ponty's interest in communication and linguistics might implicate him in Habermas's rationalism, too. I already countered some of these concerns in the context of discussing the relationship between phenomenology and genealogy in the last chapter, but it

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is important to see that Merleau-Ponty's interest in dialectical intersubjectivity and language differs from the uses that bother Foucault. I have argued that Merleau-Ponty invoked structural linguistics precisely to convey a more complex field of reversible and contingent relations than conventional dialectics allows. With its dense fabric of traces and invisible, virtual relations, his account resembles Derridean differance more than it does the "skeletal reductionism" (the "embalmed dialectic") of a reified dialectical schema. Embodiment also explains the inevitability yet unpredictability of conflict here. My explanation for Merleau-Ponty's attraction to the linguistic model also made it clear that he was not attracted to it because he wanted to reduce politics to dialogue and communication (he recognizes anyway that communicative relations are inevitably entwined with precognitive corporeal meanings and dissimulation), but because the history of language suggests a reflexive relationship with its past. It exemplifies an alternative to the bloody, "chronic" rhythm of stasis and negation he identifies in politics. But this is not to deny that collective life remains a scene of violent relationships saturated with power. Indeed, because he recognizes that it is, Merleau-Ponty considers how political actors might best negotiate such dangerous terrain and how-given that they are not for him entirely devoid of capacities for agency-they might be empowered to mitigate its violence. Although Merleau-Ponty's political studies convinced him that intersubjectivity is not harmonious, they do suggest a complex relationship between violence and rationality. It is because actors are embodied and intersubjective, he deduces, that politics is an ineluctably unstable realm where violence and encroachment proliferate but where mutual recognition and partial agreement are also possible. This is why politics is so important and the stakes are so high. Without the relationality that intercorporeity and intersubjectivity entail, there would be no basis for social relations of any kind, even those based on power. The intersubjective nature of a common lifeworld is an ontological claim that explains why power and rationality are interwoven, rather than a guarantee that peaceful coexistence will ensue. His analyses reveal the often subtle and invisible strategies of political power as well as its coercive aspects, while his insistence on the violence inherent in coexistence hardly amounts to a harmonious imaginary. He is explicit that inasmuch as "we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot:' If he sometimes invokes a Hegelian logic of recognltion in which "every consciousness seeks to have its autonomy recognized by others:' he quickly adds that society entails a "natural state of conflict" where "history has to be made through violence and does not make itself" (HT xxxvi, 2, 88; cf. 90,92,94,95,109, 147). But making history entails the appearing of shared meanings and values as well as the use of violence.

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Merleau-Ponty's understanding of violence is a broad one.1O He describes perceptual and textual interpretation as acts of violence in the sense that violence might involve carving a new layer of significance out of existence or reconfiguring some accepted meaning or habit. So violence can be used creatively as well as destructively and it does not necessarily entail a physical violation of political actors or their property. In this sense, violence is more reminiscent of Nietzsche's will to power inasmuch as violence and formation are two aspects of the same process. This is especially evident in politics, which is why it is both a tragic process and a source of inextinguishable hope. 11 At the same time, it does not follow that Merleau-Ponty sanitizes violence in his political studies or that he renders it simply metaphorical or textual. His emphasis on the body brings home the vulnerability and mortality of the flesh. His actors find themselves suspended between the violence of the visceral and the potential violence of the structural, where even peaceful aims can have violent repercussions. Because he associates politics with power and recognizes that power operates on many levels, Merleau- Ponty finds politics running throughout the social world rather than being confined to the formal political system. But not all social relations are power relationships for him, and the social is not therefore coextensive with the political. There is an important distinction implicit in his work, for example, between existential inertia and political power. All embodied existence manifests a tendency to inertia because of the sedimented habits of the flesh, due to which even cultural innovations tend to sink into the taken-for-granted horizons and repetitions of the lifeworld. Nor is this necessarily undesirable. As the critique of permanent revolution showed, Merleau-Ponty recognizes the importance of sustaining a level of institutional duration and prethematic familiarity in collective life because no society can exist without shared, familiar practices that endure over time. What is important is their quality, the tempo of their renewal, and their amenability for transformation should they become dysfunctional, not their existence per se. Related to this is the anonymity that prevails in collective action, where there is "a sort of inertia, a passive resistance, a dying fall of meaning-an anonymous adversity" (S 239). In collective life, individual acts congeal once they enter the public domain and take on a life of their own that their agents can neither predict nor master. "Does not every action involve us in a game that we cannot entirely control?" "Is there not a sort of evil in collective life?" (HT xxxviii). For Merleau-Ponty, the challenge posed by these existential negativities of violence, inertia, anonymity, and adversity is to accept that we cannot try to control or negate them without surrendering to fatalism. This is the impossible and counterproductive wager that rationalists take up. Rather, political

