Stéphanie Ménasé

Continuing the posthumous editions of the manuscripts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty started in 1964, we publish the preparation notes for the courses of the College of France of 1959 and 1961. Each of these courses questions in a different way the philosophical exercise. How is philosophy possible today after the phenomenological enterprise? In the course of 1959, Merleau-Ponty presented a study by Husserl and Heidegger. It shows the contributions but also the limits. In addition, he has recourse to the interpretation of the philosophy developed by Hegel and Marx, and his gesture is also given as a work of self-interpretation. The reading he suggests of Descartes makes the different levels of his approach sensitive. It seemed interesting to us to associate with his course notes the first writing of the chapter “Interrogation and intuition” of the Visible and the invisible which is in great affinity with the problems approached in these courses. This draft of the Visible and the Invisible, abandoned by Merleau-Ponty, makes it possible to mark the difference in style from the preparation notes which, as Claude Lefort writes, “do not exactly constitute a writing”. Rather, they offer food for thought to continue to question the philosopher's thinking.

"The world of perception, that is to say that which is revealed to us by our senses and by the use of life, seems at first sight the best known to us, since there is no need for instruments or calculations to access it, and it suffices, apparently, to open our eyes and let ourselves live to enter it. Yet this is only a false appearance. I would like to show in these talks that it is largely ignored by us as long as we remain in the practical or utilitarian attitude, that it has taken a great deal of time, effort and culture to bring it to fruition, naked, and that it is one of the merits of modern art and thought (by that I mean art and thought for 50 or 70 years) to make us rediscover this world where we live but which we are always tempted to forget. ” Maurice Merleau-Ponty