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actors must learn how to navigate this treacherous field by grasping its social ontology. "For the very moment we assert that unity and reason do not exist and that opinions are carried along by discordant options which remain below the level of reason:' he argues, "the consciousness that we gain of the irrationalism and contingency in us cancels them as fatalities and opens us to the other person" (HT 188). What is nonetheless distinctive about politics is that it is the realm where inertial tendencies and structural logics are reinforced by strategies of reification and domination. Now power is deployed to protect (and to contest) the privileges and interests that benefit from the configuration of the status quo. So while there is an inevitable turgidity in collective life, there is also a tendency for criticism and change to be closed down by ideological or institutional means in situations where the contingency and provisionality of regimes is denied. This is why the ineradicable violence of our intercorporeality becomes especially chronic in politics and why it is far more difficult to instill an interrogative, reflexive style of historicity in the political realm than it is in the linguistic one. It is also why it is imperative to distinguish between the phenomenology of (co )existence as such and a genealogy of the power relations that are particular to any situation. Foucault suggests that the best way to identify power is to look out for the resistances it incites. In many ways, this is Merleau-Ponty's strategy, too. If the proletariat is no longer privileged as the incarnation of negativity, an engaged political analysis will still begin by seeking signs of transformative agency. For the most part this manifests itself in acts of negation: refusal, resistance, revolt, subversion, transgression, criticism, noncooperation, and so on. While the phenomenal body already reacts against and strives to overcome blockages to its development and history evinces a negative logic by eliminating bankrupt forms, in social lifeworlds this negativity is typically borne unheroically by myriad small acts of negation to or noncompliance with the lacunae and dysfunctions of everyday life and its prevailing structures. As Machiavelli had argued, "the people ... want only not to be oppressed:'12 It is a corollary of the existentialist approach that liberty is not primarily a conceptual or constitutional phenomenon, but a practical relationship that is lived "in the inevitably imperfect movement which joins us to others, to the things of the world, to our jobs, mixed with the hazards of our situation" (HT xxiv). For the most part practices of liberty and resistances to power are not then motivated by grand designs or normative appeals for social transformation, but by more modest, situated experiences that might even remain on a corporeal, precognitive level. The political effect of such negativity is to open a field and to contest the ossification of the given. Jon Simons's summary of Foucault's politics nicely illustrates its parallels with Merleau-Ponty's here, when he explains

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that it "aims not for a world without power but to prevent the solidification of strategic relations into patterns of domination by maintaining the openness of agonistic relations:'13 There is an affinity between Merleau-Ponty and Habermas here, but this concerns their mutually placing more weight on the experiential aspects of this negativity than Foucault does, rather than their faith in rational agreement. For Habermas is also interested in the prepredicative and practical character of background knowledge that he associates with the lifeworld. He acknowledges that it was Husserl who drew his attention to "this 'forgotten' foundation of meaning inhabiting everyday practice and experience:'14 His accounts of civil society and the public sphere offer a phenomenology of pubIi